Pack Dynamics (15 page)

Alex’s hand tightened on the phone so hard the plastic creaked. “That’s a human being, you unethical bastard.” Anger curdled his stomach.

“And I’m sure that whatever it is he has running through his veins will save my wife’s life quite handily.” Ostheim tsked smugly. “It strikes me as quite hypocritical, Jarrett, that you’ve been avoiding my calls for months, but now that I have something of value to you, you can’t wait to contact me. You might want to think on that.”

Janni grabbed the phone. “Please, Mr. Ostheim. Please don’t hurt him. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

The harsh bark of a wholly unamused laugh came over the line, and Ostheim shouted his next sentence loudly enough that they all heard. “
He killed my nephew
.”

Janni stared, uncomprehending, at the instrument in her hand. “He hung up.”

“We need to find him,” Megan said. “Now. Alex, where would they be?”

Alex threw up his hands. “He’s a rich evil mastermind with offices all over the world. How should I know?”

“He’s a desperate angry man with a sick wife that he’s loved for decades,” Megan countered. “Think.”

Alex forced himself to sit still and shut up for a minute. “Well. If time’s a factor, they’re probably still in the area. So, one of his local labs, because he’d need the equipment. But, knowing Ostheim, he’s got a hidden lab or two or twelve squirreled away in the city, and I’m betting that’s where they’d take Ben.”

Janni actually growled. “That doesn’t help us. Are you telling me that you don’t have anyone inside that company? Industrial espionage doesn’t cut both ways?”

“I don’t have anyone so deep that they’d know about his secret underground lair.” She glared, and he relented. “Let me make a couple of calls. Although they probably won’t be returned until later.”

“Better than sitting here doing nothing.”

“Don’t you have any other cases you could be working on?” Alex paused in the middle of dialing. He should get her out of the line of fire, if at all possible, because this had gotten way too scary. Call him a chauvinist, but he didn’t like women getting hurt on his account. “Because we’ve solved mine, as least as far as what I hired you for.”

Her eyes blazed. “If you think for a minute that I’m leaving here before we find Ben and fix the werewolf thing—”

“No, no.” He raised his hands defensively. “Just, there’s not a whole lot you can do for now, and I’d hate for you to neglect your other clients because of me.”

“It isn’t about you anymore, Alex.” She put her hand over her face. “And it hasn’t really been since Ben got taken the first time.”

Chapter Eleven

The low buzz of voices and the smell of rabbits brought Ben slowly awake. For a brief second, he had the same fight-or-flight response he’d had before, but a shining moment of clarity reminded him just how useless it had been last time, and he stopped, made a conscious effort to relax, and told himself to breathe. Slowly. In two, hold two, out two.

He kept his eyes closed, because it was easier not to lose his shit if he couldn’t see—even though he could feel, with far too many nerve endings, how tied down he still was, and the fact that his arm had a needle in it. Sometime between the cage and the table his shirt had gone missing so they could affix heart monitor electrodes to his chest. But it would be worse, far worse, he knew, if he lost control again. That chain across his throat hadn’t been a joke. So. Slowly. In and out.

The heart monitor gave him away, though. “Back with us, huh?” McFoucher’s voice. “Sorry about before.”

Sure she was, and he was glad in a way that the cynical part of his brain still seemed functional. Her apology was belied by the fact that her tone was utterly clinical and her fingers not particularly gentle when she pulled down on his lower eyelid and shone a light on his face. “Open up.”

He did, squinting, but closed back down when she let him go. Breathing as slowly as he could under the circumstances, though the rapidly-beeping heart monitor told anyone who cared just how stressed he was.

“Good boy,” she said. Like she would to a dog.

“Thirsty.” One-word sentences were about all he could manage right now.

“I’ll bet.”

He heard the sound of water running into a glass, and a straw hit the corner of his mouth. He sucked the liquid down his raw throat, feeling a little better.

“Look, Lockwood,” she said with a hint of actual kindness he didn’t believe for a second. “I wasn’t kidding before when I said that you need to make this easy on yourself. We’ll get what we want regardless, and if you struggle, it’ll only piss us off.”

He didn’t have anything left anyway. Mental and physical exhaustion weighed him down; he barely had the strength to drink the water she was holding for him. The wolf was howling about giving in, but the human smacked it down and told it to shut up. He wouldn’t make McFoucher any promises about cooperating, but right now? He wanted to lie here with his eyes closed and think about not much at all because he was just so damn tired.

He wasn’t even aware of it when he fell asleep again.

O O O

“You poor bastard,” McFoucher murmured. She turned and set the glass on the counter. Noting with a tiny frown that Lockwood was shivering violently on the cold metal table, she grabbed a blanket from a linen cabinet and put it over him—not from any compassion on her part, she told herself—but because the subject going into shock and disrupting his physiology any more would adversely affect the experiment. “Do we have sick vampire rabbits yet?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nick said.

