by V M Black
Still Chay sat, looking down at the panther that had been Tara. A bullet in the brain. That’s what Liam had said that he owed her. But he wasn’t willing to give up. Not yet. Not for anything.
It wasn’t until she started to stir again that he disengaged himself from her, easing off the bed to stand over her for another long moment as her tail twitched slowly and her eyes began to blink. As he moved, the shirt that the dried gore had adhered to him pulled against his skin—a reminder of how dangerous she was and that he couldn’t stay. But it wasn’t until her heavy head lifted and she made a low, angry sound in the back of her throat that he stepped away, back out through the new clear door that replaced the metal one that had been there before.
Chay shut it, turning the mechanism to slide the bolts home with the sense that he was closing off something inside himself. Then he sat, just where he was, his blood-matted shirt stiff and itchy now. He watched her come awake, the panther’s restless movements increasing until she was able to heave herself up onto her feet, her legs trembling under her.
Her heavy head swung across as her nostrils flared at his scent, and her gaze met his. For just an instant, for a fraction of a moment, he thought that he saw recognition in her golden eyes. Then a deep growl rose from within her, and it was gone, and she turned away with an angry swish of her tail and began to pace the circumference of the room.
Chay shut his eyes, unable to watch the creature that had been Tara. A sudden bang made them fly open again, and he focused on the panther just in time to see her ram her shoulder against the door a second time, trying to get at him.
He watched her for a few minutes, his mind blank with despair as she growled and clawed at the narrow opening at the bottom of the door, her movements growing more and more frantic. He had ordered a clear door in hopes that seeing him might calm her. The more fool he.
He scooted across the floor so that his back was against the wall beside the door, making him invisible to her—as she was now to him.
Still she growled, and still her claws scrabbled on the concrete floor.
Chay began to talk. “I don’t know if you can still hear me, Tara, but I haven’t given up. I’m not going to give up on you, so don’t you give up on me. I haven’t ever lied to you, you know. Nothing I’ve ever said was a lie.”
The scrabbling stopped, but the low growl continued from the locked room.
“Not even when I was afraid of what the truth would do to you. That’s what happened now, I guess. Too much of the truth. There’s this…well, it’s not a joke exactly, but this idea, this conceit in this book that I read about how if you find out exactly how important you are in the universe, you go crazy. Too much truth drives you out of your mind.”
He was just saying whatever occurred to him in virtual free association. But the growling grew quieter as he spoke.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you everything. I didn’t want to…to do this to you. I don’t know what you found out that upset you so much. And I know a lot of the things that happened can’t be undone. But people heal. Your parents can be told that you’re alive, once you’re better. That wasn’t me, you know. It was the Air Force. When they took you to Andrews, they told everyone you’d died. They’ll release some ashes to your parents, but that part can be fixed if you just care enough to come back.”
The panther went silent, but Chay didn’t dare to hope.
“Like I said, I’ve never lied to you. But I promised you that I’d save you. And if you don’t come back from this, you’ll turn me into a liar. Don’t do that, bae girl. You have to do your part, too. For you, or for me, or for your parents. I don’t care why. Just come back. There are a lot of people who miss you.”
Chay ran out of words to say. He propped his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands for a very long time as the silence stretched out. Finally, the demands of his own human body grew too great. He’d had nothing but coffee for the past twelve hours—and his bladder was sending increasingly urgent messages to his brain. He stood, his muscles stiff from the long contact with the cold floor, and leaned to look around the wall and into his bedroom.
Instantly, the panther leaped to her feet, snarling and swiping under the door. Chay’s heart felt empty, cored out, and he gave a hollow laugh.
“You and me both, cat,” he said to her before turning and walking out the door.
Chapter Three
Days and nights had long run together in Chay’s underground world, and he’d taken to a changeable schedule years ago. The panther in him could still sense nights, even deep underground, and it preferred to be nocturnal, but there were people in Black Mesa up at every hour. The cafeteria served meals six hours apart around the clock, with a fixed set of breakfast offerings beside a changing lunch/dinner menu. To supervise all the systems—human, electronic, and mechanical—Chay had taken to making sure that he was awake for each of the daytime shifts at least once a week.
Now the last, lingering remnants of any kind of twenty-four hour structure fled. Chay stayed awake until he could fight off sleep no more, sitting on the bare concrete near the door to his bedroom and watching the panther that had been Tara. He called for food when he needed it and left only to shower and use the bathroom. When he grew too exhausted to go on, he slept.
And when he was awake, he talked. He talked about everything and about nothing. He told the panther about his favorite TV shows, about video games he’d played, about the fact that he only listened to death metal when he was coding. He talked about his Detroit childhood and the loneliness of being the only kid in a working-class neighborhood obsessed with computers. He explained in detail how he’d gotten into code hacking, first just to create silly scripts to amuse himself and his jaded friends and later to break into all kinds of places where he wasn’t supposed to be.
“I’m only telling you because the statute of limitations ran out on these a long time ago,” he said. “And also because, right now, you’re a cat.”
