by Kym Dillon
"Come on, we've got a long way to go before we rest tonight."
When they finally made camp, Jessica collapsed in a boneless heap under the shelter that Marcus had erected. She had helped build it, because she would be damned if she turned into a damsel in distress, but she suspected that Marcus had done the brunt of the work.
"Stay where you are and tend the fire," Marcus said, stepping out of his clothes as casually as if he were in a New York dressing room. "Rest. I'll come back with something to eat."
She had waved him off because frankly she did not have the energy to do much else, and then he had melted into the shadows of the dimming jungle like a ghost.
Jessica guessed that if she was a little more tired or a little more well fed, her mind would have been spinning. Marcus was not a human, and the heights of pleasure he had given her, well, that was inhuman as well. Even as she lay exhausted on the bed of woven branches Marcus had constructed, Jessica couldn't stop her hand from venturing to the small bruise on her neck where he had bitten her. It was a primal gesture, and what did it say about her that she loved it?
Jessica was almost on the verge of sleep when she realized that the light of the fire had died down.
Oh, is the fire going out?
She staggered up on her elbow to inspect, and then she realized that her problems were a lot bigger than a dying fire.
As a matter of fact, her new problem seemed to be fifteen feet long and covered in green scales with dark patches running up its thick body.
Anaconda, she thought blankly. What in the hell is a South American snake doing in Africa?
She sat up slowly, realizing that the snake was rearing back until its head was nearly level with hers. There was a strange intelligence in its dark eyes, and Jessica half-wondered if she could hear a nearly human voice in its soft hiss.
Shhhhh...
I need to move slowly, she thought. I'm not its natural prey, it was probably just drawn to the fire. Maybe it's an escapee from a private collection or...
The anaconda moved like water, smooth and swift, and in a heartbeat, its head shot forward, the weight of that heavy body behind it. The hard nose hit the center of Jessica's chest like a punch, and when she toppled on her back, the weight of the snake quickly settled on top of her.
Jessica screamed, shoving at the thick coils desperately, but the snake was far too heavy for her to budge. The coils were ridiculously strong, made of muscle, and as they coiled around her more tightly, she could feel her vision going dark.
In the jungle, Marcus raised his head, startled and confused. The twilight birds were still singing, the wind was blowing, and underneath his perch in a tree, a small wild pig was still snorting happily at its grubs.
By all rights, nothing could distract a hunting cat, but something was wrong. He hesitated, but then it came again, a scream, but one he could only hear in his mind. This time, he recognized it. Jessica. Something far stronger than his instincts took over.
With a bound, he had left the happy pig behind, and he was vaulting down to the forest floor, racing with the break neck speed and graceful efficiency of a big cat whose life was on the line.
When he was in his cat form, everything usually felt simpler, cleaner and purer. Emotions were simplified, and very few things were more important than food and rest. Now, though it was as if someone had poured pure terror over his heart, and Marcus ran with the swiftness of one possessed.
He rushed back into the camp, and in a second took in the scene, his lover unconscious, and a dark green snake coiled around her, squeezing the life out of her.
He roared, ready to fling himself across the clearing towards them, but the snake twisted towards him, ready to face a new threat.
Anaconda, his human brain supplied in confusion, but not just an anaconda.
Moving with a liquid speed that made them among the most feared predators in South America, the snake relinquished its hold on Jessica. He had just a relieved moment to see that she was still breathing, and then the snake was rearing back, rising higher and higher and changing at the same time. In a moment, instead of a snake, there stood a naked woman with ice white hair and blue chips of ice for eyes. She was as plump as the snake had been, and like the snake, she had no mercy at all.
With a snarl that stayed on his face even in his human shape, Marcus shifted to meet her.
"Sophie," he said. "You're far from home."
Her lips curved into a smile that was far from pleasant, and a part of him shivered at how very foreign snakes were from anything with fur or feathers, how alien their minds and their needs.
"Some good way," she agreed, her voice soft as a hiss in the grass. "And you are looking quite handsome yourself, Marcus, but I can't approve of your taste in lunch."
She pressed her bare toe against the unconscious Jessica's ribs to make her point, and Marcus could feel a snarl rising in his chest.
"Don't touch her," he growled. "If you harm her, I swear I will rip your head from your body."
Sophie smiled at him as if he had said something funny and obligingly stepped away from the prone woman on the ground.
"Those are a lot of big words for a man who has hampered himself with a human while trying to escape from my people," she said, her voice lightly taunting. "I may not be able to take you on, but one human woman? One human woman tending a fire in the woods, that's almost criminally easy."
Marcus could feel the ache in his spine and his hands that told him the feline in him was ramping up to a rage. He knew that snakes were meant to have sly tongues on top of all the danger in their bodies. They were tricksters, always had been, and he knew that she was no less a danger to Jessica just because she was human and naked.
"You need to leave," he said. "Leave and never return, because if you do, I swear I will make you regret it."
Sophie smiled at him, and she opened her mouth as if she were going to say something. Instead she made a stabbing motion at Jessica, and before Marcus even realized that her hand must be empty, he howled, lunging through the fire at her.
