by V M Black
“Black,” she said. “You’re a...black...black panther.” She gave a breathy, slightly hysterical little laugh.
Chay snorted. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the joke. “All first-generation panther shifters are black. So are half of the second generation.”
But Tara wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She was looking around the echoing, austere room, panic twisting her face again.
Dropping his hand, she took a shivering breath. “This is a jail. Isn’t it? Because I killed him. Oh, God, I really did kill him, didn’t I?” Her voice started to rise again. “I didn’t mean it—”
“I’ve already told you. It’s not a jail,” Chay said, curling his hands at his sides against the urge to pull her against him, as if he could give her some portion of his strength that way.
She half-stumbled as she made for the bed against the wall. She sagged onto it. “How? Why?”
“I take it that neither one of your parents could secretly have been a shifter, then,” Chay said, looking down at the small, pitiful shape she made.
Tara shook her head, seeming to fold up on herself. “If that’s what I am, then no. My mom’s a schoolteacher. My dad’s a swim coach at the university.”
“Shifters can be swim coaches,” Chay said dryly. He realized that he was looming over her, and he sat back in the chair beside the bed.
“Well, he isn’t. And before you ask, yeah, I’m sure I’m really theirs.” She gestured to her face, with its curiously piercing green eyes and sun-kissed skin that picked up the golden highlights of her hair. “My father’s half-Brazilian. A mutt, he calls himself. I look a lot like him. There’s no way I could be the postman’s kid or anything. Not that Mom would ever do anything like that.” Her voice went up suddenly in pitch on the last word—a return of hysteria. “Oh, my God, what’ll my parents be thinking—”
“It’s okay. They don’t know,” Chay said, catching her hands in his. What he didn’t say was that they had been told that she was dead. Plenty of time for that particular bomb later.
Tara swallowed and nodded, blinking hard, clinging to his hands. “Can I see them?”
Chay cleared his throat carefully. “That wouldn’t be a good idea. Your shifting is out of control right now, and more people will get hurt.”
“So it is a prison,” she said flatly, dropping his hands as if they’d burned her.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I don’t care what you call it.” She stood up and crossed to the door, the sheet dragging on the floor behind her. She jerked it open, revealing the corridor beyond.
But Chay was a single step behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her back as he tugged the lever out of her hand and closed the door again.
She laughed hollowly and sagged in his arms, her softness too warm against his body. “You lied to me,” she said. “If I can’t leave, this is a prison. That’s what prison is, when you can’t leave. Everyone’s going to lie to me now, aren’t they?”
The beast inside him was distracted by the scent of her hair, but he pushed it down and said, “There are people out there that I won’t let you hurt. Humans. Shifters. Kids. You want to be responsible for ripping some kid’s throat out?”
Tara shook her head almost convulsively.
“Then don’t go out that door,” he said, releasing her and stepping back—too quickly, he was sure. “Not the way you are now. Not without me. Can you promise that?”
She gave a helpless kind of shrug. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Good girl,” he said, loosening his hold on her. “So, then, let’s get you in control first and figure out how this happened to you, and then we can talk about getting you out of here.”
“Okay,” she said in a faint voice.
“Okay,” he echoed. “I’ll have some food sent to you. Just relax, kick back. There’s an ereader with about a thousand books on it in the dresser, along with more clothes. Take a shower. Get dressed. You have a lot to take in. Give it time.”
She nodded. “So...how’d it happen to you?”
“What?”
“How did you turn into a...shifter? Were your parents shifters, too? ”
He chuckled. “Bae girl, believe it or not, I signed up.”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze, stepped from the room, and closed the door behind him.
Chapter Six
Tara stared at the blank gray metal door and jumped when the metal dogs at the corners slotted into place as the man on the other side turned the lever. A shiver ran through her—
No, more than a shiver. A ripple, a ripple of muscle and bone that suddenly flowed like so much putty under the hands of an invisible giant. She felt the fear, the pure animal terror welling up inside her again, surging in her brain stem, threatening to take over and obliterate everything....
She screwed her eyes tight and reached for the thoughts that the panther inside her was trying to squeeze out. The purely human thoughts that no monster’s brain could hold.
Mom, she thought first, calling up an image of her mother’s smiling and entirely human face. Dad. He often tried to be stern. He’d been in the military for two decades, and even as a coach, he spent almost as much time correcting as encouraging. But the twinkle in the corner of his eye always betrayed him.
Sara. Tara’s sister was five years older, and she always had it so together. She was smart, driven. She’d finished law school and, after a brief stint at a private firm, she’d joined the commonwealth’s attorney’s office in Fairfax and was a rising star there, able to work hand-in-hand with the police department to make sure all evidence and testimonies were in order for technically faultless trials.
“Got to make sure they really have the true bad guys,” Sara would say, raising her eyebrows in that arch way of hers. “And if they do have the bad guys, I’ve got to make sure we get them locked up tight.”
