Out of the Darkness: Taken by the Panter #1 (Taken by the Panther, #1)

by V M Black

  “So what do I call you, then?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Whatever you want, bae girl.”

  She shrugged uncomfortably. She’d noticed the endearment before, but it hadn’t really registered. That had been before they’d kissed, though. And when he wasn’t shirtless, displaying a physique that was so cut that it almost hurt her eyes to look at.

  “How about Chay?” she asked. “Since it’s actually your name, you know.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Why not? Charles Antoine Bane the Third. You can call me all three if you want.”

  Tara giggled a little. “I think Chay will do.” A few of the feathers that she’d stirred up had drifted down to land on his knees, and one was caught in his hair, which was long for a man and done up in some kind of twisty braids and tied back from his face—not a woman’s fine cornrows but distinct locks nearly as thick around as her thumb.

  Everything was still so surreal. This place. Him. What had happened. She still felt the panther inside her—she could identify that alien restlessness for what it was now. But it wasn’t truly alien, was it? As long as she could remember, she’d felt it, muted, distant. Even as far back as elementary school, it had made her afraid that she just might go insane.

  And now she had. Except it was a kind of insanity that changed the shape of her body.

  “If I were schizophrenic, would I be able to consistently remember things that didn’t happen in the same way?” she asked aloud. “I mean, wouldn’t I change up my hallucinations? Or not? Or maybe they’d change, but I wouldn’t know it.”

  “You’re not schizophrenic,” Chay said.

  “That’s what I’d want you to say,” she shot back.

  Chay simply sat, waiting.

  Tara shook her head. “Okay, yeah, I’m not schizophrenic. I don’t know. Maybe it’d be better if I were.” She kicked her foot, and eddies of down swirled across the floor. It really was amazing just how many feathers had been in those two pillows. “This is seriously awkward, you know,” she burst out. “I don’t even understand what’s going on. Not really.”

  The corner of Chay’s mouth quirked. “Neither do I. The doctor who woke you up—”

  “Is that the same guy who knocked me out in the van?” Tara asked.

  “Same guy,” Chay admitted. “Sorry. You’re not stable, and if you’d shifted then ....”

  Tara shuddered. “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Anyway, that doctor, he took blood samples to run some tests.”

  “What kind of tests?” Tara looked down at the crooks of her elbows. There was no mark there. But then again, there wouldn’t be, would there?

  “He can tell whether you were born a shifter or whether someone made you one,” he said.

  “Why would anyone do that?” She shuddered.

  “I don’t know.” His eyes flashed—anger, Tara realized, not directed at her but on her behalf.

  “That’s why you were asking if my parents were shifters,” she said. “But they’re not.”

  “Sometimes there are born shifters who never actually shift,” Chay said. “No one knows why. It’s rare, but then that person can have a child with the shifter genes who does shift. Or it will skip a second generation or even a third before coming out again.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone in my family who randomly turns into a man-eating panther,” Tara said firmly.

  “Hey, hey.” Chay raised his palms in a soothing motion. “No man-eating, okay? No one ate anyone. What happened was an accident, and it won’t happen again.”

  Tara took a slightly shaky breath. It had been no accident. She couldn’t lie to herself and pretend that it had been. She had wanted to kill Dr. Butros in that instant—or the panther had, and since she and the panther were one and the same, it hardly mattered.

  If it had been an accident, she wouldn’t be trapped in here now. Sure, the last time he left, Chay hadn’t actually physically locked the door. But she had no doubt that if she tried to leave, that would change. Because it wasn’t safe for her right now to be around anyone but another panther shifter.

  What if it never was again?

  “Okay, so if I wasn’t born this way, then how did it happen?” she asked, her mind shying away from her dark thoughts.

  Chay cocked his head to the side. He looked distinctly feline to her even in his human form, and she wondered if his panther-self influenced his human shape or if it was merely a coincidence. His almond eyes echoed those of the cat, though his were black instead of the yellow of the jaguar, and his angular features and high cheekbones only reinforced the impression.

  “You were exposed to shifter factor,” he said.

  “Exposed like...a cold?” she asked.

  Chay shook his head. “It has to be injected.”

  “Injected? How the hell could someone sneak up and inject me with something?” she demanded.

  “They couldn’t,” he said. “But they could include the factor in another shot. Or substitute it. Have you had any recent vaccinations?”

  She laughed. “I’m a college student, remember? And before that, I traveled the world. If there’s a vaccination, I’ve probably had it.”

  “Last one?” he prompted.

  She shook her head. “Flu shot at the end of September. At the student health center. But hundreds, maybe thousands of people probably got them there. And I’m the only one this happened to.”

  Chay’s face went perfectly still. “So far.”

  Tara shuddered, thinking of the line at the clinic when she’d gotten her shot. “They couldn’t—I mean, no one would try to turn hundreds of students into shifters. Would they?”

  Chay still had no expression, and Tara sensed that he was ticking through a list of people who might do just that. But what he said was, “If they were dosing half the student body of William and Mary, we’ll find out soon enough. In fact, since it’s nearly Halloween, I’d have expected to see more already. A lot more.”

