Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (14 page)

His eyes widened in surprise. “I was? I knew
I was sick, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“I’m not a doctor. But it was 117 degrees
out, you were burning up, your heart was going a mile a minute,
and—”

You were calling for your mother.

Echo couldn’t say it. Not, she realized,
because it would embarrass him. Now that she’d gotten more of a
sense of him, she didn’t think it would. He adored his family and
didn’t care who knew it. But remembering him lying on the sand, a
grown man momentarily a boy again, made emotion well up in her like
blood from a wound.

Compassion and protectiveness. The desire to
comfort him and make him feel better. Jealousy that he had a mother
and she loved him. He’d sounded so utterly trusting that if he
called to her, she would come. Resentment and anger and bitterness.
Why had he gotten a mother and a family and the ability to trust,
when Echo never had and never could?

Echo tried to think of something else.
Anything else. Preferably something that had nothing to do with
feelings, families, or DJ. Butterscotch brownies. Dominating
billionaires. DJ’s brother with the ridiculous scent name and the
heart defect, whom he obviously loved so much.

Goddammit.

DJ waited expectantly. When she didn’t
continue, he said with total sincerity, “I absolutely believe that
you saved my life. Thank you. I owe you one. Actually, I owe you
two. If it wasn’t for you, I would have had a miserable time when I
woke up here. I felt awful, and wolves don’t like to be alone when
they’re sick. Wolves don’t like to be alone in general, to be
honest.”

Echo felt more awkward than if he’d called
her a liar. “It’s fine. You don’t have to be grateful.”

He shifted on the seat, and she couldn’t tell
if he too felt awkward or if it was just his general fidgetiness.
“Let me start over. I know you don’t want a partner and you don’t
want me for a roommate, so I’ll try not to annoy you too much, but
I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad I’m not locked up alone. Or
with some asshole.”

Echo couldn’t resist the straight line.
“Maybe I’m an asshole-shifter.”

DJ laughed, and Echo felt the tension between
them break. “Nope, I don’t buy it. But I hope Mr. Dowling and Dr.
Semple are, because that would mean sometimes you can catch them in
their non-asshole form.”

“I wish. They’re always like that.”

“Maybe they shifted once and got stuck that
way,” DJ suggested. “My grandma warned me that could happen.”

“Maybe they shifted once and decided they
liked being an asshole better than they liked being human,” Echo
put in.

DJ snapped his fingers, still smiling. “Okay.
I’ve made up my mind. Let’s both lay our cards on the table.”

“What do you mean?”

The smile vanished, and the intensity of his
gaze pinned her in place as if she’d been hit by a stunner. “I mean
that I’ll tell you exactly what my intentions are, and you can tell
me what yours are, and then we go from there. All right?”

Echo opened her mouth to refuse, but DJ was
already talking. “I intend to cooperate exactly as long as it takes
for me to find out where Roy is and figure out how to break him out
without getting him hurt. The instant I have that, I’m gone. If you
figure out a way for Charlie to survive outside, we should all go
together. Otherwise, let’s make it look like you tried to stop me
and failed. I won’t kill you to escape. When we’re on a mission,
I’ll back you up like you’re a sister Marine. But I’m not staying
here forever.”

Echo jumped up from the bench, her paralysis
broken. “You’re crazy. I can’t believe you told me all that. How do
you know I won’t run straight to Mr. Dowling and report everything
you just said?”

DJ shrugged. “I’m sure he’s figured out that
I’m planning to make a break for it eventually.”

“Yes, but— But—” Echo’s fists clenched. She
couldn’t even explain to herself why she felt so outraged. Probably
because he was being so
stupid.
Stupid and reckless: traits
that got people killed.

“You sound like you
trust
me,” she
burst out, putting her finger on the problem. “I’m the enemy!”

“Yeah. I did notice that. But I trust you
anyway.” His smile was ironic but sincere. “I mean, I trust that
whatever you tell me about your intentions will be true. You might
tell me I can go fuck myself and if I try to escape, you’ll feel
honor-bound to kill me.”

“I won’t feel honor-bound, you idiot. I don’t
believe in honor. I might kill you if that’s what it takes to save
Charlie. But that’s the only reason.” Echo’s jaw snapped shut as
she registered what she’d just said.

