Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed Read online

  Hell’s Breeds:

  Mark of the Wolf

  By

  Madelaine Montague

  (C) Copyright by Madelaine Montague, September 2013

  (C) Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, February 2013

  ISBN 978-1-60394-797-8

  Smashwords Edition

  New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Chapter One

  There was no question about the precise moment the drop ship entered the planet’s atmosphere. The troop carrier began to shimmy. The vibrations increased exponentially as they dropped lower until it reached a point where it felt like it would liquefy flesh, bones, and teeth, and everything around them would disintegrate. Then the transport began to buck wildly. Abruptly, an explosion ripped a hole in the hull wide enough to suck several troopers and their seats out of it.

  Something strange happened when it did. Lucien felt an odd sensation creep over him. Almost as if a faint electrical current was moving through him, his skin prickled all over, stinging as if ants were crawling over him in a blitz attack. Time seemed to slow to a halt, almost as if holding its breath, or as if it was a wheel, slowing to a halt so that it could be set into reverse. He knew that the hull breach, the flying shrapnel that peppered every troop close enough to catch a projectile, the screams, the flying bits of flesh, blood, and metal that resulted from the impact of the projectiles, and the abrupt extraction of one entire row of seats and their occupants created by the opposing forces of interior and exterior pressure occurred almost simultaneously. He also knew that his brain was quick enough to record all of those nearly instantaneous occurrences and that the most likely explanation for why it seemed strange was shock.

  It didn’t feel like shock, however.

  Beyond the fact that he had been thoroughly trained to deal with this sort of thing and should not have reacted with shock like those who hadn’t been prepared as he was, he was genetically engineered to resist the kickback effect of shock. Not that either training or genetic enhancements could completely eliminate basic animal reaction to threat, but they should have eliminated any inability to assess and react.

  And he felt frozen in time in a way he shouldn’t have.

  He blinked, heard a strange roaring sound that didn’t seem to be related to the hull breach—because it occurred milliseconds prior to that—and then he saw everything that happened in a series of stills. As if he was frozen in time or had become a mere spectator rather than a participant, he saw the hole simply appear, the darkness beyond as profound as deep space, although he knew it was simply the dark side of the world below them. He saw the stunned expressions on the faces of the four troops that were sucked out as they flew backwards in their safety harnesses and vanished in the black abyss.

  Panning right, he saw the troops who had been seated beside them turn their heads very slowly toward the hole and the strange, disjointed dance several others performed as holes appeared in their bodies and chunks of flesh, blood, and pieces of metal slowly jetted from them.

  It was more than a slowing of his visual perception, however. He couldn’t seem to process what he’d seen. He felt oddly blank, void of emotion, as if he was asleep and experiencing a nightmare—about an out-of-body experience.

  He tried to shake it off, collect himself.

  Abruptly, he felt the electrical surge again, this time unmistakable. His heart rate shot upward and he felt his body tingle with cold and then heat. It felt as if something inside stirred, something separate from himself. And then time and his motor functions seemed to abruptly right themselves, and everything was happening simultaneously around him, too quickly to process.

  Now, instead of feeling as if he was floating separate from his body and looking down at it, he felt as if he had two—separate but distinct.

  And one was angry. Deep inside he felt a vibration, almost like a low growl.

  A sense of alarm washed over him. Something was happening to him. He didn’t know what it was, but he was afraid of it, afraid of the sheer power of it and the sense of anger and barely leashed violence that seemed to be trying to escape his control. He strained against his safety harness to twist his head around enough to assess his team leader, Corporal Lindsey Merriweather—his human handler. She was staring at the hole, her blue eyes wide, her face as pale as death, her lips parted slightly. The frozen look on her face sent a shaft of … something through Lucien, making his heart jar in his chest, as if it had lost its rhythm.

  The thing inside him stirred again, straining to break free.

  “Lindsey! Are you alright? Were you hit?”

  She sent him a startled look at the familiarity. Lucien felt his face heat. He didn’t know that he’d ever even thought of her as Lindsey. He didn’t have a clue of why he’d called her by her first name! Granted, she’d made all sorts of things go haywire when he’d gotten his first good look at her—mostly below the waist—but inside of twenty minutes he’d reassessed Cpl Lindsey Merriweather—daughter of General Lawrence Merriweather—and realized she was a total hardass and bitch—just like her old man. Well, not the bitch part. The general was a fucking bastard. The daughter was the bitch. There was nothing sweet or soft about her and he’d had no trouble keeping his thoughts in line.

  At least he hadn’t thought he had.

  Maybe it was this weird thing that seemed to be happening? Maybe it had turned his mind to mush?

  He swallowed a little sickly.

  It wasn’t actually that farfetched. He was genetically enhanced, but they hadn’t stopped at human DNA enhancements. They’d used wolf DNA, as well. He’d been assured it was such a minute DNA bonding that he would never really notice—it would just improve his vision, his speed, and his agility—but the thing stirring inside him now wasn’t easy to ignore and it felt a lot like wolf.

  If it took over, would he have any mind at all?

