by V M Black
“The sedation cocktail makes some people’s stomachs upset, but it’s got a fast recovery time,” he said.
“You were in that other place,” Tara said. “The white place, with all the men.”
She looked in the cup. It looked like water, but she didn’t know what to trust, not now. He’d told some guy to stab her with a needle, she knew that much.
“Guilty as charged. Rescued you, in fact,” he said.
She looked around the room. She didn’t feel rescued.
“Where am I?” she asked, grimacing at the taste in her mouth. “Where was I? What happened?”
“You’re in my own personal secret lair,” the man said. “I call it Black Mesa. I couldn’t decide between that and Cheyenne Mountain, but then I figured, why not name it both? I mean, the mountain needs a name, too, doesn’t it?”
Tara shook her head. Nothing that he’d said made any sense to her.
“Anyway, it’s a few hundred miles from where you were, which was in deep trouble—deep trouble on Andrews Air Force Base, if you want to be exact.”
“Why?” Tara asked. “Why was I taken there?”
The man looked at her steadily. “I think you know.”
Tara took a shuddering breath, squeezing the cup. The muscles, sliding over her changing skeleton, the fear and the blood, all the blood .... “None of that happened.”
“I can tell you now that it did. And the sooner you accept that, the better for us all.” The man nodded at the cup. “Drink. It’s just water. It’ll clear your mouth.”
She looked down into the cup again. If he wanted to drug her, he didn’t need that. He could just tell one of his friends to stab her with a needle again, and what could she do?
She felt a small stirring in her body, a subtle shudder that ran through her bones, which seemed suddenly as malleable as clay. She was going to do something, maybe. Something crazy and impossible ....
The man snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, and she jumped, losing the sensation.
“Hey, I need you rational right now, okay? Just drink the damned water.” He plucked the cup from her hands, took a big swig, gargled noisily, and swallowed. “Safe, all right? I’m not going to sit here with your mouth inches from my face, smelling like sick, thanks all the same.”
And his face was inches from hers, all right. Far, far too close for comfort. He was, she told herself firmly, way too old for her—probably ten years older, maybe more. He wasn’t having any effect on her at all. He couldn’t. It was just her insides, still jiggly from the drugs and whatever else had happened to her.
She nodded stiffly and took a sip. It tasted like slightly stale, slightly rusty water. She took a deeper drink and swished it around self-consciously, clearing her mouth of the last traces of bile.
The man took the empty cup from her hands. “Much better. I have a rather sensitive sense of smell, you know, and I much prefer the version of you without barf-breath.”
“Thanks?” Tara said distrustfully.
The man had answered all of her questions without ever really answering any of them, she realized. Well, except for where he’d found her. That answer had been straight enough, if not exactly enlightening.
“Will you just tell me what’s going on?” she asked. “I was in my Intro to Western History course, and then...everything went sideways.”
“So that had never happened to you before?” he pressed.
She frowned at him. “No, I’m not really in the habit of having psychotic breaks, but thanks for asking.”
His face went very still, all except for a sadness that glimmered in his dark eyes. “Oh, bae girl. I had hoped—” He broke off and shook his head slightly, the ends of the twists of hair that fell just below his shoulders trembling at the motion.
Then, with careful deliberation, he said just two words: “You shifted.”
Chapter Five
The woman’s confusion was written across her face—and it was absolutely genuine. She really had no idea what had happened to her.
A new panther shifter. A woman, not a girl-child, for all the confusion in her eyes. Something he’d never imagined that he’d find. If someone had told him a unicorn would be showing up at his door, he would have been less surprised.
Damn. Too old. Too dangerous.
Doomed.
Yet even as he had those dark thoughts, Chay was uncomfortably aware that she was even more striking awake than she had been asleep, her heart-shaped face framed by a tumbled mass of brown curls that just brushed her shoulders. Her delicate Cupid’s-bow mouth made her seem younger than she was, and her huge eyes were a brilliant green that was made even more striking by her olive skin. Even under the heavy robe, the abundant curves of her body were evident.
Chay suddenly felt a thousand years old. He’d had this conversation too many times, with too many people, most often parents with their children, though occasionally the child himself alone. Those were the saddest cases, when a child would shift and his parents would reject him as a freak, happily turning him over to the first apparent authority that showed up.
He also dealt with the shifter outlaws, those who had gone rogue under whatever stresses their life had presented. Some were just plain evil. Nothing about being a shifter made them nobler than ordinary humans, and there were a lot of urges and temptations that a shifter faced that ordinary humans never did. But many others acted out from confusion or simply broke under the pressures the shifters uniquely faced. For those who needed it, he offered a safe haven and a place to put themselves back together. For those who were beyond saving, Chay offered the most merciful death.
His judgment was final, and for those who chose death at Black Mesa rather than a life sentence in the darkest corners of the federal detention system, Torrhanin’s people ended their lives with the same quiet efficiency that the elves worked to save others.
