by Lauren Esker
She looked down at Fletcher's pale face. He'd come in a heartbeat when she was in danger. He'd signed over the company for her without even hesitating, and she knew him well enough to know that the Sperlins might as well have asked him to rip out his own heart and offer it on a plate.
If they stayed down here, Fletcher would die. Little Olivia would lose her father.
And I will lose ...
Everything.
Debi kissed Fletcher lightly on his cold lips. "Wait for me," she whispered. "I won't be long."
She stripped quickly, peeling off her wet clothes. Steeling herself, hands balled into fists, she unchained her lioness and let it surge up inside her. The initial feeling was one of vast relief. It had been so long, so long since she'd shifted.
And then—
A scream tore from her throat. It hurt; oh, it hurt. It hurt like the end of everything. It felt like she imagined being caught in a leghold trap would feel. Instinctively, her body tried to halt her shift in the middle, arrested by pain—but she pushed through, forcing herself into the lioness body that hadn't been hers to claim for a year.
She'd missed being a lion like a part of her soul had been ripped out of her, but there was no triumph as she stood on three legs in the rain, head hanging down, her left hind leg drawn up in agony. She barely felt the snakebite anymore, compared to what her back leg felt like.
Was she really going to be able to climb like this?
I have to, she told herself.
She felt dizzy and weak with pain, her ears buzzing. But it was easier to handle as a lion than as a human. Big predators were resilient. They had to be. Their heavy bones and strong muscles could deal with a lot of punishment; their bodies were made to resist shock. The full weight of it would come crashing down on her when she shifted back, but for the moment, she didn't feel like she was going to pass out or collapse.
The shaft seemed much smaller now, filled with her leonine bulk. When she stretched to her full length, bracing herself with her front paws against the side of the shaft and balancing on one hind leg, the grate was just a few feet beyond her reach. She swiped at it fruitlessly with her front paws.
Climbing this was going to suck. But she was committed now. If she couldn't do it as a human before, she definitely couldn't do it as a one-legged human.
And she did think it was possible. With sharp feline eyes to penetrate the dark, she could see some places where she might be able to gain purchase with her claws: a large crack in the concrete near the top, a recessed area a little further down where something had been anchored. As she dropped back to all fours (or all threes), the feline part of her brain was already calculating angles and trajectories. Healthy, she could do this easily. In her present state, she might have to try more than once—and wow, did she ever not want to think about falling. Especially with Fletcher at the bottom of the shaft. She might kill him if she dropped a quarter ton of lion on him.
Let's not fall, then.
She crouched and sprang.
In a flurry of claws and flailing, muscular limbs, she went up the shaft, leaping from wall to wall. The bones in her shattered ankle ground together, but with the lioness part of her fully dominant, she was able to shove aside the screaming agony and do what needed to be done. A lion could go ahead and make its kill with a broken leg or a hunter's bullet in its heart, its powerful body pistoning on. This wasn't so different, not really.
She slammed into the iron grate and just kept going. The grate jolted up, raised by her shoulders, and she flung her forelegs over the edge and sank her claws into the muddy ground. Frantically she scrabbled and clawed for purchase, heaving herself inch by agonizing inch out from under the edge of the grate pressing into her back, pulling herself over the edge until finally she sprawled in the rain, her sides heaving. She was in so much pain that she didn't even notice her tail had become trapped under the edge of the grate when it crashed back down, until she tried to stand up and was jerked flat again. Twisting around, she clawed at the edge of the grate with her front paws until she managed to raise it enough to pull her throbbing tail free. It was definitely bruised, possibly broken too. Her entire body was one massive hurt.
But she was free.
She struggled to her feet and stood swaying in the rain. Her injured hindleg felt hot and huge; the front paw that Casper had bitten was merely numb, a mercy by comparison. Once she had her balance, she looked around. Lights gleamed through the darkness from other buildings nearby. Someone in one of those would be able to call for help, surely.
