Her Perfect Mate Read online

  Ivy spun around, every hair on her body standing on end. Her fangs elongated. Her claws came out. Her animal instincts screamed at her to run and hide at the same time they demanded she attack and kill. The classic fight or flight response, only a hundred times more powerful, and it made her entire body tremble with the need to do something.

  “What the hell was that?” Landon’s question was a hoarse whisper.

  She didn’t answer. There was only one thing in the world that could make a sound like that.

  “Ivy?” Landon put his hand on her arm and turned her to face him. “What is it?”

  She bit back a growl. “A shifter.”

  The shifter roared again, the sound lower and filled with unimaginable pain. Ivy’s stomach churned. What was happening to him?

  The fight or flight response hit her again even harder than before, and this time she couldn’t ignore it. Unable to stop herself, she pulled out of Landon’s grasp and vaulted over the railing to the atrium five floors below. The fall brought her to her knees and knocked the breath from her lungs, but she barely noticed as she jumped up and raced toward the screams.

  Landon shouted into her earpiece, telling her to wait, but she barely registered his voice. She wanted to stop but couldn’t. Nothing mattered but finding the shifter and helping him.

  She let her feline senses take over and lead her through the maze of hallways and down two flights of stairs to a door that stood ajar. The air coming from the room beyond was filled with the scent of blood, pain, and terror so strong it almost made her cry.

  She slowed her steps, nostrils flaring as she neared the partially open door. She’d thought she smelled one shifter, but now she realized there was more than one. A lot more. Ten, maybe fifteen.

  Were they all being tortured? Growling low in her throat, Ivy moved forward, her hands working as she imagined rending the flesh of whoever was hurting one of her kind. It was only then she remembered she was holding a weapon. She almost didn’t recognize it. Tightening her grip on the pistol, she pushed open the door.

  Unlike the hallway, the room was brightly lit, and she blinked as it momentarily blinded her. When she could see again, she discovered she was in some sort of makeshift medical clinic terrifyingly similar to the one in the warehouse in Atlanta. Except this one wasn’t empty.

  A group of men were clustered around one of the beds, their backs to her. A shifter was strapped down to the bed, a heart rate monitor and a bunch of other things she didn’t recognize hooked to his naked chest. She cringed as his body contorted in obvious pain. His claws and fangs came out and went back in over and over as if he couldn’t quite complete the change. After one more gut-wrenching howl, he stiffened, then went still, his body limp.

  The men murmured something among themselves, but Ivy didn’t hear it. She was too busy trying to figure out which of them was responsible for the shifter’s death so she could tear him to pieces first.

  She tensed, ready to launch herself at them when the shifter bolted upright, breaking the straps securing his wrists to the bed as if they were tissue paper. He flexed his fingers, studying his claws as if he’d never seen them before. They didn’t hold his interest for long as his nose picked up a scent. He jerked his head up to look at her, his eyes glowing red.

  Ivy took an involuntary step back, shock breaking the control her feline side had wrestled from her. Rational thought slowly returned as she looked at the…thing on the bed. Shifters didn’t have red eyes. Not normal shifters anyway.

  Alerted to her presence, the men surrounding the bed spun around to look in her direction. She was stunned to see that most of them were the same red-eyed kind of shifter that was sitting on the bed. They smelled like shifters, but there was something off about them. She didn’t know quite what it was, but the way their eyes blazed with excitement and hunger scared her.

  That fear broke the final hold her feline half had on her. Perversely, she’d finally stumbled on a way to break herself out of the shifter zone when it took over—fear. But right now, she couldn’t let that emotion take charge, either. Something was incredibly wrong here.

  Stutmeir wasn’t making a bioweapon in this mountain retreat—he never had been. He was making something far more terrifying.

  She had to warn Landon.

  “I’ll be damned. That’s her—the one I told you about.”