Except now Tara was the bad guy, wasn’t she? She’d killed her professor. She was sure of it. That made her a murderer, didn’t it? It hadn’t been an accident. She shuddered again as she remembered the crunch of the cartilage and bone in her teeth.
No, that was no accident at all. She’d killed him, and she’d meant to kill him in that instant—or at least, all that was left of her had meant to kill him, because she hadn’t felt like herself at all.
She forced her eyes open and looked down at her hands. They were both clutching the thin sheet around her body. They were blessedly familiar to her—not those strange half-paw shapes, sprouting fur and claws. Real hands. Human hands.
And that was who she really was. Tara Morland. Human. Twenty-four years old. College junior, coming to her education late after a few years spent wandering the world, an adventure that left her no closer to even knowing the questions to which she sought answers.
Not like Sara, who always seemed to know everything.
Tara took a long, deep breath, telling herself that it was a human nose that breathed the air, that it was human ribs that were expanding.
Because that was what she was. Wasn’t she? That animal inside, it was just an invader, an interloper, who took her body and made it change into something she wasn’t, that pushed her out of her own brain and made it something else. It was that thing, that monster that had killed the professor. Not her.
It couldn’t be her.
It was real, it was real, it was real ....
And she wasn’t the only one. That man had changed, too—not changed to rip her limb-from-limb, as the monster inside her had wanted her to do to him, but to help her. He was in charge of his beast. Somehow. Did that mean that she could be in charge of hers?
Shifters. It was impossible. But it was true.
Tara spun away from the door. Clothes. She wanted clothes. And she wanted to be clean. The man had said something about a shower. And he’d gone through that open door to get a towel ....
Tara crossed the room, her bare feet curling against the cold cement of the floor, an
d poked her head cautiously through the door to survey the room beyond. It was...a bathroom. Dated and institutional-looking, it had mint green four-by-four inch tiles all the way up to the ceiling and a mottled green mosaic on the floor, but she was just glad that the toilet in one corner was a ceramic commercial model with a flush lever and not the stainless steel type like she saw in prisons on cop shows.
The shower was a dark, tight space with a wavy glass door and tile on every surface. A glance inside gave her a little shiver of claustrophobia, but it was more old-fashioned than ominous. But she had so many questions and so few answers that she examined every detail in hopes that it could provide any clue—about where she was and what was going to happen to her.
The room appeared to have been prepared for her. If it had been used a lot before, then there probably wouldn’t be the spider web that fluttered in the corner in the air that came from the ceiling vent, or the dried out husk of a cricket that lay under the sink. Especially with how clean everything else seemed—it would either be visibly dirty or those things would have been swept away.
New soap and fresh towels for every person was probably to be expected, but new full-sized shampoos? A new roll of commercial toilet paper with the wrapper still on? That seemed less likely, somehow.
So this room probably wasn’t usually used as a prison cell. Maybe that meant that there were other rooms that were, but this one just happened to be empty when she arrived.
Because the usual cells were really full? Because once they brought someone in here, they never let him out again?
Or because she was an unusual case?
The man had said that she needed to control herself before she could go out. He’d also said that there were other people in the building—other shifters, even children. Did that mean that those people were prisoners, too? Were they just allowed to mingle inside wherever this place was? Or were they allowed to leave?
Would she ever be allowed to leave?
She shook her head. There was nothing she could do about it—about any of it. She felt the first stirring of panic, and she took deep, soothing breaths to slow her suddenly racing heart.
Kick back, he’d said. Relax.
Tara let the sheet drop from her body, balling it up and tossing it through the open doorway and back into the bedroom. She reached into the shower stall and turned on the spray—then jerked back as a cold rush of rusty brown water hit the opposite wall of the stall. In a few seconds, it cleared up, and steam began to rise from the spray.
Definitely not used in a long time.
Tara knotted her hair on the top of her head, the springy curls drawing even tighter in the dampness of the room, and then she stepped into the stream. The water hitting her body felt good, far better than it had any reason to feel. The sheer amount of sensation striking her naked skin made her feel more herself somehow, the bits that seemed to want to morph and change subdued by the reality of the shape that she was now. With a sigh, she leaned back against the back wall of the shower, letting the water hit her in the chest and belly and trickle down her naked legs. She stood there, staring without focus at the showerhead, as the minutes ticked by, relieved to finally feel like she belonged in her own body again.
That man. Who was he? What was he, other than the same thing that she was?
God, that had been a shock, to turn around and see him stripping. For half a second, she’d thought that he meant to assault her, but when she’d changed, he’d changed too.
And she had felt a bolt of something go through her—recognition, longing, something so visceral and fundamental that maybe it didn’t even have a name.
Tara’s heart was racing again, and it had nothing to do with shifting. She put a hand to her throat to feel the beat of her blood thundering through her veins.
What was happening to her?
She scrubbed her body roughly with the soap and washcloth. Her fingernails each had a dark line under them, and she ran them across the bar of soap to get them clean. The streaks they left on the bar of soap were a rusty red rather than brown.
