He was sprinting across the ground before he knew his feet were moving, and he was running faster than he ever had. Yet, as fast as he was moving, he had no problem following the scent trail. He knew he could have closed his eyes and the trail would have still been just as clear for him.
He slowed when he reached the place near the stream where Kendra stopped and fired her weapon. The acrid smell of burnt smokeless powder was clear and obvious. His head tracked to the left, finding the three spent 5.56 mm casings. She had stopped and turned back upstream before firing.
That was when he picked up the smell of the hybrids overlaying Kendra’s tracks. He couldn’t stop the growl that emanated from his throat.Damnitalltohell.There had been four hybrids upstream of the shelter. Kendra had run down here, then fired at them, not to kill, but to get them to follow her.
She had done it to draw them away from him, just like he’d thought.
Declan ran even faster. Kendra had risked everything for him.
He found every place she stopped to shoot at the hybrids, luring them farther and farther away from him. And with every short stop, his fear grew. She hadn’t even been trying to escape. She’d been sacrificing herself to save him. Tears burned his eyes, threatening to blind him, and he blinked hard.
Then he found the place where the chase had ended. He clearly saw and smelled the tracks of the two hybrids moving around in front of her, the other two herding her from behind. The scent of blood assaulted his nose and his heart lurched. But then he realized it wasn’t hers. It had the brackish stench of blood that could only belong to a hybrid. She’d hit one of the bastards. Not severely though. There were only a few drops on the ground. But she’d gotten one. The image brought a smile to his face, and he felt the unfamiliar tug and pull as a mouth suddenly full of fangs longer than he was used to turned upward.
His nose led him to the rock on the ground, and he picked it up. Her beautiful, feminine scent cloaked the stone. But there was a trace of hybrid odor on it. Like the rock had hit the creature just long enough to leave a hint, but not enough to cover Kendra’s scent.
The rock slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers, fresh fear gripping him. This must have been the place where the hybrids attacked and killed her. His heart began to tear open, but then stopped when he realized there wasn’t any blood—or anything else—on the ground to indicate that the hybrids had killed her.
Declan spun around, his nose not used to doing work this fine but quickly learning how.
Outside of this one spot, Kendra’s scent diminished. It wasn’t gone, but it was much fainter. He scanned the ground, searching for her tracks, but couldn’t find any. Four sets of hybrid tracks headed away from the area, though. But one set was deeper than they’d been when they’d come into the clearing. Why? Then it hit him. The hybrid had been carrying Kendra.
He followed the tracks, his head digesting what his senses were telling him. It didn’t make sense. The hybrids had attempted to subdue him with that damn needle, presumably to capture him, but they’d never seemed interested in taking Kendra alive. Back at the stream, it had appeared as if they were trying to kill her as quickly as possible.
Why take her now?
He considered and discarded several possibilities, until coming to the only one that was left. The hybrids thought he was dead and had decided they needed Kendra instead.
Declan raced faster, his mind going places he didn’t want it to go. If they wanted Kendra alive, there could be only one reason. It was insane, but it was the only thing that explained why they would bother to take her. They intended to experiment on her. The doctors who had created the hybrid drug and tortured Ivy had Kendra and meant to do the same to her.
The roar that erupted out of him startled the jungle to silence. It probably carried for miles in every direction, but Declan didn’t care. Let those hybrid assholes hear him coming. His claws flexed and he felt them extend even farther, sending stabs of pain through his hands that he relished. He felt muscles and bones moving and twisting as he ran, and he still didn’t care.
He fed the rage, let it force the shift even further until he was almost lost in it. He didn’t care if he ever found his way back to his human half again. He was going to find Kendra, and when he did, every hybrid that had even thought of touching her was going to know fear like they had never felt in their miserable fucking lives—right up until the moment he killed them.
***
“You still never said who you work for, Kendra,” Harry reminded her. “Or how you happen to know so much about these hybrids?”
Kendra winced. She and the three doctors had been talking for more than an hour, during which time she’d been careful not to divulge too much critical information about herself or the DCO, instead keeping the conversation focused on them the whole time. But Harry and the other men weren’t stupid. They’d already figured out that she’d dealt with hybrids before. If she wasn’t careful, they’d end up learning more from her than she did from them.
That probably wasn’t very likely, since she’d already learned enough to worry the hell out of her.
She gave them what she hoped was a disarming smile. “Hybrids—that’s just a name I made up. And I really don’t know that much about them at all.”
Harry didn’t look like he believed her, but at least he didn’t call her out on the fact that she hadn’t really answered either of his questions. That was good. Between worrying about what might be happening to Declan and trying to digest everything she’d learned in the last hour, she was too tired to expend any energy soothing Harry and his colleagues.
Her initial assumptions that this was another temporary research operation set up by Stutmeir’s former doctors had turned out to be completely wrong. Not only was this facility far from temporary—Harry and his colleagues had been working here for more than six weeks—but they claimed they’d never heard of the doctors who’d tortured Ivy out in Washington.
Based on everything Harry, Lester, and Albert had told her, she’d come to a pretty wild conclusion—the people who’d created this latest hybrid pack were completely separate from those who had created the Washington State pack. Worse, she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that the genesis for this latest hybrid process wasn’t Stutmeir’s work at all. It was the DCO’s.
Harry and the other doctors, as well as everyone else who’d worked there, had been hired to come to Costa Rica and work on what they thought was a top secret Department of Defense genetics program designed to enhance soldier performance through the use of cutting-edge DNA manipulation techniques. It wasn’t until they were given the boxes and boxes of background research that they realized thecutting-edge techniquesinvolved the use of animal DNA. And the way Harry described the research information made it sound exactly like the technical reports the DCO had put together after the raid in Washington State. Even the color-coding on the edge of each report matched the way the DCO tracked intel sources. Even though the doctors and scientists had been shocked at the direction they were expected to take their research, none of them had complained, until things started getting too real.
“So when did everything go wrong?” she asked, still pondering exactly who in the DCO had betrayed them. The thought that Zarina had a spy on her team who was selling hybrid information was almost as scary as the hybrids themselves.
“About four weeks ago,” Harry said. “When we were ordered to transition to human trials.”
“No one ever said there would be any human trials,” Lester interjected. The way he said it made Kendra think he felt the need to defend himself to her. “We were told that our work was completely developmental. It wasn’t ever supposed to be used on humans.”
Harry nodded in agreement. “Everyone thought that. Then we realized they weren’t kidding, and that they weren’t going to give us a say in the matter. The head of our research team, Dr. Mahsood, dismissed all of our concerns and ordered us to start administering our first batch of serum before it had even cooled. I have no idea why they suddenly started pushing so hard.”