Chay’s network consisted of many different threads—with many friends in places high, low, and in between. Tug on the right thread, and he could make countries dance. But his own, private crusade had been making “problem” shifters disappear for five years through a system that didn’t officially exist at all. Usually, he’d get a call from one of his contacts, and someone would make arrangements on his behalf and release the shifter into his care.
The government—or those in the government who knew about his existence unofficially—generally considered that work a public service. Given the other work that he did for the various three-letter agencies, they were usually willing to help him out even when a case created a bit of a jurisdictional headache.
But after the attack at William and Mary, he’d made his usual calls and was met with a wall of resistance. This was too big. There had been too many witnesses. She’d killed someone, injured others. They were going to have to let the army have this one.
That was the kind of answer Chay couldn’t tolerate. He didn’t need his contacts. They made everything easier, of course, and kept his operation away from the wrong kinds of attention. But when push came to shove, making a single girl disappear from a military base was hardly a challenge.
So he’d done it, and when the inevitable calls had come, a cascade of them following Col. Wilkins’, he’d simply told them all coldly, calmly, that every shifter he chose to claim was a shifter who belonged to him. That if they didn’t like it, then he and they could part ways because that was the deal that he offered and the only one he’d accept.
And they’d backed down. Each one, for his or her own reason, had backed down, because they all knew the cost if they cut him loose.
So now he had Tara Morland in the decommissioned military installation that he’d hidden from the government he’d bought the base from with money he’d both earned and stolen from it.
A panther, like him, though very definitely not a child. A panther that someone had foolishly, recklessly made.
“So, what do you think happened?” he asked her, trying a different tack than the one he normally
took.
Tara swallowed, looking at her hands as if she couldn’t be entirely certain they were hers.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was standing in my lecture, and I thought...I thought ....”
“No. You didn’t just think. You saw. You felt,” Chay said. “Because it happened.”
“It couldn’t have,” she protested. “It’s impossible. And Dr. Butros—” Her eyes widened, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, biting down.
“It was an accident,” Chay said, catching her hand and pulling it gently away from her cruel teeth. He could feel the muscle and bone shiver beneath his hands, and he kept his voice pitched to a reassuring tone. “No one blames you.”
It hadn’t been an accident. Not really. He knew it hadn’t been because he knew how it felt to be that animal with that terrible power coiled inside his skin, longing to be released. He knew how it felt to be surrounded by too many humans, soft-bodied, weak, and stinking, driving him mad with their screams.
And he knew how it felt to stop those screams, forever.
But she must think of it as an accident, a fluke, if she was ever to get control. She had to think of the panther not as herself but as a co-resident of her body, one that must always be kept in check.
Tara shook her head. Her face seemed to ripple, her forehead bulging slightly, and with great deliberation, Chay freed a hand, reached out, and put it on her shoulder.
“Deep breaths, now, Tara. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”
If she changed now, in this state, she’d probably try to bite him in half, and with every uncontrolled change, she’d slip a little farther down the slope of no return. He could change faster than she could, if he had to, but his shift would surely trigger hers in such a state, and he had to give her every chance possible to stop herself.
Nodding, she turned her hand in his, her grip tight and desperate. She took deep breaths, one after another. The movement of her bones and muscles under his hand on her shoulder ceased, and she was an ordinary woman again. At least on the outside, if only for the moment.
“It’s never happened before,” she said, a note close to hysteria in her voice. “You have to believe me.”
“I do,” he said grimly.
Her green eyes pleaded with him. “I’ll stop it. I promise. It’ll never happen again.”
He steeled himself. The truth was cruel, but lying was even crueler. “That’s not possible. But you can learn to control it, Tara. You have to.”
The girl looked stricken. “I can’t do that again. I killed—oh, I can’t!”
“Listen to me, Tara. You have to learn to control it. If you don’t, it will control you.” Every word was heavy with conviction, but she was too terrified and distraught to take it in.
“Tell me how to stop it,” she pleaded, her words slurring slightly even as her eyes tried to slide sideways on her broadening skull.
Chay tightened his grip on her shoulder, trying to keep her attention focused on him with the strength of his gaze. “Right now, calm down. Breathe. It won’t be like that every time,” he assured her. “If we’re lucky, it won’t be like that even once again.”
And what were the chances of that? his inner voice mocked him. He’d seen it too many times before among eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds—the beginning of the devolution of their humanity, the uncontrolled shifts that came closer and closer together, the brain that turned to animal even in human form instead of the reverse.
She was older still—she didn’t have their resilience. Her adult brain had lost its neuroplasticity. Under stress, it would simply break. It wasn’t a matter of will but of simple biology. Every change that was driven by the panther brought her closer to that point.
But that was a terminal diagnosis that Chay would not, could not accept unchallenged, even as he looked at her and realized that she was losing the battle already.
“No. You’re wrong,” Tara said, her voice rising suddenly. “It’s not real. It’s not going to happen again because it didn’t ever happen. It was just a dream. I’ve never killed anybody!”
