Mate Claimed (41 page)

“Kellerman,” Eric said.

“I was just thinking that,” Graham said. “He’s up to something, that’s for certain. I’m betting even if he didn’t do this himself, he knows who did. He damn well knew my wolves had gone missing and why.”

“How about if we ask him?” Eric said, rage making his eyes hard green. “We have phones.”

Iona broke in. “If you tell him you’ve found this place, won’t he just call more guards out here to raid the building?”

“Possibly,” Graham said. “I was thinking about using a sneakier method. Make him need to come out here and see for himself.”

“How are you going to do that?” Iona asked in puzzlement.

“Give me the sat phone, and I’ll show you.”

Eric handed over the big phone. Graham took it and started punching in numbers. After a few seconds of ringing, Iona heard a sleepy human female voice on the other end say, “Hello?”

“Misty. Sweetheart. This is Graham. I need you to do something for me. Call Kellerman—no, I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night—and tell him you heard me saying something about checking out his place in Area Fifty-one. Yep, I said Area Fifty-one. Tell him you’re not sure, but I seemed excited about something. Got it? Thank you, sweetie. Drinks are on me.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

G
raham said good-bye and hung up to find Iona and Eric, and even the tiger, staring at him. “She’s a friend,” Graham said. He might actually be blushing.

“So we wait,” Iona said.

Reid interrupted by reappearing. Iona suppressed another startled scream and jammed her hand to her pounding heart.

“Who’s next?” Reid asked.

“Iona,” Eric said. “Then come back, but we’re going to look around here for a while. We might need you.”

“No,” Iona said. “If you’re staying, I am.”

“Iona, I want you safe.”

“Not if you’re running around here in danger, especially with your pain attacks. I can’t pull you out of them if I’m not here.”

“And you started to go feral downstairs,” Eric growled, green eyes hard. “You can’t risk that. I might lose you for good.”

“I’ll more likely go feral if I’m forced to sit at home and worry about you. I’ll be tearing my way back here, not caring who gets in my way.” The wild need stirred as Iona spoke, the instinct to protect her mate, no matter what.

“Reid,” Eric snapped.

Reid lifted his hands and stepped away from Iona. “I’m not
getting into an argument between Shifters. No transporting against her will.”

Eric didn’t look happy, but at least he stopped arguing. Iona went to him and put her hand in his, liking the warmth of him, his scent telling her he wanted her there despite the danger.

She still saw the pain in his eyes, though, and it worried her. She knew right then that she’d rather risk going feral, or going insane from her mating heat, or being caught as a Shifter, than watch him go through that pain again.

E
ric sent Reid to the roof to keep an eye out for activity while they waited for Kellerman, having Reid report via the phones Iona had taken from the researchers. Reid’s first call said that no guards were rushing to the place, and the humans he did see ignored the building.

His observations supported Eric’s idea that no one really knew what the researchers were doing in here, nor did they care. He suspected that no one took Kellerman’s research seriously, or else he’d offered to pay a lot of money to use the run-down facility.

The two researchers on the top floor were just coming around when Eric knelt next to them. Iona had hit them hard in her half-feral state, to which their bruises attested. But they were recovering. The woman wore shorts and a T-shirt with a spangled neckline; the man was still in a clean suit. Both opened their eyes now to find a naked Eric grinning into their faces.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m a Shifter. I’m about to destroy this lab and everything in it, so you might want to leave.”

The man blinked at him. “What?”

“I said…”

Iona leaned down next to him, her lovely face bearing a sweet smile. “You kidnapped me, my sister-in-law, and a newborn baby. You took my niece from her mother and stuck needles into her and wires all over her. I’d say you need to leave.”

“We weren’t hurting her,” the woman said quickly. “Just trying to figure out her gene sequence.”

“So you could clone her?” Iona’s voice continued to be deceptively pleasant.

“We only want to know how Shifters work. They could be the best weapons—”

“Shut up,” the man said quickly.

Eric said, “Is this how you got the government to fund you? Said you were creating secret weapons? You see him?” He pointed to the tiger, who was standing next to Graham, his yellow eyes pinning the researchers. “That Shifter was the only one who survived. The ‘experiments’ were a failure.”

“But we have new—” The woman broke off again when the man elbowed her.

“Shut
up
.”

“New DNA samples from the Lupine Shifters you abducted,” Eric supplied. “You thought you could revive the experiments, succeed where the previous ones failed. I have news. It can’t be done.”

Both researchers, the woman with her pale, lined face, and the man, younger and angry looking, said nothing.

“But we’re
nice
Shifters,” Eric said. “At least I am. My mate here wants to disembowel you for touching our niece. The tiger over there wants to gut you for what humans have done to him over the last forty years. The wolf just wants to shoot you because he can.”

Graham’s laughter rumbled. “And it would be fun.”

The woman flinched, but the man looked more angry.

“But I’m going to let Reid take you out of here before we get destructive,” Eric said. “Because I’ve learned how to be kind to stupid creatures.”

Eric unfolded himself and summoned Reid from the roof. The man and woman looked more perplexed than afraid as Reid approached. Lanky Reid in jeans, shirt, and jacket against the winter cold looked innocuous and obviously not Shifter.

“He’ll have to take you one at a time,” Eric said. “The male first, I think.”

“Where do you want me to leave them?” Reid asked, expression neutral.

“I’ll let you decide.”

Reid thought a moment, then he grinned. A
dokk alfar
was a frightening thing when he smiled, especially when his midnight eyes began to gleam. “I have just the place.”

Reid put his hands on the man’s shoulders, then both he and the man vanished.

The woman screamed. She tried to scramble away from them, but Iona put a strong foot on the woman’s leg and stopped her.

Reid slammed back in a few seconds later and reached for the woman.

