Jennifer Ashley - Mate Claimed

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.

An 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.”

Kellerman 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.”

“Tough break,” Eric said. He understood why Kellerman used the compound in the desert for the blood taking—it was closer to Shiftertown, and he’d never have gotten permission to haul twenty cages of Shifters into Area 51. He’d have his researchers take all the samples there then transport them to this facility later.

“How did you get that other compound built?” Eric asked. “Without anyone being the wiser? No one noticed?”

“I didn’t have to build it. It was already there. Researching the effect of radiation from the nuclear testing sites, or something like that. Another project that got defunded, and the buildings left there for me to find in another file. Temporary buildings just means they get left until someone remembers to take them down. I appropriated the place for my purpose.”

“But you didn’t get enough?” Eric asked, letting his voice go deceptively soft. “So you thought taking my sister and her newborn was a good idea?”

“Again, I’m surrounded by idiots,” Kellerman snapped. “I have a nurse on staff at that clinic who supplies me with samples from time to time. She called my researchers. They decided they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to study a Shifter baby, especially one that was half-human. So she drugged them and had them sent here. And once more, they took too long. They should have had them back to you by now. Scientists are like children with ADD. They get fixed into their experiments and forget what time it is. They wouldn’t change their socks if no one was there to tell them.”

As he finished, Eric took the magazine out of Kellerman’s gun and crushed it in his strong, half-shifted hand. Bullets rained harmlessly to the floor, most of them bent. Eric then twisted the pistol in two in front of Kellerman’s face.