Out of Her Mind

by V M Black

  And yet…and yet…she was so much more. At twenty-five she was young, too young for him, maybe, but she’d seen the world—not just the pretty parts of it but the ugliness, the brutality of humankind, and she’d come out of it with a grace and a clarity and even an innocence that he certainly couldn’t match. It wasn’t just her curves and her clear green eyes or the rare smile he’d seen.

  He’d used the time that she’d been changed to delve deeper into her life before the panther had taken over, looking for something that he could reference that would call her back. He read through her profiles instead of just skimming for data points. And every status update, every message, every email she’d sent had convinced him more of how extraordinary she’d been, without any idea of it herself.

  She had a sense of balance that was rare in a person of any age, a sense of who she was even as the panther was beginning to tear her apart. Her humor shone through her dark times and petty frustrations. And every one of those messages reminded him keenly of what had been lost to her moment of horror at her own monstrousness.

  He had to get her back. Somewhere inside the panther, there had to be some part of her left, something that he could appeal to. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if there wasn’t.

  Chay finished cleaning the room in silence, and Luke left with his tools and the bucket of waste, shutting the door behind him. Chay stooped beside the panther as she fought out of her drugged stupor, stroking her from her broad head down the length of her spine to her tail. Her fur, once glossy, was growing dull, and he could feel her ribs through her fur and muscle.

  She was losing weight. She didn’t like being here, cooped up in a cage. She was dying, slowly, and whatever was left of Tara would die with her.

  Chay bent his head over the big cat, willing himself to see some sign of Tara in the dull golden eyes. He blinked and swallowed.

  “Fight for me, bae girl. You have to fight. I can’t come in there and get you. You have to come out. Don’t turn me into a liar.”

  Slowly, laboriously, the panther turned her head, her drugged eyes focusing with difficulty. She opened her mouth—

  —and tried to close it around Chay’s wrist.

  He jerked back just in time, and then his motion reversed, and he drove a fist with the full strength of his body straight into the cat’s nose.

  “Let her out!” he shouted. “Let her go, you frakking monster. Give her back!”

  The cat’s head snapped back with the force of the blow, and she made a low growl and struggled against the drugs to move. To attack him.

  Chay forced himself away and stumbled through the door to the front room, yanking it closed after him and turning the lever to slide the bolts home. Then, breathing heavily, he leaned against the wall and slid down to sit with his head hanging between his knees and his hands folded on the back of his neck. The very air hurt his lungs and throat, stinging his eyes.

  He listened to the sounds of the panther waking up, the angry grumble turning into a gradually louder snarl. He had struck her. Stupidly, out of a moment of anger, he had broken whatever fragile bond of toleration—he knew better than to presume that it was more than that—that had grown between the two of them. And maybe, by angering her, he had driven Tara even farther away, strengthening the panther’s hold on her feline body even more.

  He didn’t know. And he also didn’t know how long he could keep going before he snapped.

  Chapter Four

  The panther was restless. It didn’t know the word, of course. It knew no words. But it had the feeling that kept it circling, circling the tiny space that it now inhabited.

  It knew that it had not always been confined in that way, but what had come before was no more than a muddy sense of impressions. Animal minds didn’t carry memories as distinct point on a linear progression as humans did. Instead, their memories were tied to emotion, to specific triggers of places and people and things. Here, the panther had no triggers but more gray walls and gray floor and the endless circling, its paws silent on the cement floor.

  The light that shown steadily, mercilessly overhead drove it mad. There should be times of darkness, the panther knew, to balance the glare of the light.

  These are the things that the panther knew: The taste of blood and the raw meat that it devoured. The cold hardness of the floor, which did not yield under its weight to ease its joints. The scrape of teeth on cattle bones. The texture of the corner of the wooden furniture that it chewed. The sharp hiss of urine as it spattered against the floor. The stench of its feces. The sharp, alien smell of the man on the other side of the door it could not understand or cross, and the man’s voice, which was a noise that sometimes soothed and sometimes buzzed across the panther’s nerves like the edge of a saw blade.

  But deep, deep in the panther’s mind, there was something that came to a feeble, struggling glow at that scent and those words. The panther feared that thing more than it feared anything at all, because it knew that tiny glimmer was the most dangerous of all. Yet it could not quite extinguish it.

  The pinprick of light wasn’t Tara. Too much of her had fled to give it such a name. It was the shape of her, the shadow of her, the echo of her—like a woman in the deepest of comas, trapped beneath the static silence of her own brain that refused to spark, that would not think rational thoughts, human thoughts. But she reached out, half reflexive, half instinctive, at the voice and the smell of the man, stretching like a flower turns to face the sun. She had no concept of herself, but she had a feeling of him, and it was toward this feeling that she yearned.

  The words he said filtered down, through the panther’s ears and brain and into the tiny spark of a mind. They drifted there like leaves and with as little meaning, lying in layers for a mind that was not there to understand.

  She did not struggle because there was nothing for her to struggle with. She had become the dream of a girl in the panther’s mind, with no more substance than a thought.

