The Beast Within

The Beast Within

Suzanne McMinn

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Prologue

Light blinded him as the lab exploded.

One second, he was performing a routine test procedure with his partner, Phil Bennett, and the next, Kieran Holt’s life blew apart. His hands flew up to shield his face as heat pushed at him, whirling past him in a thunderous roar. A mighty crack tore through his consciousness and he rocked backward.

Suddenly it wasn’t the fire outside his body he felt but within—fever, aching, cramps. An extreme stinging and itching took over his body, then gut-wrenching nausea and cell-ripping pain.

He was dying. He had to be dying. And he’d never see, hold, touch Paige again if he didn’t fight. He opened his eyes to find himself on the floor of the lab, slightly below the thick smoke.

Fire was everywhere, chemicals shattering in violent, changing light. He battled through the strange agony engorging his skin, humming pressure through his blood. He had to escape, and he had to find Phil. Every move he made came with slicing pain somewhere inside his body.

His vision cleared and he saw the booted leg sticking out from behind the work table. He crawled toward it and found his partner’s empty eyes staring up at him in the eerie, swarming inferno. Grief choked him along with noxious fumes.

Kieran struggled to his feet, but balance was impossible. He felt drunk, drugged, barely capable of walking on two legs. He stumbled back onto all fours as grayish ectoplasmic vapor erupted from his own skin.

Time and space lost all meaning. He knew a shifting, excruciating energy as a warm chill rushed through his body, and he stared in horror as a prickling burst out on his arms and legs. With a ferocious will, he forced himself onto his feet and exploded from the lab. Men—security officers—rushed toward him down the corridor. He stumbled past them, rushing from the building in dazed involuntary instinct. Cool night air struck his face, but the heat within didn’t die.

He felt his proportions change—his face stretch, his hips narrow, his shoulders evaporate into his torso. His senses splintered and he could no longer think in words but in emotions and sensations as if his mind had been taken apart and put back together all wrong.

All he knew was panic, and all he could do was run.

Chapter 1

Paige Holt gave an instinctive pat to the inside front pocket of her rain slicker, reassuring herself that the documents were still there. All she needed was one signature, from one man, on one piece of paper.

“Forecasters expect Bernadette to strengthen before making landfall on the barrier islands and eastern seaboard late tonight. More details will be available around eight p.m. when Air Force Reserve hurricane hunters pay Bernadette a return visit—”

She would be long gone by then. Long gone…and free.

The National Hurricane Center broadcast crackled fuzzily in the chartered helicopter. The pilot shifted the controls, taking the craft into its vertical descent. The almost primordial island beach-bound forest of loblolly pines, live oaks and palmetto trees rose up toward her, deceptively quiet. Callula Island.

Was Kieran really here?

They went way back, she and Kieran. Back to their early days at PAX, when she’d actually thought they could do anything as long as they were together. Could she have been more naive? She’d been attracted to him right from the start, with his dark hair a little too long, his hard smile a little too wide, his umber-brown eyes a little too dangerous.

She’d loved the way he watched her, steady and confident and full of some breathtaking energy that had zeroed in on her from the very start. He’d had a way of making her feel special, as if he couldn’t see anyone but her. And that sense of overwhelming rightness had sucked her needy heart into a soul a little too damaged, a spirit a little too dark. She’d thought she could heal him, that all it took was love.

Naive didn’t begin to cut it.

She missed him and hated him and panic welled up inside her at the thought of seeing him again.

The light single-engine helicopter she’d chartered to take her to the drumstick-shaped barrier island bumped down on the wide strip of sand. Her stomach danced and a lump moved into her throat.

“This is it, ma’am,” the pilot said over the dying noise of the rotary motors as he killed the engine. “Callula Island. You’ve got till six p.m., latest. Then I’m out of here.”

He gave her a look that told her he already thought this trip was crazy. She’d paid the Savannah-based charter pilot double to fly her here in the face of an approaching hurricane. No one in their right mind would take off with this kind of weather coming, he’d suggested.

