by V M Black
“How do you do that?” Tara asked weakly. “Chay showed me how fast shifters heal.”
He smiled. “Very, very quickly.”
Right.
Tara had a sudden surreal feeling. Here she was, discussing birth control options with an actual elf because she kept turning into a big cat at the drop of a hat.
Why was it that she’d thought she probably wasn’t crazy, again? She was having a hard time remembering.
“Okay. So, I should get rid of the IUD,” she said. “What can I use, then?”
“Most women prefer oral birth control,” Dr. Torrhanin said as if he were having the most ordinary conversation in the world. “You would have to make sure to be in human form to take it on time, though, so in your current state, that might not be the best choice. The ring is soft, so it’s an option, but again, it doesn’t work if you spend more than an hour or so in your shifted form at one time. Shots are generally foolproof. DepoProvera is quite effective, though we prefer a better slow-release version that we’ve developed specifically for shifters with fewer side effects. Essentially, any drug that exists in your bloodstream will survive a shift.”
“Does that mean that the panther will be on birth control, too?” Tara asked with a horrified kind of fascination. “If she...you know ....”
Dr. Torrhanin gave her a severe look. “I recommend that she not.”
“But if—”
He cut her off. “Your menstrual state is not synced with that of the cat. For your shifted form to achieve estrus, you would have to spend some months in cat form without ever shifting back to human.”
“I’m not really sure what that means,” Tara admitted.
“Heat,” he said bluntly. “When you shift, you will always return to a form that is months from going into heat. The panther may seem like an actual animal to you, but let me assure you that it is a multidimensional biological construct. Its mind and body are real, but they are not natural. If you remain in the panther form long enough to go into heat, there would be nothing of your human mind left. Therefore, I do not recommend it.”
“And if she’s not in heat—” Tara asked tenaciously.
“No panther sex, and no panther babies,” he said. “She—or you—will not be interested in intercourse in that form. Directly,” he added.
Directly, because the panther sure as hell was interested once both she and Chay were human.
Please, kill me now, Tara thought.
“All right, then,” she said aloud. “I guess I’ll choose the shot, if that’s the most foolproof. But I’d rather have, you know, a woman doctor.” A woman elf doctor? Tara assumed that there were female elves, but at this point, she probably shouldn’t take anything for granted.
“That will not be a problem,” the elf said, setting the black bag on the table next to her tray of lunch. “Are you ready now? The sooner the IUD is removed, the better.” He flipped the latch on it, and it fell open.
“I’m ready, but I said a woman doctor,” Tara repeated. “Not a man doctor.”
“I know,” he said, pulling something from inside the bag.
“Then what are you doing?” she asked, belated alarm rising within her.
The elf looked at her calmly, holding up an oblong object. “Ensuring the safety of my staff.”
And before Tara could do more than curse, his hand darted out and the autoinjector got her in the arm. The elf steadied her easily as she wobbled on legs suddenly too rubbery to hold her up.
“You’re not putting a radio collar on me, you know,” she managed thickly through the darkness that was already gathering before her eyes.
The elf’s chuckle was the last thing she heard before the world went black.
Chapter Three
“And they call me a fox,” Annie said as Chay entered the spook shop.
Chay treated her to his best quelling glance, but Annie was immune to any attempt at intimidation.
“I needed to get myself a fan, watching that,” she continued, waving her hand in front of her face.
“No one said you had to watch,” Chay snapped.
She giggled. “You’re joking, right?”
Chay bit back his response. Annie was a fox shifter down to her very bones. Some of those raised in less traditional families had their mischievous tendencies more tempered by the mores of mainstream society, but Annie was practically a walking stereotype. At this point, it was no use expecting her to change. “Is Dr. Torrhanin with her yet?” he asked instead. He’d used his smart watch to call the elf as soon as he’d stepped out of Tara’s quarters.
Annie nodded to the screen. “See for yourself.”
The two of them were standing in the middle of the bedroom, Tara looking distinctly uncomfortable as she kept rubbing her upper arms over and over as she talked. The mics were off, and Chay didn’t turn them on. She deserved that much privacy.
“So, how’d she get dosed?” Annie asked. “Or were you too busy to ask?”
“She doesn’t know,” Chay said curtly, sinking into the indentation that he’d worn into the faux leather of his cheap rolling chair. He’d tried one of the fancy Aeron ones that Luke Ford and Annie both used, but he’d concluded that his broken-in old thing was too much like a part of him.
“Well, that’s not very helpful.”
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. Ophelia Prescott was on the duty roster for this hour, but her chair was still pulled up to her section of the long desk. “Where’s Ophelia?”
Annie shrugged. “One of her kids has a bug. She’s playing nursemaid.” Her tone hovered between sympathy and disgust. Annie didn’t have room at this point in her life for children, and she regarded them as particularly gross aliens.
Chay felt a sudden burst of gratitude at that. However much Annie would tease him about what he’d done, it was nothing like Ophelia’s tongue-lashing.
“And no one came to fill in?” Chay asked.
