They were like bookends, the two of them. The biggest difference between them was how Armando didn't smile. John wouldn't stop smiling.
There was a lot of talking going on, from what she could see on their faces. She let them do their silent mind-speak for a few moments, then crossed her arms and stuck out her hip and tapped her foot.
Max turned to her, then turned back to the men in the room, his face twitching apologetically.
“Ah, yes. Sorry. Forgot you had a human with you. Well, glad you could join us, Arcan,” John said, in a voice that sounded like it belonged to a twelve year old child. “I thought we'd never see you in the Hard World again.”
“Not my choice, Vallith,” Arcan said to John.
Of course, Nikki realized. The Ursallin wouldn't use their real names here in Manhattan. They would have assumed identities and fake lives to blend in. Wouldn't they? Sure they would.
“And Bulka,” Arcan said with a nod to Armando. “I haven't seen you in years.”
“I've been around,” Bulka said, still not smiling. Then his eyes slid over to fall on Nikki. “This the girl that all the fuss is about?”
His tone made Nikki's back straighten. “I'm not a girl, thank you very much. My name is Nikki Bryant, and buddy, you do not want to make the black woman angry, got me?”
Max grinned at her, appreciating her little display of bravado. Arcan raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said. “This is her.”
Bulka stood up. “All I wanted to know.”
His voice turned tinny and distorted.
His skin and clothes began to melt and slide and mix into each other, all of the colors that had made up Bulka churning into a deep, oily kind of black.
Oh, no, Nikki thought to herself, unable to make her mouth form words. All of her was paralyzed, stricken by fear and the knowledge that she was about to die.
The thing that had been Bulka dripped stringers of itself along the floor as bones warped and became plastic and his flesh became runny and transmorphic. He was no longer human. No longer half-bear, half-man. He was something else entirely. Something he'd been all along.
Bulka was a Shift.
Chapter 9
“It's not Bulka!” Arcan yelled out as he lunged at the Shift. “Take Nikki outside. Get her away from here!”
The morphing shape of the Shift twisted toward her. Several large bulbous orbs on what should have been its face stared at her. Parts of it stretched out like black taffy and bent in ways that were obscene and physically impossible. She'd faced these things before. Each time, there was a moment of intense terror that froze her in place.
Then instincts she had never known existed within her took over.
Blading her body to the mass of goop that had once been a trusted friend of the werebears Nikki lowered her left arm, thrusting it forward in a fist, raising her other up in a position that would allow her to strike at the arm or appendage or whatever it was that was swooping in on her now.
She blocked the thing's strike as Arcan and Vallith both rushed in at the Shift only to get tangled into its elastic skin, hammered by blows from body parts that appeared and melted away and appeared again, barely holding themselves upright from the onslaught. Vallith had a paper thin extension of skin wrap around his face, twice, suffocating away his air.
A roar like an explosive blast echoed through the room from behind her. Nikki stumbled sideways, shocked by the sudden rage in the voice she recognized so well. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Max, transformed and massive in his bear form. There was murder in his dark eyes now, and his white fur bristled. As often as she saw him change from the beautiful specimen of manhood that he was into this terrifying creature, Nikki would never get used to it.
She'd had sex with Max as a man. Would she ever be comfortable letting him into her like that again?
The bear lumbered forward on hind legs, reaching out with its arms. Not for the Shift. For her.
She yelled at him as he grabbed her up and pushed at him and tried to get out of his strong arms. She had no chance against his strength. “Max, let me go!”
He growled something that in bear talk probably meant something important but to her was just hot air and incomprehensible syllables. He was going to drag her out of the room to her safety whether she wanted him to or not.
He put her over his shoulder as he shambled at full speed for the exit door. She had a perfect view of Arcan transforming into a bear now too, his clothes ripping away from his body and black fur sprouting along his swelled form. He landed heavily on his bear paws, roaring defiance at the creature that writhed all around the room and struck at him again and again. He was ready for a fight.
Vallith wasn't so lucky. He was down on his knees, tearing at the black flesh of the Shift that covered his nose and his mouth. Every bit he ripped away healed itself and melted back together, covering his face once more. She saw the panic in his eyes before the Shift covered him back up again. He was dying.
Whipcord thin strands of the Shift shot out and wrapped themselves around her arms, and she was being pulled apart as the thing tried to yank her away from Max. She screamed, and wondered how her spine could twist like that. Then she was pulled from Max's grip and crashed down against the floor. The Shift's body pulled her towards it, wrapping around her arms and torso tightly.
It had her.
It was spread across the room now, the whole thing impossible to comprehend. Her mind couldn't follow the liquid movements of its flesh and limbs. The head on its long, sinewy neck floated above her and a mouth like a gaping hole filled with needlepoint teeth dripped with silvery gray drool.
“Mine,” it gurgled at her. “All mine.”
“Not on my worst day,” she snarled. She fought to break its grip. Fought, and struggled, and failed.
