by V M Black
She thought about her friend Sylvie, her best college friend, and the crazy fling she’d had with Tom Howe in South Sudan. She thought about her parents and about her sister Sara. She thought about Saturday morning cartoons and ice cream and any stupid human thing that she could summon up. She built the thoughts into a net—no, not a net, a life raft of a thousand tiny pieces that constantly tried to scatter on the waves as she scooped them together underneath her, over and over again.
Because beneath it all was the mind of the panther, which insisted that she, as Tara, did not exist at all.
Tara fixed her eyes on the lever handle of the door, willing it to move. And it did, slowly, easing over inch by agonizing inch, the system of pivots transferring the motion to the flat bolts the held the door closed until they slid free and the door swung open.
A blunt head nosed the door open, then sleek, high shoulders eased past. A moment later, the lean, muscular body of the other panther was through.
Past him was freedom, a way out of this cage. A growl rose in her throat—the panther’s growl, not Tara’s, even though she felt its distrust as her own. She fought it for control of her throat, for control of her lashing tail, but when she did, the precarious raft from which she was viewing everything began to scatter dangerously, and it took all her strength not to lose herself in the waves.
The other panther cleared the doorway, his tail flicking free, and there was a hiss as the door swung shut under some invisible power and a clunk as the lever twisted the bolts home again. At that reminder of her captivity, Tara’s panther brain went mad, surging past the other panther to the door, pulling up an inch away from striking it, and then turning to the side to do a frantic dash around the room, churning up clouds of feathers in her wake.
Walls, cage, trapped, trapped, TRAPPED!
The feeling battered over her, a drumming, panicked beat that set up in her blood, her head throbbing to it, everything closing in until she couldn’t even breathe.
The other panther, the big male, simply sat and, very slowly, raised a paw to his mouth and began licking it clean.
Slowly, real thoughts came back to Tara, and even though the edges of herself were still dissolved in the panther’s mind, she could think about herself rather than just as herself—something she realized that the animal could not do. Metacognition. The word came to her from her studies. She had metacognition as a human, and she had to keep that if she was ever going to get free of the panther’s mind.
Her panther self had been aware of the sharp-edged smell of blood from the moment the other had come into the room—a stronger version of the faint echo that clung to her claws. It was a man’s blood, and it was that blood that the panther was licking off his paws and between his toes, his rough tongue rasping against his fur.
His blood that she had spilled. Yet he didn’t look injured, and he’d said that he was fine. Neither Tara’s panther brain nor the human one could process that, so she simply paced, back and forth, slowing gradually with each tight turn until she eventually came to a halt in front of him, watching him warily.
His presence was somehow reassuring, but she didn’t trust it. She didn’t trust anything anymore. She couldn’t afford to. But there was something in her panther body that recognized the dominance of his stronger one, that wished to submit to it, an urge that sent bewildering little shivers through her frame. His physicality was complete and inescapable, the lines that might seem merely feline to a human becoming assertive in their masculinity to her cat’s nose. He smelled like maleness, looked like maleness, the scent of it overpowering even the blood.
The male panther stood then, slowly, and stepped toward her. Tara’s breath came fast. She could feel the air filling her ribcage, expanding it, and whuffing out again through her damp nose as her heart sped up in something almost like fear.
Like fear, but not fear. Not exactly.
The male stepped closer, his padded feet silent on the concrete. One step. Two. And then their whiskers were touching, their heads a mere inch away as he sniffed her—and allowed her to smell him.
His maleness overpowered everything else. Her nose was designed to smell two things—her prey and the musky odor of the mature and healthy male. The panther mind inside her brain instantly capitulated, and Tara was able to gasp through the animal’s mouth as she felt herself take control of the animal body.
Of her body, because it was hers now, truly hers, from the pads of her feet that rested on the cold cement floor to the twitching the end of her tail.
The male panther butted his head up against hers, mingling their scents, and instinctively, she nuzzled him back. Even as she did, the feeling of his face against hers began to change, and she realized that his sleek fur was now brushing up against the skin of her human cheek as she knelt before him.
Her arms came up around his neck out of reflex, caressing his sleek hide as she pressed her face against his and shook with the relief that came with having human arms and legs again. For a long time, the panther stood in front of Tara as she stroked him over and over, rejoicing in the feel of the cold concrete pressing into her bare knees and his thick, sleek pelt against the palms of her hands.
The panther nuzzled her face silently, reassuringly. Then he began to change under her hands until she found herself in the arms of a very handsome and very naked man. Her arms were around him, as well, splayed against his back, and her breasts were against the solid, muscular wall of his chest. And she couldn’t make herself let go.
“You might want to choose not to look down,” he said conversationally, looking into her face. “Since it upset you so much last time. You want me to close my eyes?”
But Tara was just glad—desperately glad to be in her own skin again, glad to feel the panther not simply slipping away in a moment’s inattention but actually being driven back—by him. It wasn’t control, not even close, but it was her first hint that she could possibly overpower the panther, if the situation was right.
She looked up into his eyes, as deep and dark as a thousand nights.