Of course, there was nothing in her hand. She was as naked as he was when he transformed. Instead, all that was left was the echo of her mocking laughter as she shifted down into her animal form and slithered into the darkness of the jungle behind her.
Marcus fought down the instinctive urge to chase her, because in the underbrush, she would be the one with the advantage. In the clearing, he would have beaten her handily, but in the darkness of the undergrowth, there were a dozen ways she could have attacked him.
Instead, he turned his attention to Jessica, who was regaining consciousness with a groan. He held her protectively in his arms as she awakened, and for a moment, she blinked fuzzily up at him. A slight smile strayed across her face, but then her eyes widened in fear.
"Snake!" she cried out, sitting up straight. "Snake, there was a..."
"Yes," Marcus said, holding her still in his lap. There was a very masculine part of him that insisted on noting that he was naked while she was squirming on top of him, but this was certainly not the time, no matter how delicious she was. "There was a snake. She's gone now, though..."
"She..."
Jessica looked at him in bewilderment.
"That was an anaconda. It had no business being in Africa at all... are you telling me that snake was... a.... a shifter like you?"
Marcus's unhappy look made Jessica tense even more, and he winced as she dug her nails into his arms.
"You're... you're not telling me something..."
"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow I'll tell you everything I should have told you before. Now though, we need to get somewhere safe..."
When Jessica realized where 'somewhere safe' was meant to be, she thought that she would have rather braved the anaconda. Instead, she took a deep breath and clung to Marcus's shoulders as he climbed the tallest tree that he could find.
She shut her eyes as they left the forest floor far below, and she clung to the tree tr
unk when he deposited her on a large branch. Slightly above where Jessica sat, Marcus strung a hammock from branches that looked far too thin to hold their weight.
"All right, sweetheart, just trust me. In another minute, you'll be sleeping like a baby."
She only whimpered, not looking down at the forest floor as he lifted her again and placed her into the nylon hammock. The branches holding the hammock dipped slightly and then held, and Jessica only whimpered a little when the hammock started to sway. She regained enough courage to crack an eye open, and spot Marcus. He was sitting on a branch close by, as casually as if he were sitting on a bench.
"This will be safe from the anaconda," he was saying. "If she tried to climb this high, the branches would break underneath her."
Jessica nodded. She knew that she should be grateful, but right now, so far above the ground in a world that felt entirely alien, her ribs still sore from the anaconda's attack earlier, she was simply overwhelmed. She tried to hide the tears from Marcus, but was unable to stop their flow. She wondered if, when he shifted, he could smell the salt from her tears as easily as he could smell cook-fires or tilled ground.
"Shh, shh, I'm sorry about what happened before, but I swear, I am not going to let anything happen to you..."
With her eyes still clamped shut, she could feel his hand reach for hers, holding it tightly. He was as casual as a trapeze walker on the thin branches, as careless as a man strolling down the street. She clung to his hand, and she wondered if what she felt was the warmth and strength of his vitality flowing into her.
"We'll be fine, I promise, my beautiful Jessica," he murmured, and he kept talking to her, his words soft and soothing.
Sooner than Jessica would have believed possible, a deep fatigue came over her, and the darkness of sleep started to edge her vision. Marcus was still there, still talking to her, soothing her, his voice deep and warm.
"Please don't leave me," she whispered, and she felt more than heard him chuckle.
"I never could," he murmured, brushing a hand across her cheek, and she had just enough time to wonder what he meant before sleep closed her eyes.
8
"I have something to show you," Marcus said the next day.
Jessica was back on solid ground again, and for all the travails of the day before and the hunger that was gnawing viciously at her belly, felt oddly fit and ready.
"All right," she said, and she wondered what he could possibly have been reluctant to divulge about after revealing that he was a werepanther.
He stood in front of her, and he made a strange motion reaching up over one shoulder to tug at something that wasn't there. He wasn't even wearing his pack yet, and for a moment, Jessica wondered what she was meant to see.
Then, his arm came down and somehow his hand wasn't empty. Jessica was aware that she was gaping like a fool, but there was nowhere the jeweled sword in his hand could have been, nowhere it could have been hidden that she would not have seen.
It was a gorgeous blade; the morning sun twinkled off its length, and even from where she stood, she could see that it was wickedly sharp. The cross-guard was made of cold sullen iron, but there were golden gems expertly set there. They made her think of cats' eyes, glinting in the dark. The hilt was wrapped tight in black leather, and it looked as if it had been made to fit Marcus's large hand.
"What is that?" she whispered, and Marcus smiled at her grimly.
"A weapon," he said, "and perhaps the finest of its dwindling kind. You never saw it because I didn't want you to, and that's just one of the powers that possesses. There are others, perhaps many others. I don't know all of them. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to know them."
Jessica tore her eyes from the blade, wondering for a moment if there was something supernaturally compelling about it. Once he had drawn it, she had wanted, almost needed to look at it, and suddenly Jessica could imagine standing, eyes wide, as that gleaming length swept down on her.
"Why do you have it?"
He hesitated, and then he shrugged.