“I’m good with that,” DJ said cheerfully.
“So, assuming Charlie can be protected, will you let me
escape?”

Echo felt boxed into a corner. “I didn’t say
that.”

“I know. But will you?”

As she thought about it, DJ picked up a 40-lb
barbell and tossed it from hand to hand as if it weighed nothing.
He didn’t seem to be doing it to make any particular point, but
only to have something to occupy his hands.

Another wave of bitterness broke over her.
All that strength, contained in a man completely willing to put at
her disposal, and it was useless to her. She’d been trapped before
he’d come, and she’d still be trapped after he was gone. Why should
she help him when he couldn’t help her? What right did he have to
be so infuriatingly confident that she’d risk herself and even her
sister for his sake, when they barely knew each other?

I broke him and I couldn’t fix him,
Echo remembered him saying, his voice weighted with guilt.
I’m
such a fuck-up.

She bet he wouldn’t look so self-assured if
she were to quote that back at him. But she recalled the bleakness
in his gaze, and she didn’t want to see it again. Let him keep his
guilty secrets. Ferreting them out would do nothing but get her
even more entangled with him than she already was.

If she agreed to let him go when the time
came, then he and his teasing and his fidgeting and his distracting
scent and his funny scratchy voice and his body heat and his blithe
self-confidence and his ability to stir up feelings she didn’t want
to feel would all be out of her life.

“Deal,” Echo said.

DJ beamed at her. “Thanks, Echo. I knew I
could count on you.”

Before she could explain that she was only
agreeing to get rid of him, he’d set down the barbell and grabbed
her hand. His grip was strong and warm, his palm dry. Her sense of
smell had returned when she hadn’t been paying attention; she
caught a whiff of fire and oil, smoke and salt, before she hastily
shut it off again and disengaged her hand.

“Do you have any idea where the other bases
are?” DJ asked.

“No. I think you’d have to get into the
computer system to figure that out.”

“Or I could get my fangs into Mr. Dowling’s
throat.”

Echo liked that idea, but she couldn’t let DJ
get himself killed for nothing. “He’d say anything to get off the
hook. He’s probably got fake records in the system for exactly that
sort of situation.”

DJ got up and started pacing again. “Yeah,
you’re probably right. And I can’t have someone else finding him
dead and sending a message to kill Roy. Well, I’ll keep thinking
about it. Now you ask me for something.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Echo
replied.

The expression flashed so quickly across his
face that she wasn’t sure she’d correctly identified it. It had
looked like sadness, but that made no sense. She’d turned down the
opportunity to put him under an obligation. He should be
relieved.

She dismissed it from her mind. DJ was
obviously like Charlie, constantly
feeling
random things. It
was impossible to keep track of all those fleeting, pointless
emotions.

“If you ever do, just let me know.” He held
her gaze, unblinking and still. She again had the unsettling sense
of being pinned in place. “Whatever it is, I’ll help you. I swear
it on my honor. You may not believe in honor, but I do.”

Chapter Seven: DJ

Meet and Greet

“Honor.” Echo repeated it like it was a dirty
word. “I said I’ll let you go when the time comes, and I will. You
don’t need to swear any vows to me.”

DJ could tell that she’d meant it. Once
again, he’d proved that sheer persistence could create miracles. He
ought to be overjoyed. But he felt a strange sense of let-down. He
could get out but Echo couldn’t, and that made his triumph seem
stale and flat.

When he’d sensed her resistance wearing down,
he’d been certain that she’d not only let him escape, but would go
with him. The thought had lifted his spirits. It wasn’t that he’d
imagined she’d
stay
with him. He just liked the idea of her
running free under some wide-open sky almost as blue as her eyes.
It made sense that she wasn’t a shifter, once she’d explained it to
him. There was nothing in the world, no cat or shark or flying
thing, that could move more gracefully than her own human form.

“Come on,” she said, standing up. “Let’s get
some lunch.”

DJ jumped up. “That sounds great. I’m
starved.”

As they headed for the door, she said, “Once
we leave, don’t say anything you don’t want Mr. Dowling to hear;
the entire place is bugged. The cafeteria included.”

