Taken By The Tigerlord: a sexy tiger shifter paranormal psychic space opera action romance (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 2)

by Kara Lockharte

  I heard thumps, scrapes on the wall. He was trying to break it down.

  I grabbed another sphere, digging my fingers into the code. Maybe a slow acclimation? I opened a small slot in the wall between us.

  A huge green cat-slit eye glared at me.

  Sharp claws jutted through the slot. It slowly creaked.

  Too late I realized the wall would hold as long as there was no break.

  But with the slot…

  I fumbled with the sphere.

  A crack began appearing in the slot.

  I kept uselessly entering keywords, my fingers trembling.

  The crack kept widening. I couldn’t stop trembling. I wasn’t sure if it was from fear or adrenaline.

  A monstrous yowl from him set my hair on end, a primordial part of my brain screaming at me to get out of there before the beast came to kill me.

  But it was Kai, I reminded myself. It was Kai

  My keyword search wasn’t working. I’d have to take another direction. I searched for the settings of the holding cell. There was some strange chemical being pumped into his air. Involuntarily, I sniffed, unable to smell anything with my useless human nose.

  I shut off the chemical and blasted his chamber with fresher air.

  A chunk of the wall came away.

  “Kai --”

  Another screen alerted me. Guards, actual living soldiers were coming towards us.

  The Library maintained a platoon of Specialized Infoists dedicated to learning and keeping alive martial arts lost from various civilizations. The Coalition routinely sent their own military advisors to learn from this group.

  I wouldn’t be able to just hack and reprogram these opponents.

  Kai roared again.

  “Kai! I’m trying to think here!”

  I activated the traps in the halls, but knew that it would only give us minutes, if not seconds for they could probably disable them as quickly as I had enabled them.

  I looked around for something, anything.

  There was a snarl. But this time, it sounded different. It sounded…like my name.

  “Kai?”

  I stood before the opening in the wall.

  “Kai, you need to get yourself together. There are Specialists coming and I need you to be…you.”

  The tiger yawned revealing huge serrated teeth and a mouth that could easily bite me in half without a thought.

  My heart pounded. I was going to die.

  “KAI!” I yelled. “Stop that right now!”

  He paused, closing his mouth.

  Oh my stars, that actually worked. “You can’t scare me, Kai,” I said, with my voice trembling ever so convincingly. “I came all the way to get you because we have to get out of here.”

  He stared at me with green eyes ringed with gold. I stared back, remembering the stories of ancient humans who wore masks on the backs of their heads to protect themselves from primitive tigers, who hesitated attacking opponents who could actually see them.

  Kai’s fur stood on end. He rumbled a threatening growl, showing all his massive teeth. Saliva dripped from his jaws.

  I wanted to run. I knew without a doubt that this monster was going to tear me to pieces.

  I forced myself to sit down, lowering myself, even as I kept my gaze steady. “You were right.” I said, my voice coming out in a squeak. “Are you satisfied by how right you were?”

  I tightened my fingers on the sphere. The Specialists would be here soon. And after what I had done to Annatu, there was no telling what they would do to me.

  I opened the rest of the doorway.

  Kai came toward me, supernaturally fast, knocking me to the ground. I closed my eyes, waiting for him to snap his teeth into my throat. I could feel tears sliding down my cheek.

  I should have trusted him. I should have known. But all the should haves and could haves couldn’t change the past.

  I only wish he could have known that.

  Sharp points dug into my neck and I tensed. I felt one pierce my skin, something wet trickling down my neck. I clenched my teeth, biting back a scream.

  Then a very large scratchy sandy tongue burned across my neck.

  “OW!”

  I opened my eyes and the tiger watched me, more confusion than madness.

  The tiger rumbled a warning.

  “Kai,” I whispered. I said through the tears, “I’m yours.”

  He bared his teeth. A fetid stink washed over me, making me almost want to throw up. “I’m yours, but stars, Kai, your breath is awful.” The tiger backed off. I sat up. The tiger tilted its head, watching me with confused, questioning eyes. I wrapped my arms around him, burying my tears in that blood-matted white fur.

  “Come back to me. I told you I was yours. And it’s true. It’s always been true.”

  I could feel his heart, beating with mine. It was said that shifters could smell truth and lies. I only hoped he could smell the truth I was offering him now.

  Fur began to move, tickling me. I withdrew.

  A teeth-filled mouth clamped around my forearm. I yelped in anticipation of the pain, and then realized that he wasn’t biting down.

  He watched me with those green eyes, my arm trapped in between his fangs. His tongue moved against my arm and it burned my skin like hot sand. I gritted my teeth.

  The tiger paused, watching me for a moment that seemed to stretch forever.

  Fur retreated, muscles reshaped, claws retracted, fingers emerged. I had once thought the process of transformation a hideous thing, and now it seemed the most beautiful thing in the world. It wasn’t a smooth process, it was more as if tiger and man were fighting for possession of a single body.

  The nearest sphere beeped an alert. The guards were close.

  I looked back up at him, and he was kneeling, head bowed, fist on the ground, shivering.