I'm coming back, Fletcher. Please wait for me.
She began limping through the rain. There was nothing regal about her now, bedraggled and muddy, slogging forward on sheer determination. She stopped when she was confronted by a scraggly hedge, then crashed through it, unable to summon enough mental acuity to find a way around.
On the other side of the hedge there was a parking lot, half full of cars, and oh, bless everything, an apartment building with lights in the windows. She was staggering across the parking lot when the thought occurred to her that people were probably not going to call an ambulance when confronted by an injured lion. She was going to have to shift back.
She really, really didn't want to.
There was another scruffy little hedge in front of the apartment building. Debi reeled into the gap between the hedge and the building's foundation, and with that minimal amount of privacy, she shifted.
Instantly she collapsed, tears of pain filling her eyes as the agony crashed down on her. She was afraid to look down at her bare, bloody foot, at the crushed bones of her ankle. The only thing she knew for sure was that her foot seemed to still be there, but even that seemed more curse than blessing as she crawled forward, pain lancing up her leg with every move she made.
She had to stand up to reach the buzzer for the building's locked door. Clinging to the wall, she managed to do it. "Please," she gasped. "Help—"
The door started to open, bumped into her elbow, and there was a stifled shriek from the other side. Debi knew what she must look like: naked, soaked, her body streaked with mud, her foot leaving a blood trail.
Begging humans to help her. To help her human boyfriend.
Roger would have cast her out of the pride for this.
And right now, she didn't care at all. She didn't even care whether they took her to a hospital or to prison, as long as they got Fletcher to a hospital in time.
"Please," she whispered, sinking down to sit against the wall. Her head was swimming and she couldn't stay standing any longer. Dimly she was aware of a middle-aged, shocked-looking human woman bending over her. "Please call for help. My boyfriend—he's trapped over there, on the building site. He's hurt. Please ..."
Someone wrapped a jacket around her. Time seemed to pause and skip. She babbled bits of her story to different people who came and went around her. She had to keep telling them again; she had to make sure they knew.
"A snake bit him. He's down in a hole—"
"We know," the human lady said gently. "You already said that. Your boyfriend is going to be okay."
She'd never thought of humans as being ... nice. She worked with them—all her coworkers at Chang & Luntz, and nearly all of the clients she'd dealt with, were human—but she'd never quite trusted them. Roger had employed a number of humans at Lion's Share, but they were rarely promoted very high within the company. All the Fallon pride's close friends and associates had been shifters.
But then there was Fletcher. And now there were a half-dozen people, all human, all strangers, who had clustered around her and were trying to keep her warm and comfortable until the ambulance and police arrived.
What am I going to tell the police? It almost didn't seem to matter right now. As soon as Nia found out what had happened, the SCB could go after Casper and the rest of the Sperlins.
The important thing was to make sure Fletcher was safe.
Red and blue lights strobed across the walls, and a sudden fl
urry of paramedics descended on her, wrapping her in blankets and shining lights in her eyes. The realization penetrated her sluggish, shocky brain that she was going to have to deal with humans trying to treat her medically. Fast shifter healing made hospitals problematic. I can't let them take me into surgery. Would anesthesia even work on her? And her ankle would start knitting together in the middle of surgery. Maybe it already had, healing crooked and misshapen, making it impossible to ever walk on—
"Ma'am, calm down," one of the paramedics told her, and she became aware that she'd shoved him off her without thinking, using her lioness strength to push him across the sidewalk.
"Sorry," she murmured. "Sorry." She could call Nia from the hospital. Nia would arrange things. "My boyfriend, he's on the building site, he's hurt—"
"Your boyfriend is already on the way to the hospital," one of the other paramedics said, patting her arm. "He's in good hands. Now you relax and let us take care of you. What hurts besides your leg?"
How about everything. "I got bit by a snake," she told them, holding up her hand and pointing to the puffy, red tissue around the bite. "So did my boyfriend. Did they give him antivenom?"
