by Aja James
“Good point,” Wan’er answered. “Did you leave the vampire in the experiment chamber?”
“Was I supposed to move him back into his cell? I don’t think I can handle him by myself even when he’s in his current state. But more importantly, I don’t know how to release his restraints. How did you get him there in the first place?”
“He was unconscious at the time,” the researcher muttered. “I was planning to move directly to harvesting while he’s secured. Perhaps I can still do so before you mount the other tiger.”
“And waste precious time passing my ovulation window by?”
“Your egg could be fertilized even now,” the researcher argued.
Agent Kyles shrugged.
“True. But we won’t know for days even with the most sensitive tests.”
“I can get in there and have a look directly,” the researcher persisted.
“Doesn’t that take time? You sure you want to stir the pot, so to speak, and jeopardize conception?”
Agent Kyles had a point.
Damn it. This wasn’t the plan.
Wan’er hated to veer off plan.
But time was of the essence. The very thought of having an embryo from Agent Kyles and one of the animals made her salivate more than any sexual lust.
“I need to get the Paladin here. He’s the only one who can handle—”
“He’s back at Medusa’s base, isn’t he?” Agent Kyles pointed out. “It would take half an hour for him to arrive.”
Wan’er tapped her tablet screen and scrolled through some data.
Agent Kyles was right. According to the analysis of the hormones in her blood, she had at most an hour or two of fertile window left. They couldn’t afford to wait on the Paladin or other top warriors from Medusa’s fold. They had to make do with the soldiers on duty at the facility here.
“Come with me.”
Wan’er quickly walked down a long corridor leading to the experiment chamber.
She marshalled all of the security personnel on her earpiece that were on site to meet her there. They were mostly human, only a couple of vampires, since this was the late shift. But at least they had weapons. And all of the animals were caged, restrained and controlled with shock collars.
Nevertheless, she proceeded with caution. She hated deviating from plan.
Just to be safe, she messaged the Creature to ask for the Paladin. Worst case scenario, the Pure warrior would be here within thirty minutes, maybe sooner.
Agent Kyles followed closely behind with an efficient gait. She seemed all business, ready to fuck another animal for the sake of science.
Well, for the sake of her program, anyway. Any contribution to science from what Wan’er and Medusa did was merely a byproduct.
When they arrived, four human soldiers and two vampires awaited their orders.
Wan’er and Agent Kyles entered behind two lead soldiers, and the two vampires came in behind them, leaving two guards outside.
The Chosen’s Commander was conscious, his eyes glaring at them as they all filed in.
“Do you have the tranquilizer?” Wan’er asked one of the humans.
“Is that necessary when we’ll put him in the shock collar anyway?” Agent Kyles inserted.
“I thought you wanted to do some harvesting next? I’d shot him with two maximum doses of tranq only twenty-four hours ago. If you inject him again, you’ll have to wait another twelve to twenty-four hours for the effects to wear off in order to take viable samples, don’t you?”
Wan’er gave her a look of irritation.
“Only the brain. The rest should be fine.”
Agent Kyles shrugged again, irking Wan’er even more.
“Suit yourself.”
Wan’er mulled in indecision a few seconds longer and finally said to one of the vampire guards, “Put on the collar first. Extricate the needles carefully, and only open the restraints when I tell you to.”
Thus directed, they proceeded with extreme caution.
The Chosen’s Commander didn’t show any reaction save the clench of his jaw when the needles were pulled from his temples, neck and veins.
Wan’er knew better. The pain must be excruciating.
But no matter the level of pain, the Commander wasn’t incapacitated unless he was unconscious or dead.
She eyed him warily as the guards secured the shock collar around his neck, with spikes on the inside to penetrate his skin, so that the electric current, should he get zapped, would be immediate and debilitating.
At last, she considered his restraints. They would put chains and manacles on him first before un-cuffing him from the steel table, but even in chains, and even in his vampire form, he was still a dangerous threat. She hadn’t survived for so long, all nine lives’ worth, to make a stupid mistake now.
The guards un-cuffed his ankles first using thumb-print-encrypted laser keys that had to be activated at the same time.
When they moved to un-cuff his arms, the researcher began to doubt the wisdom of her decisions. Her fox senses were crackling with alarm.
Something was off.
“Wait—”
The warning came half a second too late.
At the click of the cuff release, everything happened so fast, a blink was long enough to get you killed.
The researcher watched stupefied as Agent Kyles grew claws out of her hands and swiped one unerringly at the Commander’s neck, slicing through the thick metal collar like butter.
Immediately thereafter, she disappeared.
Just poofed.
In her place was a giant black panther, who reared up on its muscular hind legs and slashed the throats of two guards in one massive swipe.
Their prisoner simultaneously shifted into giant tiger form, the chains falling away like spider webs. He stomped another guard into the ground with his hind leg and ripped the head off of the last vampire with one chomp.