“Oh, Seamus came,” she said, “while you were...otherwise engaged. So he left again.”
Damn. None of the Mansfield brothers were going to be the least bit happy with him.
Couldn’t be helped, now. It sure as hell should have stopped him then. He’d put so much on the line for a moment of...what? Passion? Self-indulgence? None of those words quite seemed to fit. He’d risked not only Tara but the respect he had from the rest of the team he’d built so slowly and carefully over the years.
Frak. There was no undoing what he’d done. And going forward .... His mind shuddered away from any promises of what he’d do in the future. It wasn’t like he’d planned what had happened, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to keep it from happening again.
She was too young for him. Too vulnerable. And she was in a position where he was most definitely taking advantage of her. So what he had done was wrong, wrong, wrong no matter what way he looked at it. And it wasn’t like he even knew what he felt for her. He’d had crushes before—and the euphoria of early love. But this wasn’t that. It was like Tara was under his skin, inside of his head in a way that didn’t even have a name.
She was attractive enough. Hell, she was gorgeous in an earthy sense—not model material like Annie’s carefully bred perfection but stunning in her own way, with those brilliant green eyes and her olive skin. But his admiration for her physical attributes was somehow separate from the kind of psychic itch that she made him feel when she was around.
And even when she wasn’t.
Chay blew out a puff of air. None of this was going to answer his questions about what had happened to her. Tara clearly had no idea—or else she was keeping things from him. But she didn’t seem to be. He suspected that she was absolutely as bewildered as she appeared, and while shifters couldn’t read minds, his nose was excellent at smelling the cascade of stress hormones pouring through her.
So. There were two possibilities. Either something had happened to her at the College of William and Mary, or it had happened to her before, on vacation or maybe ev
en before college, and something about how she’d been given it had delayed the onset of her first shift.
Neither of which made sense. But he’d just have to roll with what he knew until he had enough pieces of the puzzle to put them together.
“Did you do the full background on her?” Chay asked Annie.
Annie was a woman of many talents. She could drive or fly practically any machine ever built, and she was wicked fast with lock picking and safe cracking. But having been largely confined to Black Mesa over the past three years when she wasn’t in the field, she’d been one of a handful on his team who had taken to coding like they’d been born to it.
And Annie’s interest was in identities—both ferreting them out and creating new ones.
“Of course I did, Beany baby,” she said in a reproachful voice. “What do you take me for? All medical, government, and school records for the past six years. Haven’t gotten to social media yet.”
She tapped a few keys at her workstation, and windows cascaded across one of Chay’s shared screens.
“Everything since she turned eighteen, just like you asked,” Annie said.
Chay poked through her medical records first. Tara was right—she had been vaccinated for practically every disease in existence. Flu vaccines every year since she had graduated high school. When she was eighteen, she’d gotten vaccinated against yellow fever, meningitis, typhoid, Hepatitis A, and had gotten another polio booster. At twenty, she’d added Japanese encephalitis and rabies. At twenty-two a Tdap booster. In all, he counted eleven different opportunities for her to be injected with shifter factor.
He felt the first warning twinge of a huge headache coming on.
“Are you sure there hasn’t been an outbreak of panther shifters anywhere?” Chay asked, clicking through the records of different clinics and doctors’ offices in a desultory fashion.
Annie chuckled. “You know that’s Ophelia’s department, not mine, but surely we would have heard something if schools were breaking out in a rash of panthers.”
“So that means one of two things,” Chay said. “Either she was targeted specifically, or the other people who are infected haven’t turned yet.”
“Or the other ones just didn’t take,” Annie added.
Chay frowned. Even that was possible, with an older military strain. Everything was speculation at this point, and he wasn’t happy about that. But finding answers sure wasn’t going to be easy.
He poked through Tara’s other records—not just government but school, too. Nothing unusual there. Very few driving incidents, which made sense because as far as he could tell, she didn’t own a car. No arrests. Passport records had her going in and out of the country a number of times over the past few years, which matched up with her time in Sudan and backpacking around the world.
Tara had a small merit-based scholarship, reserved for older students who had “significantly contributed to the wellbeing of his or her local, national, or global community.” Solid grades at a 3.5 GPA. No college debt, though he wasn’t sure whether her parents were paying or she was.
“Financial records, coming at you,” Annie chirped, and more windows appeared on his screen.
Tara had a part-time job manning the desk at a 24-hour fitness center in the early mornings. With three hundred dollars in the bank and one hundred due on her credit card, she was skating by on income, but that wasn’t unusual for a student. No records of plasma donations or anything of that sort that might give someone the opportunity to dose her.
With a slightly guilty twinge for all his snooping, Chay paid off her credit card with a stroke of a key. She didn’t need to have fines for missed payments on top of everything else.
“I’ll grab the social media,” he told Annie.
“Aw, that’s the easy part, anyway,” she said, flipping her hair dismissively before wandering over to the refrigerator and riffling through it.