  “But if they only dosed a few,” Tara supplied, “or just me ....”

  “Then we might not see anyone else shifting yet, or ever,” he finished.

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Precisely.”

  She looked down at his hands, resting lightly on his knees, and then at her smaller ones. “Why? Why would anyone want to turn me into...that? ”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “And that’s what worries me. Have you got any thoughts?” The question was light, almost as if it were a joke, but his eyes were shadowed.

  She just shook her head. “Why did you want to be a shifter? You said you signed up.”

  “I was young and stupid, it sounded like the most exciting thing I’d ever heard of in my life, and I thought I was invincible,” Chay said.

  “Maybe...maybe those people ran out of volunteers? So they infected me?”

  He laughed without humor. “The Army and the Navy run the only two legitimate shifter programs in the U.S., and neither of them is going to run out of volunteers anytime soon. Teenage boys are an infinite source of suckers. There’s a new batch every year.”

  “The Army doesn’t have shifters,” Tara objected. “No way.”

  She’d been an army brat until she was twelve. She’d have known if some of her father’s buddies had been able to change into deadly predators. Even they wouldn’t have been able to keep that sort of secret.

  “It does,” Chay said. “A couple of platoons within the Rangers. Omega Force, they’re called. And you’ve heard of SEAL Team Six?”

  Tara nodded.

  “Well, they haven’t been called that in decades. They’re DEVGRU now, but that same group has a secret squadron, the Indigo Squadron, that consists of shifters, too.”

  “Are they all panthers?” she asked. “Like you?”

  “Depends on the platoon. I chose panther. Others chose bear. There’s also a wolf platoon, for the traditionalists,” he said. “In some ways, we’re very much like the animals in our alternate forms. We
can see in the dark. We’re silent and fast. But shifter animal forms are as distinct from the actual animals they resemble as we are from humans when we’re in our human forms.”

  “Human forms?” Tara objected, rejecting his words. “This isn’t my human form. I am human. This is me!”

  In answer, Chay reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocket knife. Tara jerked away from him at the sight, the panther stirring within her in alarm.

  “Calm down, bae girl,” he said mildly. “Don’t get your tail in a wad. I’m not going to touch you.”

  He flicked the blade open, and as Tara’s stomach lurched, he put it against the flesh on the inside of his arm and drew the blade down, the skin opening up in a bright red line in its wake.

  Tara made a strangled sound halfway between horror and dismay. The smell of the blood hit her brain and jolted down into its lower reaches, into the layers of instinct. It didn’t arouse the panther but outraged it—it was his blood being spilled, his body being hurt.

  But almost as quickly as it had opened, the skin knit closed, leaving another thin scar behind it.

  “My human form,” he repeated, wiping the edge of the blade against his black pants before shoving it back into his pocket. “No matter what the shape, I’m a shifter. I have a shifter’s senses, better than a human’s, even better than a panther’s. I heal like no human or animal can. I have enormous endurance. I can run for fifty miles in either form, if need be. Real cats are sprinters. And true panthers are loners—all cats but lions are—but all shifters—” He broke off, his eyes flickering across her body in a way that made her feel naked all over again.

  “But shifters what?” Tara asked, already feeling the edge of a flush creeping up her face.

  “We pair up,” he said simply, looking at her with eyes so deep she thought she could see through them into her own soul.

  Pair up, she thought, feeling his mouth on hers again, his arms around her—

  With an effort, Tara pulled her gaze away. Pairing up aside, too much of what he said rang familiar to her. The thing about hearing too well, seeing too well .... She shook her head, trying to clear it even as a thousand memories flickered through her head, all the conversations people had thought she couldn’t hear, all the times someone had come into a room where she’d been quietly reading and flipped on the lights, exclaiming how impossibly dark it was.

  But no. This was new. She’d never turned into a panther before—not any more than she’d instantly healed from an injury.

  “I could see why the military would want shifters, then,” she said, changing the subject as much for self-protection as anything.

  Chay sat up straighter. “Most missions, we never even shifted. They wanted the endurance, the reflexes, the healing. Our animal forms were mostly just icing on the cake. An M-16 kills more efficiently than a jaguar in most circumstances, after all.”

  “Wasn’t there some other way to do it?” Tara asked. “To make you carry a monster in your head for the rest of your life...that’s crazy to me.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe once, a really long time ago. But those skills left with the pureblood elves. This generation can hardly begin to understand their technologies.”

  “Elves?” she echoed, lost. “Left?”

  Chay grinned again, that sudden, almost disconcerting flash of teeth. “You’ll have to ask Torrhanin about that directly, so you can be treated to him avoiding a coherent answer firsthand. For now, though, all I need you to understand is that you have to stop shifting like you did today.”

  “I couldn’t,” Tara said. “Stop, I mean. I tried, but it just kept coming.” Her bones seemed to shiver again with the memory of it, trying to thicken and stretch.

  “And that’s exactly what you can’t let happen.” His face was deadly serious. “No matter what, Tara. You can’t let it happen again.”

  “Or what?” she asked faintly.

  He hesitated, as if he were trying to decide what to tell her. “Or you may not be able to ever come back.”

