The meaning of Litton’s words suddenly broke through the haze of killing fury clouding Brennan’s mind. Devon, he’d said. So the vampire was behind all this. Brennan needed to transmit the information to Alexios, whom Alaric had said would be returning to Lucas’s Pack headquarters this evening. The thought of their conversation reminded him of his need to conceal the vial Alaric had given him. Brennan briefly tried to establish a mental pathway, but Tiernan made a horrible noise and his concentration fractured.
“Brennan, I killed him,” she moaned, and the utter despair in her voice terrified him. Someone who despaired would not fight back, and they were going to need to fight back, very soon, or Litton would have her in that mind-destroying chair.
Over my dead body
, he swore to himself.
Tiernan’s eyes widened, and she doubled over, making a terrible noise that came more from her gut than her throat. Litton yelled at her to stand up, but the guard took two steps back and away from her, the gun still trained on her head, as if he knew what was coming next, as did Brennan.
She cried out and then vomited, gagging until there was nothing else to heave up. Litton scrambled back and away to avoid it.
“Get her out of here as soon as the others get here,” Litton ordered the guard. “I’ll meet you at the holding pens.”
Before Brennan could say something—anything—that might stop him or even slow him down, Litton was gone, and a half dozen more guards, these heavily armed, were swarming into the room.
These men were well trained, too, no common thugs. They worked as a team, herding Brennan and Tiernan down a long corridor and then through a doorway to a set of stairs leading down. And down, and down, and down. Brennan calculated they must have been at least four stories underground by the time they came to the bottom of the stairs and the men prodded them through the doorway into another hall.
Brennan’s guards kept him separate from Tiernan, and both of them now had guns pointed at their heads. The electricity down here had not been affected by the lightning strike, apparently, since harsh fluorescent lighting flooded the corridor. He got a glimpse of Tiernan as they moved down the hall, and her face was dead white, almost a greenish gray under the lights. Shock had set in and she looked like she might pass out any minute.
He needed to find a way out, and he needed to find it quick. He hadn’t liked the sound of “holding pens” or the gleefully evil way Litton had said it. The guard behind him shoved Brennan between the shoulder blades with the barrel of his gun and cursed at him to hurry up. Brennan glanced back over his shoulder and bared his teeth at the man just for the pleasure of watching him flinch.
“Better watch this one,” the guard called out to his comrades. “He passed rational and took the crazy highway a couple of stops ago.”
Brennan started laughing, but kept moving forward as directed. The crazy highway. They had no idea.
When they arrived, it was as bad as Brennan had feared. They were cages, nothing more. Tiernan moaned again, and Brennan wanted to slash and burn and kill for her. The need to protect her sliced through him like one of his own daggers, now left lying useless on the floor above.
“Brennan,” she called out. “Do you see it?”
“Shut up,” one of the guards snarled at her, shoving her into the bars of the cage. Brennan roared out a threat in Atlantean that ripped up from his soul and forced its way out from between his clenched teeth.
“Shut up, you,” the guard behind him snarled, before smashing his gun into the side of Brennan’s head so hard it knocked him down to the floor.
“The wiring, Brennan. Look at the wiring,” Tiernan said, ignoring the guard who threatened her again. “It’s the equivalent of an electric fence. Didn’t you say—”
She cried out—one of the guards must have struck her—and Brennan, driven beyond endurance, lunged up from the floor, only to meet the butt of another guard’s gun on its way down to slam into his face. The world went hazy and he fought for consciousness. If he passed out now, he’d wake up not knowing Tiernan, with both of them trapped here. His one and only goal was to stay awake, stay alive, rescue his mate.
No matter how many had to die for him to do it.
Chapter 25
Yellowstone National Park, Pack Headquarters
Alexios paced back and forth in the spacious living area of Lucas’s HQ, stopping every few minutes to shut his eyes and try to establish a mental pathway to Brennan.