“Does it have coffee?”

To his surprise, she smiled at him. It didn’t
make her look any softer, but she looked less like she might try to
kill him at any second, and more like she was standing ready to
kill anyone who might attack him. Maybe he was only projecting what
he wanted to see. But he couldn’t help being comforted by even the
possibility that someone in this hellhole had his back.

“It’s got a coffee
bar
,” Echo
promised, heading down a featureless corridor. “Espresso machine,
flavored syrups, the works. You like the fancy girly drinks with
fifteen non-fat ingredients, right?”

“No way. I drink my coffee like a man. Like a
man with a serious caffeine addiction. Espresso, when I can get it.
How about you? Drip black, right?”

Echo shook her head. “Caffeine doesn’t affect
me, so I only drink coffee for the flavor.”

“Don’t tell me you like the fancy girly
drinks.”

Amazingly, she was still
smiling. “
I like the fancy girly drinks. Iced frappuccino,
Vienna coffee…”

“What’s that?”

“Two shots of espresso, then fill the mug
with whipped cream.”

“You have a sweet tooth.” DJ’s own teeth
ached as he imagined sucking down a cup of whipped cream. “You
should meet my sister Five.”

“There’s five of you, too?”

“Just three. It’s her scent name,” he
explained. “Chanel Number 5. She also goes by Danielle. Anyway,
she’s obsessed with desserts. Especially pastries. Once she mailed
a box of macarons to Afghanistan. They arrived in about the
condition you’d expect.”

“A box of crumbs?”

“A box of stale, multicolored dust.”

“I bet you poured it into your mouth.” Echo
opened an unmarked door and led DJ into yet another anonymous
passageway.

“I didn’t, but some of the guys did. You
would have, right?”

“If I didn’t have anything better, I’d
probably do that with sugar packets.”

“My buddy Alec used to eat sugar like that.
But I couldn’t tease him about it, because I used to chew instant
coffee crystals. There
wasn’t
anything better, and Marines
are adaptable. You’d make a good Marine.” Though he knew better, he
couldn’t help adding, “If you ever get out of here, you should
think about enlisting.”

Echo ignored that. She also ignored the pair
of security guards she passed by. DJ nodded a greeting at them.
They didn’t nod back. Belatedly, it occurred to him that they might
have been some of the same ones he’d shot with tranquilizer
darts.

She turned left at an unmarked T-intersection
of corridors. None of the doors were marked, either. DJ memorized
the layout as they walked. He’d had lots of practice doing that,
since written signs weren’t much good to him. But he usually had
more visual cues to assist him, like different colors of paint or
graphic symbols.

A maze of twisty passages, all alike,
DJ thought.
If I wander around long enough, I’ll probably be
eaten by a grue.

She stopped at a door and opened her eyes
wide. The scanner flashed, and the door slid open.

DJ started to step forward, then stuck in the
doorway. Echo grabbed his arm and hauled him inside. He heard the
door slide shut behind him, but his attention was on the woman who
sat curled up in an armchair. Echo had told him that Charlie was
her clone, but it was one thing to know it and another to see
it.

His first thought was,
They’re exactly
alike.

The cloud-white hair, the flawless skin, the
ice-blue eyes, the elegant features, and the slim figure: the women
were more identical than twins. It was as if Echo was in two places
at once. DJ was dying to become a wolf and find out if their scents
were identical, too, but he managed to restrain himself.

His second thought was,
They’re not alike
at all.

While Echo’s hair was snipped carelessly
short and rumpled as if she’d just come in from a workout,
Charlie’s hair was long and loose, falling down to her lap like a
shawl. While Echo had the spare yet strong build of a gymnast,
Charlie was simply thin. And while Echo was in her apparently
inevitable jeans-and-a-tank-top (currently rust-red jeans and a
black top), Charlie wore a gauzy dress swirled blue and white, like
a summer sky.

To complete the impression of
not alike at
all,
Charlie proceeded to do something that Echo wouldn’t have
done in a million years: she checked him out like she was on the
prowl at a dance club and had no intention of going home alone.
Then she glanced away with a shrug, just like the dance club women
did when they decided he wasn’t to their taste.