Chapter Seventeen

 

 

I CAME to in stages. First was smell. Antiseptic and rubbing alcohol. Then sound. Voices murmuring several feet away. Then feel. Smooth cold, like stainless steel, beneath me. Cool air from an air-conditioning vent blowing down on me. Then taste. A hint of copper on my tongue. Familiar and nauseating. Blood. Sight came last. Blinding white light, with subtly shifting shadows along the edge of my vision.

I tried to move, to look away from the light, but my head wouldn’t budge. And neither would my arms or legs. This was different than the paralysis I’d experienced the night of my first shift. This wasn’t my body trying to process something new and enormous. This was a stillness forced upon me from something outside.

I wiggled, trying to get a feel for what held me down. An inhuman huff escaped at the movement, and flashes of memory trickled through my brain, taking precedence over my worries about restraints.

The pop of the rifle.

Owen slumping to the ground.

Rage.

Shifting.

Blood.

Oh God. The blood.

Owen.

I yowled, my reactions more in tune with the primal side of me than the human. The lion in me didn’t differentiate between the many gradations of pain, grief, regret, anger, frustration, guilt. It just knew hurt and the need to make it stop.

Owen had been shot, and I was stuck in shifted form, strapped down somewhere.

I cried out in anger. In mourning.

I struggled against the bonds holding me down. I was three hundred pounds of Asiatic lion. No way did they have anything that could hold me. I twisted, ignoring the straps digging into my chest, pulling at my mane. I flexed my paws, unsheathing my claws, trying to find something to tear, to slash. I jerked my legs, trying to pull them free from what held them. I barely noticed the sting of pain as the metal edge of one of the restraints dug in through the fur to cut into the skin, adding the odor of my own blood into the antiseptic-alcohol mix.

“Yusuf, relax. You need to calm down.”

The midnight-smoke voice broke through the fog of rage and panic. Just a little at first, like a sunbeam peeking through storm clouds.

“Yusuf.” There was a hitch in the voice. I didn’t like it when that person, that voice, was scared. And I didn’t know if he was scared because of the situation or because of me. So I had to make sure he wasn’t afraid of me. And then we could deal with the situation.

I had to concentrate. To calm down. To relax.

I stopped thrashing. I tried to force my breathing into a less frantic rhythm. I blinked a couple of times, which helped, even though it didn’t make it any easier to see. It did give me a minute to understand that my inability to see was due to a high-wattage light shining into my face rather than some kind of rage-induced blindness. Eventually my heartbeat slowed and the fog cleared from my mind.

Throughout it all, Owen kept murmuring nonsensical words meant to quiet the beast in me.

Owen, who wasn’t dead and was conscious and helping me, even though he wouldn’t be caught up in this mess if it hadn’t been for me.

I whined at him. I wanted to ask questions, like was he okay? What happened? Where was Dr. Mirza? But without human vocal chords, speaking was out of the question.

“You doing better?” he asked.

I chuffed, hoping he understood it as an affirmative. I whined again, trying to make the pitch go a little higher at the tail end of it. Are you okay?

“I’m all right.”

I sniffed the air and could tell Dr. Mirza and his team had spent a lot of time in this room but weren’t here at the moment. The voices I’d heard when I first woke up were distant, muffled by at least one layer of wall. Owen and I were alone now, but for how long? And even left to our own devices would only get us so far, given I didn’t even know where we were or what the conditions were like.

I’d been through enough tests and procedures to say with some confidence I was in a surgery room or some other similarly decked-out chamber. The way Owen’s voice had echoed told me the floor and walls were likely tile—nothing bounced sound around like tile and glass.

I did the questioning-whine thing again, hoping Owen would take the hint. I was strapped down and blinded by a bright light. Hopefully he was in a better position. He could talk, so he hadn’t changed into his owl form. Not like when I changed—

Nope. Not going to think about that. Not yet. I didn’t have time to deal with the blood on my hands—or claws, as was more correct.

Owen. I needed to focus on Owen. Who was awake and talking. And who could maybe see more than this damned bright light.

I growled. It was getting hard to maintain any semblance of control while annoyed in this form. Part of me wondered if submitting to the feral side wouldn’t be easier. I writhed against the restraints, instinctively testing their strength, looking for weakness.

“I’ve got an idea,” Owen said hesitantly. “A way you can get free from the straps there. But it doesn’t get us much closer to getting away.”