  Was that why he was having so much trouble thinking straight?

  Lindsey blinked a couple of times and then looked down at herself as if she couldn’t assess her condition without a visual—and her hands. She patted her torso and then looked at him again. “Damage report,” she demanded abruptly. “Were you hit, soldier?”

  Lucien stared at her blankly, his mind switching inwardly as it occurred to him to wonder if he could possibly have been so cocooned by shock that he’d been hit and hadn’t yet felt it.

  There was no pain, though.

  Just the discomfort and the uneasiness that something had gone wrong.

  He abruptly abandoned the impulse to report his suspected condition to his handler.

  He was supposed to. He realized, now, that that was why he’d turned to look at her—not just to assess her condition, but because he’d been conditioned to report to her if he had any sort of problems, or suspected problems, stemming from his enhancement.

  “I’m fine. I wasn’t hit.”

  She studied him a moment longer, as if she could read his mind, and then turned to the rest of their squad. “Damien! Kane! Basil! Any problems?”

  “Aside from a few extra holes I didn’t have before we took a hit …,” Damien growled, “I’m just hunky-dory.”

  She assessed him. “Flesh wounds,” she said dismissively. “Patch the suit. Kane?”

  “I think the shrapnel went through the calf ….”

  “Fuck!” Lindsey exclaimed. “Medic! Get over here! I’ve got a man down. He isn’t going to make the jump …. How abou
t you, Basil? Can you make the jump?”

  “Hey, I’m good,” Kane said through gritted teeth. “I can make the jump.”

  “Negative,” Lindsey snapped. “You’ll just be a liability to the rest of us.”

  Don’t get all sentimental and emotional on us, Lucien thought derisively.

  Basil divided a look between them. “I’m good. Missed me entirely. I think Kane got my share.”

  The ship was still bucking like a bronco, shuddering and shaking as the tempo of the bombardment grew steadily. The medic the corporal had summoned bounced off the floor between them when he finally arrived but managed to right himself. When he’d examined the blood soaked suit, he unzipped the pant leg and then dug in his bag for antiseptic. After flushing the wound, he slapped a coagulation patch on both sides of the calf, over the entrance and exit holes, to stop the bleeding and then sprayed it down with liquid gauze. “He’s good to go for now. He’ll have to get it looked at in med-bay when we get back to the ship, but I’ve stopped the bleeding. He’s in better shape than a lot of these poor bastards.”

  But not likely to be if he tried to make it back to the mother ship, Lucien thought angrily. They were going to be lucky if any of them managed the drop. Half the drop ships had probably been blown out of the sky already. “I think he’ll have a better chance if we stick together,” he growled.

  Lindsey sent him a disbelieving look. “You challenging a direct order, soldier?”

  His lips tightened, but he sent Kane a speaking look. Kane nodded fractionally and dug a painkiller out of his med kit, popping it in his mouth and swallowing without water to wash it down—no easy feat when they were all scared spit-less from the bombardment.

  His squad leader noticed the look they exchanged and the movement. “Is there a problem, Lucien? Kane?”

  He should have known old eagle eye wasn’t going to miss the silent communication. “Negative.”

  It wasn’t just the typical resentment he felt at her commands, Lucien realized abruptly, although, truthfully, he’d never gotten past getting pissed at being told when to breathe and when to blink and when it was ok to scratch his ass. But, then again, he hadn’t chosen to be a soldier at all, much less a grunt at the bottom of the heap. He’d been genetically engineered and apparently while they were busy creating an army of the most dangerous, deadly soldiers ever known, they hadn’t considered that making them so aggressive might make them less inclined to accept being ordered around.

  So he couldn’t exactly claim that he wasn’t used to feeling a good deal of resentment about being commanded to do things.

  And still, this was … more, a more potent sense of aggression than he could recall feeling before except in the heat of battle and a nearly overwhelming desire to challenge her right to command him.

  That discovery … unnerved him.

  Struggling to dismiss it, he cast his mind back to the first moment he’d noticed a change. He realized he could track the anomaly back to the precise instant the exploding missile had ruptured the hull of their drop ship—or rather an instant prior to that. There had been a roaring sound, like the rush of air, almost as if he had anticipated the rupture of the hull. Then he’d felt the prickling all over and the strange sensation of something stirring inside, as if there was something alive and separate from himself inside of him.

  It was the animal DNA, he decided. Somehow it should have been a part of him and it wasn’t. They’d screwed up—fucked up his head big time with that shit!

  And there could be no worse time to make that discovery than in the midst of battle!

  “Bail out! Bail! Bail! Bail!” the co-pilot, a human, abruptly roared over the com-unit.

  Damien, Basil and even Kane had thrown off their safety harnesses and were on their feet before the human had issued the order the second time. Brought abruptly from his internal examination, Lucien was a few seconds behind them due to his preoccupation.

  Lindsey, he discovered, was still trying to free herself from her safety harness—due, no doubt, to the fact that she was struggling with rage that Kane had bounded out of his seat when she’d ordered him to stay put and head back to the med-bay with the drop ship.

