Roar For More
(Online Shifter Dating Agency Romance)
© 2016 Sasha Winter
**Warning: This novella contains explicit sexual situations with a sexy shifter which may be objectionable to some readers. Not recommended for anyone under the age of 18.**
COPYRIGHT
Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarities to events or situations is also coincidental.
© 2016 Sasha Winter
All Rights Reserved
Chapter 1
Aubrey wiped a tear from her eye and bit her lip as she tried to tamp down her emotions. Another shifter patient in her facility…dead.
The worst part was that there was seemingly nothing that could be done, and soon, even more could die.
She would never forget her first case of what would soon become known as ‘the Cripple’, an illness which had begun to plague shifters across the country within the last few months. Upon initially setting eyes on the patient who had been brought to her Albuquerque medical research lab, she’d been reminded of the saying ‘but for the grace of God’. If fate had sent her down a different path, she might very well have been the young lady that lay dying, rather than being the medical researcher who wondered if the efforts to save her would be anything other than futile.
Like her, the patient in the research facility had been in her mid-twenties and of Hispanic origin. Aubrey fancied that if she let her hair loose and got changed from her lab coat and into more casual clothing, the two of them could probably walk down the street and have people thinking they were sisters—the only difference being that the girl she saw as her mirror image was a panther shifter, and she herself had not inherited the shifter gene. Nope, she was a plain old human, as much as it annoyed her sometimes. Sometimes she would’ve loved to have had the famous shifter sense of smell to help decide on a new perfume, or the ability to turn into a cat at will so she could demand cuddles, scratches, and food without putting any effort in.
Ah, that’d be nice.
What wasn’t nice was the case she was working on. The Cripple had first reared its ugly head two months prior, and the infected people in the research facility were quickly running out of time.
Disease and suffering had always had a strange way of speaking to Aubrey, which was probably why she’d chosen medical research as her career. It wasn’t just that it tugged at her heart strings, but that she had felt its horror personally. It was a rare disease, not unlike the Cripple, that had stolen her father away many years ago. When she was only twelve years old, that kind and noble man had—in the space of a month—turned from a vision of health to a weak and helpless victim waiting for death. Science had nothing for him because diseases that affected shifters were so under-researched at the time, given that the existence of shifters had only been out in the open for around three years at the time. All the doctors had known was that the killer virus had entered the bloodstream via a small cut while her father had been walking in the woods one day. How to treat it, or even what to call it, had been beyond them.
Aubrey may not have inherited the shifter gene from her beloved father, but the pain of having him taken from her so viciously had set a fire in her soul. She had many shifter relatives and friends, and the gene could still be passed down through her if she was to raise a family someday, especially if she chose to marry a shifter. So it was that when she’d made it to college, she’s chosen to focus her intellect and hard work on the subject of rare shifter diseases.
The decision had been both rewarding and haunting in equal measures. On the one hand she was able to take on the foe that had caused her the most trauma in life, and on the other she was reminded daily of the cruel and indiscriminate nature of disease.
Such was the case with the Cripple.
As chilling as the first case had been, Aubrey had quickly come to terms with seeing its effects on a daily basis. Three days later a second case appeared. Then another. Then two at a time, and she didn’t have to hold a doctorate to know that a very serious outbreak was occurring. The first patient had finally died after fourteen days, and a similar period of decline was visible in the other sufferers. Five weeks later and six more cases a day were being reported in New Mexico alone. Aubrey hadn’t been home in a week, sleeping on site whenever her body demanded it but otherwise focusing every available hour on ascertaining the nature of this new threat against shifters.
Like the disease that killed her father, this virus found its way into the bloodstream before wreaking havoc on the victim’s internal system. The Cripple’s first symptoms were a strange heaviness of the legs and arms which progressed within a few days from lethargy to near-paralysis. The patient remained sentient and able to speak for another week or so before its effects on the rest of the body really began to take their toll. Thought and speech became sluggish, and soon only life support could keep them alive.
After watching more and more patients slip into comas, Aubrey’s frustration levels were at a maximum. Antidotes for viruses that entered the bloodstream were typically not impossible to find a cure for, but it was a lot easier if researchers were able to establish what exactly the source was. At best, Aubrey was able to study the disease’s progress in the bloodstream between one and two days after it had been contracted. By this time the virus had blended and impacted on so many different factors that assessing the initial reactions of patients was proving to be something of a puzzle.
What she needed to know in order to find a solution was how the virus interacted with the bloodstream on initial infection. This way she would be able to observe how the bacteria set in and progressed towards full immobility and death, which would enable a clearer route towards manipulating or reversing its behavior. Without a source, she and the other researchers were left groping in the dark and dreading to imagine how serious the epidemic would become before any serious progress could be made. At best it would take months. In the worst-case scenario, shifters could still be dying two or three years later, especially if the disease strain proved particularly brutal.