I grunted, jerking my head up and down, trying to tell him to get on with it. If I could get away from the straps, I could see. And speak. And maybe actually do something.

“The straps holding you down, even the ones at your paws, are meant to hold you in your lion form, right? Your human form is smaller than your lion form in all aspects. If you shift to human, you’ll be able to just slide out of the straps.”

Yes! It made so much sense I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought about it before. If I shifted, I could at least get more information and have a chance to plan an escape attempt. The lion might be bigger and stronger—I had to push away the Technicolor reminders of exactly what the lion was capable of—but human would be better suited to protect Owen. If I had better control of my shift, maybe I’d be able to shift back to lion if the situation called for it, but control was not something I could count on yet.

I sucked in a breath as deep as the strap across my chest would allow, closed my eyes, and willed myself to change. Nothing happened. I tried again. Change, damn it.

“Yusuf, relax. Remember who you are. What you look like. Your long fingers. Your height. Your belly button.”

Belly button. Belly buttons and Owen’s hugs. Those things that make me feel human.

The wave of energy overtook me. I had to fight to the surface and struggle to come through the other side. Muscles seized, lungs burned, and I pushed through. Finally, when I feared it wasn’t going to work, or that I was going to tear myself apart from the inside out, I broke through, gasping for air. I jerked up, naked and shaking, drenched in sweat, tangled in industrial-strength straps—like those used to tow cars—and wires.

I knocked away the broad surgical lamp blazing at me from a nearby stand. I blinked to clear my vision, and then I immediately sought Owen.

Owen’s torso had been secured to a straight-backed chair using more of those tow-strap things, and his arms and legs were bound with rope. His hair was a bit more tousled than normal and his face was pale, but other than that he looked okay.

I slid out of the too-loose restraints and tried to run to him, but my muscles still shook, so it was more of a stumbling lurch. “Why didn’t you shift too? Like, the opposite of what I did? Owls are smaller. You could have gotten loose.” I found the rope wound around his wrists and felt for the knot.

Owen hissed, jolting away from me, skin turning a sickly sort of yellow. “In the struggle I ended up with a dislocated shoulder,” he managed to say. “Can’t shift with a dislocated shoulder. Wing would be all messed up.”

I threw up my hands, falling on my ass next to the chair.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” He’d been hurt because of me. Because he’d come with me to a stupid doctor’s appointment I hadn’t even wanted to go to.

I leaned forward and got back to releasing him. This time I was much more careful about how I jostled his arm, which slowed me down. His left shoulder hung a little lower than his right, and knowing why it did had me fighting a desire to vomit. His bones weren’t where they were supposed to be. I shuddered. It had to hurt, but Owen sat there, stoic.

I freed his arms and bent lower to get at his ankles.

The door to the surgery opened. “That’s far enough. Can’t have you getting too far ahead of yourselves.”

I snarled under my breath. I hadn’t paid enough attention to what was going on around us. I’d missed the distant rumble of voices going quiet. My only thought had been to get to Owen and come up with some kind of escape plan.

I was definitely not hero material.

Dr. Mirza stood in the doorway, the two goons who’d grabbed Owen behind him.

I swung around to crouch in front of Owen. It was small protection, but it was all I had at the moment. “David’s sending help.” Owen’s voice was so low I was the only one in the room who had a chance of hearing it. Score a point for shifter senses. It was something, at least. “Just need to stall.”

How? Why? I kept my eyes trained on the bad guys. I couldn’t ask for more information. Subvocal commentary from Owen was one thing. Seeing me demand answers was something Dr. Mirza definitely wouldn’t miss.

“Where’s Nora?” I asked. I needed a distraction, and that worked as well as any.

“Taking care of Paul. Someone had to arrange for the disposal of the body.”

My stomach lurched.

The pop of the rifle.

Owen slumping to the ground.

Rage.

Shifting.

Blood.

“Focus,” Owen muttered behind me.

I don’t know how he knew what I needed, but his voice, his presence, made all the difference.

“I don’t understand what you want. Why are you going to all this trouble?”

Dr. Mirza shook his head. “Money, of course. Why else? I suppose there are other considerations, such as prestige and glory, but really, there’s a lot of money to be had if someone such as myself can find a way to militarize shifters and their strengths.”

