The Crimson Sentinel Ops Division of PSI—or Fang Gang if you asked the right person, since it consisted of vampires—had their own off-shoot division headquarters scattered throughout the world, but as of late had been working closely with the main branches of PSI. That meant he was seeing more and more of the Fang Gang than normal. It also meant the bullpen tended to be crowded.
Such was the case now.
Rurik had half a mind to turn around and go back in the direction he’d only just come from—the lower-level holding area. So far, Rurik’s team captain, Garth Ingersson, was going on a week of being locked away down there. Seven days of being chained while stuck in shifted form, full of nothing but rage. Seeing a man Rurik respected greatly and thought of as a brother chained like a wild animal was hard. As much as Rurik wanted to free Garth from the shackles holding him, he couldn’t.
The captain was being restrained for everyone’s safety but explaining as much to him wasn’t possible. Not in his current state. Like the man in the cell adjacent to Garth’s, he wasn’t exactly himself. His shifter side was doing all the decision-making, and that never went as well as anyone might hope.
When not stuck in wolf form, Garth was a twelve-hundred-year-old shifter who came from the Viking age of Scandinavia and headed PSI-Ops Team Eight. And when Garth wasn’t covered in fur and foaming at the mouth from sheer rage while walking on all fours, he was pushing seven feet tall, with a head of long blond hair that Rurik thought was a touch on the girlie side.
Not that Rurik had a ton of room to talk.
It wasn’t as if he kept his hair short, but he didn’t braid it like the captain. Sure, they were tiny braids hidden throughout Garth’s hair and the practice dated back to the man’s days of longboats and raiding villages, but they were braids all the same. It would be an extra-fucking-cold day in Siberia before Rurik braided anything, so there was no risk of them appearing in his hair.
A week prior, when Team Eight, along with members of the Fang Gang, had raided the estate of a man who ran drugs and guns for the enemy, they’d assumed it was an open-and-shut case. Rurik had thought the arms dealer was scum for more than one reason, so when he’d happened upon the man’s taxidermy collection—bears and wolves included—he’d wanted to rip him into tiny pieces. To hunt the non-shifter variety of their species was too much. That alone warranted the man’s death.
When an underground laboratory was discovered, containing test subjects who were all children, it had been all Rurik could do to temper his inner beast. Born a bear-shifter, he liked to think he had decent control over that side of himself. The incident a week ago told him otherwise.
It let him know that when children were involved, all bets were off.
Unlike humans, supernaturals didn’t reproduce at high rates of speed. He was sure it was nature’s way of balancing everything and keeping the supernatural population from exploding. Children were to be valued and protected at all costs.
Not experimented on.
Yet that’s exactly what PSI had uncovered.
Sadly, that lab hadn’t been the only one unearthed that day, or during the last week, for that matter. Rurik had lost track of the number of facilities that had been discovered and raided. All of which Garth had been absent from assisting with, since he’d lost control during the first of the raids. The enemy had been busy, and PSI had missed all the signs. Now they were stuck playing cleanup and being reactive instead of proactive.
Knowing the enemy’s history and ties to World War II eugenics, Rurik highly doubted the current labs marked the re-start of the testing. His gut said the testing from the height of eugenics had never actually ended. That the enemy had just gotten better at hiding it from everyone.
Assholes.
He had to take a deep breath and count backward internally from ten to calm himself and the animal he shared his body with. The bear wanted a pound of flesh from every bastard involved with the testing facilities. Hell, the bear wanted more than simply a pound. It wanted to consume them all—to rip them to shreds and eat them, leaving no trace behind.
A line of Russian fell free from Rurik’s lips as he grumbled about how much he hoped to get his hands on the bastards who had dared to hurt children.
The momentary loss of control and speaking out loud only served to gain him more attention in the bullpen. There were a decent number of men there, and all with their eyes on Rurik. Normally, very few paid him any attention when he entered a room. Right now, it seemed like everyone was paying attention. For a moment, he wondered if his zipper was down, seeing as how all eyes were on him.
He checked.
It wasn’t.
Still, they all continued to stare.
Some began to snicker, while others averted their gazes quickly as he made eye contact with them, an unspoken challenge in the air. Not a shock, seeing as how his temper was somewhat notorious. It had once earned him a blender from his coworkers—though he still wasn’t sure why the men thought he’d want one.
“What?” Rurik demanded of Miles “Boomer” Walsh, as he approached the desk the man was currently occupying. It wasn’t Boomer’s desk, but he’d clearly made himself comfortable in it all the same. He reclined in the office chair, with his feet propped on the edge of the desk as he toyed with some metal contraption that seemed as if it was made to hold paper clips.
Boomer, who always looked more like he was about to attend a vampire-themed nightclub rather than work for an off-the-books organization that fought against supernatural threats,
