CHAPTER 24

In the shadow of the stairwell, Eli listened to Garrett England spill out the story of his megalomaniacal plan for world domination and wished like hell he were getting this on tape. Unfortunately, recording equipment hadn’t been part of the master plan. While the story unfolded, he had a very good look at the expressions on the faces of his mate and his friend, though, so he knew they heard every word. And would be happy to testify to the facts at trial.

He also knew that Josie had taken moral offense at the idea of a scientist and a doctor, any doctor, using his or her knowledge and skill in order to specifically destroy the life she had dedicated herself to fighting to preserve. So far, though, she had held steady, not leapt forward to confront the criminal mastermind single-handedly. He prayed for her to continue to show such sensibility.

The problem now was that the plans had changed slightly. Here his team had discovered the two highest-rated targets of their little mission but none of the evidence they needed to support the arrest. Since neither England nor Huddlesford had pulled the trigger on the rifle that shot Rosemary and Jackson, they couldn’t be tied to the bullets. They could still be charged with murder if the DA could make the connection between their orders and the actual shootings, but that would require a lot more proof than a single statement overheard in the hallway of an NAH campground. So the question became: Did Eli step forward and make the arrest now in the hope that the other search parties had or would locate the necessary evidence against these men, or did he stand back and wait to see if England let out more rope for his own hanging?

Steve signed him that very question, and Eli hesitated for a second before he made the call—wait. Wait to see what else might come of the conversation, at least for as long as their presence remained undetected.

“I won’t be dismissed!” Eli heard Huddlesford shout along with the creak of the stairs as England began to re-ascend. Another creak indicated that his father meant to follow. “I demand tha’ you sshow me sssome respec’, boy!”

“I show you just as much as you deserve. All you are is a front, Frances. I’m the real power in this organization, and I owe you nothing.”

“Y’do so! Wivout me, you’ still be sthinkin’ yer firs’ stinkin’ virus w’s some kina holy grail. I’m th’ one foun’ tha’ Lupine’n brought ’im back here. I e’en told you the damn p’ple a’ the refuge place gave ’im tha’ rabies shot. I’m th’ reason you know yer first bug was just a big frickin’ flop!”

It took Eli a minute to piece together the meaning of that slurred and disjointed speech, but when he did, he felt his heart begin to race. Was Huddlesford right, or just drunk? Because if Eli understood him correctly, he had just said that a Lupine infected with the LV-7 virus—presumably, hopefully, Bill—had been picked up by a wildlife refuge and given a canine rabies shot, which had cured him of the infection. Was that even possible? He wanted desperately to ask Steve or Josie, but they couldn’t take the risk of speech and this question was not one covered by the handy military hand signal code.

He also wanted to ask how a refuge had managed to pick up Bill in his wolf form and not believed he already had rabies, based on his last known actions. Had the violence worn off somehow? Shit, he needed answers.

Two bodies clashed somewhere on the stairs, and Eli heard a thud and what he assumed to be a moan of pain from the older man, because it was followed immediately by England hissing in contemptuous rage.

“Don’t you ever speak that way to me again, you fat old bastard! All you brought me was a dead body. That virus was perfect in vitro! Indestructible! How were we to know that when the antibodies in a standard dose of vaccine combined with normal Lupine immune cells, it would spell disaster? Lupine immune cells aren’t lying thick on the ground in laboratory supply houses, you know. But it hardly matters. The Lupine was one subject. A programmed loss. By now, there are dozens of infected Others out there, by tomorrow there will be hundreds, and within a few weeks, the virus will sweep across the continent. By the time anyone even realizes it’s based on the rabies virus, they’ll all be dead.”

Eli’s gaze flew to Josie’s face and saw the dawning excitement written there. He watched as she fumbled in the bag she had slung over her shoulder and pulled out a black-and-white notebook, flipping quickly and silently through the pages. What had she found there? As long as it kept her occupied, he didn’t care. He’d already half expected her to jump to her feet, run back to the clinic, and begin ordering massive amounts of canine rabies vaccine, but she didn’t, and that was the important thing.

“I tol’ you—” Huddlesford began, but the sound was cut off with another sickening thud.

“Shut up!” England yelled, sounding nearly unhinged at this point. “I don’t want to hear another word, you disgusting waste of flesh! This is all. Your. FAULT!”

