Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (4 page)

“
Your
car
might not be here in the
morning,” he said dryly. “If there’s anything in here you want,
you’d better get it now.” He lifted his head and looked over hers.
“Damien! Kane! Basil! We’re going to need some help
here.”

Laurie had already reached
for the small bag when he lifted it from the trunk. The bottles and
cans inside clanked together when he did and he sent her another
look, which she decided to ignore. As
if
it was his business if she liked
to bring all the stuff she needed to make her coffee so she didn’t
have to go out in the morning before she’d had it! And it
cost
twice
as
much to get stuff out of the vending machines as it did at the
convenience store! Which was saying something when everything cost
nearly twice as much at the convenience store as it did the grocery
store!

When Laurie looked around, she saw the
other three had pushed their bikes up into the parking lot. Lucien
left her to retrieve his own while the men unloaded her trunk and
carried her luggage to their bikes.

“
Uh … you’re taking me on
a bike?” Laurie said uneasily.

“
They’re going and your
car isn’t,” Lucien said pointedly as he straddled his bike. “Come
on. Get on the back. I’ll take care of you.”

“
We aren’t going on the
freeway, are we?”

The four men looked at each
other.

Lucien set his kickstand and climbed
off the bike. Striding toward her, he dropped a heavy arm across
her shoulders, walked her to the bike, and lifted her onto the
back. “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked as he slid a leg
over the bike again and started it.

It was a little reassuring that he
asked the name of the hotel, but not much after he’d manhandled her
and put her on the bike! She told him where she planned to
stay.

“
You might want to hold
on,” he said evenly as he gunned the engine.

He hadn’t put his jacket
back on and there was nothing between them but a thin t-shirt! She
did not want to get
that
chummy with the scary man! She nearly went off
the back when he accelerated, however, and grabbed frantically for
a hold. By the time he hit the freeway ramp, she was plastered as
tightly to his back as she could get and had locked her fingers
around his waist. She would’ve wrapped her legs around him, as
well, if she could’ve gotten them that high.

She didn’t want to see the cars flying
by them, but somehow she couldn’t seem to help herself, especially
since the bike seemed to be swooping from side to side. She
discovered why it seemed that way when she finally unclenched her
eyelids and opened them a fraction. He was zipping back and forth
between lanes. The rest of his team had closed in around them, but
it didn’t especially feel like a ‘buffer’ between her and the cars.
She closed her eyes again, trying to focus her mind on something
else—anything else.

Even the fact that she was plastered
more tightly against the man than she’d ever embraced her former
boyfriend and it felt like she was coiled around a block of stone
couldn’t hold her mind away from the terror long. She was actually
surprised that she managed to notice anything at all about the man
considering the level of terror—but she did notice that she liked
his smell, because she had burrowed her face between his shoulder
blades—and she did notice that he had lovely muscles everywhere.
Descending the off ramp was even more frightening since she could
feel gravity pulling her forward, but she told herself that she
only had to endure a few more minutes and she could get off the
vehicle from hell and she was never, ever going to set foot on a
motorcycle again as long as she lived!

Chapter Three

“
She didn’t know us,” Kane
said as soon as they’d trooped inside the cabin they used as a safe
house near the city—‘near’ being a subjective way of describing it
since it was two and a half hours from the city.

Despite the fact that it had been
hours since they’d dropped Laurie Stone at her hotel nobody asked
‘who?’. “Because it wasn’t Lindsey, you dumb fuck!” Damien growled,
stalking into the kitchen and grabbing a beer from the
fridge.

Kane glared at his back. “How do you
know that? She looked like Cpl. Merriweather. She was right behind
us. She could’ve been sucked through, too.”

Damien turned to look at him for a
long moment and then exchanged a significant look with Lucien. “She
didn’t know us,” Lucien responded succinctly.

“
Yeah, but we knew her and
we pretended we didn’t. Couldn’t she have been pretending too?”
Kane said pointedly.

Lucien shook his head, caught the beer
Damien tossed to him and sprawled on the couch. “Her
file.”

Kane glanced from Lucien to the other
two men and stalked into the kitchen to get himself a beer since
Damien hadn’t bothered to get anybody one but himself and Lucien,
his twin brother. “We’ve got files, too. We’ve got the files on the
men that we were and files we made up after we got
here.”

Basil spoke up for the
first time. “We
weren’t
those men. Those poor bastards are probably on
Xeno-12 right now, wondering what the fuck happened, just like
we’re here, wondering the same.”

Kane frowned, thought it over. “You
know what I mean,” he growled irritably.

“
Alright, let me put it
this way,” Lucien said when Kane reached the living area again.
“One, I saw Cpl. Merriweather when we went through the vortex and
I’m pretty damned sure she didn’t. And two, five minutes in
Laurie’s company is enough to convince me that she is definitely
NOT Merriweather.” He took a draught of his beer. “I’ll admit it
gave me a nasty turn when the DA handed that file over and I got my
first look at her. I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t her when we were
doing surveillance. But now I’m convinced. She isn’t
Meriwether.”

Damien dropped into his favorite
chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing
them at the ankles. “Well, where the fuck does that leave us? Here
I thought we might be getting closer to finding out what the hell
happened or, more importantly, how to get the hell out of this
place, and now we’re back at square one?”

Lucien stared at his bottle
broodingly, as if it was a crystal ball. “I think we can accept the
theory that we’re in an alternate universe,” he finally said
musingly.

“
Don’t start that again!”
Kane snapped. “It gives me a fucking headache!”

“
Shut the fuck up and let
him talk!” Damien and Basil snarled at the same time.

