Howling Mad: A paranormal wolf shifter romance (Badlands Book 2) (7 page)

Chapter Fifteen

The next morning, Mae and James, Byron, Naomi and half a dozen others gathered in the office for the council of war – as Mae insisted on calling it. With her skin whorled with dark blue ink, Mae looked like a twin-setted Boadicea. Naomi was glad she was on their side. James was wearing the same conservative slacks and shirt he’d had on when Naomi had first met him, but he’d added yellow spotted suspenders, and she realized with shocked delight that he’d once been a clown. She would never have guessed, but when she thought about it, his gentle manner, gangly limbs and long, lugubrious face probably made him a natural.

Byron’s folks had come ready for battle. They also had a pretty good collection of battered bounty hunters. The boar shifter had been cuffed and bound. She shuddered at the memory of his splintered yellow tusks, and in the confined space of the office, his rank piggy smell was overpowering. The man was sullen and silent now, but he glowered at her with an expression that let her know he wasn’t taking his humiliation well. If he was free, she was pretty sure he’d kill them all, or die trying.

Three others hadn’t been as lucky, and their corpses had been dragged to one side and covered with pieces of tarpaulin. Mae had waved away Naomi’s concerns about the dead bodies bringing trouble down on the carnival. That seemed like something it was better not to ask about. Naomi only agonized about it very briefly – she got as far as feeling bad that she didn’t feel bad, and then she decided,
fuck ‘em
. They’d been trying to kill Byron and her. They’d got what they deserved.

The wolf Naomi had kicked in the face was breathing with loud, ugly snores, curled unconscious on the floor at the boar’s feet. Blood was dried in dark scabs around his mouth and nose. Beside them, in the middle of the room where the coffee table had been, the sniper was sitting on a wooden chair. He wasn’t tied up, but he was the center of focus of maybe a dozen really pissed fugitives, acrobats, bare-knuckle fighters and not-very-reformed criminals. What was he going to do?

Byron grabbed another chair and swung it into place in front of the sniper, straddling it with his arms folded across the upright back.

“Okay,” he said. He nodded at the wolf and the boar. “These guys were after me and after Naomi, dead or alive.”

There was a phlegmy wheeze of laughter from the boar. “Dead suits me better. Especially when it comes to the pretty ones. They don’t struggle so much.”

Naomi shuddered.

Very casually, without making a fuss, Gus put his big hand on the boar’s shoulder. His claws dimpled the flesh, just enough to make the point. “Mind your manners when there are ladies present.” He smiled pleasantly, and on his face, it looked like a threat.

The boar wasn’t as stupid as he looked. He shut up.

Byron continued, addressing the sniper. “But you…when you fired at Naomi, you were using tranquilizer darts, weren’t you? And you took down the wolf, and you tried to tranq Gus when you thought he was attacking her. I’m not surprised that didn’t work, by the way. We’re not even completely sure what he
is
. No offence, Gus.”

“None taken,” said Gus amiably.

“So,” Byron concluded. “Explain.”

The sniper cleared his throat. “My name’s Felix,” he said, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I provide…special services for certain clients. Discreetly.”

“You kill people for money,” Byron clarified.

Felix narrowed his eyes. They were a remarkable green and had a cat-like tilt at the corners. “Among others things,” he conceded. “But I don’t let anyone just point me where they like and pull the trigger. Including Dr. Atkins.”

“So my father did send you after me.” Naomi had known it was true, but she’d been holding on to a fragment of hope as fragile as dandelion fluff, and now it had blown away on his words.

“Yes.” Felix switched his gaze to her. “And for what it’s worth, he asked me to avoid killing you if I could. Not that I’d take too much comfort from that if I were you.” He jerked his head at the boar, frank disgust in his eyes. “He still sent things like
that
after you. Death might be preferable.” He nodded at Byron. “You, he wanted dead.”

Byron nodded. “But you were firing tranqs, and you weren’t carrying any other ammo.”

“Right.” Felix stretched his arms above his head and cracked his knuckles. It was a nonchalant gesture, but Naomi had a feeling his every move was studied.

“At first I was given the same story as everyone else – Naomi sabotages the security system and runs away with Big Bad Byron. But that story didn’t add up to me. Why put herself smack bang in the picture like that when she could have made sure she had a watertight alibi and joined him later?” He shook his head. “However love-struck she was, that would be just plain stupid. So I did a bit of digging. Turns out the only person with the authority to override the security protocols like that was Dr. Atkins himself.”

