by Nalini Singh
Keelie called it meditating.
Dorian would get ribbed so hard if he admitted to meditating, so he called it mental discipline. Just like the discipline his friends had to learn to deal with their own leopards. Only they were learning how to balance their wild instincts with the human part of their nature, and he was learning to keep his trapped and angry leopard from driving him insane.
There.
Zeroing in on the tiny movement, he used the same mental discipline to hold utterly still, so that his scent wouldn’t shift along the air currents. He’d already messed up his scent trail using a few other tricks, so if he stayed motionless . . . He took the shot.
“Fuck!” Lucas glared up at the tree as if he could see Dorian, the splatter of green on his T-shirt marking him as a “kill.”
Dorian grinned but didn’t shift position as, growling, Lucas came up his tree to lie down on the branch beside him. “How the fuck did you make that shot?” he said on a subvocal level. “From here you can’t even see where I came out.”
“I knew you were there.” Dorian had practiced and practiced until he could make these shots blindfolded. He didn’t need to see his target to hit it. “Just like you always know where we are, even if we hide our scent and stay out of sight.” The only reason he’d got Luc today was because his seventeen-year-old friend hadn’t expected him to make the shot.
“Yeah, well,” Lucas said in that same subvocal tone. “That doesn’t give me much of an advantage with you guys. I don’t even know how Mercy does that thing where she disappears from sight.”
Dorian hadn’t figured that out, either, and it was one hell of a trick. What he had figured out was that Lucas would one day be his alpha, and that these exercises were meant to hone them all. Because DarkRiver wasn’t the happy place it had been when Dorian had been a cub. The ShadowWalkers had hurt them—Lucas’s parents were gone, and he’d been wounded badly before the pack found him.
Dorian and Mercy would probably be too young to join the hunt for the ShadowWalkers when it took place, but they could help protect their packmates while the hunters were gone.
Now Tamsyn was the healer even though everyone said she was too young. Dorian thought she was amazing, so calm and gentle. She reminded him of Shayla. Lucas’s mom had trained Tammy, and Dorian was sure she’d be real proud of her student. “You think Nate and Tammy are gonna have cubs?” Dorian didn’t usually think about stuff like that, but his mom and Mercy’s mom had been talking about it that morning.
Lucas made a sound low in his throat. “I dunno. I heard Emmett’s dad say Nate was being stubborn because he thinks Tammy’s too young.”
“Yeah, but she’s a healer. They’re, like, cub magnets.”
“Adults.”
“Yeah.”
They fell silent for long minutes, and then Dorian felt it. A faint whisper along the air currents, a bare hint of a familiar scent. He couldn’t see Mercy but he knew she was in the trees to his left. Shifting with extreme care so as not to give away his position, he closed his eyes and listened. And then he took the shot.
The curses that sounded from the canopy were so colorful that had Mercy’s parents heard her, she’d have been grounded into the next century. “I’ll get you for this, Dorian!” Jumping down to the ground, she glared in his general direction and he realized exactly why she was so pissed.
He’d gotten her in the face, the green bright against the pale gold of her skin.
“Shit,” he muttered. “That’ll leave a bruise.” Because his job was to be a sniper, he was using relatively small paintball pellets rather than the larger ones the others had been issued, but at that velocity it would’ve hurt regardless. “Her mom’s going to smack me. I don’t even want to think about her dad.”
“Yeah. Sucks to be you.”
Watching Mercy wipe off the green paint using her forearm, he tracked her as she strode over, sniffed around to confirm their location, then climbed up the tree to join them. “Sorry, Merce,” he said. “I wasn’t aiming for your face.”
A scowl but no real anger from Mercy, his friend as quick to forgive as her temper was hot. “Don’t worry about it.” She finished cleaning off the paint. “Tell me what gave me away.”
“Caught your scent, but it was your gun that gave me your exact position,” he said. “You should’ve primed it earlier.” The faint click had been all he needed.
“Damn.” She looked at Lucas. “What gave you away?”
