BlindHeat (25 page)

Seth uncovered Lila’s mouth.

Jake fired off a question while he still had a shot at
getting a word in. “Where’s Allie?”

“I don’t know. Marcus is playing some creepy game.” Lila
rubbed her arms as she talked. “Now you see him now you don’t. The guy does a
wickedly believable illusion with a leopard. Allie ran off after him and hasn’t
come back or answered us.”

“I’ll find Allie and Marcus,” Jake said, refusing to let
Seth slip in and take control. “You get them out of here.”

“Allie said take the pig to her place.”

Seth cradled the pig in one arm and took Lila’s hand. “I’ll
catch up with you as soon as I have them safely tucked away.”

Jake didn’t argue. Marcus always took females in labor. Seth
wasn’t going to get away as soon as he thought.

Jake crept back up the trail, noting an occasional human
footprint, most males in shoes, some small, barefoot and female. Farther along
tracks got more complex, many overlapping—a trampled area where shoe prints cut
across tracks made by a big cat and tire tracks led away. The cat tracks,
leopard, confused him. The mix of scents was impossible to untangle.

He was at the edge of the business park when Maya turned up,
naked and dripping wet.

“Go home,” he growled.

“No. Besides, I brought your reinforcements.” She pointed to
a black van waiting in the corner of the parking lot.

“Ean will have my head for this. How did you find us?”

“Feminine intuition.”

“The truth, Maya.”

“I heard Marie put in the call to Ben. I knew it must have
something to do with Allie and once I got to Greyville it wasn’t hard to locate
Ben. We don’t have time to argue. I scouted out a way in, but you have to go
under water and come up through a drain cover. Marcus is in there. Do you know
how to teleport through water to get to him?”

Jake couldn’t even swim. “No and you shouldn’t either. How
do I know you are skilled enough not to get hurt?”

“I was skilled enough to escape Pantheria and find my way
here to Ean. I can get to the magus. I did it before when Adam and Ean got in
trouble. We don’t have time to waste.”

Ben had emerged from the shadows and joined them. “She’s
right. The tracks lead away from the pool, get confused, and then all lead here
with some missing, notably male and female barefoot. Once she gets in she can
let us in. With all the activity in the building it’s about the only way we’re
getting in.”

“Okay. Okay!” Jake grabbed Maya’s shoulders and gave her a
hard shake, then bumped her forehead with his. “Be careful. And come straight
to that side door once you’re in. You let us in as soon as you’re inside.”

When Jake let her go, Maya moved into the woods. Power
stirred the air around him. It was an unsettling feeling, that kind of energy
in a female. Feminine power should be channeled inward, toward creating and
nurturing new life. Males were the ones who created and manipulated energies in
the external world.

They hunkered in the brush and waited. Time crawled.

“Ben, how many of your guys are with you?”

“They’re all here, including Lobo. He bounces back fast.”

“Isn’t he a vet?”

“Yeah.”

“You better send him over to Allie’s apartment. Any moment
now Seth is going to realize he’s got a major problem in his arms.”

“What kind of problem?”

“A sow in labor.”

Ben chuckled. “Of course. By the Mother of all, life is more
interesting with the magus around.”

“Mmm. That’s not quite the way I’d describe it.” Jake leaned
to one side and then the other, shifting his weight to ease cramping in his
knees from squatting in the underbrush. “Where the fuck is Maya?”

* * * * *

Allie slipped down the corridor as soon as the elevator
indicator showed the men had reached the third floor. She had been hoping for a
simple lock on the room containing Marcus, something pickable, but she was
thwarted by the keycard style used in motels.

Leaning against the door, she scanned the corridor. It all
seemed rather hopeless. Through the window she could see Marcus in a fenced pen
nearly as high as the ceiling. If he were conscious he could probably knock it
down with the swipe of a paw.

He was breathing, the motion of his rib cage expanding and
contracting barely perceptible. She didn’t know a lot about leopards, but in
her brief experience with cats the movement was more pronounced than that, even
when they slept.

