“Look at you, Dr. Jones. You’re absolutely magnificent. To think all this time, you were a giant golden wolf. And almost as large as the acquisition. How were you able to fight off the change for so long?”
Ariel heard him talking, but his words meant nothing. She leapt into the air toward the bastard who had tormented her, only to feel a taser hook attach to her chest while she was still several feet away. She hit the lab floor with a thud, whimpering in pain as Crane sent voltage into her. She struggled at the end of the attached wire.
Writhing, she watched Crane walk to the wall and pull a silver collar off a peg. Ariel blinked her new eyes and recognized it was a match for the one Reed wore. She couldn’t let Crane put the collar on her. She couldn’t fail them all by letting Crane control her wolf.
Behind her, she heard Brandi and Heidi whimpering, but also growling and snarling.
I know it hurts, but you must fight for us, Ariel. You’ve killed one. Kill the other and free us all.
At hearing Reed’s encouragement in her head, she rolled to a half-sitting position, lifting what felt like massive wolf's shoulders from the ground. It took a lot of effort. Crane sent another shock into her as he reached out with the open collar. Though it hurt to move, she lifted a giant paw and knocked the metal from his hand. He pressed the button on the taser, only to find it was out of juice. Her wolf quivered in relief.
A low growl started in her chest as Crane set the taser aside, casually rose, and headed to the door. He was definitely not leaving, not if she could stop him. She wobbled as she stood and took a couple unsteady steps. Crane’s hand was on the access pad. She listened to him enter the exit code. Three – eight – nine – two. Maybe she was going to like having ears that could hear this well.
She braced herself and leapt on the back of him, dragging him to the floor by his white lab coat. He yelled once as she landed heavily on his back, but stopped struggling when she chomped on the back of his neck. She bit down until she felt something crack at the same time she punctured his jugular. Hot blood rushed into her mouth. Mad still, she raised up his body with her bite, which she soon realized covered his whole neck. She shook him back and forth even though the dead man was already totally limp.
Knowing she had indeed stopped Crane was the most amazing feeling. She walked around with the scientist clutched in her teeth, even trotting back to show Brandi and Heidi. They laid down on the floor and put their noses on their paws. Her pride over his death filled her with enormous satisfaction. The crazy scientist would never torture another female.
Enough, child. Let the dead man go. Don’t contaminate your body by chewing on him. You need to change back to human form now and free us.
Whimpering, Ariel walked back and dropped Crane’s body in front of Reed’s cage. Part of her didn’t want the cruel bastard to be dead yet. She wanted him to suffer longer—suffer the way she and the women had—the way Reed had. Maybe she shouldn’t have bitten so hard. Maybe she should have done it in a way where he would have bled out and died slowly.
Ariel sat on her rear haunches and glared at the black wolf. How was she supposed to become human again? She didn’t want to be human. She was happy in her wolf form. Look at what she’d done. Her head turned and she whimpered again at the body of the man who had smacked her naked ass. She dropped her head to look at the other dead man in front of her.
If you change back, the others will follow your lead. You need human hands to unlock my cage…and theirs. You need human hands to gather up the evidence of Crane’s experiments. Dr. Jones, I’m begging you to do this. You can be a wolf anytime you want now. I promise.
Her ears perked up. Dr. Jones? Yes. She had always liked being called that. Lying down, she laid her head on her paws and thought about becoming a female again. Fire consumed her once more, but not as much as it had when she had become her wolf. Again she felt the nanos getting busy under her skin.
A tortured groan split the air when she turned and saw a bloody Crane lying next to her, his dead eyes wide with shock.
“Shit. Did I really do that to him?”
Ariel raised to her knees gingerly and stared back at the cages.
“Did I really kill both of them?”
She looked back at Reed. He blinked, but said nothing to her, not even in her head. Of course she had killed them both. The memory of their deaths lived in her brain now. She had been a wolf, but she had been herself too. She just hadn’t cared about anything but stopping them. She had no regrets.
