Prisoner (Werewolf Marines) (12 page)

“Deal,” said Mr. Dowling.

“Fine,” said Dr. Semple.

“And I want my family to know I’m alive,” DJ
added. “They’re wolves. They can keep a secret.”

“We’ll consider letting you send a message,”
Mr. Dowling said. “No live communication, though.”

“I want them to reply in video or audio, so I
know they got the message.”

As Mr. Dowling started to agree, Dr. Semple
said, “Do any of your family have useful powers? Where do they
live?”

Though DJ knew the doctor was just screwing
with him— if she wanted to go after his pack, she could easily find
them without his help— anger and fear flared through him. “You stay
away from them! My sister’s famous. She disappears, it’ll be all
over the news. My brother’s a corporate lawyer with a heart
condition. He’s not James Bond— he’s not even allowed to play
racquetball. My grandmother’s seventy, my oldest niece is six, my
parents—”

“Enough, Torres. We’re not interested in your
family. So long as you cooperate.” Mr. Dowling pointed to a door.
“Take a shower. Get dressed. We’ll get some food for you. And
then—”

“And coffee. Unlimited coffee. That has to be
part of the deal.”
Should I push my luck?
DJ figured he had
nothing to lose. “And an iPod.”

“Excuse me?” Mr. Dowling said icily.

“You’ve completely fucked up my life,” DJ
pointed out. “The least you can do is give me an iPod. With
speakers. And internet access—”

“No internet.” Mr. Dowling and Dr. Semple
spoke in perfect unison.

Without missing a beat, DJ continued, “Then I
want it to come loaded with music. I’ll tell you what songs—
actually, albums would be simpler. I’ll tell you what albums I
want. I can sort through them later.”

“
And then,
” Mr. Dowling went on, with
an edge in his voice, “We’ll introduce you to your partner.”

Chapter Six: Echo

Roommates

Charlie stretched luxuriously out on the
sofa,
Flames of Desire (Billionaire Firefighters # 3)
discarded at her side. “…and then Kevin said his cast itched, and
he didn’t know how he could take a bath without it getting wet. So
I said I’d help him…”

Normally Echo enjoyed hearing about Charlie’s
escapades with her boyfriend-of-the-month. Last month it had been
Juan the lab tech. But as Charlie recounted all the details, Echo’s
mind kept drifting away from Kevin the security guard, to what
might be happening to DJ. When she’d returned to check on him, the
guards had told her that Dr. Semple and Mr. Dowling were in there
with him. The head of medical research and the head of covert ops:
whatever was going on in there couldn’t be pleasant. She hoped that
at least his sunburn was better.

“But I didn’t take care of him
all
night
like you did with DJ,” Charlie said, poking Echo in the
ribs. “That’s so romantic! Was he grateful? Did he—”

Echo’s attention returned to Charlie so
quickly that she felt like it had been yanked with a bungee cord.
“There was nothing romantic about it. I accidentally promised him I
would, that’s all.”

“What’s he look like?” Charlie asked. “Is he
devastatingly handsome? He is, right?”

“Ask Kevin,” Echo said, grinning.

“Kevin never saw him. He got knocked out when
DJ kicked the door in.”

“The first time I saw him, I was too busy
fighting him to see if he was devastating or not. The next time I
saw him, I’d punched him in the mouth and he had second degree
sunburns. His face was all red and swollen. He definitely wasn’t
devastating then.”

“Do you think he will be when he heals?”

“No,” Echo said firmly. “Stop trying to set
me up with him. It’s a terrible idea. He’s a born wolf who’s been
cut off from his pack. He—”

He probably won’t live very long
hung
in the air between them, unspoken.

Charlie laid a gentle hand on Echo’s
shoulder. “Everybody dies. Kevin will, some day. I—”

Echo couldn’t stand hearing her sister talk
like that. “He’s not my type, all right? But maybe he’d be yours.
He’s dark and handsome.”

“I thought you were too busy fighting to
notice.”

Caught out, Echo protested, “I never said he
wasn’t handsome. I just wasn’t sure about the devastating
part.”

“Forget the devastating. Is he tall?”

“Well… He’s not short.”

“Average height,” Charlie said dismissively.
“Is he a dominating alpha male?”

