Читать книгу The Beast Within - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 6

The world as she knew it shifted, changed. Pain seared her temple, sudden and nearly blinding. The ground on which she stood swayed, seemed to open a chasm into which she dropped—yet it was no chasm that enclosed her but rather Kieran’s arms. Paige was hit by confusing sensations of safety, rightness, fear—but the pain made it all impossible to sort.

She could only stare up at him, locked in by his fierce, protective, angry eyes. Those eyes held her, kept her from the fast-swirling darkness.

The gathering storm over the barrier island receded until there was nothing but Kieran’s arms, Kieran’s eyes, Kieran’s heat.

Then he was gone, somehow, in the time it took her to blink. He’d lowered her to the ground—she knew that. She could feel the soft-packed forest floor beneath her cheek, smell the dirt and the moss. Now a shadow blurred past her eyes.

Low, lithe, dark.

The form streamed across the earth like a ghost, only it was real, she was sure of it. She watched it bound, lifting through the air toward another blurry shadow—a man. There was another sharp explosion, and she realized he was shooting, only comprehending then that she must have been shot. Her gaze spun around wildly, desperate for some point of connection.

Where was Kieran?

The world wavered, and she felt lost. Bright bursts of light crackled before her eyes. She knew she was going to lose consciousness, and she made a desperate attempt to stave off the enfolding blackness, blinking hard, clearing her vision with an effort. The dreamlike quality of the scene gripped her in fear.

The bounding creature reached the man, snarling in lethal fury, and she knew it for what it was. A wolf. Faster, more powerful, larger than any wolf she’d ever seen.

The man stumbled backward, screamed. The wolf latched on to his throat, and they were both down, in a struggle for life or death.

Paige jerked up from the ground, her mind crying Kieran’s name, but pain streaked immediately through her head and she couldn’t make her lips form the word. The world around her tilted, turned black.

The image waved into her consciousness, blurry, shifting, rippling like water. It was the wolf, red now. Dripping blood. She kept staring, baffled and scared, slowly understanding what she saw.

It wasn’t blood. It was some kind of dye. Ochre. She’d seen art like this before, in museums and books. Feather drawn, crude yet sophisticated at the same time. This was not the wolf she’d seen bounding in the shadows of the stormy forest. That wolf had been real. This was another wolf, created by some primitive hand, springing against a stone backdrop, wild and beautiful. Running free. Hard as the immutable surface on which it was painted and gentle as the soft, blowing breeze that seemed to sweep back its fur.

The wolf pulled at her heart in some inescapable way that baffled her even as it held her fast in its lonely, lost world.

Paige stared at the figure illustrated on the rock surface above her head, her eyes adjusting to the low light, the source somewhere beyond her view, her mind coming awake in dreamy increments. Finally, she tore her gaze from the rock with a sharp force.

Where was she?

She moved, started to push up on her arms, but pain dropped her back down onto something soft, padded. Oh God, her head throbbed. Her whole body ached. And then she remembered—

“Kieran?” she whispered, her voice coming out raw, hoarse.

“Don’t move.” He appeared above her, and she realized he must have been there all along, at her side. But for how long?

“Where am I?”

“Callula Island.”

“No, I mean—” Callula Island. Kieran’s home now. His cave. She struggled to put together the pieces from her memory. “The hurricane—”

“You’ll have to stay here till it passes.” He was doing something, his shockingly tender fingers moving over her head. His nearness was as strange as it was achingly familiar.

“How long was I unconscious?”

He glanced at the watch on his wrist. The leather strap was worn, the clockface scratched. His arm looked like one solid muscle.

“It’s about seven o’clock now,” he told her. “Several hours.”

He was removing some kind of gauze compress from her forehead, she realized. She felt the rush of air meet her wound, the sting of the raw pain. Still stunned, she took in her surroundings. She was on some kind of pallet, a thin blanket pulled up around her, in an alcove of sorts. Above her, there were those haunting, painted images of wolves running, leaping, flying. Alive in the stone, real inside a dream.

Had Kieran painted them? She had never known him to paint, but she didn’t know this Kieran of Callula Island, did she?

Her gaze shifted from the artwork to his face, his expression intent, his powerful hands steady. His touch soothed her and terrified her all at once. It was bizarre, intimate and yet distant. She was closer to him than she’d been in two years, and yet she knew nothing about him—just that the sensation of his touch on her skin brought a fearsome grief that pinched her heart, and she couldn’t bear the knowledge of loss that came with it.

