by Jade White
“That ship has kind of already sailed,” Cynthia agreed. She chuckled, shaking her head and knocking back the last of her wine in a few fast gulps. “So what are we going to do next?”
“What do you mean?” Cynthia raised an eyebrow.
“I mean that you were just in a fight with a lion. I don’t think that lion escaped from the zoo.”
“You’re right.” Nick grinned. “The next thing we do is to call the detective working on my father’s murder. We tell him we were attacked, and I let him look over my clothes and injuries.”
“Do you know who it was?” Nick shook his head.
“Not anyone I know,” he said. That fact galled him. If someone wanted him dead, he wanted to know who it was. Besides, the call he’d gotten earlier that evening—saying that he had something that belonged to his would-be murderer—suggested someone who knew him very well. Well enough to have his direct line. Well enough to be able to find him in the city on his date with Cynthia. “But I am damn well going to find out who it is,” Nick told Cynthia firmly. “In the meantime, I’m going to want you to stay here.”
“Why?” Cynthia frowned, almost scowling at him.
“Your place isn’t secure enough. I don’t want to hear an argument on this, Cynthia. This guy tracked us to the restaurant, and I don’t even know him. He can track you to the townhouse for sure.”
“It’s got the security system,” Cynthia pointed out.
“That lion could kill you before the cops arrived, alarm or no,” Nick told her firmly. “You’re staying here.”
“You don’t get to make me stay here,” Cynthia said, crossing her arms over her chest. Her scowl deepened. Nick shifted in his chair, lifting his shirt to show the raking scratches along his ribs.
“You’re staying here. You can’t heal this fast. You can’t take a full-grown lion by yourself.” Nick saw Cynthia’s jaw tighten, and he knew that she wanted to argue the point—but he also saw the fear in her eyes. She snatched up the bottle of wine and filled her glass.
“Fine,” she said, drinking half of it in a few fast gulps. “I will stay here… for a few days.”
“We’ll work this out,” Nick said, trying to keep his voice soothing. “We’ll talk to the detective, and I’ll do some investigating myself.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight,” Cynthia offered. Nick shook his head.
“No. I have a guest room—I have two guest rooms, in fact. If you don’t want to share a bed with me, you can sleep in one of those beds.” Nick raised a hand to stall any further comment from Cynthia. “Let’s call the detective, okay? We can work out the details after we’ve gotten the ball rolling on them finding this guy.” Nick began to smile as a thought occurred to him. “If nothing else, at least the fight got him good and injured. He’ll be easier to find if he’s slinking around trying to find a doc to stitch him up.”
Cynthia smiled weakly, and Nick decided that, all things considered that was enough of a victory for him.
Chapter Six
Cynthia woke with a shiver, disoriented and for a moment not sure what had even awakened her. She frowned in the darkness, taking in the quiet of the room around her, the feeling of the decadently comfortable bed underneath her. How can I possibly be cold with blankets this thick? Cynthia patted the duvet, shaking her head on the thick, soft pillows. It didn’t make any sense; none of it made sense.
In a flash, everything that had happened the previous evening flowed into her mind: the conversation with Nick, the dinner, the attack by the were-lion… and the detective. Cynthia groaned, turning over onto her side and pressing the heels of her palms against her temples. She was in one of Nick’s guest rooms, where she’d retired after an awkward, tense meal with the man who wanted her to carry his child. His were-tiger child, she corrected herself glumly.
She knew that it shouldn’t matter to her. Nick was technically no different from the person he’d always been. He was just as charming, just as gorgeous, just as wealthy, and just as intelligent. He was everything he’d ever been. The personality that had stirred up her feelings was the same. But knowing that the man she’d had sex with dozens of times in a month in the hopes of conceiving a child turned into a wild animal capable of killing a lion… that changed things. Cynthia closed her eyes and tried to will herself back to sleep.