She turned back to the corridor. There had to be something
she could use to get in. It had been three years since her days of street burglary.
In the tech age six months was a long time.

Lacking a better idea, she went down the corridor trying
doors. It could have been worse, they could use biometric locks. If they were
using keycards there was a universal keycard somewhere and there were
individual keys. What was the easiest way to manage key cards in a research
facility this size?

Bingo. She found a door that hadn’t quite closed behind its
owner. She slipped into the lab and closed her eyes, allowing her pupils to
adjust to darkness and then reopened them. The lab was only semi-dark, a heat
lamp over a terrarium housing two huge hairy spiders. Allie’s skin went cold
with dread.

They cannot hurt me.
But it felt as if they were
looking at her, watching her with beady little spider eyes. The cheesecloth
covering the terrarium had gaping holes. Why didn’t they at least have a screen
over the box? What if they were like Marcus, some sort of super spider that
could launch itself from the glass box and make itself as big as a human? Her
heart hammered triple time and despite her shivers, sweat trickled from her
armpits down her rib cage.

She tried calming herself, taking one shaky breath and then
another. There was no time for phobias. She had to find a way to get to Marcus.
The handy thing about labs was that they always had gloves handy. The sight of
a boxful reminded her she should have a care about fingerprints. She grabbed a
pair, cringing at the powdery rubber feel of them encasing her skin. The
sensation set her teeth on edge. Between glances at the spiders, she searched
the desktop with its jumble of papers and objects. Then the drawers, offering
up a silent prayer that all spiders were in that terrarium and they didn’t have
a friend that had decided to go strolling about the lab before she arrived.

A mouse in the bottom drawer sent her jumping back with a
squeak. It leapt to the edge of the drawer, twitched its tail and disappeared
into the murky shadows under the desk. A chewed package of crackers proved to
be the sole contents of the drawer.

One of the spiders had scrambled up onto a branch propped
inside the cage, sort of a spider version of a jungle gym, something to
entertain them Allie guessed, but it could also be a bridge to the outside.

“Don’t look at them. Don’t think about them,” she whispered
to herself.

She turned to a coat rack with an assortment of lab coats,
jackets and sweaters draped over hooks. Hopeful, Allie worked through the pile
as quickly as she could. Attached to a lab coat hidden under a sweater she
found an ID badge with a magnetic strip on the backside. Yes!

Now, if it opened the door to Marcus, she could get him out
of here.

Keeping an eye on the spiders, she grabbed a rag from the
desk, shook to be sure nothing alive was attached and backed out the door.

Allie held her breath when she inserted the card. The LED
indicator flashed green and the door opened. She glanced around for some sign
of a camera but didn’t see one. The dog pen must not be something that required
constant monitoring.

Marcus. He looked so vulnerable, smaller, a less substantial
rumpled heap of fur tossed onto the concrete floor. Allie squatted beside the
cage and worked her hand between the gate rails, running gloved fingers through
Marcus’ fur.

The gate had a lock and chain, a basic garden-variety
padlock. She’d dropped a couple of paperclips in her pocket when she was
searching the desk and she went to work with those. She was so out of practice,
cursing under her breath. At last she felt the soft ting inside the steel
casing and the hasp spring releasing.

Inside the cage she tried to lift Marcus’ head into her lap.
“Marcus, you have to wake up, my heart. I can’t carry you out of here.” His
nostrils flared. His tongue gave her wrist a weak lick and he went limp again.
She looked around for something to use to haul him out. A cart with a couple of
sacks of dog food on it rested against one wall. It wouldn’t hold a full-grown
leopard, but she wondered if she could drape him over it somehow. She might be
able to drag him to the warehouse area, maybe hide him there until he woke up.

Chapter Thirteen

“Patience, brother. She has to steer clear of the humans,”
Ben said. “Rushing could get her in trouble.”

“Nothing like the kind of trouble we’ll be in if something
happens to her. We have to get in there now. It’s been too long.” Jake stripped
out of his clothes, tossed them to Ben and shifted.

