Pack Dynamics (6 page)

Three shots, three down. Okay. Finished.

Ben dropped the rifle. Dropped to his knees. Looked down at his chest, which kind of hurt, a lot. Was that blood? His blood? Wow, that was … a shitload of blood.

“Ben?” Janni’s voice.

He leaned against the cabinets, started sliding, caught himself on one elbow before hitting the floor, glasses skittering away. “Omigod, Ben, Benbenbenbenben …”

Breathing. Breathing was an issue. Breathing was always an issue, but the mouthful of wet, sticky copper was new. Cool tiles on his hot forehead, Janni’s warm hand holding his cold one. She was still calling his name, but it was such a slender string holding him to her and he couldn’t …

O O O

Megan swore. “Jeremy, get Doc Allen down here, now; he’s in one of the guest rooms! And get Mike Reed out of bed if you have to!”

What the hell had Ben been thinking? And she realized, even as she thought it, that the poor son of a bitch probably hadn’t been thinking at all, had probably been working on sheer instinct, the same fight or flight impulse she’d smelled him wrestling since they’d brought the sniper in, and flight hadn’t been an option. Which didn’t make the situation any better, but she and the wolf understood it.

She grabbed the pair of dish towels hanging from the oven handle. Ben lay face down in a spreading puddle of red, the scent sending her wolf into overdrive.

Janni blinked at Megan through tears and a spatter of Ben’s blood. This was too much for her; it was too much for all of them, but they had to deal with it or he’d die this time. No exit wound—Megan wasn’t sure if this was beneficial or not. She eased him onto his back and pressed the towels down on his chest, but they were quickly soaked.

“Come on, Ben, stay with us,” Megan said, knowing he couldn’t hear her. His heart was still beating, anyway. She could both hear it and feel it under her hands.

Doc Allen appeared at her side, gently pushing both her and Janni out of the way. He held a syringeful of something just short of magic, she hoped, which he injected directly into the bullet hole.

“Mike’s on his way,” Jeremy said. “He’s about fifteen minutes out.”

“Do we have that long?” Megan asked.

“This should stop the worst of it,” Doc Allen said, setting the empty hypo on the floor. “But I need to get him into surgery stat. Ten minutes ago would be better.”

Fortunately for everyone involved, Alex had such a lively horror of hospitals (“You can die in places like that, Miss Graham.”) that he had his own fully-equipped operating theater right here in the house. It was getting a workout tonight.

“Jeremy, stretcher,” Megan said, and here she was directing traffic again. He ran out, coming back less than a minute later with the folding one from the basement lab.

They rolled Ben onto it and carried him down to the surgical suite, which was right off the lab. Alex tended to have the majority of his accidents at home there.

Doc Allen and Jeremy scrubbed up and sent everyone else out, including Janni, despite her protests.

Megan headed back upstairs and realized that she hadn’t even checked to see if the bad guys were dead or alive. She decided she didn’t actually care. She got Janni cleaned up and calmed down, then settled in the living room with a cup of tea just before the real police arrived with clipboards and questions. But not too many questions because this was Alex Jarrett’s house, and she was his PA, and it was amazing just how much the cops trusted you when you had billions of dollars at your beck and call and made large, regular donations to the Widows and Orphans Fund.

The three bad guys were dead. Ben’s shots had been scarily precise, and Megan wondered where he’d learned to handle a gun like that, because he struck her as more the mild geek type than a Rambo. She decided to ask Janni about it later when things weren’t quite so crazy. But right now she was juggling police and the coroner, sending Mike Reed down to the OR to help Doc Allen out with Ben, and holy crap, was that daylight peeking in through the windows? And she still hadn’t called a cleanup crew for the blood all over the place or cancelled Alex’s appointments for the day.

Speaking of her boss, four rather loud gunshots had been fired in his house, and he hadn’t made an appearance wondering what the hell was going on. When the police left, Megan went upstairs to check on him.

O O O

“Suction.” Doc Allen’s voice was cool, but he was losing his patient, and he wasn’t sure he could do a damn thing about it. Even with the nanotech, Ben’s body had sustained too much trauma in too short a period of time, and this wound might prove fatal if Allen couldn’t pull something out of his ass, and quick. This wasn’t the first time he’d roped Hasgrave into assistant duty, and Jarrett’s chief of security was good at it, but he honestly couldn’t help much.