  A sudden cold gripped Tara’s heart, and she nodded stiffly.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’ll just make this harder on you. I don’t know. But you have to stop.”

  “I’d never shift again if I could help it,” Tara said.

  He shook his head, the ends of his twists brushing his shoulders. “Not going to be possible. But you can—and you will—learn to control it.”

  “You said I can get out of here.” Tara heard the edge of panic in her voice and swallowed against it. She tried again. “You said I’d be able to leave.”

  “When you can control yourself,” Chay said.

  “But what if I can’t? What if I keep shifting when I don’t want to?”

  Chay stood up and looked down at her, his face drawn into light lines. “You can’t let that happen, Tara. You can’t.”

  She was starting to feel the stirrings of desperation again, and with them came the panther, trying to push through her skin. On impulse, she reached out and grabbed Chay’s hand, and as she took deep breaths, the feeling subsided.

  “Good,” Chay said, squeezing her hand. “I know you can do it.”

  She looked up into his face. “How many other people have you helped?”

  “Hundreds,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about, bae girl.”

  “And how many couldn’t you help?”

  His face closed. “A few. A very few.”

  “And how many could you help who were like me?” she pressed.

  He let out a little puff of air. “Bae girl, ain’t none of them been like you.”

  And with that, he dropped her hand and walked out.

  Chapter Ten

  Chay had left Tara’s quarters too quickly. He knew he had, but he couldn’t stay, not a moment longer. Going back into the room with her had been overwhelming in a way he hadn’t expected.

  Breaking off the kiss had apparently done nothing to convince the more distant reaches of his brain that an entanglement with the girl was a bad idea right now. If anything, it had put an edge on all his senses, until the mere smell of her was enough to drive the panther inside him wild.

  And that must be why he’d told her things that he’d no intention of explaining to her then—or perhaps ever. Stupid things. Dangerous things.

  He looked at the screen of his smart watch. Tara was still sitting on the bed, looking thoughtful rather than desperate. So she was safe—for now. He called up Cortana again and snapped out a series of orders to connect to Mrs. Olsen and drop her a message. Despite her age, the fox shifter would probably be the person best equipped to deal with Tara in her current state of mind.

  His watch beeped with an incoming connection just as he finished and started up the first staircase toward the green level where the spook shop lay. He allowed it through with a quick command.

  “I just finished seeing the most interesting video.” Annie Liu’s amused voice came over the tiny speakers in the watch.

  “I am not discussing this with you,” he said flatly.

  “Didn’t expect that you would, Beany baby,” she said. “Just calling to tell you that Ford’s hitting the hay and I’m on duty. But I have to say that it was interesting to see what it takes to make the ice king melt. Perhaps I should have been a little more pitiful. Maybe you would have been more interested in me.”

  Chay snorted. “I made the mistake of sleeping with the first fox shifter we rescued from some stupid mess of her own making. And you might have heard how that turned out.”

  Katsumi Sano had managed to cause such problems among his team and the other residents of Black Mesa that he’d finally had to bar her from the installation. She’d left still pouting prettily and protesting her innocence even as she managed to provoke a quarrel between a bear shifter and his cull brother that had ended in blows.

  “You know I’m not like that,” she protested.

  “No, you’re not,” Chay agreed, reaching the
top of the stairs and pushing through the fire door and into the corridor. “You’re twice as smart, which means ten times as much trouble.”

  “That’s just prejudice,” she protested. “And stereotyping.”

  “I know you, Annie,” Chay said flatly. “Is that really the only reason you called?”

  “Oh, yeah. Torrhanin wants to see you ‘at your convenience.’” She captured the elf’s tone, somehow both differential and condescending, perfectly.

  “Right,” Chay muttered, changing direction abruptly to dodge down a side corridor. He well knew that Annie must have been tracing his progress through the complex, waiting to tell him until he was at the very last turn toward the elven lab before he reached the spook shop. It suited her sense of humor. “I’ll see you later, then.”

  “Sure thing, boss-man,” she said lightly before killing the connection.

  He reached the outer door to the elves’ lab in another two minutes, the one with the word NARNIA stenciled across it in large letters in the orange paint of that level.

  It slid open silently at his arrival. It was the only section of the complex that was not a part of Chay’s computer system, and the thought of something so important being outside his control still made him uneasy. For that matter, elves made him uneasy, even Torrhanin. They were tied inextricably to the history of shifters—both the good and the bad parts—and they’d more than earned their reputation for treacherous dealings.

  But autonomy had been a condition of Torrhanin’s relocation to Black Mesa, so Chay had swallowed both his fears and his pride and had allowed it in return for what the elf had offered him. The truth was, he couldn’t work even half the elven technology he’d seen, much less understand it. The interfaces were made for other elves, though Torrhanin said he was developing some sort of mind-net for Chay’s use. Whatever that meant.

  Chay walked down the narrow corridor that formed the buffer between Torrhanin’s lab and the rest of the installation. It was a brilliant white from the ceiling to the subtly curved walls to the floor, not a sharp corner to be seen anywhere. The walls and floor and ceiling were all made of the same stuff, seamless, the room’s light coming from it in a diffuse glow.