Since when had she been in her right mind?

“You can’t pay me enough to stay past six,” he added for good measure, just in case she was considering that added foolishness.

“I’ll be back by six.”

Calulla Island was four miles long, two miles wide. Paige was in shape, and dressed for hiking. They’d made an exploratory flyover that put the majority of Callula out of the question for a hiding place.

The island was a mix of natural communities—from marshland to forest within a surprisingly short geographic area. The marshes and dunes of the lower portion of the island made it easy to dismiss. The northern end, with its maritime jungle, was the part she would have to hike into on foot.

She had six hours to find a man who didn’t want to be found.

The pilot got out, and Paige pushed open the passenger door of the helicopter. She jumped out, walked around the side. Sand crunched beneath her boots. The late May air felt cool on her face. A light breeze, in no way suggestive of the storm to come, fingered through the blonde hair she’d left hanging loose to her shoulders.

She felt Kieran’s spirit as she gazed into those dark, thick woods. He was here.

He had to be here.

She came around the side of the helicopter. Shells littered the beach. Far across the water, a dolphin broke the still-calm surface. Dolphins meant luck, and she needed some today.

She found the pilot leaning up against the rear cargo door, his ropey build taut as he gazed out at the ocean. He flicked his Bic, lit a cigarette. He leaned his head back as he sucked in, his dark hair teasing the collar of his denim-blue shirt. His hawkish, sharp eyes watched her as he blew out.

Paige hadn’t smoked in five years, but she almost begged him for a hit.

Dammit, she wasn’t going to feel anything. Not anxiety. Not regret. Not grief. Nothing. She was so good at lying to herself, it was almost scary.

She turned her back on the pilot, the helicopter, and any half-baked notion of going home. She’d spent months trying to find Kieran. Now she was here.

And she was damn well going to get what she came for.

Kieran didn’t care about her. Maybe he never had, despite their three years of marriage. He’d abandoned her and the PAX League without the slightest effort at defending himself or explaining the mystery of that final, fatal night.

How could he have so completely turned his back on everything they believed in? How could he have turned his back on her?

She’d seen the evidence, and it had damned him. Even so, the charges against him had been hard to buy. But she’d had to buy one thing—he’d left her, without a word of explanation or even a goodbye.

Now, she just wanted the long nightmare to end. She wanted a new life, and that meant leaving PAX.

And divorcing Kieran.

She left the beach and entered the thick woods. A rush of birds lifted up from the trees, the beat of their wings filling the air above her, followed by a scampering—-squirrels, or raccoons—from somewhere ahead. Through the shadows, she heard the tap-tap of a woodpecker. The maritime forest was home to countless animals, including the red wolf that Kieran had spent so much time studying as part of his work in PAX.

She supposed it wasn’t so strange that when he’d taken flight, he had buried himself in a place that was home to those same wolves.

She’d written, called, finally visited every family member, colleague, friend, distant acquaintance of Kieran’s. PAX had looked for him, too, she knew. He was their agent, even if he had turned his back on them. They wanted him back—and not to continue his ectoplasmic research. When they found him, he would be placed in a prison isolation facility for the rest of his life if what they believed about him was true.

For some stupid reason she didn’t dare examine, she couldn’t stand the thought of Kieran living the rest of his life in a government lockup. And maybe she was as crazy as they believed he was to still believe he could be innocent of the terrible charges that had been lodged against him. She’d conducted her own search quietly, carefully, behind the scenes.

When she’d visited Kieran’s cousin, Dub Walker, for the third time and he’d finally admitted he knew where she could find him…if she promised to keep Kieran’s secret, she’d agreed. And Dub had believed her for one reason.

She had loved Kieran with all her heart.

But like the song said, what did love have to do with it? Love had betrayed her, broken her soul, destroyed her dreams. She’d trusted him. And he’d let her down in the worst way.