"There aren't poisonous snakes in western Washington," the paramedic told her.
Debi sat up, heedless of the shock blanket falling down to expose her chest. "Well, someone forgot to tell the snake, because there was one over there, and it bit us. It was big and brown, a—an escaped pet, I guess? Or a zoo snake? I think it was some kind of viper."
She argued with them all the way to the hospital. She still wasn't sure if they believed her, but she was vehement enough to get them to call ahead and tell the hospital to prepare to treat snakebite when they received Fletcher.
And all she could think, the whole time, was:
Please let him be okay. I'll give anything. Just...
Let him be okay.
Please.
Chapter Sixteen
Fletcher didn't want to open his eyes; he was deeply, profoundly tired, as if he'd been dragged out of a heavy sleep and his body was still caught in its depths. And he'd been dreaming of something tawny and beautiful, a lioness with a coat like spun gold ...
But he was thirsty and his nose itched, and his arms hurt in a stiff, cramped kind of way. Both arms. Wait. Had something happened to both his arms?
He cracked his eyes open and gazed up at the ceiling for a moment before he turned his head slowly to the side—it felt like his skull weighed a thousand pounds—and stared uncomprehendingly at a mass of blonde hair.
Gradually the scene began to make sense. Debi was in a chair beside the bed, flopped over with her head resting on his arm. Her breath whispered softly against his skin. She was asleep.
Fletcher wiggled his fingers and winced as pins and needles prickled through them. Well, that explained that arm. He turned his head the other way and found his right arm on top of the blankets, swollen and swathed in bandages. He wiggled those fingers, too. They looked and felt as fat as sausages, but they moved.
Fletcher relaxed in profound relief. He was terrible at writing with his left hand. Good thing it looked like he wasn't going to have to learn how.
He raised his bandaged right arm to scratch his nose. It hurt, but it moved, and it bent at the elbow; he was able to do it. Then he started trying to gently extricate his pinched, cramping left arm from under Debi. He'd managed to work it most of the way out of her clutches when she woke with a tiny, cute little snort and sat up abruptly, blinking in owlish startlement.
"I'm awake," she said blankly. "I'm awake. I ... uh ..."
She was wearing her reading glasses, which were now hanging off one ear after being shoved off her nose. Her hair was a tangled mass covering part of her face, and there was a red mark on her cheek with a blanket print.
She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
"Hi," Fletcher whispered.
"Oh. Oh my God, Fletcher." Debi started to lean forward, then swiped impatiently at her dangling glasses. Taking them off, she laid them on his chest, and then she took his face in her hands and kissed the breath out of him.
"Well, that's a nice thing to wake up to," he murmured.
"The important thing is that you're awake." Debi cleared her throat, trying to get herself under control, and sat back in her chair. She was wearing an oversized sweater, one of the least stylish things he'd ever seen her in, with sleeves that flopped over her hands. It was unbearably cute, especially when she reached up to touch her face, discovered her glasses were missing, and had a tiny freakout in pantomime until she realized she'd put them down on Fletcher's chest.
"Are you okay?" he whispered.
"I'm fine. Well ..." She gave a soft laugh and tucked her glasses on top of her head. Looking around, she bent over and straightened up with a fashion magazine—she must have been reading it when she fell asleep—and set it neatly on the tray beside his bed. "Okay, to be honest, I'm going to be fine. Eventually. Soon. But I'm on my way there."
Fletcher frowned at her. Bits and pieces of that night at the construction site were trickling back. "Did you—shift?"
Debi glanced away as if he'd made her talk about something embarrassing. "Yeah."
Everything after Casper bit him was like a dream, disjointed and hazy. In that hallucinogenic confusion, one thing stood out above all else: a lioness, sleek and golden and beautiful. She'd been in his dreams ever since, not as a nightmare but as a guardian. It felt as if nothing could hurt him with that sublime golden creature standing above him.
