Mate Claimed

“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

  “Tell 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.”

  Up, 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 reas
oned 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?”

  Neither looked like they were going to grab for her, so Iona melted the second computer monitor. Both were now nicely warped, useless hunks of plastic.

  “Open up that room and take her out of there,” Iona commanded.

  “How did you escape?” the man asked, still staring. “Where are your clothes?” His gaze swiveled to Iona’s breasts, his mouth dropping open. Some researcher he was.

  “Robbie,” the woman wailed.

  “Don’t worry,” Robbie said. “She’s not a Shifter. Call security.”

  Iona snarled. She morphed into her half-Shifter beast, swung the acetylene torch’s canister, and smacked Robbie on the side of the head with it. Robbie’s eyes rolled back, and he fell to the linoleum in a boneless heap.

  The woman screamed again and dove for the red fire alarm on the wall. Iona got there before she did, smacked the woman out of the way, and slammed her fist against the base of the woman’s skull. The woman slid silently downward, joining Robbie on the floor.

  Iona set down the torch and fumbled to open the door imprisoning Amanda, praying it wasn’t sealed by an electronic lock opened by the computers she’d just melted. But, no, the researchers were at least wise enough to have a door with an ordinary handle, which Iona nearly broke when she wrenched open the door.

  She rushed inside the little booth, which had scanners surrounding the tiny baby on the table. Amanda’s body was nearly covered with sticky nodes that attached multiple wires to her skin. She too was being fed an IV drip, the needle huge in the tiny arm into which it had been shoved.

  Amanda was crying fretfully, a child alone, scared, and unhappy. Iona peeled the disks from the baby’s skin and gently tugged the needle out of her arm. Amanda began to cry more strongly, and Iona swept her up.

  Iona was still her half beast, but Amanda quickly snuggled against her soft fur. Her little mouth sought Iona’s breasts, small in this between state, and Iona shook her head as she cuddled Amanda close.

  “Sorry, little one, I don’t have anything for you. But I’ll take you to your mommy, all right?”

  Amanda seemed to understand that things were looking up. She cried harder, but in irritation now, not in her too faint whimper of fear.

  Iona could move faster as a panther, but she had to worry about carrying Amanda. She needed to make it to Cassidy quickly though, in case these two woke up and sounded the alarm, or in case their unconscious bodies were found by more researchers.

  She glanced around for some kind of sash in which to sling Amanda. She found no handy towels or blankets—everything here was plastic or flimsy paper towels. She looked down at the woman in her clean suit and smiled in satisfaction.

  Iona tore the woman’s suit in half with her beast strength and pulled it away from her body. The woman wore shorts and a T-shirt beneath, the T-shirt with a glittering, sexy neckline, maybe to entice the breast-liking Robbie.

  “You can do better than him, sweetie,” Iona said, fashioning the pieces of the clean suit into a sling.

  She wound the sling around her body and used it to hold Amanda securely against her belly. Iona cradled Amanda as she made her way out of the room, but she stopped when she noticed a niche near a dark window that held a familiar-looking purse and cell phone.

  Iona snatched up her phone and began punching numbers. Then she made a noise of irritation when the phone gave a desultory beep. No service.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Iona glared at the phone. “I am so changing my service provider.”

  She dropped the phone into her purse and wedged the purse into the sling alongside Amanda. Iona checked the stairwell, heard nothing, and shifted back to her panther, Amanda hanging snugly beneath her.

  Iona hurried down the stairs on swift panther feet, changed to her beast to open the door on the floor where Cassidy waited, and ran on through without shifting again. She touched Amanda’s face, the half Shifter surprisingly gentle, but all was well. The little cub was still, her breathing deep and even.

  Iona quietly opened the door to the room where Cassidy lay, but the broken door handle clanked, the sound echoing in the deserted hall. Iona halted for a frozen moment, her heart pounding furiously, but she heard nothing, saw no one.

  She slipped inside and shut the door, changing back to human as she approached Cassidy on the bed. Cassidy’s hands were still strapped down with the metal cuffs, but Cass was wide awake.

  Cassidy gave a cry of joy to see Amanda, then started to cry because she couldn’t reach for her. Iona unwound the sling, set Amanda on Cassidy’s chest, and carefully retied the fabric around Cassidy, holding Amanda in place against Cassidy’s bare breasts.

  “There. Now she’ll be fine,” Iona said, trying to sound reassuring. “And that’s a clean suit, so she’s germ free.” She smiled, but Cassidy didn’t relax.

  “Iona, we have to get out of here. And then I’m going to kill everyone in this building.”

  “I already whacked a couple of them. It felt good. But I agree. We’ll go.”

  Iona checked Cassidy’s cuffs again, metal and tight, bolted down, no latch to break. Even Iona’s Shifter beast wasn’t strong enough to break them. A couple of Shifters together might, but Cassidy couldn’t help.

  However, there was a Shifter in this building who might be strong enough. Iona looked at Amanda, who’d happily found sustenance at her mother’s breast. Amanda and Cassidy would be sitting ducks for someone like the tiger Shifter in the basement.

  On the other hand, there were no other Shifters in sight, and Iona had no way of knowing how long it would be before Eric would find them, or if he even could. She had to use the resources she had on hand.

  Right now her resources consisted of one of the st
rongest females in Shiftertown secured to a bed, a half-crazed Shifter with no name in the basement, a building full of old equipment, and a baby.

  If Iona could handle the tiger until she freed Cassidy, then Cassidy would be able to help them all get out of there. Including the tiger. Iona had made a promise to him, and she’d keep it.

  “Cass, I’ll be right back,” she said.

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Find a way to get you out of here. Don’t go running off now, all right?”

  Again, Cassidy didn’t smile. She’d relaxed from her insane worry about Amanda, but her attention was now entirely on her baby.

  Iona kissed Cassidy’s forehead, touched Amanda’s cheek, changed to her half-Shifter beast, and left the room again.

  Eric sensed something moving in the dark desert with him. Diego had driven him up the 95 toward Indian Springs, where they’d stopped at a roadside bar. Diego had headed on to the 375 to Area 51’s front gate, while Eric had walked quietly around the building, holding his breath against the noisome garbage in the back, and faded into the night.

  He’d stripped when he was well away from the bar, hiding his clothes in a plastic bag under some rocks. He’d fastened the pack that contained everything he needed tightly around his torso, shifted to his wildcat under the moonlight and clear sky, then loped off east and north.

  Now someone else moved in the dark with him, and that someone wasn’t human. Eric sniffed the wind, then stopped to wait for the large black wolf to trot down from the shadow of the nearest ridge.

  Eric said in body language, What the fuck are you doing?

  The wolf answered in his own body language with plenty of expletives, basically conveying the message, You need me, asshole.

  Eric didn’t have time to shift and swear at him, so he growled again, moved off into the darkness, and let Graham follow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The tiger Shifter who called himself Twenty-three was surprised when Iona returned. She could tell the surprise only through his scent, however, because he glared in fury through the bars and didn’t change expression when he saw her.