Lion And The Falcon (Furry United Coalition) (4 page)

The day went from annoying to worse.
Once the meeting ended, he skipped his morning nap and headed over to the safe house, a nondescript brownstone converted into a makeshift hospital. Despite his speed in arriving, he walked in to discover that of the two victims they had recovered, one died while he was en route and the other slipped into a coma.

Great. Just bloody great. Shutting himself in his office, he did what any self
-respecting lion would do in his situation. He ate a package of Hot Rods and took a nap.

What a bunch of incompetent idiots. And I have to work with them until further notice.

Clarice simmered as she took the stairs two at a time down to street level. Unbelievable. Tell one stupid vain bird high up in the avi
an food chain to take a flight, and next thing she knew, she got reassigned to FUC duty. An ASS agent expected to give herself over to FUC.

How demeaning.

Never mind her boss couched her dishonorable department transfer in terms like “Best hunter we have,” “Improving interspecies relationships,” and “Time to cool off.” She saw her deployment for what it was. A slap in the face for saying
no
to the son of the guy in charge of Avian Soaring Security. Okay, so her no might have involved a bloody nose, a sprained wrist, and threats to his manhood. Still, what did he expect when he grabbed her ass? Not that anyone cared she was the recipient of sexual harassment. They expected her to look the other way and forgive the strutting peacock. Not likely. Nor would she forgive them for punishing her. When she finished this assignment, she was so going to stuff some chestnuts where the sun didn’t shine and roast some ASS over coals. And despite the wagers to the contrary, she would succeed in solving the FUC problem just to spite her old boss and his fowl—probably descended from a turkey—excuse of a son.

N
ow that she’d met the FUC team, she could see why they needed her expertise. A crocodile with no sense of smell. A bear who worked as a lawyer when he wasn’t stuffing his face with honey buns. Another bear who didn’t take anything seriously. A crazy, pregnant rabbit—who would give Bugs Bunny a run for his money. And a blonde kitty cat doctor who wanted to save criminals instead of putting them down. No wonder they were stuck and in need of help.

It amazed her they
had ever managed to track down the mastermind and her lair in the first place. Then again, they didn’t so much capture the mastermind as inadvertently sweep her up with all her victims, taken in by her diminutive size, thinking she was one of the prisoners instead of the one in charge.

Sloppy
work.

Well, it wouldn’t happen anymore. Not on her watch.

While Jessie, the Swan king’s very own daughter and resident tech geek, worked on fine-tuning the mapping of the sightings and possible hiding spots, Clarice decided to visit the safe house and talk to the staff. Get a feel for the
things
she hunted. She wanted the fine details, the items nurses and orderlies didn’t put in files. Those small clues might make the difference when it came to finding the psychos at large. She just hoped she could avoid the annoying Dr. Manners.

She couldn’t have pinpointed exactly what about
the guy irritated her, although his good looks were part of it. A blond Adonis who, despite being dressed in a suit, appeared more like a tanned surfer than a doctor in charge of saving lives. Think of the most good-looking doctor on television, multiply it by ten, and you’d probably come up with Nolan Manners. Add to it his superiority complex and feline heritage and she was predisposed to hate him just on principle. She was a bird. Blame it on her genes.

Winging her sport
bike through traffic and getting stuck at a train crossing meant it took her longer than she expected to make it to the safe house. Yet, despite that, she managed to park in the spot marked “Reserved for the doctor.” Did she care it probably belonged to Dr. Manners? Not really. Lazy cat should have gotten his furry ass to work on time. Besides, no way would she leave her two-wheeled baby on the road where uncaring motorists could scratch it. Let the doctor park his BMW or Mercedes, or whatever the pretentious prick drove, on the street. It would serve him right for taking his time. Late to the meeting. Taking his sweet time getting to work. Her impression of him just got better and better.

Swaggering to the front door
, leathers creaking, helmet in hand, her aviator glasses hid her eyes from the worst of the sun’s glare. She stabbed the buzzer, but instead of a voice on the intercom asking her to state her business, the door swung open and she got a surprise.

“What took you so long?” Dr. Manners asked
, his smile a touch too wide and toothy.

“How did you get here before me?” she sputtered
, taken aback at his appearance.

“
I drove,” he replied with a smirk. “I’ll admit, I expected you much sooner. It took you so long to arrive, I even had time to take a nap.”

A nap? She eyed his perfect hair and unwrinkled appearance and figured he pulled her drumstick.

“Are you coming in, or are we going to give the neighborhood something to talk about?”

In she stepped, dancing out of the way as he swung the heavy portal shut with a metal clang that belied the scarred
, wooden exterior façade. Though the brownstone appeared benign from the outside, hidden beneath its veneer was a bunker style residence. Not that it did them any good when they’d harbored the most feared criminal within its very walls.

The familiar scent of hospital antiseptic washed over her.
How she hated that smell and the reminder of how she ended up an orphan of the state. Squashing memories, she flipped her glasses up on her head and peered around. “Pretty slick setup, Sylvester.”

“My name is Nolan.”

“Whatever. I’m bad with remembering names.” The smile she flashed was not exactly nice, but the best she could manage. He brought out the nasty in her. “What do the neighbors think you have going on in here?”

“Botox clinic.”

“For real?”

He shrugged. “It’s worked quite well
as a cover so far. Especially when we get shifters caught in a half morph or who are injured. People ignore the bandages and head wraps because of the cover story. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to quiz me about our setup. I assume you want to question the staff who worked with some of the patients and review video footage, what little we have of the night in question.”