"Because it is an ancient shifter weapon that cannot fall into the wrong hands," he said. "It'll be invisible for me when I want it to be, which allows me to continue on my mission of transporting it across Tanzania to a sanctuary where it can be properly protected."
"That's why you didn't want any company on this trip," she said, and Marcus surprised her with a smile.
"I would have changed my mind if I had known you," he promised.
He sheathed the sword on his back again, and to her fascination, it disappeared. She couldn't see any weight rumpling his clothes or altering his stride. It wasn't just invisible, it was as if it was gone.
She reached for the place where it should have been, but Marcus grabbed her hand, stopping her. He soothed the suddenness of his motion with a kiss to her palm, shaking his head.
"Better not. I don't understand the damned thing. No one really does. It's better that we get it to a place where it can do the least harm and the most good."
She nodded, and as she fell into step behind Marcus again, she wondered at how dark and mysterious the world was revealing itself to be, how very much was out there that could never be explained.
Around midday, Jessica realized that they were in a dry gully, the stone on either side of them high and carved from the torrential waters of the centuries. It was beautiful, the red stone gorgeous in the clear air, but Jessica was too tired to absorb it.
"We need to keep marching, but this gully is good," Marcus said. "Clear path, no underbrush to fight through, and I can't scent any enemies at all. You keep marching along it. I am going to go scout the forest for a while to see if there's anything to be seen yet."
Jessica, who had been dying for a break, took a deep breath and nodded. Her entire body felt as if it had been beaten with a baseball bat, and though some of it was the anaconda attack from the day before, she knew a great deal of it was simply exhaustion. Marcus seemed to sense her weariness, because he paused and pulled her into his arms.
"This isn't forever," he murmured, kissing her on the forehead. "I promise. Soon enough, you'll be in a place with soft beds and plenty of food where you can rest for a while, all right?"
"All right," she said, and she smiled up at him. It wasn't a pretense she was putting up for him, she realized. She believed him. When he spoke, his voice rang with simple truth, and something in Jessica knew, beyond a doubt, that she could trust this man.
Marcus smiled at her briefly, and he shed his clothes, stuffing them into her pack. She would have thought that she was too tired by far to be at all interested in a naked man, no matter how drop-dead gorgeous, but her breath still caught at the broadness of his chest and the elegant curve of his hip bones.
Marcus tilted his head to shoot her a smile that was utterly rife with male satisfaction, and then he transformed into a black panther again. This time, instead of bounding off, he came closer to her, butting his head under her hand like a house cat seeking caresses.
Despite the dire nature of their situation and her own exhaustion, Jessica couldn't help but laugh as she scratched her lover behind his dark velvety ears.
"Oh, so beautiful," she murmured, and Marcus rumbled in smug agreement.
Then he was gone, leaping up the wall of the gully, his paws finding purchase on what looked like utterly flat stone. He paused at the top to look down at her before disappearing into the brush.
Jessica looked after him for a moment, but then she shook her head.
All right, time to keep walking. Just one foot in front of the other, one step closer to the village, one step closer...
Jessica lost all track of time. At some point in the last few hours, she had pulled back from her body, and she felt as if she were piloting it from a great distance.
I’ll make it, she thought with detachment, feeling the ache in her legs and chest, the hunger that made it hard to think. I’ll make it.
Her mantra, one foot in front of the other, dulled to a mono
tonous chant in her head, droning over and over. The anaconda from the night before could have appeared in the wash in front of her, and Jessica would have walked straight into the thing.
Her steps were slower but they were still steady, and she did her best to walk as steadily as she could. Just one foot in front of the other.
She wasn't sure when she started to smell roasting meat, but her head shot up, and her mouth started to water. She was so hungry that a wave of dizziness washed over her, and then before she could think of being cautious, she was around the bend in gully. The sight that met her eyes made her want to cry with relief.
The gully had opened into a small flat area, surrounded and protected by deep walls. At one end was an achingly clear pool, and at the other end, Marcus had set up a small camp. There was a fire crackling away with meat spitted neatly over it, and the man himself was tending the fire. He was still naked but from the water that weighed down his hair, he had just come from the pool.
"Oh good, there you are," he said with a smile. "Another moment and I would have started back looking for you."
Jessica was so tired and so hungry that she couldn't speak. Marcus seemed to sense that, and he guided her to the smooth log near the fire, where he handed her one of the skewers of roasting meat.
Jessica knew that in another time and place, she would have pulled away from it. It was dripping with grease and charred along one edge. It was so hot that she burned her tongue on it. There was a gamy taste that was like nothing she had ever tried before.
However, right there and then, it was delicious, and to her surprise, it was all for her.
"I ate my fill earlier," Marcus said when she had the wit to ask him about it. "The panther makes more out of the food I eat than my human body does. This is all for you, but take your time with it. You don't want to make yourself sick."
She took his advice and slowed down, taking small sips of water from the canteen to chase every few bites. She had only been in the bush for a few days, but she was still astonished by how immediate and loud her body had become. Her responsibility on the trail was to tend to its needs as soon as she could, because otherwise, she would not be able to do anything else.
