Heh. She laughed at her little joke, then soaked her toy in the water and closed her eyes, and pictured Maximillian with the long last name and tanned skin and very tight jeans.
Mmm.
She stopped, the toy poised in her grip, listening. What was that?
The noise was a loud thump. She felt it in the soles of her feet as much as she heard it.
Had that been from inside her apartment? The soundproofing in the walls was pretty good in this building. She hardly ever heard anything her neighbors were doing. So most likely, yeah, that had been something in her apartment, out in the living room, or her bedroom maybe?
What could it have been?
As she was trying to puzzle that out, wiping water away from her face, she heard a horrible rending kind of sound that was part metal tearing and part wood cracking and part nerve-shredding horror- movie creepy.
What in the hell?
She shut off the water, collecting the loose strands of her wet hair and straightening them back over her shoulder. Then she realized she was still holding the vibrator. An image of herself confronting a burglar in her naked skin holding nothing but the long purple toy flashed through her mind. She stared at it, then rolled her eyes and put it back in its spot.
"Later, Cottontail." She whispered, calling the toy by its name.
It couldn't actually be a burglar out there, could it? She was on the fourth floor here, in a building that required a key to enter or someone to buzz you in at the front door. Besides, that noise she'd heard…it wasn't a door being broken in. It was something else.
And Nicki knew she was going to have to investigate it.
Damn.
Stepping out of the shower as quietly as she could, very aware of every drip that echoed in the tight space, she took a towel off a hook on the bathroom door and quickly patted herself dry. She took down her pink terrycloth bathrobe from the hook and wrapped her body in it, feeling oddly protected and ready to meet whatever threat was out there in her apartment in the thin material of the robe. It clung to her curves, and she almost blushed to see how her nipples were so clearly outlined. It sure wasn't any bulletproof vest.
Whatever. She was a strong Black woman and this was her apartment. Besides, it was probably nothing more than a squirrel getting in through the window. Or something. She'd once had a pigeon smack itself into the glass once so hard that it killed itself. It took the building superintendent three weeks to fix the crack that time. If some animal had done worse than that now, she'd have to raise hell with the super to get him off his lazy ass and fix—
Thump. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
It took her a moment to realize her hands were shaking. That was a loud sound, louder than a bird should be making. Or a squirrel. What kind of animal could make a noise like that, in her apartment?
Unless it wasn't an animal after all.
She did not want to go out there. Nothing on God's green Earth could get her to go out there. Except, she kind of needed to. She couldn't stay in her bathroom for the rest of the night. There was no way for her to signal for help from here, either. The bathroom was on the building side of the apartment so it didn't have a window. She didn't usually bring her cellphone into the bathroom with her. Some things should still be private, in her opinion.
A fine sort of sentiment, she told herself with a harsh frown. Now it was going to get her killed.
"Easy, Nicki." She whispered. "Nobody's out there, just a little animal. Or something is wrong with the building pipes. Just go out and check."
Feeling even more foolish for giving herself a pep talk, she finally turned the doorknob to slowly peek out and down the short hallway toward the living room. She couldn’t see much from here, just the couch and one short bookshelf against the wall.
"See?" She said to herself. "Nothing. Now get your black ass out there."
Still, she grabbed her hairbrush off the sink-top before she left the bathroom. She held it up in front of her and imagined herself hitting some poor, stupid chipmunk over the head again and again with the business end of the brush. Stupid. She didn't even know what a chipmunk looked like. She'd never seen one before in her life.
The hallway from the bathroom opened up to the wide living room area, the kitchen beyond that, a low wall the only separation between them. She looked around everywhere she could see and at first nothing seemed out of place. The sofa and the modern orange loveseat, right where they should be. Everything on the shelves in place. Her clothes draped where she had left them.
Then she saw it.
Beside the little television on her media cabinet, a window that usually faced out onto the back alley behind the building had been somehow torn out of its mounting in the wall and dropped heavily to the floor. Glass had shattered all around it. A breeze blew through the gaping opening that had literally been torn into the brick façade of the building.
Now what could do that?
A shadow flashed through the kitchen, and then another, and then two large somethings caught her from behind.
She turned in their grip and thrust the hairbrush forward and it smacked into something so hard that it stuck there and was sucked out of her grip. She put an elbow up into the other attacker's face. Then a knee into what should have been a stomach. Just like that, she was free. How did she do that?
She didn't know and she didn't have time to figure it out and she didn't have time to get a good look at her attackers. She had to run. Get to a neighbor's apartment or get to a phone or just get to the street but she had to go. That was when hands grabbed her from all around and rushed her into the living room and held her face down on the floor.