“It’s never a good sign when the bad guys explain their plan. It means they don’t expect you to get out of it alive.” This time Owen spoke loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Oh, I don’t want you dead.” Dr. Mirza’s chuckle was, not to sound melodramatic, evil. “I can’t study you as effectively if you are dead.”

“Why were you studying me? I didn’t even know I was a shifter.”

“Half shifters are rare. Most of your kind don’t breed outside of their species. We needed to track the evolution, so to speak. You were one of the variables we needed to watch. We needed to map your genetic traits as a half shifter whose ability to transform is repressed, to those of a half shifter who shifts regularly, to those of a full shifter.”

“But… how did you find me? How did you know what I was?”

“I knew your parents.”

Everything inside me froze. “My parents?” They couldn’t have been involved. It would be one thing to have been adopted and not know it. But for them to actively participate in this kind of repulsive testing, while at the same time acting like they loved me? I shook my head, denying the possibility, even as my heart was being torn in two.

“Oh, not the Frankes.” Dr. Mirza waved his hand in dismissal. “No, they don’t know anything about this, do they? But then, they aren’t your real parents.”

“Not my parents?”

“Focus,” Owen urged from behind me.

“It had taken us years to find a suitable shifter-human couple. Years. And then you were born and somehow your parents—your biological parents, for clarity—managed to send you out of the country with the Frankes. We thought you were lost to us, until you were five years old and started showing symptoms of a repressed shifter gene. I took one look at you and knew. I didn’t even have to see the results of the first blood test to know for certain. You look just like your father.”

I couldn’t breathe. Something heavy and tight, like the straps that had secured me to the exam table I’d woken upon, squeezed my chest. Green edged along my vision, and my gums throbbed. I wanted to lash out, to hurt him as he was hurting me. Not just the years of futile testing or the painful procedures. I wanted to pay him back for the heartache I faced now. My parents weren’t my parents. They’d lied to me. But they’ve loved me, another voice whispered.

“Focus.”

The green receded at Owen’s voice. A little.

“If you’ve know where I was for the last fifteen years, known who I was, why didn’t you do anything earlier?”

“It was the best possible scenario. We could keep you separated from other shifters, to keep proximity from triggering the change. Your parents trusted me, so I could do any number of tests on you to track the impact. And best of all, they paid for it.”

“You are such a bastard. You took advantage of them.”

He shrugged. “I had an assignment to complete. Do we really need to have the ‘ends justifies the means’ conversation?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “One of these days I’m going to take great pleasure in—” I didn’t finish the statement. The two goons, who’d stayed silent throughout the whole exchange, each took a step closer. Both held handguns of some description. They didn’t look like dart guns; they weren’t going to take any chances.

I couldn’t shift and tear his face off, no matter how much I wanted to.

No, I needed to stall.

“Now that I’ve shifted, doesn’t that mess up your tests?”

Dr. Mirza’s smile widened, and dread slithered down my back like winter slush. “Not at all. In fact, this is perfect. We can now have what is, essentially, a before and after. If we can isolate the difference in your DNA from before to now, it might be the key to finding a way to create new shifters. Imagine having a soldier with your strength and speed? Or the ability to fly undetected over enemy lines? No, Joey, this couldn’t be more perfect.”

Stall.

“Shifters aren’t indestructible, you know. If you’ve done testing, I’m sure you’ve figured out we don’t have any special healing ability or superpowers. Sure, most of us can see a little better, but mostly we just eat more and turn furry every once in a while.” Owen teetered on the edge of mocking and serious. A hair in the wrong direction, and he’d become a target. Again.

“But that’s the best part.” Dr. Mirza’s enthusiasm landed somewhere between head cheerleader at homecoming and a sci-fi geek at DragonCon. “Your metabolism! What if the fast metabolism can be harnessed and turned toward healing? The potential is already there. If it can be targeted to specific functions, militarized shifters would be immensely valuable.”

“So what was your plan for me?” I wanted to distract Dr. Mirza and his goons from Owen. He was doing something behind me with his freed hands. From my position in front of him, I couldn’t tell exactly what. They hadn’t noticed his unbound hands yet, and we needed every advantage if we were going to get out of this.

My life as an invalid hadn’t prepared me for facing off with some kind of Bond villain.

“You’re just going to steal me away to some secret research facility to poke and prod me for the next several decades?”