With the last word, she shoved him away with enough strength that he rocked back in his chair. She jerked to her feet and ran clumsily to a corner of the room even as her joints tried to change orientation.
Tara was breathing so heavily that he could see her shoulders heaving with the effort, her head bent low—and lower still, because it was moving, her neck and shoulders shifting under the robe that she still wore.
With a muttered curse, Chay shoved the bucket of vomit under the bed with one foot and stood, stripping off his clothes as fast as his hands could move, stepping out of his loafers, dropping his coat and tie, and working down the buttons on the front of his shirt.
She turned, and her eyes, already slitted like a cat’s, widened in a face that was broadening as he watched.
“What are you doiiiiiiiirrrr—” The last of her question turned into a panther’s yowl as her vocal cords went, hair sprouting at once all across her body, and she stalked forward, a cat’s brain behind her now-yellow eyes.
There was no time left. With a mental apology to the tailor who had crafted his bespoke suit, Chay shifted fast. The pants tore from his body, and he sprang forward just as she leaped, meeting her midair and batting her down with a powerful swipe of his paw.
The panther hit the cement hard, tangled in her clothes, the breath going out of her body in audible huffs. Right now, she was hardly Tara at all—her human mind was buried, and the predator was in control. She rolled over back onto her feet, her claws tearing the remains of the hospital gown and the robe from her body. She jumped again, high, and again Chay batted her from the air, her lighter female body no match for his bulk and coordination.
The female panther hit the floor again, and this time, she didn’t try to get back up. Instead, she bunched her paws under her body, her tail lashing angrily and her ears pressed back against her skull as she made a low, angry noise in her throat.
Chay settled back on his haunches in front of her, wrapping his tail around his feet. The cat inside him was half-mad with the sight of the defeated female in front of him. Never before had it encountered a mature she-cat, and his feline mind hardly knew what to do with it, whether to drive her away or to claim her as his own. The smell of her beat against the lower reaches of his brain, her human and panther scents mingling.
But Chay was the master of his inner beast, however uneasy the control was at times, and he betrayed no signs of the animal’s reaction, even inside the animal’s own skin. He controlled just as fiercely the very human feeling of despair at the sight of her, entirely given over to the animal, growling and panting in the corner, her heavy tail lashing back and forth.
Chay was willing to wait however long it took for Tara to come back. And she would come back. However strongly the panther had a grip on her now, the habit of years would drag her body back into human shape, and when it did, her mind would come, too.
This time.
The seconds ticked by, one after another, and then slowly, the noise in Tara’s throat got softer, intermittent, until it stopped entirely. The muscles that were visibly bunched beneath her skin gradually relaxed, her ears easing up. A small shiver seemed to run through her. As quiet as a whisper, she shifted back again and curled into a tight ball in the middle of the floor.
Chay bent with an iron control around his instincts, butting his head gently, reassuringly against her shoulder. With a small shriek, she curled tighter, her entire body wracked with shivers of fear as she screwed her eyes shut tight.
“Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me! I didn’t mean to do it.”
That was not the response he’d meant to get. He shifted back hurriedly, his muscles and bones sliding back to their familiar places, to squat at her side.
“Hey, hey,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
She gave a little gasp and her eyes flew open as she turned back toward him.
“I
really don’t think—” he started. But it was too late. She’d gotten a good eyeful of him, stark naked as he was, and she gave another gasp.
“Sorry about that,” he said as neutrally as he could, willing his body not to react to her nakedness and the luscious curve of her ass that he was trying extremely hard to ignore. This was most certainly not an appropriate time. “Clothes don’t survive shifting very well.”
Tara looked down at her own body and yelped, curling up even tighter.
“Here, let me ....” He went to the bed, tugging the sheet from it, and he brought it back to where she lay against the cold floor. He wrapped it over her shoulders and draped it across her body.
“Thanks,” she said faintly, keeping her eyes carefully fixed to the opposite wall as she sat up.
Oh. Right. His pants were in shreds on the concrete floor, so he ducked quickly into the adjoining bathroom and snagged one of the towels that hung there, tucking it around his hips.
“Better?” he asked.
He offered her a hand, and she took it, blushing furiously. It made her seem even more pitiful somehow.
“And thanks for that,” she said as she stood up, adjusting the sheet more tightly around her body. She looked at the tatters of their clothes that lay on the cement floor. “You’re one, too. A...thing.”
“Been that way for a while,” he said. “We generally call ourselves shifters. Bit more specific than ‘thing.’”
“It’s real, then,” she said, her voice dull, numb. “Not a dream or a...a psychotic break.”
“Completely real,” he agreed. “Do you know what you are?”
Her face was still completely blank, her green eyes flat and unresponsive. “I think...I think the same as you. A really big cat,” she said.
He wanted to bring the life back into her eyes. He wanted to see the strength that he’d seen when she’d first woken. Now she just looked spent, like she was already defeated.
“A panther,” he corrected. “A jaguar, to be exact.”