“He might be an alpha
wolf
. He didn’t
seem dominating, but you never know. He could be into bondage and
spanking and giving orders, the whole nine yards. Besides, he’s a
werewolf. That’s sexy, right? Why don’t you ever read any werewolf
romances?”

Charlie made a face. “Too much like real
life.”

The knock at the door made Echo jump. “Who is
it?”

To her dismay, Mr. Dowling opened the door.
Normally the apartment she shared with Charlie was a refuge. It was
going to start feeling exactly like everywhere else if her handlers
kept invading it.

“What do you want?” Echo asked
ungraciously.

Mr. Dowling smiled as if she’d welcomed him
in. “I want you to come with me.”

Echo followed him through the unmarked
corridors. She thought they’d go into the office, but he kept on
walking. They passed medical research, then the hospital.

“Where are we going?” Echo asked.

“Residential quarters.”

That told her nothing. Apartments were
scattered all over the base. “Whose residence?”

He stopped at a door and waved her toward the
retina scanner.

“It’s keyed to me?” she asked.

“Yes. Open it.”

“Why?”

As she widened her eyes for the scanner and
the door began to slide open, a blast of music hit her, a
swaggering rap song in… Hindi? Echo didn’t speak it, but she was
familiar with the sound. Charlie loved Bollywood movies.

Mr. Dowling spoke loudly, to be heard over
the music. “Because it’s your new apartment.”

“What?” She swung on him before she got a
look inside.

From inside the apartment, an equally
startled voice said, “What? Seriously?
She’s
my
partner?”

Echo didn’t have to turn around to see who
was speaking. She recognized that scratchy voice.

“He’s my
partner?
” Echo exclaimed.

Mr. Dowling gestured her inside. DJ was
leaning against the living room wall, adjusting the sound on an
iPod with a tiny speaker system attached. Their eyes met, and he
turned it off.

He looked much better than he had the day
before. The blisters and swelling and redness had subsided, but a
pink line still cut across his mouth. The sight again made her feel
guilty, which made no sense. It was a trivial injury, inflicted on
a werewolf. It would be healed into invisibility by the next
morning.

Then she remembered the other bomb Mr.
Dowling had dropped. “What do you mean, my new apartment? I have an
apartment!”

The door slid shut as Mr. Dowling took a seat
on the sofa. “You two will be roommates while we train Torres. We
want you to learn to work as a team. It’s a method that should be
familiar to you, Torres.”

“You mean the way guys who don’t get along in
boot camp get assigned as battle buddies? You know, that doesn’t
always work out so great.” DJ shot a furtive glance at Echo, then
earnestly informed Mr. Dowling, “Anyway, she and I get along fine.
Mission accomplished. We don’t need to room together.”

“If you both behave, it won’t need to be
permanent,” Mr. Dowling said blandly, as if he was addressing a
pair of recalcitrant teenagers. “You’re lucky it’s just the two of
you, and you have a nice apartment instead of bunks in a
barrack.”

“That’s true,” DJ remarked, then shut up when
Echo glared at him.

Echo’s temper rose rather than cooling. “I’ve
always lived with my sisters— my sister. Charlie needs me. What if
she has a medical crisis and I’m not there?”

“She’ll press her alert button, the same as
she would if you were on a mission or she was alone for any other
reason,” said Mr. Dowling.

DJ had been staring at Echo ever since she’d
mentioned her sister. But to Echo’s relief, he didn’t comment.
Instead, he tugged at the sofa until a shred of cloth came away in
his fingers. He examined it, dropped it, started to tear off
another shred, and then jerked his hand away and began to pace
around the living room.

Over his shoulder, he said, “I want to see
more video. I want to know that Roy’s recovered from you torturing
him.”

Echo’s stomach lurched. She hoped Mr. Dowling
would deny the accusation or say that DJ was exaggerating, but he
only said, “I’ll consider it. Echo, you can visit Charlie, of
course, but you sleep here at night.”

Her eyebrows flew up. DJ’s jaw dropped.

Mr. Dowling rolled his eyes. “There’s two
beds. I’m your handler, not your matchmaker.”

Echo didn’t know what was most embarrassing,
that she’d thought Mr. Dowling was ordering them to sleep together,
that Mr. Dowling knew what she’d thought, or that DJ had obviously
thought the same thing.

