Page 69 of Bad Blood Wolf

Chapter 25

Jasmin was pacing the cage in the empty fight barn, trying to keep her jag from panicking.

Across the barn, Brody and his mother were lying on identical metal gurneys, electrodes attached their heads, hooked up to some kind of portable scanning equipment.

Men in lab coats were huddled around the screens, along with a couple of the men in black. Their leader was grilling Bastian about the location, clearly pissed off.

“You told me this place was secure,” he said sharply. He had short blond hair in a military cut, and a weathered face with deep creases down his cheeks. His name was Decker.

“I said nobody would find us here,” Bastian said sullenly. “It’s usually used on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but with it being Christmas, nobody’ll be here until next week.”

“Unless they decide to show up and do a little organizing. Or cleanup. Or some other fucking thing you can’t predict.” The blond man shook his head in frustration and spoke into his radio. “Perimeter, keep a sharp lookout. Use any means necessary to divert or neutralize intruders.”

Translation: if you can’t get rid of them, kill them.That set Jasmin’s jaguar pacing again. Flynn and the others had no idea what they were up against. They could walk right into an ambush.

Be careful, she prayed. Be paranoid.

At least Decker hadn’t found the tracking device, stuck to the bottom corner of the cage in the van. His guards were on the lookout for casual visitors, not a rescue party.

Be paranoid. Be badass. Be Flynn.

Decker strode over to the scientists. “What’s the holdup?” he said. “Can we use Jameson, or should we just take the old lady and kill him and the jag?”

“He has some kind of a mental block.” That was one of the scientists, an Asian man with thick glasses. Not a shifter, then. Shifters never needed glasses.

“It’s fascinating,” said one of the others, a younger man with a boyish enthusiasm Jasmin found sickening. “Like someone erected a wall in his mind. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”

“So he’s useless,” Decker said.

The Asian man shook his head. “Not from a scientific standpoint, certainly,” he said. “Simply to examine his brain and see how this might have been done, how it could be replicated, how it can be broken…”

“I’m not here to bring you toys to play with,” Decker snapped. “And neither are my clients. They’re looking for white wolves with specific powers. Mental blocks are useless.”

The boyish man gave Decker a ‘stupid civilian, you just don’t get it’ look.

“If he has a block, he has powers,” he said. “He has to be blocking something, or there’d be no point. And a wall like this must be blocking something big.”

Excitement crept into his voice. “This one’s almost more important than she is. Do you know what Gen-X will pay for a half-breed with verifiable powers? Ones that possibly can be turned on and off with the right stimuli? That could solve the instability problem—”

Cold fear spiked through Jasmin. They were going to take Brody. Test him. Experiment on him.

Torture him.

Hoses. Water pulsing in her nose and eyes and ears, choking, can’t breathe. Then the shocks, the burning pain. Must shift. No, can’t shift. Jag. Human. Jag. Human. Do what they want and they’ll stop, but they won’t stop, they can’t win, don’t do it do it don’t do it…

Jasmin threw herself at the cage wall, rattling the metal grating. The impact nearly stunned her, but she scrambled to her feet, ready to attack. Get to Brody. Can’t let them take him. Not Brody. Nooooo…

She gave a hideous, desperate yowl of pain. No one she loved was ever going through what her crew had been through, not if she had to die to keep it from happening.

“Cut that out!” one of the guards yelled. He hit the button on his shock stick and slapped it against the cage. Jasmin barely jumped back before the current hit her.

For a second, she teetered on the edge of panic. Run! Hit the wall! Beat it down! Kill them, kill them, kill them…

With all the mental strength she’d gathered from Alexander Grant’s cells, from the fight cage, from the dark locked closet in her childhood, she pushed the panic down.

She used to make herself Change in the cells at night even though she’d been ordered not to. Trained not to. Tortured and punished and beaten and bloodied. She’d held down the panic then, and when it grew too unbearable, she bled someone.

She had no one to bleed now, but she couldn’t panic.