Dark Wrath (8 page)

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 don’t 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 are 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.

* * * *

Three times a
week a guard came and took Erin to an exercise room where she was allowed an
hour to expend excess energy and work to keep in shape.  Without a clock
or a window in her cell to help her to guesstimate the passage of time, it was
hard to keep up with how many days she’d been imprisoned or when to expect the
events that made up her daily routine.  And yet, Erin sensed that
something was off the moment she heard the mechanical click of the lock to her
cell.

She tensed,
studying the guard suspiciously as he stepped inside her cell, but she could
see nothing outward that seemed to indicate they had anything in mind for
her.  It wasn’t until she’d obeyed his demand to come with him and stepped
outside the cell that she discovered she’d been right to begin with--something
was in the wind and it wasn’t going to be something she would like.

A lab tech stood
just outside the door.  As she stepped through the doorway, he grabbed her
wrist and stabbed a syringe into her arm.  By the time her brain had
caught up with the surprise attack, the drug was already circulating through
her system and the world seemed to shift around her.  Pocketing the
syringe, he gripped her upper arm.

“What’s that
for?” Erin demanded, but the words came out slurred.

“Just a little
something to keep you calm.”

Alarm bells rang
out.  If they were concerned about her being calm, she was definitely in
trouble.  She tried to struggle, but she found she was already too
uncoordinated and woozy to even give them much of a challenge.

Supporting her
between them, the two men escorted her to the elevator and took her up one
level.  Despite the drug, Erin felt her alarm escalate.  The holding
cell where she was imprisoned was in the lowest level of the facility. 
She hadn’t been above that level since she’d arrived.

Had they caught
another Lycan?  Caught Jesse?  Was she to be used to extract more
specimens?

She supposed she
should have been at least a little relieved when she saw this was not the
case.  She wasn’t.  Although the room they took her to didn’t appear
the least bit extraordinary, she knew them well enough by now to know better
than to think it was a simple examination room or that they had nothing more
diabolical in mind than a physical to determine her health.

That suspicion
was borne up by the fact that the guards immediately dragged her to the
examination table in the center of the room.  Lifting her off her feet,
they placed her on the cold hard surface and held her down despite her attempts
to pull free while a medical assistant wearing a putrid green lab coat
proceeded to strap first her arms and then her ankles.

“What’re you
doing?  What’s happening?”

Neither the
guards nor the lab assistant answered her.  The door opened at just that
moment, however, and she turned to see who’d come in.

Dr. Wagner curled
his lips in a smile she supposed was to reassure her, though there was no
warmth in it.  His eyes looked as cold and reptilian as gator eyes.

It was the first
time she’d seen him since she’d been recaptured and she felt ill with the hate
that welled inside her, sick with the power of her desire to tear him limb from
limb.

“Bastard!” she
snarled at him, balling her hands into fists and straining against the straps
as he made his way to the foot of the examination table and looked her and the
situation over.

Dismissing the
guards with a jerk of his head, he focused his attention on his lab
assistant.  “No. No. No. We need her feet in the stirrups for the
procedure, Johnson,” he said, stepping back to watch the technician critically
as the man did as told and glancing at the guards by the door disapprovingly
several times.

Obviously, he
didn’t appreciate having the guards inside his lab and just as evidently he
knew it was useless to demand that they leave the room.

“Where’s my
baby?  Where’s Joshua?” Erin demanded, her voice a shrill scream now with
fury that Wagner behaved as if she was a piece of the furniture.

He sent her a
look of surprise and finally frowned thoughtfully.  “Joshua.  Hmmm,
that has a nice ring to it.  I’ll pass it along.  They can put it in
his records.  I can’t guarantee they’ll use it, of course.  I’m
fairly certain, considering what they have in mind for HL001, that they’ll
probably prefer just to use the clinical designation, but they may not want to
completely dehumanize him.”

A mixture of
horror and relief collided inside Erin at his calm announcement--relief to at
least discover that he was alive--horror to realize what they had in mind for
him, for despite the wild thoughts that had plagued her since they’d taken him
from her, she hadn’t truly accepted that they could, and would, behave with
such a complete disregard for human life.

“Jesse will kill
you,” she managed to say, though she couldn’t deliver it with the fury she felt
roiling inside of her.

His brows rose
and then came together in a frown.  She saw he was trying to place the
name and her heart sank.  “Jesse?  The Lycan we had before?”

He was
astonished, she realized.  He must have thought that Jesse was dead--and
she’d just given away the fact that Jesse wasn’t.  She wasn’t in any
condition at the moment to consider the consequences of her revelation, though,
and in any case, Wagner stunned her by snickering like a juvenile caught in the
act of some malicious prank.  “This could be awkward.”

“What are you
talking about?” Erin demanded, struggling to lift her head to see what he was
doing as he moved to the supply cabinets at the end of the room at her feet and
began searching for something.

She saw when he
turned at last that he was holding a strange looking syringe.  He tapped
it with one finger, smiling now with a good deal of pride and excitement. 
“I’ve a half dozen little Jesses right here.”

Erin stared at
the syringe blankly as he set it on a sterile tray and dropped the end of the
table where she lay.  Fipping her gown back to her waist, it took no more
than a few seconds for the answer she was seeking to present itself.  “Clones?”
she demanded in disbelief as he pulled a rolling stool up and settled on it,
his face framed by her spread thighs.

“We hope to get
three or four out of the batch,” he responded absently.  “The hybrid might
work better for us, but we need some pure breeds before we’ll know that, don’t
we?”