Removing the bulk of the bullet itself required a fairly basic operation, but it had punched through a rib, tumbled, and shattered, sending shards of bone and metal into Ben’s lung and pericardial sac. Allen managed to repair most of the damage, but something in there was still bleeding, maybe several somethings. Ben was losing blood pressure and still in the same state of shock he’d been in when they’d put him under the knife with no time to stabilize him. Transfused blood leaked into his chest almost as fast as it entered the vein in his left hand.

“Shit. Shitshitshit …” Allen muttered, digging around. “Where are you, you little bastard…?”

Mike Reed came in, scrubbed and ready, carrying an aluminum case loaded with, Allen hoped, miracles. “I’m glad you’re here, Dr. Reed. Tell me you’ve got something good in that shiny container.”

Reed’s gaze took in the monitors, which told an unhappy story, and his brow lowered over his mask. “One thing that might actually work. It’s untested on humans—”

“And yet you brought it anyway, so you must think it’s special. He’ll die on my table if we don’t do something drastic, now.” Allen briefly met Reed’s eyes across the still form before he went back to hunting whatever the hell was bleeding in Ben’s chest.

Reed nodded on the periphery of his vision. “All right. No guarantees.” Reed opened the case and pulled out a syringe.

“It’s better than what I have.” Which was a whole lot of nothing. He still couldn’t find the bleeders … “Now. Now would be ideal. Shit,” he added as warning klaxons began sounding on more than one machine.

“Stand aside; you don’t want these things in uninjured tissue.” Allen and Hasgrave backed off, and Reed stuck the needle into the incision in Ben’s chest and pushed the plunger.

“Now what?” Hasgrave asked.

“We wait,” Reed said.

“Not too long,” Allen breathed, watching the monitors. “He’s going to go into v-fib in a minute. Get the paddles ready, Hasgrave.” He stripped the wrapping off a hypo full of adrenaline.

More panicked beeping from the machines, telling them the patient was crashing. Like they didn’t know. Allen moved, was arrested by Reed’s hand on his arm. “Thirty seconds.”

It was the longest thirty seconds of Allen’s life. Everything in him screamed that he needed to do something, right the hell now, and the inaction was like to kill him, if not Ben. But by the end of thirty seconds, the monitors had gone back to being reassuring, and, at forty-five seconds, Ben’s vitals started stabilizing.

Allen blinked. “Why … are we not using this on everyone?”

“It hasn’t been fully tested yet.” Reed tipped his head and grimaced. “And some of the side-effects, at least in animals, have been kind of nasty. Strictly last-ditch.”

Allen poked around, looking for the bleeders. They’d closed up. “Well, your last-ditch nanotech just saved my patient. What was it?”

“Mostly a higher concentration of what we usually use, with some extra added oomph.” Reed shut his eyes. “Just … watch for the side-effects, yeah? High fever, berserk behavior, heavy disorientation, anything like that. I need to know right away.”

“At least he’ll be alive to have them.”

O O O

Alex opened his eyes, Megan noticed, as soon as she walked into his room. Gunfire hadn’t woken him up, but her muffled steps on his carpet did. Later she might have time to laugh at the irony.

Something in her face must have given everything away, because he sat up immediately and said, “What happened?”

She fell into the wheelchair and covered her face with her hands. “I’m just happy you were here and not there. The last thing we needed was
two
heroes getting themselves shot.”

“Jeremy?”

“That’s who you’d think, but no.” Her voice shook. The wolf wanted to curl up and hide under the bed at this point. “We had fake cops show up to take our trespasser away. Ben recognized them and took them out in, like, three seconds with the sniper rifle. But one of them got a round off, too. Ben’s in the OR downstairs with Doc Allen and Reed. Shot in the chest. It looked …” She stopped, swallowed. “Fatal.”

Alex gave her a Look she was sure he’d learned from her. “Did you ever get any sleep, Megan?”

“When would I have done that?”

“All right, seriously. Go to bed. That’s an order.” His tone brooked no argument.

She had to try anyway. “I haven’t cleared your schedule yet.”

“I’ll do it. What’s the usual excuse, personal emergency, so sorry I have to reschedule, what’s a good time for you?”

She nodded, her face still in her hands. “Words to that effect.”

“How many appointments did I have today, anyway?”