She turned her head away slightly, and from the corner of her eye she was drawn to the low glow that seemed to fill a cavernous space, much larger than where she rested now. A vast space filled with the most unlikely of items, utterly incongruous in their otherwise primal, sepulchral environment.

Laboratory equipment. Microscopes, a generator, a small refrigeration unit, slides, burners, a laptop computer, work lights—

Ointment stung her wound as he dabbed something onto her skin, and she gasped.

“Don’t move,” he said, his voice grim. “I’m going to put a fresh bandage on the wound. It’s just a flesh wound—thank God.” He turned away to pick up a fresh bandage that he must have prepared in advance. “I’ll get you out of here as soon as possible.”

Out of here. Off Callula.

Her mind clicked onto another link and she looked back at Kieran, a hum of understanding beating its way through her pulse. Seven o’clock. Well past the time she was to make the return flight.

“The helicopter pilot—” Panic seized her. He would have left her by now—He’d made it perfectly clear he wouldn’t wait.

Kieran’s gaze darkened. “Tell me his name. What do you know about him?”

She struggled to put the words together, to remember. “Matt Dinsmore.” She felt cold suddenly though the air in the cave was warm, heavy. “He’s a charter pilot out of Savannah. Fifteen years experience. Ex-military. I ran a background check myself.” She had taken the extra precautions to ensure the secrecy of her trip to Callula. “I have to get off the island.”

“The helicopter’s still here.”

He taped the new bandage with quick, sure movements of his strong fingers. His voice frightened her, it was filled with such ferocity.

“What do you mean, the helicopter’s still here? What about the pilot?”

“He’s dead.”

Paige’s pulse thumped. “Dead?”

“He would have killed us both if he’d had the chance.” Kieran’s face was hard. “I made sure he didn’t get the chance.”

The shadow of the man with the gun came back to her. The helicopter pilot was the man who had shot her in the woods. Why wasn’t even a question yet. She was too shocked. Her mind reeled.

“There was a wolf. It attacked the pilot.” Her memory stretched, searched. Where had Kieran been? Why had he left her alone? “You’ve trained some wolves to protect you?”

He was silent for a long beat, and she was suddenly more scared than she’d ever been in her life. She pushed up to a sitting position. Pain rocked her temples, but she fought through it. The alcove in which she had lain on the pallet was small, low, the painted ceiling of rock just feet above her head. It made her think of a bunk on a ship. Beyond, in its stark, unnatural light, lay the main part of the cave.

No, not a cave, despite its natural setting. A laboratory.

Kieran’s laboratory. She looked again at Kieran. His deep, secret eyes blazed back at her with some unknown pain that went past anything she could have imagined. Questions tangled in her mind. Answers twisted within those questions, answers she didn’t want to believe.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Lie down, Paige.”

She ignored him. “Kieran—”

“I did everything in my power to protect you, Paige.” His voice lowered, and a new quality crept into it. Something burned-out, hollow. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she knew it wasn’t just about the helicopter pilot. It was something more.

Dread seeped into her from out of nowhere. She watched as he rubbed a frustrated hand over his forehead, and she realized within her own shock that Kieran was exhausted. He looked drawn, pale, as if he’d suffered through some kind of horrific ordeal.

He rose, stretching to his full height as he stepped back from the alcove, back from her. He looked larger than life, like some transcendent being.

“Protect me from what?” she demanded shakily, determinedly pushing past the fear. “What are you doing here, Kieran?”

Sudden comprehension exploded in her mind. Kieran had been developing a way to imbue a PAX agent with extrasensory powers of scent, sight, hearing. The attributes of a wolf. It was what PAX did best—research and create superhuman qualities that enabled their agents to fight terrorism on a level heretofore impossible. Kieran and his partner, Phil Bennett, had been working on a containment serum to control the effects of the activation they’d already perfected. None of the testing had been completed, but its possibilities had ripped through PAX like an electric shock in those days. Everyone had known of the startling potential of the research. Even the Pentagon had been aware—and wary. The impact on the human mind of such transformation held the dormant capacity for unrestrained violence, powers beyond any control. There had been quiet rumbles that the research funding would be pulled, and the PAX chief had fought relentlessly for the project’s survival.