The side door opened and Maya’s blonde head appeared. Jake
dashed across the parking lot and pushed Maya out the door, “Go home.”

“No chance, big guy. You still need me. Allie is here
somewhere. What if they’re both drugged or held in different areas? We need to
stick together until we figure out what’s going on.”

Maya sent him a flirty little look, which made him snort. He
was Yeti and she was Tiger. She couldn’t even talk in shifted form but had to
rely on telepathy. But while Yeti might be the superior subspecies, Tigers
didn’t view it that way. She was about as attracted to him as a turtle might be
to an eagle. Nothing would ever happen in that department, which freed them to
joke about it. But deep inside a longing for a mate twisted like glass. The
last Yeti female had been killed by a hunter’s stray bullet. Wasting had so
devastated the Yeti tribe that no female child had survived to adulthood in
more than a century.

Extinction loomed. The few dozen remaining males had
resigned themselves to watching their species die. He tamped down the emotions
and moved into the dark warehouse. Maybe the Magus had the right of it. They
had to accept change, adjust to a future that didn’t include them. If they
couldn’t save the Pantherian tribes, maybe they could save the hybrids humans
were manufacturing.

When he peeked through a door that led out on a corridor,
another mind brushed his.

Magus?

Get Allie out. Get out.

Then the telepathic connection broke. “Did you hear?” Maya
asked.

Jake nodded. He looked up and down the hall then turned to
Maya. “Okay, now we go.”

“Oh sure, a seven-foot-tall Yeti isn’t going to look
conspicuous at all on the security tapes.”

“It’s better than being identified. You keep your head down
and stay close to me.”

To his relief she listened, but her stifled giggle told him
she still looked at this as more an adventure game. She’d grown up in the
sheltered world of Pantheria, far from the cruelties of nature’s worst and in
particular humankind’s worst. He wanted to protect her, maintain that
innocence. But for her own well-being, she had to know the reality he knew.
Unfortunately, that lesson would start with whatever had been done to the
magus.

* * * * *

Allie didn’t want to leave Marcus, but she couldn’t wake him
and couldn’t lift him. She put her arms around his neck, pressed her face into
the thick rough there. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll find a way to get you
out of here.”

If she used the cart and possibly the broom handle for a
lever she might be able to work enough of him onto the cart to drag him out of
here. She struggled just to drag the fifty-pound feed bags off the cart and
rolled the cart through the cage door as close to Marcus’ back as she could.
Next she grabbed the broom and clambered over cart and leopard. When she paused
to think about it, she was in a cage with a full-grown, supersized hybrid
predator. She had no idea how he would take to the idea of being prodded with a
broomstick when he woke up.

From the new angle it was obvious that to lever him onto the
cart would mean having to flip him over entirely like a pancake in a skillet.
She crawled back over him, sweating, acutely aware that time was slipping away.
She needed to raise his body six inches, something possible if she threw all
her weight into it. And then try to somehow nudge a corner of the cart under
with her foot or something.

She worked the broomstick under, prying gently at first and
then apologizing as she threw all her might onto it. Once she had what she
hoped was enough underneath, she blocked the wheel locks on the cart and braced
an end of the stick on a corner of the cart. Then pried. She threw her weight
into it. Just as she’d inched the cart close enough to get his hip under the
stick snapped, dropping him back onto the concrete floor. She collapsed,
panting beside him, tears burned the backs of her eyes and swelled her throat.
There was no time for tears. There had to be a way. There just had to. She
could not leave him.

Allie was leaning over Marcus, palm pressed in the vicinity
of where she thought his heart should be. She couldn’t feel the beat. She tried
her hand over his nostrils, holding her breath, while she waited for that kiss
of moisture that would signal breath.

The door creaking open behind her nearly sent her own heart
shooting out of her mouth. Her brain categorized details—blonde, female, no
clothes. A flicker of recognition stirred, not in her mind, but a light flutter
in her stomach. The name fell off her tongue before Allie thought about it.
“Maya?”

