Serengeti Sunrise

Chapter Ten

The voices were the first thing that infringed on Zoe’s consciousness. Long before she was awake enough to move, she heard them, broken riddles that faded in and out and meant nothing in her fuzzy cotton-candy world.

“…can’t keep him under. Nothing in the data suggests a male of his size should be able to…”

“…responding to the hormone yet? Check her temperature again.”

“…don’t think the wall will hold if he attacks it again…”

“…shouldn’t she be shifting? The data clearly states within four hours of injection…”

“…you wanna try putting him in restraints, be my guest. I’m not going in there…”

“…running out of sedative…”

Sedative. That explained the IV she could feel in her arm. She was drugged. Was she in the hospital? Lying on her back, she could be in a hospital bed. Had she been in an accident? Emergency surgery? The voices didn’t sound like the pride doctor. If she wasn’t at the pride, where was she?

The last thing she remembered…huh. What was the last thing she remembered?

Tyler’s face pushed to the front of her fuzziness. Tyler. She remembered the shock on his face as he told her to run, the sickening dread and fear that had hardened in her stomach as he’d collapsed at her feet, the sting in her upper arm. She remembered running for help, though everything in her screamed to stay and guard him. Then nothing.

Chills shot through her blood, but Zoe couldn’t let terror freeze her. They’d been taken. Were they being held together? Was he all right? Was she?

She flexed her muscles as much as she could without moving, careful not to alert their captors that she was awake. She tested her extremities. Everything seemed to be working, but she felt…odd. Achy, hot, and like her skin had been stretched too tight.

“I can tell you’re awake.” The voice was feminine and high-pitched, young. Not one of the voices.

Zoe opened her eyes. The room was tiny and poorly lit, the walls and ceiling corrugated metal, like a container from a cargo ship. But they were in west Texas, or at least they had been when they were captured, not exactly close to a port. The room barely fit the narrow twin bed Zoe was strapped to and a pile of unidentifiable medical equipment.

The girl who’d spoken stood in the corner, as far as she could get from Zoe without leaving the room. She was older than Zoe’d guessed from her voice, but still couldn’t be much more than twenty-five. Thin and nervous, she clutched a water bottle against her breastbone, her wide eyes fixed on Zoe as if she might leap from the bed and eat her—which she would, if she weren’t strapped to the bed tight enough to restrict circulation.

“Where am I?” Zoe tried to say, but her voice came out a ragged croak. Her throat was raw, as if she hadn’t swallowed for days. How long had she been out? She felt nauseous. From lack of food? Or the aftereffects of the drug? She hadn’t completely shaken it off. The room still seemed to lurch and sway around her.

“Are you thirsty?” the girl asked, though she showed no inclination to give Zoe the water.

Zoe ignored the question as beyond idiotic. “What do you want?”

She fidgeted with the bottle. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you. They only let me check your vitals.”

A low growl and a shuffling thud sounded through the wall. Zoe’s heart rate quickened. Tyler.

The girl made a keening noise and scuttled away from the metal barrier. “You need to get him to calm down,” she whispered urgently. “They want him alive because they’ve never been able to capture a breedable pair before, but if they can’t keep him sedated, they’ll kill him. You have to make him stop.”

“Untie me and I will.”

She shook her head frantically. “I can’t.”

One of the voices filtered through the wall. “…half dose should do her. Use the rest on him.”

The girl shuddered. She was terrified. Of Tyler, of Zoe, but also of them.

“I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. You need to use your mate-link thingy to tell him you’re okay, or they’re going to shoot him with something other than a tranq.”

Mate-link thing? “We don’t have—”

“Candice!” A piece of the wall slid open and a slim, dark-haired man with a ponytail appeared in the opening, holding a syringe. “Out. Now.”

The girl sucked in a sharp breath and darted past the ponytail guy.

He advanced toward Zoe, never looking at her face, his eyes flicking over her body like she was nothing more than an animal or a specimen on a table. Which to him, she probably was. Zoe jerked against her restraints, baring sharp teeth and releasing her claws in a partial shift, but it didn’t do any good.

The plunger on the syringe pressed down. The world blacked out.

The last thing Zoe heard was the unmistakable roar of an enraged lion. Numb lips twitched in a smile of vicious satisfaction. They’d messed with the wrong lion.

Tyler was coming for her.

Tyler swam up through a yellow haze, desperately clawing his way to consciousness even though he couldn’t remember why he felt such violent urgency. He knew only that he needed to be awake. To be strong.

He heard a snarling roar and realized dimly that it was coming from him. His fur felt sticky—blood?—and his claws were extended with the awareness of a threat. He scented the air, trying to identify the danger.