“Good. Try the nanotech alone in one batch and the tech with his blood in another. Let’s get this show on the road.”

An hour later, the rabbits they’d dosed with the subject’s blood were dead.

“That’s not promising.” She made some slides and had a look through the microscope. “Oh. Huh.” She had assumed that the vampire rabbits could only be killed via the standard stakes through the heart, sunlight, or decapitation—but apparently she was wrong, because the mixture of rabbit and human blood had been lethal. Interesting. “Give some healthy rabbits the nanotech and then inject some sick vamp ones with their blood once they start showing signs of lycanthropy.”

The vampire rabbits who’d been dosed with the nanotech alone hadn’t gotten any sicker, but neither had their condition improved. They’d stabilized at a level of “ill” that McFoucher was sure the boss would find unacceptable.

They’d be working through the night on this. The bonus that Ostheim had promised made the time worth it. She wasn’t sure, however, that it was equally worth the toll on her professional ethics, and her conscience smote her again as she arranged the blanket over …

The subject. She needed to keep thinking of him that way. It was easier.

O O O

Megan tapped on her datapad, hunting around LA County property records for places that Ostheim owned. She’d stumbled across three or four dummy corporations already, and she wondered how many she’d missed, cursing the lack of Ben to do this for her.

Of course, if Ben were here, she wouldn’t be looking for Ostheim properties so she could find him.

So far she’d eliminated several places for various reasons. That still left her with a dozen or so to check—and the dilemma of how to gracefully exit, since the only way she could think of to investigate the locations with any degree of accuracy and stealth was with her nose.

Well. If she couldn’t exit gracefully, maybe ungracefully would be the ticket. She bent over and moaned, clutching at her abdomen.

Alex looked over from his microscope with a lifted eyebrow. “A day early, Miss Graham?” And wasn’t it just like him to keep track of when she had her “period”? Board meetings were beyond him, but her body clock wasn’t. She wanted to smack him at times like this.

“The last day or so has been rather stressful,” she pointed out, wheezing a little.

“Do you need to go home and lie down?”

“Might be best if I do.” She gathered her things.

“Be careful?” His brown eyes regarded her worriedly. “Ostheim has what he wants, but I wouldn’t put it past him to get something extra out of my hide if he can.”

“He’s probably busy—”
Using Ben as a guinea pig
, she stopped herself from saying. “—but I can call you when I get home if you want.”

“That would set my mind at ease, Miss Graham.” He went back to the microscope as if concerns about her safety were an everyday item on their agenda, but his back radiated tension.

“Very well, Mr. Jarrett. If you haven’t heard from me within the hour, you may call the cavalry.”

“Oh, I will.”

She didn’t walk over to him and plant a kiss on top of his head for being so cutely protective, even though she wanted to. Instead, she left without another word.

O O O

McFoucher stared glumly at her test rabbits. She finally had a result that would be acceptable to Ostheim. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she should tell him. Even more unfortunately, she wasn’t sure she had a choice. Crossing her rich and powerful werewolf employer seemed like an unwise career move, not to mention an unwise life move. She’d seen the man’s manic obsessiveness when it came to finding a cure for his wife, and …

She smoothed the dead blood donor rabbit’s fur, while the now-healthy vampire bunny snarled in the cage next door. A little thing like the death of a research subject wouldn’t even be a blip on Ostheim’s radar.

Looking at Lockwood’s file again and the highlighted words
killed Deiter
in big bold letters, she gathered that the death of this particular research subject might be something that the boss would want anyway. If Lockwood died so that Idna would live, so much the better from Ostheim’s perspective.

McFoucher wasn’t sure she’d signed up for this.

O O O

The next time Ben woke up, the room was spinning gently around him and his heart was pattering against his ribs fast enough that he noticed it. His limbs felt heavy and his head felt muzzy and he was incredibly thirsty. When had he rated a blanket? Not that it was helping; he was still freezing, aching from the cold metal table.

And what the hell was that scent? Laboriously, he rolled his head over and saw a woman in a real hospital bed next to him. She smelled … sick. And not quite human. Sort of dead, in fact. Probably, his brain figured out after far too much time, the vampire everyone was so worried about. A bag of blood hung from a hook above her, with a line leading down to a needle in her arm.

Her eyes were closed, but she opened them, seeming to feel his gaze on her, and smiled. “Hello, young man. I’m feeling much stronger thanks to you.”

He wanted to protest that he wasn’t that young, sometimes he felt a hundred years old, he’d been in a
war
, dammit. But it just wasn’t worth the effort. The wolf was anxious, prowling in the background, but he didn’t have the strength to let it come out, and the McFoucher woman would have choked him down anyway, if he’d tried.

Speaking of McFoucher, she heard the vampire lady speak and came over to have a look at him. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired.” Still at one-word sentences. “Thirsty.”

“That’s normal. This will … all be over, in a very short while. Nick, a glass of water, please.” She accepted a glass from her assistant and held it for Ben while he sipped through the straw.