  Ivy recognized the man’s voice but couldn’t remember from where. She was still trying to wrap her head around what Stutmeir was doing.

  “Take her alive,” another man ordered.

  Instinct took over again, only this time, the instinctive action came from years of training, and Ivy was the one in control. Lifting her weapon, she fired off what she hoped were enough shots to slow down the shifters, then turned and ran.

  They followed immediately, growling like rabid dogs as they chased after her. She fired her pistol behind her, but either her aim was worse than she thought or they were bulletproof because not a single one went down.

  She made it to the second set of stairs when she felt a stinging pain in her leg, then another in her back. She winced and glanced down, expecting to see blood spurting from a bullet wound, but instead there was a dart sticking out of her leg.

  Tranquilizers.

  She pulled them out and kept running, speeding up as she raced toward the atrium. “Landon!”

  “Ivy!” Landon’s voice was breathless in her ear. “Shit. I heard gunshots. Where the hell—?”

  “Listen to me!” She didn’t know how much time she had until she lost consciousness, and she needed to get as much information to Landon as she could. “Stutmeir’s not making a bioweapon. He’s making shifters. They’ve already hit me with tranquilizers. Get out of here while you can.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you!”

  “You have to. Someone has to warn the DCO.” She’d made it to the first floor and began weaving her way through the maze of hallways. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She was almost to the atrium when the drugs she’d been hit with kicked in and she was suddenly lightheaded. Ten feet later, it felt like her feet had turned to lead. Within ten more feet, she was on her knees, her muscles refusing to follow her orders anymore. As she collapsed, she caught a glimpse of tall windows with velvet drapes and realized she was in the atrium.

  Somewhere above her, Landon swore.

  She lifted her head. He was swinging his legs over the railing, preparing to jump down from the second floor so he could come to her rescue like he had so many times before. The thought of what those things in there would do to him made her eyes fill with tears.

  “Landon, no!” she screamed at him. “Run. Get out of here. They’re coming.”

  Gunfire came from the hallway behind her, drowning her words. Landon threw himself backward over the railing onto the second-floor walkway to immediately return fire. She thought she heard bodies hit the floor, but she wasn’t sure. Those things were fast—faster than she was maybe—and they didn’t go down easy. No one had ordered them to take Landon alive, either, so they were riddling the whole second floor with hundreds of rounds.

  Her arms gave out and she felt her upper body hit the floor. She tried to lift her head again so she could see Landon one more time before the drugs took their full effect, but it was no good. Hands clawed at her, dragging her across the floor, and she knew it was too late. For her, at least. Please God, don’t let it be too late for Landon.

  “Run, babe,” she begged. “Please.”

  Then even her voice stopped working as everything went black.

  ***

  Ivy’s whispered plea tore at Landon’s gut. He would do anything for her, except run. Unless it was toward her. And right now, that was looking more impossible by the second.

  “Hold on, Ivy.” He didn’t know if she could hear him over the headset or not. It didn’t mat
ter. He needed her to know he was still there. “I’m coming to get you.”

  He ducked behind a support column to reload.

  Why had she zoned out again on him and jumped over the freaking railing? He’d immediately raced for the stairs, but when he got to the fourth floor, he discovered the stupid staircase didn’t go all the way down to the ground floor like it was supposed to. He’d had to run all the way along the concourse to the other end of the lodge to get to the stairs down to the third floor, then do the same thing to get to the second floor.

  Slamming a magazine into place, he turned and emptied all thirty rounds into the swarm of shifters descending on Ivy. He might as well have been pelting them with spitballs for all the good it did. Some went down, but not many. The damn things were bulletproof.

  He ducked behind the support column to reload, then stuck his head out for a quick look. In the atrium, one of the shifters picked Ivy up and slung her over his shoulder, then turned and ran back in the direction he’d come. They’d gone to great lengths to take Ivy alive, and that gave him hope. He still had time to rescue her. He just had to find a way to get through the pack of ravening beasts looking to put a hole in him.

