Page 23 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

G ray

“She did this?”

This is the second time I’ve asked this question, and this time I am even more shocked than I was the first. I made my way to the facility as fast as possible, hoping I’d be able to uncover some clues. I never imagined it would be this messy.

There are a lot of bodies. A lot.

The scene at the laboratory is grim. Aftermaths of massacres tend to come across that way. The staff are already starting to clean up, I mean cover up, but there’s certainly enough left to demonstrate that whatever happened was nasty and violent.

I am being escorted by a tall, thin man in what used to be a white lab coat.

His name tag reads Doctor Moon. He’s balding on top, but he is keeping the hair at the sides of his head.

He’s probably mid to late thirties, if I had to guess.

He has an air of detachment that might be coolness under pressure, or might just be necessary dissociation.

“She underwent the first phases of treatment,” he says.

“She was injected with a series of isolated and engineered DNA fragments that we believe are connected to the were-process. It’s believed the human body will naturally integrate them over time, and start to replicate and produce their own variants. It’s very exciting.”

It is a little exciting when he says it that way, and when I turn my gaze away from the pools of blood. Scientists have a way of making their horrors seem reasonable. That is why I resist the urge to admire their cleverness in anything other than the shallowest of ways.

“The rats did become quite violent during the testing phase,” he admits. “We should perhaps have been more careful, but she was a small, blonde female. We really didn’t think she’d do that much damage.”

“Nobody ever does,” I murmur under my breath. “Did she turn into a wolf?”

“No. We don’t expect a transformation to take place until the therapy has had thirty days to take effect. A full moon might bring the shift on sooner.”

Therapy. They have the absolute fucking nerve to call what they are doing therapy. What they are doing is chemical torture. They are trying to create something entirely unnatural. Not supernatural, just something that should not exist.

And they used my mate to do it.

Dr. Moon keeps explaining, probably more out of nerves than anything else.

“Sometimes the process can cause a little in the way of excess aggression. We’re still fine-tuning doses, but when you’re trying to replicate a natural process, there’s always an element of guess and test.”

They guessed and tested on my mate.

The slaughter makes up for that, in some respect, but not entirely.

She should never have had to do this. She didn’t deserve to have to do this.

She was a sweet girl when I met her. She’d never done anything wrong.

All she’d done was try to understand what happened to her, what gave her the bite that scarred her.

And then I started liking her, and now look what she’s done.

She’s a wild creature with wolf instincts, a human who doesn’t know what the fuck just happened to her. And now she’s somewhere out in the world, trying to survive and not knowing if I led her into the trap or not. She’ll probably hate me, if she even has the mind to know who I am.

I stalked my mate for months. I infiltrated her life. I became part of her world. This is less like stalking though, and more like hunting.

“How did she leave?”

“Took a car, I believe,” the scientist says.

He avoids saying stole, because stealing cars is something that people do, and Callie is just an escaped subject to them. They’re not angry at her in the sense someone would be angry at a murderous person. They’re treating her like a zoo might treat an escaped beast.

“Alright. I need the details of the car. And an antidote to what you did to her.”

“There’s no antidote, sir. There’s never been a cure for lycanthropy.”

“You’re not even trying?”

“No, sir. We’re not funded to try to cure the condition.

We’re funded to try to bring it under our control, to find new mates from the human dating pool.

A lot of the packs are starting to genetically dwindle, and more often than not, babies born from female shifters who have liaisons with human men turn out to not have the curse at all.

Our kind is on the brink of extinction.”

“But giving human women some kind of treatment that simulates our condition doesn’t make them werewolves, does it? Not genetically?”

“Genetics are not the only determination of reality,” he says.

Seems like a deeper argument than I want to get into right now. In this moment, all I want to do is hold Calista again, and punching a hole through this man’s head, though I very much want to do it, would not solve the problem.

“Can I see the footage, please?”

He nods and leads me to the security room, where there is more blood on the floor. The absolute carnage of the place puts me in mind of the act of a completely wild animal. I can see it in my mind’s eye, a she-wolf taking vengeance on those who wronged her with fury and fang.

