Bad Cat Baby Blues (Shifter Squad Six 3) (19 page)

I can’t let anything happen to him,
a stern voice echoed inside of Ari.

She stifled a growl, the large jungle cat soundless and graceful as she slipped through the hole in the fence and padded after them. If luck had been on her side, neither of the men would have seen her coming until it was too late, but one of them glanced over his shoulder the exact moment he began scaling the ladder rungs up to the tower.

He yelped in surprise, training his gun on her, but Ari was already in the air. Her teeth ripped into his arm and she practically tore it off, taking the man down to the ground with her. She landed on top of him, his body large and strong, but hers faster and more deadly. She felt him stutter a breath as her jaws locked around his neck and the satisfying, resounding crack of a spinal column between her jaws marked his quick and mostly painless death.

A shot rang in the air a second later and another body tumbled to the ground inches from Ari, the man brandishing a knife now lying lifeless on the gravel, his blue eyes wide with surprise. Dutch stood straight upon the tower, his assault rifle in his hands and his face a stern mask of efficiency.

“What’s going on?” he called down, already putting together his rifle kit and then slipping down the rungs.

Ari turned back, breathless, wiping blood from her mouth. It tasted disgusting. Werewolves were never all that tasty when they happened to die in one’s maw.

“There’s something wrong. There are two… I don’t know what they are. They look like freaking werewolf super soldiers, huge and unstoppable. They wiped out Squad Nine.”

“I heard the transmission,” Dutch said darkly, discarding the heavy sniper rifle case between the two dead bodies. “What are we doing? And why are you here?”

“All the comms are down. We need to get everyone out. There are still survivors in Squad Nine.”

“We can’t leave them in there,” Dutch said, his eyes turning toward warehouse, cold efficiency sparkling in them now.

“I know. But I don’t know if we can take those
things.
”

“Squad Six can take anything,” Dutch said, steadfast in his resolve. “Come on. Let’s go find Squad Nine,” he said, taking a deep breath.

“Dutch, I—” Ari began, but he wouldn’t let her finish.

“Not now, later. We’ll have time later.”

“We might not,” she growled, though she knew he was right.

There were lives at stake—not only their own—and if they could help, they would have to move now. He seemed to hesitate for a second though, and before either of them fell into the shift, he grabbed her roughly by the shirt, making her gasp as he crushed his lips against hers briefly, but defiantly.

“I will not die. You will not die. We will talk.”

She couldn’t argue with that kind of resolve.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dutch

Everything felt clearer as a jaguar. From the first step and the first breath, his senses came alive and the world seemed to suddenly make sense. All the pieces fell into place and Dutch felt unstoppable.

Perhaps it was the woman he was with, her step as lithe and strong as his, though her body was smaller and her markings were clearer, but he’d never felt quite so focused. There was something pounding in his chest now that had not been there before. A purpose. A drive. A goal other than to survive. It felt fucking fantastic.

The large predator ran across the field separating him from the warehouse, sure in his knowledge that Ari would be right behind him. He’d recognized those blond-haired blue-eyed motherfuckers that he and Ari had taken down, and now he was more convinced than before that something fucking horrid must have been happening to Carter and he had every intention of making sure he’d grab the kid if he could.

The Arctics didn’t fuck around and he’d seen those bastards enough times over the last few years to recognize evil when he saw it. They were all like Spade’s fucking long lost cousins with their wily, dead eyes and their iron resolve to do whatever they could to fuck up as many lives as they could.

Screw the rules. He wouldn’t let Ariadne put herself in danger, but he couldn’t be a father to a shifter boy if he didn’t stand by his word to other men. As far as Dutch was concerned, Roman was better off without a father than one who couldn’t do what was needed when the time came.

They snuck in through a door left open by Squad Nine’s entrance and Dutch crept along the dark corridors, pointedly making his way toward the stairwells and not the warehouse. They both froze in their tracks, the jaguars solid as statues, listening when disjointed sounds of battle came to their ears.

Ari growled softly behind him and when he glanced at her, her golden eyes were staring transfixed in the direction of the storage areas, where Squad Six would now be, perhaps fighting for their lives. But had Connor or any of the other men been in the same situation, Dutch knew they would have behaved similarly to him. So Dutch kept moving, painfully putting the noises of bloodshed out of his mind, hoping that Squad Six would both triumph as well as come out of this with their lives intact.

It was curiously quiet in the building otherwise, except for a low hum that seemed to resonate through the facility, coming from below. When they reached the stairs leading lower, the noises became even clearer and louder with every step the two great cats took toward the heart of the facilities. Human ears likely could not pick it up, but those of shifters certainly did.

Every nerve was on edge and every muscle rigid as Dutch smelled the stench of blood and sweat, knowing for certain that he was coming close to Squad Nine now. When they rounded another corner in the staircase, the carnage became more than evident.

It took far too much self-control to keep from reeling, from shying back. Six men, all with stories not unlike those of his own squad, lay dead or dying before him. The squad leader’s face had been torn clean off, as if by jaws much greater than anything Dutch could fathom. Another had been ripped apart. Bullet holes riddled the stairs and the ground, haphazard fire that had done no good to anyone.

Gingerly, Dutch checked each of the men, finding three of them still clinging to life. He sniffed at them, sensing the wild stench of the beasts on them, but he did not stop. He was past the bodies a few paces when he heard Ari calling to him in a low snarl behind him.