None of them anticipated what happened next. One minute the father and son were arguing on the stairway, and the next England gave a scream of inhuman rage followed by a grunt of exertion. Eli listened in disbelief to a series of three loud thumps, then the sickening crack of a melon splitting open on a wooden picnic table. Only the melon wasn’t a melon; it was George Huddlesford’s skull and the table was the parquetry floor of the house’s elegant entry hall.

Eli couldn’t see anything in front of the stairs, not from where he stood pressed up against them, but he saw the look of shock and distaste on Steve’s face, and the abject horror on Josie’s. Then his heart sank into his boots as he saw her throw herself out from between Steve’s legs and scramble to her feet. She was halfway down the hall before the shout of denial had left his mouth.

His Josie just had to be the hero.

He sprinted after her in a panic and collided with Steve doing the exact same thing. Like something out of the Keystone Kops, their chests bounced off each other, sending both of them to the floor in a tangle of limbs and weapons, but neither felt like being amused. Over the roar of panic in his head, he heard Josie calling the old man’s name over and over, and after a week of medical mishaps, he could picture her clearly pressing her fingers to his throat, looking for a pulse. He knew already that she wouldn’t find one. Underlying the smell of fear, rage, and blood was the smell of the waste released at the instant of death when all the body’s muscles went simultaneously limp.

George Huddlesford was already dead. Dr. Josie Barrett, he thought, wouldn’t be satisfied until she had checked for herself. Then she would know for certain.

Eli scrambled to his feet with a sense of urgency he’d never experienced before. Time seemed to distill into something like slow motion and sound reverberated in his head the way he remembered from the old television shows about people with bionic limbs, only the sounds Eli heard were his own footsteps on the wood of the hallway floors and Garrett England’s footsteps as he raced down the stairs intent on destroying the witness to his father’s murder. They seemed to fall simultaneously to Eli and with every step he took the length of the hallway beside the stairs seemed to grow in comparison with the number of stairs on the way down.

Panic surged inside him and he feared he wouldn’t make it in time. If England reached Josie first, all it would take was one blow and he could crack her skull against the floor as easily as he had his father’s. The height of the stairway was entirely superfluous.

“Bitch!” Eli heard, and he wondered oddly if this was what it would feel like trying to move through quicksand. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What did you see?”

“He’s dead.”

Josie’s voice sounded oddly calm and unconcerned for someone about to be attacked by a proven murderer still not recovered from his last homicidal rage. As Eli plowed forward, he saw her come into view, crouched beside the body of George Huddlesford with one hand in her medical kit and the other still poised on the pale skin of the man’s throat. She didn’t seem to notice the spreading pool of blood slowly encroaching on the spot where her left knee touched the floor.

“You killed him,” she said levelly. “You hadn’t done enough? You had to kill your own father, too? Why? What drives a monster like you?”

She couldn’t have been more than seven feet away, but to Eli it seemed like miles.

“You won’t wonder about that when you’re dead!” England screamed and dove off the bottom stair with his arms outstretched and his finger curled into grasping claws.

Eli shrieked in rage and completely disregarded his promise to remain in human form. He shifted as he leapt, wanting fangs and claws with which to tear limb from bloody limb the man who dared to threaten his mate.

His foolish, brave mate, whom he was going to beat for breaking her promise to him, just as soon as he got her to safety. His mate who didn’t even flinch away from the madman bearing down at her. Instead, Josie twisted at the waist, her hand coming out of her kit and swinging toward her attacker’s chest in one smooth motion.

England, it turned out, was the last one to scream. His mouth opened and rage and pain poured out for a single instant before he went limp and crashed to the floor at the feet of his dead father.

Eli was left with no target and nothing to slow his momentum. He sailed through the space England had recently occupied and caught his hip against the decorative ball on top of the newel post. The wood cracked under the force of a seven-foot lion fueled by momentum and rage and the ball popped off, bounced against the floor once, and rolled through a doorway on the other side of the hall. Eli crashed into a wall and slid down into an undignified heap, his hip throbbing and his head spinning, since that had been the part of him to hit the wall first. Thankfully, the old plaster had been replaced with drywall, which had enough good grace to give under the impact, leaving the wall scarred but Eli’s skull intact.

He watched in a daze as Steve reached Josie just seconds behind England and hauled her to her feet.