Metal, chemicals, human sweat, a fading scent of onions. And beneath it all, familiar as his own heartbeat, Zoe.

Protect your mate.

There it was. That’s why he needed to be sharp. Why he needed to fight. He had to keep her safe. His mate, his life.

And they’d dared touch her.

Tyler launched himself at a wall already heavily gouged, the metal yielding like warm butter beneath his claws. He heard voices shouting on the other side, frantic and panicked. Good. Let them piss themselves with fear. Tyler roared again, pushed beyond reason and violence into blind carnage.

The room jerked. Only when it slammed to a stop, throwing him sideways against the far wall, did he realize the entire structure had been moving. As his lion leapt again at the sides of his cage, savagery in every swipe of his paws, the small part of him, buried deep but still capable of rational thought, picked up on the telling details.

The room was claustrophobically tight, no room for a running start. They had to be in a trailer of some kind. If the bastards had been dragging a camper all over, it would explain why the pride hadn’t been able to track their movements to any one spot. It also meant he had no idea where they were and only instinct telling him he hadn’t already been separated from Zoe. Instinct and scent. She was either near or they’d doused the trailer in the scent of her distress just to send him into a frenzy.

Dimly he heard panicked voices seeping through the holes his claws were punching in the metal.

“…used the last of the sedative an hour ago. He’s shaking it off at four times the rate the research suggests,” a tenor whined.

“I don’t give a shit. Get a hold of the situation!” a dark, authoritative voice barked. “I can’t drive with a thousand pounds of enraged lion rattling around back here. Put him under or fucking put him down, but get control, dammit! We can always catch another male, but I refuse to jeopardize the female. We’ve never been able to experiment on one before—”

Tyler stopped listening. The female. Zoe. Like hell they were going to experiment on his mate. His humanity receded under the crushing need to reach Zoe. To protect her, no matter the cost. Adrenaline coursed through his blood, thickening it until each heartbeat was heavy with angry purpose.

He coiled back on his haunches and sprang at the door. Jagged metal edges screamed against one another, more piercing than nails on a chalkboard, as the frame gave way. The deadbolts held, but the frame ripped out of its moorings. The heavy metal panel fell into the room beyond, a feral lion riding it down.

Tyler spun in a circle, his tail lashing out behind him as he scanned for threats. He’d fallen into a compact office of some kind, tightly packed with filing drawers and locked cabinets. It was empty, but held two additional doors. The one next to where he’d been held smelled sterile, with distinct human scents—lab. That’s where the men behind the voices were hiding. But the door on the opposite side of the little office smelled so familiar the fur on his shoulders stood on end. Zoe.

Anger called him toward the lab, but need drove him across the room. The deadbolts holding Zoe’s cell shut required thumbs, but for a moment he couldn’t shift. Rage locked him in his lion form. Tyler planted his paws on the metal floor, struggling to calm himself enough to change. There wasn’t time to waste. The scientists must have heard the crash. They would know he was loose. They’d be coming.

But his body refused to obey. Tyler, who never lost control, was at the mercy of his lion and the lion wouldn’t rest until he’d ripped out some throats and lapped up the warm blood that spurted out.

The small part of him that still possessed some shred of human awareness appreciated the catch-22. His feral need to protect his mate prevented him from freeing her, but the man’s frustration was a dim echo of the lion’s obsession.

The sound of the lab door opening behind him spun him snarling to face the new threat. Time was up. The lion roared his pleasure. He would have blood.

Zoe came awake to the same sound that had followed her into darkness—a familiar ragged roar. But much closer now. Tyler was right outside the door. He’d gotten loose.

He’s coming for me.

The sharp comfort that thought inspired was disconcerting. Was she a damsel in distress? Did she just lie there and wait to be rescued? Tyler would always come for her, her certainty of that fact was unshakeable, but she refused to be declawed by that certainty. She was a lioness, dammit. She didn’t wait for a white knight.

Even if she was still dopey from sedative and strapped to a bed. She wasn’t without resources.

Zoe tested the restraints, but they were no looser than before. She was going to have to shift. It would destroy her clothes and hurt like hell—changing the shape of her body while restrained felt like her joints had been repeatedly jerked out of their sockets and rammed back in again. But she wasn’t afraid of pain.

Zoe reached for her lioness form. There was a minute delay, thanks to the sedative still slowing her reflexes, but when it came, the change ripped through her hard. The force of the shift shredded the leather of the restraints, and she gave a feline hiss of pain. Shaking off the remnants of leather, she sprang to the foot of the bed on four paws then abruptly shifted back again, coming to her human form with her arms wrapped around her middle like she could hold the broken pieces of herself together.

