Loe raamatut: «Claimed by the Beast»

Chapter One

Acidic, silent tears scorched down Dr. Daphne Panetta’s cheeks even as her palm crashed down on the red emergency button that sealed the caged enclosure and, more important, the LZ virus, behind an impenetrable shield.

With trembling fingers, Daphne programmed the cameras to zero in on her assistant so she could document the stages of infection and transformation for study. Bethany’s once warm brown eyes had quickly threaded with icy blue strands—the wriggling tentacles of infection. The gaping slash through her reinforced biohazard suit hung like an accusation, and that horrible, newly hungry gaze dragged slowly from the healed wounds back up to Daphne’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Daphne mouthed at the glass with trembling lips.

Sorry didn’t even begin to cover the riot of emotions surging through her. So many memories welled up in her, from the first time she had met Bethany to arguing with her recently about the ghastly orange she’d chosen for her bridesmaid dresses. The wedding that wouldn’t happen now. The people she wouldn’t be able to save with her research. The life left unlived.

Pain, sorrow, guilt—these were all a physical weight that crashed against her and pulled her down into a suffocating undertow.

Bethany nodded slowly, tears of her own streaking down her face even as she reassured Daphne. “It’s okay.” She kept nodding and repeating it like a mantra, as if that would actually make it so.

The virus had to be contained at all costs. Another outbreak could be apocalyptic. The closest term she could use to describe the effects of the virus was that it turned people into a kind of lycanthropic zombie. Literally. The real world collided with the supernatural, and when that happened, everything changed. Governments were scrambling to create defensive strategies and new weapons, all while trying to keep their new knowledge secret. The U.S. Department of Defense had even brought in a private group called the Aeternali to consult after the first outbreak in Arizona. It had been the Aeternali who constructed the facility they used now, hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

The virus had to be stopped.

Daphne wanted to look away, but instead, she crossed her fingers and held them over her heart—the symbol they used when things seemed bleak to remind them of their vow to find a cure.

Bethany’s fingers crossed briefly before her spasming muscles made it impossible. Blood trickled from her ears, her nose and bubbled out of her mouth.

But rather than the long, drawn-out agony of the change seen in most of the others victims—each bone breaking and reforming, muscle and fascia burning away only to regenerate—the transformation occurred much faster in Bethany. More like the videos of real werewolves Research and Development had shown her when she’d been brought in on the project. It was almost as if the virus had already been inside her, but dormant.

She watched as an animal erupted out of Bethany’s skin now—bipedal, sleek and predatory. She watched her former assistant for what seemed like an eternity, then she saw Bethany move to all fours and bound away from the observatory bubble toward the small cluster of trees in the terrarium.

The other infected creatures shied away from Bethany, cowering as they fled. It was unusual behavior. They’d introduced human test subjects before, prisoners on death row who’d chosen to donate themselves to science. They were attacked, the infected attempting to devour them even as they metamorphosed.

Not so with Bethany.

The best thing Daphne could do for her now was find a cure, and to do that, she needed to find out why Bethany had been infected. The bio suit blocked her heat signature, her pheromones, everything that seemed to entice the infected to see her as a food source.

Her infection had been done with purpose and intent, by the one who was different than all the others. In every group of animals, there was always a leader, and it was especially marked with pack predators. If he’d been more like the others in the enclosure, she’d say he was the Alpha.

Daphne scanned the enclosure and, finding the creature she sought, focused the cameras on him.

Where the others were seemingly mindless killing machines, there was self-awareness in his eyes. He was a predator, to be sure, and as ravenous as the rest of them. What made him terrifying was his cunning, his obviously human logic.

And this one had a name—Konstantin Gevaudan.

Obviously aware of her scrutiny, he stepped forward, prowling toward the observatory as if she were the one on display.

The shadows fell away like a cloak, the bright sodium lights blaring down on his massive form. He stood, rising up bipedal and perfect, with none of the abnormalities of the others except for those eyes blazing that strange electric-blue, like an LED bulb. Form followed function, each part of his body designed with the same purpose in mind—to be the most efficient killing machine. Thickly muscled, but his tread was light, graceful. His movements were fluid synchronicity. In fact, he was horrifyingly beautiful.

He knew it, too. The beast stopped under a particularly focused shaft of light, displaying himself for her. The sleek pitch of his silky pelt, the sculpted planes of his musculature so much like a human’s but still so alien, and the sly, knowing look in his eyes.

Daphne found herself almost hypnotized by the creature, unable to look away. Maybe he was somehow part King Cobra and he’d caught her in a death sway. Her rational, educated brain told her this was more information than they’d ever been able to gather before. No matter how uncomfortable it was, how ugly, or even how she ached for Bethany, she had to keep him engaged. The cameras were still recording.

Although, the primal, basic, animal part of her brain screamed for her to break the spell, to flee. To hide away so his horrible eyes couldn’t dig down into the meat of her, into her fear. The faint beep from the lapel of her lab coat vaguely registered—she was excreting pheromones at dangerous levels. The infected could scent them even through all the barriers.

The throng of the deformed, snarling infected were suddenly in frenzy mode, throwing themselves against the electrified walls, their claws scraping down the enchanted glass as they struggled to get at her—prey.

A sound that Daphne first thought was an earthquake rumbled deep, until she realized it was coming from it—him—Konstantin.

His muzzle retracted in a snarl, revealing supernaturally straight white teeth that looked more at home on a barracuda than a wolf. She shuddered, and his lips twisted further. He turned his great head slowly toward the wolves, as if focusing the sites of a weapon.