When she could stand, she stumbled to Assistant Asswipe and fished the cage keys out of the pocket of his bloody lab coat. She looked at the wolves prowling the cages again. “Think of the women you were and change back. If you do that, I’ll let you out.”
Brandi laid down immediately and two seconds later, she was her normal self. Heidi still paced and whimpered, reluctant to do what they’d done. Ariel walked to the cage and stared at her. “Yes, it hurts, but it’s necessary. Now do it, so we can get the hell out of here.”
Whimpering harder than ever, Heidi laid down and moments later screeched as her human form took over. Ariel unlocked both cages as quickly as she could.
“In a minute, I’m going to set off the fire alarm. While that’s distracting the building guard, go find us some long lab coats,” she ordered. “There are two techs somewhere in the building who are going to stare at you both if they see you naked. They’re harmless. Wiggle your fingers and giggle. They’ll think you’re the party girls Crane orders for entertainment on Fridays.”
Brandi glared at her for her comments, but Heidi just hung her head. Apparently, one of them was a party girl. Ariel rolled her eyes at the knowledge and headed to unlock Reed’s cage. He barely moved while she searched the key ring for the collar key. “I can’t find it, Reed.”
Leave me. Find Matt. He’ll take care of you.
“No. I’m not leaving you. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you. You told me to save all of us and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Ariel left the cage open. She bent over Crane’s body and ripped a wide swatch of fabric from the back of his blood soaked lab coat. She brought the fabric swatch back and wrapped it around the chain where it attached to the wall. She could feel the metal heat her skin as she tugged on it to test.
“Come on nanos. Get your little fixing asses to work. I’ve got to do this no matter how bad it hurts.” She yanked and tugged and yanked some more. At this rate, it was going to take awhile.
Brandi appeared at her shoulder and without speaking took hold of the chain too. Ariel nodded at her stare. Breasts swinging with every yank, she and Brandi pulled twice and then the damn thing popped free of the wall.
Ariel kept her fingers wrapped around the chain. Even through the fabric it was burning her skin. Not being able to handle silver had to be some kind of metal allergy. She was going to look into it sometime and see what the hell that was all about.
“Okay. You’re free now. Let’s go, Big Guy.”
Reed stood, wavered, and then braced himself for each painful step. Ariel walked slowly as he limped out the door beside her. At the lab exit, Ariel deftly keyed in the code Crane had used earlier. The doors opened smoothly. She held it wide for the women who followed behind her and Reed.
Just outside the lab, Ariel rammed her fist into the door of a locked case in the wall, the glass cutting her knuckles. She ignored the pain which was already going away by the time the fire alarm filled the air. Her gut was overruling her brain. It was an odd sensation, but something urged her to trust it for the sake of all their lives.
“Go. Find us clothes. Do what I said,” she ordered, turning to Brandi and Heidi. “Try to find us transportation too. Our vehicles are all dead. Crane drives a jeep. Let’s take that. He’s never going to need it again.”
“Heidi, hold the door for me,” Brandi ordered. She ran back into the lab and stooped to search Crane’s pockets, brandishing jeep keys when she found them. Once she was outside the lab, Heidi closed the lab until the lock clicked.
Beside her, Ariel felt Heidi shiver. She turned and gave her a stern look. She had no time to deal with any emotional meltdowns. “Look—I don’t know you and you don’t know me. But I can tell you for certain that what was done to us can’t be undone. All we can do is move forward. Unless you want to be responsible for Crane’s backer coming after all of us, get your ass moving and follow Brandi out of here. We need to run while we can.”
Both women nodded and ran off ahead. Heidi trailed behind Brandi only by a fraction.
The lab wasn’t heavily staffed on Fridays. Knowing Crane, he’d made sure most of them weren’t around for a few days during the experiment. She and Reed stopped at Crane’s office. His laptop was open and still running on his desk. She took the time to turn off the screen lock before closing the lid and tucking it under one arm.