“What? No. I don’t believe that.” Naomi was on her feet. “You’re saying my father planned the whole thing? He knew he couldn’t bug Byron with electronics, so he bugged him with…with me?” She felt sick, and she was sure all the color had drained from her face. The office seemed suddenly too small and too hot.

Felix nodded slowly. “That’s why I went after the rougher, scarier people he sent after you. And that’s why the tranquilizer darts – I knew you’d run from me, and I needed to talk to you. Find out the truth.”

“You were going to drug her and interrogate her?” Byron growled.

“Yes,” Felix said simply. He turned his feline green gaze on Naomi. “I wasn’t sure. Not a hundred percent. But now… Looking at your face…I’m sure.”

He was wrong about one thing, Naomi thought. The boar and the wolf might have been rougher, but Felix was scarier. And the scariest person of all…someone who saw her not even as an enemy or a target but as a disposable tool…was her father. She retched.

Byron rose to his feet, knocking over the chair, but before he reached her she dodged around him and ran out of the office.

It was a dazzling early morning, and the tears in her eyes made the sunlight fracture. She gulped in air. The drumming of her heart was painful.

When she felt Byron’s presence at her back, she turned into his arms and he held her to him, whispering fiercely that he was sorry and he loved her.

Chapter Sixteen

One thing you’ll find plenty of at a carnival is rope. Byron and Gus each sat on a heavy coil of the stuff, which they’d loaded into the back of a gaily-painted wagon that smelled powerfully of horses. Naomi sneezed. She was travelling in the back with Byron, Gus, the heavily muscled dude – whose name turned out to be Anton – and Felix.

Gus and Anton were asleep, unused to having eaten their breakfast in daylight. Anton’s head had fallen sideways onto Gus’s shoulder and he was drooling onto his shirt. Byron and Felix were still bristling and snarling at each other, and not just in the usual dogs-and-cats way, but they’d just have to dial the Alpha shifter testosterone levels back a notch or fifteen. Felix wasn’t just on their side…he was their secret weapon.

The wagon rattled along the road, surrounded by a phalanx of burly men on powerful, purring motorcycles. If anyone tried to intercept the convoy before it got where it was going, they’d have a fight on their hands. Naomi had spoken to a couple of the Road Wolves when they’d roared up to the carnival grounds, and despite their tough swagger and leather-and-grease fashion sense, they were a bunch of really sweet guys. Misfits, sure, and a bit gruff and growly, but sweet. Despite the name, there were all kind of shifters in the group, not just wolves, and even a couple of humans. Apparently species wasn’t as important as the brotherhood.

As they approached the Dynamic Earth Rehabilitation Center, the Road Wolves peeled away one by one, leaving the wagon to drive the last few miles alone – at least to the casual observer. Naomi knew that some of the Wolves were grouped at rest stops, keeping in touch with trucker buddies by CB and monitoring the radio channels used by the police and emergency services. Others ran in the woods beside the road, keeping pace in their animal forms. Nothing and nobody was going to prevent Byron from returning to the Zoo.

When they got there, though… Brute force wasn’t going to help. If their plan was going to work, they needed the element of surprise.

As the last of the Road Wolves peeled away, Felix flipped open a sleek silver cell phone. He hit a sequence of numbers, and when his call went through, he said, “Felix. The job’s done. Yeah, the girl too.” He snapped the phone shut.

“That’s it?” Naomi was surprised. She’d been half expecting code words, or some kind of exchange of random-sounding phrases, like Russian spies in old movies. It seemed like there should have been more drama.

“That’s it,” Felix confirmed. “It’s not a very chatty job. What were you expecting?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t you have to send proof or something?”

Felix gave a brief shout of laughter. “Like a severed ear, maybe? I could slice a few bits off the Big Bad Wolf here, if you like. Who knows? The lopsided look might suit him.”

Byron bristled. “Watch yourself, pussy cat,” he growled, with the emphasis right where it would be the most insulting.

“Guys,” said Naomi, “this is bad enough without you fighting. We’ve got to hold it together if this is going to work.”

“Are you certain about the timing?” Byron asked. “You’re sure he’ll hold a press conference right away? I mean, he’s just been told…” He trailed off. Dr. Atkins had just been told his daughter had been killed in cold blood, on his orders.

“I’m sure,” she said mournfully. “My father’s the ultimate PR machine. A death would only stop him from spinning the situation to Dynamic Earth’s advantage if it was his.”

