by Devyn Quinn
But the passage of time held no promise. None. Willie Barnett had claimed he was selling her off. Like she wasn’t a human being, but a piece of property to be haggled over, bartered for. Her gaze fell on the cougar. Like an animal.
Dakoda regarded her own skimpy meal, nothing close to the double-bacon cheeseburger and fries she’d like to sink her teeth into. Dieting had never been a concern. She’d always been tall and thin, on the scrawny side. Her build was boyish; washboard breasts, stomach, and the barest hint of an ass. “Two raisins on a surfboard” was how one lover had characterized her figure.
The asshole who’d made the unkind remark was now an ex-lover. Since her split with Thad almost a year ago, she’d sworn off men for a bit. As a teen, she’d followed her mother’s lead, looking for love in all the wrong places, mistaking promiscuity for affection time and time again. Though the physical side found some gratification, the emotional side hadn’t.
Dakoda had to admit she loved the feel of a man’s body pressed next to hers. Muscular. Powerful. A man who was fit, who kept himself in shape, was a turn-on. Chest like a rock wall, six-pack abs, a tight round ass. The musky scent of hot male skin…
Need jolted through her, sending a shock all the way to her toes. She had denied herself for so long, just thinking about a man’s physique could get her revved up.
Taking a ragged breath, Dakoda fanned herself with a hand. Amazing the subjects the mind could wander onto when stressed. Sex was the last thing she should be thinking about. If the cougar hadn’t attacked, she would be a rape victim about now.
Her gaze traveled back to the big cat. It was easy to remember the first time she’d laid eyes on the splendid beast—and the powerful reaction she’d felt deep inside. Stretched end to end, it was at least six feet long, maybe more. Its chest was bulky, thick with muscle. Long legs stretched out endlessly. And the paws, the paws were huge.
She smiled. “If you were a man,” she murmured, “you’d be outstanding.” Despite her remark, she craved more than sex. She craved an emotional connection, a meeting of the minds.
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
No such luck. Otherwise she’d have called upon a few and wished herself far away from this place.
Her smile faded. As always, her mind journeyed to places it had no business visiting. Must be how incarcerated souls passed the time without losing their sanity. Wishing, and wondering about the path not taken.
Dakoda’s stomach churned, reminding her she needed to eat. She picked up the bag of trail mix, tearing it open. The aroma of nuts and dried fruit tickled her senses. She scooped up a handful. Popping the bite into her mouth, she chewed the crunchy mass into a pulp before swallowing. Delicious.
She cracked open the bottle of water, gulping down the tepid liquid inside. More handfuls of trail mix followed. A few minutes later the bag was empty. Satisfied her throat hadn’t been cut, her stomach stopped growling.
But the pressure building at the back of her mind hadn’t eased.
Dakoda reached behind her head, gingerly fingering the lump growing there. The wall was inflexible and she’d taken a hell of a wallop. “Just what I needed,” she muttered. A concussion. Headache and fatigue were definite symptoms. Even with some food in her stomach, she still had both.
Finished with its grooming, the cougar rose. Its lean frame flexed and stretched with familiar movements. Mouth opening wide, its pink tongue flicked out in a yawn. Satisfied every kink had been vanquished, the cougar padded toward the bunk on four silent paws.
Dakoda stiffened. She’d done nothing to agitate the animal, draw its attention. She kept absolutely still as the feline approached.
It lifted its head toward her, its broad nostrils flaring as it sniffed along her body, beginning at her feet and heading up her legs. The light chuff-chuff sound of its breath filled the silence of the cell.
Dakoda realized the cougar was checking her out, doing a little investigating in the only way it knew how. She slowly put out a hand. “Nice kitty,” she said.
The cougar sniffed her hand. A low sound emanated from its throat, something strangely akin to a whistle. Head dipping low, he all of a sudden butted against her hand. The tawny head slipped under her palm.
The message was clear: pet me.
Dakoda nodded. “Ah, I see. You want a little loving.”
The cougar snuffled, butting her hand for a reply. Yes.
