Howling Mad: A paranormal wolf shifter romance (Badlands Book 2) by Rebekah Blue Page B

But he couldn’t fight dirty and he knew it – not if he was to have any chance of coming out of this with his polished, people-person reputation intact. He subsided, but Naomi could see the wheels turning behind his eyes, and she could see something else in his face. Something she’d never seen there before. Uncertainty.
    “Fact number one,” said Byron. “In the 1930s the government was conducting research into the creation of super soldiers. Men and women with the strength of a bear, the grace of a big cat, the savagery of a wolf. Activists released the experimental serums into the water supply, and the shifter races were created. As some of you know to your cost, the ability to shift sometimes carries with it other abilities. Pyrokinesis. Clairvoyance. Berserker strength. And we are all at risk of turning feral – of our animal natures taking over.”
    “You aren’t telling us anything new,” piped up a reporter in an unconvincing toupee.
    “Yeah, this is Shifter Origins for Dummies ,” agreed his cameraman.
    Dr. Atkins saw an opportunity. “Dynamic Earth is dedicated to addressing those fundamental concerns—” he began, then gave a choked gurgle as Felix tightened his arm around his throat.
    “Let the man talk,” the feline assassin said in a low, deadly tone.
    “Dynamic Earth is engaged in cutting-edge biomedical research,” said Byron. “That much you know. Clinical trials into microbiology, vaccines, and mapping differences in human and shifter genomes. It has extensively studied the records from the original 1930s trials – what little of them survive. It has recreated at least some of those trials’ results.”
    He held his audience spellbound now.
    “Decades ago, scientists mixed some amazing things in their test tubes. The ability to shift into a wolf or a cat or a bear. The ability to walk through a hail of bullets, or kill with a thought, or burn out your enemy’s brain. And Dynamic Earth has been replicating those results. Ask yourselves why.
    “In its laboratories, it has been creating subjects with the ability to shift into more than one animal. It’s been pumping people full of a serum that mimics berserker strength. How many of you recall the reports in the newspapers of humans killed by berserker bears? Hell, you probably wrote some of them, based on press releases from Dynamic Earth. Did you ever speak to any witnesses? Find medical records or police reports? A few months back, all of a sudden those reports dried up. Find out what changed .”
    There was a murmur of interest.
    “Doesn’t anyone remember two years ago, when a company called TerraDyne was shut down and its principals prosecuted because it was snatching cubs from families with fire-starting genes? Don’t you know that powerful men always have a fall guy? Some of you must know Latin. Terra. Earth. Dynamic Earth is TerraDyne. It’s the same monster with a different face, and we’re letting it eat people because it has good table manners.”
    The murmur had become a hubbub of shouted questions and exclamations of disbelief.
    The guy with the toupee raised his voiced above the row. “This can’t be true,” he said plaintively. “They wouldn’t be so stupid as to use the same name. It’s too obvious.”
    Naomi stepped forward. Her voice was a little shaky, but that was no bad thing – the reporters had to quieten down in order to hear her.
    “It wasn’t stupidity,” she said, the truth suddenly clear. She couldn’t take her eyes off her father. His face was ashen and Felix wasn’t so much restraining him as holding him up. “It was arrogance. He… They don’t think other people are as clever as them. They don’t really think of them as people at all.”
    She turned to face her father. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “My father…never really thought of me as a person at all.”
    The stunned silence was broken by slow, sarcastic applause. Professor Stanhope had got to his feet.
    “Oh, very good. Very