“I was overconfident, knew Blondie was here but didn’t think he’d make the shot before I got him.”
The three of them fell silent as a unit as something changed in the air. Vaughn. The jaguar changeling moved differently from the leopards, was quieter, a shadow. That made him near impossible to hit at night, but it was late afternoon now, which meant Dorian had a slightly better chance if he didn’t screw up.
Falling into the quiet space where he could hear his pulse as a soft echo in his ears, slow and easy, he didn’t look. No, he just was. And when his body wanted to turn in a hard motion and his finger wanted to squeeze the trigger, he did it before his conscious mind realized Vaughn had doubled back on him.
Vaughn didn’t swear like the others. He just snarled. “Next night hunt, Blondie,” he said. “Your ass is toast.”
Dorian allowed his body to relax now that the exercise was complete. Jumping down after Mercy and Lucas, he grinned at the jaguar. “Bet you ten bucks I can hit you at night.” He enjoyed giving himself a challenge, enjoyed pushing himself.
“Like taking money from a cub.” Shoving a hand through the thick amber of his hair, Vaughn looked at Lucas and Mercy. “Who do you put your money on?”
“Lucas.” Mercy placed her hands on her hips, her tone snarky. “He’s a black panther, you idiots. You think you’re going to see him?”
That, Dorian admitted, was an excellent point. So far, he’d never managed to take Lucas down on a night hunt, but neither had he managed to hit Vaughn. The two of them were really good at night. Just like Mercy was really, really good at dawn. She was a ghost. He was still considering that when Nate appeared out of the trees with an unfamiliar male by his side. The guy looked like he was around Luc’s or Vaughn’s age; his green eyes were a little wild in his dark-skinned face, as if his leopard was just waiting to explode out of his skin.
Taking in the scene, Nate gave Dorian an approving nod. “We’ll talk through the exercise tonight at dinner,” he said. “For now, I want you to meet Clay. Lachlan’s just accepted him into DarkRiver.”
The older boy didn’t smile, didn’t look particularly as if he wanted to be in a pack, but he nodded at their greetings.
“Clay’s been on his own for a while,” Nate said. “I want the four of you to store your paint guns and take him for a run, show him around.”
On his own? Dorian didn’t know any cats that young who’d been on their own. Wild cats might be okay with a solitary life, but changeling cats were human, too, and they needed to be with pack. Even the loners didn’t always roam alone. “You like paintball?” he asked Clay as they walked to store their guns in back of a truck Nate had parked some distance away.
“Never played.”
“Here.” Mercy passed him her gun. “Have a go at some trees. It’s pretty fun.” A scowl. “Except if Blondie here is shooting at your face.”
“Hey! I said sorry!”
Clay looked from one to the other, a slight easing in his expression. “Jeez, you hit a girl in the face?”
Mercy punched Clay in the arm at the same time that Lucas choked and Vaughn hissed out a breath. “She’s not a girl,” Dorian told the confused guy. “She’s a dominant and she can probably kick your ass in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Huh.” Clay stared at Mercy. “Really?”
Mercy raised an eyebrow, then looked her far bigger opponent up and down. “You want a demonst
ration?”
She put Clay on his ass three minutes later. Slapping her hands together as if dusting them off, she said, “And my work here is done.”
Getting up, Clay settled his shoulders, and Dorian wondered if he realized they were all waiting to see how the big stranger with the green eyes would react. It was obvious to all of them that Clay was very, very dominant as far as the pack hierarchy was concerned, but working as an effective unit had to do with more than simple strength. If Clay was one of those dominants who couldn’t handle a strong female, then they were going to have a serious problem. Because Mercy wasn’t the only dominant female in DarkRiver.
“I want to learn how to do that,” their new packmate said to Mercy. “Will you teach me?”
Mercy smiled as the rest of them blew out quietly relieved breaths. “Yeah, sure.”
It was strange, but a half hour later, as they ran through the forest, Dorian realized he understood more about being a leopard than Clay did, even though the older boy could shift. It made him wonder what had happened to Clay to make him so close to his leopard—and yet so unaware of how to be a cat in a pack.
