Viola’s eyes grew wide with fright, but it took only one more roar from the beast for her to turn on her heel and dart at top speed out of the bedroom. She flew down the stairs, paying no attention whatsoever to the fact that she remained naked and unarmed. Perhaps she spared a single second’s thought to leaving her gown and Louboutins behind, but she was out the front door as fast as her legs could carry her.
Chapter 4
On bare feet she sprinted down the drive toward the limo, where Rowan was waiting in an easy lean against the passenger’s side door. He straightened when he saw her running.
“Turn the car on, Rowan!” she shouted as she ran down the drive. He didn’t ask questions, simply slid over the hood of the vehicle and opened the driver’s side door. By the time Viola reached it, the engine was on, the gear was set to drive, and she was ready to go.
She dove into the backseat and yelled, “Drive!” Before she had even had a chance to close the door. Once inside, she got up on her knees on the seat and peered out the back, squinting to see if the bear was following them. When she didn’t see it, she relaxed somewhat, wondering somewhat absently if a bear could run as fast as a car.
Spying her purse, she crawled over to it and fished out her cell phone. Pressing down the home button, she heard a beep and spoke into the microphone. “How fast can a bear run?” she asked it.
“Checking on that,” came the phone’s reply. “Okay, here’s what I found for: How Fast Can a Bear Run?”
Viola clicked on one of the links, scanning it quickly: A bear can run up to 60 kilometers per hour, which is approximately 37 miles per hour. She visibly relaxed, tossing the phone onto the seat beside her. She hoped very much that Rowan was going at least seventy as they peeled out onto the main road.
She curled into herself as they drove, lacking anything whatsoever to cover her body. And when Rowan finally pulled to a stop outside of her apartment building, she stayed put in the back of the limo until he came around to open the door. When he did, his eyes were averted, and he was offering her his jacket, which she quickly took and put on. Grabbing her phone and purse, she climbed out of the limo, clad only in a men’s jacket that she was swimming in, and darted into the building with Rowan close on her heels.
He knew better than to open his mouth until they were safe within the confines of her personal space. But as soon as they were, he turned a pair of wild cat eyes on her. “What in the holy mother of fuck happened back there, Viola?” he demanded, throwing his arms out to the side.
She shrugged out of his jacket and pulled on a tee shirt and an abandoned pair of sweatpants, her hair staying put in the messy side bun.
“Honest to God, Rowan, I have no fucking idea,” she said, and immediately set to work doing a thorough search of her apartment. She had taken up smoking when she was a teenager in the convent school, finding any way that she could to act out, even if only a little. She’d given it up on her twenty-first birthday, but kept a pack around in case of emergencies. This, she thought, was a legitimate emergency, and she needed something to calm her down.
She trailed a hand along the top of the refrigerator and found the pack, pulling it down and clutching it to her chest as though it were a life raft. She plucked one from the pack and put it between her lips, lit it with the lighter she kept in the empty space in the pack, and inhaled a breath of toxic calm. Exhaling, she then set about to find item two: vodka. That was easy enough, as she kept it in the freezer. She poured two fingers into her mug for herself, tossed it back and offered the bottle to Rowan. He gave a shake of his head, refusing, confused. “Viola, what did you see back there?”
And she looked him square in the face and said, “A bear.” She thought he might berate her, or laugh at her, or tell her she’d been seeing things, but the fact that he did none of this deeply concerned her. Instead, he gave a sharp nod of his head, and snatched the bottle of vodka from her fist, taking a deep drink straight from it.
“Rowan, what is going on?” she demanded.
“Hang on a sec, Vi,” he began. “Why don’t you just have a seat?” Viola took a drag of her cigarette and sent the smoke swirling in a halo above her head. Her eyes belied the panic her body felt but was not showing.
“I don’t want to fucking sit,” she shouted. “I want to know what’s going on. Why aren’t you freaking out? Graham McCallum turned into a goddamned bear, and you’re not even… you’re totally calm! Why are you calm? This is the most insane thing I’ve ever… Is it even…? How…? And you’re just standing there.”
“Viola,” he said again, this time more forcefully, “sit.” She deposited herself into a chair at the kitchen table and locked her eyes on him as he rounded the table to sit across from her. This is where they’d been, not too long ago, when he first revealed the mission to her, where she’d begrudgingly accepted. How she wished she’d never agreed to it in the first place. Even if it had meant she never killed again, she could never unsee what she saw.