“Where did you take him?” Iona asked.

“Las Vegas Police Department,” Reid said. “Processing cell.” He closed his hands on the woman’s shoulders, and then they were gone.

“Huh,” Graham said. “Good sense of humor, for a Fae.” He looked around the room. “So they brought the blood and tissue samples from my wolves here?”

“Maybe egg and sperm samples too,” Iona said. “If they’re trying to breed Shifters.”

“Shit.”

Graham strode to the cooling cabinets, ripped one open, and started throwing the test tubes to the floor. They shattered, whatever agar preserved the samples oozing out and mixing with the broken glass.

The tiger Shifter watched Graham a moment, then he walked to the next glass cabinet and tipped it over, without bothering to open it. The resounding crash was satisfying, and Graham gave triumphant cheer.

“You all right?” Iona came back to Eric, her hands warm on his arms, her blue eyes soft with worry.

“Much better. The mate bond is helping.”

“The mate bond,” she said. “Cassidy told me about that. She said it was magic.”

Eric cradled Iona’s face in his hands, thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “Whatever it comes from, it’s filling me. It’s making me know I love you.”

He saw the hunger in her eyes. “I love
you
.” She touched his face. “I never knew—I never thought I could love like this.”

“The Goddess must have known. I’m glad she did.”

Around them, crashes sounded, along with the satisfied growls of two Shifters enjoying themselves. Eric slid his arms around Iona. “I love you. I’m going to keep saying that because I like hearing it. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Iona smiled as she leaned into the warm curve of his body. “I wish we were home.”

“Soon, love. And then, we won’t come out for
days
.”

Graham looked around at them. “Will you two take it out of here? Your pheromones are making me crazy.”

He’d strapped the tranq rifle across his back while he found and broke things. The tiger ignored them all while he swept his arms over the lab benches and punched the glass out of the hoods. He finally looked happy.

“Watch him,” Eric said to Graham.

“Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

Eric craved Iona with his entire body, but he knew that would have to wait. “We need to search the rest of the floors.”

“Yes,” Iona said. “Unfortunately.”

But later, when he had her home…

Eric fixed what they needed into a pack around his waist, then they walked together, hand in hand, to the stairwell, where Eric had the pleasure of watching Iona remove her clothes again. Then they shifted to their wildcats and descended to see what they could find.

A
n hour later, Reid, back on the roof, alerted Eric that Kellerman had arrived.

Eric and Iona had found little downstairs—the rooms hadn’t been used for years. Fortunately they found no more victims of the researchers’ experiments, no more captive Shifters. The researchers had used the top floor, the lowest basement, and Cassidy’s room, and that was it.

Reid’s message was to the point. “He’s here.”

“Go down and tell Graham.” Eric flipped the phone closed, his heart beating in rage and anticipation. He looked at Iona, who returned the look with the same anger in her eyes. “Let’s go meet him.”

K
ellerman headed up, not down when he walked into the building. He took the one working elevator to the top floor and emerged, a semiautomatic in his hand.

Eric’s half-leopard beast twisted the pistol away.

Kellerman’s eyes widened, and he tried to leap back into the elevator, but Eric grabbed him by the collar and jerked him forward as the elevator doors closed. Iona stepped behind Kellerman and checked his pockets for more weapons, relieving him of his phone and a magazine of bullets.

Iona had resumed her clothes upon arriving on the top floor, but Eric and Graham had left theirs far away in the desert. Kellerman gave them a contemptuous look.

“I have backup coming,” he said. He tried to sound unworried, but he couldn’t conceal the tremor in his voice as he took in the ruined lab, the floor a river of broken glass.

“We’ll be long gone before they get here,” Eric said.

Graham aimed the tranq rifle at Kellerman. “I have backup too. Except I don’t know his name.” He whistled, and Tiger Man stepped from behind the pile of wreckage that used to be a lab table.

Kellerman’s face drained of color. “You let him
out
?”

“He looked unhappy,” Iona said. “So I opened the cage.”

“But he’s dangerous. He could kill us all.”

“Why?” Iona asked. “He’s only a Shifter.”

“No, he isn’t.” Kellerman wet his lips. “He’s a
programmed
Shifter. He’s been coded to kill. To fight the enemy and not stop until that enemy is destroyed.”

“Oh.” Iona looked ill. “So you didn’t only breed him, you also messed with his DNA?”

“
I
didn’t,” Kellerman said. “The people who ran this facility before me did. They were brilliant. They blended genetics from animals, humans, and other Shifters to create the perfect Shifters, but ones obedient to human wills. The perfect fighting machines. Military weapons. They imagined whole armies of them.”

“So, what happened?” Eric asked. “I don’t see any armies of Shifters.”

Kellerman shook his head. “The prototypes didn’t last. Too unstable. The project got cut because they didn’t produce results fast enough.” Derision entered his voice. “The government was too shortsighted.”

“How do you know about what went on here?” Iona asked. “You were wandering through Area Fifty-one and stumbled across it?”

“No, I stumbled across it researching Shifters,” Kellerman said with a touch of his usual arrogance. “When I was put in charge of the Shifter council a few years ago, I did my homework on them. I found a file on this project, parts of it declassified because it was forty years old. I looked into it. I had ideas for how to make the project actually work, so I put together a team and got permission to research what people had done here. They had good ideas back then, but not the technology to implement them.”

“And when you had to combine Shiftertowns,” Eric finished, “you saw an opportunity to take fresh DNA and other samples without anyone being the wiser. So you thought. Graham was going to notice when some of his Shifters went missing—why did you think he wouldn’t?”

“They took too long,” Kellerman said impatiently. “The whole transfer and tissue harvesting was supposed to take only an hour or so. I’m surrounded by idiots.”