Ever attuned to self-preservation, the fox spirit hastily dashed for the door, but not before the panther’s claws raked across her back.
She didn’t waste breath screaming at the fiery pain, shutting herself on the other side of the chamber and sealing the animals within.
Slow to react, the human guards outside just now cocked their weapons, but the researcher had better ideas.
“Get me out of here!”
The door, explosion proof and a foot thick as it was, didn’t stand a chance against two giant, royally pissed off animals. Already, one of them rammed a feline-shaped dent into the metal, the titanium steel frames creaking in protest.
They’d be out in seconds. She had to escape!
She was useless when it came to battle. And the humans could hardly protect her if it came down to that.
She’d already alerted the Creature. The Paladin and reinforcements were close.
She entered an escape tunnel, the human guards half carrying, half dragging her as her strength waned with the blood loss from her back wounds.
But she knew she’d survive.
Her body had Pure healing abilities, after all. She knew her shell well enough to be assured of recovery.
And then a thought occurred to her.
Agent Kyles—the researcher’s programmed, genetically engineered mutant—succeeded in transforming into a giant animal where all of her previous experiments had failed.
This was a breakthrough!
Good thing she had backup samples of Agent Kyles in another facility.
Things were going to get very interesting from here on out.
*** *** *** ***
Ishtar looked with two parts longing and one part worry at her Mate.
He’d come back that night before dawn broke through the sky.
He always came back. But the intervals between his sudden departures had shortened significantly.
It was a couple of months after they’d Mated when he had his first “attack.”
One night, they’d been sleeping peacefully, their bodies entwined
, his sex held covetously within hers, when he awoke on a choked scream and shoved blindly at her, practically throwing her against the wall.
She’d been uncaring of her own pains, the back of her skull throbbing from cracking hard against the concrete, totally concentrated on him. She tried to reach out to him to see what was wrong, but he leapt away from her, hastily pulled on some pants and banged out of the rear door before she could even open her mouth to call his name.
She’d tracked him that night in her snow leopard form, the kitten version, given there might still be some humans out despite the late hour. She’d watched him walk swiftly through familiar alleys that he now knew like the back of his hand.
Though he was blind, he’d learned to harness all of his other senses to provide a three-dimensional virtual reality in his mind. Unless he was unfamiliar with a space, he moved as if he was still a seeing male.
But he wasn’t.
His blindness was a constant reminder of all the wounds he bore that didn’t heal.
His physical wounds had mostly healed by now, but he still wore them on his skin like haphazard tattoos, though they’d faded in color over time.
There was still an echo of the pain he’d endured, she knew. She sometimes caught him unconsciously rubbing his ribs or neck or chest as if he were trying to ease a persistent ache.
In the beginning, his eyes had started to regain the ability to sense light. But after a while, his vision receded again, plunging him into unending darkness.
And with it, despair.
His nightmares became more frequent. Sometimes, she found him locked in the fetal position while he slept, his entire body clenched and shuddering with stress.
It had been many weeks since she’d fed from him. The last time she’d taken his blood, he’d been in so much pain he could barely breathe, his chest rising and falling in labored gulps of breath.
She didn’t think she hurt him. Not with the love in her heart infused into the venom of her fangs. But he was hurting nonetheless. Hurting in ways she couldn’t fathom, was helpless to ease.
She didn’t know how to help him. And it was killing her by slow degrees.
They hadn’t made love for even longer.
They’d had sex. Yet, it didn’t even feel like they did that.
He’d forced himself to give her the Nourishment she needed. Pulling her into his body with shaking hands and pushing himself inside her, pumping with desperate thrusts until he released his seed.
When she touched him, he jerked away. When she tried to kiss him, he always pulled back as if burned.
Despite it all, she never doubted for one moment that he loved her with his entire being, body, heart and soul.
It was because he loved her that he forced himself to satisfy her physical needs as her Mate. She knew it tore him apart inside that she wanted more, he wanted more, but his demons held him back.
She knew he wanted to be the best male for her. She knew he thought she deserved the sun, the moon and the very stars, and he wanted to be the one to give them to her.
But she didn’t want any of that.
She just wanted him.
Tal-Telal was her entire universe.
She lived for his rare smiles. She soared for his chuckles and laughs.
She invited Inanna, Gabriel and Benji—especially Benji—to their shop every day, and for the most part, one or more of them came to visit daily.
Benji was able to pull Tal back into the light when Ishtar couldn’t, no matter how she tried. Tal was always relaxed around the boy with the golden curls and contagious cheer.
She wondered whether Benji represented in some ways to Tal the son they’d lost.
They both felt that he was still alive and out there in the world, but neither of them knew where to start. Inanna had combed through the Dark Ones’ archives with Devlin and Grace to help her, but there wasn’t even a hint about the son, Inanna’s twin brother, that the Dark Princess bore four millennia ago.
The only mentions of him said that the boy had died at birth.