Blood. She realized with a sudden, violent horror that it was blood—her professor’s blood, deep under her nails. The image came to her, as distinctly as when it had first happened, of her claws gouging across his body, her teeth closing on his neck. Her claws and her teeth, not those of some other beast with her as a powerless witness, but her very own.
Her suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the soap, and her stomach rebelled. Tara scrabbled for the shower door handle and jerked it open, half-falling through it and into the main part of the bathroom. She lurched for the toilet and arrived just in time to retch up a stomach full of bile. She heaved again and again.
There was little in her stomach, but her body didn’t care. She could see the last seconds of Dr. Butros’ life as her claws scored deep lines down his chest, could feel his last, bubbling breath before she crushed his neck in her teeth, and she shuddered with the horror of the rusty red blood on the bone-white bar of soap.
She heaved and retched until she thought she would never stop. But eventually, when she had become limp from sobbing, the twisting in her stomach receded. She slid down against the side of the toilet, her naked body pressed up against the cold porcelain, her wet rear on the frigid tiles, and cried and cried as if it could somehow knit together the shreds of her broken life.
Tara didn’t know how long it had been when her tears finally stopped, but they did, and she came back to herself slowly. First, the hiss of the shower broke through the storm of self-recrimination and grief that she had wrapped herself in. Only then did she realize that she was shivering, her skin covered with goose bumps as the tile and toilet stole the heat from her body.
She pushed up stiffly, her cold muscles protesting the motion. She wiped the back of her mouth with her hand and winced at the taste of soap. Reaching out painfully, she flushed the toilet. She staggered over to the sink, and avoiding her own reflection, she washed the soap from her hands and rinsed her mouth over and over until the taste of bile and the memory of the bright copper tang of blood were gone.
Tara stumbled back into the shower, letting the hot blast of water wash over her until the cold was driven out of her bones and she felt something like herself again. She scrubbed everything this time—every inch of her skin and even her hair. Then she reached out and spun the faucets to turn the water off and grabbed the fluffy white towel.
I’m alive, Tara told herself as she dried off. That was something. She’s survived whatever had happened to her, at least so far. And that man, whoever he was, he acted like she could control it one day and maybe get out of this place.
Maybe. Or maybe this was some kind of trick, and he was just trying to get her to cooperate for reasons of his own ....
She went back into the other room—the bedroom, she supposed it was—and pulled open the top drawer of the dresser, revealing a stack of high-waisted white panties along with a pile of lightweight sports bras.
She dropped the towel and tried them on experimentally. Both fit—she was honest enough to admit that her curves were more of the hips-and-butt type than the chest—and she was disturbed at the idea of that man, whoever he was, measuring her unconscious body for clothes.
But he wasn’t the only other person in this place, she reminded herself. There were women here, too. He’d suggested as much when he’d mentioned the children. Wasn’t it much more likely that one of them had gotten clothes for her?
The second drawer revealed t-shirts in an array of solid colors, all the same cut and brand. She pulled one on before opening the third drawer and finding a stack of thick yoga pants—not thin, like leggings, but almost as thick as sweatpants and made to skim rather than conform to every curve of her body.
Tara pulled them on and returned to the bathroom to hang up the towel and give herself a critical once-over, wishing there was a better mirror than the tiny one over the sink. She was relieved to find that she still looked like herself—with a puf
fy face and red eyes from crying, but still fully, recognizably herself. She wasn’t sure what she’d been afraid would be looking back at her. But since her body had taken to changing of its own will, she felt like she couldn’t take anything for granted.
She remembered seeing a brush and a wide-toothed comb on top of the dresser, both apparently new. She returned to the bedroom to grab the comb and sat on the edge of the bed, working it through her damp hair.
Clean, dressed, and engaged in such a normal, routine activity, she felt human again...
...until the lock she’d put around her brain cracked open, and a sliver of fear was allowed back in as she sat in the middle of the cold, echoing room that was now her home for who knew how long.
She froze as the sense of being trapped flooded back in a rush. Out of nowhere, another small shudder ran through her body, and she felt bones and muscles ripple in its wake. Closing her eyes, she squeezed the comb hard and tried to hold onto herself.
I can do this, she told herself. I can do this. I’m me. Tara Morland, just me.
But the world was going all wobbly again as her muscles slid in a disconcerting way over her suddenly malleable bones, and she knew this was one she wasn’t going to win.
Chapter Seven
Chay watched the girl—no, the woman—walk back from the bathroom and into her bedroom, the image from the camera thrown up on one of the monitors in the great bank that dominated the room.
“I never had you pegged as a perv,” said Luke Ford.
Ford was sprawled next to him in his Aeron chair, using one foot to idly pivot it back and forth. He was a complete pretty boy, with big, soft blue eyes and eyelashes that made the girls swoon. He could also kill a man eight different ways with his bare hands without bothering with his panther form.
Chay jerked his gaze away, focusing on his friend. “I’m not getting off,” he ground out.
Ford snorted. “You were literally slack-jawed. You looked like you were eighteen hours into a WoW marathon, with no intentions of stopping until the Mountain Dew ran out.”