  And every day that passed, her light grew weaker still.

  ***

  A few days before the third time that Chay cleaned out the bedroom, he began to seriously consider trying to reach Tara by using his panther form. He’d deliberately avoided shifting after her last change—although his shifting had once soothed her panther enough to allow Tara to return, she was beyond the point that merely calming her would make the beast in her surrender control. Even unconsciousness had failed to return her three times now, and far too many nights of sleep had made no difference, either.

  So Chay had remained in his human form in hopes of coaxing from Tara reminders of her own humanity and everything she was leaving behind. He’d been afraid that her panther, rooted as it now was, would find in his alternate form more reason to stay. But he was growing desperate, ready to try anything, and he was debating the wisdom of a shift when Tara forced his hand.

  When it happened, Chay had almost finished scrubbing the room down, this time without Luke’s help. He didn’t often speak to the panther anymore. He’d simply run out of things to say. He’d told her every story from his life that he could remember, every like and dislike, every thought, every fear, every dream. Talking to her was like trying to fill up a bucket with no bottom, and he’d kept shoveling words in until he had no more to give.

  Chay had emptied the mop bucket into his shower for the third time and cranked the water on to watch the clean water swirl with the filth and run down the drain when a movement out of the corner of his eye attracted his attention—and saved his life.

  The panther was standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom. In an instant, Chay understood what had happened: she’d shaken off the drugs too soon, and she’d followed the scent of him into the bathroom, her soft footfalls silent above the hiss of the shower. Her head hung as if it were too heavy to hold up as she swayed drunkenly on her feet, but there was still a dangerous strength in her body, and her yellow eyes were fixed on Chay with the intensity of a predator hun
ting its prey.

  Slowly, carefully, Chay twisted the shower off and lowered his hands to his waist.

  “Easy there, girl,” he said, and he pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it softly at his feet to avoid scaring her.

  The panther was advancing. Chay knew that she was hunting him, even as the drugs in her system made every step slow and heavy. He retreated, peeling off his pants between steps, but there was nowhere to go but toward the back wall of the bathroom a few steps away.

  The panther began to growl, a low, menacing sound. But Chay let go of the tight hold he kept on the panther inside his own head, and he felt himself shift with the speed and the force of the strength built up in his panther’s mind.

  It had been long, too long, since he’d let the panther out. Always before, he’d taken an evening every week or two to allow the animal to go free for a short time. He’d go out into the moonlight and run among the trees, allowing the senses of the cat to unfold, to luxuriate in the rich smell of the earth and the scent of the rain on the wind. He would let the mind of the panther unfold, stretch out to the limits of its skin, filling it with enough of the wild that it could store that piece of contentment within itself for the long days underground in the artificial domain where Chay lived.

  On those trips he would let it hunt the deer that lived on the mountain—and sometimes other shifters, too, though of course the second only in sport and never to a fatal conclusion. More than once he had landed on Liam’s great, shaggy back only to be batted away. And more than once he had leaped nimbly into a tree to dodge the nipping jaws of a wolf pack, come to tease him with their greater numbers but unable to match his dexterity.

  But now the panther was irritated, angry at how long it had been suppressed, and when he let it out, it bounded into its own shape with a force that stunned Chay’s mind for an instant. And in that time, it surged forward, knocking the female panther off her unsteady feet with a swipe of a paw in outrage at her arrogance in challenging him.

  She crumpled at his feet, and he bent down and whuffed her scent softly. The smell went straight into the depths of his brain and tangled with all the thoughts and the suffering that Chay had undergone since she had shifted the last and final time.

  And the panther thought, Mate.

  The thought was not a word. It was more than a word, deeper than one, and it filled Chay the man with a surge of despair. The panther was reacting to its own battery of confusion and guilt, but it was perfectly capable of making judgments on its own, and it had found her in both cases to be exactly what he wanted, man and beast.

  Exactly what neither could ever have.

  But Chay allowed his panther to nose her softly, to urge her back up to her feet now that she had assumed a properly submissive demeanor to his dominance. She wasn’t angry. As a panther, she understood that her attempt to attack him had been an insult to his position, and she took the correction as her due.

  She stood, still unsteady. He stalked past her, the length of his body sliding against hers as he entered the bedroom. She followed at his heels, obedient. His ears swiveled to allow his preternaturally sensitive hearing to catch her footsteps without his deigning to turn his head.

  In the bedroom, he took the platform bed, the highest point that was stable enough for his panther body to leap upon it. From that slight vantage, he looked down at the panther who had been Tara, striking a pose that asserted his supremacy over the room—and over her.

  The female stepped toward him almost hesitantly, her head down not because of the drugs that her metabolism was already burning off but in recognition of his role as her master.

  Jaguars were solitary cats by nature, coming together only at breeding times and when the male encountered one of the females whom he permitted on his territory. But shifters were not true jaguars, and the habits of the natural animal were tempered by the traits that the ancient elves had given to all shifters. Though the beast in Tara had taken over, she still wasn’t an actual jaguar any more than he was now true human even when he was in his human form.

