Saved by Wolves (Shifters Meet Their Mate Book 1) (12 page)

“Good,” Jackson said. “We’re camping here tonight. I’ll gather wood.” He uncrossed his arms and strode toward the forest.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Marcus called after him. “We could travel a few more hours today. If we take too long, the council meeting might break up before we reach Blue’s Hollow.”

“We’re not going another step until we have all the facts,” Jackson said. “I won’t be taken by surprise again.” With that, he faded into the trees, leaving an awkward silence in his wake.

Kirra shifted her weight from foot to foot, hands twisting together. He hadn’t taken her for a fidgeter. “Your stuff’s over there,” she said, tilting her head toward the foot of her blankets, where their packs were lined up.

“Yeah.” He forced his feet to move in that direction. “How long have you guys been here?”

“Not long. Maybe half an hour. Jackson didn’t want to leave me alone—that’s why we don’t have a fire going yet.”

“Ah. Makes sense.” Nothing made sense. He’d left them alone for a few hours, and...

He caught her stealing sidelong glances at him while he dressed, and wondered what she saw. How did he compare to Jackson? Objectively, he knew he didn’t look half bad—or so he’d been told over the years. People complimented his strong jaw, wavy hair, and charming smile. Jackson had the strong jaw part down, but no one had ever accused him of being charming. He was large, though, and strong. Stronger than Marcus could ever hope to be. Kirra probably felt safe with Jackson around. He wasn’t the one who’d saved her, though. If it had been up to Jackson, they would have left her in the river, at the mercy of the Cats. Marcus swung around to face her, ready to say as much.

The words froze in his throat when he saw her huddled on the blankets, forehead resting on her knees. Sinking to the ground in front of her, he set a hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She raised her head and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. “Everything. I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me. I never cry. I’ll be all right in a sec.”

Lightly massaging her shoulder through her jacket, he said, “Don’t worry about it. A few tears never hurt anyone. Besides, I’m not surprised you’re crying.”

She squinted at him questioningly, tears sparkling on her eyelashes.

“You had to spend most of the day alone with Jackson. When that happens to me, I always end the day in tears.”

That got a laughing snort out of her, and Kirra straightened up, blinking away the last of her tears.

“He ignored me all morning, then...” Her voice trailed off, a flush rose up her neck and spread over her cheeks, and her breathing deepened.

“Then?” he prompted, not really wanting to hear the answer, but needing to know.

She cleared her throat. “Then we took a short break, and then he was back to giving me the silent treatment.” Sighing, she plucked at a loose thread on the wool blanket and shook her head. “I can’t blame him for the tears, though. That’s—”

Jackson chose that moment to reappear, a load of thin branches in his arms. He glared at Marcus’s hand, still resting on Kirra’s shoulder, then turned his back and dumped the wood a few feet away, proceeding to clear a spot for the fire.

Something had definitely happened between them. But if it was what he thought it was, their behavior didn’t make sense. Burning with questions, Marcus glanced at Kirra, but she was back to not meeting his eyes. Under his hand, her shoulders hunched.

Tamping down his frustration, Marcus turned his attention to Jackson, tossing him a fire starter when he held up his hand. “What were you talking about before you left—about needing all the facts, I mean.”

“I mean exactly that. If we’re going to end up at war with the Cats, and perhaps with humans, we should know why. Not to mention, it’s hard to protect against an enemy you don’t know.” The kindling caught, and Jackson tossed the fire starter back to Marcus, who tucked it away in the outside pocket of his pack.

“Well, can’t really argue with that. So, mysterious lady, are you going to fill in the blanks for us? So far we know a group of soldiers wants you either caught or killed, and the Cats do too, although most of them don’t seem to know why.” Doing his best to appear lighthearted and casual, despite the serious subject and the emotions roiling inside him, Marcus rested on his haunches, fished a package of jerky out of his pack, and tore a piece off, offering the rest to Kirra. She accepted it with a nod of thanks, but didn’t make a move to eat. Instead, she got up, tucked her hands under her armpits as if for warmth, and stared at the last vestiges of the setting sun.