What had pulled her out of her sleep in the first place? Cynthia frowned as the question flitted through her drowsy, foggy brain. She had awakened shivering. Was it some kind of nightmare? Cynthia turned onto her back once more and stared up into the darkness, trying to remember. Everything had seemed so unreal, ever since the lion had appeared. It was almost impossible to believe what she had seen with her own eyes, heard with her own ears.
The detective that had come the night before after Nick’s phone call hadn’t found any of the details shocking. When Nick had said the word “were-lion,” Cynthia had glanced at the man—and not even a flicker of surprise had crossed his eyes. The detective was wearing a suit—not as good as the one Nick had all but destroyed in his transformation, but of reasonable quality—and had graying hair that was just starting to recede at the temples, framing a sharp-featured, stubble-roughened face.
The detective had taken down the information, which was—as far as Cynthia could tell—normal law enforcement procedure. But then he’d asked for Nick’s clothes, the ones he’d been wearing when the fight broke out. Before Cynthia’s shocked eyes, the detective had sniffed them thoroughly, going over every inch of the fabric. It was at that point that she realized that the reason that the detective hadn’t been shocked at the mention of a were-lion—or a were-tiger—was that he knew, personally, that such creatures existed. After the man had left, Nick had told her that Detective Ayers was a werewolf.
“You see a lot of wolves in that line of work,” he had explained, as matter-of-factly as if he’d been saying that working-class people tended to stay in trade jobs. “Their noses are pretty damn keen, and they’re better than some other shifters at hunting someone down.”
Cynthia pulled the blankets over her head. She felt very much like she was losing her mind. A billionaire were-tiger wants me to carry his shape-shifter child. The detective investigating his father’s murder is a werewolf. If someone had told Cynthia the morning of the attack that werewolves and shape-shifters existed, she would have laughed in their face. But how could she deny it, when she’d seen it happen?
What was it that woke me up? The question plagued Cynthia. She hadn’t had a nightmare—she knew that she’d remember that. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it for a moment, racking her brain for any detail that she could connect with her waking. She had come out of sleep suddenly, shivering—but she wasn’t cold, not really.
Her mind wanted to wander back over the last twenty-four hours; Cynthia didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to go back to sleep, to pretend none of it had ever happened. The two of them—Cynthia and Nick—had been trapped in the house. There was nothing, technically, preventing either of them from leaving; there was no police presence, and there was no law against them leaving, but they had both agreed that with their attacker on the run, they would be safest in the house, together.
And thus began the most awkward day of my entire life, Cynthia thought with a mixture of bitterness and frustration. She and Nick had given each other space throughout the day; Nick had retreated into his office, and Cynthia had parked herself on the couch in the living room and had spent the day watching old TV sitcoms on Netflix. Their paths had only crossed at meals, but their conversations had been so strained, so stilted, that Cynthia had nearly skipped dinner just to avoid having to feel guilty and irritable.
A loud thud, followed by first a groan and then a low-pitched roar, stopped Cynthia’s ruminations in their tracks. She sat up in the bed. The roar was undoubtedly animal, the thud and the groan, on the other hand…
Before she knew what she was doing, Cynthia threw the blankets off, swinging h
er legs over the edge of the bed. She strode towards the bedroom door quickly, realizing that Nick’s bedroom was almost directly above the room she’d taken. Something—clearly—was happening to Nick. She walked across the living room, coming to the foot of the stairs leading to the top floor of the townhouse, and then stopped in her tracks. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her blood roared in her ears. Cynthia tried to slow her breathing down, tried to listen for another noise, some indication that either things were still going on above—or that they’d ended, that Nick was okay. She heard another roar—and then another, and a third, all three different in a way that she couldn’t define.
“Okay,” she said, her voice calmer, more level than she expected it to be. “Obviously something is going down upstairs.” Cynthia licked her lips and looked around.
The animal roars made convinced her that whatever was going on, she didn’t want to be in the midst of it with nothing between her and the animals in question other than the pajamas she had borrowed from Nick. A shriek cut through the air, and Cynthia shivered.