In the back of her mind, things registered that she hadn't really had time to make sense of while she was defending herself. Hands held her arms from behind. More hands pushed down on her between her shoulder blades and on her ankles. She was being assaulted. Men held her.
Men had broken into her home.
But these weren't men.
Their skin was cold and rough and slick like wet rubber. Whenever she could turn her head to look at them at all she could see their skin was black and shiny. Not Black like she was black. Black like night was black. Like the middle of the night when she would wake up from a nightmare to find the city in the middle of a power failure that kept any light anywhere from turning on. That kind of black.
She struggled, trying to break their grip or hit them or kick them or anything. Nothing worked. There was too many of them. They held her fast and would not let her up.
Nicki pulled in a hard breath to scream.
One of them put his hand over her mouth. She couldn't tell how many of them there were. It was like their bodies were all tangled together. It might have been four guys holding her or one guy with ten arms. She couldn't tell. This one's hand smelled like dirt and sweat and growing things. It was smooth against her lips and pressed into her mouth and forced her to breathe through her nose.
There had never been terror like this in her life before.
"What do we do with her?" One whispered voice asked. It didn't sound…right. Like the man's mouth was misinformed or something.
"We kill her." Said another, although the voices sounded almost identical.
"Shame to waste her." was the reply.
"Take her first?"
"All of us?"
"Why not. Shame to waste her."
"Agreed."
Nicki's eyes were ready to pop and she was screaming even though the man's hand kept it from being heard by anyone but herself. She tried harder to struggle but their hands were like iron bands as they turned her over onto her back and thumped her down onto the floor and pulled apart the front of her robe, exposing her.
Her entire body quivered as unshed tears rimmed her eyes. Please don't let this happen, God, she prayed. Please!
Then her mind went strangely numb as she got her first good look at her attackers.
Their bodies were stretched out into impossible dimensions. Arm
s that were too long, jointed in three places like insects. Or legs that were too short. At least two had necks that coiled and bent like a snake's torso. Their heads and faces looked like someone had fashioned them out of black putty with no idea of what a person's head should look like. Nothing was in place, their eyes lopsided or in the wrong spot, mouths too wide and thin and teeth like little claws.
They were naked, too, and nothing about that looked right either. Things pulsed and grew between their legs that made her want to gag as she imagined them going into her.
These weren't men. They were…things.
Her whole body went rigid with fear and with the overwhelming desire to do something to fight back. Something. Anything.
And that was when the first man lay down on top of her with a body that was too cold and too angular and just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Something hard and long and thick snaked its way up the inside of her leg.
In desperation, she bit at the hand that was held over her mouth. It tasted like raw sewage. Her teeth sank into it, and it filled her mouth in gobs of flesh.
All she could do was scream in silence.
The hands holding her legs disappeared amid a crash of noise. The man standing directly over her, his arm a liquid length reaching down to the hand that held her quiet, growled loudly and looked at something down by her feet that Nicki couldn't see.
The pressure of the one on her chest disappeared as he—it—was pulled up into the air and flipped wildly end over end to smash into the last of her attackers. The hand over her mouth was yanked away and she sucked in a fresh breath of air and wondered how she had been saved.
Maximillian. The big bear of a man stood over her now, reaching down to lift her up and hold her in his arms like a bride being carried over the threshold, her feet off the floor and her arms around his neck. She had barely a moment to care that her robe was still open, or that he was pressing her naked flesh tightly to him.
He'd saved her life. She could care less about anything else.
"How are you here?" she asked stupidly. "How did you get in?"
"I got in the same way these things did. Talk later. I caught them off guard but we need to go now if we're going to live."
She sensed the hurry in his words and saw the sweat on his bare scalp as he rushed them across the floor. Glass crunched under his boots. He was heading for the window.
The window?
"Wait a minute!" she said. "They got in through the window!"
"I know." He said, more calmly than she thought he had a right to.
"Then how are we getting out?"
"The same way."
Then they jumped off the broken ledge of the window and the world below rushed up at them.
Nicki screamed.
A black arm snaked out into the open space near Maximillian's head and Nicki saw the fingers rake across the side of his face. Blood dripped from his cheek as the hand recoiled back through the hole into her apartment.
She was going to die.
That was the only thought she had time for as he landed them on the paved alleyway below, the shock of it rattling her teeth and jarring her bones but it didn’t killing them. It was impossible, but here they stood, in the short alley with the three large green dumpsters from her building and the one behind it. He looked down at her, his eyes smooth and steady.