“No,” she breathed, and half on an impulse from the panther deep in her brain and half out of some confused feeling of her own, she stretched up ....
And kissed him.
For just an instant, his full, damp lips were still under hers. Then they started to move—not tentatively but hungrily, demandingly, as if he hadn’t kissed a woman in a very long time, yet with devastating skill. For the first time in days, weeks, maybe, Tara felt fully human, fully herself as a twist of reaction shot through from her core and crackled through all the nerves of her very human body.
She made a small noise in the back of her throat and opened to him. He invaded her mouth with his tongue, and a sharper jolt shot straight down between her legs, shaking her. His arms around her tightened suddenly, the flat of his hands sliding down her ribs. Her nipples were so hard that they ached, pressed against his chest, and she kissed him desperately, as if he held the secret to saving her in his touch.
One of his hands slipped up to cup the back of her neck, sliding around until his thumb caressed her cheek to the rhythm of his mouth. Then a shudder went through his body, and he broke off with a groan.
“Not a good idea,” he said. His pupils were so wide that the slightly lighter brown of his irises formed only the thinnest rings around them.
Tara rocked in his grip, scrambling to find some kind of balance again. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I just .... I’m sorry,” she finished lamely.
“I didn’t bring you here for this,” he said. He dropped his arms as if he’d just realized that he was still holding her.
“I didn’t think you did,” Tara said, scooting away from him and lifting her knees protectively to shield her breasts, her heels pressed tight to her body.
Or rather, she hadn’t thought that. But now the thought was almost inevitable, wasn’t it? Now that the barrier had been breached, even if she’d been the one to breach it.
Transference
, she thought. It was like when a patient fell in love with his doctor or psychiatrist. Or maybe it was Stockholm syndrome. Or co-dependence. Or something.
The man stood up, and the evidence of his reaction became pretty much impossible to miss. Blushing, Tara jerked her gaze away. He seemed entirely immune to embarrassment, even as a secondary reaction to hers.
“I’m going to go out now and get dressed,” he said. “I’d suggest you do the same.”
“Go out?” Tara asked, looking carefully at the open door to the bathroom so that she couldn’t even see him out of the edges of her vision.
“Get dressed,” he corrected. “Then we can talk.”
“Yeah. Talk,” she echoed, feeling like her head was wrapped in a thick fog.
“Be right back,” he promised, and then he was gone.
***
“What the ruttin’ hell did you think you were doing?”
Ford’s voice cracked over the speakers in the hall as soon as the door to Tara’s quarters was closed.
“Shut up,” Chay snapped, grabbing his underwear and pants and pulling them on together.
“Seriously, Beane, you know I was joking about the whole mate thing, right? I mean, that girl...you have to know that she’s not going to make it.”
Chay clenched his teeth for a second before replying as he fastened his belt. “I know her chances.”
“Then what was that?” Ford demanded.
“She kissed me,” Chay said with perfect accuracy.
And what a kiss it had been, her body yielding to his even as she pressed her lips to his mouth. He’d been so shocked for an instant that he hadn’t been able to respond—far more shocked by his own body’s reaction than by her kiss. The panther was still close to the surface of his mind after his restlessness from the shift and his exposure to the female. When she’d kissed him, his brain had lit up like someone had fired off a kilo of C4, and he might as well have shifted into a bird and flown away as resist kissing her back. His entire body had been on fire with the urge to do far more than that—to push her down on the cement floor and claim her body in every way it could be claimed.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like that. Hell, he couldn’t remember ever feeling like that. Not with the kind of burning demand so strong that his rational mind had barely been able to put on the brakes. Even now, he could taste her on his lips, could smell the sweet scent of her body on him.
He was, he realized, well and truly screwed.
“Yeah, that’s totally what I saw,” Ford said sarcastically. “Her kissing you. Yep, that’s absolutely a fair summary of it. Holy shit, man, I thought the monitor was about to turn into a Skinemax special.”
“You could have turned it off,” Chay returned.
“And she could have shifted in the middle of your little tryst and ripped your throat out. That’d bring a new meaning to the term ‘coitus interruptus.’”
Chay turned to glare up at the nearest small black dome in the ceiling. “She’s not going to kill me.”
“Dude. She kind of already tried to. You’re not thinking straight. Like I said, I was joking about the mate thing before. Just...don’t, okay? Not with her.”
“Right.” Chay took a deep breath as he retrieved his hair elastic from the floor and twisted it around his hair.
Not with her, because she was doomed. Not with anyone, at all, ever ....
He’d resigned himself to being alone a long time ago. He couldn’t have a normal relationship with an ordinary human woman—there were dangers involved that he wasn’t willing to undertake. While Chay had full control of his inner beast when he was awake, when he slept, the panther would sometimes gain the upper hand. At times, he’d wake in its body and not realize his own humanity for several minutes, or he’d find that he’d shifted in his sleep and back again and had shredded his bedclothes in the process.
