Chasing His Bunny Read Online Free Page A

his work, and it wasn't the government.
    About a year ago, Eli had been
contacted by the U.S. government, when scientists had started
reporting that their work was being stolen.  All of them had
been working on some kind of research involving shifters. 
What had started out as simple recovery had taken a major turn
today when they'd found the Bunson siblings.  The other
compounds hadn't had experiments; they'd just been guarding and
continuing the research.  Some of it was focused on military
uses, but a lot of it also seemed to be geared towards the diseases
which had devastated much of the smaller shifter population in the
past few years.  The smaller shifters, who turned into prey
animals, tended to be pretty insular and scientists had theorized
that inbreeding may have contributed to the spread of disease and
the general weakness of those shifter lines. 
    The larger predator
shifters could be somewhat insular as well, but they didn't mind
mixing with humans as much, or with each other.  Most of them
didn't take it to the extreme like Steele did with his pack, but he
liked having a mixed grab bag of shifters around him, rather than
just wolves.  Especially since his pack was made up of both
fighters and other shifters who wanted to support the fight; no one
like his sisters would make it very far in his pack.  Everyone
was expected to pitch in and lend some kind of hand whenever shit
went down.  Either you were a soldier, or you contributed in
some way by healing, cooking, logistics, tech support... everyone
had a job.  Everyone was useful.  Or they left to find
another pack where they could sit on their laurels and have
everything handed to them. It didn’t matter their place in the pack
– unlike his parents’ pack where the alpha and his family
definitely received preferential treatment and rarely had to lift a
finger unless they wanted to.  Which was probably why his
sisters never visited Steele; they waited till he came to visit
their parents’ pack to see him.
    "What do you mean, woke
them up?" Steele asked, confused.  His hands were balled into
fists as he tried to control his frustration.  Fortunately,
his wolf seemed to understand the need to stay in human form right
now.
    They needed as much information as
possible to protect their mate.
    "The Bunsons have shifter
genes, way back in their ancestry," Eli explained, looking down at
the notes he had in front of him.  "No one in their family has
shifted for generations, it looks like, but the genes are still
passed down.  If any of them had mated with a shifter, there's
a good chance their children would have been shifters, because of
that."
    Shifter-human pairings had
a fifty-fifty chance of producing humans or shifters.
Shifter-shifter pairings had a one hundred percent chance, but the
children always came out as one or the other animal when the
shifter parents were different animals.
    "But they didn't," Steele
said. 
    "No."  Eli said, his
face grim.  Blond hair and bright, green eyes didn't usually
do brooding well, but right now Eli pulled it off.  "But it
doesn't seem to have mattered.  It appears this Dr. Montgomery
figured out how to unlock the shifter potential in their
genes.  The process sounds... painful."  Steele's wolf
howled internally.  He was going to need to go for a long run
tonight to let his poor wolf work off some of its frustrated
fury.
    "So, what are they?"
    "We're not sure."
    "What do you mean you're not sure?"
 Steele's jaw creaked as he gritted his teeth.
    Eli sighed, rubbing his hand over his
face, looking more tired than Steele had ever seen him
before.  Even though he was dressed in a suit, as always, he
looked... rumpled.  Which was highly unusual.
    "From his notes, Montgomery says that
he successfully unlocked their potentials.  Plural.  On
their mother's side, they have bear ancestors.  On their
father's, rabbit and... turtle."  Eli's mouth twitched. 
There hadn't been turtle shifters in