As time went on, the panther grew more tolerant of him. It took a day before he could be in the animal’s sight without her trying to attack him through the door. Then she ignored him for a while, pacing around the room, her tail flicking in irritation. That lasted for longer—Chay collapsed in sleep three times before she stopped doing that. Then she began to come up to the door again, not to attack him but to watch him, to stand or sit close as he talked.
He told her about how he’d finally screwed up and gotten caught after pulling an insanely brazen bank heist. It wasn’t that he had particularly wanted the money. In fact, he hadn’t really thought of it as stealing in his twelve-year-old mind. He was just moving some numbers around to impress his friends. He’d blown it when he’d had a debit card created for the bank account where he’d stashed all the money and had pulled out the daily limit to prove to his friends that it was real.
They’d blown the money on crappy mall food and the arcade—“Yeah, I know, you’ll really think I’m old now,” he told her—and three days later, the FBI had raided his parents’ house.
When the FBI discovered that the middle schooler was the actual thief and mastermind of the heist, not just a patsy sent in to take out funds, the prosecutor’s office had lost some of its judicial zeal. After a few days where he was sent first to juvie and then to a foster home, he was brought into a room with his parents and asked to sign a confession in return for a plea deal that sent him off to Washington, D.C., to be fought over by various three-letter agencies as a part of their intrusion teams.
He’d been cocky then. Thought he’d known everything because he was smarter than anybody that he knew. Yet he’d learned volumes more than he’d ever dreamed existed in those years working for the government. And the series of families that he’d stayed with had been an education of their own—directors and committee members and generals and admirals and even a couple of congressmen. They’d opened his mind to other ways of viewing the world that he hadn’t even considered from his narrow Michigan r
ow house.
When he’d turned eighteen and had been released from the terms of his deal, he hadn’t wasted a second before signing up with the Navy on the promise that he’d be able to join the most exclusive SEAL unit.
“I’d been planning it for four years by that point,” he told the panther, hoping Tara was in there listening somewhere. “Worked out two hours a day just so I’d kill it in boot camp and hell week. All the military guys, they seemed so much more impressive to me at twelve and thirteen than the spooks and the computer jocks. Sure, they had even more rules that I had to deal with, but they seemed like cool rules.”
The panther was lying with her body up against the plastic, and she lifted her head from her paws, looking at him.
“Well, I was a kid,” he said, as if responding to an unasked question. His throat ached from talking too much. He didn’t know how much longer he could go on—didn’t know how many more words he could come up with. “Kids are dumb.”
It was almost too easy to talk to her, and the longer he talked, the more he said—often about things he hadn’t ever planned on telling anyone. He told her about the shock that boot camp and hell week had been to his starry-eyed system and about the battle of the first few nightmarish weeks after he’d been given the shifter factor. He talked about the missions that he’d been sent on, both the ones he was allowed to speak about as well as the ones that were still classified.
He told her about the high times, the thrill of the chase as a panther that he’d never felt before, the sense of immediacy of being alive that humans somehow couldn’t feel except in the grips of an orgasm. And he told her about the dark moments, the fear of the beast within, the brutality of war, and the memories of the men in his unit that he’d lost—especially the men under his command and the deaths he blamed himself for.
“And that’s how Mrs. Olsen came to be here,” he explained. “Her son was born a cull. A nonshifter, an ordinary human. He thought by signing up to become a shifter, he’d get the depth of life that his mother and his siblings had been born to. But one damned operation went wrong for just a few seconds. That’s all it took. And I came home, and he ended up in a body bag. Should have been me. Always should have been me, but it never was. I was too damned lucky for that, I guess.”
He took a long drink of the Mountain Dew beside him, then hurtled the empty can into the trash can halfway across the room. Then he lapsed into silence, letting it spread out around the two of them as his raw throat slowly healed.
The bedroom stank. There was no other word for it. Agosti had manufactured a tray to slide under the opening at the bottom of the door to give the panther food and water, but there was no way to get in safely to clean up the waste that the panther produced. That had been so far from his mind when he’d had the door made that he hadn’t even considered it. He hadn’t allowed himself to consider what would happen if Tara didn’t come back quickly.
He still didn’t allow himself to consider what he’d do if she never came back.
Chay had to do something about the room, though, and really, there was only one choice. He had to drug her again. So with a weight like a stone in his stomach, he called Torrhanin up and had him dose her daily serving of raw beef. He asked—again—whether the elf had made any progress on a medical or technological solution to getting Tara back. And the elf again had said no, but he was working on it.
Chay didn’t know whether he meant it or if it was a polite elven hand-wave. Either way, it wasn’t going to help Tara.
He watched the panther as she ate. “I’m sorry, Tara,” he told the panther. “I know you’ve got to be sick of being drugged. But the room has to be cleaned, and you’re not in any state to do it. And I really don’t want to have my head bitten off by that damned panther of yours when I do it. So this is really the only option.”