Other shifters from DEVGRU’s Indigo Squadron had greater control of their animal-forms, and even some of those who didn’t had worked out arrangements that worked for them, such as secure sleeping quarters away from those they loved. But to Chay, that was an unacceptable compromise, one with too many inherent risks. If he relaxed his guard just once, if he fell asleep on the couch or in the car beside his mate, he might wake up as something quite different—and the results could be tragic.
Choosing another shifter was an option that others had taken. A she-bear would have nothing to fear from his panther form, for instance. But when two shifters mated, the issue of children became fraught, and he’d never been able to look at another shifter with the kind of desire that would lead to more than a casual tryst. The smell of the foreign animal was just too strange, too off-putting.
But Tara Morland wasn’t some other species. She was a panther, a fully adult female panther, and she took the deepest, most primitive instincts of his shifter self and tied them in knots until they overwhelmed what little sense and prudence he considered himself to have. That she lit up every human protective impulse he had only made it worse.
Deliberately, Chay looked at his smart watch, which was still synced to the video stream in Tara’s quarters. She was running her fingers through her hair, trying to calm the wild mass that had been left after her shift.
But Ford was right. It couldn’t be her. Not ever her. Because no matter how hard he tried, the experience of fourteen years told him she couldn’t be saved.
The thought made his chest hurt. Ignoring it, he twisted the lever to open the door and stepped back through.
Chapter Nine
The second the door shut behind the man, Tara scrambled for the dresser, a dust devil of feathers kicking up in her wake. Her clothes were beyond recovery, so she shimmied into a new outfit as quickly as she could. She even put on a pair of socks and shoved her feet into the slip-ons that had been left to one side of the dresser, as if that act could make her more fully human.
As if that could put up a wall around her or erase what she’d just done.
But all she could think about was the kiss, his lips, his arms, his body. How good and human it had felt.
God, she didn’t even know who he was, and she was kissing him because...what? She thought he’d save her from herself? It was the most human thing that she could do?
And he’d pulled back. He’d stopped her. She burned with the humiliation of it—not so much his rejection, because he’d done the right thing, the adult thing, but her impulsive act itself.
Way to complicate things, Tara.
She was trying to run her fingers through her shoulder-length mop of hair when the door opened again and the man stepped back through. He was dressed from the waist down, to her relief—definitely relief because disappointment would be beyond stupid even for her. But he was still shirtless, the muscles of his chest and belly standing out under his smooth skin.
He must have seen the confusion in her eyes—and she hoped not also her involuntary reaction to those beautiful, rounded shoulders that narrowed to washboard abs—because as he closed the door, he said, “My shirt met with an accident.”
Tara had a flashback—his body in the doorway, the panther leaping toward him, claws finding purchase briefly before he jerked back out of her range.
She had been the ‘accident.’
“Why did you say I didn’t hurt you?” she asked, indicating his arm with her chin.
“It wasn’t enough to matter,” he said.
“You lied to me, then,” she said. “What else did you lie about?”
“Nothing. Look at me now. I’m not hurt, okay? I’m fine.” He held out his arms on either side to display them. There was a thin, raised scar going down one arm in a snake-like, twisting pattern, but that was all. “That wasn’t even a white lie. More of a slight exaggeration, really.”
Tara didn’t know what to believe. “Why aren’t you still, well, bleeding?”
“It’s a perk of being a shifter,” he said.
Tara looked down at her own hands, rubbing h
er thumbs across her fingers as if that could make them more real, less able to shorten and thicken and change.
“So I’d heal like that, too?” she asked.
“Definitely.”
Tara took that in. It meant that even when she looked like herself, when she appeared to be the Tara Morland she’d always been, she really wasn’t. Not anymore. She’d always been a fast healer. Bruises faded fast, and when she’d broken her arm in elementary school, it had healed in three weeks instead of six. But what he was talking about had to be a whole order of magnitude more incredible.
Impossible, really. But then again, everything that had happened since her last history lecture had been impossible.
“What’s your name?” she asked abruptly, realizing that she still didn’t know it. She’d been so focused on herself when she’d first woken up it hadn’t even occurred to her to ask. And now...well, now she’d seen him shift into a panther, had seen him naked twice, and kissed him. It occurred to her that she had done everything backward, though she hadn’t exactly been thinking anything through at the time.
“People call me Beane,” he said, retrieving the sturdy, institutional wooden chair from where she’d flung it as a panther and setting it back on its feet.
“They call you Beane,” she repeated, not missing his phrasing. “But that isn’t your name?”
“Chay Bane, actually,” he said, turning the chair to face away from her with a twist of his wrist and straddling the seat so that his crossed arms rested on the back.
“That sounds a lot more impressive,” Tara said. “Bane instead of Beane.”
He smiled, revealing a flash of straight white teeth in his dark face that somehow looked even more dangerous than his panther’s grin. “I don’t need to sound impressive.”
Tara realized that she was still standing frozen in the center of the room, and she cast around for a place to sit. The mattress was drooping off the side of the bedframe with a huge tear down the center of the sheet—done by her own claws in her blind panic to escape. She shoved it back square and sat on it as Chay Bane watched.
