Forever's Fight (9 page)

“The world has so much to learn about you.” She stifled a yawn as exhaustion tugged at her. “I’ve so much to learn.”

“I’m not that different than you, but tomorrow I’ll answer any of your questions. Now you should rest.” He placed a gentle kiss on her cheek and rose. “Remember, if you need anything just come find me.”

“I’ll be all right. As you said, I need some sleep. I’m sure once my head hits the pillow I’ll be out.”

When he turned and strolled out of the bedroom, she reached up and placed her hand over where he had kissed her. She could still almost feel his lips there. She wasn’t sure what to make of shifters, but she couldn’t deny her attraction to Patrick. There was a heat between them that she had never felt before. She wasn’t sure if she should give in, like her body so desperately wanted to, or if she should fight her attraction to him.

Weighing all she had learned about shifters, she stood and wandered over to the large bay window. Through the darkness, she could just barely make out the mountains surrounding the area. During the day, or even at night with the light of the moon, she was sure it must be beautiful. She’d have to wait to take in the magnificence because there was just a faint glow from the moon behind some clouds. Most of what she could see was the heavy snow falling.

The mountains would be different than her childhood home in Florida, but at least she felt a measure of safety here. Her thoughts left Patrick and returned to her brother. Where was he? Was he regretting his decision? She had no way of knowing, and that made it harder to bear.

“Oh, Dean. I hope you’re safe…wherever you are.”

As he climbed the stairs to the fifth floor, fatigue wrapped around Patrick like a second skin. He felt as if he was climbing the mountain outside the hotel. Even his lion within was barely stirring. The planning session with Austin could have waited until morning, especially since they couldn’t bring down Hathaway Medical until Luke had finished going through their system. He had to back up the information they needed, otherwise it would all be destroyed. To make the most out of the mission, they needed to be completely informed.

Luke would work around the clock, only stopping when he simply couldn’t go on without sleep, and get it done as quickly as possible. Then, Patrick would lead the team to take down the lab, despite Austin thinking it was a bad idea. The family felt they had a duty to protect Patrick. After all, he was the Alpha. Austin reasoned that he shouldn’t be risking himself on the frontlines.

Even with Austin’s fierce argument, Patrick was determined to see this through. He’d be on the team to destroy Hathaway Medical. It was the least he could do for his mate, after all, the terror they’d instilled in her, and the manhunt they’d sent after her. With every lab, he took down, it was another retribution for Jade. They might have destroyed the lab she was kept in weeks ago, but this one would be yet another lab that could never harm shifters again.

As he came down the hall, he could see Luke’s office door slightly ajar, letting the rest of the family know he was still up working if they needed anything. Yawning, he pushed the door open and entered. “Got a minute? Or is this a bad time?”

“Naw, come on in.” Luke took a long drink from the coffee mug he held in his hand before setting it back on the cluttered desk. “What’s up? I figured you’d be in bed by now.”

“I just finished going over possible plans of attack with Austin. Find anything?”

“A ton of shit that I’ll never be able to erase from my mind.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a deep sigh. “When you rescued Jade and brought back the stuff you found there, it was nothing compared to this.”

“Do you mean they’ve advanced their experiments?”

“Not really advanced, just decided to record them more. Photography and video. Some of these have been viewed so many times I wonder if there isn’t someone getting off on them. How anyone can stand to watch someone being tortured like this is beyond me.”

As he settled into the chair across from Luke’s desk, he nodded in agreement. What he had read was bad enough but to actually watch it or see the aftermath captured in photos would bring it to another level. His mind had already done enough to reconstruct what had happened to Jade, and the others who had been held captive in various labs.

“What brought you in here? If you came to put more pressure on me to get this stuff onto my own system, I’m working as fast as I can. A lot of the files are encrypted and need to be unsealed first. It’s going to take a little time.”

“I know you’re working as quickly as you can. No, I’m here because Clarissa thought of something else. Something that might be more terrifying than what’s going on in the labs.”

“After what I’ve seen I’m not sure there is anything worse.”

He ran his fingers through his hair and tried to swallow the lump in his throat. “She remembered that Hathaway Medical has an on-site daycare for their workers. They’re using the children to control the parents, possibly more. They threatened their employees, claiming anyone who doesn’t follow the rules and do their work would risk having their child turned into a shifter.”