“In that case, could we get a two-bedroom?”
DJ asked.

Mr. Dowling was clearly impervious to
embarrassment, because he spoke without a hitch. “No. The point is
to force you to interact. I don’t want you hiding alone in your
rooms.”

“If we promised not to…?” DJ suggested.

Mr. Dowling ignored him. “Echo, show him
around the base. We’ll collect him for training after lunch.
Torres, you know what happens if you don’t honor our
agreement.”

DJ stopped pacing and looked straight at Mr.
Dowling. With no expression whatsoever, he said, “So do you.”

The temperature seemed to drop thirty
degrees.

“The door will unlock from the inside now.”
Mr. Dowling retreated, the door sliding shut behind him.

There was a brief silence. Then the ice
melted from DJ’s face, and he once again looked like the sweet
innocent guy whom Echo had been so sure couldn’t hurt her. But
though it had only been for a second, she’d seen the real man
beneath the cheerful mask. He was a ruthless killer, just like her.
She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse about being
stuck with him as a partner.

Better, she supposed. At least she didn’t
have to worry that he couldn’t pull his own weight. If Echo was
forced to have a partner, she could do a whole lot worse.

“I’m sorry I got you booted out of your
apartment,” DJ said. “About being partners—”

Echo put a finger to her lips. DJ fell silent
while she scanned the living room. She spotted the heat-glow of two
bugs in the walls, got a knife from the kitchen, pried them out,
and smashed them underfoot. DJ followed her as she went from room
to room, scanning for bugs and destroying the ones she found.

The apartment was similar to the one she
shared with Charlie, except that the bedroom was very small, with a
pair of single beds about two feet apart and no room to push them
further away from each other. The gym was larger, with a hot tub
and an empty area that was presumably for free-sparring. There was
a bug in the bedroom and another in the bathroom, plus two in the
gym. Echo destroyed them all.

After she crushed the last one against the
floor of the gym, she said, “We can talk now.”

“Aren’t they going to notice that you smashed
their bugs?” DJ asked.

“Of course. But I don’t like being spied on,
and they know that. I guess they felt like they had to try. But I
never let them bug our— my apartment.” Now that she could speak
freely, there was something she’d been wondering about. “What was
that song you were playing when I came in?”

“‘Kali Denali.’” DJ grinned. “I’ll turn the
speakers to 11.”

The bass line made the walls shake, and the
few lines in English were pure gangsta rap. Echo wished she hadn’t
been so quick to smash the bugs— she liked the idea of blasting her
eavesdroppers with it. Then she remembered that DJ had been playing
it when the bugs had still been in the walls, and her grin matched
his.

“Was that Hindi?” she asked, when the song
ended.

“You’re close. It’s Punjabi.”

“Do you speak it?”

“Not a word. But I’ll play you something in a
language I do speak.” DJ turned on another song. Echo couldn’t even
guess what language it was in, but she liked the catchy tune of the
sung part and the expressive voice of the rapper. Without
understanding a single word, she was certain that it was a love
story that ended sadly.

“Did you like it?” DJ asked after the last
notes faded.

“Yeah, I did. What language was it in?”

“Tagalog, from the Philippines. It’s ‘Magda,’
by Gloc-9.”

“What’s it about?”

“The way our lives can change, and how we
look back and can’t even figure out how it happened. The narrator
is this guy Ernesto, who was childhood friends with this girl,
Magda. They lost touch with each other, and he went looking for
her. Finally he found her in the big city, where she was stripping
in clubs. I think she might be a prostitute too, but I’m not
totally sure about that part.”

Apologetically, he added, “I’m fluent, more
or less, but my vocabulary’s not that great when it comes to words
my parents wouldn’t say in front of a kid.”

Echo laughed. As DJ started playing another
song by the same guy, tapping out the beat on the wall, she peered
over his shoulder at the song list.

She put her finger under the word ‘ng.’ “How
do you say that?”

DJ stopped tapping. He hit the song she’d
indicated, interrupting the one that was playing and starting a new
one.

After the first few notes played, he said,
“‘Alalay Ng Hari.’”

“I meant…” She still hadn’t caught the
pronunciation; the word had blended together with the others as
he’d said it. She found a different song with it and again
indicated it. “This word. By itself.”