A decision crystalized in her mind. She darted into the kitchen. “He’s got to have a knife. He’s got to—I’ve seen him use knives…” Cynthia opened drawers quickly, fumbling as quietly as she could with the clattering implements. She felt a sharp, brief flash of pain along her fingers and hissed, pulling her hand back.
Cynthia swallowed against the tightness in her throat and looked at her fingers in the gloom of the nightlight. She was cut all right, but it wouldn’t matter that much. She took a breath and reached into the drawer again. Glancing around, Cynthia saw the knife block off to the side. There was another roar from upstairs, followed by a thud and a groan and growling that had an unmistakable big cat sound. She snatched up knives quickly, not caring if she made noise. The creatures upstairs were making enough to cover her. Cynthia realized that she wouldn’t be able to make use of more than at most two knives at one time, and looking down, selected the sharpest, longest two of the ones she had grabbed.
She darted out of the kitchen, still listening for the noises of the fight raging upstairs. Telltale sounds of furniture skidding across the floor, animal sounds, thuds and cries filled her ears. She hurried up the steps, willing herself not to trip, not to slip on the thick, soft rug that lined each riser. Cynthia took no more than a few seconds to catch her breath on the landing between one flight and the second and then plunged onward, her mind filling with dread at what could be happening to Nick.
As she reached the door to the master suite, something hit it—hard. The thick wood shuddered in the frame, rattling the knob. Cynthia took another quick, deep breath. Her palms felt a little slick, but she didn’t dare to take the time to wipe them on the pajamas; she would have to hope that she could hold onto the handles of the knives she’d brought with her well enough.
Another groan—and somehow, without knowing just how, Cynthia recognized it as Nick’s voice—and she managed to get the door open and plunge through it. For an instant, all of the movement in the room stopped, and everything went silent. Cynthia took in the scene before her in a few rabbit-fast heartbeats: two people lay on the floor, one a male and the other female, eyes glazed over in death. The man’s head was twisted at an odd angle on its neck, indicating how it had died; the woman lay in a pool of blood, her throat ripped open. A huge tiger—Nick—stood cornered, bleeding from several wounds, panting between low, menacing growls. Three more lions surrounded him but their attention was no longer completely on the tiger. Their baleful honey-gold eyes staring at Cynthia instead.
“All right, assholes,” Cynthia said, bringing the knives up in a defensive posture. “I have no idea what the hell you’re doing here—but I am going to do my level best to kill the shit out of you if you don’t get the hell away from my boyfriend.”
One of the three lions—Cynthia saw the unmistakable stitches where a flap of skin had hung down the night before—started to growl, glancing briefly at Nick before turning towards Cynthia fully. Nick let out a loud, chest-vibrating roar. The three lions looked at each other, sharing the communal animal kind of telepathy. The lion in lead, the one with the stitches, turned back towards Nick. The other two moved with the liquid speed of felines, launching themselves at Cynthia. Yes, because of the two opponents here, I’m the more dangerous one, she thought in a flash, before dropping into a slight crouch. Cynthia brought the knives up, thrusting them at the advancing lions. The female moved to come under the blade, and Cynthia barely missed the swat from the male’s huge, tawny paw.
Cynthia lost track of everything except for the two lions attacking her. She moved on pure instinct, adrenaline flowing in her veins, blurring details of things but fueling her arms. She made decisions in fractions of a second, slicing at the air and stabbing at each of the lions, ducking and twisting and moving. Pain exploded along the back of her shoulder and Cynthia cried out, but she knew that she couldn’t let herself stop, couldn’t give into the pain and hesitate or stop moving. She barely noticed the growls and roars; her blood pounded through her ears, her heart thudding in her chest as Cynthia kept the two lions at bay.
She could feel herself starting to tire. She couldn’t last indefinitely, and the pain in her shoulder was beginning to throb. Cynthia watched the two lions circling her with clear, predatory intent, looking for another opening, looking for their chance to take her out. She feinted, sinking down as if the stress and fear of the encounter had made her weak. When the lioness leaped, Cynthia twisted around. She brought the point of the knife in her hand up and sliced as hard and as deeply as she could along the female’s pale underbelly. The lioness shrieked, falling to the floor in a thump, reedy-sounding, whimpering purrs flowing from her as she curled up on herself.
