by V M Black
And stopped himself. Shaving his head wouldn’t make Tara come back any more than abandoning his people had. Instead, he brushed over the short curls that remained to tease out the last of the knots and trimmed the result as evenly as he could. Then he scooped up the mass of hair and threw it into the trash before cranking the shower as hot as it could go and stepping into the stream.
He scrubbed his entire body with the bar of soap, from the top of his head down to his toes, rubbing at his skin as if he could wash away the power that his panther had gained over him since he had lost Tara. When he’d almost lost himself, too, he’d realized what he had to do to free her from the prison that she was in. What he’d want his friends to do for him.
That reality was like a thick black tar that all his thoughts mired in, stinking with it until he thought they’d never be clean again. Eventually, he stepped out of the shower, toweled off, and dressed in fresh clothes for the first time in far too long. He brushed his teeth vigorously, and once he was as clean as he could make himself, he rolled his clothes up in his towel and returned to his quarters to do what needed to be done.
Chay took his smart watch from its charger and pulled it onto his wrist. With that final, small action, he felt that he had made himself whole again—back into the Chay “Beane” of Black Mesa, who was as much a part of the facility as the gray walls and the electric lights that flicked on to follow a wanderer’s path.
He didn’t look into his bedroom as he crossed to the case where he kept his old service handguns from his days in the Indigo Squadron. His thumbprint released the lock, and ignoring the 9 mil, he closed his hand around the .45 caliber MK23 pistol. He was surprised to discover that his grip was steady when the breath in his lungs trembled and shook.
Chay walked over to the clear door and looked inside his bedroom. The panther was awake, watching him with feline disinterest.
“I’m sorry, Tara. I couldn’t save you,” he said. “I tried everything I could think of, but you’re gone. And the panther…she’s dying. Slowly. With you inside. I don’t know whether you can hear me, but I know that you deserve better than that. I’d want better than that for myself, and my friends—none of them would have let me suffer so long. I guess I’m just a coward when it comes down to it. And I’m sorry for that, too.”
It had been a long time since he’d said so much aloud, and both of the panther’s ears swiveled toward him, her golden eyes focusing on his face until he could almost believe.…
He shook his head. He was fooling himself again. In his mind, he went over every hour of the scant two days he’d spent with her before her final shift. It must have been for the thousandth time, because it seemed that every memory had worn a groove into his brain from how frequently he’d replayed it. But there was still nothing in them that he could use to save her. Nothing that made her the exception to the immutable rule.
Nothing had been enough. Not the person she’d been. Not how much he cared about her. Not Torrhanin’s art or science or magic, whatever it was.
Chay put his hand on the door handle. He could have drugged her first, but somehow, that seemed worse. She deserved a clean, honest death. He would open the door, and she would leap for him, and he would pay her the respect of making sure that the first shot that slammed into her brain was a fatal one. It would be what he’d have wanted for himself.
He adjusted his grip on the pistol handle and twisted the lever just as the watch at his wrist chimed with an urgent message, which automatically began to play.
“I believe I have the solution that you asked me for.” Dr. Torrhanin’s voice was tinny but clear. “I will be there momentarily. If Tara Morland’s human body is still able to be retrieved, she can be restored.”
Chay turned the lever back to the locking position, set the gun down with extreme care, and wept.
Chapter Seven
By the time Torrhanin appeared, Chay had regained control of himself, locked up his pistol, and chugged two energy drinks. Locking up the pistol was an important step because his first urge had been to shoot the elf with it. He knew elven ways better than to suppose that Torrhanin had perfect timing on accident. He’d been driven to the wall because the elf wanted him there.
To what ends, he didn’t know. Yet.
Chay entered the spook shop to meet Torrhanin only to discover that the room was so crowded that there was hardly a path to the door. Not only were the usual spooks there—Annie Liu, Eddie Agosti, Luke Ford, the Mansfield brothers, Ophelia, and the rest—but so were his field operatives and even old Mrs. Olsen. They all stood at silent attention as he looked around the room. To support him, he realized, because they knew what he had to do.
What he’d thought he’d have to do.
“It hasn’t been done,” he said curtly. “Dr. Torrhanin messaged me for a meeting first.”
The assembled shifters moved amongst themselves with uncertainty, casting looks at one another, but Chay ignored them all as he went to the door, opening it to allow the elf leader inside.
“Greetings, Beane,” Dr. Torrhanin said as he stepped inside. If he was surprised by the crowd, he gave no sign. “And to all of you,” he added, nodding smoothly.
“This way,” Chay said unnecessarily, uncomfortable under the force of the attention of his people. He retreated to his quarters, standing aside to allow Torrhanin to go in first.
Chay closed the door firmly behind himself, shutting his team outside. The elf looked as composed as always, as if he floated above all mundane concerns.
“This is her last chance,” Chay said bluntly. “Let’s hope it works.”
The doctor reached into the depths of his white robe, producing a small silver device that sat on the palm of his hand. It was strangely shaped, another inscrutable elven contraption of silver and jewels, these as yellow as the eyes of the panther.