“That’s not possible.” Luke appeared incredulous. For the first time, Patrick noticed how red-rimmed his eyes were, and wondered when he’d slept last.

“I’ve been thinking about this. Though we can’t bite someone and turn them, there might be another way. Our blood is so mixed with that of our beast that it could be possible to give someone traits of ours if they were nearly drained of their blood and had ours used in replacement. It might not give them the aptitude to shift, but it would give them some of our abilities such as to purr or growl.” Even as he said it, he hoped he was wrong. He stared past Luke, watching the royal blue curtains wave as the floor heating vent kicked on, sending warm air throughout the room. It was surprising that with the dark wood desk, and the blue curtains that nearly spread the whole length of the wall, that Luke still looked at home there instead of his pale skin and blonde hair clashing with the decor. This was his space, and rarely anyone intruded, the only exception being Patrick or Austin.

“Could you really do that? Drain someone of their blood and replace it with ours? That seems ridiculous.” Even though he appeared disbelieving, Luke had paled as he clenched the arms of his chair.

“If you have medical knowledge and equipment, then yes.”

“Fuck.”

“My sentiments exactly.” He stood and rolled his shoulders. “See if you can find anything that might lead you to believe they carried through on their threat.”

“I’ll put some keywords into a search and get it going. If I find anything—”

“I don’t care what time it is, find me. I want to know immediately. We might not be able to reverse it, but we can be damn sure they don’t experiment on these children any more than they already have.”

He left Luke to get back to work, and headed for his own bedroom. Exhaustion tugged at him, but his brain was working overtime trying to digest everything he had learned. What made these people think that what they were doing was right? He understood medical testing because he was a doctor—but not like this. Not with shifters being forced into it, and especially not with torture involved. If the government wanted to do testing, it should have been conducted like any other drug test with volunteer subjects. And there was no way it should be done on children.

Something had nagged him since Clarissa recalled that horrendous memory, making his lion restless. It was almost as if his beast was warning him that it wasn’t just a threat. Could they have possibly carried out their warning? He sure hoped not.

Screams pulled Patrick from a restless sleep. He climbed out of bed without thinking. The stress of finding this new lab must have been preying on Jade’s mind. Austin had mentioned she had a nightmare while Patrick was gone, but it had been mild considering those she’d had in the past. Now, it seemed to have changed.

Once he was in the wide hallway, he heard her desperate cries. “No, no. Damn it, stop!” Heart-wrenching sobs and shrieks pierced the walls of the castle. “You can’t do this, they’re innocent!”

“Patrick,” Austin called to him as he stepped into the hallway.

“Not now, I’ve got to check on Jade.”

“That’s just it. It’s not Jade, it’s Clarissa.”

With Austin’s statement, Patrick paused and listened. Sure enough, the cries were coming from the other side of Chase’s room, not from across the hall. “Oh, hell.” He rubbed his hand over his face, trying to wake himself up. “Go back to bed, I’ll check on her.”

“If it wasn’t bad enough with Jade having these nightmares, now it’s Clarissa, too. But maybe they can find some comfort with each other. Or maybe with you…her mate.” Austin leaned against the wall, a smirk tugging up the corner of his lips. “When were you going to tell me?”

“It’s not official.” Patrick reached for the handle on Clarissa’s bedroom door.

“Maybe not yet, but it will be. I smell you all over her and don’t give me that bullshit that it was for her protection on the journey here.”

“We can discuss this later.” He slipped inside and shut the door behind him. The soft glow from the attached bathroom gave him enough light to see. She was stretched out in the middle of the bed, the sheets tangled around her legs as she lashed out with her arms, fighting someone he couldn’t see—a nightmarish phantasm.

He crossed the room in two quick strides and came to stand near the bed. His lion rushed forward, demanding to touch her, but he knew she could strike out at him. She wouldn’t mean to, but in the midst of a nightmare she wouldn’t be thinking clearly. “Hush, angel. You’re okay, you’re safe.”

“Oh, please. No, stop, they’re just children!”

“Shit,” he whispered before lowering himself onto the edge of the bed. Clarissa wasn’t like Jade, who was a shifter and could hurt someone if she let her beast out unintentionally. She was human, and there was very little she could do to hurt him.

Careful to avoid her swings, he placed his hand on her shoulder. “Clarissa, wake up. Come on, angel. I need you to wake up.” He ducked out of the way of her next swing but caught hold of her wrist. “I need you to wake up.”