"You okay?"
"No!" She screamed back at him, pushing herself out of his arms and finally folding her bathrobe back together. She crossed her arms under her breasts and did her best not to throw up. “I just got attacked by black Gumbys who tried to have their way with me and then you broke in and we jumped out from…there! And we're still alive somehow and no, I am not okay!"
He looked upset that she was upset. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I had to save you from them." He shrugged. "It seemed like the easiest way."
A scraping, scuttling noise drew her attention back to her ruined fourth floor apartment. Forms were crawling out, freaks with multiple arms that were clinging to the red bricks of the wall and making their way slowly down to where they stood. Maximillian saw it, too.
"Gotta go." He told her, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her along without so much as asking her if she wanted to come with him. Of course she wanted to go with him. She'd follow him anywhere that took her away from those freaks.
"Stay close to me." He said.
She didn't know how she could stay any closer to his white ass than she already was, but she did it anyway and then she saw him raise his opposite hand and slash at the air like he was trying to rip something out of his way.
For just a moment, his fingertips looked like claws.
A bright line of light appeared in the arc of the motion his hand made, and it split open and grew wider and suddenly they were stepping through it like a doorway. And they were gone.
Chapter 3
Gone.
That was the only way she could think to describe it. One instant, the world of Manhattan was all around them. Skyscrapers. Hard concrete. Dirty air. People staring at her in her skimpy wet bathrobe. The very next instant, on the intake of a single breath, that world was gone and
were replaced with trees.
Everywhere Nicki looked, there were tall, twisting trees with shaggy bark and heavy branches loaded down with pine needles and pine-cones the size of her fist. The ground beneath her feet had changed from hard, unforgiving pavement to soft warm soil. Her toes sank into the black, loose dirt. It felt nice, in a weird sort of way. All around her was the sounds of life. She heard chirps and birdcalls and other sounds she couldn't identify that were eerie and mysterious. For a girl raised in the city, this place she found herself in now, was as foreign as the surface of any alien planet would be.
"When did they plant a forest on my block?" She asked, trying to mask her rising panic with sarcasm.
Maximillian stood close by, looking all around him, his arms stretched wide, a smile on his face. He breathed in one long, deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Ah. Now that's better. So good to be back."
"Uh, excuse me," She said to him, waving a hand up in front of his face. "Almost naked Black woman standing here. And I don't know where here is!"
He nodded. "Right. Sorry. We had to get away from the Shifts." That was all he said, like it somehow made sense of the whole thing.
"Care to try that again?" She demanded, shifting her weight, glaring at him as menacingly as a ninety pound Black woman could manage, standing there with soaking wet hair, in just her bathrobe. "Maybe this time, use words that make sense to people who can't jump out fourth floor windows without breaking every bone in their body!"
His eyes fixed her with a look that made her uneasy. "I think you'd be surprised what you can do, Nicki Bryant."
"Meaning what exactly, Mister Riddle Man?"
"Meaning, there's no way that I could have gotten to you in time to save you from the Shifts. I was tracking them, had their trail, so to speak, but I was way behind. I should have realized they'd come after you as soon as I met you on the sidewalk. I didn't, and there was no way I was going to get to you in time. So what saved you? Hm?"
His question confused her. She thought back to the attack in her apartment. Max had been the one to save her. But she had almost made it out on her own. She'd fought back.
That thought struck her like a ton of bricks as the memory replayed itself. She took two of them down before the rest had overpowered her. That had been before she had seen what they were, those rubbery and malleable pitch-black bodies that changed their shape and stretched or twisted and coiled around her and covered her mouth and…and…Then she saw what they were, and the fight had gone out of her. How could she have had any chance at all to fight off those shifting, morphing things?
Shifted. Their bodies had shifted shape. They weren't anything close to human.
She swallowed back the lump rising in her throat. "Is that why you keep calling them Shifts?" she asked him. "Because of the
way they, kind of, change shape?"
He nodded. "They shape their bodies to whatever they need in the moment. No one knows for sure what they really look like. They can just as easily make themselves into a rock or a bird or even someone you know. Mostly, they just shift into the sort of monsters you saw in your apartment. Now, how did you manage to keep the Shifts from hurting you until I could get to you?"
"I did it…" She admitted, a little in awe of that fact. "By myself. How'd I do that? I beat those things down like I was a woman possessed. How? I saw them. They were…" She shivered. "Horrible. How did I do that? How could I do that?"
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 28