She wasn’t sure what she wanted now, but she knew it had to start with closure. She could have divorced Kieran without the signature—there were ways, she’d investigated them. But she’d never be able to move on without facing him, one last time.

Damn Kieran for making it so hard.

She kept an eye on the time as she worked her way into the island forest. It was a strange, almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere of slash pine growth born of the disruptive force of fires and hurricanes that occasionally recreated the barrier island habitat. Shade-tolerant hardwood reached up within the pines, slowly taking over the swampy wood with hauntingly romantic palmettos and live oaks strung with creeper vines and Spanish moss.

The maritime jungle was so thick, the canopy of leaves cloaked the sky, and it was preternaturally shadowed, a world of endless twilight and unknowable sounds. Paige carefully hiked a grid pattern through the woods, mindful of the approaching weather…and the eerie sensation of being watched.

The noise of the helicopter must surely have announced her arrival. He would know it wasn’t Dub. His cousin—at least in his legal line of work—was a commercial fisherman, which was how Kieran had made his way to Callula Island. Dub hadn’t given her too many details, but she knew Dub brought Kieran supplies on a regular basis. Not directly to the island, but in sealed bundles packed in crates and set free such that they would eventually come ashore on Callula’s long beach. Every precaution had been taken along the way to protect the secrecy of Kieran’s location.

“He could be dead for all I know,” Dub had told her. “How could he have survived all this time, alone, on that island? But the crates keep disappearing off the beach. And so I keep bringing them. I don’t want to believe he’s dead.”

Paige understood how he felt. She didn’t want to believe Kieran was dead either. He had been the most vibrant person she’d ever known.

And she would know if he had died, wouldn’t she?

He was alive. She felt him watching her. Her pulse sped, and she glanced back, almost expecting to see him there. Eyes glowed out at her from the dense brush of the thick woods.

Kieran.

Then the eyes moved, and a shape formed from the shadows. It was a wolf, sleek and lean and beautiful. Paige watched the creature for a long moment, a sense of loss keening through her chest as it disappeared back into the forest.

She was too close to the edge, emotionally, and she had to get hold of herself. She was imagining things. Imagining Kieran’s eyes on her. Imagining that she knew Kieran, could feel Kieran.

How utterly, painfully ridiculous.

What if he was dead? What if she found his body, his skeleton?

She felt sick, and with all the training PAX had given her, she blanked the image of Kieran, dead, from her mind. She looked at her watch, pushed the button that lit the digital display. She’d been searching for three hours. Her legs hurt and her lungs burned as she kept up a steady pace. She had no time to waste. She had to keep on track, keep moving.

Had Dub lied to her? She couldn’t dismiss the possibility, but she had to search, had to hope that he’d told her the truth.

Continuing to hike the grid she’d mapped out, she found herself on higher ground. The forest became less swampy, more rocky and hilly, though still dense. Above, wind rustled louder.

The storm was coming. The helicopter pilot would be impatient. The hurricane was real, and it was coming, and she couldn’t ignore its dangers.

Suddenly, from out of the forest, a cliff-face rose before her. It took long, thudding pulse beats for her to recognize the large yawning darkness near the bottom for what it was—a cave. It blended into the mossy rock so seamlessly, she’d almost missed it.

She barely felt her feet, barely breathed, as she took one step, then another, as if in slow motion. She felt every pound of her heart. Blood rushed in her ears.

Then a hand clamped down on her mouth, an arm took hold of her waist, and an achingly familiar voice ground in her ear, “I want you off my island now.”

He twisted her in his arms, forcing her to face him. Paige’s eyes were wide, frightened—of him—and a gasp of shock exploded out of her against his palm. He knew what she saw, and it wasn’t the Kieran Holt she’d known. His brown hair was long, to his shoulders, and he hadn’t shaved in months. He was as wild as anything on this godforsaken island. Wilder.

And much more dangerous.

“Don’t scream,” he warned her, still holding tightly to her arms even as he dropped his hand from her mouth. She had adrenaline charging her strength, but he was stronger. Especially these days.