She moaned and her eyes fluttered opened. “What…” She tried to pull her wrist from his grasp, but he didn’t budge.

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Why are you holding my wrists?”

His embrace loosened, but he didn’t let go. “To avoid being hit. You were thrashing about.”

“Nightmare.” Her voice was light as if she didn’t want to remember it. “An awful nightmare.”

“I know, angel. Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head and slipped her hands from his embrace. Leaning against the headboard, she slid her legs up until she could pull them tight against her chest and sat there with her arms wrapped around them. “Awful, just awful.”

Without invitation, he scooted onto her bed beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Come here, angel.”

Without hesitation, she slid into his embrace, her hand on his bare chest. When he’d rushed from his bedroom, he’d thought it was Jade crying out, and hadn’t even bothered to grab a shirt. The plaid pajama pants were fine then, but now he wondered if she’d think about this a moment later, when the fear wasn’t icing her veins, and question his intentions since he was half-dressed.

Mating for a human was like being tossed out to sea with the waves knocking them in one direction and then the opposite, over and over. Her delicate human body was going through changes to adjust to what was happening, to expand her lifespan to match her shifter mate. Her emotions would have been erratic just from the mating, but everything else was only making it worse for her.

All he could do was sit there and hold her until she was ready to talk. There was nothing he could do about the dream, nothing he could do about what was happening inside her when it came to their mating. He’d be there for her every step of the way, to hold her, a shoulder to cry on, someone to talk to when she was angry and frustrated. He was determined to give her anything else she needed. Together, they’d get through this.

He pulled the blanket up around her and ran his hand down her arm. “It’s going to be okay.”

“I’m not sure my world will ever be okay again. So much as changed recently, and I just don’t know how to adjust to it. I almost feel like I’ve been kidnapped and transported to another planet.”

His hand paused on her shoulder. “Because you know shifters exist?”

“That was a shock in itself, but that’s not the reason I feel like I’m in a different universe.” She ran her hand up his chest, her fingers teasing along the contours of his muscles. “What happened to civilization? We’re not wild creatures that need to go around attacking those who are slightly different. There’s enough room in this world for all of us. I just don’t understand why they’re doing this.”

“They’re scared.”

“That’s not a good enough excuse to torturing people. Maybe it’s valid for locking them up in those camps, but not to experiment on them.” She tipped her head back to look at him. The sadness and tears glistened in her eyes. “I’m ashamed to be a part of this world. To know my species would do something so disgusting.”

“We’re going to stop this.”

“A band of shifters and one lonely human up against the whole of civilization?” She shook her head. “I hate to be a pessimist, but I don’t think we stand much of a chance.”

“It’s not just me and my siblings. There are other shifters out there ready and willing to fight. None of us want to live in fear any longer.”

She pulled back from him enough to get a good look at him. “Have you considered what might happen to you or your family if you try to stand against the government? They’ll kill you.”

“Oh, angel, they’ll do much worse than that. We all know because we’ve seen what happened when Jade was captured. She suffered the actual torment, but as the Alpha of the pride, I felt it, too. The others saw the files I brought back. Each of us knows what we’re risking.”

“If you know, then why do it? Why risk being a lab experiment when you’re safe here?”

The fear rolled off her, permeating the air with its odor and piquing his lion’s attention. “I wish I could tell you the end justifies the means, but since I don’t know what the future holds, I can’t. For that, my angel, I’m sorry. But I do know someone has to stand up and try to make this better.”

“Why you?”

“Before things got so bad, my family had a beautiful home. Even though we were all older, Jade had just turned twenty-one and we still lived at home. None of us really had the desire to move out.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“For humans, maybe, but not for shifters. Even though some of the animals we shift into are solitary creatures, we’re still human. We seek at least part of the time, the company of those like us. You’ll find many shifters living in groups or clans. Sometimes they’re families, others are groups of the same species, and more recently there are some groups that have gotten together just to stay alive. No matter our living arrangements, each of us still need time alone.”

She leaned back into his embrace and tugged the blanket up around her. “Sorry, I interrupted you. Tell me about your life before all of this.”

“It will be a good story to get you back to sleep,” he teased, leaning his head against the pillows, settling in. “Our house wasn’t fancy by any means, but it was large enough to give each of us our own space. That’s no easy task with six siblings and my father. Seven bedrooms upstairs, with the large living, kitchen, and dining rooms downstairs. My father also kept a small office off the dining room for his trading business. He was a financial genius.”