“Shit.” Yeah, it definitely hurt. Lurching to her feet, she staggered from the wave of dizziness that always accompanied changing form twice in quick succession. She groped at the door, fumbling with the knob for several seconds before her fuzzy thoughts cleared enough for her to realize it was locked. Brilliant, Zoe.

She was doing a pretty shitty job of rescuing herself so far.

She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d eaten, but it was too long to risk another shift—she’d just pass out in lioness form. Helplessness churned sickeningly in her gut. Then a pair of gunshots echoed loudly in the room beyond her cage.

“Tyler!” she screamed. Claws sprang from her fingertips, her teeth sharpening to fangs as she barely stopped a full shift from incapacitating her.

A fraction of a second later the door sprang open, and Zoe saw the blood.

It wasn’t the pain of the bullet punching through his shoulder that brought Tyler back to humanity. It was the sound of Zoe’s voice screaming through the door.

The pansy-ass science geek who had fired wildly into the room retreated behind the shut door to the lab again. Taking advantage of the cowardice and his own sudden clarity, Tyler shifted back to human form. Blood gushed from the hole in his shoulder, running faster with the reconfiguring of his body. It streamed down his torso in thick rivulets, but he didn’t care. He threw back the bolts on Zoe’s cage and yanked the door open, his heart jerking spasmodically at the sight of her, clothing shredded, claws sharp, fangs bared. She was an Amazon warrior ready for battle.

Sweet Jesus, she was gorgeous.

He reached for her, needing to touch her, but though she rushed forward, it wasn’t into his arms. “God damn, you’re bleeding a ton. No spurting, that’s good. Not arterial, then.” Her hands slapped his shoulder over the bullet hole, bearing down on the wound. Tyler made a sound that wasn’t remotely human, and Zoe’s wild eyes jerked up to meet his. “Who shot you? How many are left?” Her words were choppy, efficient and emotionless—crisis mode.

As gratified as he was by her confidence that he’d already eliminated some, he couldn’t live up to her expectation. He shook his head as he pulled her behind a filing cabinet so they’d have some cover if the bastards opened fire again. “I’ve heard two men and one girl.”

Zoe nodded once. “The girl’s scared shitless. She shouldn’t be a problem. The one guy I saw was sort of thinnish, but if they’re armed—” She broke off, her eyes scanning every surface of the tiny office even as she applied pressure to the wound in his shoulder. “D’you see anything I can use as a shield? Kevlar would be nice, but I doubt they left a flak jacket lying around for me.”

Tyler wrapped his fingers around Zoe’s wrist to get her attention, focused on the one part of her statement that scared him most. “You aren’t going in there.”

“You want to wait ’em out? I gotta say that’s a pretty crappy plan, Tyler, since I’m pretty sure the exit to this tin can is through that room. Unless you’re feeling up to tearing through another wall.”

“I’ll go.”

“You’re bleeding. A lot. There’s macho and then there’s dumbass. Don’t be a dumbass.”

The animal rose up inside him, fast and violent, and he ground his teeth against the primal urge to shift. He’d probably die of blood loss if he did, but instinct didn’t care. “I can’t watch you get shot, Zoe,” he growled. The sight would kill him faster than a bullet.

“Yeah, well, I can’t stand here and watch you get shot again. The one who isn’t injured gets to take on the bad guys. Those are the rules.”

“Together.” The word was painful to push out, but Zoe was right, he wasn’t much protection shot up and unable to shift to his more powerful form.

“Together? Bonnie and Clyde style?”

Tyler winced. “Maybe pick a couple who didn’t die.”

“Can’t think of any. Butch and Sundance… Thelma and Louise…”

“Zoe. Stop.”

“Together is good,” she said, a catch in her voice.

He squeezed her wrist gently, looking away from the door to study the curves of her face he’d long since memorized. Dark circles smudged the smooth skin beneath her eyes, lines of stress bracketed her mouth and her eyes were glassy, but her hands were steady. “Zoe,” he whispered.

She swallowed thickly, looking up to meet his eyes. “Yeah, I know. I love you too.”

His heart lurched. He’d run from her, from this, for months. He’d known from the second he laid eyes on her that Zoe King was his, and he’d done everything he could to keep from falling for her. He’d seen her as another duty, another weight of responsibility, but Zoe wasn’t an obligation, she was his whole heart. He didn’t just need her or want her, he loved her with an intensity that made the rest of his life small by comparison.

What kind of fool saw that truth only when their life together might last only a few more minutes?

Tyler wrapped his uninjured arm around Zoe and held her against his chest, pressing a kiss on her forehead, breathing in the scent of her—even if it was overlaid with the thick tang of his own blood.

A muted thud from behind the door to the lab called them back to the task at hand.

Zoe pulled away, straightening to stand on her own. “Let’s do this.”