Lucien, who’d already opened his mouth
to blast him, closed it again and tried to pick up the thread of
his thoughts. “We know we sure as hell ain’t in Kansas anymore,
ToTo!” he snapped. “Nothing else fits—whether we know how we got
here or not!”

“
We got here through the
damned vortex! Don’t tell me you forgot that!”

Lucien glared at Kane.

Basil, who’d just returned from the
kitchen to get a beer for himself, punched his shoulder. “How about
you just shut the fuck up and listen for a change? How about
that?”

Jostled, Kane, who’d been about to
take a sip of his beer, poured it down the front of his shirt
instead. Uttering a snarl of rage, he bounded out of his seat.
Damien had been prepared for it. He punched Kane in the chest,
sending him sprawling in his seat again.

“
Cut it out!” Lucien
roared. “I can’t fucking think when y’all start that
shit!”

Everyone froze for a moment, exchanged
glares, and then settled in their seats.

Silence reigned for
several minutes. Finally, Lucien resumed his speculation. “Nobody’s
forgotten the damned vortex,” he growled. “All I’m saying is,
whether it was natural or not, it wasn’t a damned tornado—because
if it had been we’d still be on Xeno-12—probably dead, but still
there. And I, for one, don’t think it was natural at all. Not
saying it couldn’t be, but we
were
at war. It seems to me that we have to consider
that the chances are high that it was some kind of
weapon.

“
We know positively that
we aren’t in our universe! A lot of things seem to be the same, but
everything’s backwards and twisted. We dropped onto a battlefield
in our time and place—war games, I’m pretty sure, here. We keep
seeing people we recognize as people we knew in our own time and
place, but they aren’t the same. They just look like the people we
knew—well, except for the people that got sucked through that thing
with us. And I’m thinking it had to be an exchange—we switched
places—because I don’t think I could be in the same time and place
as another version of me—any of us.”

Damien shook his head. “We’ve gone
over this, Lucien, over and over in the past eighteen months. I
don’t see that going over it is helping. I don’t see that we’re any
closer to figuring this shit out just by rehashing it.”

Lucien glared at him. “Bear with me.
I’m just trying to get this straight in my head,
alright?”

Damien shrugged and focused on his
beer.

“
What I was getting around
to is that even though this is a different place there are
connections and parallels. Laurie isn’t Lindsey. I’m almost one
hundred percent positive of that. But one thing I have noticed
since we got here is that …. Well, it’s like the two places are
connected in a way. They run parallel to each other and a lot of
the same things are true of both. What I’m saying is Laurie
isn’t
our
Lindsey, but she’s the person our Lindsey would be in this
universe—is. So there must be a connection even if she isn’t the
same person.”

Damien blinked at him, glanced at
Basil and Kane and then looked at Lucien again, and then his beer.
“How many of these have I had?”

Lucien glared at him. “Ok, let me put
it this way—I still think we might be on to something and I still
think we need to stay close to Lindsey/Laurie. There’s a connection
somehow someway. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure we met up
with her because it was inevitable/fate/ or whatever the hell you
want to call it.

“
It’s like DA Peeples all
over again. He barely glanced at the identities we’d made up for
ourselves. Why? He isn’t Donald. He doesn’t know us—isn’t our
brother in this world--but he
still
felt the connection. There’s no other explanation
for him hiring us without a thorough background check.”

Kane frowned, obviously turning that
over in his mind and examining the logic for flaws. “It didn’t look
to me like Lindsey/Laurie felt any connection. She didn’t trust us
at all.”

Damien gave him a look. “And Cpl.
Merriweather was our bud, right?”

Kane stared at him a moment. His brow
cleared. “True. She hated our guts so that’s not really
different.”

Lucien and Damien both glared at him,
but it was Lucien who spoke. “Speak for yourself. She didn’t hate
me, and I didn’t get that vibe from Laurie either.”

Basil and Kane exchanged a
look. Basil knew when to keep his mouth shut, though.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t something Kane had ever learned. “She
threatened to have us terminated … twice! … for insubordination.
She said we were defective. You’re saying she actually
liked
us?”

“
She was
against
the genetic
engineering project,” Lucien said pointedly. “She didn’t hate us.
She just didn’t trust genetic engineering, and, as much as I hate
to admit it, she was right. We damned sure aren’t
normal
.”

“
Somehow I don’t think the
shape-shifting was part of that project,” Damien said dryly. “That
was something that happened to us when we went through the
vortex.”

“
I don’t think it was a
planned part of the project,” Lucien agreed, “but we don’t know
that it wasn’t a side effect.”

“
That never
happened
before
we went through the vortex,” Basil pointed out. “And they had
years to study us before they put us in the field.”

Lucien frowned. “In which case it
might be reversed if we can ever figure out a way to go back
through. But since we don’t know, yet, if the vortex was created
naturally or if it’s some kind of weapon …. It could even be this
place for all we know. Maybe the guys that were us in this place
could do that and we can now that we’ve taken their
place?”

Kane gaped at him. “So why did they
try to kill us when we shifted if they were used to it?” he
demanded, harping back to their arrival. “I wasn’t exactly thinking
normally, but it seemed to me that the ‘friendly fire’ we were
getting was because they didn’t know what the hell we
were!”

“
Nobody really knows a
damned thing!” Basil snapped. “Give us a break, Kane. We’re just
kicking possibilities around, trying to figure it out. Not but what
I don’t agree with you on this one—I think we all do even though
it’s hard to swallow. The only explanation for what we landed in,
though, was exercises and, if that’s what it was, then they had no
business lobbing live rounds at us and
trying
to hit us. And I don’t think
they would have except that they weren’t expecting us to
change.”