Shifter's Claim (The Shadow Shifters) (40 page)

Chapter 31

Havenway

Northern Virginia

On an otherwise serene night, Nick and Ary lay in bed asleep, only to be awakened by the high-pitched wails of their only child.

Ary was out of bed first, moving quickly to the cradle that stayed at the foot of their bed. It had been their original plan to find their own house and move out of Havenway, but after Shya’s birth and because of Ary’s job as
curandero
to the Stateside Shifters, they’d remained at the compound with Rome, Kalina, and at least fifty other Shadow Shifters.

Shya was now four months old and for the last six weeks had been having crying spells and running light fevers. If Ary was worried then Nick was beside himself with anxiety over what might be plaguing their child. As she lifted the clearly agitated baby into her arms, cooing and whispering comforting words, Ary thought of Dr. Papplin’s advice.

“She may simply have what the humans call colic,” he’d explained. “It is normal and usually lasts until they are a year old.”

Ary had been taking classes in human medicine so that she could better assist the tribe in this environment, so she’d had no problem looking up the ailment and coming to the conclusion that Dr. Papplin may in fact be correct. But the fever was a different symptom and as she rested her forehead on Shya’s, Ary thought glumly, it was rising.

Nick sat on the side of the bed with his usual worried glower.

“Here, Daddy, see if you can quiet her down. She likes when you rock her,” she told him, placing Shya gently into his arms.

In a thousand years she would have never thought Nick Delgado would be rocking a baby, kissing the child on her forehead, and staring down at her with nothing but genuine love in his eyes. They’d come a long way, she thought as she moved to the table where she kept all Shya’s supplies to retrieve the thermometer. These last couple of months she’d been trying valiantly to keep a positive outlook, to keep Nick calm. It was taking its toll as Ary too had begun to worry more. When the apparatus beeped, signaling it had completed taking the temperature, Ary looked at the screen and frowned.

“I’m going to call Dr. Papplin,” she told Nick.

Dropping the thermometer onto the bed she crawled over it and reached for the phone on the nightstand.

“What’s wrong?” Nick asked.

“Her temperature’s too high,” Ary told him, panic clear in her voice. “Dr. Papplin? Are you still at the compound? Okay, good. Can you come now? Yes, it’s Shya.”

“He’s coming,” she said to Nick as she moved across the bed once more to sit beside him.

“It’s not colic, is it?” Nick asked.

Ary shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

He frowned, continuing to rock and attempting to soothe Shya who was now red faced, her tiny fists balled up as she screamed with every ounce of oxygen in her little body.

“This is bull! We’re taking her to the hospital,” Nick announced, standing from the bed.

“She’s not human, Nick,” Ary replied. She was wringing her hands, trying desperately to keep it together, but the sound of her child in such obvious distress was killing her. “They’ll find out.”

Nick only shook his head. “I went to the doctor when I was young. Caprise and I had regular checkups just like other kids. Our blood is red and bleeds into a vial just like humans. We go to dentists just like the rest of them,” he argued.

“But we don’t get colds. We don’t contract sexually transmitted diseases. We don’t take as long to heal. Despite trying to fit in, we are different, Nick.” Of all the shifters in the world, Nick was the one Ary knew she could say this to.

“I know that,” he countered. He’d been the one to always point out their differences, to question the blending in of the shifters and the humans, to them hiding what they truly were. But now he wasn’t thinking clearly, Ary was convinced. He was thinking like a concerned parent and so was she.

A knock at the door tore her attention away and she hastily went to answer it, believing it was Dr. Papplin. It was Rome and Kalina instead.

“Is everything all right?” Kalina asked, concern marring her features in what Ary figured might be a mirror of her own.

“She won’t stop crying and her fever is 103,” she recited, her voice cracking slightly toward the end.

Kalina immediately stepped inside, putting an arm around Ary’s shoulders. “Have you called Papplin?” she asked.

Ary nodded. “He’s on his way.”

Rome moved into the room and closed the door. He looked like he wanted to say something but didn’t know what.

“I think we should get her to a hospital,” Nick said again to Ary’s chagrin.

