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

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.

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.