They parked a little way from the gates, and made their way into the grounds easily enough. The facility housed dangerous criminals, semi-feral shifters, and those whose paranormal powers made them too dangerous to be allowed to go free. The security guards weren’t worried about people getting
in
– especially since the word had gone out on the grapevine that Byron and Naomi were dead.

Naomi crept close to the window of the family room and saw her father preparing for the press conference. He looked relatively calm and unruffled as he bent his head in quiet conversation with Professor Stanhope. If anything the scientist looked more distressed – like her father, the stress of his work had been affecting him lately, and his hours had been getting longer and longer, but today he looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. She felt a little pang of pain in her heart at the idea that, of the two of them, he might be more distressed about her supposed death.

Dr. Atkins checked his watch and spoke briefly to the gathered journalists, who made last-minute checks of their cameras and microphones.

It was now or never.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” her father began, “thank you for coming. This is an extraordinary situation, and I know the public is anxious for answers. I do have an announcement to make today, and I would appreciate it if you could keep any questions until after I’ve made my statement.”

As the cameras rolled, Felix and Naomi slung coils of rope over their shoulders and started to scale the wall, pushing their fingers into shallow cracks between bricks and clawing their way upwards. For a leopard and a cat, even in human form, it wasn’t much of a challenge.

Gus, Anton and Byron stood below, squinting up against the sunlight as they watched them climb. Dr. Atkins’ voice was clearly audible to shifter hearing.

“I regret to announce that a security operation late last night resulted in the deaths of the man going by the name Byron…and of my daughter, Naomi Atkins.”

Heavy coils of rope tumbled from the roof, unspooling as they fell and hitting the ground with muted thumps. Byron, Anton and Gus hauled themselves up hand over hand.

Standing on the roof, it was possible to look down through the skylight and see a bird’s-eye view of the press conference. Camera flashes stuttered and strobed, and Naomi’s father was sweating in the heat of the lights. From this angle she could see the very faintest glimpse of pink scalp where his glossy, expensively styled hair had begun to thin, and it gave her a tender pang in her heart. It made him look vulnerable, somehow, despite his carefully polished public presence. But this was no time for sentimentality. He certainly wasn’t showing any as he lied through his teeth.

“…attempted to contain the situation…”

Gus and Anton nodded to each other. The skylight was made of reinforced glass in a heavy steel frame. They set their fingers underneath the edges and, muscles straining, heaved.

“…resisted arrest, leading to a violent altercation. Despite medical attention at the scene…”

The skylight began to shift. Mortar drifted down onto the people standing below. It settled on Dr. Atkins’ hair and shoulders like snow. His voice faltered. He looked up.

As Gus and Anton wrenched the square of glass and steel away, Naomi and Byron dropped through the skylight.

Chapter Seventeen

Naomi should probably have said something clever and snappy. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” maybe. Or, “Sorry for dropping in unannounced.” But she just said, “Daddy…”

For a long moment they stared at each other. Naomi could feel the hurt and betrayal brimming in her eyes. Her father looked like he’d seen a ghost, and in a way she supposed he had.

Byron didn’t hesitate, though. He punched Dr. Atkins hard in the face and, as Felix dropped into the room with silent, catlike grace, pushed him into his arms. Anton seized Professor Stanhope from behind in a muscular bear hug and dumped him unceremoniously in the nearest chair, while Gus shot the bolts on the door, to the consternation of the stunned reporters.

A couple of security guards stepped forward, but Magnus, the big bear with the ability to hear the dead, got slowly to his feet. He didn’t threaten, but a low, steady rumble came from his massive chest, and the guards stepped back.

The room fell still.

Then as if a switch had been flipped, the reporters realized their story had suddenly become a hundred times more interesting. A shrill babble of questions was punctuated by camera flashes.

Byron raised his hands, gesturing for quiet, and as the cameras rolled the noise abated apart from the occasional shouted question, quickly shushed. When he started to speak, his voice was calm and confident, and Naomi was reminded that he was a showman. Her father wasn’t the only experienced spin-doctor in the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, you have been lied to. Naomi Atkins is alive. I am alive. And we are here to tell you what else the Dynamic Earth Corporation has been lying to you about.”

Dr. Atkins struggled fruitlessly in Felix’s hold. “This is an outrage!” he shouted. “This man is a known criminal!” But he couldn’t fight dirty and he knew it – not if he was to have any chance of coming out of this with his polished, people-person reputation intact. He subsided, but Naomi could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, and she could see something else in his face. Something she’d never seen there before. Uncertainty.