“Um, yeah, sweetie. I saw Franny and Lila in the park. They
were worried so I came looking for you. It’s probably a really bad idea for you
to be messing with that leopard. Why don’t you come out here with me?”

“I know this won’t make sense right now, but I know the
leopard. He’s completely safe. We just have to get him out of here and fast.
The guys here stole him and they said something about sacrificing him tonight.”

“Honey, I’d love to help, but stealing will only get you in
more trouble. Didn’t you just get out of jail? And I know Marcus is here
somewhere. We need to get you both out before this place is overrun with
researchers, which by Jake’s best guess will be any minute now. Have you seen
Marcus?”

Allie looked down at the leopard and back up at Maya. “Yes.”

“Tell me where he is.”

“Not until the leopard is out.”

Maya turned, swatting at something or someone behind her.
Allie could just make out the first of the whispered words, “You’ll scare her.”
Maya lost ground as she was backed into the room by the biggest, hairiest beast
Allie had ever seen in her life.

Fear, a cold, watery feeling, spread from her toes to the
roots of her hair. He was enormous, silver hair, ice-blue eyes. She felt as if
she was in one of those dreams where a monster is coming toward you and you
can’t move or scream.

And then that flutter in her stomach again. A name came to
mind. “Jake?”

That froze the pair of them. “H-How?” Maya stammered.

Jake put a hand over her mouth.

Allie didn’t have time to be afraid, to worry she was losing
her mind. All that had to wait until they were out of this place. The walls
seemed to breathe doom and they were closing in.

“Jake, this is Marcus. You know that, don’t you? He’s a
hybrid of some kind. Of course you know. So are you.”

Maya answered, “Marcus isn’t a leopard, Allie. That’s not
him.”

Allie turned her back to them. “I’m not going to argue about
this. Help me or not.” She dropped back beside Marcus, her voice tight on a
knot of emotion. “He’s so still, barely breathing.”

“By the Mother, I swear the council knew what they were
doing when they banned females from leaving Pantheria,” Jake grumbled. “Maya,
watch the door. Marcus didn’t used to be a leopard, but little Marisa might
have permanently damaged him in some way when she shifted him.”

Maya had her head out the door, but she withdrew it and
turned around. “Marisa what? The baby shifted him?”

Jake was beside Allie in two strides. He lifted the cat in
his arms. “This is Marcus. Even knocked out he emanates arrogance. Let’s get
out of here.”

Jake swung Marcus over his shoulders and led the way. Maya
and Allie followed.

They were halfway across the warehouse when the elevator
doors opened and someone shouted, “Stop!” Jake sprinted forward and hit the
button to raise the garage door. A van materialized in the parking lot. Maya
was lagging behind them, her yelp spun Allie around in time to see Maya go
down, a tranquilizer dart embedded in her left leg. She was reaching to pull it
out, but Allie knew whoever was shooting would have another in her in seconds,
enough drug to possibly kill her if he’d loaded the gun with the same dose
they’d used on Marcus. Rage and frustration roiled, a pot coming to boil and
energy churned the air around her. She could feel the change coming and for
once she recognized it for what it was, only she didn’t know how to manage it.

Let it happen.
Marcus’ thoughts drilled through hers.
Just let it take you up off this plane and stay on the next.
Allie let
pain push her over the edge, carry her into darkness. Her energy rearranged and
she fell, tumbling head over tail, bursting back into the world of light and
sensation.

The shock of Allie’s landing sent the guard skidding into
the wall behind him. Beneath her Maya curled into a ball with her arms
shielding her head. Outside Jake could only run for the van with Marcus and
count on the shock of seeing Allie shift to buy them some time before the guard
started shooting again. Carlos was at the wheel.

“If this gets much worse. Get him out of here.”

Back at the warehouse Ben and Atka hung back just outside
the door. Jake warned them back.

Easy, boys. I don’t think she knew she could do that. We
got a newly shifted female and the sensory stimulation has to be driving her
out of her mind.

