Page 47 of Shadow Boxed (Shadow Warriors #2)

Chapter thirty-eight

Confused, O’Neill looked back and forth between Wolf and an anorexically thin woman sitting at the table.

What the hell’s wrong with my eyes? And who the fuck’s the Screaming Mother?

“You mind explaining?” he asked, trying for the same mild tone Wolf excelled at.

A grating sound drew his attention back to the skinny woman at the table.

She scooted her chair around until she faced them.

He’d never met her before. Never even seen her.

But he knew who she was through gossip and speculation.

Everyone on both the Brenahiilo and the base was obsessed with Wolf’s shadow le'ven'a.

But few had met her. Looked like he was one of the lucky few.

Lovely. But why?

There was obviously more going on here than mere introductions. What did this summons have to do with Wolf’s shadow le'ven'a and her heschrmal’s sleeping preferences?

“I know you,” Wolf’s woman said, her cloudy gaze steady on his face.

O’Neill shook his head. “Sorry lady, you’re mistaken. I’ve never met you. Never even seen you.

He glanced at Wolf. His perennially terse boss had finally closed his mouth and was looking back and forth between O’Neill and his le'ven'a as though he’d lost the thread of the conversation. O’Neill sympathized. He had no fucking clue what the skinny broad was saying, either.

“I do know you,” Wolf’s shadow le'ven'a reasserted. When Wolf’s mother settled a calming hand on the woman’s shoulder, she absently shrugged it off. With a head tilt, she lifted her gaze to his and stared. “The Screaming Mother has shown me your face. She favors you.”

O’Neill’s eyes narrowed. “Screaming Mother?”

“Yeah…” Wolf shoved his fingers through his thick black hair, which was loose and flowing down his back and chest like an ebony waterfall. This was the first time O’Neill had seen it down. Prior to this, his betanei had always kept his hair braided.

He glanced toward the skinny woman. Was the warrior trying to impress his woman ?

“Jillian calls her spirit heschrmal the Screaming Mother,” Wolf revealed in his normal mild tone. The dude had regrouped and regained control.

“No shit.” O’Neill chewed on that for a second. Wolf had told him earlier about his anistaa’s claim that her charge—Wolf’s shadow le'ven'a— was claimed by the heschrmal . “So, she was claimed by the feminine version of the spirit, then? And it sleeps with her?”

“So it would seem.”

The surprise wasn’t that Wolf’s le'ven'a was claimed by the feminine version of the mountain lion. Female Kalikoia were always claimed by the feminine version of their spirit animal. Or so he’d heard. No, the surprise was that the heschrmal had claimed a woohanna, rather than a Kalikoia warrior.

Wolf’s eyes suddenly flickered with discomfort. He cleared his throat. “Does your spirit heschrmal sleep with you?”

“No. It does not.” He’d often imagined what it would be like if others questioned him about his spirit claiming. Whether his heschrmal slept with him was not a question he’d ever expected to answer. “Her spirit guide seriously showed up here? On base? In her bed?”

While Wolf’s le'ven'a didn’t respond, both Wolf and his anistaa nodded. Still, Wolf was the one who answered. “It did.”

“And you saw it? With your own eyes?” O’Neill asked.

“We both did,” Wolf confirmed.

O’Neill turned to study Jillian’s face. She was watching the door with uncanny focus, like she was expecting her favorite movie star to walk through at any minute.

She didn’t appear to be paying the slightest attention to the conversation taking place, even though it was about her, or at least her heschrmal .

When a knock sounded, she made a beeline for the door.

“Jillian asked the cafeteria for waffles.” Wolf broke the startled silence as Jillian opened the door and accepted a Styrofoam container.

“Waffles?” O’Neill echoed, knowing he sounded befuddled. But holy hell, waffles seemed far too mundane for the turn the conversation had taken.

Silence fell as Jillian returned to the table and opened the Styrofoam box. The smell of sweet bread reached O’Neill’s nose and then his taste buds. His stomach growled, whispering it could go for some waffles about now, too.

Wolf finally returned to the conversation. “We think her heschrmal visited her on the Brenahiilo. Does yours visit you?”

“No.” Although that would be awesome. He battled a surge of envy as he watched Wolf’s le'ven'a devour her waffles. “I’ve never heard of a spirit animal returning to the one it claimed. Have you?” he asked, already certain of Wolf’s answer.

“No.”

