Wolfen Domination (12 page)

            And if she was right, then there was only one
reason that she could think of that they’d brought her back.  They expected to
have use of her.

            Either they meant to use her to breed another
hybrid.

            Or they meant to try using her as bait to catch
another Lycan.

            Possibly both.

            Either way, they weren’t going to allow her to
escape.  They’d already tried that and failed to capture the Lycan they wanted. 
If that was the agenda, then they would try something that gave them more
control next time.

            Unwelcome, thoughts of Jesse crept into her mind.

            Guilt had swamped her for a long time after she’d
orchestrated his escape, because so many had been killed, but mostly because,
by releasing him, she’d been his executioner.  She wasn’t certain how she felt
about the fact that he’d survived.  Relief was part of it.  That she needn’t
shoulder the guilt of having a hand in his death, and the death of her child’s
father.

            Her feelings went beyond that, though.

            In the first months after she’d been imprisoned,
she’d had nothing but time and her thoughts.  As reluctant as she’d been to
relive that time, she hadn’t been able to help it and every time the memories
had replayed, she’d discovered some nuance in his expression and the things
he’d said and the way he’d behaved that she hadn’t noticed before.

            She’d convinced herself she cared for him and
mourned his loss.  She was no longer certain that it was anything else beyond a
need to convince herself that what she’d been through hadn’t been the clinical
nightmare she’d thought, though.  Maybe some, or even most, of it was true. 
Maybe not.

            It didn’t really seem to matter now one way or
the other.  If she had guessed right and he had had feelings for her beyond
lust, he hated her now and she doubted she could change that even if she wanted
to.

            That thought had no sooner crossed her mind than
she realized she did want to.  It didn’t really matter how she’d come to care
for him, it seemed, whether she’d fallen for him by way of fantasy, or because
of who and what he truly was.  The bottom line was that she did care--enough
that it hurt to think he hated her and the need filled her to try to make him
understand that none of the things that had happened were things she’d done or
even had any control over.

            It seemed unlikely she would get the chance.  The
agency wasn’t through with either one of them.  If they captured him again,
particularly if they used her to do so, he would hate her all the more and she
didn’t think it was likely that he would allow his desire for her to influence
him in her favor.

            She wasn’t even certain he desired her anymore
for that matter.  It seemed to her that he had been pretty damned good at
teasing her and remaining aloof.  In the end, he had given in--just long enough
to discover her secret--and he probably hated her even more for that.

            It was hopeless, she realized.  If there had ever
been a chance, there wasn’t one now.

            Worse, she didn’t know how he might feel about
Joshua.  If he’d been human, there was probably at least a 60/40 chance in her
favor that he wouldn’t give a damn about the baby one way or the other--certainly
not enough to challenge her for the child.  He wasn’t human, though.  He was Lycan,
and she had no idea how strong his parental instincts might be.  If they were
strong enough to goad him into going after his child, he would take Joshua and
she would never see her baby again because he hated her, because she was human
and she knew that as much as he despised humans in general and her in
particular it was very unlikely he’d allow her near his young.

            If the worst case scenario was that Jesse would
find Joshua and take him away from the agency, then she could rest easier with
that than to think the agency had their hands on her baby.

            What were the chances, though, that he could find
Joshua when she hadn’t been able to?  He hadn’t even been able to find her.  If
she’d understood what she’d heard correctly, he had had to rely on her
returning to the lab.

            God only knew where they’d taken Joshua, she
thought, swallowing against the knot of misery that formed in her throat.

            He could be in the same facility where she was,
but she didn’t think so.  She’d been transferred to the current facility after
his birth.  He was either still at the hospital where he’d been born or they’d
taken him to a different facility altogether to prevent any chance that she
could get near him.

            When she’d finished eating, she got up and set
the tray on the floor in front of the panel on the door.  They hadn’t given her
anything to eat with.  She’d used the utensils before to destroy the cameras
and tried to work the lock open.  Since then, she’d gotten nothing she couldn’t
eat with her hands.

            She searched the room for the cameras anyway,
squirting a good dollop of mustard on the lens of each--there were three, two
in plain sight and the last ‘hidden’.  She would’ve used the catsup except that
she liked catsup.  She wouldn’t be getting any more mustard.

            It was a lame rebellion, but the only thing she
could do at the moment.  For now, she had a little privacy at least.

            She moved back to the cot and settled on it,
trying to jog her memory of her outward trip the day she’d escaped.  Assuming
she was in the same facility, she had to be on one of the lower levels, which
meant underground.  The walls were poured concrete.  She wasn’t going to be
able to dig out.

            There was a dropped ceiling in the room, but she
knew the metal was only strong enough to support the tiles, which meant they
wouldn’t support her.  The vent in the ceiling was no better.  The opening was
so small she doubted anything bigger than a rabbit could climb through the duct
work.

            That left the door, and unfortunately,
electronics wasn’t her field.  She might be able to beat the panel off of the
lock, but she didn’t have a clue about changing the wiring to open the door. 
If she had time, she might manage it by trial and error, but she knew that if
she disabled their ability to see what she was doing, she wouldn’t have much
time before they came to check on her.

            A sense of frustration and urgency washed over
her.  She had to figure out some way to escape and find Joshua.

* * * *

            “Dis is an ant hill,
mon ami
.  How we
supposed to sneak in and grab the female?  I count ten guards around the
perimeter.  I guarantee we stir dis ant hill, gonna be a lot more pourin’ out
of the hill.”