“Nothing. Gods damn it, nothing. It’s wrong, somehow. Not silence or an emptiness, which would happen if he were out of range, but more an odd static and a—” He broke off. He trusted Lucas completely, but there were several other Pack members in the large wood-and-brick room, and he didn’t want to give away what he’d felt from Brennan. There were too many variables, too many chances that one of them might be compromised.
It had happened before. The very night before, in fact.
Lucas gave him a narrow-eyed stare and then nodded almost imperceptibly. “Let’s set up a perimeter watch,” he ordered his second. “I want everybody out there, keeping us safe.”
The shifter jumped up, not quite meeting Lucas’s eyes. Alexios did not fully understand Pack politics and hierarchy and believed none but shifters really could, but he knew enough about dominance and shifters to realize that Lucas was one of the most powerful alphas he’d ever encountered, on the level, power-wise, of Ethan of the Florida panther shifters.
Thinking of Ethan led his tumbling thoughts to Marie, sister of Bastien, one of his closest friends and a very powerful warrior. He still couldn’t believe Bastien’s sister, Marie, leader of the Temple of the Nereids, had fallen in love with Ethan during such a brief trip to Florida. They were trying to work it out, but as Grace had said once, Ethan and Marie gave a whole new meaning to the long-distance in the term “long-distance relationship.” Atlantis-to-Miami trips took quite a bit of planning. For Ethan to travel to Atlantis was, as yet, forbidden.
“Deep thoughts?” Lucas said, and Alexios looked up from his mental ramblings to realize the room had emptied out and they were alone.
“It’s something bad, Lucas,” Alexios said, suddenly whirling around to smash his fists down on the pile of wood near the fireplace. He watched, almost unseeing, as the pile collapsed with a crash and logs rolled across the floor.
“Honey will love that,” Lucas said dryly. He crossed to a side table and poured them both glasses of a clear brown liquid, then handed one to Alexios. “What is it?”
Alexios took a deep sniff of fine Scotch whiskey, then drained his glass in two gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and Lucas snatched the glass out of his hand, pointedly looking down at the logs. “I like these glasses,” he said, holding up the bottle and raising an eyebrow.
Alexios shook his head. “No more. I need a clear head. Brennan isn’t gone, exactly, but he isn’t there, either. When I open a pathway, I get a flooding sensation of rage and violence, almost animalistic in nature.”
Lucas’s face went hard. “Don’t give me that bigoted bullshit. It’s not the animals who kill each other for no reason.”
“I didn’t mean that, and you know it. It was more fury and unreasoning pain, like an animal caught in a trap. Does that make more sense?”
Lucas drained his own glass and put it down on the table, considering. “Would pain alone block the pathway?”
“No. That’s the problem. Something else, some kind of magical or psychic interference or—” His gaze went to the lamps, and another connection formed. “Electricity. If he’s somehow bound with electricity or held in one of their science labs, which we have to assume is filled with electrical equipment—” The obvious conclusion hit him with the force of a tsunami. “Oh, by all the gods, Lucas. What if they’re messing with Brennan’s brain? If their science conflicts with Poseidon’s curse, it may destroy Brennan in the process.”
“Stop. Stop thinking that way, it achieves nothing,” Lucas said. “First of all, they haven’t been missing that long, right? So it’s unlikely that the scientists have had time to experiment on anybody. Plus they think he’s Mr. Money-bags. They’ll want to play nice with him, at least until they can figure out how to get their murdering hands on that money.”
“If they haven’t broken through his cover story,” Alexios said grimly. “We don’t know what they know or what resources they have. You of all people know that.”
Two more of Lucas’s wolves had gone insane during the night, one slaughtering his wife in their bed and then killing himself with knives. He’d gotten quite a lot of carving done before he finally died of the blood loss, apparently. Lucas, who had seen a great deal of violence in his life, had gone a little pale around the edges when telling Alexios about it. The second to succumb to the madness, convinced he was a were-hawk, had climbed very high up in one of the tallest trees near Pack headquarters and tried to fly. Even wolf shifters couldn’t survive some things. The man was dead, every bone in his body shattered.