An explosion of pain lit Cynthia’s back. She tumbled over, barely avoiding her own knives. Her lungs were on fire. The male lion wheeled around, recovering from his leap. To her astonishment, Cynthia realized that she’d landed more than a few gouges and slices with the knives at him: he was bleeding from a shoulder, and had a long slice down his flank. Cynthia’s back was on fire, her shoulder hot with the same pain. She struggled to catch her breath; she didn’t even know whether or not Nick was still alive—but at the moment, keeping her own skin more or less intact was the most important thing.
“Well? Come on! Come at me!” Cynthia glared at the panting lion. It growled and after a moment’s hesitation launched itself at her once again.
Cynthia twisted—but the lion had anticipated that, having seen the female go down only moments before. He shifted midair, giving Cynthia his back instead of his belly. She decided that that would have to be good enough, and in a split second, she brought the other knife down, plunging it into the male’s back. The lion let out a pained, indignant roar, and they both tumbled to the floor. Cynthia felt another fiery lick of pain along her arm, and then half of the lion’s body crashed onto her, nearly crushing her—or so it felt—with its weight.
Cynthia heard another roar, and her heart beat faster in a way that had nothing to do with fear; she recognized it as Nick. Craning her head, she saw the tiger, standing over the defeated final lion—the leader. Cynthia sagged, meeting Nick’s gaze.
“Can you do me a favor and change back?” She was breathless, panting and gasping. The weight of the lion on top of her wasn’t doing anything for her struggles to catch her breath.
The tiger shook its head, growling lowly. He came towards Cynthia, and the smell of musk and blood began to fill her nose as the adrenaline ebbed. The tiger groaned and growled, and Cynthia watched the mist envelop him. She closed her eyes, resting her head against the floor of the bedroom. The sound of thick, gloppy liquid churning, crunching, with hard bits clattering in it, filled her ears. Cynthia heard more groans—gradually becoming more and more human.
A few moments later, Cynthia felt the weight lifting off of her. She opened her eyes and saw Nick—totally naked, marked with scratches and rips in his skin, but otherwise okay—depo
siting the injured lion on the floor a few feet away. Cynthia took a deep breath, exhaling it slowly.
“Okay,” she said, gathering up the remnants of her energy and pushing herself into a sitting position. “So what do we do now?”
Nick smiled slightly, looking around the room. “We call the detective,” he said. Cynthia nodded numbly. Looking down at her body, she saw the shallow, long cut on her arm, blood spattering her borrowed pajamas.
“How exactly are we going to explain all this?” she asked, pointing to the fallen forms scattered around the room. The lions were changing back into humans—naked humans.
“He’s a were,” Nick said with a shrug. He looked at the leader of the group; Cynthia saw that the man was not dead—but was merely very wounded. “I wanted him alive so that we can find out if there’s anyone else after us.”
“I need a shower, some clean clothes, and maybe some medical attention,” Cynthia said. She twisted around, trying to look at her back.
“How badly are you hurt?” Nick crouched down next to her, turning her this way and that. He pulled up the back of the pajama top and hissed. “We’ll get you cleaned up and get in touch with Ayers. Then I’ll take you to a doctor who won’t have too many questions about why there are claw-marks on your back.”
“Sounds good,” Cynthia said, nodding vaguely as everything started to go slowly gray around her. She was exhausted; she wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep. “I’m just going to take a little nap for a minute, if you don’t mind.”
Chapter 7
Nick winced as he sank down onto the sofa in his living room. He was healing fast from the battle with Lars and the other lions that the rogue had managed to attach, but the lingering soreness from a few deep scratches couldn’t disappear fast enough. He sighed, thinking of Cynthia upstairs in his bedroom; she would take much longer to heal than he would.
