“I’ll get them out of here,” Max said. “Go after Kelsey.”
Alex nodded, then turned and sprinted for the stairwell, praying he wasn’t too late.
* * *
Lacey was waiting as patiently as she could in Alex’s truck, sure everything was going to be fine, that Alex and his SWAT teammates would get Kelsey and the other girls out, when an ambulance pulled into the parking lot and backed up to the loading dock along the rear of the building. Ten seconds later, a guy in a white lab coat came out the back door of the building, wheeling a gurney with someone on it. The driver, also dressed in a white lab coat, got out and helped the man shove the gurney into the back of the ambulance. Then both men turned and disappeared inside the building.
She thought her heart had been pumping hard before, but she’d been wrong. Right now it was thudding so wildly, she thought it might jump out of her chest. The person on that gurney was almost certainly one of the girls who’d been kidnapped—maybe even Kelsey. Lacey couldn’t let these people drive away with whoever it was.
For half a second, she wondered if she should try to call Alex, but then chided herself for how dumb that was. He wasn’t going to answer his cell phone in the middle of looking for the girls. If she wanted to tell him, she’d have to go into the building and find him, and she didn’t have time for that. She had no idea where he and the other SWAT guys even were.
Opening the door, Lacey hopped out of the truck and ran for the loading dock before she lost her courage—or came to her senses.
She was gasping for air before she even got to the knee-high loading dock, for no other reason than she was so terrified, it felt like her throat was closing up. She slowed as she ducked her head to peek in the back of the ambulance, suddenly scared of what she would see. What if whoever was on the gurney was already dead?
Her breath hitched at the sight of the girl’s blond hair. Heart in her throat, she climbed into the ambulance, sobbing out loud at the sight of her sister lying there so still. But Kelsey was breathing, albeit slowly. Knowing she’d never be able to carry her, Lacey jerked on the gurney, trying to back it out of the ambulance. She didn’t have a lot of time before those men came back.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when the building behind her erupted with gunfire. The urge to run inside after Alex shocked her to the core. It was so strong that she almost gave in. Then she got a grip on herself. Alex was a werewolf. He could take care of himself. Kelsey couldn’t. Lacey had to get her out of here—now.
She’d just figured out the wheels of the gurney were locked into the ambulance and that she was going to have to release the latch on the floor to get her out when a familiar voice right behind her froze her solid.
“Well, isn’t this precious?” Pendergraff said.
Lacey snapped her head around just in time to see the butt of a pistol coming down straight at her temple. Stars exploded in her vision, and she found her knees giving out no matter how much she fought to stay upright.
“Drive!” Pendergraff snarled to someone in the front of the vehicle.
Lacey stumbled backward, falling to the floor as the ambulance sped away from the loading dock. Her head hit something on the way down, but while it made her vision swim even worse than it already was, oddly enough, it didn’t hurt. A part of her realized that was probably a bad thing.
All those thoughts got pushed aside as a man in a white lab coat leaned over Kelsey. Lacey grit her teeth, trying to push herself upright so she could grab the man’s leg. Pendergraff kicked her in the shoulder, knocking her down.
“The only reason I didn’t shoot you on sight is because there might be a few parts in you that someone can use,” he sneered, the scars on his face making the expression even more evil looking. “But if you piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the head. No one will need that.”
Lacey stopped trying to get up, but only because she realized they wouldn’t do anything to Kelsey while they were in the ambulance. She needed to wait and pray that Alex would find them in time—or she lucked out and managed to rescue them both on her own.
Chapter 18
Alex followed Kelsey’s scent through the first floor and out the back of the building, ignoring the growls and shooting going on all around him. When he came out on a loading dock, he discovered that things were even worse than he’d feared. Kelsey’s scent was definitely back here, but so was Lacey’s, which meant she’d been on this dock mere seconds ago. He glanced hopefully at his truck, but she wasn’t there. His head started to spin. What the hell had Lacey been doing back here?
She’d been trying to help her sister, because he’d completely fucked up that task himself.
Shit.
As much as Alex wanted to continue the mental ass kicking he was giving himself, he needed to focus. He sniffed the air, picking up the smell of burnt tires. A vehicle had just squealed away from the building, and his gut told him Lacey and Kelsey were inside it. Looking up, he saw a pair of taillights disappearing into the darkness in the distance. That had to be them.
Alex took off running, only to stop before he’d gone a hundred feet. He could run damn fast, but there was no way he could catch a vehicle, not with the head start this one had.
He stood in the middle of the road, weighing his options. Knowing Kelsey had been kidnapped so they could harvest her organs, he could make a few educated guesses about where that vehicle had been taking Lacey and her sister. This part of town had a lot of hospitals and surgical clinics, which was likely why so many of McDonald’s research facilities were located in this area. If they were planning to cut into Kelsey, it would stand to reason they were heading for a place that could handle a major surgery. Even if he threw out all the hospitals—they’d definitely notice something weird going on—it still left a lot of places to search.
He reached for his phone, thinking Becker and his damn computers could do something, but then stopped. He couldn’t just wait around and hope Becker might figure out where Lacey and her sister were. He’d wasted time once before up in Rochester, and innocent people had paid the price.
Alex jogged back to the loading dock, going with the only real link he had to Lacey and Kelsey—their scents. While he could smell both of them, Lacey’s scent was much stronger. Maybe it was thanks to the connection that had been developing between them before everything went wrong.
He closed his eyes, pushing his shift and trying to lock onto her scent. Once he had it, he moved away from the loading dock, praying he could stay on her scent even though she was in a moving vehicle. But the scent began to get lighter the farther he moved from the loading dock. Within fifty feet, it disappeared completely.
He doubled back and picked up the scent again, then leaned down closer to the ground as he fought to force his shift as far as he could take it. Both Khaki and Brooks had said his inability to push his shift was holding back his sense of smell. Now was the time to get past that.