He didn’t ask, though; he understood that sometimes, a guy just had to be who he was. Luc, Vaughn, Mercy, Nate—none of them treated Dorian as any different than them. He knew he was different, but his latency no longer made him angry-sad as it had when he’d been a cub. Lachlan had helped him a lot, as had his parents. Then, one freezing night, when he was only six, he’d run and run and run, and somewhere in there, he’d come to a kind of peace with himself.
It still hurt deep inside, and he knew it probably always would, his leopard horribly wounded, but he was a valued member of the pack and that was what mattered.
III
Dorian lay stunned next to the fire with Shaya. He had his head in his mate’s lap and she was using a comb on his damp hair. He’d just have thrust his fingers through the white-blond strands and left it after he took a dip in the nearby stream, but Shaya had offered and he liked it when she petted him, so he was happy to lie here looking up at the brilliant stars above.
“I shifted,” he said, not quite able to believe he’d run through the forest on four feet, the wind rippling through his fur.
“You were beautiful,” Shaya told him again, her own joy a vibrant pulse along the mating bond that linked their hearts to one another. “And so cute.”
“Hey.” He growled, grabbing her hand to nip playfully at it. “I am a DarkRiver sentinel. We aren’t cute.”
Laughing, she bent down and kissed him, her tight curls electric with energy around them. “How about adorable?” she teased before going back to her combing of his hair, the rhythmic motion making him feel lazy and cherished both. “What was it like? When you first found yourself on four feet?”
“Disorienting,” he said, thinking of that first shock after Shaya’s gene therapy had taken sudden, unexpected effect. “You have no idea how difficult it is to coordinate four paws at one time.”
Smile luminous, Shaya put aside the comb and placed one hand on his bare chest, playing with his hair with the other. “I’ve seen the cubs,” she said. “No wonder they’re always tumbling.”
“Yeah.” He felt like a cub himself, was conscious he had so much more to learn. But one thing he knew beyond doubt: “Your voice, telling me to trust the leopard to know what to do—that’s what I needed to hear.” All his life, he’d fought to control his leopard, to restrain it so it wouldn’t claw him bloody in its frustration, wouldn’t drive him insane.
That discipline had given him a life and a strong, trusted position in the pack, but in that moment after the shift, it had also left him alone and lost. “My leopard was waiting, ready,” he said to Shaya, wonder bright in him. “As soon as I surrendered to it, I understood how I needed to balance, how my body was meant to move.” He shuddered out a breath at the glorious memory of freedom. “I know I’m not anywhere near graceful yet, but I don’t care. It feels incredible.”
“I know.” It was a whisper, Shaya’s eyes shining wet in the firelight. “I could feel your joy through our bond.”
Lifting her hand to his mouth again, he pressed his lips to her palm, drawing in the lush, sensual scent of her. Of his smart, sexy, beautiful mate. “I didn’t spend my life feeling sorry for myself,” he said, thinking of the years past. “I became the best I could be, and then I pushed myself even harder.”
His packmates teased him affectionately about his overachieving tendencies, but that drive was all that had kept him together for a long time. Then, it had simply become part of him. “But it hurt,” he said, admitting his vulnerability to the woman who held his heart—and who already understood his pain. “Deep inside me, so deep down that I almost forgot it at times, it always hurt.
“I want to say it felt like a piece of me was missing, but that isn’t true. It was worse than that. It was feeling that piece trapped inside me, feeling as if I was betraying my leopard every day of our existence.” He swallowed. “I wouldn’t have blamed my cat if it never forgave me, but it does, Shaya. It does.”
“Of course it does. You’re not two separate beings, Dorian, you’re one.”
“Yeah.” He smiled because it was true. After a lifetime of being separated from his cat, he didn’t have to fight it anymore. They could just be. Now that leopard rubbed against the inside of his skin, as excited as he was, as happy. Its emotions were wilder than his own, its mind thinking in far simpler patterns. “The cat doesn’t see the point in worrying about the past.”