Tiny hooked fingers sprouted all along the appendages wrapped around her. They bit into her, tearing at her clothes, shredding them apart until they were just scraps of fabric hanging over her black flesh. The touch of it was slimy, oozing and fluid, and where the tiny hooks cut her made her skin flare erotically.
The remains of her shirt were pulled away. Her jeans were already sagging off her ass and falling away beneath her as she struggled. Her panties were tugged down one leg. The left strap of her bra was severed.
The damned thing was stripping her naked.
Max was there suddenly, all fur and teeth and claws. He was a sleek white demon as he battered at the Shift, swipe after swipe, tearing holes that leaked thick green liquid. It's blood. The Shift was hurt but Max's attack alone wouldn't be enough to bring it down.
The face of the thing that had been hovering over Nikki suddenly turned away, a long tongue slithering out as it hissed in fury. The head struck out like a cobra at the rampaging Max.
Arcan, his bear self, jumped on the Shift's slithering neck and brought it down to the floor, and Max tore into it further, and now the Shift began to shrivel and shake and Vallith could tear himself free, too, and just like that the constricting grip on Nikki was gone. They were all free. The Shift recognized that fact immediately, its bulging eyes sliding left and right, its appendages picking up big drooping segments of itself as it tried to hold together. Green blood poured everywhere.
Nikki found herself on her knees, her ribs aching, and breath burning in her lungs. It had let her go, finally. One Shift. Just one Shift and it had almost taken her down.
The three men from the other reality, all of them in bear form now, backed the Shift into a corner. It turned one way, then the other, every escape path blocked. The bears were careful, not rushing in, still recognizing the danger the nightmare creature represented even after being hurt so badly. They would kill it bit by bit. That was their plan.
“No,” Nikki called to them, still on her knees. “Leave it alive!”
The three bears turned to her, their eyes intense. It scared her to see the hatred there, almost as much as it had scared her to look into the dead black orbs of
the Shift. Max muttered something at her. Arcan just growled.
“Boys, you know I don't speak bear.” She got to her feet now, painfully aware that she had nothing left on except her torn bra. Living with Max's people for three days made her less self-conscious about exposing her body, but not so much that she didn't try to cover the notch between her legs with one hand. A girl had to do what she could to keep her secrets.
Max tried to talk to her again but she shook her head at him. “Don't give me any of that backtalk. You want me to understand you then turn back to your human self and actually talk to me.”
His great big bear muzzle swung toward the shift then back to her with his head cocked sideways. No need for words to understand that one. He was asking if she was crazy.
“We need to know why it was here,” she explained. “Don't you think?”
Arcan twisted and groaned aloud and his body shrank down to the lanky human form she was used to seeing. He was on his hands and knees, his cock hanging low, his face angry. When he sprang up onto his feet it was clear that he did not like her telling him what to do. Not one little bit. “This thing killed Bulka! How about we ask it what it did to Bulka and then do the same thing to it!”
The Shift lashed out with such sudden speed that Arcan never saw the blow that hit him in the back of the head. Vallith lashed out, cutting the appendage in two with one powerful snap of his jaws. It was too late to keep Arcan from being knocked sideways into the wall. He fell in a heap to the floor, and didn't get up.
Nikki's turn.
She ran in and ducked under probing pieces of Shift body and then she came up straight with both hands cupped to grab the thing's neck right under its chin. When she squeezed, her fingers sank into its flesh. It had the same texture as a balloon filled with wet sand and it gave under the pressure of her grip and suddenly it was trembling and shaking and she realized that she was hurting it.
“Don't like that, do you? You...you...ugly mother!” She winced, hoping the Shift didn't realize just how lame that sounded. Monsters from other dimensions didn't care about things like that, did they?
“Nikki,” Max said, back to his naked human self and standing next to her again, and just as nervous as Arcan had been about leaving the Shift alive. “Just kill it. That's all these things are good for.”
She couldn't help a look down at his groin. Even limp he was impressive. She snapped her attention back to the Shift to find it looking at her with a smirk on its thin, twisted mouth.
“Shut up,” she said to it. “A girl can look. You just worry about answering what I want to know.”
It hissed in a low, choking voice that spit foul breath at her. “I could kill you.”
“Not without dying yourself,” Max told it.
“Max, can you go check on Arcan?” she asked.
He hesitated. She would much rather have the big bear of a man at her side, too, when dealing with this thing. But she'd held her own against Shifts before. She had killed at least one. Plus, Max was making this thing nervous. It wasn't going to talk with him hovering. After another few seconds of hesitation Max did move away to check on Arcan. When he was gone, Nikki let off the pressure on the Shift's neck. Green blood poured over her hands where she'd torn into its flesh.
How had she gotten so strong? How could she possibly know how to fight like that? She wondered at that. She was just a girl from Manhattan. Only human.
Only, maybe she wasn't. Maybe what the Council had told her was true. The sudden bursts of strength that she had. The way she could fight these things when even Max and Arcan were scared of them. While the Shifts could cut through werebears like windup dolls, she could take them on, and win.