“You say
was
but you don’t know that he’s—”

“Dead,” he supplied. “You’re right. We don’t know, but I know my father. If he were alive, he’d have found us. Plus, if he’s not dead, that means he’s in one of the labs. That would be worse than death.”

“What about one of the camps? He could be there.”

“It’s possible, but knowing Dad, he’d have found a way to let us know he was alive. Shifters Underground hasn’t offered any hints to his whereabouts, and Jade’s been searching every day since he went missing, not counting the time she was held captive. If he were alive, we’d have found something.”

“What’s Shifters Underground? That name almost reminds me of the Underground Railroad.” She tugged the comforter high enough to cover her arm, as well as his torso, as she continued to tease along the contours of his chest.

“It’s kind of like that, at least in part. We help shifters who need to get somewhere safe. But it’s so much more than that. There are boards for people to share information, like towns to stay away from, and places that are safe. Jade started a section for people to find lost loved ones and she handles most of that. She scrolls through the website, our boards, the information we collect, trying to find anything she can. I can’t begin to count how many families she’s reunited or brought closure to.”

He leaned his head against the top of hers. “But we’re straying from the subject. You wanted to know about life before all of this.”

“It’s all fascinating.”

“It was an average life. Dad was an investment banker, helping people invest their savings. He had some high powered clients, a few shifters, but mostly humans who didn’t know about his second nature. He provided a stable income that put most of us through college.”

“Go on. I want to hear it all.” Sleep coated her voice as she snuggled a little closer to him.

“We lived in a small town. It wasn’t too far away from the city but far enough that I was able to set up a medical practice. People came to me instead of venturing into the city. A small family practice was what I always wanted, and for a short period, I had it.” He missed the simple days of his medical practice, even when he’d get a call in the middle of the night when someone was sick or in labor. Unlike doctors in big cities, he offered house calls. He had set up his practice just like so many other doctors had done in the past, with house calls and bartering. Times were tough, and medical care was sometimes put on the back burner.

Thinking she had dozed off, he adjusted slightly, moving down into the bed so that once she had fallen completely asleep he wouldn’t have to wake her. This way he could hold her all night if he needed to, and keep the nightmares away.

When she looked up at him, he could tell she was struggling to stay awake. “What about the others?” she asked, sounding groggy.

“Austin joined the Army when he was eighteen and put in ten hellish years. He was alone and had to keep his beast a secret. Once he returned home, he went to work for the police department part time and weapons training through the department. We were all glad to have him home, not just because he’d be safe, but because having him missing from our pride was like having a chunk taken away.”

“Sounds like you two are close.”

“We’re all close, but Austin and I work together a lot. Luke went to college for his computer science degree. Blake has always been the handy brother, so he did construction and worked on cars. Pretty much anything to keep him busy. Jade had been in her final year of college when the world changed. She wanted to be a kindergarten teacher,and she’d have been good at it. So patient and caring, just like our mother.
”
Thinking about the good old days, when things were easier, he let his eyelids fall shut. Poor Jade might never get her teaching degree, and they might never be able to live among civilization again, but at least they were alive. That’s what mattered.

“You didn’t mention Chase. What was he doing before everything?”

“Running.” He let out a long sigh. “He was born running, and hasn’t stopped. Nothing keeps his interest longer than five minutes. It’s gotten worse with the uprising, and he’s become antsy. With the shit he’s seen since all this started, it doesn’t help matters.”

“Why?”

“Chase’s lion picks up on the unease and just won’t settle. He stays in lion form because it’s easier for him to control his anxiety. If you put him on a task, he’ll get it done, but to self-start something he finds his attention drifting and his lion pacing.” He rubbed his hand along her back as if he was trying to soothe tension from her. But it wasn’t tension from her that he was feeling, it was within him. “A week before we came up here, Chase was out when he saw something that still to this day he won’t talk about. Whatever he witnessed changed him.”

“You said before he wasn’t dangerous.”

“He’s not, my sweet angel.” He pressed his lips to her forehead, leaving a gentle kiss below her hairline. “Chase is still himself whether he’s in lion form or human. Either way, he’d never hurt you or anyone else. He’s just running from being an adult, from facing the realities of what happened to him that night, and what’s happening in the world.”