What she really wanted to do was get ahead of the doctor and call the shots, something he’d not allowed since she got
her foot in the door. Having pegged him as an idiot who got the job because of his looks and pedigree, she did not like how he seemed determined to smash her preconceptions by predicting what she thought.

“If you’ll just show me to a room I can use and give me a list of the staff, I can conduct the interviews while you get on with your own work.”

A sad expression crossed his face as he shrugged. “What work? The only patient I have left slipped into a coma and I don’t expect they’ll survive the night. At this point, I’ve done everything I can. Now, I need to wait on test results to see if anything I’ve tried has made a difference.”

“Tried
, as in…?” Not that she possessed much medical knowledge, but even she had to wonder what the doctor thought he could achieve. Mutant movies all seemed to have one resounding theme in common. Once a person’s genes got messed with, forget turning them back to normal.

“
From the information we’ve gleaned, the mastermind was obsessed with enhancing certain shifter aspects. She wanted the ability to make a shifter bigger, more aggressive, and stronger.”

“Why?”

“Why does any power hungry being do anything? To intimidate others. To feel in control. Given what little we’ve discovered, I’ve formulated a theory that given her diminutive size, the mastermind suffered from megalomania and a Napoleon complex.”

Her brow knitted at
the expressions. She’d never done well at biology, or psychology, or anything that ended in ology.

Apparently
, he grasped this because he explained in normal terms she could follow, the jerk. “She was obsessed with doing great things and being recognized for them while at the same time battling with the feeling of being too small. The mastermind overcompensated by being overly aggressive and controlling. In other words, she believed herself smarter than us all, but it wasn’t enough. She also wanted to be big enough to fight her own battles and have people fear her.”

“So she was looking for a way to change herself into a monster?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean for that aspect to happen. Jessie’s still working on pulling up background information on Mastermind. Most of it was obliterated, probably intentionally. The interviews we’ve conducted, though, from classmates who recalled Mastermind growing up, those who survived, that is, gave a picture of someone who hated her shifter side. When it came to the gene pool, she truly got the short end of the stick. And I mean short. She had poor eyesight, little muscle tone, was undersized, and in general the weakest of the weak. A victim of bullying, Mastermind wanted to change that.”

“By becoming the bully.”
Clarice wanted to sneer at the doctor’s empathy and understanding, but he’d obviously placed a lot of time and thought into the motive behind Mastermind’s actions. He also seemed to genuinely want to help those the psycho bitch hurt. It messed with her perception of him as a jerk.

“Essentially, yes. She didn’t seem to realize that her increased intelligence more than made up for a lack of physical ability.
So she experimented from an early age, but never on herself. At least, until the end. It seemed the work I did on reversing the effects of her testing had her stumble along the solution she had looked for all along. I inadvertently gave her the ability to turn on a regressive DNA strand harkening back to our primitive origins.”

“
Whoa, wait a second. She turned those patients into what, cave men?”

“Not quite. She found a way to switch on the prehistoric versions of their animals with some added modifications. What she didn’t factor in was that thousands of years ago, brain sizes and capabilities were much smaller.”

“So in making her animal side stronger, she in essence made herself stupider.”

“
The loss of cognitive ability and intelligence were an unfortunate result of too much testosterone, possible hypoglycemia, and the increased body mass reducing blood flow to the more logical parts of the brain.”

She more or less followed his scientific explanation and summarized it.
“So when she shifted, all her blood left her brain, kind of like a man when he gets a hard-on. Gotcha.”

Finally, she
flustered the doctor. Clearing his throat, he grabbed his tie and tugged on it. “Um, yes, I guess you could compare it to that.”

“So she got what she wanted and injected herself. I got that from reading the report about her takedown, but why did she inject everyone else at the safe house
? Wouldn’t it have been more logical for her to keep them as weak victims, people she could dominate?”

“Keep in mind that at this point
Mastermind was no longer entirely rational. From what we could piece together, she expected the patients to thank her for what she did and become her willing minions. Things didn’t quite work out that way.”

“
According to one of the inmates—”

“Victims
.”

“
—they laughed at her and she ran off.”

“
Yes. But we didn’t find out about her injections until much later.”

“Because she’d managed to hack your computer systems and put the safe house in lockdown mode.” She smirked. “
Outsmarted by a nutsy squirrel. That had to burn, eh, Sylvester? So what did you do?”

“Me
? Nothing. We were stuck in lockdown in a dark room with no food.” Again, he rolled his wide shoulders and she couldn’t help but notice the size of him, and not from fat. “I napped. It was Jessie who managed to hack back into the computers and eventually send out an SOS to the main FUC office to get us out.”

“
But the patients hadn’t yet escaped or changed at this point.”

“No. That happened later that night.”
With devastating results. Again, sadness shadowed his expression. She almost felt bad for the guy. He’d not just lost coworkers that night, but probably some friends.

“
So all of the patients were infected?”

“Every single last one. Two
, though, never made it out the door. Their bodies just couldn’t handle it. The others busted out of here and split off.”

“Without any tracking devices.”
Clarice shook her head in disbelief.

Nolan’s expression turned defensive.
“You can’t be serious? Why would we chip them? These were people, not criminals or pets,” he snapped.

“They were unknowns in FUC custody with abilities that made them dangerous before the mastermind screwed with them further. You should have tagged them.”