Danger in a Fur Coat (The Fur Coat Society Book 4) Read Free Page B

her backpack and slowly munched on it. She was beginning to wonder if this had been a stupid idea. She’d had such grand visions of swooping in here herself on a helicopter, breaking into the lab, coming up with a cure, and then swooping back to Michigan almost before the rest of her clan even realized that she was gone. But in the harsh light of day, she was starting to think that she had been just a wee bit foolish.
    She had no idea how she was going to break into the lab. Not only that, but everyone back in Michigan was going to be furious with her, even if she did find a cure. You don’t just leave your clan members without warning. She had done it for their good, though. Juno took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she opened her water bottle and took a long sip. Grant and Jack didn’t need to put themselves in danger. They had lifemates to think about. And, even though the city was quiet and still at the moment, Juno wasn’t kidding herself. She knew that Chicago was a dangerous place. Maybe it was a ghost town for the most part, but there were still people left behind. If what she’d heard last night was any indication, those people weren’t exactly getting along well.
    Juno shivered as she remembered the bloodcurdling screams that had traveled across the darkness. She closed her water bottle and shoved it back into her backpack, then slung the bag over her shoulder and headed for the door. She needed to get to the lab and get this whole situation taken care of as quickly as she could. As she stepped out into the sunshine, she looked left and right to make sure that no one else was around. Then she stepped quickly onto the street, her boots crunching loudly in the snow as she walked as closely to the wall as possible to avoid detection by anyone who might be watching. She breathed in deeply, trying to smell whether there were any other life forms around. But even her bear senses couldn’t detect much amidst the smell of death and dying. Whoever was left here was likely suffering from the bear flu or had already lost everyone they love to it. Whatever the case, the city was full of death. Juno kept walking, quickening her pace for the last block of her journey. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following her, but every time she turned around she saw no one. Everything was quiet except for the sound of her own feet and her own loud breathing.
    She made it back to Hook Labs and quietly stepped inside, assessing the situation once again in the light of day. The front windows were indeed broken and vandalized, but the security systems that led to the lab itself were still intact. Soft, electronic beeps came from the eye scanners mounted near the entrance. Juno walked over to them, then set her backpack down against the wall. She looked up and down at every square inch of the door, trying to see if there were any weaknesses. Of course, there were not. Hook Labs would have taken care to make sure they had the strongest level of security possible. Eye scanners were state-of-the-art security systems. Before their invention, most companies had used fingerprint sensors, but eye scanners were even more accurate. You could fake a fingerprint, but you couldn’t fake the DNA in someone’s irises. Either the eye scanner recognized your DNA and let you in, or it didn’t and you stayed out. The technology was amazing. As a scientist Juno, should have been intrigued by it. But she hated eye scanners. How could she not? The arrival of eye scanners is what had caused the war on shifters in the first place. Someone had realized that you could make scanners that detected animal DNA. This meant that when a shifter was scanned with a shifter-detecting scanner, there was no hiding. There was no way to change the fabric of who you are. Shifters could no longer blend in, pretending to be human.
    Juno ran her fingers across the top of the scanner, then jumped as it started beeping.
    “Welcome to Hook Labs,” a