“Like I started to tell Jackson earlier, this whole problem started years ago—before I was born even,” she began. “Twenty-five years ago, my mom—who was only nineteen at the time—worked as a waitress at some little diner in Los Angeles. She was working there to make money to put her through night school. She grew up in a small town, less than two thousand people, and she was so excited to pack up and leave the day after she graduated high school. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do or be, but she wanted to do something, be somebody.”

Tears ran down Kirra’s cheeks, but Marcus doubted she was even aware.

“Anyway, there she was, nineteen, young, innocent, trusting. One night while she was working the night shift—it was a Monday, which was typically the slowest day, so only she and the cook were there—this charming, handsome man came in and struck up a conversation with her. She was bored, and lonely because she hadn’t made very many friends yet, and it was flattering for a slightly older man to pay attention to her, so when he asked her about her family and what she did, she told him.

“He came back three more times, always later at night, always when she was the only waitress working. And I’m sure you can guess what happened next.” Kirra gave a short, sad laugh that made him ache to hold her in his arms. “On the final night, he asked her out to dinner. Offered to pick her up at her apartment the next night. Of course she agreed. The time for the date rolled around, and she dressed up in her cutest dress and took extra care with her makeup. She was excited and nervous. A car with tinted windows rolled up in front of the low rise she lived in and honked its horn. As soon as she climbed in, her charming, handsome man jabbed a needle in her arm, knocking her out.

“She didn’t know how long she was out for, but when she woke up, she was in a ten-foot-square cell with no windows and a locked door. There was a bed and an adjoining bathroom, but nothing else. Oh, except for the clothes on her back. Instead of the cute dress, she was dressed in a white shift with numbers across its front.”

A sick feeling coiled in Marcus’s gut, and from the way Jackson was staring at Kirra, hands balled into fists, he had a feeling he was dreading what she was going to say next too. It wouldn’t be good.

Kirra swiped at her tears with the sleeve of her windbreaker. “It was Blackstone’s first step in dehumanizing them—the subjects, that is. The scientists wouldn’t do anything as barbaric as branding them with an iron, but they may as well have. From that point on, my mom was Subject 19.”

Jackson cleared his throat, and her head snapped in his direction. “Why did he single her out?” he asked. “Beyond the obvious.”

“The obvious?” Marcus asked.

“Young, naive, alone in the world, probably attractive.” Jackson ticked off the points on his fingers. “There had to be more to it, though.”

Kirra slowly nodded. “You’re right. She didn’t know it until much later, but she was targeted because she had certain key genetic markers—she’d donated blood a few weeks earlier, and that’s how they found out. Blackstone used blood drives as a way to find potential victims. They probably still do. It’s why I’ve never given blood.”

Questions swam through his mind. “What kind of genetic markers? What were they studying? And how could they get away with it? And what’s Blackstone?”

“How could they get away with it?” Kirra parroted back at him. “Easy. They were sanctioned, that’s how. Blackstone is a subsidiary of a major corporation. The military is using the company name to hide under-the-radar military research and operations, and the government funds it. Its true function is hidden under the umbrella of ‘classified research,’ so few people know what’s really going on, and I’m sure those who do have signed nondisclosure agreements.

“As to their goal. Well, they want to make the perfect soldier, of course. A strong, intelligent, loyal, and unquestioning killing machine.”

“And they thought something in your mom’s DNA would help with that,” Jackson said. It wasn’t a question.

“Not just hers. There were twenty-five women in the first wave. The scientists impregnated them, and they carried their babies in that horrible place. Only nine of the babies were brought to term. I was one of them. Francesca was born a year later.”

“You were supposed to be a super soldier?” Marcus asked. She was strong willed and obviously mentally strong, but he had a hard time associating her with the term “soldier.”

“Yeah, well, kind of,” she said. Kirra looked down at the jerky clenched in her fist as if seeing it for the first time, and she took a bite. “One of the first disappointments of the program was that every viable fetus was female. Every single male died in the second trimester. The second disappointment was that we weren’t stronger and quicker.” Her lips quirked. “Later on, they learned we weren’t anywhere near unquestioning, either.”