She blinked, said nothing, just stared at him for a long, horrible beat. He could feel her body trembling against him, feel her soft warmth even in the thick chill of the approaching storm.

“Kieran,” she breathed finally, almost a question, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

She smelled like lemons and sunrises and faraway dreams. It was nearly drugging, holding her this way. His sense of smell, like his eyesight, was sharper now. Almost painfully so. And nothing was more painful in his dark world than Paige.

He couldn’t bear to look in her eyes, that damnably burning blue that he could still see all too well, and found himself looking everywhere else—at her sweet, wide mouth, pale golden hair feathering across her smooth cheeks, chest rising in fast breaths. Her body felt tense.

It had been too long since he’d held Paige. The ruined heart he might as well not have anymore thundered in his chest. Fiery grief stung his heart, all the worse for having been so deliberately, carefully, suppressed for so long.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t belong here, could never belong here. Her presence went against every plan, every strategy, every hope in hell he had of ever getting off this island.

And he did mean hell. Callula Island was his own personal level of Dante’s Inferno, a never-ending nightmare that had begun the night his laboratory had exploded around him.

He focused on the things he had to know, the answers he’d needed from the moment he’d heard the helicopter flying over Callula. Since Paige had landed, he’d stalked her, soundlessly, through the woods.

“How did you know I was on this island?”

“Dub.” The admission was low, hoarse. She struggled against him. Her frame was slight, her limbs slender, but she was stronger than she looked.

He met her eyes, and as he’d known they would, her eyes stabbed him, hated him. He knew what she must think. She would think he’d betrayed PAX. She’d believe he and Phil had planned to steal their own research, sell it—the activation serum they’d spent years developing along with the containment serum. She’d believe he’d set fire to the lab—a fire in which Phil had ultimately died—to cover up the crime. A fire in which, ironically, their research, their work, and both the serums had been destroyed. She’d believe all of that and more, and she had to keep believing because it kept her safe. But that didn’t make it any easier for him.

Those secrets, those truths, couldn’t be revealed to her. His innocence was an empty badge of honor.

“Who else knows I’m here?” he asked.

How long had he thought this harbor would last? He was grateful Dub had held out this long. His cousin had always lived on the shady side of the law, and keeping Kieran’s secrets from government agencies wouldn’t have been a stretch for him. He had no doubt PAX would have questioned Dub relentlessly, but Dub hadn’t broken. His cousin hadn’t known the exact reason Kieran was hiding out, but Dub would never turn him in to the authorities. But he’d told Paige, and that was in many ways worse.

“No one,” she said. “Just me.” She struggled in his hands again, kicked at him, hit his leg with the toe of her boot. A slash of pain, meaningless in his world of pain, seared his calf. “Let go of me, Kieran.”

“You have no idea how much I want to do just that,” he growled. Every second that he faced her killed him a little bit more.

Her devastatingly blue eyes were nothing like he remembered. Her soul was in her eyes, that’s what he’d always said about Paige. But now her eyes were hard, protected. She’d changed, and he knew he was to blame. Her life had never been easy, and he’d made it a hell of a lot harder. Guilt, ever near the surface, twisted its knife.

“What about the helicopter pilot?” he demanded, fierce because he couldn’t allow himself to be otherwise. For her sake, she had to keep hating him.

“He doesn’t know why I came here,” she said, her voice low and angry.

Good. He wanted her angry.

“He didn’t ask?”

“I paid him double his normal fee. That was the end of our conversation.”

“He knows you’re here. That’s bad enough.”

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” she told him, her body still humming with tension

“That you’re here at all is trouble,” he ground back. More trouble than she could imagine. “Swear to me no one else knows you’re here, Paige.”

“No one knows. I told you. Dub wouldn’t have told me except—” She broke off, looked away for a horrible beat in which Kieran felt as if his chest was being crushed and he didn’t even know why, then she said, “I want a divorce, Kieran.”