This gloomy line of thinking had been growing in Aubrey’s mind for the last week. It was her life’s mission to help prevent such death and misery, and there was something so hauntingly familiar about this foe that caused her to imagine some hidden devil was behind it all, mocking her from the ether by repeating the same childhood tragedy that had made her feel so helpless all those years ago. That was until her supervisor, Marshall Collins, burst into her lab that Thursday morning bringing with him just the slightest hint of fresh air.
“We know where it comes from…possibly,” he said.
“Are you serious? Oh, thank god!” Aubrey replied, emerging from her mental fog. She’d missed out on her morning coffee, and she’d been regretting that until Marshall perked her up with the news.
Whereas her own research had been focused on the behavior of the virus itself, Marshall and his assistants had been weighing up the percentages behind the source of the Cripple. By the process of elimination they had actually nailed it, to an extent—only nothing in life is ever that simple.
“Your suspicions were right, Aubrey,” he said. “This is a waterborne virus; we’ve ruled out every other contender. And it must be coming from water supplies. It isn’t passed from victim to victim; it isn’t airborne or from solids. The infected shifters are drinking it.”
“Well, at least we know what’s
causing it now. Can we start experiments on the water supply straight away?”
“That’s just the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we can start that, but the water supply is so diluted and difficult to pin down that the work could still take weeks. If we had a researcher at the source on the other hand, tracking down the actual contamination, we could come up with a solution in days if they were successful. As it is we’re just going to have to plough on as usual; the process of getting blood out of a stone.”
“Lack of resources again, huh?”
“Yep, that old chestnut. It might be politically correct to speak about shifter’s rights these days, but when it actually comes to getting money out of government funds for them, the truth is…you might as well be asking to help raccoons or something.’
“Even with the shifters high up in society that are hiding their true nature.” The hypocrites that never helped my father, she felt like saying, but held back. “There must be some favors from people in the field we can call in?”
“Ah, but I haven’t told you what we’re dealing with yet. When you compare an analysis of the water supply pipelines to the area of infection it traces to Colorado. And I’m not talking about Denver or Broomfield, I mean some small town out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Well, so what? I’ll go!”
“You what? Really?”
“So the source is out in the wilds somewhere. Big deal, it beats wrestling with these test results for weeks on end and waiting for more people to die.”
“True. But we have no more expense funding…”
“I don’t care, I’ll go. Decision made.”
“You’d really do that?”
“Yep. Think of how many lives we’ll save.”
“But it could be dangerous. And the travel expenses would be coming out of your own pocket.”
“I’ll hire some local scout or something, they’ll protect me from bears. Come on, Marshall, this is the US, not the Amazon—I’ll be all right.”
Aubrey had a great deal of respect for Marshall. He’d been a terrific mentor since she’d started working at the lab, but he was a man of books and theory. Adventure was something completely alien to him, and she could see he found it difficult to come round to the idea. None of this mattered, though—his most rational of minds could find no argument to her going, and soon Aubrey was on the phone booking transport and accommodation. She’d have one much-needed evening at home and hopefully a good sleep before Colorado, here we come.
***
After her ordeal at work, returning home felt like stepping into an old memory. The apartment felt stale and unlived in, and Aubrey couldn’t help but ask herself the question: am I ever going to have a real life like other women? The thought was fleeting and easily dismissed when she recalled the suffering she had seen at work, but she still felt the need to remind her senses of some form of normality.
Once all the clothes and research notes she needed for the trip were packed, she forced herself to think about something she had been doing before the Cripple began to command her own limbs as well as that of her patients. What life did she have outside of research right now?
The TV remained turned off, because she was in the mood for some soft music. There was a copy of Frankenstein on her coffee table that had held a bookmark on page fifty for the last six months, but the classic didn’t tempt her as much as she thought it should. Truth be told, her only real impression of having a life was a virtual one, and so it was that the only unwinding she achieved in nine days was directed towards her laptop. Working such strange and long hours made meeting men a complicated affair, so it was hardly unpredictable that online chat rooms might draw her in. Her need to flirt and interact had become reserved for an online world; one that she could turn on and off whenever it suited her.
Aubrey hadn’t even cooked her microwave meal before she’d logged on to her profile and made an attempt to reconnect with a shifter she’d been messaging nine days ago.
When she’d first heard of the shifter matchmaking website Roar4More.com, Aubrey hadn’t taken it seriously at all. She laughed at the notion that she might become addicted to such a trivial thing, but it had quickly become her guilty pleasure. The website was a service for big cat shifters or people who specifically wanted to get into a relationship with them. Aubrey had only dated human men up until this point, but she knew deep down that the wild side of a shifter’s nature fascinated her. After all, some of her own family members were shifters, and if her own genetic makeup had taken a slightly different route, she would have been one of them.