  The female bowed, presenting herself as a supplicant requesting the favors of her master. His tail twitching only slightly with alertness, Chay allowed her to approach him. She reached up and rubbed her face against his, once, twice. He ducked his head in return and twined his neck against hers, his whiskers catching against fur that was no longer sleek.

  Upon that invitation, she climbed cautiously onto the bed bedside him and, with a heavy sigh, she curled into a ball with her back leaning against his legs, wrapping her tail almost completely around her body.

  Chay nuzzled her again. In his panther form, he could smell even better than he could in his altered human state, and he smelled the weakness in her, the sickness that was deep in her muscles and bones. It wasn’t a physical ailment but a spiritual one. What she wanted was to run and leap—and rend, with those sharp teeth. All the things that had been denied to her, being trapped in these rooms far below the surface of the earth.

  They were the things she could never have. As she was now, with no controlling human mind to provide a counterbalance, she could never be allowed to run free. She would be a man-killer, a monster, a danger to every human being.

  One way or another, she had to come back to herself—or she would die.

  The female sighed, and Chay let the panther in him begin to lick her dull, matted hide, coaxing some level of shine out of the lusterless fur. She closed her eyes under his ministrations, her too-lean muscles relaxing at his touch. He bathed her from her nose to the tip of her tail, then, when he was done, he gave in to the impulse to curl his body around hers.

  She put her head up on his flank, and soon, her eyes shut and her breath came shallowly in sleep. He found his own eyelids growing heavier and heavier. With a great effort, he pulled himself away, leaving her twitching gently on the bed in her dreams, and stepped through to the front room. If he fell asleep next to her, he’d turn back into a human at a most inconvenient time.

  He shifted as soon as he passed through the door to the front room, then shut and bolted it behind him. Some days before, he’d pulled the sofa over to face the doorway to the bedroom and had made a bed upon it, and now he pulled the blankets over his body without bothering to dress, and he fell, for the first time in a long time, into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  ***

  Chay woke to the nose of the panther butting up against the door. This time, she wasn’t trying to attack him through it. Instead, she seemed to be merely attempting to get his attention. She would lower her head and use its force and the weight of her shoulder to make the bolts rattle against the holes that Agosti had put in the door frame. Then she’d sit back and look at him, patiently.

  “Do you want your food or your friend?” Chay asked, realizing that both their dinners had been delivered while he slept and now sat on the concrete a short distance away. He saw a scrap of fabric in her nest on the bed and realized that it was his shirt. He’d left his clothes in the room with her, along with all the cleaning tools. If he didn’t want them all destroyed, he’d need to retrieve them.

  But first, breakfast.

  “Here you go,” he said, sliding the tray under the edge of the door.

  He’d stopped looking for some sign of human understanding in her eyes, but he wasn’t sure when that had happened. A few days ago? Longer? Now when he talked, which was much less frequently, it was with no hope that she understood anything that he said.

  He was, he realized, becoming resigned to the fact that his Tara wasn’t coming back.

  “We missed Halloween, you know,” he said conversationally as he dug into his food, some sort of fall pot pie medley. It was…better, he realized, even though it was cold. Fresh vegetables. Jen Hardison, in charge of the kitchens, must have taken her own initiative to buy the kinds of foods she wanted to cook instead of relying on the bi-monthly trips down the mountain that he’d allowed before.

  The smart watch on his wrist would have
told him exactly what day it was, if he hadn’t let it run out of batteries long before…but he didn’t want to know. He didn’t think he’d be able to go on if he knew. Too many times, he’d called Torrhanin, only to be told that the elf was still working on a solution, and he didn’t want to hear from anyone else.

  Shaking off those thoughts, he continued, “I figured you just wanted to go as a panther, anyway. And I guess I just wanted to go as a moron. So it all worked out.”

  The panther was crouching in front of her food, her eyes on the meat that she was devouring, but her thick black ear swiveled to track his voice.

  “You know, sometimes, you look like you wouldn’t tear out my guts and eat them as soon as you got the chance,” Chay continued around another mouthful of food. There was a thermos of coffee, too, and unlike the food, it was still warm. “And then I do something stupid, like not notice that you were coming out of sedation, and you prove me wrong. Good thing I looked up, because if you’d gotten me, you might have also gotten the first person through the front room door. And I would have felt responsible for that, getting two people killed.”

  The cat made a low noise deep in her throat.

  “So I guess my choices now are to let your bucket of shit rot until I can’t stand it anymore or get back in there and pull it out.” Chay frowned down at her. “I really, really don’t want to drug you again so soon. It’s not good for you, you know.”

  He raised his eyes to the lever on the door. It was designed so that a paw or a nose of a large animal could move it from the outside—not much help for the foxes, like Annie, and even the coyotes had difficulty with them, but for the various large cats, wolves, and bears, it presented little problem. It was a standard design in the facility, replaced on the reverse side with a human-only handle so that the panther couldn’t get out. It meant that he could shift in safety, come inside with her, and retrieve whatever he wanted.