Next they stopped at her lab where she tugged on a lab coat she’d left there two days ago. She buttoned it up all the way to cover her nudity. Patting Reed on the head, she dropped his chain on the floor for a moment. “Wait here a minute.”
Knowing she would heal fast because of the nanos, Ariel walked to the nearest chemical cabinet and repeated her bare knuckled fist pump through the glass. Reaching inside, she drew out the two most volatile chemicals it contained. Dumping both in a glass beaker she’d placed in a nearby sink, she watched the chemical reaction start to happen. She wanted to make sure it was working before they left.
“Come on, Reed. Compliments of my scientific education, that mix is going to have this room in flames in about five minutes. Then the whole building is going to go up when everything else in this lab explodes.”
On the way out, she grabbed the largest microscope she could carry and tucked it under her arm. With Crane’s laptop and a strong microscope, maybe she could start to unravel what had been done to them. Not that she believed she could ever reverse it. What she had said to Heidi still reverberated as truth. Nanos couldn’t be removed once injected into you. They could be killed by extreme radiation, but never removed.
And Reed’s blood was part of their molecular structure now. She wasn’t sure how she knew that was a fact, but it felt like the same kind of truth as the nanos. Transpecies mutations weren’t anything she’d learned in any genetics class. Knowledge of her blood connection to the black wolf who patiently waited for her came from sources she hadn’t identified yet.
She picked up the silver chain still attached to Reed’s collar, forgetting to wrap the cloth around it first. It burned like fire and stuck to her fingers, but there was no time left to think about the pain. Right now, they needed to vacate the premises before they went up in flames with it. By the time she and Reed got to the front door of the building, her hand was stinging like she’d rammed it into a hornet’s nest. She was regretting her haste in leaving the fabric swatch behind.
When Brandi swerved in with the jeep two seconds later, Ariel and Reed both limped over to it. He made a running jump and nearly missed. Ariel caught his backside to push him up the rest of the way into the seat. He immediately curled up into a ball in the passenger’s seat and shuddered. The effort to leave had obviously cost Reed the last of his energy. It made Ariel angry all over again. She turned a glare on the male who yelled at her.
“Why did you bust the wolf loose, Dr. Jones? You didn’t seem the type. Are you one of those freaking animal lovers?” Feldspars’ surly guard demanded.
Ariel glared briefly and then dismissed the speaker. The man and his attitude weren’t important. Getting away was. “Yes, Frank. In this case, I am an animal lover. I’m setting the wolf free.”
“Well, I hope you got everything you wanted when you got out, because you can’t go back now anyway. You know this whole place is about to be blown all to hell, right?”
“Yes, I know, and good riddance,” Ariel declared as she climbed into the backseat, plopping down beside Heidi. “Let’s get out of here, Brandi.”
Brandi shook her head, climbed out of the driver’s side, and walked to the guard.
Before Ariel could figure out her intentions, Brandi grabbed and twisted the guard’s head until she broke his neck. The man fell soundlessly to the ground. She watched Brandi drag him by one leg and throw him back into the building, closing the front door behind him. The lab techs were nowhere in sight. Ariel decided not knowing where they were was probably the best thing. She imagined they’d suffered the same fate as the irritating guard.
Fire engines were turning into the quarter mile long drive from the main road to the secluded facility as Brandi jogged back to the driver’s seat. “The techs we talked to on the way are already headed home. I let them go because they were grieving your alleged death, but the guard recognized you, Dr. Jones. He was a loose end and would have given people way too much to talk about later if he had lived.”
“Did you have to kill him? What if the man had a family?” Ariel demanded, biting her lip as Brandi swerved and drove down a side road she said would take them out a rarely used entrance.
“I don’t think Frank had a family. He was too good a customer at the place where I worked,” Heidi declared.