Mate Claimed

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 br**sts, 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 br**sts, 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.”