His throat felt better enough, after he finished drinking, to try a full sentence. “When are you going to kill me?” They had to. He’d seen their faces, knew their names. He wasn’t getting out of this alive.

What frightened him, and didn’t frighten him, was that he couldn’t bring himself to care all that much.

Janni …

Would be better off without the burden of putting him together every time he fell apart, the insidious, poisonous part of his mind said.

He’d gotten her out. Kept her safe. Done his job.

Dying was easy. Living was hard. And he was too bone-weary to fight anymore, as evidenced by the fact that he was thinking in clichés.

McFoucher wouldn’t look at his face. “I’m sorry,” she said, fiddling with her stethoscope, eyes sliding away from his face. She was conflicted, he could tell, but in the end, she’d do her job, whatever Ostheim deemed it to be.

“No you’re not.” He closed his eyes, tried to take the sting out of the accusation. Hell, who knew what kind of hold her boss had on her? “Not really. Just … tell Janni I loved her, okay? Can you do that for me?”

“Jesus,” she muttered, but before she could say anything more, the whole atmosphere of the room electrified as Ostheim swept in and came to a stop between the vampire’s bed and Ben’s table.

Ben’s breathing, already too shallow and too fast, sped up even more, and his wolf whimpered.

“How are you feeling, my dear?” Ostheim said to the vampire lady, ignoring Ben for the moment, which was just how he liked it.

“A bit better,” the woman said. “My appetite is back.”

“We’ve given her three units of the subject’s blood,” McFoucher said. “I’d like to see how she progresses without further intervention.”

Three units. No wonder Ben felt like a discarded rag doll, and he wondered if this was why all the fight was drained out of him. The nanotech couldn’t heal him without something to feed on, and no meals, he knew, would be forthcoming. As nauseated as he felt, he couldn’t hold anything down anyway.

“What about this one?” Ostheim asked, and Ben could
feel
the man’s focus shift to him. His throat closed, and his claws came out—the wolf wanted to flee the room. Maybe the country.
Breathe
 …

“Well, sir, those three units have weakened him significantly.” McFoucher’s scent sharpened with anxiety, and Ben wondered what she was worried about. “He’s stopped resisting us, at least.”

“Open your eyes, boy.”

Unwillingly, the wolf cringing, Ben did so. The face that stared back at him was implacable and feral, and if Ben had a tail it would have been clamped between his legs. Ostheim was pissed at him, and he didn’t even know why. The man curled his lip, baring a fang. “So insignificant,” he said. “How you killed a professional like my nephew …”

Oh. Oh shit. Ben flinched and closed his eyes again. Not that he was sorry, because hey, cattle prod, and the bastard had threatened Janni. Now he was doubly sure that he wasn’t going to survive this. However, saying “He got sloppy and underestimated me” would be counterproductive, and a sentence that long was out of the question anyway.

“Sir?” McFoucher’s nervous voice said, and Ben had never been so grateful for an interruption in his life.

“If Idna shows no improvement after three hours, then use your next protocol.”

McFoucher swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“Bring me a chair. I wish to sit by my wife for a while.”

Ben was thankful when they set the chair on the other side of Idna’s bed rather than between the bed and the table. Being in the same room with Ostheim was unnerving enough; having him right there would have been torturous. More torturous. Shit. Tied to the table with a needle in his arm.

He retracted his claws and reminded himself to breathe.

O O O

Megan punched the addresses of the likely locations she’d found into the GPS in her car and let it calculate the best route to take to hit them all that night. She had no idea what she’d do if Ben was at one of them, but she’d cross that bridge if and when she got to it.

Four hours and five dry holes later, frustrated and angry, she pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and banged her head on the steering wheel once before going in and buying a cup of bad midnight coffee. She knew she looked like hell, and the expression on the cashier’s face confirmed it, but the kid was polite enough not to remark out loud on it, and she made her escape with her dignity mostly intact. Looking for the next place.

O O O

Ben zoned in and out. Mostly out, out enough that he didn’t quite register when the climate in the room changed to something more purposeful and everyone’s tension ratcheted up a notch.

The low-volume argument in the corner got his attention, though.

“I’ve given you the time you asked for, plus some.” Ostheim’s voice was rough. “She hasn’t gotten better, and is in fact getting worse again, I can tell. Do it. Now.”

“Yes, sir.” McFoucher sounded resigned. “Nick, let’s prep the subject, please.”

The subject
. Ben had figured out early on that she was referring to him when she used that phrase, but only when she had to do something to him she didn’t particularly like. He tensed as she flipped the blanket down to his waist with an unreadable expression.

The bald, tattooed werewolf stood by the counter, stripping paper off something that turned out to be the hugest fucking needle Ben had ever seen, and it was heading for his
chest
. His eyes slammed closed, and he tried to burrow through the table to the floor, scrabbling for purchase, not finding it. The oxygen had vacated his lungs and left no forwarding address.