The panther flicked a black ear toward his voice as she crouched over her food, but otherwise, she gave no sign that she had heard him. He sighed and watched her tear and gulp down the meat. Was Tara still in there at all? Or was he making a fool of himself with what was no more than an animal?
She began to eat more slowly, and after a minute longer, she blinked her eyes, gave a feline groan, and rolled over onto her side.
Neatly blocking the doorway, of course.
The team was gathered in the spook shop that adjoined his quarters, too many to be just those on the daily roster duty. Liam Mansfield was there, and so were both his brothers, as well as Agosti, Luke Ford, and even Ophelia. They watched him silently as he passed through to gather supplies to muck out the room. Black Mesa was his facility, and everyone who was there was present only because he allowed them to stay. He could have asked for any one of them to do this job, to clean the filth that the panther had made.
But keeping Tara after she’d been lost was Chay’s decision, and he would burden no one else with her care.
Chay gathered his supplies, staging them in the living area of his suite—a rolling mop bucket full of water, an empty galvanized bucket for waste, a scooper, a mop, and a bottle of all-purpose disinfectant. He pulled the tray out of its slot under the door and turned the lever to slide the bolts back for the first time since the panther had woken from the hypospray that Torrhanin had given her. He opened the door until it met her limp body, and then he put his shoulder against it and pushed, shoving her gently out of the way.
The reek made his nostrils flare as he stepped inside. He’d thought he was somewhat used to it from sitting right outside the door, but the full force of it made his eyes water.
That was why he had to blink quickly to clear his vision. It wasn’t because the stench was a bald reminder of how little of Tara must remain.
“All right,” he said to the unconscious cat. “Let’s get this place clean, then.”
He set to work, scooping then scrubbing. After a few minutes, he heard the outer door open, and Luke Ford stepped through.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Chay said abruptly. Then he saw that Luke was carrying a mop and rolling a bucket of his own, and Chay felt a flash of shame as he realized that his old friend had come to help.
“If you’d gone on for much longer, I would have drugged you both to clean the place,” Luke said as he passed into the wreckage of the bedroom. “It stinks so bad in the spook shop that we’re all taking half-shifts.”
Chay looked around and saw the room with fresh eyes, and a sickness filled his belly, overflowing to throb in his head. He must look crazy. The room was so clearly the residence of only animal intelligence. No human being would live like that. The ballistic nylon mattress was still intact, but the sheets were shredded, and even the metal doors he’d had put over the closet were askew on their hinges. All the wooden furniture was gouged with the marks of claws and teeth, and even though he’d scooped up everything he could, the evidence of the panther’s scat was still everywhere.
He’d hardly noticed it happening over the past…few days? Week? More? He didn’t dare to wonder. He’d been so focused on Tara, Tara who must be inside the panther still, that he hadn’t seen what was right in front of his eyes.
As Chay scooped up the last of the cattle bones that were scattered around the room, Luke stuck the rag mop into his yellow rolling bucket, pulled the lever to wring it out, and began to clean.
They worked silently for a long time, the only sound the slap of the mop on the floor, the squeak of the wringer handles, and the slosh of water in the buckets.
The panther lay, limp and scarcely conscious, by the door. She twitched slightly as Chay mopped beside her but otherwise didn’t move.
“She’s gone, Chay,” Luke said finally. “Just look at her. Look at this place. How long are you going to keep this up?”
Chay set his jaw. “I can’t give up on her.”
“When has that ever worked?” Luke said bluntly, stopping to lean on his mop handle. “This isn’t the first time that you’ve seen people lose to the animal. Three of the guys who made it through hell we
ek didn’t come out the other side. And they were younger. And stronger. You’re not doing anything here but torturing yourself. Put her in a cage and give her a zookeeper and watch her die, or be a man and put her out of her misery. But you need to stop this bullshit.”
“I promised her I’d save her,” Chay said.
“Well, then, that was your own rutting mistake,” Luke snapped, his blue eyes flashing. “She chose this. I heard what happened. She went online with that mind-net thing, she saw something she didn’t like, and she shifted because she didn’t want to deal with it. Well, now she doesn’t have to. You do. It was a stupid, selfish thing to do, but she probably wasn’t in a state to think about anyone else, and it was just a matter of time before she snapped, anyway.”
“Torrhanin’s researching it now. If we figure out a way to bring her back, it can help other people, too—” Chay started.
“But you don’t want to help anyone else. You didn’t start this crusade until her. Is it because she’s the first adult female panther you’ve ever gotten a sniff of? You really think that’s worth ruining your life over?”
“Look, just because you chose to give me a hand here doesn’t give you the right to question everything I do,” Chay said brusquely.
Luke just raised his eyebrows.
Was he right, though? In the corner, the panther twitched as she fought the sedation, and Chay went back to mopping. He’d asked himself that question a thousand times over the past several days. Hell, he’d asked her that question, not that she was in any state to reply. The fact that she was a panther had to be a part of his resolve. He couldn’t deny that, when what they’d had was little more than a one-night stand.