  He wasn’t only taking fire from the shifters in the atrium. Two shifters were shooting at him from the stairwell leading down to the first floor, while two others pumped out rounds from the stairwell leading up to the third floor. He put half his magazine into one stairwell, then emptied what was left into the other.

  He had to get to a place where he could both defend himself and put some of these creatures down for good. To do that, he’d have to abandon Ivy. At least for right now. He’d rather cut his right arm off than do that. But jumping over the railing into a pack of bloodthirsty shifters was only going to get him killed. Ivy needed him alive.

  Landon grabbed his fourth—and last—magazine and jammed it into his M4. There was no way that was going to be enough firepower to take down an entire lodge of shifters. He snatched the single grenade attached to his vest and pulled the pin. It was tempting to throw it into the atrium and blow the shifters down there to kingdom come so he could rescue Ivy, but without any backup ammo, he’d be toast. And Ivy would still be in trouble. He needed to clear his exit route, get to the packs he’d hidden in the forest and load up on extra ammo, then get back here as fast as he could. When he did, he was going to kill every single creature that stood between him and Ivy. First, though, he had to clear out the shifters in the stairwell. Trouble was they were too fast and could pick up the grenade and throw it back at him before it went off. He’d have to hold it for a few seconds before he threw it. Doing that was dangerous, but it was a risk he had to take.

  He pulled the pin and counted to three, then tossed it along the concourse toward the stairwell. It went off two seconds later. The blast shook the floor, stunning the shifters in the atrium as well as the ones on the steps, and they stopped shooting momentarily.

  Landon was up and running for the third-floor stairwell before anyone could start shooting. The grenade hadn’t done as much damage to the two shifters blocking the steps as he’d hoped, and he paused just long enough to shoot both of them in the head before running for the stairs.

  He made it up to the fifth floor and onto the wall before he heard someone behind him. That was fine. He didn’t need a huge head start, just enough to get to the forest before they caught up with him. He knew where he was going—they didn’t. That meant they’d have to waste time tracking him once they entered the woods.

  When he reached the section of wall where he and Ivy had climbed up, he started thinking he may have underestimated the shifters’ speed. Half a dozen of them were on the wall and headed his way, guns blazing. As if that weren’t bad enough, he started taking fire from somewhere below the wall, too.

  Swearing, he turned and put a few rounds into the shifters coming at him along the wall. Landon was sure he hit at least four of them, but only one went down.

  Dropping to his stomach, he slid his feet over the edge of the wall. He climbed down the first few feet, then dropped the last ten. He hit the ground and rolled, making sure to take a second to put a few more bullets into the wall up near the edge before taking off into the forest. That might discourage the bastards from climbing down right away.

  It didn’t.

  The shifters jumped down from the wall, hitting the ground so hard it vibrated under Landon’s feet. And that theory about them having to waste time tracking him through the woods? He’d been wrong about that, too. They followed like hounds on a scent, which he supposed was an apt description.

  Running through the woods while wearing NVGs was never a fun event—the lack of depth perception was difficult—but it was even worse when someone was shooting at you. Trying to focus on where his feet were landing at the same time he was worried about taking a bullet in the back didn’t give him a lot of speed.

  Luckily, the shifters were horrible shots. If he wasn’t in a heavily forested area, he might have been dead already. The trees around him were taking a lot of punishment, that was for sure. Sooner or later, the bastards would get lucky and hit him.

  He returned fire as accurately as he could while on the run. He was pretty sure he hit a few of them, but not before they rerouted him away from where the backpacks of ammo were waiting. Then he felt a sickening sensation—the bolt on his M4 locked to the rear because there were no more cartridges in the magazine.

  Knowing the shifters would figure out he was empty pretty quick, Landon turned and ran. He didn’t want to think about it, but for the moment at least, his plans had changed. Now, he wasn’t trying to get to his ammo and then to Ivy. Now, he was trying to stay alive for the next five minutes until he could think of a better plan.

