Dark Wrath (10 page)

Glancing back,
she saw that Jesse and the man who’d so unnerved her had helped one of the men
from the back and was supporting him between them.  The Lycan who’d been
seated beside her was helping the second man.

The stranger was
the only one of all of them who showed no sign of an injury she realized, even
as she studied the bloody bandage around Jesse’s upper chest and shoulder in
consternation.

As she was
dragged inside the building Erin’s attention was snagged by the woman still
standing in the doorway.  The woman met her curious gaze with a
calculating one that didn’t hold so much as an iota of friendly
curiosity.  In point of fact, her gaze was downright hostile.

Erin couldn’t
fathom why until the woman’s gaze lit on Jesse.

Enlightenment
blossomed.  The woman had a ‘thing’ for Jesse.  Either they had a
history, or they were currently involved.  Erin wasn’t certain of which,
but she knew the two of them weren’t just casual acquaintances and it was also
obvious from the deadly look that the woman knew about her.

Encountering the
woman’s challenging glance with a neutral expression, Erin held her gaze just
long enough to allow the woman to know she wasn’t intimidated and then assuaged
her curiosity about the building they were entering.

Cages lined the
walls.  Dogs and cats, every hair bristling with alarm, stood at the door
of each, raising a near deafening din as the rag tag group entered the
building.

The woman was a
veterinarian?  She supposed she had known that in the back of her mind
from the deafening racket the animals were putting up from the moment they’d
gotten out of the vehicle, but it hadn’t connected in her mind with the bullet
holes in the Lycans until now.  Horrified at the thought, Erin turned to
glance at the men entering the building behind her.

From what she
could see no one was either surprised or disturbed besides her, which, when she
added in the fact that the woman had been ready to let them in when they
arrived, meant that this wasn’t an unscheduled stop but an arranged one.

As soon as
everyone was inside, the woman closed the door and locked it, then threaded her
way to the front of the group and led them down a narrow hallway.  The men
filed into an examination room.  When Erin paused and turned to follow
them, the woman took hold of her upper arm, drawing her to a halt. 
“You’ll come with me.”

Erin frowned, but
the woman’s grip was surprisingly strong.  “Where?” she demanded.

Instead of
answering, the woman gave her arm a tug that nearly wrenched it from the
socket.  Erin was still trying to decide how much of a threat the woman
represented when Jesse stepped into the hallway.  “We need to lose that
chip,” he said tightly.

Erin glanced from
him to the woman and back again.  “You might have said so,” she retorted.

“I suppose you
would have considered cooperating if I had?” the woman said tartly, speaking
directly to Erin for the first time.

Erin glared at
the woman and then glanced at Jesse again, realizing that, with or without restraints,
she was obviously still considered a prisoner.  Now wasn’t the time to
argue, however.  If the FEDS had recovered their cool by now from the
assault on the facility, they’d discovered their prize breeding mare and mad
scientist were missing.  “I wouldn’t have told Jesse about it if I hadn’t
intended to cooperate,” she said tightly, following the woman into another
examination room.

The woman shoved
her in the direction of a table.

Pushed off
balance, Erin fell against it and turned to glare at the woman’s back as she
moved to the supply cabinets.  “Get on the table.”

Erin didn’t even
look at the table. “I’m not one of your patients,” she ground out.

“We need to do a
scan to find the transmitter.”

Erin turned from
the vet and glared at Jesse when he spoke.  “Maybe so, but I’m not lying
on an animal gurney.  The floor’s probably cleaner.”

The female vet
turned with some sort of electronic device in her hands.  “Put her on the
table and strap her down.”

Jesse’s face
tightened as his gave flickered from Erin to the other woman.  “That won’t
be necessary, Juliette.  She’s offered to cooperate.”

Anger washed over
Juliette’s face.  “Do you want me to take care of this or not, Jesse?”

“Just locate the
damned thing--or give me the scanner and I will.”

“You going to
extract it, too?”