“Fact number one,” said Byron. “In the 1930s the government was conducting research into the creation of super soldiers. Men and women with the strength of a bear, the grace of a big cat, the savagery of a wolf. Activists released the experimental serums into the water supply, and the shifter races were created. As some of you know to your cost, the ability to shift sometimes carries with it other abilities. Pyrokinesis. Clairvoyance. Berserker strength. And we are all at risk of turning feral – of our animal natures taking over.”

“You aren’t telling us anything new,” piped up a reporter in an unconvincing toupee.

“Yeah, this is
Shifter Origins for Dummies
,” agreed his cameraman.

Dr. Atkins saw an opportunity. “Dynamic Earth is dedicated to addressing those fundamental concerns—” he began, then gave a choked gurgle as Felix tightened his arm around his throat.

“Let the man talk,” the feline assassin said in a low, deadly tone.

“Dynamic Earth is engaged in cutting-edge biomedical research,” said Byron. “That much you know. Clinical trials into microbiology, vaccines, and mapping differences in human and shifter genomes. It has extensively studied the records from the original 1930s trials – what little of them survive. It has recreated at least some of those trials’ results.”

He held his audience spellbound now.

“Decades ago, scientists mixed some amazing things in their test tubes. The ability to shift into a wolf or a cat or a bear. The ability to walk through a hail of bullets, or kill with a thought, or burn out your enemy’s brain. And Dynamic Earth has been replicating those results. Ask yourselves why.

“In its laboratories, it has been creating subjects with the ability to shift into more than one animal. It’s been pumping people full of a serum that mimics berserker strength. How many of you recall the reports in the newspapers of humans killed by berserker bears? Hell, you probably wrote some of them, based on press releases from Dynamic Earth. Did you ever speak to any witnesses? Find medical records or police reports? A few months back, all of a sudden those reports dried up.
Find out what changed
.”

There was a murmur of interest.

“Doesn’t anyone remember two years ago, when a company called TerraDyne was shut down and its principals prosecuted because it was snatching cubs from families with fire-starting genes? Don’t you know that powerful men always have a fall guy? Some of you must know Latin. Terra. Earth. Dynamic Earth is TerraDyne. It’s the same monster with a different face, and we’re letting it eat people because it has good table manners.”

The murmur had become a hubbub of shouted questions and exclamations of disbelief.

The guy with the toupee raised his voiced above the row. “This can’t be true,” he said plaintively. “They wouldn’t be so stupid as to use the same name. It’s too obvious.”

Naomi stepped forward. Her voice was a little shaky, but that was no bad thing – the reporters had to quieten down in order to hear her.

“It wasn’t stupidity,” she said, the truth suddenly clear. She couldn’t take her eyes off her father. His face was ashen and Felix wasn’t so much restraining him as holding him up. “It was arrogance. He… They don’t think other people are as clever as them. They don’t really think of them as people at all.”

She turned to face her father. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “My father…never really thought of
me
as a person at all.”

The stunned silence was broken by slow, sarcastic applause. Professor Stanhope had got to his feet.

“Oh, very good. Very dramatic. And so very noble.”

He looked enraged. His cheeks were flushed and his hands were shaking. His breath came with a catch and a wheeze, and out of sheer habit Naomi wanted to ask him if he had his inhaler – he’d always been part of her life, and she could tell when his asthma was bad.

He didn’t reach into his pocket, though, just dragged in a labored breath. Anton stepped up behind him and seized his thin upper arm in one huge fist, but he ignored him as if he wasn’t there, and went on. “The problem with you people is that you’re so small-minded,” he said. “So limited. Your thinking is so mundane.”

He coughed and struggled for breath before continuing. “Yes, my labs have been working to recreate those extraordinary abilities that are so wasted on such ordinary people. Strength… stamina… power… they shouldn’t be under the control of common criminals.” He pointed to Byron. “Half mad animals.” He glanced at Magnus. “Feeble halfwits.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed the whole room.

“You don’t deserve it. Do you hear me?” His voice had a tinge of hysteria now. “You don’t deserve it."

He turned swiftly. Naomi saw a sharp silvery flash, and Anton folded up around the blade that had been thrust into his stomach. He coughed and dark blood stained his lips.

Byron gave a heartsick howl and his eyes went wolf.

Felix released Naomi's father and turned as a stun gun crackled and sizzled behind him.

The reporters, panicked, pushed and brawled towards the doors.

And found them locked.