Dr. Mirza’s mouth twisted. “Basically.”

“You’re not going to get away with it.” Which is what every victim of every action movie ever said. “There are people who know where we are and will be looking for us.”

Owen grunted softly. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder. Owen was slumped in the chair. I didn’t have time to discover more, because Dr. Mirza caught my look and was turning his attention on Owen. I took a step forward, drawing his gaze back to me. The goons kept their eyes—and their guns—trained on me.

“You mean your parents. I’ve got a plan for them. They’ll never know you’re gone.”

I stopped worrying about whatever Owen was doing.

“Excuse me?”

Satisfaction rolled off him in palpable waves. It even had a scent, something cloying like overripe fruit. “A car accident, maybe. Chicago traffic can be dangerous, you know.”

An ache built in my jaw, and once again the world around me was colored by a green haze. I stalked forward, ignoring the increased tension coming from the goons.

“Yusuf, focus.” Quiet as Owen’s voice was, I could hear the strain in it. I was able to regain a small measure of control. Enough that the green partially receded.

Then Dr. Mirza had to go and ruin it by saying, “Of course, a home invasion might be better. Give a good excuse for someone to destroy any physical files or records linking me to the Frankes.”

“No.” The word came out in a bass rumble that sounded inhuman even to my own ears. It was a command, plain and simple. Nonnegotiable. One I was willing to ensure no matter the risks.

I took another step forward. My control hung by a very thin thread. There was something to be said for simplicity. The lion running on instinct was a simple creature. Simple was easy. The lion saw a threat, eliminated the threat. The human psyche complicated matters with guilt and regret, with morals and conscience. My fingertips tingled, the muscles along my back throbbed.

Owen grunted again, then sucked in a breath.

One of the goons jerked his head to try to see past me.

“I should have taken care of them long before now, but the money was useful to our cause.”

I snarled.

“Uh, Dr. Mirza?” one of the goons said.

“He won’t hurt me. Will you, Joey? If you take another step forward, I will have them shoot the boy.” He jutted his chin to the area over my shoulder.

“What if he does what he did to Paul?” the other goon asked.

Their fear was sour-sharp in the small room. I loved it. The lion was in the driver’s seat now, and it wanted them to be afraid of us, of me. Their fear soothed and tempted at the same time.

I bared my teeth and hissed.

Dr. Mirza’s fear scent blended with the other two. I grinned with feral satisfaction.

“Joey,” he warned, “If you take another step closer, I will have them shoot your friend. Is that what you want?”

A new odor filled the room. Snow and pine and midnight. Owen. Deeper and richer than normal. A subtle shift of energy swept past my feet, crawling along the floor.

I took another step closer.

Dr. Mirza stumbled back. “Shoo—”

I pounced, wrapping my fingers around his throat like I had Paul’s.

A gun fired.

With a screech, a grayish feathered form swooped past my head.

Another shot rang out.

An icy line of fire cut across my biceps.

I ignored the pain, tightening my grip, squeezing past the loose flesh of his neck.

He was weak. He was prey.

The goons hollered as a huge great horned owl dove toward them, talons outstretched. They ducked, covering their heads. The owl continued to harry them as much as he could in the small space.

Dr. Mirza’s eyes bulged in his rapidly reddening face.

I dug my nails in deeper.

The lab doors burst open in a wave of complex scents, and half a dozen men in black tactical gear and black caps swarmed the room.

I roared. I would attack anyone who threatened my parents, Owen, or me. If these guys were part of Dr. Mirza’s psychotic group, I needed to show them I wasn’t intimidated by their gear or their guns.

The owl whistled, the sound breaking my concentration enough for me to notice something besides the apparent threat. The room was awash in the smell of fur and feathers, of tropical rain, desert breezes, and pine forests. The owl—Owen—settled on the back of the chair where he’d been held.

The men in black uniforms had the two goons hauled up and in handcuffs within seconds.

The tallest among them stepped toward me and Dr. Mirza. I snarled. He was going to take the doctor away. I couldn’t let the man who’d tormented me almost my entire life, the man who threatened my parents, who threatened Owen, live. The only way to stop the threat was to eliminate the source.

Dr. Mirza gurgled, his hands clawing at my arm. His knees buckled, but I held him firm by the neck. With the lion’s enhanced vision, I could see the blood vessels popping in his eyes, the deepening purple suffusing his skin.

