"I want Elizabeth and Ely immediately," Jonas shouted as they raced through the steel- and cement-lined corridors to the main lab.
"They're waiting in the labs." Pride Leader Callan Lyons raced at his side as head of security Kane Tyler and Sanctuary's Enforcer commander, Mercury Warrant, brought up the rear. "Elizabeth was still on-site when you called. She and Ely have everything ready."
"Jonas, what's going on?" Rachel could feel the dread tearing through her system.
The hair-raising ride from D.C. to Virginia hadn't taken more than fifteen minutes in the heli-jets. It had raced to Sanctuary at full power with Jonas yelling at the pilot for more speed as Amber lay lax and limber in his arms.
He wouldn't let her hold her child. Amber hadn't whimpered, she hadn't cried.
"Here's the syringe. It was beside her in her carrier." Jonas slapped the small pressure syringe that Rachel hadn't even noticed in Callan's hand. "I want a full analysis from Amburg ASAP."
Callan passed the syringe off to Mercury, who took a quick turn down another corridor and disappeared.
Jeffrey Amburg, the scourge of the Breed community. He had been known as a butcher in the Breed labs before the rescues twelve years earlier.
Moving ahead, Kane Tyler, his dark hair cut military short, his icy blue gaze frozen with fury, flung open the doors to the main level of the labs where two women raced from a nearby office.
"We have everything prepped and ready." Elizabeth Vanderale, her dark hair tied back in a close ponytail, a white lab coat flying out behind her, pushed open another door as Ely Morrey, the Breeds' main scientist, moved quickly to an incubator set up in the middle of the room.
"Jonas." She was pulled to a stop just inside the room, watching in horror as Amber's small gown and diaper were pulled quickly from her before she was laid inside the incubator.
"We need blood, saliva and tissue samples immediately," Elizabeth was barking out as she and Ely began to move quickly.
"What's going on?" Jerking away from the two Breeds holding her Rachel latched onto Jonas's arm, fury and fear tearing through her as she stared into the living fury that brewed in his gaze. "Damn you to hell, talk to me. What did that bastard do to my baby?"
Terror was tearing at her mind, digging into her soul. God help her, if anything happened to her baby, she couldn't survive it.
She'd been begging Jonas to talk to her since the second he had rolled to his feet, just ahead of the fiery blast that had taken her house to the ground in an explosion of flames.
"Rachel, give him room." Kane gripped her arm to pull her back, only to face the snarling, animalistic fury that Jonas turned on him.
Rachel almost stepped back herself as Jonas's head lowered, his lips pulling back from his teeth to flash the predatory canines at the side of his mouth. One hand clamped on her arm, and Rachel jerked her gaze down in time to see the lethal curve of sharpened claws that had sliced from the flesh beneath his fingernails.
She lifted her gaze slowly. "Jonas, please. Tell me what happened."
A growl tore from his throat.
"Miss Broen, my son is primal at the moment. He can think, he can react, but the beast is currently controlling the man."
Rachel jerked around to face Leo Vanderale. He was a near replica of Callan Lyons, or perhaps it was more accurate to say Callan was a replica of the other man.
Long, flowing tawny hair was streaked with blacks and reds. Fierce features framed golden eyes, and power seemed to exude from his very pores and give lie to the civilized cut of his dark gray suit.
Jonas snarled back at Leo, only to receive a flash of canines as the other man came slowly forward.
He stopped and stared into the incubator for a long second before turning to Jonas. "Will you trust me to oversee her safety as you oversee the child?"
Jonas's jaw clenched. "No!" The sound was a rumble of rage.
Leo's lips tightened. "Do you really want to take me on tonight, whelp?" he growled. "Or make this woman hate you?"
Jonas growled again as he finally allowed Rachel to jerk away from him.
"Get them out of here, Leo," Elizabeth barked out at him as she moved back to the incubator with a syringe designed to draw blood.
The pressure-activated vial was quick, painless, but at the moment, it looked like a tool of death as it neared her baby's tiny arm.
"Jonas, please." Her nails dug into his arm as she gripped him. Anger and fear latched onto her with an inhuman grip. "What's wrong with my baby?"
"Brandenmore," he snarled down at her. "He injected her with something, Rachel. We have to find out what."
The words were barely human. The implications were a nightmare.
She released him slowly. Rachel pressed her hands to her stomach as it cramped with a spasm of horror, threatening to heave what little contents she had taken in that day.
Her gaze flew to the unconscious form of her child as she began shuddering, shaking with such fear now that she wondered how she managed to stay on her feet.
Amber looked so tiny in the incubator. She'd been born underweight, not sickly but her slight weight had given Rachel months of worry.
Now she lay pale and unmoving, her mop of red-gold curls laying limp along her tiny head as Rachel slowly released Jonas's arm and backed away from him.
"Amburg is testing the syringe," Kane reported, a finger pressed against the small communications bud at his ear. "He expects an initial report within thirty minutes."
"Five minutes or he dies." Jonas turned on Kane, his dark face so much more savage than normal and filled with predatory mercilessness. Rachel had no doubt he meant what he said.
Coldly, Kane repeated the order.
Evidently, Amburg didn't argue.
"Why?" Rachel turned to the only man willing to give answers, the man who had called Jonas his son. Rachel had no idea that Leo Vanderale was a Breed until this moment--until she had seen the wicked incisors at the side of his mouth that he normally kept hidden. "Why would he want to kill Amber?"
Leo shook his head. "I doubt seriously what he's done was done with the intent to kill her. Anything Brandenmore does is done with the intent to experiment, nothing more. He simply doesn't care if she lives."
Jonas snarled at Leo again.
"Why?" Rachel cried again, her voice rising as terror began to steal her senses. "Why would he do it?"