Dakoda riffled the tips of her fingers across the crown of the cougar’s head. The reddish-brown fur felt coarse, like straw, not soft and silky the way she’d imagined. Its head was short and rounded with powerful jaws and strong teeth. The wound above its left eye was beginning to clot and close. Overall the cougar appeared to be a healthy animal.
Using the tips of her nails, she slowly worked her way toward one rounded, cup-shaped ear. The cougar turned its head slightly, welcoming the long deep scratches across its skin.
She smiled. “Ah, you like that, don’t you, boy?” she worked her fingers a little deeper, giving the other ear equal attention. “A good scratching behind the ears would make anyone feel better.” Leaning forward, she inhaled the animal’s scent. Its odor was musky, feral, dangerous, and dark, hinting of the deep forests it prowled. The smell teased her senses, leading her to wonder how it would feel to roam, wild and free.
A chain saw of enthusiastic sound broke burst out. The cougar purred loudly, responding to her touch.
Dakoda laughed. “My goodness, you sure are a friendly boy.”
The cougar yawned, giving her a blast of meat-scented breath. Without warning the big feline did a rolling flop, presenting his tummy for a scratch.
Dakoda couldn’t fail to get the hint. Leaning over the edge of the bunk, she reached down. “You want more?” Using a rhythmic motion, she scratched her way down the cougar’s chest and belly.
Enjoying the attention, the cougar did what came naturally when a male got to enjoying himself just a little too much. A nice rosy penis came into view.
Dakoda blushed, a feverish heat immediately rising to her cheeks. “Oh, my…”
She didn’t have a chance to say anything else.
Something bizarre happened.
The cougar started to change. Fur zipping away, its torso and limbs stretched out, muscle and bone unknotting and reshaping. Contorting and unsnarling, paws elongated into hands and feet. The skull reshaped, feline features vanishing, simultaneously taking on a distinctly human cast.
In the blink of an eye the cougar had vanished.
A naked man lay on the floor in its place.
Dakoda jolted, damn near choking on her scream. Holy shit! What she was looking at couldn’t be real.
Could it?
Gaze fixed on the impossible sight, her eyes widened at the display of his bobbing shaft. Heart skipping a beat, a hot flush spread through her veins. Her cheeks heated. His erection sure looked genuine enough. Jutting toward his abdomen, hard and eager, his cock was quite impressive.
The stranger’s hands rose, covering a vital piece of his exposed anatomy. “Sorry.” A grin of embarrassment split his lips. “I always get a hard-on when a pretty girl pets me.”
4
Dakoda’s stomach lurched. Hand lifting, she closed her eyes and pressed her palm against her forehead. “The concussion,” she reasoned, barely speaking above a whisper. “It’s making me hallucinate.”
She was seeing things. Yeah. That’s it. Between the trauma of witnessing Greg’s murder, the exhaustion of keeping herself in one piece, and a near rape, her trolley had somehow slipped off the track of sanity. Reason was going in an entirely different direction, exploring uncharted territory.
I’m losing it for sure, she thought. Cougars don’t turn into men.
She inwardly cringed. The idea seemed crazy, even inside the confines of her apparently demented mind. Of course a human couldn’t turn into an animal. Magic, hocus-pocus, call it what you will, didn’t exist.
A man’s voice
broke through the curtain Dakoda was attempting to pull around her murky senses. “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but I can assure you I’m not a figment of your imagination.” A pause. “Though, if it helps, I wish I were. I’d rather be anyplace else but here.”
The apparition was talking. To her.
Dakoda lowered her hand. She opened her eyes. Sure enough, the naked man was still there.
For a moment she considered the idea she’d fallen asleep. It made sense her damaged, desperate psyche might conjure up such an extraordinary scenario. It could all just be a creation of her imagination.
Easily explained, easily understood.
But the scene unfolding before her eyes didn’t have the surreal, kaleidoscopic quality of a dream. In dreams, the angles were off, odd and vague, stretched and distorted. What she saw now was all sharp and very much in focus.
“You were the cougar,” she said, a slight frown curving her mouth. “I know what I saw.”