“Are you okay?” the colonel demanded, scanning her for injuries. Luckily, he wasn’t sufficiently lost in the moment to run his hands over her to check. “Did he hurt you? What happened?”

“I’m fine,” she reassured him. “He barely touched me, but he’s probably dead. I need to make sure Eli is okay.”

As she hurried to his side with gratifying speed, Eli watched Steve walk up to the second body and use his boot to nudge it over onto its back. In the center of its chest, a hypodermic needle protruded at an odd but clearly effective angle.

Eli shook his head again, felt it actually clear this time, and shifted just as Josie laid a hand on his chest. He heard her gasp and saw wonder flicker through her sweet chocolate eyes as she got a little feel of his transformation spreading through him.

“I’m fine,” he reassured her, taking her hand in his and raising it to his lips. “I’ve got a pretty hard head.”

Josie laughed, then gave a little sniffle. “See, I’ve been telling you that all week. It’s nice to finally hear you admit it.”

“What did you give him?”

“Sux. Succinylcholine. The stuff I used to knock Bill out that morning in the clinic, but it was a dose calibrated for a crazy Lupine with a built-up tolerance for sedatives. I imagine it stopped his heart immediately.”

Eli was happy to hear not a single note of regret in her voice. He was even happier to confirm with his own hands and eyes that she really had not been hurt.

“You shouldn’t feel bad about it, Josie,” Steve said, clearly less attuned to the nuances of the woman’s tone than her mate was. “He would have killed you. You just used the weapon at hand and made the only decision you could have made: Kill or be killed.”

Josie sighed. “Well, I didn’t actually mean to kill him. When I put my hand in the bag, I could feel a needle, but I wasn’t sure which one it was. I have a couple of other preloads in there in case of emergency. I was kind of hoping that I’d grabbed the morphine and it would be enough to get him off me and give Eli time to get to him. I would have preferred for him to live so that we could find out more about how he worked with the virus and whether or not he’d already started any more modifications. Now we’ll have to hope we find out when we search the rest of the place. I hoped the notebook I found in the study would be the key, but it’s mostly megalomaniacal self-congratulations. His real notes are probably in his lab, wherever that is.”

Eli felt the room spin and saw his life flash before his eyes. He squeezed his mate’s hand, not letting up until she squealed in discomfort.

“Are you telling me,” he began weakly, “that instead of running away from a demented killer, you faced him thinking that you had nothing to defend yourself with aside from a needle full of painkiller? Josie?”

He saw her eyes searching his face and knew she was looking for anger. He hadn’t bellowed the question, after all. In fact he’d asked it quietly and politely and with a sort of dawning wonder that must make quite a contrast from the other times they had discussed her right and ability to take care of herself. He didn’t waste words trying to reassure her, just let her see the truth on his face.

Finally, she nodded, still looking a little wary. “I am. Are you going to lecture me?”

“No.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I’m going to congratulate myself for having such a clever, resourceful, quick-witted, and courageous mate,” he murmured, smiling into her eyes. “And then I’m going to thank my lucky stars that she belongs to me.”

Slowly and beautifully, a smile began to curve her lips. It actually started in her eyes, making them glint and glow; then it spread outward bit by bit, crinkling the corners of her eyes, rounding her cheeks, and finally blooming into a perfect expression of joy.

“I think you should also thank this mate of yours,” she whispered back, leaning forward until her forehead rested against his and her body melted against him in perfect intimacy.

“I should?”

“Mm-hm. Thank her for having the incredibly good sense to fall in love with you.” She brushed her lips over his, more a promise than a kiss. “Thank her by telling her you love her, too.”

Eli smiled and wrapped her arms around her, realizing that nothing ever felt to right as the moments when he touched this woman; on the hand, on the cheek, on the breast, it didn’t matter. All that matter was her and him, joined.

“I love you,” he whispered and watched her joy turn to exaltation while the same feeling rose warm and perfect in his own chest. “I will always love you, Josephine Barrett. And I will always be thankful to you for loving me.”

Behind them, a completely forgotten air force colonel cleared his throat and tilted his head toward the ceiling, making a big show of studying the intricate detailing of the plasterwork there. Between them, they continued to ignore him.

Josie laughed softly and her smile took a slightly wicked turn. “Well, if you’re going to thank me for loving you,” she murmured as she raised her lips to his once more, “you’re going to have an awful lot to be thankful for.”

And he did. Every day of his life.

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