“That’s where you grew up,” Jackson said. “And you escaped at fourteen.”

“Francesca and I,” Kirra said. “Talk about a shock to the system. We knew about the outside world, had even run a few supervised missions outside of the lab, but we weren’t ready for it.

“We lived on the streets and in cheap, cash-only, rent-by-the-week motels for two years, moving from city to city because we didn’t dare stay in one place for too long. We knew they’d try to track us down, either to reclaim or kill us. We knew too much for them to just write us off.” She ran a hand through her hair and paced by the fire. “Eventually we made contacts and figured out how to get good quality fake IDs so we could rent an apartment and get jobs. Still, we moved every year or so. Just in case. They almost caught up with us a few years back, but we got out in time.”

She raised her head to meet first his eyes, then Jackson’s. “We weren’t so lucky last week. Francesca broke her leg in a stupid accident a few weeks ago, so when they tracked us down, she couldn’t run. I-I had to leave her.” Guilt coated her voice. “I didn’t want to.”

“You did the right thing,” Jackson said. “It would have been stupid to let them get both of you.”

“That’s what Francesca said,” Kirra said with a watery smile.

“She’s smart then.”

Some of the puzzle pieces were in place, but Marcus felt he was still missing the key corner pieces that would hold everything together. “I’m still not clear on why they kept you for so long once they realized you weren’t what they expected. And why did you come here, to Shifter Territory?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” Kirra said. “We weren’t what they expected, but it turned out that we had... unique abilities they wanted to research and exploit. They studied and tested and trained us for years. And if it wasn’t for our mom, they probably would have brainwashed us into believing everything they said. We were lucky they allowed us to stay with her. Actually, there probably wasn’t any luck involved. They wanted us to have strong emotional ties to her—threatening her was the most effective way of getting us to obey.”

“What kind of abilities?”

“It’ll sound really strange, like out of a sci-fi movie,” she warned, twisting her hands together.

“We’re shape-shifters,” Marcus said. “I think we’ll be able to handle a little strange.”

“Right. Well, I’m what you might call an energy manipulator. I can draw electrical energy from building storms or power lines—and even from organic sources, although it’s not very effective and I don’t like doing it.”

Marcus wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. “That’s why you asked about power lines around here,” he said.

“Yeah. Other than when I was put in isolation as a kid, I’ve never been anywhere so empty of direct electricity. I’m used to a steady buzz, so it was a bit disorienting at first. It also made it harder for me to fight off Lash and his partner. If I’d been able to access a power line, they’d have been on their asses by the time you caught up with us.” Her matter-of-fact tone said it wasn’t a boast, merely fact.

“So it can be used as a weapon,” Jackson said.

“Yes.”

“And your sister, Francesca, she has this power too?”

“Not exactly. Have you ever heard of telekinesis?”

“Where you can move things with your mind?” Marcus said. “I thought that was a myth.”

“Not anymore. My sister, and I suspect others, can do it.”

It did all sound a touch unbelievable, and part of him wanted to ask her to prove it somehow, but the other, larger part believed everything she was saying. In its dealings with shifters, the human government had proven it was corrupt time and time again. It wasn’t shocking to discover the military was corrupt as well. Kidnapping innocent people and experimenting on them...

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Jackson said. He stood with arms crossed, frowning. Marcus realized he was mimicking his stance, so he hastily uncrossed his arms and dragged a fallen log over to the fire, taking a seat on it and motioning Kirra to the spot beside him. She brushed at the dirt on the log, sending an ant scurrying out of the way, and sat.

“I came here to convince the Shifter Council to help me rescue my sister.”

He’d guessed as much, but still didn’t follow her logic. Choosing his words carefully, not wanting her to burst into tears again, Marcus said, “What happened to you and your family was terrible, but I think you’ll have a hard time convincing the council to help you. If you were a shifter, that would be one thing—they’d have an obligation to help. But you’re not. You’re a human threatened by the human government. The alphas won’t see that as their concern. In fact, helping you might expose us to retaliation.”