  I rushed toward him. I embraced him, saying his name over and over again,

  Kissing his forehead, his cheek, his jaw, his lips.

  “Seria,” he said, his voice hoarse, stumbling over my name as if he were trying to figure out how to speak again. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  I pulled his arm around my shoulders and stumbled under the dense weight of him, but I managed to get to my feet. “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

  The sphere whined. I looked up. “We have to go.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  We were deep in the center of the Library and the white hallways were endless. I couldn’t risk dragging Kai onto one of the public commuter transports lest his face be seen in the cameras. So we took the back halls where the spheres surrounding us could disrupt the fewest sensors.

  His arm was still around my shoulders, though he grew less and less heavy with each step. Shifters were renowned for the ability to recover from injuries.

  “This robe itches,” he said. The spheres had been able to find an extra brown robe lying around in the laundry rooms. I had shorted out the circuitry within the robe and though it was much too small for him, it would draw less attention than walking through the station nude.

  I focused on his words, rather than the heat of him so close to me. “I’ll be sure to choose something more appropriate for your sensitive skin next time.”

  Kai snorted. He made me stop. His arm came off my shoulders.

  “I can walk on my own,” he said, taking a stumbling step.

  “But you don’t need to,” I said, catching him with my hand on his chest. His robe had fallen open and the touch of skin on skin was a shock that I was unprepared for.

  Green eyes gazed at me for a moment.

  A large hand closed around mine. “It’s better if I do,” he said.

  I swallowed the bitterness in my mouth, and yanked my hand back.

  I kept my face neutral, even as I felt a pain sharp in my chest. “Fine. Just stay behind and follow me.”

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Back to the docks. Our ship is still there.”

 
“The others?”

  “Barricaded in the ship, waiting for us.” A sphere had returned after delivering the message.

  He was a silent presence behind me.

  He snarled behind me. “Everything in this place looks the same, smells the same to me.”

  “The station is designed to make it hard for shifters to escape.”

  He grimaced. “You don’t have to remind me.”

  The spheres around us turned red and began spinning. “Incoming,” I said. “More spheres by the look of it.”

  Kai brushed past me. “I’ll take care of them.”

  A sphere flew in front of me, projecting a map.

  “Come on,” I said, turning down another passageway. “The best way to win a fight to the death is to not be involved in one in the first place. The spheres will hold them off.”

  I didn’t turn to see if he followed, but sensed he was behind me, his robe back on again.

  “It can’t possibly be that easy to evade the spheres,” he said.

  Escape sagas from the Library were practically their own genre of stories in tiger shifter literature. I had read enough of them as a student in the Library.

  “Perhaps. But those trying to escape probably never had a trained Infoist at their side.”

  "When we get out of here,” he said suddenly, “You need to seek refuge with your father. He'll be able to protect you."

  "You don’t have a chance of finding the Dragonlords without me."

  "I'm not going to let you sacrifice yourself."

  “Are you trying to decide my future, for me again? After all that has happened, there is no way I’m going to let anyone take that choice from me. You need an Ealen code breaker. And who says I'm going to sacrifice anything? You heard Anna. As long as we have those organs, we can wake the Dragonlords without me having to sacrifice anything."

  He made a visible show of looking around. "Yes, because you clearly have those organs with you."

  "No. I sent spheres to retrieve them. They will be at the ship.”

  Kai gave me an odd look, as if remembering what I truly was.

  Ealen. The species that had enslaved his ancestors.

  He turned his back to me.

  After all that we had been through, after everything, that’s all that I was to him now? My eyes felt hot, and wet. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, glad he wasn’t looking at me. “My abilities as well as my heritage, make me more than uniquely qualified for your…quest, Tigerlord.”

  Part of me still wanted him to tell me it didn’t matter. Even if I knew better.

  We headed down another dark hallway. Lights flashed on.

  Android guards lined our path, their lights flickering on and sighting us, interfacing with the network, receiving orders and undoubtedly sending out our location in a matter of nanoseconds.

  I hadn’t directed the spheres to keep sleeping android guards asleep.

  Stupid stupid me.

  "Stand down, and you will not be harmed," came the order from one of the androids.

  Before I could do anything, Kai moved in a blur, kicking off the wall.

  The lights went out.

  The electric hiss of an emergency light illuminated his form briefly in red. The lights shattered, and in moments, there was silence.

  “Kai.”

  There was a flash of light, a glimpse of a huge mouth filled with teeth.

  “Lights NOW!” I yelled at the spheres.

  Kai, stood amongst a heap of shredded torn sparking metallic android parts. His robe had fallen off, and he was now completely naked as he strode toward me with a feral determination in his face.

  And stars, what they say about fighting? The adrenaline and testosterone rush makes a man hard?

  Yea, he was quite hard.

  I took an involuntary step backward. I still don’t know what the Ealen had done to him, what the ramifications of being forced into his more primitive shape would be.

  “Kai?” I said, almost taking another involuntary step backward before I realized how much ground I was ceding to him.

  His eyes glowed, more tiger than man. He kept coming.

  Nostrils flared.

  I could feel my cheeks growing hot, my body’s response so irritatingly inappropriate I stood my ground. “Kai.”