"I remember," he whispered. "You were gorgeous."
Debi gave a soft, shy laugh. "Hardly. I was covered with muck."
"No. You were amazing." But something still nagged at the back of his mind. Something about her shifting. His thoughts still felt like they were wrapped in cotton, but eventually he dredged it up and looked at her in shock. "Wait. What about your ... leg thing?"
"You are still pretty out of it, aren't you?" She smiled, touching the side of his face with her fingertips.
"That's not an answer." He caught her fingers with his good hand. "Debi, tell me. What happened?"
She caught her breath and dropped her gaze again.
"Debi." He pushed himself up on one elbow. A head rush almost sent him flat onto his back again, and then he had to be content with Debi trying to push him down. She could have overpowered him easily, he knew, but instead her hands were gentle.
"Fletcher, lie down. You just lost all the color in your face."
"Your leg," he pressed. "What happened to your leg when you shifted?"
"If I show you, will you lie down like a sensible person who's still recovering from being poisoned?"
Fletcher nodded.
Debi slid an arm around his shoulders and helped him sit up, tucked cozily against the warmth of her sweater. She twisted in her chair and stuck out one leg.
She was wearing a skirt. He'd never seen her in one before. And the reason for it was obvious: she had a walking cast on her left ankle, encasing her leg from mid-shin to foot. Debi rotated him a little further so she could point out a pair of crutches leaning against the wall.
"See? Everything is still attached and healing up nicely. Faster than it would for you—I'm a shifter, remember? We heal fast."
"Yeah, but ..." He allowed her to lay him back down. "That couldn't have been fun."
"Thank you, master of understatement." Debi fussed with his pillows as she talked. "Yeah, it's going to be awhile before I can walk on it again, but it's healing up okay. It's just sore. There are some metal pins holding it together. The doctor—Nia helped me find a doctor who treats shifters, did you know we have those?—told me that it might actually push the pins out of my skin as everything heals. If that doesn't happen, the bone will just heal around the pins, like it would with a human, except harder and stronger because of our extra healing abilities. My ankle will probably be just about unbreakable if that happens."
Despite her light tone, there wa
s an underlying chill to her voice that suggested to Fletcher she was downplaying how severe her injuries had been. If she didn't want to talk about it in more detail, though, he wasn't going to push her. "Through the skin? That sounds ... interesting."
"Creepy. I think the word you want is creepy. Dr. Lafitte told me it would be relatively painless if it happens, for whatever that's worth. I like that word, 'relatively.'"
"I do not think that word means what you think it means," Fletcher said, and was rewarded with a startled, delighted laugh from Debi.
"The Princess Bride! I love that movie."
"Me too. Can't wait 'til Olivia is old enough to watch it." He grinned up at her. "I guess we still have a lot to learn about each other."
Debi took his hand and kissed the knuckles. "And still plenty of time to do it in." She pressed the back of his hand against her cheek. "I should warn you that the one thing our healing doesn't do is heal scars. Well, that or regrow lost limbs. We get scar tissue just like humans do, sometimes even worse because we heal so fast. So I'll probably have a lot of scarring on that ankle."
"Debi, you got those scars saving my life." He pulled her hand down to press his dry lips to the back of it. "Everything about you is beautiful to me, but I think your ankle is going to be my new favorite part of you."
Pink tinted her cheeks. "That doesn't even make sense. How many drugs have they got you on?"
"I'm not responsible for my actions right now, it's true." Another thought wandered up from the foggy depths of his subconscious. Something about her hand ... "Wait, didn't Casper bite you too?"
Debi smiled and turned her left hand to the side. A pair of faint purplish marks were visible on the side of her palm. "All healed up. He didn't get much venom in me."
"Where is Casper now, anyway?"
Debi's smile turned feral. "In custody at the SCB. The big surprise is, I didn't even have to call the cops on him. Your ex did."