Zoe crouched on her haunches beside the door, trying to shake the woozy feeling that had accompanied her latest shift. Tyler hunched to the left of the doorway, ready to throw it open so Zoe could leap through—a plan she’d feel much more confident with if he didn’t look like he was about to pass out from blood loss.

They made a great team. Dizzy and dizzier. If surviving came down to a race to see who could lose consciousness first, they were set.

But the situation wasn’t going to get better if they waited. There was nothing in the office to stitch Tyler up and nothing for her to eat to get her energy level up. They were never going to be in better shape than they were in right now.

Zoe nodded once—the gesture always feeling oddly foreign in her feline form—and Tyler reached for the doorknob.

She darted through the opening as soon as it was wide enough to fit her body, belly low to the ground, teeth bared, claws out—and drew up short, paws scrabbling to stop her momentum on the smooth tiles of the lab.

Two bodies lay prone on the floor, unmoving, white foam dribbling from their mouths and a sickly sweet smell rising off them. Zoe hissed, instinctively backing away from the too-sweet death scent.

Ponytail guy and a younger, even thinner man with a military-style haircut weren’t going to be a problem anymore.

“What the hell?” Tyler stood in the doorway, frowning at the bodies on the floor.

A clicking sound brought Zoe around sharply, and she saw the girl, huddled in the corner between an exam table and a metal cabinet, sobbing silently and shaking so hard her teeth were rattling against one another. “I c-c-couldn’t,” she moaned, holding something clutched tightly in her fist. “Please don’t h-h-hurt me.”

Zoe closed her mouth to hide the sharpness of her fangs, rising out of her hunting crouch.

“A suicide pill?” Tyler bent over the bodies to check for pulses, his nose wrinkling at the sweet-and-sour scent. He turned his head toward the girl. “Why?”

“B-B-Ben said the bullets didn’t stop you. We didn’t have s-s-silver,” she explained, somewhat calmer now that she wasn’t being snarled at by a few hundred pounds of pissed-off lioness.

Silver bullets. Thank God for superstitious idiots.

“Ben was a lousy shot,” Tyler grunted. “Why not just run?”

“They knew too much to be captured and tortured by weres.”

Tyler’s eyebrows arched speculatively. Zoe could almost see him assuming the mantle of a pride lieutenant. “And what do you know?”

The girl’s teeth began to chatter again. “I don’t know anything! I’m new. They only brought me in a couple months ago in San Antonio. Long after they broke off from the Organization. I don’t know where any of the research bases are, I swear. Just don’t hurt me!”

The Organization. Zoe’s ears pricked forward. The girl didn’t know how much she did know. The shifters had never even had a name for their boogeyman before now.

“We aren’t going to hurt you. What’s your name?”

“C-C-Candice. Candice Murphy.”

“Candice. Where are we?” Tyler asked her.

Her face screwed up in concentration. “New Mexico? We couldn’t make very good time because Dr. B couldn’t use the main roads with you making the truck swerve all over, throwing yourself around back there.”

Zoe eyed the two men on the floor, wondering which of them was Dr. B. Her stomach rumbled noisily, hunger from her multiple shifts stabbing into her gut. If she didn’t eat soon, she’d be tempted to take a bite out of one of the bodies. Just a small bite. A little nibble from the calf maybe. Did it even count as cannibalism if she was in her lion form?

The room dipped and swayed around her and Zoe sneezed, shaking her head sharply to try to get the world back to rights.

“Zo? You all right, babe?” Tyler came toward her, digging his fingers into the fur behind her ears. She leaned into his touch, steadied by his presence.

When the wall behind him began to slide to the side, she thought it was just her eyes playing tricks on her again. Until the muzzle of a gun lowered into the opening, aimed at Tyler’s broad back.

Dr. B wasn’t on the floor.

Zoe roared, throwing her weight against Tyler’s legs to knock him to the ground and leaping past him toward the opening as the gun fired, deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. Zoe didn’t have time to see if the bullet had struck Tyler. She landed hard on the heavy-set man behind the sliding panel which led to the cab of a truck. Her claws ripped through flesh, her teeth sinking deep into the soft tissue of his throat, cutting off any attempt at a scream. Warm blood gushed in a sweet rush into her mouth.

This man had tried to kill Tyler. He’d kidnapped her and experimented on her. Who knew how many other shifters he’d harmed? She basked in the last feeble beats of his heart before dropping his body with a thud. She swayed over him, dizzy from expending the last of her energy, and felt Tyler’s hands on her, steadying her.

She looked up, seeing only that he was whole—no new bullet wounds marking him. Then the world flipped upside down and whooshed away from her like a train through a dark tunnel, and Zoe collapsed into blackness.