“And you don’t want to?” Rome asked Ary.

That sounded like an awful accusation to Ary and she wanted to scream with frustration. “I want to do what’s safe for her, that’s all.”

“We understand, honey,” Kalina insisted. “We’ll just wait to ask Papplin his thoughts.”

“He’s been giving us his thoughts for the past couple of weeks and it’s gotten us nowhere! He has no clue what’s going on!” Nick yelled, which only made Shya scream more, the sound vibrating off the walls and piercing their eardrums.

“That’s not true,” Papplin said once he’d entered the room. “I know exactly what the problem is.”

“Really?” Ary asked, moving so that she stood right in front of the doctor. “Tell us.”

Papplin was a gangly man who looked as if the weight of the world rested squarely on his shoulders. Ary remembered the first time she’d met him at George Washington Hospital, he’d seemed a whole lot different then.

“Shya doesn’t have colic,” Papplin told them.

“Then what does she have and how can we fix it?” Rome asked. “I agree with Nick that this has been going on for far too long. If she’s sick tell us so we can get her healed.”

Papplin visibly startled at Rome’s cold tone. He removed his glasses, rubbed viciously at both his eyes, then put his glasses back on again.

“Do you remember when you were held captive by Sabar?” he began, speaking directly to Ary.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you remember when you realized that he’d drugged you? That he’d sampled the damiana mixture on you to test your reaction?”

A chill ran down Ary’s spine.

“I remember.”

Papplin cleared his throat, the sound a low rumble compared to Shya’s crying. “I tested Shya’s blood when she was born. I knew something was wrong then.”

“What? You knew something was wrong four months ago and you’re just telling us now?” Nick roared.

Shya all but jumped out of his arms with the sound of his voice and Kalina moved quickly to take the baby from him.

“What are you saying, Dr. Papplin? What did you notice when Shya was born?”

“It’s customary to take a newborn’s blood,” he began, wiping a hand over his forehead that was now prickled with sweat. “But when I looked at the vial I realized there was no coagulation. I figured I may be tired, becoming alarmed by nothing, but then I got the results back. There were traces of something different in her blood, compounds that should not be there. I ran more tests and linked some of the compounds to traces of damiana that she must have contracted from you.” He looked pointedly at Ary.

“She’s reacting to the drug, and that’s why her crying is so extreme,” he finished.

“No,” Ary whispered. “No. That’s not possible. The damiana should have been long out of my system before I became pregnant with her and I’ve never taken it again. There must be some mistake.”

Papplin shook his head. “I even sent her blood to another lab to be tested. It’s like her body is re-creating the drug so that it stays continually in her system. I’ve taken samples every two weeks since her birth and each time it’s present to the same degree. It’s not dissipating.”

“So she’s getting worse,” Rome added. “She’s going to get worse as long as the drug is in her system and you don’t know how to get it out. Is that what you’re saying?” he asked, raising his voice for what may have been the first time Ary ever heard.

Papplin looked from Rome to Ary apologetically. “That is what I am saying.”

Comastaz Laboratories

Sedona, Arizona

“There’s a problem with the sequence, a gap that I can’t quite figure out,” Dr. Mario DiLaurent told Captain Crowe as Lilah, the lab assistant Crowe had hired for him, stood on the other side of the lab table.

“Maybe it’s a genetic gap that goes with a particular family,” she offered. “It looks like a mini-strand is missing.”

“It is. I’ve been over this a million times. This is the blood taken from that…” he hesitated, “that thing you pulled out of the field and this is how the DNA breaks down. No human lives with a broken DNA strand.”

“They’re not human,” Crowe pointed out.

DiLaurent’s brow was prickled with sweat, the man was more than nervous. So much was riding on this project and Crowe was anxious to share this discovery with the whole world. The thought of creating a super-soldier based on the genetics of a real-life half animal, half human would be a phenomenal discovery. It would also be a very lucrative one, especially for the three creators in this room. They had to fix the genetic sequence and they had to do it soon.

“We need another one of its kind, preferably one from its direct bloodline,” DiLaurent stated.