“You are sure she didn’t shift?” I ask again, though I remember the answer.

“No.”

“Christ.”

“Was unavailable at the time, far as we can tell,” the scientist deadpans.

Damn it. I’m starting to like him in spite of myself.

He brings up the relevant footage of her leaving with a few swift, efficient keystrokes.

I watch the security footage. Calista strides into the parking lot with a key fob in her hand and hits the unlock button until she sees the car that responds with blinking lights.

She goes straight to it, gets in, and drives away.

She doesn’t look agitated at all. She could just be coming out of a business meeting, though she is dressed in corduroy pants and an oversized funny sweater that I don’t think she would ever wear.

Now I have a license plate number, and as luck would have it, the infrastructure is available to follow the car via satellite, which is driven to Bell Breaux, a small town. That’s where the car remains to this moment.

I follow in my mate’s tracks, knowing that I am not the only person looking for her.

They did not wait for me to get here to start searching.

The alpha of New Orleans was nice enough to let me know she’d gone feral and escaped the lab, but teams are already on her tail, and if they find her first I can only imagine what will happen.

I go to the diner, where a single waitress is tending to what I suppose passes for the evening rush. She seems nice and motherly, well-built and clad in a floral dress with a pink apron frilled with white. She is delivering a plate of onion rings as I step through the door and smile.

She stops and smiles back, because she’s polite, and because I am fortunate enough in the facial features department that women generally take a little time to look at me.

“Hi,” I say, walking over to the counter, where there’s some bar seating for the overflow.

She comes over a moment later, and asks me what I’d like to eat.

I order a po’ boy, and enjoy it when it comes.

I could have walked in, asked if she’d seen Callie, and left if she said no, but I want to get a sense of the one place I know Callie definitely came to.

I can imagine she is close. The car is still in the parking lot, and satellite surveillance didn’t catch her leaving. It’s an imperfect tech that way.

The fried shrimp sammich comes on a crispy yet soft roll drenched with the best damn sauce I’ve ever had. I force myself to enjoy it, even though I am in hot pursuit of my mate.

Sometimes, slower is faster.

And everybody needs lunch.

“Everything good, sir?” The waitress checks in with me.

“Brilliant, thanks,” I say. “I was wondering, have you seen anybody come through here in the last few hours? I’m looking for a young lady who’s gotten herself into some trouble. She’s pretty, blonde. Might be covered in blood.”

“There was a young woman,” the waitress says. “There was something strange about her. She had what I’m thinking might have been blood on her clothes. She ordered a raw steak, got some gas from the gas station, and left town headed east.”

I know the woman paid attention to Callie, because Callie was making her prey instincts tingle. An animal knows when it is at risk of being eaten.

“Thank you,” I say. “Was she any trouble in any other way?”

“She was no trouble at all. Very polite. Very hungry.”

Callie

Horns blare as I send the fastest car in the world down the highway. It’s a pretty standard sedan, but stolen cars go much faster than ones you own. That’s a scientific fact. The speed is soothing, in a strange way. The near misses with other vehicles feel like a balm to my soul.

Brraappprrrprraarrpp!

A truck is angry at me, but it can’t do anything, because it’s a truck.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to be a good person, as if enough goodness would somehow erase the badness. It doesn’t really make sense, but that’s how it’s worked. And then they gave me whatever they gave me and I don’t feel guilty anymore. I feel animal. I feel instinctual.

I haven’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt. I didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t hurt me first. But the people who did? I hurt them bad. Really fucking badly.

There’s something different inside me now. Something strong and wild, something that makes other people seem a little less like people and a little more like meat. But even meat deserves to be treated nicely most of the time, right?

I keep moving, ditching one car, and taking another. People’s keys are just in their pockets most of the time, and my fingers are light. I would never have dared do this in the past. I would have been horrified by what people would think. But I don’t care anymore.

I’m also very, very rich.

Like, insanely rich.

I’m rich in a way that most people will never be rich, and now I’m also feral in some way I never was before.