THE COUGAR'S BABY - 21

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E - - - - S H A U N

Everything felt clearer as a jaguar. From the first step and the first breath, his senses came alive and the world seemed to suddenly make sense. All the pieces fell into place and Shaun felt unstoppable.

Perhaps it was the woman he was with, her step as lithe and strong as his, though her body was smaller and her markings were clearer, but he’d never felt quite so focused. There was something pounding in his chest now that had not been there before. A purpose. A drive. A goal other than to survive. It felt fucking fantastic.

The large predator ran across the field separating him from the warehouse, sure in his knowledge that Dani would be right behind him. He’d recognized those blond-haired blue-eyed motherfuckers that he and Dani had taken down, and now he was more convinced than before that something fucking horrid must have been happening to Carter and he had every intention of making sure he’d grab the kid if he could.

The Arctics didn’t fuck around and he’d seen those bastards enough times over the last few years to recognize evil when he saw it. They were all like Ace’s fucking long lost cousins with their wily, dead eyes and their iron resolve to do whatever they could to fuck up as many lives as they could.

Screw the rules. He wouldn’t let Daniella put herself in danger, but he couldn’t be a father to a shifter boy if he didn’t stand by his word to other men. As far as Shaun was concerned, Roman was better off without a father than one who couldn’t do what was needed when the time came.

They snuck in through a door left open by Squad Nine’s entrance and Shaun crept along the dark corridors, pointedly making his way toward the stairwells and not the warehouse. They both froze in their tracks, the jaguars solid as statues, listening when disjointed sounds of battle came to their ears.

Dani growled softly behind him and when he glanced at her, her golden eyes were staring transfixed in the direction of the storage areas, where Squad Six would now be, perhaps fighting for their lives. But had Jerome or any of the other men been in the same situation, Shaun knew they would have behaved similarly to him. So Shaun kept moving, painfully putting the noises of bloodshed out of his mind, hoping that Squad Six would both triumph as well as come out of this with their lives intact.

It was curiously quiet in the building otherwise, except for a low hum that seemed to resonate through the facility, coming from below. When they reached the stairs leading lower, the noises became even clearer and louder with every step the two great cats took toward the heart of the facilities. Human ears likely could not pick it up, but those of shifters certainly did.

Every nerve was on edge and every muscle rigid as Shaun smelled the stench of blood and sweat, knowing for certain that he was coming close to Squad Nine now. When they rounded another corner in the staircase, the carnage became more than evident.

It took far too much self-control to keep from reeling, from shying back. Six men, all with stories not unlike those of his own squad, lay dead or dying before him. The squad leader’s face had been torn clean off, as if by jaws much greater than anything Shaun could fathom. Another had been ripped apart. Bullet holes riddled the stairs and the ground, haphazard fire that had done no good to anyone.

Gingerly, Shaun checked each of the men, finding three of them still clinging to life. He sniffed at them, sensing the wild stench of the beasts on them, but he did not stop. He was past the bodies a few paces when he heard Dani calling to him in a low snarl behind him.

She stood there, next to one of the survivors, who was unconscious but breathing with his leg smashed and countless other wounds riddling his body. Her tail swished slowly and her ears pricked up, looking at him with surprise. But even that didn’t stop him. If he could have, he would have told her to stay, to save herself now that they knew there were people alive, to guard them if she could.

He hadn’t gotten very far before he felt her presence again, clear and strong. Shaun glanced back, growling in a threatening way, wanting her to turn around and go back, but the stony-faced glare she gave him told him that he would have no luck with that. She would not listen. As always, she was as stubborn as he was.

So they moved forward, step by step, until the humming was so loud it deafened his other senses almost completely. Down the hallway where the sound seemed to be originating, a bluish-green glow bathed the area through a cracked door, which was calling to Shaun. He moved closer, every step completely soundless now, masked by both the noise as well as his own capabilities of stealth.

He listened at the door and then slid in, barely needing to open it more, Dani at his heels. They moved a few paces in before the sight before them froze them again, Shaun’s eyes going wide with horror.

All around them, there were vats of liquid that seemed oddly gelatinous. The pylons powering them were about ten feet tall each, towering high. Wires and tubes ran into them and each one glowed with an eerie light, blue, green, or red, some pulsing a little more than others. And in each of these tubes was a person, floating in the mass of not quite liquid, not quite solid, a mask on their face and wires and needles pinching into their skin at various locations.

