Mate Claimed (37 page)

Iona forced her panther to calm. Whoever was in the cage was a Shifter, trapped, taken against its will. She should help it, not fear it.

But the waves of emotion that emanated from the cage had Iona’s defensive instincts roaring. She shifted back to her in-between beast, the shift a little slower and more painful this time.

“It’s all right,” she said, her voice the guttural one of the beast. “Who are you? I can help you.”

Another snarl of pure, aggressive rage. The yellow eyes flashed red and a body slammed into the bars of the cage.

Iona jumped back, but the cage held, which seemed to enrage the creature even more. It pressed its face to the bars and glared out at her.

Tiger.

Iona stared at the animal in surprise. Feline Shifters could be any wildcat or a combination of wildcats, each family tending toward the traits of one more than the others. Iona’s father obviously had a lot of panther in him; Eric’s family, snow leopard.

While in Shiftertown, Iona had met Felines whose wildcats resembled lions, lynxes, pumas, and one family of cheetahs, but no tigers. Cassidy sometimes looked after an orphaned cub who was a white tiger, but he was the only one.

This Shifter was a Bengal, orange and black striped, and gigantic. His scent was overwhelmingly male. No Collar gleamed around the tiger’s neck, and his eyes held madness.

He’d gone feral.

Iona stared at him in horror, finally realizing what Eric had been trying to tell her would happen to her if she didn’t control the beast within her. This was what he meant.

Crazed, furious, out of control, dangerous to herself and everyone around her.

Looking at the feral tiger in the cage, the untamed beast inside Iona tasted a tang of his madness and liked it.

Iona quickly shifted fully to human. “Who are you?” she asked again. “Did they capture you? Why don’t you have a Collar?”

The tiger’s face distorted, nose receding, eyes growing more human, but the Shifter settled into his half man, half beast form. “Let me out.”

The pheromone scent that came to her was loud and clear. Crap. He was an uncontrolled Shifter male facing a female who’d recently entered her mating years and was a bit wild with the mating heat. He wanted her.

Iona took a few steps back. “And have you jump my bones? No, thank you. I smell what you want to do.”

“I smell it on
you
. You want to mate. You want cubs.”

“I have a mate. He’s the leader of the Shifters. He’ll help you.”

“No one can help me.” The words were matter-of-fact.

“Where’s your Collar?” Iona asked.

The yellow eyes narrowed. “What collar?”

Interesting answer. “How long have you been in there?”

Surprise flickered in his eyes, as though he’d never considered it. “Always.”

“Who captured you?”

“I was never captured,” the tiger said. “I have always been here.”

The chill in Iona’s blood grew. “Where are the humans who run this place? They took a cub. I need to find her.”

“A cub.” The voice became sharp, more alert, more enraged. “Don’t let them have the cub.”

“I’m trying not to. Tell me how to find them.”

The tiger went silent a moment, claws scratching the floor. “Let me out. I’ll show you.”

“How about you just tell me? I’ll find the cub, and my mate, and he’ll help you. Promise.”

“No promises. Promises are lies.”

Iona took one bold step toward the cage. She couldn’t show fear. She had to calm him, to make him understand.

The dominance game, she understood with sudden clarity, wasn’t about fighting. It was about making the challenger know what would happen if things came to a fight. Iona might be smaller than the tiger, but she had to prove that she was fast and strong, and smart enough to win.

“I’m not one of the humans who put you in here. I’ll find the cub, with or without your help, and I’ll come back for you. That’s how it will be.”

The tiger fixed her gaze with his crazed red one. Iona didn’t flinch.

Staring him down was harder than staring down Shane or even Graham. But not tougher than facing Eric.

Eric, as calm and laid-back as he pretended to be, had dominance down to an art form. He didn’t need to challenge anyone, because he knew he’d already won before the game even started.

Defiance in the face of Eric’s will was almost impossible, but Iona had managed it. And she knew that if she could withstand Eric, she could withstand Tiger Man.

The battle took a long time though. Whoever this Shifter was, wherever he’d come from, he was a dominant.

The tiger didn’t lower his gaze or turn away, but finally Iona sensed a minute change in his stance.

“They do experiments on the top floor,” he said. “When they don’t do them down here. But they wouldn’t bring a cub down here with me.”

Top floor it was, then. Iona hoped he wasn’t sending her into a trap, but he didn’t smell of lies.

“I’ll make sure you get out too,” Iona said. “What’s your name?”

He hesitated for a long time, then finally said, “Twenty-three.”

“That’s not a name.” Iona glanced back down the row of
empty cages. “What happened to numbers one through twenty-two?”

“They died. Now it’s just me.”

Iona met his gaze again, her fear of him changing to sympathy. “I’ll come back for you,” she repeated.

As though the conversation had become too much for him, the tiger shifted back into his huge wildcat, snarling breathily in his throat.

Iona became her panther again, finding it easier this time, and slunk back into the darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“T
ell me you’ve got a fix,” Eric said for about the tenth time.

Xavier tapped keys on the keyboard in the offices of DX Security. “Getting there. A little quiet would help.”

Diego was pacing the long room, his fingers fondling the handle of his Glock. He paced, Eric knew, to keep himself from ripping the computer out of Xavier’s hands and trying to pull up the GPS data from Iona’s cell phone himself.

Eric contented himself with standing over Xavier and breathing down his neck.

Shane had summoned Eric back to the clinic in a state of panic. Iona and Cassidy had disappeared, Shane said, little Amanda with them. Shane and Brody had scoured the clinic and bullied the staff, but the three were nowhere to be found. Jace had already headed out to the compound in the desert to search for them there.

Eric had been about to call Diego and break the news, when he and Xavier had returned from a restaurant near the clinic, where the brothers had celebrated Amanda’s birth with beers and burgers.