As O’Neill expected. “What does all of this mean?”

“We do not know.” Wolf followed O’Neill’s gaze to the table and the woman sitting there, plowing through the food in front of her. “She claims to know you?” There was a question in his voice.

O’Neill shook his head. “I’ve heard of her. But I’ve never met her. She doesn’t know me.”

A puzzled frown wrinkled Wolf’s forehead. “Yet she knew the color of your eyes, before she looked at you. She mentioned the way they glow...”

Yeah...that had been weird.

“Perhaps someone mentioned me to her?” He glanced at Wolf’s anistaa, although it had been years since he’d run into the woman. “The color of my eyes...the way they appear to glow sometimes...it attracts attention.”

“Perhaps.”

But Wolf didn’t sound like he believed it.

O’Neill wasn’t sure he did either. The only person who might have mentioned him to Wolf’s le'ven'a was Rachel Eaglesbreath, and the last time she’d seen him was prior to his spirit claiming—before his eyes had started to glow.

Day 37 Washington, D.C.

Clark sucked back a 32-ounce white chocolate breve as he stared at his computer screen, switching back and forth between the camera feeds in the two bot labs.

He still didn’t understand what his brilliant little creations were up to.

While Comfrey had dunked her arm in the testing tank, the specimens in the clean room had opened the lid to the NNB26 holding tank.

Whoever, or whatever, was running amok in his security system had green-lit the panels for both tanks.

The holding tank was too large for an arm dunk. His prodigies’ solution had been freakishly chilling. They’d picked up the smallest specimen from Karaveht—a girl of five or six—and dumped her into the tank.

He’d about shit his pants as the child disappeared inside the vat. The thought of all those nanobots crawling over her, eating their way inside of her... He shuddered, the breve climbing back up his throat.

They’d hauled the kid back out five hours later. Since then, the whole lot of them had turned back into mannequins while staring at the ventilation grates. That was where he lost track of their thinking...if they were capable of human thinking.

He knew why the specimens had accessed the NNB26 tanks. They were soaking up the rest of the bots, preparing them for dispersal. Their obsession with the ventilation shafts even made sense. They obviously considered them a viable distribution option.

But why didn’t they try to access the tunnel door, or the elevator? Did they know both access points were physically disabled? Had the eyes and ears monitoring the Nantz building’s computer system passed on what escape routes were a waste of time?

But even if they knew the tunnel was inaccessible, shouldn’t they try to shed the bots at the foot of the door?

The prototype could scurry beneath the exit, even if the infected could not walk through it.

Then again, he hadn’t installed an atomic force microscope on the tunnel door.

Maybe the damn things were already marching beneath it.

Instead of approaching the tunnel or the elevator, the specimens in both rooms stood in clusters beneath the ventilation ducts, although none of them had tried to reach it.

Did they know the shafts went nowhere? The basement ventilation system was a closed system, unconnected to any other ductwork in the building.

The separation was a safety protocol, meant to ensure chemical spills wouldn’t leak into the upper floors.

If something went wrong in one of the basement labs, the consequences stayed in the basement.

He switched over to the first camera in the testing lab and straightened from his slouched position over the burnished black desk. Comfrey had left the huddle below the ventilation shaft. She stood next to the sink now. He leaned forward again, watching her turn the faucet on.

What was she up to?

At no point during the six days he’d been obsessively watching the camera feeds had anyone down there attempted to drink. That included the three specimens still breathing—aka Comfrey and her assistants. The sink had a tall, arching faucet, tall enough to fill tall water bottles or containers.

Without blinking, she bent at the knees and stuck her arm into the stream of water. The same arm she’d dunked into the testing tank. A silver stream slid down her arm and into the drain.

His stomach cramped—sudden and hard. This time he couldn’t stop the breve from hurling up and splattering over his desk and laptop keyboard. The sour smell triggered his already churning stomach and more of the contents of his stomach spewed over his laptop.

The stream of water kept running down her arm, washing the bots down the drain. He wiped his mouth on his fifty-thousand-dollar Gucci jacket and tried to breathe through the sour taste in his mouth and the panic in his chest.

There was no doubt in Clark’s mind that the NNB26 prototype knew exactly what it was doing.

Comfrey had picked up a load of bots from the testing tank, and now she was washing them down the drain.

From there, they’d flow into the building sewer system, which eventually merged with the city’s sewer system.

The damn things had figured out a way to escape their prison.

And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop them.