Ben looked back at him.
Where did you find a female
leopard shifter? Did the humans create her?

Let’s just get out of here alive and collect details
later, bro.

Allie was crouched over Maya. Maya was still conscious. He
saw her rub Allie’s belly. Jake wasn’t sure how much longer Maya had before the
drugs immobilized her.

Maya, see if you can get on her back. Quick, baby. Just
take a chance. I don’t think she’ll hurt you.

Allie’s tail snapped back and forth like a whip. She sent a
deep-throated growl at the guard. He still looked too frightened to breathe.

Maya managed to get her arms around Allie’s neck and tried
swinging up on the leopard’s back. She wouldn’t have made it if Allie hadn’t
lowered her belly to the floor to let Maya crawl on. Allie turned in a circle,
snarling at everyone. Maya was still hanging on. Jake called to her
telepathically. Reassured her all would be fine. Atka and Ben joined in. It
seemed to agitate her more. She whirled and charged toward the door.

The guard was on his knees aiming the rifle again.

Ben leapt and snatched Maya from Allie’s back. A dart
whizzed past his head. Jake decided his only hope of saving Allie was to try
catching her. This was going to be about as much fun as throwing himself in a
paper shredder.

She wheeled and lunged for Ben, Jake grabbed her. As
expected, her claws sliced into his thick Yeti hide as if it were paper. He
hugged her to his chest and ran, making the van in three long strides, Ben
scooting in ahead of him and Atka diving through the front door into the
passenger seat.

The van was rolling before he was all the way in. Jake
dropped Allie on the floor and grabbed hold of the seat, picking up pavement
rash on one shaggy foot before he managed to pull himself all the way in and
slam the door. Atka was hanging half out. Ben dropped Maya and helped him in.
The door swung, caught a light pole and shut as Carlos laid into the
accelerator.

“We have light shields,” Carlos said. “Everyone can breathe
easy.”

Allie’s menacing growl suggested otherwise.

* * * * *

Jake pulled up in front of Allie’s apartment. For the
hundredth time he caught himself before he automatically touched minds. He
never noticed how much he relied on telepathy until he didn’t have it. How was
he going to have a private conversation with Seth without drawing attention
from Franny and Lila? Even mind touching that occurred more than a mile away
could send Allie into a frenzy. In a brief flash of consciousness, Marcus had
warned Jake she wasn’t integrated enough with her animal form to comprehend
speech. Until she had spent enough time in her true form, it was possible that
all her senses were hammering a brain unused to the onslaught, it was probable
that magnified senses of her leopard form were painfully overwhelming. It was
obvious that communication, especially telepathy, caused extreme pain. She
acted as if they were blasting commands at her through a bullhorn pressed to
her ear.

Until they found a way to shift her back or communicate with
her, Allie wouldn’t let them near Marcus or Maya.

Shadows played across the blind covering Allie’s window,
their shapes and sizes unique enough that he could tell the occupants apart by
their shadows. Lobos the same height as Lila but broader built and lacking her
grace. His gestures and actions, frantic. Seth towering above them all, a large
black shadow toward the back corner, near the sink. Lila and Franny moved
between the men, swallowed momentarily by Seth’s shadow and then remerging on
the other side.

Jake moved closer, scuffing his feet lightly on the cracked
sidewalk, contemplating how best to gain Seth’s attention, but the sound seemed
to do the trick. Seth straightened, weaving between the others to get to the
door. Jake shuffled his feet again, a little louder, then stamped the right foot
three times. He felt silly. This was like sending smoke signals instead of a
text.

Seth was tangled with a dance of bodies now. The shoebox
apartment was over capacity with four adults. Lila stepped up onto the desk and
Franny moved over onto the bed so Seth could get by. The front door opened and
Seth stepped out, ducking under the low doorframe.

A light breeze carried scents of porcine blood, human
females and Pantherian anxiety. Those Jake recognized. Something else raised
hair on the back of his neck. Someone else. Jake surveyed their surroundings,
on alert for a shape that didn’t quite belong.