Jesse glared at
her.  After a moment, she moved toward Erin, flipped a switch on the
scanning device and moved it slowly down Erin’s body, studying the gauge on
it.  When she’d reached Erin’s feet, she stood up and gave her a cold
stare eye to eye for a moment.  “Turn around.”

Erin didn’t
particularly want to give the woman her back.  After a pregnant moment,
she turned, though.

The woman found
the device in her hip.  Figured!

The needle she
stabbed into Erin’s hip to deaden the area made her knees buckle.  She had
to grip the examination table she was leaning against to keep from falling on
the floor.  Right up until the woman sliced into her flesh and began
digging for the implant, Erin thought it might almost have hurt less to have
the procedure without the medicine to numb sensation.

When she gasped,
Jesse stepped around the table opposite her and grasped her arms.  She
wasn’t certain whether it was to support her--morally and physically--or if he
thought she might try to lay the woman out, but it was good for her that he
did.  It kept her from passing out and crumpling to the floor.

If she’d been in
any condition to do so, she
would
have knocked the woman out.

By the time
Juliette had finally dug the electronic implant out, closed the incision with a
couple of stitches, and plastered a bandage over it, Erin was beginning to
wonder if she would puke or pass out first.  She was relieved when she did
neither, but she was only saved from the latter by the fact that Jesse gathered
her against him when the woman was done with her, holding her tightly to
prevent her from falling.

“Fucking bitch,”
she managed to mutter when he’d half carried her to a chair and helped her to
sit.  “You can be damned sure I won’t be recommending you to anybody I
know.”

It occurred to
Erin belatedly that she wasn’t really in any better position to defend herself
now than she had been when the woman had been torturing her with her scalpel.
 She hadn’t said anything at the time because she wouldn’t have put it past
the bitch to ‘accidently’ cut an artery if there was one handy for cutting, but
she was as weak as water, dizzy and nauseated.  If the woman felt like
stalking across the room and slapping her head off she wouldn’t be able to stop
her.

Thankfully, she decided
to pretend she hadn’t heard Erin’s comments.  When she’d finished wiping
up the blood and dropping her instruments in the sink, she left the room and
went down the hall.

Erin supposed to
torture the poor, wounded men.

Lucky for them
they had someone with some medical knowledge and access to medicine on their
side!

As the dizziness
finally subsided, it dawned on Erin that they’d been completely prepared to
remove the tracking device from her.  That not only meant that Jesse had
gone with the intention of rescuing, or recapturing, her.  It also meant
that he knew about the device or at least suspected.

Was that why he
wasn’t being as nasty as he had been before?  Had some doubt shaken his
conviction that she was a totally cold, insensitive, traitorous bitch?

Without asking,
there was no way to be certain and she didn’t really feel up to a verbal battle
at the moment if she’d guessed wrong.  Besides, she wanted her baby. 
From what Jesse had said, she knew he meant to go after Joshua and she wasn’t going
to do anything to rock the boat until she had her baby back.

Erin was half
drowsing in the chair where she’d been left when the sound of footsteps coming
in her direction roused her.  With an effort, she lifted her head and
focused her eyes.  Jesse filled the doorway on the opposite side of the
room.  He studied her for several moments in silence but before she could
wonder what thoughts were running through his mind, he moved toward her.

“We’re moving,”
he said, his voice brusque.

Nodding, Erin got
to her feet with an effort.  Jessie caught her when she swayed on her
feet, half supporting her as he escorted her from the examination room. 
The building that housed the veterinary clinic was strangely quiet as they
moved along the hallway.  Even the dogs had ceased to bark.

They set up
another alarm as she and Jesse neared the kennel, however.

Confused when no
one joined them, Erin glanced at Jesse questioningly several times, but she
didn’t ask him what had become of the others and he didn’t volunteer the information. 
Outside, she discovered the Hummer had disappeared.  In its place was a
dark late model sedan.

“A cliché,” Erin
murmured with a touch of amusement as Jesse opened the passenger door and
pushed her inside.

When he’d settled
beside her in the driver’s seat, she studied him for several moments in the dim
pre-dawn light.  “What happened to the others?”