The bass sound began to build, but it wasn’t until the space around him trembled with its might that the noise erupted from him in a deafening roar. He sounded like a vengeful god smiting the wretched masses.

Infected wolves yelped and whined as their ears bled, and it seemed their nervous systems had been paralyzed by the sound. They dropped to their bellies, their yips quickly fading.

Daphne prayed to any gods that were listening that they’d caught a digital imprint of the roar and could reproduce it. It could be the weapon they needed if they couldn’t synthesize a cure.

His attention snapped back to her, his appraisal blatant, intense and obviously human. She refused to look away or back down, even though her adrenaline spiked again.

The beast lifted his nose to the air with purpose, his too-sharp eyes still focused on her. As if that scent were some delectable sweet she’d prepared especially for him. He stalked forward, closing the space and coming as close to the observatory bubble as any of them had ever dared.

That primal part of her screamed at her to run, and the logical part agreed, but she stood her ground. She knew he could smell her fear like a perfume, but that was the difference between humans and beasts. Daphne was a rational being in charge of her own actions.

The only thing between them now was the glass. She swallowed hard, her saliva thick as a wad of cotton in her throat. Daphne’s fingers hovered over the button that would slam the panic protocol wall shut between the enclosure and the observatory.

His regard was as intense as it had been before, but instead of staring her down, he sized her up. His gaze lingered on her breasts.

Undeniably male, and human.

Suddenly where there’d been a beast, there was a man. She jerked back from the glass, unable to control the need to put more space between them. If she’d thought the beast was horrifically beautiful, the man was even more so.

Daphne could see the beast looking out at her from underneath his skin.

What beautiful skin it was—smooth and unblemished, like alabaster. He was as pale as the moon, the silvery sheen of his flesh utterly surreal. His powerful body seemed compacted now, coiled and waiting to strike. This creature was still every inch a predator.

Her gaze was drawn down from his broad shoulders to his pecs, his defined abs and lower still to that ridged triangulation of muscle that directed her study to the last place she wanted to look.

Yes, every long, thick, hard inch of predator.

Already high on adrenaline, her body responded in kind. Fear and lust induced many of the same bodily responses. Clinically, it was a simple matter of biology, as basic as breathing.

Only, her breathing wasn’t basic. It shuddered out of her in staccato bursts. Her lips plumped, nipples tightened, heartbeat thundered, and her thighs clenched hard against the electric jolt of desire that stabbed through her.

Daphne jerked her eyes back to his face—it looked like something that belonged in an art museum. Or maybe it was the face of the devil himself, with those damned infected blue eyes staring back at her.

His mouth curved in a scimitar of a smile, lifting his head as the animal had done. Scenting the air—her desire.

Even though he looked like a man, he wasn’t. She knew the bio suit worked. He’d infected Bethany, ripped her humanity away from her not out of instinct, not because no matter what he ate he was always starving, but simply because he wanted to.

Guilt flooded her again, disgust at her body’s reaction to the monster.

His head cocked to the side, as if he could hear her thoughts and found them strange. He splayed his hand on the glass, the electric current there having no effect on him. Or if he felt it at all he demonstrated no reaction.

Her hand rose of its own accord, slowly, as if it was moving through water, and settled, palm flat, against the spot where his rested. She wanted to jerk her hand away. He was a monster. He was a test subject. He was the enemy.

Daphne’s muscles rebelled and refused to obey her. The hot jolts of need bursting through her at the pseudo contact were even worse. Even though he was a beast, she waited for him to mock her. He had that same sly, knowing look as when he’d scented her, but he didn’t mock her. He seemed to be studying her, waiting for her to cycle through her thoughts.

His hands, even in this form, were like paws. Huge—the tips of her fingers reached to only his first knuckle. She knew he was big, but the reality of his size hadn’t been clear until just now.

He whispered something in a language she didn’t understand. At least her conscious mind didn’t, but her body, it understood more than she wanted it to.

Every nerve ending flickered, sparked and burned. It was as if his hands were everywhere, on her waist, sliding up her rib cage, down her spine, cupping her breasts. And his mouth, sweet lord, his mouth...

Daphne knew the horrors that lay in his mouth with all those sharp teeth, but the sensation of lips on her breasts, his tongue flicking and laving at her tight nipples, pushing her ever higher and closer to the edge... Each stroke on her swollen flesh heightened the sensation after it.

In her mind’s eye, she was on her back with her legs spread wide, the black cascade of his hair draped over her thighs, and that evil mouth working her slit—tongue and fingers plunging and caressing faster, harder and hotter.

She bucked and moaned, begged him for more—and he obliged her. Daphne’d never experienced anything like that, not in the real world and certainly not in her own head. As impervious to damage as he was, her nails raked little gashes up the smooth plane of his back—her mark on him.

Mine. No, no! Not hers. She shook her head.

Only, she’d said the word aloud.

Konstantin.

His voice touched her as intimately as these foreign thoughts, reverberating through her and burrowing under her skin, past fascia, deep into the marrow of her bones. Invading her on a cellular level.

There was a bomb inside her, and it started the countdown to detonation.

“Mine,” he said, his lips curled in an expression of purely male satisfaction as the aftershocks of the orgasm shook her.

He dropped his hand and backed away from the observatory slowly, as if she were the animal and he the scientist.

The ramifications of what had just transpired made Daphne grab the console for support, before she crumpled to her knees. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Daphne slapped blindly at the console, sending the wall crashing down between the observatory and terrarium, but it was too late.

A demonic aria of howling echoed throughout the facility, but it was his howl that took the lead. His howl that scraped against her skin. And in every nuance of the song, all she heard was that one, single damning word.

Mine.