            Jesse glanced at Tavian.  “Which is why I’ll need
help.  It’s gonna take a hell of a diversion to pull this off.”

            Tavian exchanged a look with Billy Ray. 
“Dynomite?  I doan mind rock’n roll, but there’s only three of us.  Gonna take
some big noise to create the distraction you talkin’ about,” Billy Ray
muttered.

            Jesse frowned but shook his head.  “I need to
have a look inside first.”

            Tavian and Billy Ray exchanged another speaking
glance.  “How you gonna have a look in the ant hill without sneakin’ in?  I
ain’t seen no way in or out but the front door,” Tavian put in.

            “There’s always a back way,
mes ami
,”
Jesse said, smiling grimly.  “No matter how secure, any place with people, ant
hill or not, gotta have air, gotta have power, gotta have water supply and
sewage.  I found the air shaft.  I’m goin’ in the back door, see if I can tie
in to their computer system and have a look see.  When we know what we can
expect inside, you two gonna convince the pack to help with the diversion.”

            Tavian looked troubled.  “I doan know, Jesse. 
The pack is pissed about these doin’s, but it’s gonna take some fast talkin’ to
convince them this is somethin’ we need to do.”

            “Then you’ll have to make them understand that I
ain’t the only one these bastards is after.  They got it in mind to use the Lycan
for some kind of war toy, make no mistake.  They stole my seed to breed
half-breeds.  They ain’t gonna stop there.  If this is where the research is
being done, it’s a threat to the whole pack--and not just this pack.  I ain’t
just talkin’ about retrievin’ what’s mine.  I’m talkin’ about protectin’ the
brethren from the humans.  This is ain’t just personal.  It’s all out war.”

            There was only one guard within sight of the
mouth of the air shaft.  Jesse studied him a while.  It wouldn’t take much to
take the guy out, but then they would know something was up and they’d beef up
security at the very least.  The place was already swarming with security.  He
didn’t want to make it any harder to crack the nut.

            It took patience and three nights of watching to
learn the pattern.  The guy was shy, though.  When he needed to take a piss, he
went off into the trees.  The fourth night, Jesse waited until he disappeared
and bounded across the short distance to get a closer look at the shaft.

            The cover, not surprisingly, was locked down, but
the lock was a simple pad lock.  Just inside was a powerful fan.  Below that,
rungs had been set into the concrete for maintenance of the second fan, which
looked to be about twenty feet down.  About twenty feet below that he heard the
whir of a third fan.

            A quiet entrance was going to be a bitch.

            It took fifteen hours to figure out how to
interrupt the fan sequence without alerting the breach to security.  When Jesse
returned to implement the plan, he discovered the guard he’d been watching had
been replaced.  Two days later, the guard returned and Jesse went down the
shaft.  As tricky as it was to interrupt the power supply and crawl through the
ventilation fans, it was worse on the return trip.  It had taken nearly thirty
minutes to install the remote device that he would need to hack in to the
facility’s computer system.  Afterwards, he could do nothing but wait for
several hours and hope the guard ran true to form.

            He ran out of luck when he at last climbed out of
the shaft again.  He was scarcely half way back to the cover of the trees when
the guard reappeared from the brush.  He had no time to consider what to do,
only time to react.

            Tamping the instinct to shift and confront the
threat, he raced for the tree line.  A shout went up behind him.  Cursing under
his breath, he realized as he reached the woods that he only had two choices:
He could risk getting caught in human form and hope, if he managed to elude
them, that they thought it was only some curious human.  Or he could shift and
allow them to know that a Lycan had been nearby.

            It wasn’t much of a choice.

            If he was caught, he was going to be too busy
trying to escape to do either Erin or the baby any good.  Shifting abruptly, he
outpaced the pursuit fairly quickly.  When he’d eluded them, he circled around
to the Hummer he’d left parked in the woods three miles away and returned to
his apartment in the city.

            If his objective had been to hack into the data,
it would very likely have taken him a matter of days to crack the security. 
Since his only interest was in getting into the surveillance system, it took
him only a little more than half a day.

            The layout of the facility and the guard stations
were fairly predictable.  It was obvious from observing the guards and the lab
technicians that security had been beefed up since his intrusion, but he saw
nothing to indicate that they’d realized he’d breached security and actually
entered the facility.

            It was as much as he could hope for.  It might be
months before they took security down a level.  At the very least, they would
be looking at weeks.  He wasn’t willing to wait that long.

            As hard as he’d tried to focus strictly on the
objective, he knew they were experimenting on the baby and possibly Erin, as
well.

            As soon as he’d mapped the layout, counted the
guards, located watch stations and the cell where they were holding Erin, and
studied Dr. Wagner’s movements over a three day period, he met with Tavian and
worked out the assault of the facility.

            It was strongly in their favor that the humans
thought of them only as sub human.  They would be expected to behave as
animals, not intelligent beings.

            When Tavian went to summon the pack that had
adopted him and nursed him back to health after he’d been wounded in his escape
the year before, he returned to his own pack to convince them to take part in
the operation.  In a general way, each pack was more inclined to see other
packs as their enemies and it was a rare thing for two packs to join forces. 
The experiments and threat to them all went a long way toward convincing the
majority.  The possibility of a sanctioned attack on the humans convinced the
remainder.

            Half the Lycans participating were to launch an
all out frontal attack.  Once they’d diverted the humans into retaliation and
pursuit, the remaining half would enter the facility through the air shaft.