“It is her only chance,” Torrhanin said calmly. “My dear friend, I found it a sore trial to create this for you. My resources are so limited that it was scarcely ready in time to avert Miss Morland’s final doom.”
Chay braced himself, not believing a word of it. “What is it that you need?”
The elf blinked his clear blue eyes. “Access, my friend. Access to all your systems and the systems that you call the internet. In the mind-net, I have made something that will allow elven minds as well as human to enter into its mysteries and depths. But you have so many tools that would take us so long to build on our own. We are trying, but I very much fear that our time is running out.”
So. That was it. The price to help Tara.
And it was everything.
Torrhanin wanted full access to Black Mesa’s servers and to Chay’s intrusion tools, with which he could do almost anything. He could bring down the power grid for the East Coast. He could scramble the communications grid. He could change traffic lights and divert airplanes, speed up generators and halt factories.
He could bring the entire civilized world to a halt.
“Why?” Chay demanded. “What do you want my tools for?”
“When I call you my friend, I say it in truth,” the elf said gently. “There are others of our kind who already have this power and more. They are opening doors that must not be opened. Those of us who wish to oppose them are too hidebound. We have allowed ourselves to become too rooted in our half-remembered past, to the detriment of all races, and your tools will help us catch up before it’s too late.”
Chay didn’t know what to believe. The elves had lived in their corner of Black Mesa since Torrhanin had approached Chay six months after he’d acquired the underground decommissioned Army base. In all that time, on the occasions that they hadn’t simply kept to themselves, they had been nothing but helpful.
But elves had won their reputation for trickiness for very good reasons, and Chay had always been certain that at some point, he would come out worse off for the deal.
It was common knowledge that the elves were the enemies of many of the other fae, who were re
garded for good reason in the garbled stories in which they reached human folklore as monsters. In that capacity, they got reputations as helpful spirits, clever brownies.
But the other, darker stories of abduction and treachery had just as much basis in history, and their motivations were often opaque and their timelines so expanded that anyone with a human lifespan could hardly hope to figure it out.
Torrhanin was asking for everything. Absolutely everything.
“I can already destroy it all,” Torrhanin said softly, as if he could read Chay’s mind. And what was to say that he couldn’t? “Obliteration is not difficult. What I am trying to do is save it.”
Elves were tricky. Elves lied. And to try such a bargain when Chay was at his weakest.…
Chay didn’t know anything about the struggle that Torrhanin spoke of. But he did know that Torrhanin had never tricked him before, despite the fact that Chay had weighed every single one of his actions for years.
Chay looked at the panther, who was now sleeping, completely unaware that her fate hung in the balance. In there somewhere was Tara. Was she as oblivious as the cat?
“I want it for everyone,” Chay heard himself say. “Not just Tara. I can’t give you what you want to save one person, but if it’s something that will help all the people who fight against their beasts—I’ll make a deal for that. But only if it works for her.”
Was he damning humanity? He didn’t know, but how difficult would it really be for Torrhanin to do everything that Chay feared on his own—if not right at that moment, then in six months, a year? Given the elves’ technical superiority, it almost seemed impossible that he wouldn’t be able to do it. If he felt that time was pressing, it wasn’t because he had a specific timeline for destroying humanity but that he truly needed to save it.
Or so he told himself.
Torrhanin didn’t even hesitate. “Done, my friend. Either she shall change back or she shall die.”
He stepped past Chay and pulled the door to the bedroom open. The panther stirred, rousing herself and raising her head. But the elf moved fast, crossing the room in a moment, and even as the cat struggled to her feet, the elf reached her side and pressed the silver contraption to her ear.
The panther let out a noise Chay had never heard before, a piercing yowl that went straight into his bones and raised the hairs on the back of his neck. She howled again and began to writhe, claws tearing at the mattress as her limbs flailed and her back arched.
Chay’s heart did a backflip, and he ran to her side, pushing the elf away from her.
“What did you do?” Chay shouted over her agonized cries.
“Saved her, with any luck,” Torrhanin said dispassionately, unruffled by Chay’s shove.
The panther scrabbled desperately at the gleaming object behind its ear. Except even as he watched, her limbs were changing, morphing, as if there were clay under the fur that some great hand was reaching down to squeeze. She didn’t look like a panther anymore, but she didn’t look human, either, or like any other kind of creature that could be capable of life. She opened her mouth to scream again, and the sound that came out went straight through Chay’s bones.
Ignoring the flailing limbs and the raking claws, he threw himself onto her monster’s body. Abruptly, she stopped screaming and went limp.
And he found himself looking into Tara’s human but unseeing face.
Chapter Eight
The first thing that Tara was aware of was the voice, the sound of it and the feel of it as she was pressed against a warm, strong chest. In the next instant, a thousand thoughts and millions of words sleeted down onto her, coming from some place that was apart from where she’d been.
Coming from the dried, stored up memories of the time that Chay had spent with the panther when she’d been locked away from the panther’s mind.