Then the lab had blown up, and deadly documents found in Phil’s home had told the tale to PAX investigators. He and Kieran had been planning to sell the serums to a terrorist network. Together he and Phil had plotted to cover up the crime by destroying their lab, but something had gone wrong. The activation serum had been destroyed in the fire, along with all the data on the lab computers. Phil had died, and in the panic of his escape, Kieran was believed to have left the now-useless containment serum behind.

With PAX hot on his heels, Kieran had disappeared—without either of the precious serums. PAX wanted Kieran back. They wanted justice.

And Paige wanted answers. How could the gifted, dedicated man she’d wed betray PAX that way? She wanted him to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d never been involved in the plot with Phil. Even the discovery of the containment serum in their apartment hadn’t taken away her questions. Her heart had held on to impossible possibilities.

Knowing his past as she did, she’d understood his flight on some psychological level. Kieran had lived in frightening neighborhoods where he’d slept under his bed instead of on top of it for fear of drive-by shootings. He’d been twelve when his strung-out father had driven their car off a washed-out bridge. Of course his dad had survived while Kieran had nearly drowned himself trying to hang on to his twin sister. When rescue workers arrived, his dad was passed out on the riverbank and Annelie was dead. By the time he was fifteen, his addict father had him doing the driving, and when a drug buy ended in a murder, he’d put the gun in Kieran’s hand. Kieran had spent the next three years of his teenage life locked up in a juvenile detention center for a crime he’d never committed.

He’d achieved things no one would ever have expected from the troubled teenage boy he’d been. But there was no way he could let himself be locked up again, for another crime he hadn’t committed. She couldn’t blame him for not believing in the justice system or even PAX. His life hadn’t given him a whole hell of a lot of reason to believe in anything. But that he hadn’t believed in her—That was what she couldn’t forgive.

And now, she had to wonder if she’d been wrong and naive all along to hold on to even a measure of her faith in him.

What was he doing? Had the activation serum really burned up? Had Kieran stolen it? Was he recreating the containment serum now? Without it, the activation serum was far too dangerous to utilize. Or was he working to reproduce both serums?

Why else would he be hiding here, reproducing his work, if not to sell it? Everything she’d never wanted to believe ripped into her heart like a knife. Betrayal seared her all over again.

“You’re recreating the serums,” she whispered starkly, and she wanted him to deny it. She wanted to beg him to give her some rational explanation for everything. Oh, God, if this was true, she’d have no choice. She’d have to do anything in her power to stop him. “I can’t let you do this,” she said, gazing at him in growing horror. “You’re going to have to kill me. Because if you don’t, I’m going to turn you in.”

“Paige—”

“I just thought you were hiding here on this island so you didn’t have to go to prison. I never wanted to think—How stupid could I be? Was the activation serum really destroyed, or did you just make it appear that way? You decided to sell your own research, and leaving part of it behind only meant it would take you that much longer because you would have to recreate it from scratch.”

Kieran spun on her.

“What do you mean, left behind?” he demanded.

“The containment serum was found in our apartment, in your lockbox. They searched everything—”

“What? Where is it? Where is the containment serum now?”

“Why? So you can steal it—again?”

“I thought it was gone. I thought it was destroyed in the fire. I thought there was no hope—”

He turned away again, made a sound in his throat, a keening groan of horror. Then he swung back, eyes so dead she nearly screamed.

“I never tried to sell it, Paige. I never tried to sell any of it. I was framed.”

“If that was true, why didn’t you stay? Why are you here, with this secret lab?”

The weight of the betrayal in the evidence before her was crushing her. Her heart was dying, right here, right now.

“Tell me where the containment serum is.” He came back, took a strong hold of her shoulders as he sat beside her. “If you ever believed me, Paige, believe me now. If you ever loved me, trust this one thing. I have to have it.”

Suddenly she was overwhelmed by a terrible foreboding. The force behind his voice terrified her. She didn’t want to be humiliated, betrayed, destroyed by him again, but she had no choice about asking the next question.

“Why?”

A nightmarish beat passed in the heavy silence of the cave. The storm outside might as well have been a thousand miles away. In Kieran’s laboratory, it was utterly, eerily still.

He finally spoke.

“That was not a trained wolf.”