A cheap therapist might have pointed out that flirting with shifter males was a way of flirting with the person she might have been, but Aubrey couldn’t care less how therapists might sum it all up. What happened between her legs cared nothing for analysis, and a certain man she’d been talking to recently always managed to get her all hot and bothered in more ways than one…
Once the thought entered her mind, she recalled the last conversation she’d had with this particular shifter. It was amazing how transfixed the mind could be on one thing only for another avenue of life to ruthlessly drag your attention away – in her case, work. Last time she’d spoken to the man—a tiger shifter who went by the name of J2Oh—she’d been fantasizing about what he looked like. Unlike most members of the site, he hadn’t uploaded a photo of himself; only a few nature shots he’d taken in the past.
Aubrey wondered if it was far-fetched to think that because he was so cheeky and charming, that he might have a hot body and gorgeous eyes to match. Of course the sensible part of her brain frequently warned her that getting involved with someone she hadn’t really met was a sure route to disappointment—if not peril—but clearly the lustful part of her brain was not listening as she was already searching his profile out on the site again, to see if he was online. She didn’t expect much, because it only took twenty seconds to get bored and move on in the online world, so for all she knew, he’d deleted her from his match list and started chatting up other women on the site.
Seconds later, she realized that she must have made a real impression—or else this shifter was desperate—because he was present as soon as she logged on and sent him a wink.
Hey, it’s you! I don’t believe it, came the response. Haven’t been around for more than a week!
I know, I know. Sorry. Work has been crazy, Aubrey replied.
Where have you been? Hope I didn’t bore you last time we spoke.
No, quite the opposite. It really has just been work, work, work. I’m in the healthcare industry, and the bugs are in town.
She couldn’t really tell him more than that. As much as she would have liked to warn him that a disease was spreading around and affecting shifters just like him, it was against the government’s policies to speak to members of the public when it came to diseases—warning even just one person could result in widespread panic which could make the situation worse.
Well, I hope you get to relax a bit now. You deserve it for working so hard ;)
Thanks. But no relaxing just yet—thought I’d message you first, she replied, giddy with excitement that the man still seemed at least somewhat keen on her.
Wow, that sounds like I’ve had an effect, he said.
Well, you made me laugh last time we spoke—in a good way! A girl needs to laugh sometimes.
What else does a girl need…?
Aubrey giggled at how brazen he was becoming. Now now, don’t get carried away.
Well, I’ve missed talking to you.
So have I. I was telling a friend that I’ve been talking to someone from this site, and she had a question about you—she wants to know if you’re catfishing me? Haha. We know tiger shifters are quite rare, so we figured maybe you’re actually a panther, she said, adding an emoticon at the end to let him know she was just teasing.
I’m really a tiger. But if I was lying, that would put a whole new meaning to ‘ca
tfishing’, wouldn’t it? Would we call it ‘tigerfishing’?
Just like the endangered species itself, tiger shifters were rare. Aubrey knew there were a few in the States, but she hadn’t expected to come across one on a matchmaking site any more than some Hollywood celebrity. Whoever this man was, he probably had thousands of women throwing themselves at him. For now, she was enjoying the teasing and flirting, but surely that’s all this was.
So what can I do to convince you that I’m really a tiger, and not secretly a hyena or something? J20h added to his previous sentence.
I don’t know if you can convince me…it would just be too easy if you were a tiger. I’d have to let you hunt me down and make me your mate, Aubrey replied, smiling to herself at how boldly she was talking to him. In real life, she’d never speak to a man like this, but the internet made it so easy to say things.
He replied immediately. Then we’ve just got to get together…
Hm, maybe. I’ll have a think about how you can convince me – might need some research, but truth is I’m off for a few days again at least.
What? God, how hard are they working you?
I know, it sucks sometimes. I’m only home for a short break before an important piece of research. I hope to have more free time when it’s done.
You’ve got to leave me with something. I’ll go crazy waiting for you to return, he said.
Like what? Aubrey replied, her lips curling up in a smile. Hopefully the guy didn’t want nude pictures, because that would be taking things a little too far, no matter how bold she’d grown during their conversations.
Well, there’s no profile picture for you. I vaguely know what you look like from what you’ve told me, though. Beautiful brown hair and hazel eyes…curvy and wonderful.
Hey, all I said was brown hair, brown eyes and curvy. You’re the one who added in the ‘beautiful’ and ‘wonderful’ parts! she replied, her smile growing wider.
Well, I can tell you’re beautiful. And I bet that you describe yourself as curvy as a way of being modest about your amazing body. I bet you have gorgeous legs and cleavage that’d make me pass out.
Roar For More (Online Shifter Dating Agency Romance) Page 1