The man sat up slowly, moving with lazy grace as he settled into a sitting position not quite as distracting. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “But what do you see now?”
What she saw was enough to take her breath away all over again, and in an entirely different way. The one thing she definitely hadn’t been prepared for was a man who looked like he’d just walked out of the pages of a Playgirl magazine.
Jet-black hair fell past his shoulders, parted exactly in the middle and surrounding a face that might have been chiseled from stone: high forehead, prominent cheekbones, strong jawline. His wide-set eyes were dark, so black she couldn’t find a hint of irises in their depths. His face was lightly stubbled, his mouth generous, full, and sensual.
The telltale signs of a hard and rugged life had etched themselves into his skin. Scars slashed down his shoulders, abdomen, and legs. Knotted and long healed, they hinted at deadly claws and jaggedly sharp teeth.
But it was the color of his skin that really made Dakoda sit up and take notice. The shade might have been compared to that of a copper pot, used for ages over an open fire. A thin gash angled above his left eye, still puffy and tender. The line of his nose also wasn’t perfect, as if broken by a foot or the stock of a rifle.
Overall, the effect of viewing him as a whole was stunning. Here was a man who’d lived a hard life, living on the edge as he fought to survive in a land yanked out from under his feet by encroaching civilization.
Assuming he was even real.
Real or not, though, he looked damn good. Larger than life, his masculine presence filled the small cell.
Gazing at him, a final possibility loomed large in the back of Dakoda’s mind, floating out of the shadowy recesses like a red-eyed specter. What if Greg wasn’t the only one who died? Maybe she’d also been hit by the shotgun’s blast. And this place was some kind of limbo, a realm where the normal rules of existence didn’t apply. Logic certainly didn’t.
She looked at the man who’d once been a cougar. “Did I die?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
He grinned. “You’re very much alive.”
Testing the theory, Dakoda gave her cheek a hard pinch, all too aware of the pain. Would the deceased feel any pain? She didn’t think so.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” she informed him for lack of something better to say.
His lips pulled back in a familiar, feral smile. “Shit happens to the best of us, babe.”
His words were delivered as a verbal slap, snapping her back to reality. Not that it was one she wanted to continue experiencing much longer. As it stood, she was locked in a small cell out in the middle of some godforsaken mountain tract, having been kidnapped to be sold as a slave in some twisted animal act to a private seller. And oh, yeah, her partner had been shot dead right in front of her, gunned down in cold blood by a wanted criminal.
Nothing about this day could get any worse…or any more unbelievable.
Suspending disbelief and discounting death, Dakoda eyed the naked man. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one standing in front of the fan,” she commented dryly.
Amusement sparked in his dark gaze. “Looks like I caught a good portion of shit, too,” he affirmed with a smile. He politely extended a hand. “My name’s Jesse Clawfoot.” If his looks hadn’t confirmed his Native American heritage, his surname did.
Tension knotted Dakoda’s shoulders as her hand slipped into his. His flesh certainly felt real enough, warm enough…firm enough. She felt a twinge of confusion, but shook it off, mentally willing herself to stay focused, alert. The least she could do was offer her name. “Dakoda. Jenkins.”
“Nice to meet you, Dakoda.” A flash of straight white teeth followed. “I hope you’ll forgive me for the rude introduction. I never could resist a good belly scratch.”
She pulled her hand away. “So where did the cougar go?” she blurted, close to babbling.
Her question startled him. Heavy brows dipped together. “I don’t get what you’re asking.”
Dakoda wasn’t exactly sure, either. Nothing made any sense. But rather than have a complete meltdown, she was trying to work through the matter the only way she knew how. By asking questions and getting answers. She could think about chasing down her errant sanity later.
“You know,” she prompted. “You’re here. The cougar’s gone. Where’s the cougar?”
He got it. “I’m the cougar,” Jesse said, pointing to himself.
Dakoda didn’t believe him. “No, you’re not.”
Jesse started to shake his head, then shrugged. “I guess you need another demonstration.” Repositioning himself on his hands and knees, he assumed the pose of a crouching animal. “Watch me. Try to pay attention.”