“Graham McCallum is a shifter,” he said calmly, though the tone of his voice did nothing for the spinning of her mind. “He is the Alpha of Clan Ursus, a very powerful sect of shifters in this region. Theirs is a smaller clan than most, but they’ve worked together in such a way that they’ve amassed inconceivable wealth. McCallum’s rise to power has been a fairly recent one, when the death of his father, Beau, meant he had the opportunity to step forward as Alpha. Now that he’s taken over, he’s pointed the Clan’s wealth at purchasing and expanding environmentally friendly corporations, and it’s proven very successful for him, and the rest of his kind.”
“A shifter…?” she repeated lamely, stuck on the fact that she now lived in a world where shapeshifters existed. She blinked in rapid succession, trying to get herself to wake up from this nightmare.
“Yes, Viola,” Rowan said calmly. “The faster you accept this as truth, the better off you’ll be.”
“How could you send me in there to kill him when you knew what he was?” she demanded. “How could you send me literally into the lion’s den?”
“He isn’t a lion,” Rowan hissed, “He’s a goddamned grizzly bear, and I didn’t think you’d believe me. How am I supposed to do that, Vi? Here’s your mark, oh, and by the way, he sometimes turns into a bear?”
She ashed her cigarette in an empty cereal bowl on the table and pried the bottle of vodka from Rowan’s hands. She took a swig. “So, you want me to take out the, er… Alpha of this clan? That was the idea?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she wanted to know. “To what end?”
Rowan heaved a sigh and stood up, loosening his tie so that he could eventually tug it off over his head. He undid his cufflinks then as well, setting them carefully on the table. “There is more than one clan of shifters in this area, and there are hundreds of clans throughout North America alone. Many of these clans are known to one another, and many would do business together, trying to ensure the continued growth, health and well-being of shifter kind. However, business dealings go sour, or a particularly nasty Alpha may rise to power, and things are thrown off balance.” Rowan unbuttoned his dress shirt, tugging it out of his pants as he went, and shrugged out of it. “In this case,” he continued, stepping out of his dress shoes, “Clan Ursus used to be in business with Clan Felidae. But the previous Alpha, Beau McCallum, was interested only in advancing the interests of his own clan, and that meant many members of Clan Felidae lost their investments, their savings, and their lives.” He looked at her levelly as he unbuckled his belt; she watched him, the smoke giving the air a familiar, tangy scent.
“Beau died of old age — the man was a fossil, and we couldn’t get to him because he very rarely left the den at the end of his life. But once his son took over, we knew we could get to him, take him out, and ensure that someone else rose to the position of Alpha, someone who might be interested in making reparations to Clan Felidae, or if not, at least resuming a prosperous business partnership.”
“So this is
all about business?” she asked. “Money?”
“It is largely about money,” he confirmed, “but there is also a matter of pride and principal. A while back, there were members of both clans that defected, a male from Clan Felidae, a female from Clan Ursus. Mating outside of the clans is unheard of, strictly against the rules.”
“But they mated.”
“They did.”
“And what happened to them?”
Rowan looked her levelly, his expression softening somewhat. “They were executed.”
A shudder ran down Viola’s spine, but she put the thought out of her head. “So, Clan Felidae hired Somnus Sacrae to take out the Alpha of Clan Ursus?” Viola asked, wanting to make sure she was keeping up. She hooked her feet up onto the edge of the chair and hugged her knees close, feeling better if she made herself as small as possible.
“Not exactly, Viola,” Rowan said, and slid his pants down his legs.
“What am I missing?”
“Somnus Sacrae wasn’t hired by Clan Felidae; Somnus Sacrae is a part of Clan Felidae. You are a part of Clan Felidae.” He removed his boxer briefs last and kicked them out of the way. “I am a part of Clan Felidae.”
Viola parted her lips to ask another series of questions, but before she could, she watched Rowan start to change, just as Graham McCallum had changed. But for him there was no agony, no fight against the change, no pain from an attack. For him, it was easy, like diving into a pool of warm water. In one moment, he was tall, lithe, lean Rowan, and in the next moment, in a blur of movement as though someone had come in and muddled his image, he was on all fours and covered in a thick coat of black fur. Rowan Weaver was a panther, beautiful and terrifying. He stretched his paws out in front of him, hoisting his tail high into the air, and stretched, giving a mighty cat yawn as he moved. Righting himself, he shook his head from side to side, and moved forward toward Viola. Stunned, she peered down into the big cat’s face and saw Rowan’s eyes, a sort of yellow-green, eyes she had always known belonged to a cat.
Shades of a Shifter (Alpha Assassins Guild: Part 1) A Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance Page 5