Lucas’s face hardened. “When I get my hands on this Litton—”
“If it really is Litton. We don’t have proof yet,” Alexios reminded him. “That’s why Tiernan convinced Brennan that they had to go back. We all knew it was dangerous, we just thought they had a little bit of time before the noose tightened, since the scientists clearly believed Brennan to be who he claimed to be. Litton is desperate for funding.”
“He can’t get any from normal sources, since he’s doing the mad science. No ethical companies, hospitals, or government organizations would fund him.”
Alexios shot him a look. “The unethical ones are still a pretty deep pool. Especially with all the radical shifter hate groups springing up in the past few years.”
“But he went for Brennan’s bait. My best computer guy set up that billionaire businessman cover story,” Lucas insisted. “It would take CIA-level access and knowledge to hack past it. I still think the cover story held.”
Alexios crossed to the window and stared out into deepening shadows of dusk. “Then maybe that didn’t matter anymore. If you can control the mind of a billionaire, you can have all of his money. Why take a mere ten million when you can have everything?”
“We’ll find them,” Lucas told him. “Now that Honey took the children and all the young and elderly away, we’re left with only our best fighting force, and no worries about family to distract us. We’ll find them.”
“We’ll find them, all right,” Alexios vowed, his hands on the hilts of his daggers. “If we have to take every damn scientist in that entire conference hostage, we’ll find them.”
Chapter 26
Litton’s labs, deep underground
Brennan slammed his body against the bars, and again the electricity zapped him so hard that it knocked him to the floor. This time, probably the dozenth, he stayed down a little longer. He was beginning to weaken and tire; an animal trapped in a cage, his much-prized logic and control gone.
Tiernan. The rage and terror built and built inside him, overwhelming him, driving him to escape, to protect her, and he was killing himself trying. But his frenzied mind had gone feral—insisting he had no other choice. He gathered himself for another charge.
“Brennan.”
Just a single word, just his name, but it had the power to calm something; to soothe the edges of the madness long enough for him to look up and find her. They’d put her in the cage right next to him, and most of the guards still stood around the room, calling out taunts to Brennan and vile remarks to Tiernan.
She ignored all of it, an oasis of purity in the midst of the cruelty and violence. She ignored the guards and the cell and everything but Brennan, focusing her gaze on him so intently that he could almost feel the weight of it, tangible, upon his skin.
“Brennan, you have to calm down,” she said, trying to smile a little, perhaps to offer reassurance.
She
was trying to comfort
him
, when he had let her be captured. Allowed her to be harmed.
When they escaped, he would spend the rest of his life making it up to her.
“I need you to be calm. For me. I’m freaking out here, and you’re not helping,” she said softly.
Shame swamped him. He must find his control, for her even more than for himself. He closed his eyes, searching for his serene center, but it was impossible. His newly found emotions were churning like a tempest at sea. He could manage a semblance of tranquillity—the thinnest of veneers—but no true calm. Not until he had her safe in Atlantis, preferably locked in his rooms, for the next hundred years at least.
“Brennan?”
He opened his eyes. She was so pale; her eyes dark and haunted. She needed him, she’d said. He’d be damned if he’d let her down.
“That man,” she began, her voice soft and trembling. “I—I killed him.”
He moved a little closer to the bars between them, a small movement so as not to attract the guards’ attention. “I know. He was a monster. I saw him hurt your friend in that video. He deserved to die.”
She flinched a little. “Is it so simple in your world? You just pick who deserves to die? No trial? No remorse? It’s not like that for me.”
He remained silent, not knowing how to comfort her. Emotion was too new to him—a foreign language in which he could not navigate nuance. Wielding words like blunt weapons would cause more harm than help now.
“And yet I killed him, you’re thinking,” she said. “But it wasn’t like that. I—I picked up that dagger to defend myself when one of the guards came at me, and then you were there fighting them, and the lights were off, and I heard his voice and swung around. I was going to hit him, and, well, I guess I did hit him, but the knife was in my hand and . . .”