“Three. A teleconference with the board, a meeting with Moore in R&D, and … something else.” Her memory failed her. It was her job to remember, and she couldn’t. She wanted to cry, but didn’t have the energy.

“I have a teleconference with the board on a Saturday? What gives?”

She looked at him briefly between her fingers. “Well, Mr. Jarrett, you were too hung over for the one on Monday, couldn’t be bothered to attend the one we rescheduled for Wednesday, and said, and I quote, ‘A board meeting on a Friday is a travesty, a travesty, I say.’ So, we scheduled one for today instead.”

“Ah.” He got off the bed, and then their positions were reversed as he began pushing the chair, with her in it, toward one of the guest rooms.

“You shouldn’t be up …” she protested weakly.

“I’m way better.
Because I got some sleep
.” He wheeled her through a doorway and stopped next to the king-sized bed. Stripping the covers back, he said, “In, Miss Graham.”

She levered herself out of the chair and onto the oh-so-soft mattress. Curling around the oversized pillow, she nearly whimpered in relief as Alex pulled the comforter over her. “Wake me up in a couple of hours, Mr. Jarrett.”

She heard him snort as sleep claimed her.

O O O

“And she talks about me running myself into the ground,” Alex muttered as he made his way downstairs to find Janni in a state of shellshock.

“So much for being safe here,” she said, a little bitterly, turning Ben’s bloodstained glasses over and over in her hands. She was curled up on the sofa in the living area by the kitchen. Someone had given her a throw, and she huddled under it, gazing straight ahead at nothing.

Alex felt inadequate. “Sorry.” He made a wide berth around the blood on the floor, grabbed the coffeemaker, and plugged it into a different socket within easier reach, making a mental note to give the maids the day off and call in an outside cleaning service. His kitchen looked like someone had dumped several good-sized cans of red paint on the tiles and then spattered the walls with it for good measure. He couldn’t believe he’d slept through the incident, gunfire and all.

Janni shook her head and massaged the space between her eyes as he sat on the couch beside her. “I know you are. I can’t believe Ben did that.”

“I may have to hire him away from your mom,” Alex said with a twisted grin he didn’t feel.

“You’re not funny, Alex. At all.”

“Sorry,” he said again. “What happened? Megan didn’t give me any details.”

“The second he saw the fake cops come in, Ben lost it. He backed himself up against the counter where we put the sniper rifle.” Janni rested her chin on her bent knees and stared off into space. “You know, Ben looks like a damn baby seal. He’s not that big, and he just has this air of, I don’t know, harmlessness.” She frowned a little. “Something about his eyebrows, maybe, and the glasses help. Anyway, he was an Army Ranger for a stint before I got him the job with my mom.”

“He was?” Alex was surprised, because Ben hadn’t struck him as the type. Whatever that meant, upon reflection.

“Yeah, straight out of high school, wanted to do his part. He did two tours in Afghanistan, got captured by insurgents for a while during the second one, and the GI Bill put him through computer school after he came home.” She bared her teeth. “And these people only saw ‘guy we nearly killed to make a point’ rather than ‘combat veteran with PTSD who has a real reason to hate our guts,’ and didn’t even think to move him away from the big scary gun. And he executed them with it,
efficiently
. Didn’t hesitate, none of that standoff bullshit, didn’t tell them to drop it and back off, just boom, boom, boom. Total soldier mode, ‘servicing targets,’ he’s called it. He doesn’t like it when people point weapons at his friends.”

“I’m not too fond of the concept myself.” The soothing aroma of coffee filled the room, and Alex grabbed a couple of mugs and a bunch of supplies, sugar and flavored creamers and spoons.

Janni put a hand up. “None for me. As soon as we know something about Ben, I’m going to fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours.” She rubbed her arms as if she was cold. “I … haven’t actually slept since he disappeared without calling. It was so unlike him I knew something was wrong.”

No, she wouldn’t have slept, would she? “I can go check, if you like.”

“Thank you.”

He dumped hazelnut creamer into his Kopi Luwak and headed downstairs. The basement was eerily silent, and he took a second to remind himself that this was his house, dammit, and if it was quiet, that was his doing.

The door to the surgical suite was shut. He tapped on it and stuck his head in. “What word?”

“Just closing,” said Doc Allen, straightening and rolling his head around a couple of times before bending back over the table. “It was iffy for a while, but he’ll be all right, thanks to whatever magic Dr. Reed brought with him.”