  Behind him, the pack of shifters howled. Landon threw a quick glance over his shoulder. They were gaining on him. He looked around for someplace—anyplace—he could use to set a trap. If he could take out the first shifter that caught up with him, he could grab the guy’s weapon. It was a long shot, but it was all he had.

  Landon was so focused on what he was looking for he didn’t realize the forest had opened up in front of him until he was standing in a patch of moonlight. The ground around him erupted in a shower of dirt and rocks as the shifters immediately zeroed in on his location. A bullet ripped into his vest, grazing his shoulder, and he winced. He tried to run, twist, do something to find cover. But suddenly the ground disappeared from underneath him and he was falling.

  A cliff.

  Shit.

  What the hell would happen to Ivy if he didn’t make it?

  ***

  It felt like someone was driving a spike into her head. Either that, or a red-hot poker. Regardless, ouch.

  Ivy opened her eyes and found herself staring up at fluorescent lights. The brightness only made her head hurt worse, and she squeezed her eyes shut as the room suddenly started spinning. She was going to throw up.

  She tried to turn over so she wouldn’t get sick all over herself, but something held her down at the wrists and ankles. Everything came rushing back—the red-eyed shifters, Stutmeir, the tranquilizer darts…Landon. She prayed more than anything he’d gotten away. She didn’t care what happened to her as long as he was safe.

  She opened her eyes again, more slowly this time. She squinted up at the light, waiting for another wave of dizziness to hit her. When it didn’t come, she lifted her head slightly and saw that she was strapped down to the same bed as the red-eyed shifter she’d seen earlier. She was naked except for her bra and panties. Panic surged through her, making it hard to get enough air, and she forced herself to take a deep, calming breath. Freaking out wouldn’t help her escape.

  She lifted her head again to survey the room and was relieved to find she was alone. She wrinkled her nose at the scent of blood. It was old, as if it had been there for a while. It didn’t smell like it came from a shifter. Bu
t it wasn’t quite human, either.

  More like a combination of the two. Like the creatures Stutmeir had made. Suddenly, kidnapping genetic scientists and DNA experts made a lot more sense. They’d thought the ex-Stasi was making a bioweapon, but instead he’d been developing shifters. Why?

  She’d have to worry about the answer to that question after she got out of here.

  She yanked at the leather straps around her wrists, but they wouldn’t budge. She jerked on the ones around her ankles next. Same deal. The red-eyed shifter had made it look so easy.

  The sound of men’s voices drifted in from outside the room, and she froze.

  “We can’t leave now.” A heavily accented man’s voice, German by the sound of it. Stutmeir, maybe? “Not when we’re on the verge of finally realizing our goal. Last time we moved, it took weeks to get the lab up and running again.”

  Lab? Ivy almost choked on a laugh. Of a mad scientist, maybe.

  “Klaus is right,” another man said, this time with what Ivy thought was a French accent. “Now that we have a naturally occurring genetic mutation to study, there’s so much we can learn. Her DNA likely holds the secrets to allow us to overcome the rage and impulse control issues the hybrids display.”

  “Which we’ll study when we get to the new location,” a second German said. Maybe this one was Stutmeir. “Staying here is too risky.”

  “I don’t understand why.” The Frenchman again. “The man who came with her is dead.”

  The second German said something about the organization that sent them having people combing the area looking for them by tomorrow, but Ivy didn’t pay attention to the rest of their conversation. She was too busy thinking about what the Frenchman said and desperately trying to convince herself she’d heard wrong.

  Landon couldn’t be dead. He was Special Forces. He’d been trained to survive every kind of dangerous situation that had ever been conceived and then some. He’d been to the most perilous places in the world, done things in his life that would have killed a normal man ten times over. The Frenchman wanted her to think Landon was dead so she would be more vulnerable.