Page 22 of Feral Mate

Intel? An orderly who talked about intel? Yeah, he was no more a simple orderly than she was a goat-shifter. He didn’t carry himself like an orderly, either. If she had to guess, based on the books, movies, and television shows she liked to watch, he was ex-military and probably now worked as a mercenary.

“Dr. Payne?” she asked, approaching Mason’s bed.

There was no response. Mason wasn’t moving. She might have been worried except for the fact that she could see his chest rising and falling, and all the monitors indicated that he still lived.

She touched his arm. “Mason?” she whispered.

Nothing. It was now or never. Slipping the syringe out of her pocket, Emery removed the cap and injected the solution containing her DNA that would forcibly overwrite Mason’s DNA with her own. She watched the monitors, and she thought she could detect a slight strengthening in all of them. Ensuring that her movements could not be detected, Emery replaced the cap and slipped the used syringe back in her pocket.

Reaching down the link, she could feel he was peaceful and resting. It was a sedated sleep, but he wasn’t unconscious. Deciding at this point rest was probably what he needed most, she checked the IV and nutrition bags and all of the monitoring equipment. She made a great show of doing so.

She left him, closing the door quietly behind her. “There is no chart in there. Can you see that any daily notes are sent to me? And I’d like to wean him off the liquid nutrition and start him on some real food. I believe it could help in his healing. Considering he hasn’t been eating for a while, we’ll have to go slow, but I’d really like to make that happen.”

“I can pass your requests…”

“Not requests,” Emery corrected him, “medical orders. I was told by Dr. Perkins that I was in charge of Dr. Payne’s recovery. If that is not everyone’s understanding, then I will need to meet with Dr. Perkins and convene a meeting of the treatment team. Either I’m in charge and responsible, or I’m not, in which case my being down here is a waste of my time and talent.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will pass your concerns along.”

“Thank you,” she looked at his name badge. “Kurt. I appreciate your assistance.”

“No hard feelings from before?” he asked.

She smiled and forced her body to relax. “None. You were just following orders, right?”

He grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Have a good evening. I’ll most likely see you in the morning.”

Emery turned her back, dismissing anything more he might like to say, and headed for the elevators. Terrified that somehow he or whoever was watching might be able to detect what she had done, she walked down the hall, her footsteps echoing along the empty space.

It wasn’t until she had arrived at ground level that she felt some of the tension she’d had since she’d been denied access to Mason start to dissipate. Surreptitiously, she used her phone to scan her SUV, finding a single GPS tracking device located in the passenger side rear wheel. It could remain there for now. It couldn’t hurt her and by leaving it alone, she might keep them from realizing that she knew they were monitoring her movements outside of work.

She got into her car, grateful that the device could also tell her if someone had planted explosives in her vehicle. Starting up her SUV, she pulled out of the parking lot and waved at the guards at the gate as she headed back into Reykjavik. She spotted a small, nondescript sedan in her rear-view mirror. It seemed to be keeping space with her, always staying a single car behind. She waited until the last minute to take the exit that was before her normal one and watched to see the sedan scrambling to keep up with her, leaving a trail of honking horns in his wake.

To give herself a reason for doing that, she headed to a small fish and chips joint located in the most nondescript building she’d ever seen. There was only a small sign in the window that gave any indication it was a pub. It was a local joint, not a place tourists regularly visited. She went inside, sat at the far end of the counter, and waited. Sure enough, two goons entered and realized they’d exposed themselves. As they scanned the bar, they caught sight of her, but she ignored them, covertly taking their pictures with her phone’s camera. Let them think their little ruse had worked. She would just add their pictures to the data she was gathering.

Emery sat at the back of the bar, ate an order of fish and chips, drank two beers and watched one of the Icelandic soccer teams playing somebody or other. Emery had been shocked by how little hockey was broadcast in Reykjavik. She loved hockey, but as she learned more of the nuances of soccer, she could watch it in a pinch, and it often provided a kind of white noise when she was working at home.

Finally, she paid her tab, resisting the temptation to pay theirs and let them know she was on to them. Climbing back up in her SUV, she made her way through the city streets, as opposed to using the highway, until she arrived home. She parked her vehicle in her secure and covered spot, popped into the bakery to grab an éclair, and then trotted up the steps to her apartment.

Once again she checked for the small piece of matchbook she’d left wedged into a different piece of the door jamb and quickly ran her explosives app before unlocking the door and heading inside. Walking all through her flat, she scanned for electronic bugs and made a thorough check of the flat.

Feeling as though she was as secure as she could be given the circumstances, she locked all of the locks, flipped on the gas fireplace and then grabbed one of the flash drives she’d hidden in the toilet paper holder, scanned for viruses and malware with an external scanner, and then began to review it. It consisted of nothing more than a seemingly random mess of notes, graphs, random numbers and files that seemed to have no discernible context. She password protected the flash drive and returned it to its hiding place.

Emery retrieved the second flash drive from its hiding place behind the outlet cover just inside her closet door. She repeated her procedure of scanning for viruses and malware before she ever plugged it into her computer. It was nothing but images, and not the kind from someone’s vacation. They were violent, horrific, and made her sick to her stomach. She stumbled into the powder room and deposited the contents of her stomach into the toilet. It took a lot for an image to affect her that profoundly, but the evidence of NLGP’s experimentation on humans—or perhaps shifters in their human form—were frightening and disgusting.

Other pictures showed animals that she was fairly sure were shifters. Some of the pictures showed what looked like extra parts that had been grafted together, or perhaps they were mutant shifters someone had tried to clone some kind of hybrid. Even as revolting as they were, Emery tamped down her emotions and forced herself to carefully examine each one. It seemed each time she told herself that one picture was the worst, she’d find another to take its place.

She went back to her bath, washed her face and mouth with cold water and then retrieved the first flash drive. She plugged it into her laptop, doing a split screen to compare the two files. Little by little, she began to make some sense of the numerical data and notes on the first flash drive with the pictures on the second.

Emery retrieved the handwritten notes from behind the framed photograph and laid them out on her desk, trying to correlate what was scribbled down with what she could see on either side of her computer screen. The paper notes seemed to be more of a field journal, as if someone was chronicling in a scientific method form the various experiments from start to finish. It was all there: the hypotheses, methods, procedures, notes, results, and conclusions.

As she was going back through the images on her computer, she noticed a small mark on one of the photos. Zooming in, she saw it: the photo had been marked ‘EnGen’—the failed project in Seattle that everyone whispered about. Everything was falling into place.

Emery retrieved the final flash drive from its hiding place, scanned it, and plugged it in. It was a video—a detailed video shot over several months. Sitting in a dark basement or dungeon there was an enormous dragon—a fucking dragon—who was chained and being tortured. Humans with knives carved chunks out of its skin and threw water on it. Emery tried to recall what she’d heard about dragon-shifters. They were rare but supposedly still existed, and their kryptonite was salt water. As it remained in its dragon form, the restraints must have been iron, keeping it from shifting.

As terrifying as the video was, it was the matter-of-fact voiceover which confirmed Emery’s first assumptions—use of iron restraints and salt water—as well as detailing what the torturers were trying to do and their failure to achieve the desired results. The voice belonged to none other than Kam Perkins. There was no doubt now that Kam was a part of whatever evil NLGP was perpetrating.

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