Iona quietly opened the door to the room where Cassidy lay, but the broken door handle clanked, the sound echoing in the deserted hall. Iona halted for a frozen moment, her heart pounding furiously, but she heard nothing, saw no one.
She slipped inside and shut the door, changing back to human as she approached Cassidy on the bed. Cassidy’s hands were still strapped down with the metal cuffs, but Cass was wide awake.
Cassidy gave a cry of joy to see Amanda, then started to cry because she couldn’t reach for her. Iona unwound the sling, set Amanda on Cassidy’s chest, and carefully retied the fabric around Cassidy, holding Amanda in place against Cassidy’s bare br**sts.
“There. Now she’ll be fine,” Iona said, trying to sound reassuring. “And that’s a clean suit, so she’s germ free.” She smiled, but Cassidy didn’t relax.
“Iona, we have to get out of here. And then I’m going to kill everyone in this building.”
“I already whacked a couple of them. It felt good. But I agree. We’ll go.”
Iona checked Cassidy’s cuffs again, metal and tight, bolted down, no latch to break. Even Iona’s Shifter beast wasn’t strong enough to break them. A couple of Shifters together might, but Cassidy couldn’t help.
However, there was a Shifter in this building who might be strong enough. Iona looked at Amanda, who’d happily found sustenance at her mother’s breast. Amanda and Cassidy would be sitting ducks for someone like the tiger Shifter in the basement.
On the other hand, there were no other Shifters in sight, and Iona had no way of knowing how long it would be before Eric would find them, or if he even could. She had to use the resources she had on hand.
Right now her resources consisted of one of the strongest females in Shiftertown secured to a bed, a half-crazed Shifter with no name in the basement, a building full of old equipment, and a baby.
If Iona could handle the tiger until she freed Cassidy, then Cassidy would be able to help them all get out of there. Including the tiger. Iona had made a promise to him, and she’d keep it.
“Cass, I’ll be right back,” she said.
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“Find a way to get you out of here. Don’t go running off now, all right?”
Again, Cassidy didn’t smile. She’d relaxed from her insane worry about Amanda, but her attention was now entirely on her baby.
Iona kissed Cassidy’s forehead, touched Amanda’s cheek, changed to her half-Shifter beast, and left the room again.
Eric sensed something moving in the dark desert with him. Diego had driven him up the 95 toward Indian Springs, where they’d stopped at a roadside bar. Diego had headed on to the 375 to Area 51’s front gate, while Eric had walked quietly around the building, holding his breath against the noisome garbage in the back, and faded into the night.
He’d stripped when he was well away from the bar, hiding his clothes in a plastic bag under some rocks. He’d fastened the pack that contained everything he needed tightly around his torso, shifted to his wildcat under the moonlight and clear sky, then loped off east and north.
Now someone else moved in the dark with him, and that someone wasn’t human. Eric sniffed the wind, then stopped to wait for the large black wolf to trot down from the shadow of the nearest ridge.
Eric said in body language, What the f**k are you doing?
The wolf answered in his own body language with plenty of expletives, basically conveying the message, You need me, ass**le.
Eric didn’t have time to shift and swear at him, so he growled again, moved off into the darkness, and let Graham follow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The tiger Shifter who called himself Twenty-three was surprised when Iona returned. She could tell the surprise only through his scent, however, because he glared in fury through the bars and didn’t change expression when he saw her.
“I need your help,” Iona said to him. “You help me free my friend, and I’ll take you out of here.”
“You said you’d take me out if I told you where the cub was.”
“And I will. But I have to take my friend too, and the cub. And you have to promise not to touch them.”
The noise that came back to her was a feral snarl, and she worried again.
“Hold it together,” Iona said. “Tell me about yourself. What did you mean when you said you’ve always been here? Were you brought here as a baby? A cub, I mean?”
“No. I have always been here.”
“Born here?” The tiger looked full-grown, about the same age as Jace perhaps. “Your mother was captured?”
“I don’t know. I never knew the female they made me from.”
“Made you? You mean like artificial insemination?”
“I don’t know.”
“Holy crap on a crutch,” Iona muttered.
Humans breeding Shifters? Iona thought about what she’d seen up in the laboratory—dozens of test tubes in the glass cabinets, Amanda, a half-human Shifter baby, being scanned every which way, the data flowing across the computer screens.
Humans had stolen Graham’s wolves from a bus and taken them to the facility in the desert to harvest blood and skin samples. Iona bet the Shifters had been scanned and studied there too, while they’d been tranqed.
She looked at the cages again, all empty except this one. Tiger Shifter was number twenty-three. Numbers one through twenty-two were all dead.
“Why?” she asked in horror.
“To fight for them.”
“But Shifters aren’t allowed to…”
Collared Shifters, Shifters acknowledged by humans, weren’t allowed to be in the military or law enforcement, the human government reasoning that dangerous Shifters couldn’t be trusted with weapons. Shifters might turn the guns on their human masters.
But Shifters bred in secret, in this building in the middle of who knew where, un-Collared and allowed to go feral…Were humans trying to create Shifters they could control to fight for them, the same reason the Fae had bred them long, long ago?
Shifters they could control without Collars…Iona thought about what Eric had told her about the experiments done on him twenty years ago, and the pain he was experiencing now. Liam and Eric had surmised that Eric’s adrenaline spikes were causing the pain, as though the Collar was doing its job without actually going off.
Iona went cold. Had the experiments on Eric been a precursor to this? If the humans had been trying to develop Shifters to fight, they’d have to be un-Collared so they could battle without restriction. But the humans would need another way to control the Shifters when they wanted to—had they been trying to find a way with Eric? And now, twenty years later, whatever they’d done to him was biting him in the ass.