Each tube had a small readout screen with a code and a first name and last name, and vital statistics. The ones that were red showed subjects that were close to dying, their heart rates low, their breathing ragged. And there were many of these.

All of the subjects were strong, muscular, and built for action. He recognized squad insignias, tattoos denominating their service on several of them, not only US Special Forces and military but other nations as well, British, French, Russian… other than the evident military background, one thing tied them all together—all of them were shifters.

Whether men or women, that kind of musculature was not meant for simple humans. Some of the bodies seemed to throb with something, their bodies convulsing every now and then and their faces rigid with pain, though it seemed as if they were completely disconnected from what was going on with them. Shaun’s human side was confused, but his jaguar? Simply fucking enraged.

Someone was doing testing on his brothers and sisters, shifters who were too fucking good to be used this way. He moved forward after staring for much too long, prompted by Dani padding up in front of him. He didn’t know what she’d noticed by the time they got there and Shaun got another shock in a day filled with surprises.

The readout blinked with the code: TR-89, Taylor, C.

It was Carter.

Shaun’s stomach fell.

His nails scraped at the ground and it was nearly impossible to keep himself from throwing himself at the damn vat to break Carter out of there. His tube was glowing green and pulsing slowly. Whatever the fuck that meant, he was sure it wasn’t good. But just as Shaun was getting dangerously close to losing his cool, he heard noises, something other than the sloshing and the whirring of the seemingly endless rows of test tubes for humans.

Shaun ducked behind one of the vats as Dani took another, the sound of leisurely conversation drifting to their ears.

“We could just unplug the entire group. Most of these are for the dumps anyway,” a man’s voice said, gruff and low.

Shaun noticed the way Dani’s ears pricked up, her expression betraying the fact that the voice was not completely alien to her. His shoulders hunched, readying himself to pounce when the opportunity presented itself.

“Whatever we fucking do, it better be fast,” another voice said. “The puppies won’t take too long to wipe our guests out, but you know there will be more coming after the team doesn’t check back in.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll get out of here before the puppies get to them,” the first voice mused again, the makings of a sigh underneath his rough tone.

“So should we. What the fuck are we doing here anyway? We need to fucking go. If those things round back downstairs, we are dead. You know we can’t contain those things yet,” the second man said, sounding far more antsy than before.

“Hold your fucking horses. You saw the squad at the stairs. Ain’t no one getting down here. The lab rat needs to pack a few things. Good thing we got some of this shit out already and most of the team is moving toward Delaware. Now we only need to get rid of these shits and call it a night,” the first man said, seemingly bored with the nuisance of having to end countless lives.

Shaun shared a look with Dani and she nodded. Both of them peeled away from their positions, stalking deeper into the room. Shaun kept close to the vats, keeping his body low. He was thankful all the men and women in the tubes had their eyes closed; he wasn’t sure he could do this shit with their eyes staring, judging. Enough had gone wrong recently. He didn’t need their lives on his conscience as well.

His steps soundless and his body ready, Shaun was perfectly poised to attack the moment one of the two big men came into view. He recognized one from the night in the jungle and the pictures Dani had gotten. It was Shar and his buddy Ron. It only took a flash of a second to note that Dani was ready on the other side when both of them pounced in unison, raining down on the two men like the reckoning had come early.

They didn’t even have the time to draw their guns, but Shaun didn’t manage to rip out Ron’s voice box before he let out a few strangled screams, which echoed up into the high ceilings of the endless room. Dani was cleaner, going straight for the neck and clamping down on Shar’s neck instead of clawing at his chest as Shaun had done in a fit of rage, wishing to maim before kill.

She’s got her shit handled better than you do, Shaun. Focus.

Again, easier said than done. At least he was glad to see that they’d wordlessly agreed that the time to take prisoners was over. They’d have to move fast and be ruthless if they wanted to save these people and Carter, and failure was not an option.

Heavy footsteps thudded somewhere above them and the wild-eyed look Dani gave him left Shaun no question. Whatever these fuckers had created was coming for them now and this fight could only go one of two ways—either it died or they did.

With Dani and Roman on his mind, Shaun was going to make it very damn clear that the only way he would see this ending was with the bastard dead at his feet. Whether or not it took him with it scarcely mattered as long as she would be okay, Ro would have at least one parent, and Carter made it out of here in whatever intact form that could be managed.