Tal and Ishtar refused to believe it. In their hearts, they couldn’t believe it. And the last memory Ishtar had after giving birth did not confirm the boy’s death, certainly. But she’d been told he was too weak to live.
It couldn’t be true.
He lived!
They would find him one day, she was sure of it.
In the meantime, she focused on not losing Tal too.
She wanted to take his pain away and bring him joy. She wanted to spend the rest of eternity making him happy.
But these days…
Even when they were in the same room, sitting just half a foot from each other, she felt like they were galaxies away.
She didn’t know how to reach him, except to be patient, a virtue she most assuredly did not possess.
“What are you carving?” she asked quietly.
She wasn’t the quiet sort of female. But she couldn’t help but be subdued by the aura of pain around him.
“A leopard,” he answered just as quietly, his deep voice a soft rumble.
It was his favorite animal, of course. He must have carved hundreds of leopards in her likeness over the past year.
But her favorite one, and the one she refused to give to anyone else, even though she liked to share the trinkets in her shop with strangers who needed them, was the first one he’d ever made for her. It was still wrapped in its blue ribbon, now worn and faded with time, sitting on her bedside table.
She scooted slightly closer to have a better look. But really, it was just an excuse to inhale more of his drugging scent.
“This one looks different. You’re not carving a likeness of me, are you?”
He shook his head.
“It’s a…boy leopard,” he said hesitantly.
Then cleared his throat before continuing, “If our boy could turn into one, I thought…”
He stopped his whittling and breathed deeply in and out, looking sightlessly at the wooden block in his hands.
Ishtar stroked the tips of her fingers very lightly on the back of his large, vein-wrapped hand that held the carving.
He flinched slightly but didn’t pull away.
Emboldened, she curled her fingers into his palm, holding him loosely while he held the leopard.
A shaky exhale left his lips, and a muscle ticked in his clenched jaw.
“I love you, Ishtar.”
The words were roughly spoken, almost defiant.
“I know.”
“I want to be what you deserve.”
He closed his hand tighter around the leopard, and in doing so, tighter around her fingers.
“You are everything I want, Tal-Telal. I don’t think I will ever deserve you, but I’m never giving you up.” This she vowed.
He raised his eyes to gaze at her.
It never ceased to amaze her that, even blind, his aquamarine orbs always pierced into her very soul.
“You are Mated to a broken male,” he rasped harshly. “You cannot fix—”
“I don’t want to fix you,” she said fiercely, squeezing his hand as tightly as she dared.
“You are not broken. And even if you were, shattered into a million pieces, I would still love every single one of them. All the fragments and shards. All the sharp and jagged edges. Every single part of you is beautiful to me, Tal. I love it all.”
Something cracked like lightning across his face, a fissure in the wall he’d erected around himself. She knew he’d done it not to shut her out, but to protect her from the indescribable pain that raged inside him.
He’d endured over four millennia of torture and imprisonment. By her own twin sister, no less.
She wouldn’t let Medusa win. They’d figure it out together. They had forever to look forward to.
“Arammu mi shi,” she whispered to her Eternal Mate, bringing his knuckles to her lips for a fervent kiss.
My love, breath of my life, my soul.
Chapter Sixte
en
The fabulously constructed steel cages were no match for the teeth and claws of two giant predatory felines after all.
Once Maximus and Ariel busted out of the experiment chamber, they made short work of the cells that held their friends, as well as the collars that prevented them from shifting.
“I need to destroy everything in the lab,” Ariel said grimly, once they were together, clothed in whatever covers and shoes they could find.
When the six of them got out and rounded up the few other felines that had been captured, they couldn’t exactly saunter into the night in their animal forms. And being naked didn’t equate to being covert. So she scrounged up a few lab coats and the discarded clothes from the human guards and disintegrated vampires for camouflage.
The facility was deserted. The mind-controlled human assistants nowhere in sight.
Not surprisingly, the head researcher also didn’t loiter in the halls, waiting for them to get out and end her miserable existence.
Ariel made a mental note to hunt the bitch down later.
The researcher might appear to be one of Medusa’s many pawns, but Ariel saw the evil in her. She considered living beings nothing more than objects for experimentation. She had no feeling, no remorse, for all the heinous acts she’d committed on Medusa’s behalf.
The researcher needed to die.
What she did to Maximus—locking him down on that lab table to be used and raped and dissected—Ariel would yank her innards right through her nostrils for that alone.
Maximus caught her eye and shook his head.
Wordlessly, he communicated that he was fine; she needed to focus on the tasks at hand. But one day, when they encountered the researcher again, he’d let her rip the bitch’s guts out to her panther heart’s delight.
What a male! So considerate of her wants and needs.
While Ariel got to work erasing all the research files from the facility’s central database, Rhys, Luka and Roark put together some home-made bombs using whatever was handy, which was quite a lot. There were all kinds of chemicals, wires and instruments in the lab.
