Excerpt: Moxie & the Maverick
If only her brother had been willing to fight back against their captors, she thought. Personally, she had no qualms about killing any of the human or Elven scum who chose to work in the secret laboratory performing horrific illegal experiments on Shifters. Anyone who worked in the lab had to be aware of the vivisection, the torture, the bizarre and cruel experiments. They deserved to experience payback, but the girl vowed she would never be as evil as the researchers here. She would, however, be happy to deliver a swift and just death.
If only she were not the house cat, and her brother the enormous predator. Despite everything his tormentors had done to him, he was the real pussycat at heart. Soft and kind, he was still willing to forgive those who had captured him, experimented on him, and ultimately destroyed his natural method of shifting.
They had passed through several layers of security already. Her brother might be a softy, but the same experiments that had enhanced his size and mutated his normal shifting patterns had also endowed him with surpassing intelligence. He had planned their escape for a long time. Everything was timed perfectly and going according to plan.
“Now comes the second shift of guards,” his strange, animalistic voice rumbled behind her.
A team of humans armed with assault rifles passed in the hallway. There were six guards in all. Five were ordinary mundanes. Although they had to be aware of the grotesque experiments in the laboratory, they were ignorant that magic was involved. It must have seemed to them simply like horrifying genetic engineering that created chimeras, crossbreeds of human and animal that could not and should not exist in nature. They would be unable to distinguish between a natural Shifter and the monstrosities created the laboratory.
But the remaining soldier in the group was different. The other humans thought he was one of them, but he was not. He was an Elf. A Winter Elf, to be precise: an Azir, one of the many minions of the King of Swords who, together with his human and demon counterparts, ran this laboratory and the military base in which it was embedded.
As soon as the soldiers passed by, the two felines, the house cat and the lion, quietly trotted across the passageway. Her brother had already disabled the cameras, sending them into endless loops of repeating footage that would hopefully deceive the security guards in the monitoring stations.
The obvious way to try to escape the laboratory would be to take the elevator or the stairs up, to the surface. But not only would that be the expected path, it would mean going through level after level of military personnel. Most of them had no idea that the laboratory existed on the lowest levels of the secret base, but they would recognize that a lion did not belong in the hallway.
So instead of heading up, the two Shifters headed down. Below even the lowest levels of the laboratory were the service levels that included sewage and gas and other utilities. Independent generators thrummed and churned down here, ensuring that the base would always have power even if the electric grid in the continental North America went out.
Down they went, following the narrow metal utility stairways. Finally, they reached a door which opened into the utility tunnels. The lion barely fit in the stairwell and was extremely hard pressed to squeeze into the tunnels that were thick with pipes and metal boxes of switches and levers.
“There.” Her brother’s growly voice echoed against the cement and middle walls of the narrow corridor. “Switch to your human form to open the door.”
She switched from house cat to girl.
“There’s a code,” she said.
“I know.” He told her the numbers and she punched them into the keypad. The little metal door opened. It was only about a foot and a half high and one foot wide
“You’ll have to switch back to cat to fit,” the lion said. “As a cat, you will be limber enough to climb up the air duct in. It goes all the way to the top. Don’t fall. Even as a cat, if you fall from near the top, it will kill you.”
Still in human form, she whipped her head around to stare at the giant lion, her only remaining family in the world. “What about you?”
“I won’t fit,” he rumbled. “I wouldn’t fit, even if I could change into human form. Which you know I cannot.”
“I’m not going to go without you.”
The lion only stared mournfully at her with immense green gold eyes that reflected like a predator’s in the dark.
Slowly, the full extent of her brother’s deviousness dawned on her. “You knew all along you wouldn’t be able to get out. You knew I wouldn’t go without you, so you dragged me down here pretending you could escape with me.”
“I’m not going to apologize,” he said. “I’ve examined every possibility, and it all adds up to one thing. There is no way for me to escape. They will never let me go. If I did escape, they would hunt me until the end of days and drag me back here, so escaping is not even a viable option if we could get out.
“The only chance either of us has is for you, and you alone, to go. They consider you a failure. That’s a good thing. It means that although they will mount a hunt to search for you, they will eventually give up if they can’t find you within a few weeks. It means you have a real chance at freedom.”
“You know I won’t go without you.” Tears stung her eyes.
“That’s not fair to me,” he said gently. “You know that they want me to become one of them, to help them with their research. To design experiments for them. There is no torture, no pain they can inflict on me to make me do that. But if they torture you in front of me, I will crumble. I just can’t bear that, sister. Please don’t put me in that position. Don’t you see? Your freedom will mean my freedom. It means they no longer have any pulled over me that is outside of my control. My own pain is mine to accept or reject. Yours… I can’t…”
Her cheeks boiled hot with tears. “I understand.” She hugged him fiercely. “But if I get out, I’m never going to stop searching for a way to get you free too.”
“No! Promise me you won’t do that!” he insisted. “Not only would it waste your life, but it would mean that you would end back up here if you fail, and we would be right back where we started. Promise you will do nothing to try to free me!”
“I promise I will do nothing rash or stupid,” she said. “I know that I don’t have the ability to break you out right now. I will focus on eluding capture as long as it takes until interest in me dies down. But I will never forget you and stop trying to find a way to free you. You can’t make me promise to abandon you. I won’t go otherwise.”
The great lion hung his head. She hugged him tightly.
“I will find a way, brother. It may take me years. Don’t let them break you or make you help them. But if you can, hold onto life. Don’t die. Don’t give up on me.”
She turned back into a small cat and dashed into the little air duct.
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