AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“How is Ely doing, Callan?” Jonas asked, his voice quiet as they walked down the hall, scanners quietly humming as they did a final check for weapons, weapon components, or any conceivable manner of threat to the facility.
“She’s doing better,” Callan stated. “The past year has been hard on her, but she’s coming out of it.”
She had been used against the very Breeds who trusted her to ensure their health and well-being. A mind-control drug had been slipped into her system, creating in her an addiction and an inability to refuse the orders of those w
ho had initiated the reprogramming of her delicate mind.
She had almost died as a result. And she had almost taken Jonas and one of their best enforcers with her, and Callan knew she still suffered the guilt of it, a guilt that might torment her for the rest of her life.
“The past year has been hard on us all.” Jonas sighed.
For the past month, it had been especially hard on Jonas and his mate, Rachel, as they watched the changes in the child a monster had managed to get his hands on.
Callan felt his chest tighten, felt the ever-present fury that rumbled just below the surface and the animal genetics that roared out in rage.
Amber Broen Wyatt, the child Jonas had adopted after his mating to her mother, had been injected with a serum that was presently destroying the monster who had attempted to use Amber against Jonas.
That serum was eroding Phillip Brandenmore’s mind, destroying it a cell at a time as it forced his body, his organs, his very cellular structure to change.
The monster, Phillip Brandenmore. For decades he had conspired with the Council. He had destroyed Breeds, spilled their blood, filled them with such agony that they had begged to die, that they had bled out, howling with the need to escape.
The same monster the Breeds were now fighting to save. That they were risking their own secrets to attempt to end his agony when he had never had a moment’s mercy for the agony he had caused.
“Can she handle this?” Nikki Armani paused to glance at them, the long black braids she wore in her hair flowing around her as the dark chocolate brown of her eyes gleamed in concern. “Brandenmore is her own personal nightmare.”
“She’s handling it.” Callan kept his expression calm, his gaze, if not serene, then at least, composed.
What else could he say? Ely no longer talked to him as she once had. Hell, she no longer talked to anyone about anything but the most mundane topics these days. She was more reserved than ever, more focused on her research and, it seemed, more determined to cut herself off from everyone who cared for her.
As they neared the end of the hall, the double doors there clicked open, and the stoic faces of the Breeds behind the heavy clear shield at the side of the doors watched them carefully.
Wolf, lion, and coyote Breed enforcers worked together here as they did nowhere else except perhaps the labs in the wolf Breed base of Haven in Colorado. The enforcers, who were charged with the protection of the labs, the research, and their futures, were specially selected and rigorously tested before being assigned to the most sensitive areas of the Breed strongholds.
Callan and his group passed through yet another sensor before heading down a shorter hallway to the observation room where Ely awaited them.
It was a journey that seemed to take a lifetime. Each step of the way Callan was too aware of the fact that what they were doing here was a slap in the face of every Breed living and dead. Because the assignment charged to the scientists moving ahead of him was to save the life of a man who had taken so many Breed lives.
As another enforcer stepped from his post in the hall and opened the doors to the observation room, Callan nodded back at him. This enforcer was human. The only human allowed into the compound, and this one only at Jonas’s insistence.
Jackal had been a part of a specially trained Special Forces group when the Breeds had first revealed themselves. His loyalty to the Breeds stemmed from his commanders, Callan’s brother-in-law, Kane Tyler, the man who had saved Jackal’s life and the life of his sister.
He was Ely’s personal guard, whether she liked it or not. And the fact that she didn’t like it was voiced by her often.
Entering the meeting room, Callan moved to the far end and stood at the head of a long conference table. Chairs were placed around it, but no one sat. Instead, they turned and stared through the window that looked down on the padded cell Phillip Brandenmore had been confined to for more than a month now.
What they saw was shocking, horrifying.
He was a seventy-five-year-old man, but he now had the appearance of a man in his fifties. His hair had grown back; his skin had lost that dry, parchmentlike appearance. The dark age spots that had once covered his face had almost disappeared, and he wasn’t stooped as he had been the night he was taken captive after Jonas’s attack on his mountain cabin retreat.
He sat against the wall, his head tilted back, staring up at the deceptive appearance of a mirror, a sneer on his face.
He knew the mirror was more than a one-way reflection, that eyes watched from the other side. Someone was always watching, both from this room as well as from the room that the video cameras fed into.
“My God, he looks ten years younger than he did the last time I saw him,” Dr. Armani breathed out roughly.
Ely stepped from the shadowed corner of the room then. “As indeed, physically, he’s nearly thirteen years younger than he was the night Jonas brought him in,” she stated. “And the metabolic and cellular changes are only increasing. As is the degeneration of his brain. As his youth returns, we’re seeing parts of his brain actually dying off, and any sense of morality or right and wrong deteriorating. At the same time, his sense of cunning and self-preservation seems to be growing.”
Drs. Chernov and Sobolov moved closer to the window, their expressions still and silent as they stared down at the deceptively unassuming man that stared back at them with hatred and demonic rage.