The owl—Owen, I had to remind myself—flapped his nearly five feet of wings, alighting from the chair. It was an awkward movement given the enclosed space, but he managed to land on my shoulder. Tucking his wings down, he hooted softly, scraping the side of his beak along my cheek. Even with his talons biting into my naked skin, his touch comforted me and allowed me to regain a measure of control.

Throwing Dr. Mirza away from me was the hardest thing I’d ever done. But I did it.

Head lowered, I pressed my clenched fists against my thighs as I watched two of the men rush to secure the man who’d made my life miserable. I inhaled, sucking air deep into my lungs, then held it for a moment before letting it out.

Every nerve and instinct I possessed told me to destroy Dr. Mirza before he could do any more harm. Tendons strained, muscles tightened.

Owen cooed at me. The sound landed somewhere between a hoot and growl, and it centered me.

Focus. I needed to focus.

I swallowed, licking my lips. When I’d gathered enough control that I didn’t think I’d snap at our rescuers, I said, “I need to call my parents. They’re in danger.”

The tall man at the front of the remaining team members pulled off the black cap. He’d been giving orders to others, something about securing the rest of the building, but at my words he focused the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen on me. “I’ll send someone to pick them up.”

Whether it was the adrenaline crash or a residual effect of the tranquilizer Dr. Mirza had used, my knees buckled. I landed hard on the floor. Owen hopped down next to me. “Hey, you.” It was the first good look I’d gotten at the owl that was my friend. He stood about two feet tall, with his wings tucked in. He feathers were a mottled mix of gray and brown and white. The eyes, those amazing amber eyes, were 100 percent Owen. I trailed my fingers over the tufts of feathers that made up the great horned owl’s “horns.” “You kind of look like Thor,” I said before I could think better of it. “You know, when he’s wearing his helmet.”

Owen cocked his head at me, grumbled a bit, then shifted into his human form.

He settled in at my side, both of us sitting on the cold tile floor. I pulled him close so I could bury my face in his neck, letting the familiar scent of him calm my nerves. “I was so scared.”

He hissed, and I jerked back. “Shit. Your shoulder! How’d you shift? You said you couldn’t—” I let my gaze examine every centimeter of flesh from collarbone to elbow. Except for a little swelling, he seemed mostly intact.

“I don’t recommend trying to relocate a dislocated shoulder without medical supervision and probably drugs.”

“You can do that?” I reached out to touch him but was too afraid of hurting him to follow through.

“We have a medic on the team,” the rescue leader said. “We’ll have him take a look at it. He’ll take care of your arm too.”

“My arm?” I looked down at my biceps and winced. There was a bleeding tear in the upper swell of my arm, right below the shoulder. Only once I acknowledged the wound did the tearing pain show up in its freezing/burning glory. Blood trickled past my elbow and dripped from my fingertips.

Another black-clad person—this one a female I instinctively knew shifted into some kind of feline—entered the room with two sets of medical scrubs. She passed one set each to Owen and me. She turned to the blue-eyed man to brief him on… something. She kept her voice low, and I needed information from Owen more than I needed to eavesdrop on their conversation. Besides, I didn’t know who they were.

I leaned closer to Owen. “Who are these guys?”

“Shifter Council enforcers,” Owen answered before the blue-eyed leader could.

“What are they doing here?” I asked him.

“David.”

I blinked. “David?”

“When he called, he said he’d uncovered a tie between the family of Asiatic lion shifters in Iran and your doctor in Chicago. That’s why he called. He wanted to warn us. He heard when the dudes in suits showed up. As I was being dragged away, he said something about contacting the enforcers.” Owen explained all this while he tried to wriggle into the scrub pants using one hand.

I still held the blue fabric loose in my hand as I tried to process what he said. When I didn’t say anything, he continued, “Well, his mom is on the Western regional council, so she’s got contacts with all the different regional councils. The Great Lakes regional council is headquartered in Chicago.”

“Right.” I nodded. The explanation made sense, but I clearly had a lot to learn about shifter politics.

“Okay,” the blue-eyed council enforcer said, turning back to us. “Let’s get you checked out. We need to know what’s been going on.”

“My parents,” I reminded him.

“Yes, I haven’t forgotten. Two of my men will pick them up as soon as we have your address. We need to find out what they know about this whole mess.”