Her beautiful, feminine scent cloaked the stone. But there was a trace of hybrid odor on it. Like the rock had hit the creature just long enough to leave a hint, but not enough to cover Kendra’s scent.
The rock slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers, fresh fear gripping him. This must have been the place where the hybrids attacked and killed her. His heart began to tear open, but then stopped when he realized there wasn’t any blood—or anything else—on the ground to indicate that the hybrids had killed her.
Declan spun around, his nose not used to doing work this fine but quickly learning how.
Outside of this one spot, Kendra’s scent diminished. It wasn’t gone, but it was much fainter. He scanned the ground, searching for her tracks, but couldn’t find any. Four sets of hybrid tracks headed away from the area, though. But one set was deeper than they’d been when they’d come into the clearing. Why? Then it hit him. The hybrid had been carrying Kendra.
He followed the tracks, his head digesting what his senses were telling him. It didn’t make sense. The hybrids had attempted to subdue him with that damn needle, presumably to capture him, but they’d never seemed interested in taking Kendra alive. Back at the stream, it had appeared as if they were trying to kill her as quickly as possible.
Why take her now?
He considered and discarded several possibilities, until coming to the only one that was left. The hybrids thought he was dead and had decided they needed Kendra instead.
Declan raced faster, his mind going places he didn’t want it to go. If they wanted Kendra alive, there could be only one reason. It was insane, but it was the only thing that explained why they would bother to take her. They intended to experiment on her. The doctors who had created the hybrid drug and tortured Ivy had Kendra and meant to do the same to her.
The roar that erupted out of him startled the jungle to silence. It probably carried for miles in every direction, but Declan didn’t care. Let those hybrid assholes hear him coming. His claws flexed and he felt them extend even farther, sending stabs of pain through his hands that he relished. He felt muscles and bones moving and twisting as he ran, and he still didn’t care.
He fed the rage, let it force the shift even further until he was almost lost in it. He didn’t care if he ever found his way back to his human half again. He was going to find Kendra, and when he did, every hybrid that had even thought of touching her was going to know fear like they had never felt in their miserable fucking lives—right up until the moment he killed them.
“You still never said who you work for, Kendra,” Harry reminded her. “Or how you happen to know so much about these hybrids?”
Kendra winced. She and the three doctors had been talking for more than an hour, during which time she’d been careful not to divulge too much critical information about herself or the DCO, instead keeping the conversation focused on them the whole time. But Harry and the other men weren’t stupid. They’d already figured out that she’d dealt with hybrids before. If she wasn’t careful, they’d end up learning more from her than she did from them.
That probably wasn’t very likely, since she’d already learned enough to worry the hell out of her.
She gave them what she hoped was a disarming smile. “Hybrids—that’s just a name I made up. And I really don’t know that much about them at all.”
Harry didn’t look like he believed her, but at least he didn’t call her out on the fact that she hadn’t really answered either of his questions. That was good. Between worrying about what might be happening to Declan and trying to digest everything she’d learned in the last hour, she was too tired to expend any energy soothing Harry and his colleagues.
Her initial assumptions that this was another temporary research operation set up by Stutmeir’s former doctors had turned out to be completely wrong. Not only was this facility far from temporary—Harry and his colleagues had been working here for more than six weeks—but they claimed they’d never heard of the doctors who’d tortured Ivy out in Washington.
Based on everything Harry, Lester, and Albert had told her, she’d come to a pretty wild conclusion—the people who’d created this latest hybrid pack were completely separate from