He let go of her. She nearly stumbled backward, as if she hadn’t expected it in that instant. He barely held his own ground. Of course. Why hadn’t he foreseen it? How had he managed to so block out every agonizing thought of the wife he’d so loved that he hadn’t realized one day she would want a divorce? That she would want to move on, make a new life without him?

Was she in love with another man? He almost choked, stopping himself from blurting out the too-revealing question. He couldn’t bear the answer, and in truth, that was why he hadn’t let himself consider the question in these long two years. He couldn’t afford to think of Paige and her life without him.

As if in some kind of surreal dream, he watched her reach inside her rain slicker and pull out a folded pack of papers. And a pen. Paige was always prepared. He almost laughed in bitterness then he saw the brittle shield of her blue eyes slip, saw beyond the steely shield of anger and hatred.

Pain.

Behind the anger, she was hurting, as he was. He would have given anything to tell her the truth—except her life, which was what it could cost.

“If I sign that paper, they’ll know you found me,” he said harshly, as if he cared more about himself than her. That’s what she had to keep thinking. Kieran just knew he didn’t want to sign that paper.

“You mean PAX. I’m leaving PAX. They don’t know or care what I do anymore.”

He didn’t ask why she was leaving PAX. He didn’t have to. Paige was a passionate spirit. She did things full throttle—or not at all.

He had broken that passionate spirit, at least when it came to PAX. He had disillusioned her the night he’d thrown away her trust.

She’d been so bright and full of hope the day he’d met her early in their training for covert operations. They’d both been recruited into the PAX League’s secret under-layer that simmered just beneath its public façade, and if anything, she’d been more eager than he for the wonders it offered her brilliant mind.

The world knew the PAX League as a private foundation dedicated to the philosophical pursuit of global peace. They engaged in human rights missions, environmental campaigns, and charitable projects. And while all those public endeavors were true and beneficial, it wasn’t all PAX did.

To over two-thirds of the employees in the PAX League as well as the world, PAX meant peace in Latin and stood for nothing further than the organization’s devotion to that cause across the globe. But in truth, PAX was an acronym for Paranormal Allied eXperts. Deep in the heart of PAX’s Washington, D.C., building lay a beehive of secret laboratories and experimental studies dedicated to research into the mystical, telepathic, transformational sciences that was leading the world into a new era of defense. Peace through PAX.

As a secret PAX agent, Paige had carried on what had begun as a marine engineering project into research in remote underwater communication while Kieran had become part of a mission to develop superpowers of vision, hearing, and strength through combining wolf and human ectoplasm.

Then his laboratory had exploded along with his life. He’d woken to find himself not only a fugitive…but a monster.

And if he didn’t get rid of Paige, and soon, she’d find out, too.

“You know that the agency knows everything. Hell, Paige, they probably already know you’re here. You’re a link to me.”

“Then sign the paper.”

She made a twisted logic. She was right, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He’d had some insane idea that he could fix everything, if he just had enough time. But that wasn’t true. He couldn’t fix everything.

He couldn’t fix what he’d done to Paige.

All he could do was sign her damn paper and hope by some miracle of miracles that PAX would never know Paige had been here. She hadn’t come here for his signature, he realized suddenly. She didn’t need his John Hancock to get a divorce.

She wanted some kind of agonizing closure. He could give her that, if nothing else.

Then he’d leave Callula. Find another island. Another level of Dante’s Inferno. He would either find the answer he was looking for, and soon, or the thing inside him would destroy him. He almost didn’t care which anymore.

But he could still save Paige.

“Give me the paper.” He all but ripped it out of her hands. Without intending to, his fingers brushed hers. Fire flashed through his veins and it took a strength of will honed by two years of loneliness to slowly move away as if he hadn’t noticed.

He didn’t bother to read the documents. He signed his name and pushed it back at her. “Take it. And go home. Don’t come back. Ever.” He wanted her out of here, before she found out more. Before he hurt her more than he already had.