Serengeti Sunrise - By Vivi Andrews Page 0,39
bullets. Thank God for superstitious idiots.
“Ben was a lousy shot,” Tyler grunted. “Why not just run?”
“They knew too much to be captured and tortured by weres.”
Tyler’s eyebrows arched speculatively. Zoe could almost see him assuming the mantle of a pride lieutenant. “And what do you know?”
The girl’s teeth began to chatter again. “I don’t know anything! I’m new. They only brought me in a couple months ago in San Antonio. Long after they broke off from the Organization. I don’t know where any of the research bases are, I swear. Just don’t hurt me!”
The Organization. Zoe’s ears pricked forward. The girl didn’t know how much she did know. The shifters had never even had a name for their boogeyman before now.
“We aren’t going to hurt you. What’s your name?”
“C-C-Candice. Candice Murphy.”
“Candice. Where are we?” Tyler asked her.
Her face screwed up in concentration. “New Mexico? We couldn’t make very good time because Dr. B couldn’t use the main roads with you making the truck swerve all over, throwing yourself around back there.”
Zoe eyed the two men on the floor, wondering which of them was Dr. B. Her stomach rumbled noisily, hunger from her multiple shifts stabbing into her gut. If she didn’t eat soon, she’d be tempted to take a bite out of one of the bodies. Just a small bite. A little nibble from the calf maybe. Did it even count as cannibalism if she was in her lion form?
The room dipped and swayed around her and Zoe sneezed, shaking her head sharply to try to get the world back to rights.
“Zo? You all right, babe?” Tyler came toward her, digging his fingers into the fur behind her ears. She leaned into his touch, steadied by his presence.
When the wall behind him began to slide to the side, she thought it was just her eyes playing tricks on her again. Until the muzzle of a gun lowered into the opening, aimed at Tyler’s broad back.
Dr. B wasn’t on the floor.
Zoe roared, throwing her weight against Tyler’s legs to knock him to the ground and leaping past him toward the opening as the gun fired, deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. Zoe didn’t have time to see if the bullet had struck Tyler. She landed hard on the heavy-set man behind the sliding panel which led to the cab of a truck. Her claws ripped through flesh, her teeth sinking deep into the soft tissue of his throat, cutting off any attempt at a scream. Warm blood gushed in a sweet rush into her mouth.
This man had tried to kill Tyler. He’d kidnapped her and experimented on her. Who knew how many other shifters he’d harmed? She basked in the last feeble beats of his heart before dropping his body with a thud. She swayed over him, dizzy from expending the last of her energy, and felt Tyler’s hands on her, steadying her.
She looked up, seeing only that he was whole—no new bullet wounds marking him. Then the world flipped upside down and whooshed away from her like a train through a dark tunnel, and Zoe collapsed into blackness.
Chapter Eleven
“Ben and Andy worked for the Organization for like six months, but they weren’t being given any responsibility, see? So they decided to go it alone. They’d heard about Dr. Busey getting kicked out of the Organization for trying to, you know, breed the weres in captivity, which went against the Organization’s, erm, mission statement, I guess? So they went to find Dr. Busey and get some hands-on experience. When I met them, they’d all been together for a couple months, hunting weres. Dr. B was definitely the boss, but he let Ben and Andy have, like, responsibility, right? They were more like equals. I mean, Ben barely even got in trouble with Dr. B for telling me about the weres. I almost knew already. I’d read a lot of werewolf books, right? And I told him I really wanted to see one up close, see? So Ben convinced Dr. B to let me come along as a research assistant. That was when we heard about this town.”
“So the Organization doesn’t know about this pride?” Landon’s sharp question cut across Candice’s rambling recital.
She sat on a chair in the mess hall, her hands wrapped around a cup of cocoa, surrounded by the pride’s war council. They hadn’t needed to torture anything out of her, though Zoe thought they might need to apply thumbscrews to get the girl to shut up about how