Crowe frowned. “Then I guess it’s a good thing those assholes lost the blood samples we were going to send for final testing. It held the incomplete DNA so it probably wouldn’t have created the super-soldier I’ve got in mind.”

DiLaurent hurriedly shook his head. “No, we do not know what that DNA would produce. I think our best bet is to duplicate what it seems like nature has given that one. Keep everything as close to matching him as possible so there’ll be less chance of fallout.”

“Great, now we need all new blood samples. Ones that match that creature’s exactly. Where the hell are we going to get that?” Crowe asked, cursing this turn of events.

Lilah sighed. “Go back to where you found this one and look for another one. There’s bound to be a female somewhere because there’s no way a man like this was traipsing around out there all alone.”

DiLaurent resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the simpleminded assistant. “It has to be a direct match, a sibling or a child.” He paused then ran to his cell phone, pressing buttons wildly. “Wait a minute, wait a minute.”

“What is it?” Lilah asked.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. A few weeks ago my cousin sent me a blood sample, or rather the DNA strand from a blood sample. He works in the lab at George Washington Hospital in D.C. He said this was left on a microscope and he read it. He thought it was unreal and so he sent it to me to get my advice. I’ve been so busy working with our tight timeline I didn’t pay it much attention. But now that I’m thinking about it, now that we’re talking about it…” He paused, still looking at his phone. “I got it! I got it right here!”

Moving quickly he thrust his arm forward so Lilah could see his cell phone. She looked at it once, and then looked back at the sequence showing on the screen of DiLaurent’s laptop. For good measure she looked back once more. “You need to get both of these sequences loaded and run them together, make sure they’re a match,” she told him excitedly.

“Does it look like a match?” Crowe asked.

Lilah was already nodding her head. “It does. It looks like a match.”

“Then your one and only job for the foreseeable future is to find me the one that blood sample belongs to. I want that one here on this table within the week. Do we understand each other?” Crowe commanded.

Lilah looked at DiLaurent and they both replied, “Yes, sir.”

It looked like Lilah would be heading to Washington, D.C., to find out whose blood sample that was in the George Washington Hospital and to bring that someone or something back to Comastaz. There was a lot riding on this, surely this “person” wouldn’t mind donating some more of its blood for a good cause, even if that cause put an end to its kind for good.

Read on for an excerpt from

HUNGER’S MATE

by A.C. Arthur

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Press

His skin was glossed with a light sheen of sweat, marred by one tattoo over his right bicep. Pure strength rippled along the thick pronounced veins in his arms as he lifted the bar holding at least two-hundred-and-fifty-pound weights on either side. From his position on the bench Jewel had a great view of thighs cut to perfection with muscle, narrow hips, and a bulge in his shorts that made her mouth water and her temples throb slightly at the thought that this was his relaxed—and not aroused—state.

From where she stood across the floor of Perryville Resort’s fitness center, peeking around the wall that she used for cover, Jewel had a magnificent view. A delicious view that had awakened feelings inside her she’d thought long dead. She swallowed deeply, figured her lips were just as dry as her throat, and then licked them before releasing a deep breath. How many times had she come down here to work out? How many hours had she spent in this very room, absorbed in her own routine, focused only on the burn of tired and thoroughly worked muscles? Yet for the last ten minutes, she’d been glued to this spot, watching this man lift those weights, wanting him like she’d never wanted anything else in her life.

“Why don’t you join me?”

She startled and stepped back at the sound of the male voice. After a second or two she leaned forward once more, easing her head around the wall and feeling absolutely foolish for doing so, until she saw that he’d sat up on the bench and was staring directly at her.

“I said, why don’t you join me?” he asked again, the cleft in his chin holding her attention as he talked.

It was easier to find a focal point than to look directly into his eyes. They were smoldering; she knew because she’d just peeked and felt waves of heat pouring over her. It was ridiculous, she knew. He was just a man and she was just a woman, and even considering the distance between them, there should not have been any type of connection.

But there was.

Jewel cleared her throat. “I’m leaving,” she announced but failed to move.