Mate Bond

“Leave your friends and exit the lab through the door at the end. It will be unlocked for you. I want you alone, or they both perish.”

Bowman said nothing, only ended the call and dropped the phone into his pocket.

Graham, Pierce, and Reid had good enough hearing that Bowman didn’t have to repeat the caller’s words. The three followed him to the indicated door, which was another stainless steel one, but this one’s padlock hung open on its hasp.

Bowman gave the others a quiet look, and they nodded. Drawing a breath, Bowman removed the lock, squared his shoulders, and reached for the door handle.

“Take this,” Reid said, handing him the iron rebar he’d brought as a weapon. “Plain iron is best against Fae spells.”

“It’s good for whacking people too,” Graham said. “Good luck, O’Donnell.”

“It’s not me who will be needing it,” Bowman said, then he opened the metal door and walked inside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The first thing Bowman knew was icy chill. That and the door clanging closed behind him, an electronic lock clicking into place.

He had entered not a room but a narrow hallway about twenty feet long. To his right was what looked like a radio control booth, the top half of its wall clear glass that reached to the ceiling. No door led from it to the hall Bowman stood in, though a closed door was on the booth’s back wall.

Two smaller booths lay side by side at the far end of the hall, or else it was one booth divided by a partition. Each had a door, their top halves glass.

Turner sat in the booth on Bowman’s right at a control board. Several cameras were fixed to the walls in the hallway, and Bowman saw himself on monitors inside Turner’s booth.

Behind one door in the booth at the end was Kenzie. Behind the other was Ryan.

Bowman rushed to them with Shifter speed, raising the rebar to pound through the glass. Kenzie, bound to a chair with chains, lifted her hands, wrists in cuffs. She said something he couldn’t hear, the booth soundproof, but her gesture was apparent enough.

Stop.

Bowman halted, the bar uplifted, and peered inside at her then at Ryan. Ryan was likewise bound to a chair. They both looked whole and unhurt, if grimy. In each booth, a shotgun had been positioned on a stand, the barrels pointed directly at each of them.

Even through the glass, even over Kenzie’s and Ryan’s fear and anger, Bowman could smell the weapons, gunpowder and metal packed into lethal barrels.

Bowman heard a click and then Turner’s voice. “I study Shifters, you know. Everything they do intrigues me.”

Bowman swung around and made for Turner’s booth. “I don’t care, asshole.” He slammed the iron rebar into the glass.

The bar bounced off, jarring Bowman’s arm. The glass didn’t even scratch.

“I am quite safe,” Turner said. He looked fresh and clean, as though he’d showered, while Kenzie and Ryan were filthy. “I am very interested in the decision-making processes of the alpha males. It is of great importance to understanding Shifters and how to deal with them. I have watched you try to defend your friends single-handedly; I’ve watched you delegate responsibility when you were hurt. I also watched you drag yourself up and attempt to save those in your care when you could barely walk. You use strength but also great cunning. Yes, I have observed you very carefully.”

Bowman glared through the glass. “What does that prove except that you’re the sick, twisted bastard I already knew you were?”

Turner continued as though Bowman hadn’t spoken. He was dictating, Bowman realized, into a microphone.

“The familial bonds interest me most. The alpha Shifter must not only lead his pack but take a mate and continue his authority through his male offspring. Which is the more important to him? This experiment will study which he has the strongest instinct to protect. My hypothesis is that the alpha male will always choose the heir, in his need to keep his gene pool intact and continuing. A mate, who does not share his genetic material, on the other hand, will prove to be expendable, once she has born a living male cub.”

Bowman slammed the rebar into the glass in front of Turner’s face again. Futile, but he needed to lash out, to pound at something until he could think.

“I have devised the experiment thusly,” Turner went on, unworried. “The alpha male is placed into a situation in which he must make a choice. I have divided the far chamber into two rooms with a temporary wall. In one sits the mate. In the other, the offspring—the cub.”

Bowman swung back to the two doors. Kenzie’s look was pleading. Don’t.

Turner was still speaking. “If the male opens one door in an attempt to free whoever is behind it, that door will activate a solenoid that completes a circuit to fire off the shotgun in the other chamber, destroying the Shifter confined there. The alpha male thus can make only one choice—saving his mate will kill his offspring; saving his offspring will kill his mate. Which will he choose?”

* * *

Kenzie watched Bowman’s expression dissolve into fury and horror. She could hear Turner fine, because he’d made sure the speakers came into her booth and Ryan’s. She could hear and see Ryan as well, because the partition between them was only a piece of hard plastic with holes in it.

Ryan was terrified, she knew. He didn’t want to die. But equally, he didn’t want to watch his mother be killed either.

“No choice is also a choice,” Turner’s loathsome voice droned on. “If the alpha male chooses neither, then I will fire off the guns myself, one after the other. Which will I choose to kill first?”