“What the hell…” Ethan muttered, drawing his sword.
So did Destiny. “Must be another Apex agent. We can’t let it report back!”
The dinosaur leaped away, changing shape as it did. A blond man in desert camouflage fell over backward into a bush, exclaiming, “Oops, sorry!”
He sprang up, started to hold out his hand to them as if he was asking for a shake, then pulled it back as Destiny instinctively followed the movement with her sword. “I’m friendly! Ethan, tell her I’m friendly.”
“He’s friendly.” Ethan sounded more resigned than relieved. “Very friendly.”
“I meant to turn into a man, not a man-sized raptor,” the blond guy said, as if that explained anything. “I’m still getting the hang of this.”
“Who are you?” Destiny asked, bewildered.
Ethan made a gesture of introduction. “Destiny, this is Merlin Merrick, from my fire team. Merlin, this is Destiny Ford, my…”
Destiny had to repress a snicker as she watched Ethan fish for an explanation that wouldn’t keep them there all day. But Merlin was a shifter, he’d know what mates were… or had Apex only turned him into a shifter after he’d been captured? There was an easy way to find out.
“Mate,” Destiny said firmly. “We’re mates.”
“Oh.” Merlin blinked a pair of extremely blue eyes at her. “You don’t sound Australian.”
The snicker escaped. “I’m not. It’s a shifter thing. It means…” Now it was Destiny who had to fish for an easy explanation. As the words left her mouth, she realized that she was repeating Hal’s explanation to Ethan from those two very long years ago. “He’s my true love. Shifters mate for life.”
“Congratulations,” Merlin said, as if that didn’t seem the slightest bit odd to him. He seemed sincerely pleased. “And you fight with a sword, very nice. Do you play video games? Ethan’s true love would definitely play video games.”
“Merlin—” Ethan began, sounding exasperated.
It was obvious that the two of them had a lot of clashes under the bridge. Destiny decided to cut the argument off at the pass. “Let’s do the pleased to meet yous later. Here’s the important thing about me: I’m an Army vet, former military police—” She overrode Merlin’s remark of “A mudpuppy, cool,” by continuing, louder, “—a tiger shifter, and also I’m a bodyguard in a private security agency where everyone’s some kind of shifter. If we can get into the base, I can radio them to come back us up. They don’t know I’m here.”
“Merlin, is anyone following you?” Ethan asked.
“I doubt it,” Merlin replied. “I don’t think they know I’m gone yet. I escaped about an hour ago, when I figured out that I could change my size and squeezed through a duct. I’d meant to make a wide circle through the jungle, in case they did check my cell and launch a search, and squeeze back in through some other duct that wasn’t guarded.” Proudly, he added, “I camouflaged myself so if anyone did see me, they’d think I was a… hmm…”
“A chicken-sized leaf monster?” Ethan inquired.
“Something more normal in a jungle than a stealth-sized raptor,” Merlin concluded. “Listen, do you know where Ransom and Pete are?”
“No,” said Ethan. “We were hoping you did.”
Merlin shook his head. “I woke up in a lab. They weren’t there with me and nobody would tell me what happened to them or you. A doctor said they’d put me through some process called Ultimate Predator 3.0. He said it would give me special powers, and once I got them, I had to work for them or die. Then they stuck me in a locked room. Someone really screwed up to give me shrinking powers, then put me in a room with vents.”
“They didn’t know what powers you’d get,” Destiny said. “I have some friends who got caught by this same organization—it’s called Apex—and they think the powers have to do either with your personality, or with what you want at the time you get them.”
“Oh.” Merlin nodded. “Well, I definitely wanted to get out. And here I am. Out!”
Destiny was relieved that he didn’t seem particularly traumatized by his brush with Apex. Maybe it was because his stay at the lab had been too short for them to do anything horrible to him. But she hoped that the T-Rex shifter had also been telling the truth, and their new version of the Ultimate Predator process was less dangerous and damaging than the old one. If the worst that had happened to Ethan’s other two teammates was that they’d become shifters and gained powers, well, Merlin certainly didn’t seem unhappy about that.
Ethan gave Merlin an extremely brief summary of what had happened since they’d last seen each other. Destiny was impressed with Ethan’s ability to explain everything that Merlin actually needed to know in about five minutes, mostly by dint of not stopping whenever he tried to interrupt with a question.
“I like your original plan,” Ethan concluded. “Let’s keep it. We circle around, and you squeeze into a duct and let us in. The three of us can take it from there.”
Destiny was relieved to hear his obvious confidence in Merlin’s abilities, since she didn’t have any tactful way to check for herself. But any man Ethan trusted was good enough for her.
The three of them slipped through the jungle, working their way in the direction Merlin indicated. The sun set, and in the darkness of the night they could hide unseen in the cover of the jungle and survey the base. No one seemed to have discovered Merlin’s escape yet; there was no commotion or search parties that they could see. And while the entrances were all guarded, no one was guarding the vents.
“Here we go,” whispered Merlin. “I’ll try and get out that door there.”
He first became a raptor even bigger than the one they’d first seen, about the size of a small pony. Then, with an exasperated hiss, he shrank into his chicken-sized (or, Destiny supposed, velociraptor-sized) form. Like the T-Rex and daeodon shifters, he took his clothes with him when he transformed.