Shane had been about to shit himself. He’d always had a thing for Cassidy, and now he blamed himself for losing her,
her baby, and Iona. He should have checked on them more often, he said. He’d let them down. He deserved to have Eric and Diego kick his grizzly ass.

Eric had interrupted this self-flagellation by saying in clipped tones that if Iona had her phone with her, they could track her through its GPS chip. Even if Iona couldn’t use the phone, they could still find her, and Xavier knew how to get to that data.

“Won’t help if they threw her phone away,” Xavier had said glumly.

Eric answered, “Even finding out where they threw it away gives us a place to start.”

“Here we go,” Xavier said now from his computer. “Iona’s phone is at these coordinates, which is roughly…” He brought up a map and entered the data. “Here.” A red dot blossomed on the map in the middle of nothing.

Eric leaned to look and felt Diego crowding behind him. The dot was in empty desert, not at the compound they’d found, but farther north and west.

“That’s Area Fifty-one,” Diego said. “What the hell are they doing in Area Fifty-one?”

“Experiments,” Eric said, his rage burning cold. “That’s where they did the experiments on Shifters twenty years ago.”

“The fuck they’re going to experiment on Cassidy and my daughter.”

“Or my mate,” Eric said.

Xav broke in. “Diego, you can’t take a posse up there. There’s gates and guards and people with guns to shoot your ass as soon as they see it.”

“They can’t take my daughter hostage. I’ll get every law enforcement official in the state of Nevada to make them let us in.”

“No,” Eric said, his eyes on the map. “I’ll go in myself.”

“To a top secret government facility?” Xavier asked, incredulous. “They have security cameras and guards happy to shoot you as soon as they see you. What does
authorized use of deadly force
mean to you? Trust me, I’ve studied their security—I study everyone’s security. It’s my job.”

“You drop me off here.” Eric pointed to a spot on Highway 95. “I’ll go through the desert. It’s dark now, and I’m very good at navigating terrain without being seen.”

“It’s a long way, and it’s rough,” Xavier said. “Mountains, canyons, dry lakes, you name it.”

“Norway wasn’t easy either, and this time I don’t have bombs strapped to me.”

Diego interrupted. “Fine for you getting in. But how are you going to get Iona and Cassidy out safely, with my daughter?”

“Reid.”

Diego relaxed a little, but only a little. “Reid can only teleport to someplace he’s seen.”

“Which is why you’re giving me a satellite phone and a camera and a way to send you photos with your state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. Show the photos to Reid, and he can get there.” Eric hoped.

“Eric, this is my mate and daughter…”

“And when I need a helicopter and machine guns, I’ll call you. There’s no way you can keep up with me through the desert, no way you can sneak into wherever they are like I can. If you want to drive around to the front gate and create a distraction, be my guest. But I need someone to get the photos to Reid as soon as I send them.”

“Diego, he’s right,” Xavier said. “It would take you too long to cross that country on foot, and any vehicle will be seen. Let him go. I’ll take care of alerting Reid.”

Diego’s face was hard, but he gave Eric a nod. “Fine.” He fingered his pistol again. “If you want a distraction, I’ll give you a distraction.”

“It’s still a long way,” Xavier said to Eric. “Straight through desert, no water. You sure you’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be just fine,” Eric said.

The mate bond would pull him on. It was already urging him out the door, to run, run, run to Iona’s side.

“Get me the equipment and let’s go,” Eric said. Every minute could be a minute too late.

“You got it,” Xavier said. He managed a grin. “Say hi to the aliens for me.”

U
p, up, and up. Iona climbed eight floors, panting by the time she reached the top. She opened the door a crack, and finally found people.

Not many. She hadn’t scented them in the stairwell—she’d smelled them only when she opened the door, which meant the doorway must be airtight. To keep germs out, she reasoned as she slunk inside.

This floor was a laboratory. While she’d found the lower floors to be old and cluttered, the lab here had state-of-the-art technology.

Rows of sealed, glassed-in cooling units marched down the room, each containing racks and racks of test tubes. Lab tables held glass-fronted exhaust hoods with gloves extending into them so people wouldn’t have to put their bare hands onto whatever was inside. At the far end of the room, two people wearing white clean-room suits and surgical caps studied large flat-screen computer monitors.

Iona was bringing her panther germs and the dirt from the floors below into their pristine lab. Aw, wasn’t that too bad?

Being a black cat against all this white was a decided disadvantage. Iona slunk from bench to bench, keeping low. The lab workers, fascinated by whatever was on their screens, never looked up and never saw her.

As Iona paused to decide what to do—rip into their bodies until they talked or question them calmly?—she heard Amanda cry.

The sound was faint, very weak, and would have been inaudible to a human. But Iona, Shifter and now a member of the cub’s pride, heard her loud and clear.

Iona couldn’t smell Amanda, which meant they had her sealed in someplace, like the hoods on the lab tables. She’d kill them.

The thought formed and grew, delighting the half-Shifter beast and panther. Even Iona the human wasn’t alarmed. Killing these researchers for hurting Amanda sounded like a good idea.

Iona picked her way forward as far as she could as a panther, then silently rose into her human form—effortlessly this time. She took a small acetylene torch from a holder on one of the lab benches and walked forward on bare feet.

As she drew closer, she saw that the large computer screens nearly hid a small glass window behind them. The two researchers
fixed their attention not on the window, but on the screens, which showed electronic scans of a baby. Amanda.

Amanda lay beyond the glass in a room where she was being X-rayed or MRI’d or whatever, and she was crying.

Iona turned on the acetylene torch, stepped forward, and aimed the stream of fire at one of the computer screens. It melted.

The researchers, a man and a woman, swung around. The woman screamed. The man said in shock, “What the hell?”