How could she do that?
The Shift's tongue licked at her cheek suddenly and she realized that she'd let her concentration drift and that it could have been a lot worse than having this thing lick her. She swung its head into the wall and it squished. It didn't bounce, it squished. These things were so disgusting.
“You done?” she demanded of it. “Good. Now. Tell me what the Shifts want with me.”
It chuckled, an eerie, vibrating kind of sound. “Want you. Yessss. Want you.”
Nikki had never felt so dirty in all her life. Standing here, nearly naked while this gelatinous pile of dung talked about how it wanted her. It kept reaching out with little edges of itself that would shrink back, like it was afraid to get too close to her.
It was afraid of her.
Let it be afraid.
Letting go of its neck with one hand she grabbed its tongue, still hanging out obscenely from its mouth. She yanked, and she twisted, and she felt a sense of triumph when it shrieked in pain. “Tell me! Tell me what you want with me!”
“You are the key!” it wailed. “You can be the way. You can get us there!”
That didn't make any sense. What was it talking about?
“Get you where?” she asked, the feel of its slick tongue in her hand like some nasty dildo.
Ew. She would never get that image out of her brain.
It shook its head, violently, back and forth, and the teeth started to cut through the spongy tongue, and Nikki had all but lost her patience for this murdering, psychopathic ball of filth. “Tell me what I'm supposed to help you do! What do you think I can find for you?”
It stared at her hard, its puss-sack eyes sagging. “You will be the way between worlds. You will open the way to Gallandrian!”
“They want you to bring them to our world,” Max said, his voice incredulous. She turned to find him holding Arcan up, one of Arcan's arms around his shoulders. Both men naked as the day their moma bear birthed them, both men staring at her.
“What?” she asked. “I can't open a door for him to the bathroom let alone to your world. I don't know how!”
That laugh again from the Shift, evil and low.
“What's so funny?” she asked it. “You find any of this funny?”
It hissed at her, and tried to stroke her hand with its tongue. “You are all dead. That is what's funny.”
“What are you—?”
A loud thump cut her off. Another came right after it, and then the sound of paste being squeezed through a tube.
The Shift laughed. “All dead.”
“There's more coming,” Max said a second after Nikki's brain made the connection. Of course. That was why this damned Shift could laugh when it was cut up and bleeding and being choked to death in Nikki's hands.
It wasn't alone.
“We need to move. Now,” Arcan said. He was looking better, although the right side of his face was slick with his own blood. “I don't know how many more are coming and even with our little hybrid here we won't stand a chance.”
“Don't call me that,” Nikki protested.
“What?” Arcan said with a harsh smile. “Little or hybrid?”
She could have kicked him in his exposed balls just then, if she didn't have a sudden tugging attraction to him. Her heart did a little flip flop in her chest and her breasts heaved with each breath and she realized just how messed up it was, but the excitement and the rush of danger was turning her on.
She never knew she was one of those kinds of girls.
“What about this one?” she asked, the Shift's neck still in her one hand.
Max took a hold of the Shift right next to where she was holding it and in one motion tore the thing in two. It gurgled once and then the whole mass of it fell to the floor like liquid taffy.
“Okay,” he said. “Time to go.”
That was when the walls broke in.
Nikki shrieked and ducked her head as jagged pieces of thick cinderblock flew past her, narrowly missing her more than once. Holes big enough to drive Mac trucks through appeared all around them. Through those openings stepped black forms, misshapen and horrible, barely human and completely terrifying.
“Arcan!” Max grabbed hold of Nikki by her wrist as he called to the other man. “Make the passage!”
Arcan nodded, morphed his hands into bear's claws, and slashed at the air.
Two Shifts took him in his midsection before he could create the portal. He went down and did not get up.
Nikki panicked. The Shifts were everywhere. Arcan was down. What were they going to do?
Attack, her mind told her. That was what they would do.
A black wall of flesh with appendages that were hooked and curved flowed in between her and Max. She was separated and alone and in deep, deep danger.
On the other hand, she was not defenseless.
This had happened to her before. She had been threatened before, by these monsters, and each time she had reacted like she had been trained her whole life to fight them. Her mind disconnected, and her body took over. It was creepy. Like watching herself in a movie. She moved, she reacted, and all of it without a single conscious thought on her part.
She struck out with a flat hand, fingers first, and cut through a thin membrane of the Shift that was trying to block her path to Max, leaving her arm green with gore. The monster roared and lashed out at her with twin appendages that had razor sharp edges to them. Ducking one, blocking the other with the side of her arm, she was inside its guard and wrapping her arms around its thick, stubby neck just below its head and then she was falling, using her weight to snap whatever passed for bone to these things.
Its head tore partly away from its shoulders. Even for a Shift that meant death.
Arcan was beside her suddenly. She didn't have time to wonder how he had gotten past the swarming horde. Max was in front of them and he clawed at the air to form a straight line of pure light that twisted and spun into a doorway. Arcan pushed her through after Max and when he followed, the door began to close.
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 35