He glanced at
her, but he didn’t answer as he turned the key in the ignition and started the
car.  Frowning, mentally shrugging it off since she wasn’t actually that
interested anyway, Erin focused on fastening her seatbelt.

“They’ve been
removed to a safe house for recovery,” Jesse said as they left the parking lot
and turned onto the dark nearly deserted street in front of the building.

Erin’s brows rose. 
Everyone, including Juliette apparently, had gone to the safe house while she
was ‘resting’ in the room where the bitch had removed her tracking
device?  It was hard to avoid the implications of that, that she was the
least important participant if she’d been the last to be moved to safety. 
“Are we going there, too?”

“No.”

So what was she,
bait? She thought angrily?  Again?  He was using her to lead the
pursuit away from the others?  “Did Dr. Wagner have a devisc on him, too?”

“Yes.”

“Did, but he doesn’t
now?” Erin persevered.

“They won’t know
that for a while.”

Erin digested
that for several moments, studying the cityscape outside the car windows and
absently trying to place her location.  “For a while?” she echoed. 
“You didn’t destroy it?”

Instead of
answering this time, he shrugged.

“You’re playing a
seriously stupid game with some very bad people,” Erin snapped, more scared
than angry.

His lips
tightened.  “But then, being a dumb animal, I cain’t help myself.”

Erin gaped at
him.  A chaotic wash of emotions went through her--frustration,
hopelessness, anger and most difficult to deal with, empathy.  She could
see his point, unfortunately.  In her own way, she’d been just as guilty
as the others in treating him as less than human, not to the extent he seemed
to believe, but she
had
considered the Lycans little more than
beasts.  They
were
beasts when they shifted, controlled more by
their instincts than their instincts were under their control, but Jesse at
least had a gentler side when he had mastery of his beast, and he was
intelligent--and quite devastatingly appealing both in personality and physical
appearance.

As frustrated and
frightened as she’d been about everything that had happened, she couldn’t avoid
that knowledge.

Truth be told,
believing what he believed about her, he had every reason to behave horribly
toward her, to hurt her, or at least want to.  He very obviously hadn’t
wanted to hurt her or he would have.

Something else
occurred to her as they drove, Jesse moving steadily and with purpose through
the city, as if he was very familiar with it and had a specific destination in
mind.  The Lycans obviously moved among them.  Even with everything
she’d discovered about Jesse, she’d had a deep rooted prejudice about his kind. 
She supposed, in the back of her mind, and not too distantly, she’d thought
they eked out an existence hidden away in the swamps.

Juliette was one
of them, she realized with sudden insight, and practiced veterinary medicine
right under the noses of humans coming and going every day with no clue of what
walked among them.  No doubt they all did.

They had money
behind them--a lot of money.

Unless they went
around stealing tremendously expensive vehicles and electronic equipment, and
somehow she didn’t believe that.

“What were they
doin’ when I arrived?”

Erin looked at
him blankly.

He frowned, but
more, she thought, because he didn’t want to be forced to make an issue of his
interest than because she didn’t answer at once.  “In the lab,” he added
tightly.

Enlightenment
dawned.  She repressed a shudder with an effort.

She thought she’d
repressed it.

“They were about
to impregnate me with a little Jesse.”

His head whipped
toward her so fast she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gotten whiplash
from it.  “An extremely repugnant thought for you, I see,” he said dryly.

Erin flushed, but
she grew angry, as well.  “Was I supposed to be thrilled only because it
was yours?  I’d like to see how fucking excited you’d be about being
strapped to a table and having some asshole shove a syringe full of sperm into
you!”

Several different
emotions flickered across his face in rapid succession, too swiftly for her to
grasp them all. “I’d just as soon no’ have sperm shoved into any of my
orifices,” he said wryly.

He hesitated,
obviously struggling with the urge to say more, and she knew suddenly that he
wanted to ask her if the clinical aspect was the only reason she’d been
repulsed.  He repressed the impulse and a flicker of amusement replaced
her anger.  “You know what I meant,” she added a little testily.  “If
it had been you, instead of me….”