Shifting off Shaya’s lap on those words, he said, “Come lie with me.”
When she would’ve lain down on the picnic blanket beside him, he tugged her on top of his body. She was dressed in a plain white tank top and a pair of black boxers she’d stolen from him and that would’ve hung off her if she hadn’t tightened the elastic. “Why aren’t you naked?” he complained after slipping his hand into the back of the boxers to cup her gorgeous ass.
Nipping at his lower lip, she kicked up her legs after tucking her curls behind her ears in a futile effort to control them. “Because we have two tiny and very curious chaperones.”
He grinned. “They get to sleep okay?”
“Yeah. Fell asleep waiting for you.” Her blue-gray eyes danced. “Noor wants to brush you.”
His chest rumbled with laughter. “I have a feeling she’ll get her way.” Their son’s best friend was an adorable little cub who’d survived a terrible start to life with her sweetness and heart intact. “And Keenan?”
“He wants to go running with you.” Shaya kissed him again. “If you’d rather have some privacy to explore the leopard, I can—”
“No.” Stroking his hands up her back and under the tank top, he smiled. “The leopard wants to play with them, too.” Cubs were to be looked after, said the leopard, even if that meant being brushed by a sparkly pink hairbrush. “It needs to care for them . . . it’s never had the chance to exercise that instinct.” And the instinct was a visceral one—Dorian had had it his entire life.
Shaya smiled. “You really should call Lucas back.”
His alpha had called soon after Dorian shifted for the first time. “What did he say?” Dorian asked.
“Just that he’d felt the urge to check up on you. I didn’t want to steal your news, so I told him you were fine and would call him back.” She bit her lower lip. “That was a few hours ago.”
Blowing out a breath, Dorian nodded. “Right, where’s the phone?” His alpha was worried, no doubt having sensed something staggering through the blood bond that linked all the sentinels to their alpha. If Dorian didn’t get in touch, Luc might decide to come and check things out in person and Dorian wasn’t ready for that.
He needed to settle into his new skin first.
“Here.” Shaya sat up and picked up the phone from another part of the blanket, the laz-fire turning her into a
lush goddess above him, the rich brown of her skin glowing in the light.
Stroking her thighs, he just looked at her. “You’re so pretty, Shaya.”
A lopsided smile. “Let me go check the babies are still asleep. Then maybe we can play a little.”
His body definitely liked that idea. Watching her walk away to duck into the tent, he sat up and blew out a breath before calling Lucas. “Hey, Luc, Shaya said you’d called.”
“You okay?” Lucas asked straight off. “I’ve been fighting the urge to find you all day, check on you.”
“Oh, jeez, Luc.” Dorian groaned. “I just got Shaya to agree to—” He bit off his words as his mate came out of the tent and scowled at him.
Grinning, he said, “To play chess.”
Lucas snorted on the other end. “Yeah, I know that kind of chess,” he said with a grin in his voice. “You sure there’s nothing I need to know?”
Dorian had never lied to his alpha. “There is something,” he said. “Nothing bad, but something I need to work out for myself first.”
A pause, before Lucas said, “All right. You know where I am when you’re ready.”
Hanging up after a few more words, Dorian put aside the phone and watched Shaya come to him. “Hey,” he whispered before a wild craving tore through him.
Sharp concern in his mate’s eyes. “Dorian?” She dropped to her knees beside him. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just . . . change of plans.” Cupping her face as he held back the shift so he could speak to her, he said, “The leopard . . . it needs your touch.” And then he surrendered to the painful beauty and sheer joy of the shift, allowing the human part of him to recede into the background as the leopard took center stage.
The leopard he was folded its legs and put its head in Shaya’s lap, its eyes closing as her hands stroked through its fur.
Peace sank into the bones of man and leopard both.
IV
Three hours after returning home from their camping trip, Dorian loitered in the trees outside his alpha’s aerie. He didn’t know quite how to tell Lucas, how to share the joy of what had happened. Any words seemed inadequate.