  Catching Kane’s eye, he jerked his head significantly toward the bay doors that had just been shoved open and then allowed the bumping and rocking of the ship to pitch him toward Lindsey. He heard her grunt as he landed on top of her. “Sorry, Cpl,” he growled, getting to his feet again with an effort. Kane had already made it to the door, though, and he made sure Lindsey didn’t manage to get around him before Kane had made the drop. Lindsey shoved him aside and arrived at the bay just before Lucien, staring down at the frozen surface below them.

  “What the fuck?”

  Lucien’s first thought was that that was Lindsey’s reaction to having her orders ignored, but there was something about the tone of her voice that made his heart skip a couple of beats. He shoved her aside as he hooked onto the drop line and leaned out the opening for a look.

  “Shit! What the hell is that thing?”

  Not surprisingly, nobody answered. Lucien had never seen anything like it and he was fairly certain none of the others had either. It looked more like a tornado than anything else in his experience, except that he could see down inside of it—as if it had tipped over, making it more of a tunnel than a funnel.

  And there was a strange, greenish light emanating from it.

  The damned thing was sucking the men into it!

  His men!

  “Fuck!” he snarled and leapt over the side of the ship, allowing the line to reel out so rapidly through his palms that it felt like they’d burst into flames even through his gloves. “Kane! Don’t let go of the line! I’m coming!”

  He supposed if he’d been thinking straight, he would’ve known that there was nothing he could do in the face of so fierce a manifestation of nature, but he’d just ordered a badly wounded man out—his man—and he couldn’t leave him hanging—literally.

  He actually thought they might have resisted the pull of the vortex except that just as they reached the mouth of the twister the ship they were tethered to exploded and the lines they were holding went slack. Lucien’s head instinctively jerked toward the horrendous sound. He was in time to see the ship fly apart. He thought he spotted Lindsey twirling madly at the end of a drop line still attached to what was left of the ship as it went down, but he wasn’t certain and, in the next instant something dark smacked into him and he blacked out.

  The sounds of battle were raging around him when he came to—just in time to feel the impact of hitting the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He was too stunned to move for several moments. Around him, he thought he heard the familiar voices of his own men, but something definitely wasn’t right. The sky was fading … to dusk, when, if it was changing at all, it should have been growing light with dawn—because they’d dropped on the night side of the planet.

  And the surface he was laying on did not feel like ice or even hard packed snow, and it should have because Xeno-12 was an ice world.

  Galvanized by the ferocity of the firefight to worry about what was right and what was weird later, he rolled over to survey the situation as soon as he managed to catch his breath.

  Nothing looked as he’d expected it to look, the way he knew it should have! There was no snow, no alien landscape surrounding him, no alien sky above, no alien army drawing down on them.

  Very distinctly, he saw the ‘enemy’ bombarding them, throwing everything they had at them, were wearing the uniforms and emblems of the U.S. military.

  What the fuck?

  Kane was lying close by, writhing in pain. Damien and Basil had already reached him. Even as Lucien struggled to reach the fallen man himself, he noticed that there was something decidedly off about Kane. The shrapnel had penetrated his calf. Why would he be writhing and bucking in such a strange way from a calf wound? Particularly since he’d popped pain meds before they dropped.

 
And why was his suit shredding, coming apart?

  And then Damien’s and Basil’s?

  The memory of the vortex and the exploding drop ship flickered through his mind, but Lucien couldn’t connect the two events with what he saw happening. He struggled for several moments as he crawled across the ground toward his men. Abruptly, that thing inside stirred again, the something he’d almost forgotten in all that had happened since. This time it felt a lot more like rage as he met the contorted faces of his men and saw that they were no longer recognizable.

  Their scent was the same, though.

  It wasn’t them that was calling his wolf. It was the others, the attackers. It was the need to protect himself and he acknowledged that and didn’t try to stop the beast as it took over.

  The pain was the most excruciating, all encompassing agony he’d ever felt before in his life. It felt like he was being torn apart. He screamed as it reached a crescendo and he thought he couldn’t bear it anymore, growled, and then howled as his vocal chords changed with the rest of his body. The rage was still with him when the pain vanished and he leapt to his feet, shaking the rags off that were still clinging to him and hindering his movements. He called to his men to rally round him. It issued through his throat as a series of yips and growls, but they seemed to understand. They followed him as he raced across the field toward the men trying to kill them. Around his pack, he saw others charging toward their enemies, other packs like his, the great cats, the dragons, the griffons. Above them, the Hawks, Eagles, and Condors—the angel troops as their handlers called them—circled and dipped, looking for weak points to attack.

  A conflicting mixture of satisfaction and surprise and anger went through him when he saw the enemy troops abruptly break and run. They followed and attacked anyway, savaging the men who’d rained bullets and mortars down upon them. In the midst of the carnage, though, a spark of sanity finally returned. These were still fellow soldiers. He didn’t understand why they’d turned on them and attacked them, but that didn’t alter the fact that they were supposed to be on the same side.