“I will.” Dakoda watched closely. Nothing was happening. All she saw was a buck-ass-nekkid man hunched on the bare floor. “How long does it take?”
Jesse shot her a look of annoyance. “Give me a minute, will you? That crack on the noggin really took something out of me.” He crouched lower and closed his eyes. “Come on,” he muttered under his breath. “Cat, don’t fail me now.”
Dakoda watched closely, fighting not to blink an eye.
Then, it happened.
Jesse’s body changed, skin budding fur as his features changed and contorted, again taking on the body of the sensuous feline.
A fine tremble shimmied up Dakoda’s spine as she glanced around the cramped cell. The Indian had vanished.
The cougar settled on its haunches. Its amber gaze burned with intelligence. Human intelligence.
Dakoda shook her head. “I am losing my mind,” she murmured. “I’ve gone mad.”
The cougar tossed a saucy wink. No, you’re not, it seemed to say.
The fine hair at the nape of her neck rose. “Don’t do this to me, you fucker,” she breathed.
The cougar shifted again, and the naked Indian was back. Dakoda would have sworn she saw the instantaneous second where feline and human met, then separated. How he’d managed it, she didn’t know. This time some gut-level sense confirmed the reality.
Her eyes definitely weren’t deceiving her.
Jesse Clawfoot could, indeed, turn into a cougar.
He pulled a leg up in front of his body, concealing vital parts from view. “Are you satisfied now?” he asked.
Even though she’d just witnessed his transformation—twice!—Dakoda still had a problem comprehending the entire matter. She mentally ticked off all the rational explanations again. When those ran out she had…what? She wasn’t quite sure. One certainly couldn’t argue with their own eyes. Looking at him now, she could almost see the power stirring under his skin, see the cougar straining against its imprisonment inside a human’s body.
She argued anyway. “But people don’t turn into animals. It’s impossible. Maybe that sort of magic works in the movies, with the help of computers and a lot of CGI. But in real life?” She shook her head. “No fucking way.”
Brow ruffling with annoyance, he frowned. “I just gave you
an up-close and personal demonstration,” he countered. “How can you not believe when you’re sitting here, talking to me now?”
Dakoda studied him for a long moment. Her need to believe squared off with the idea that any life-form capable of shifting its physical shape could not possibly be human. At least not in the sense science explained it. “I’m not sure what’s happening to me any more,” she finally admitted in defeat. “All I know is I’m not having a really good time.”
Looking at her, his gaze chilled. “This day hasn’t been a party for me, either,” he grumbled.
A long stretch of silence ensued.
“How come you can shift, and nobody else can?” she finally asked. “I mean, if anyone could do it we’d all be running around on four paws. Right?”
Jesse’s icy gaze thawed a little. “I can try to explain,” he offered.
She nodded. “That would help a lot.”
Jesse drew a deep breath. “Imagine the beginning of time, when the Great Spirit was creating the earth.”
Dakoda hesitated. “Okay…” The problem with that line of reasoning is she didn’t believe in God, or a higher power of any sort. As far as she was concerned mankind had climbed out of the primordial ooze. “Wouldn’t this shifty-thing go better with Darwin’s theory of evolution?” The idea men had evolved from chimps wasn’t so far-fetched in her mind. Despite the advances of civilization, Homo sapiens nevertheless continued to act like senseless brutes and beasts.
Jesse considered her skeptical expression. “You aren’t buying anything I’m saying, are you?”
Dakoda briefly considered his question before shaking her head. “No, I’m really not into the God and the whole creation-of-the-earth thing.”
He stared at her through heavy-lidded eyes. “Well, that’s going to make it difficult for me to explain the Tlvdatsi, then. Our traditions are based on the belief in greater spirits, divine spirits.”
She spread her hands. “Sorry. I wasn’t raised to believe in any higher power.” Her jaw tightened. “My mother was too busy shoplifting to buy her crack.” Though she didn’t intend it, her voice came out tinged with bitterness.