It was only with the return of memory that she realized that she’d had none for such a long time—that any time at all had passed. She had been beyond time, beyond thought, almost beyond existence. As her eyes focused again, she was flooded with awareness of her own body in a way that she’d never felt before. She registered all the parts of her body that her brain normally edited out, the shadow of her own nose and her own eyelashes in her field of view, the feeling of her heart beating in rhythm, the movement of her intestines and diaphragm and the sound of her own blood in her ears.
It had been so long since she’d had any kind of body to call her own that she almost didn’t have a sense of it any longer. But with great difficulty, she blinked, and she focused her eyes on a face—Chay’s face.
All the words he had said over the past few weeks clamored in her ears all at once—the things he had told her during the long, silent nights. Funny stories, happy ones, sad ones. And stories that could only come from the depths of the darkness and the emptiness with their raw and terrible pain.
He had told her everything. And now she remembered it all.
Her arms spasmed around his body, holding him even harder than he held her.
“Tara,” he was saying urgently. “Tara, are you there?”
She swallowed, and she found her voice. “I’m here, Chay.” She discovered with a shock that she was alone in her skull. There was no panther there, not even an echo of one, and she realized in the stark emptiness that the animal must have been with her for most of her life.
“I’m here, and I’m not going away ever again,” she repeated.
Chay’s face twisted suddenly with a flood of emotions she couldn’t name, and she had a flash of memory of him standing at the door with a gun in his hand and wearing the exact same expression. The emotion was gone as quickly as it had come, and he breathed, “Thank God.”
And then he kissed her.
His lips were rough and chapped, chafing her own dry ones. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that his lips were against hers, that the touch of them sent a jolt straight down through her center and buzzing back up into her brain so that she felt she could get drunk on it.
His mouth was hot and needy—and above all it was real. The words swarmed in her brain: carnal, physical, corporeal, tangible. None of them were enough to describe the sheer immediacy of it. None of them could capture her desperate gratitude for the sensation—or for him, the cause of it.
Her savior.
At his urging, she parted her lips and teeth, letting him in, wanting to make him a part of her. She welcomed the rhythm of his kiss that she felt in her blood and her heart and her head until she thought that it might be the rhythm of her life itself. Everything visceral, everything carnal and human—she wanted it all, and she wanted him.
She kissed him back as if his kiss were the only thing keeping her in the world, the strangeness of her own body fading away under the urgency of his touch. The taste of him and the smell of him was everything she’d ever wanted, and when he finally pulled away, it was far too soon.
“Your hair.” Tara realized for the first time the changes that had come over him, the gauntness in his face and the fact that it was no longer framed by jet-black locks. Instead, his scalp was an uneven fuzz of tight curls. “What happened?”
His arms tightened around her body. “I cut it.”
There was a wealth of pain in those three simple words that Tara couldn’t begin to plumb the depths of. Pain because of her, she knew. In a moment of weakness, she had run away and let the panther take her—and then she couldn’t come back because there wasn’t enough of her left to even try to fight it.
“You kept your promise,” she said. “You said you’d save me, and you did.”
“Torrhanin saved you,” Chay said, shifting so that she could see the elf behind him.
Tara realized that she was completely naked. Under ordinary circumstances, she’d probably want to die of embarrassment right then, especially since only moments before she’d had her tongue in Chay’s mouth. But she had a hard time caring right then. Her body still didn’t entirely feel like her own, so it was hard
to be concerned with what was or wasn’t being exposed.
“Do not remove the suppressor,” the elf advised, as if that was supposed to make sense. “Perhaps in time, we will develop a method for fine-tuning the level of interference your beast form has and you will be able to shift without fear of losing control. But right now, if you take it off, the panther will reassert itself.”
“English, please?” she asked Chay.
Chay chuckled and captured one of her hands in his own, lifting it up so that she touched the bony place just behind her ear. There was something there, something hard, with smooth spots and twisty bits, forming an arch that started just in front of her ear but mostly nestled behind.
“How’s it staying on?” she asked, realizing that she felt a strange sort of pressure against her scalp. It was a pretty important question if she wasn’t supposed to take it off.
The elf instantly launched into an explanation that Tara followed for approximately three words. What she gathered was that it wasn’t putting anything into her bone or brain—always good to know—but because of some something or other that meant that she had to both pull against it and wish it to be off at the same time.
“Oh,” she said weakly when he finished. “Magic, then.”
The elf’s usual indifferent expression grew even chillier. “As you wish,” he said with great dignity.
“I won’t touch it,” Tara promised, which was more to the point. Living with some kind of elven device glued to her head for the rest of her life was a small price to pay in return for staying human.
Tara was still lying against Chay’s body. With difficulty, she pushed up into a sitting position, Chay steadying her. The room spun, and she closed her eyes until it stopped. The elf started to talk again, and Tara dragged her eyes open to focus on him.
“I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain,” Torrhanin said, his beautiful face as aloof and unreadable as it always was. “Now you must hold up yours.”