She stood there, next to one of the survivors, who was unconscious but breathing with his leg smashed and countless other wounds riddling his body. Her tail swished slowly and her ears pricked up, looking at him with surprise. But even that didn’t stop him. If he could have, he would have told her to stay, to save herself now that they knew there were people alive, to guard them if she could.

He hadn’t gotten very far before he felt her presence again, clear and strong. Dutch glanced back, growling in a threatening way, wanting her to turn around and go back, but the stony-faced glare she gave him told him that he would have no luck with that. She would not listen. As always, she was as stubborn as he was.

So they moved forward, step by step, until the humming was so loud it deafened his other senses almost completely. Down the hallway where the sound seemed to be originating, a bluish-green glow bathed the area through a cracked door, which was calling to Dutch. He moved closer, every step completely soundless now, masked by both the noise as well as his own capabilities of stealth.

He listened at the door and then slid in, barely needing to open it more, Ari at his heels. They moved a few paces in before the sight before them froze them again, Dutch’s eyes going wide with horror.

All around them, there were vats of liquid that seemed oddly gelatinous. The pylons powering them were about ten feet tall each, towering high. Wires and tubes ran into them and each one glowed with an eerie light, blue, green, or red, some pulsing a little more than others. And in each of these tubes was a person, floating in the mass of not quite liquid, not quite solid, a mask on their face and wires and needles pinching into their skin at various locations.

Each tube had a small readout screen with a code and a first name and last name, and vital statistics. The ones that were red showed subjects that were close to dying, their heart rates low, their breathing ragged. And there were many of these.

All of the subjects were strong, muscular, and built for action. He recognized squad insignias, tattoos denominating their service on several of them, not only US Special Forces and military but other nations as well, British, French, Russian… other than the evident military background, one thing tied them all together—all of them were shifters.

Whether men or women, that kind of musculature was not meant for simple humans. Some of the bodies seemed to throb with something, their bodies convulsing every now and then and their faces rigid with pain, though it seemed as if they were completely disconnected from what was going on with them. Dutch’s human side was confused, but his jaguar? Simply fucking enraged.

Someone was doing testing on his brothers and sisters, shifters who were too fucking good to be used this way. He moved forward after staring for much too long, prompted by Ari padding up in front of him. He didn’t know what she’d noticed by the time they got there and Dutch got another shock in a day filled with surprises.

The readout blinked with the code:
TR-89, SAWYER, C.

It was Carter.

Dutch’s stomach fell.

His nails scraped at the ground and it was nearly impossible to keep himself from throwing himself at the damn vat to break Carter out of there. His tube was glowing green and pulsing slowly. Whatever the fuck that meant, he was sure it wasn’t good. But just as Dutch was getting dangerously close to losing his cool, he heard noises, something other than the sloshing and the whirring of the seemingly endless rows of test tubes for humans.

Dutch ducked behind one of the vats as Ari took another, the sound of leisurely conversation drifting to their ears.

“We could just unplug the entire group. Most of these are for the dumps anyway,” a man’s voice said, gruff and low.

Dutch noticed the way Ari’s ears pricked up, her expression betraying the fact that the voice was not completely alien to her. His shoulders hunched, readying himself to pounce when the opportunity presented itself.

“Whatever we fucking do, it better be fast,” another voice said. “The puppies won’t take too long to wipe our guests out, but you know there will be more coming after the team doesn’t check back in.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll get out of here before the puppies get to them,” the first voice mused again, the makings of a sigh underneath his rough tone.

“So should we. What the fuck are we doing here anyway? We need to fucking go. If those things round back downstairs,
we
are dead. You know we can’t contain those things yet,” the second man said, sounding far more antsy than before.

“Hold your fucking horses. You saw the squad at the stairs. Ain’t no one getting down here. The lab rat needs to pack a few things. Good thing we got some of this shit out already and most of the team is moving toward Delaware. Now we only need to get rid of these shits and call it a night,” the first man said, seemingly bored with the nuisance of having to end countless lives.

Dutch shared a look with Ari and she nodded. Both of them peeled away from their positions, stalking deeper into the room. Dutch kept close to the vats, keeping his body low. He was thankful all the men and women in the tubes had their eyes closed; he wasn’t sure he could do this shit with their eyes staring, judging. Enough had gone wrong recently. He didn’t need their lives on his conscience as well.

His steps soundless and his body ready, Dutch was perfectly poised to attack the moment one of the two big men came into view. He recognized one from the night in the jungle and the pictures Ari had gotten. It was Jola and his buddy Tro. It only took a flash of a second to note that Ari was ready on the other side when both of them pounced in unison, raining down on the two men like the reckoning had come early.

They didn’t even have the time to draw their guns, but Dutch didn’t manage to rip out Tro’s voice box before he let out a few strangled screams, which echoed up into the high ceilings of the endless room. Ari was cleaner, going straight for the neck and clamping down on Jola’s neck instead of clawing at his chest as Dutch had done in a fit of rage, wishing to maim before kill.

She’s got her shit handled better than you do, Dutch. Focus.

Again, easier said than done. At least he was glad to see that they’d wordlessly agreed that the time to take prisoners was over. They’d have to move fast and be ruthless if they wanted to save these people and Carter, and failure was not an option.