Whatever had happened, Chay needed to go back farther, before her college years, to see if something in her past had set her on her current path. Tara had an Instagram account that she set to post to Facebook. Most of her Facebook photos seemed to come from there, so he suspected that Instagram was her older account. Taking note of her user name, he switched over, and sure enough, her Instagram was fully public, like most people’s were.
He scrolled through the college photos—selfies with friends in dorms and apartments, at restaurants and college parties, all the normal sorts of things he’d never experienced. He felt like an anthropologist, peering into a foreign culture. He was able to identify her closest friends quickly—Sylvie and Olivia, Piper and Katriona.
Farther back, the occasional glasses of beer or martinis disappeared from the party pictures, and then, abruptly, there was a picture of her standing in a driveway next to a sedan, a pile of luggage around her as she held up a pennant from William and Mary. “Off to #college!” the caption read. “#WilliamandMary #collegerocks #worldsoldestfreshman.”
There were dozens of likes and comments on it—more than any before or since. He stared at it for a moment, trying to see the bright-eyed, grinning girl in the woman with the haunted expression that he now had in his custody. Shaking his head, he scrolled back farther.
And then he groaned as he read the tags. She hadn’t just done the basic European backpacking tour that so many teens dreamed about. She’d gone frakking everywhere. #Kualalumpur. #Marrakech. #GreatWall. #MachuPicchu. She’d clearly horded whatever small income she’d made from working for the NGO at the refugee camp and had used it for a spin around the world.
Which, he admitted, had been pretty appealing to him at the same age, too—though he’d signed up to “travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them,” as the joke about the military went.
But her whirlwind around-the-world-in-360-days tour meant that he had no idea where to begin finding out where she’d been dosed, if it had even happened then.
Before that, there were other pictures, ones from Sudan. Some consisted of her working in a clinic with patients—cleaning wounds, giving out food, packing supplies. Others were the kind of thing that any teenager would post, selfies with friends, silly poses, bedroom shots. It just so happened that the bedroom was a large tent, and the shots often had a muddy refugee camp in the background. She often looked tired in those pictures despite the smile on her face, but she also looked satisfied. And then there were those of her with another man—a very definitely older man, identified in her photos as Tom.
In the later photos, they were often casually embracing in a way that wasn’t quite overly flirtatious, but they left no doubt in Chay’s mind about the nature of their relationship. He narrowed his eyes reflexively at the sandy-haired man with the short-cropped beard, then called the panther inside him to heel.
But all his prying did nothing but give him an unaccustomed sense of being a peeping Tom, for all that such background checks were routine for him.
Yeah, but I usually haven’t just screwed the person I’m checking up on.
He shrugged off that thought—nothing he could do about it now. But really, the whole thing was an exercise in futility. Nothing he found gave him any hint as to how she’d been dosed—or even how many others might be out there, because if someone had taken the trouble to dose one teenager or twenty-something without her knowledge, he would bet a good chunk of his considerable fortune that she was far from the only one.
How many others were there? And what kind of ticking time bombs were they?
But Chay couldn’t dwell on that thought because his messenger app pinged with three requests at once. He checked the time—10 p.m., a full two hours before he normally went on duty. He sighed and rolled his shoulders.
He’d slept when Tara had, on the way back from Andrews Air Force, wedged into the corner of the van with her head on his lap, then caught a couple of hours in his room before she showed signs of stirring again. But four hours wasn’t enough to be at his peak for a night of hacking—much less t
o deal with all the crap that came from being nominally in charge of the loose community that was Black Mesa.
He checked his messages. One was from Jen Hardison, in charge of the kitchen, a pissy, snippy one-liner about using frozen vegetables again. Chay snorted. Maybe some people cared. He really didn’t. Frozen kept longer, meant fewer trips to meet the greengrocer’s truck and fewer possible questions about what they were doing and where they were from.
The next was a question about supplies that had somehow not had their RFID tags properly entered and were now missing somewhere in the warehouse caves. He shook his head and forwarded it to the supply manager.
Then there came an update from Torrhanin about the so-called “mind-net” he’d been developing—almost ready, he said, just like he’d said for the past three weeks—plus a request for a meeting about Tara. And that was a request that Chay couldn’t ignore or delegate. With a frown, he pushed back from the table. He wasn’t quite comfortable with Torrhanin coming into the spook shop except when absolutely necessary. He trusted the doctor as far as he trusted any elf, but that wasn’t saying much.
“I’m off to Narnia,” he told Annie.
“We’ll still be here when you come back,” she said cheerfully. “Unless of course time accelerates suddenly and we’re all dead because two hundred years have passed.”
“Right,” he agreed, and then he left to see what the elf wanted.
Chapter Four
Tara fluttered back out of unconsciousness and opened her eyes against the great weight that seemed to drag at them. The world seemed strange, distorted, as if she were looking at it through a thick piece of warped glass, and the sounds came to her ears both muffled and too loud at once.
She was moving, but she was lying down on some sort of bed. A gurney, she realized. The ceiling above her was white and curved like the interior of an egg, except that it glowed. With great difficultly, she made herself concentrate on the voices around her.