  I tried to place my palms against his chest.

  He grabbed my wrist before I could even exhale. “I want you to know that I don’t care if you’re Ealen. I don’t care if you’re wolf. I have known you were mine since the moment I scented you.”

  His words broke something in me, and my eyes welled with tears. I closed them and felt the tears trickling down my cheek.

  He kissed away each tear.

  I wished that the moment could last forever, and knew I’d remember it until the end of my days.

  In the background, I heard a distant alarm. “This isn’t the time.”

  Nostrils flared again. His voice was rough. “I can smell your…irritation.”

  He lowered his nose to my neck. Stupid shifters and their sense of smell.

  “Fucking adrenaline,” I muttered, pulling my wrists back. He let them go.

  “Fucking adrenaline,” he repeated with a suggestive grin.

  And there we were, so close to each other. His cock completely unashamed and demanding attention than I knew better than to give.

  He grinned, his eyes wild, almost drunk. “Physical exertion tinged with aggression helps heal shifters.”

  I ducked under his arm, grabbing a sphere and reconfigured the alerts so that we wouldn’t be ambushed next time. “So all I have to do is piss you off and have you fight someone. I’ll remember that next time.”

  “There are other ways you can help,” he said with a familiar gleam in his eyes.

  Anger flushed me. “This is not the time.”

  He let out a long-suffering sigh as if there really was a choice between near instant death and hot crazy sex.

  He was positively feral. And stars helped me, I liked it.

  I followed him, and the wake of his scent trail. No man that sweaty and dirty had a right to smell so good. It had to be tiger shifter pheromones, because I wanted nothing more than to rub my scent all over his naked skin,

  He turned and flashed another grin at me.

  And by that gleam in his eye, he knew it.

  A vambrace. The spheres had actually found and brought me back a vambrace

  It was sweaty, slightly too big, and had a sour reek to it but it would do.

  I logged into the interface.

  Cool relief spread through me.

  With the vambrace I was able to see the movements of spheres, even recognized the ghost spheres added to the software to foil hackers.

  But I had coded those ghost spheres. I had coded many things in the Library’s network, particularly the many mundane tasks Annatu had delegated to me and told me to design to be maintenance free. Some were the little silly things of a child. A holo of a long eared feline projected when a certain sequence was typed in a specific place. Bots that ferreted out tiny bits of deleted remainder data and ate them.

  I wondered if they were still there.

  I looked. They were.

  Hmm.

  With a few more taps and swipes, I made a few modifications and unleashed a series of bots scrambling through the networks. Whatever upgrades they had made to the security algorithms would most likely destroy what I had created, but they should at least cause a few problems.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Just a moment.”

  To Kai’s apparent dismay, we arrived at the hangar bay without much more trouble.

  And it seemingly empty of living beings, save for a few ships. Kai pushed me back, stepping in front of me. The quiet was unnatural, compared to the teeming great unwashed chaos of before.

  I caught sight of our ship behind a pillar. The bay doors to the ship were open, and I caught the glimpses of spheres disappearing into the ship with a black metal box.
r />   I felt the barest touch of relief. At the very least, the Library would not be able to use those organs to force the Dragonlords to do their bidding.

  “This is a trap,” I said, hearing our footsteps in the eerily silent cavernous space.

  Kai made a show of inhaling deeply. He smiled. “Yes.”

  “Red,” I said into my vambrace. “Is the ship ready?”

  There was a burst of light and something exploded into tiny fragments on the right side of the ship.

  The illusion dropped, revealing a squadron of Infoists in Smart Armor between us and the ship.

  There was a buzz of static, then Red’s voice squawking into my vambrace. “ -- a trap! I’m going to need a few minutes to redirect power to the shielding.” she said, as I watched several black and green exo-armor clad soldiers filter around us, their black helms and visors making them all look like human insectoids.

  “Stand down. We don’t want to hurt you,” said the first leader

  My hand flew to Kai’s forearm. He was all deadly coiled tension.

  “Don’t kill them,” I said to Kai.

  His eyes were trained on the barrels of their weapons, all aimed at us. “I’ll try not to,” he said dryly.

  “You don’t know what they’re doing.” I said to the Infoists. “They’re making zombies, breaking the laws of nature.”

  The Infoists didn’t move. Kai snorted. “They’re all zombies,” he said. “Does that mean I can kill them?”

  They parted and Annatu walked out from behind them.

  But it was the expression on her face that punched me in the gut. “I was wrong about you,” she said.

  Even now the words stung the child-like part of me that would hold the memory of who she had been to me.

  My fingers flew to my vambrace. “I could say the same about you.”

  Annatu shook her head slowly. “We are doing what we have always done: preserve life.”

  “Making the undead live is not life.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.” She lowered her vambrace, the image disappearing. “It’s too late. Our fleet is already out there.”

  “We will find the Dragonlords. And they will destroy them.”

  She laughed. “There are only four of them left, my dear. Even if you do wake them, you expect four beings frozen for millennia to destroy an entire fleet of ships? Surely you don’t believe in children’s stories.”