by Nara Malone
And then that flutter in her stomach again. A name came to mind. “Jake?”
That froze the pair of them. “H-How?” Maya stammered.
Jake put a hand over her mouth.
Allie didn’t have time to be afraid, to worry she was losing her mind. All that had to wait until they were out of this place. The walls seemed to breathe doom and they were closing in.
“Jake, this is Marcus. You know that, don’t you? He’s a hybrid of some kind. Of course you know. So are you.”
Maya answered, “Marcus isn’t a leopard, Allie. That’s not him.”
Allie turned her back to them. “I’m not going to argue about this. Help me or not.” She dropped back beside Marcus, her voice tight on a knot of emotion. “He’s so still, barely breathing.”
“By the Mother, I swear the council knew what they were doing when they banned females from leaving Pantheria,” Jake grumbled. “Maya, watch the door. Marcus didn’t used to be a leopard, but little Marisa might have permanently damaged him in some way when she shifted him.”
Maya had her head out the door, but she withdrew it and turned around. “Marisa what? The baby shifted him?”
Jake was beside Allie in two strides. He lifted the cat in his arms. “This is Marcus. Even knocked out he emanates arrogance. Let’s get out of here.”
Jake swung Marcus over his shoulders and led the way. Maya and Allie followed.
They were halfway across the warehouse when the elevator doors opened and someone shouted, “Stop!” Jake sprinted forward and hit the button to raise the garage door. A van materialized in the parking lot. Maya was lagging behind them, her yelp spun Allie around in time to see Maya go down, a tranquilizer dart embedded in her left leg. She was reaching to pull it out, but Allie knew whoever was shooting would have another in her in seconds, enough drug to possibly kill her if he’d loaded the gun with the same dose they’d used on Marcus. Rage and frustration roiled, a pot coming to boil and energy churned the air around her. She could feel the change coming and for once she recognized it for what it was, only she didn’t know how to manage it.
Let it happen. Marcus’ thoughts drilled through hers. Just let it take you up off this plane and stay on the next. Allie let pain push her over the edge, carry her into darkness. Her energy rearranged and she fell, tumbling head over tail, bursting back into the world of light and sensation.
The shock of Allie’s landing sent the guard skidding into the wall behind him. Beneath her Maya curled into a ball with her arms shielding her head. Outside Jake could only run for the van with Marcus and count on the shock of seeing Allie shift to buy them some time before the guard started shooting again. Carlos was at the wheel.
“If this gets much worse. Get him out of here.”
Back at the warehouse Ben and Atka hung back just outside the door. Jake warned them back.
Easy, boys. I don’t think she knew she could do that. We got a newly shifted female and the sensory stimulation has to be driving her out of her mind.
Ben looked back at him. Where did you find a female leopard shifter? Did the humans create her?
Let’s just get out of here alive and collect details later, bro.
Allie was crouched over Maya. Maya was still conscious. He saw her rub Allie’s belly. Jake wasn’t sure how much longer Maya had before the drugs immobilized her.
Maya, see if you can get on her back. Quick, baby. Just take a chance. I don’t think she’ll hurt you.
Allie’s tail snapped back and forth like a whip. She sent a deep-throated growl at the guard. He still looked too frightened to breathe.
Maya managed to get her arms around Allie’s neck and tried swinging up on the leopard’s back. She wouldn’t have made it if Allie hadn’t lowered her belly to the floor to let Maya crawl on. Allie turned in a circle, snarling at everyone. Maya was still hanging on. Jake called to her telepathically. Reassured her all would be fine. Atka and Ben joined in. It seemed to agitate her more. She whirled and charged toward the door.
The guard was on his knees aiming the rifle again.
Ben leapt and snatched Maya from Allie’s back. A dart whizzed past his head. Jake decided his only hope of saving Allie was to try catching her. This was going to be about as much fun as throwing himself in a paper shredder.
She wheeled and lunged for Ben, Jake grabbed her. As expected, her claws sliced into his thick Yeti hide as if it were paper. He hugged her to his chest and ran, making the van in three long strides, Ben scooting in ahead of him and Atka diving through the front door into the passenger seat.
The van was rolling before he was all the way in. Jake dropped Allie on the floor and grabbed hold of the seat, picking up pavement rash on one shaggy foot before he managed to pull himself all the way in and slam the door. Atka was hanging half out. Ben dropped Maya and helped him in. The door swung, caught a light pole and shut as Carlos laid into the accelerator.
“We have light shields,” Carlos said. “Everyone can breathe easy.”
Allie’s menacing growl suggested otherwise.
* * * * *
Jake pulled up in front of Allie’s apartment. For the hundredth time he caught himself before he automatically touched minds. He never noticed how much he relied on telepathy until he didn’t have it. How was he going to have a private conversation with Seth without drawing attention from Franny and Lila? Even mind touching that occurred more than a mile away could send Allie into a frenzy. In a brief flash of consciousness, Marcus had warned Jake she wasn’t integrated enough with her animal form to comprehend speech. Until she had spent enough time in her true form, it was possible that all her senses were hammering a brain unused to the onslaught, it was probable that magnified senses of her leopard form were painfully overwhelming. It was obvious that communication, especially telepathy, caused extreme pain. She acted as if they were blasting commands at her through a bullhorn pressed to her ear.
Until they found a way to shift her back or communicate with her, Allie wouldn’t let them near Marcus or Maya.
Shadows played across the blind covering Allie’s window, their shapes and sizes unique enough that he could tell the occupants apart by their shadows. Lobos the same height as Lila but broader built and lacking her grace. His gestures and actions, frantic. Seth towering above them all, a large black shadow toward the back corner, near the sink. Lila and Franny moved between the men, swallowed momentarily by Seth’s shadow and then remerging on the other side.
Jake moved closer, scuffing his feet lightly on the cracked sidewalk, contemplating how best to gain Seth’s attention, but the sound seemed to do the trick. Seth straightened, weaving between the others to get to the door. Jake shuffled his feet again, a little louder, then stamped the right foot three times. He felt silly. This was like sending smoke signals instead of a text.
Seth was tangled with a dance of bodies now. The shoebox apartment was over capacity with four adults. Lila stepped up onto the desk and Franny moved over onto the bed so Seth could get by. The front door opened and Seth stepped out, ducking under the low doorframe.
A light breeze carried scents of porcine blood, human females and Pantherian anxiety. Those Jake recognized. Something else raised hair on the back of his neck. Someone else. Jake surveyed their surroundings, on alert for a shape that didn’t quite belong.
Again Jake wished for telepathy to warn Seth. Upwind he might not catch the same scent that had warned Jake, but Jake noted a shift in stride, the slightest hitch and tilt of head that signaled something had alerted Seth too.
Threat confirmed. Now how to remove it fast? He had Allie in a van back at the shop, threatening to shred anyone who came near Marcus or Maya. He didn’t know how long he had before one of the tenants in apartments above the shops on either side of his might notice the activity in his backyard. How long before someone spotted the leopard in the van.
“Trouble?” Seth asked as he joined Jake. But his eyes cut quickly away to the left, a signal of where he thought trouble la
y.
Jake went along. “We need to maintain inner silence, which is always troublesome. But trouble of the external variety? I guess that depends on your definition.”
Seth ducked his head and murmured, “I’d say trouble is more problems than there are people to solve them. Let’s just say I draw a line in the sand. How many problems do you have on your side, Jake?”
“Two. One large and threatening, the other much smaller, distant, the sort that lingers at the edge of your awareness, a nagging little voice.”
“Well, I win. I have three. I think all three fall into the major problem category. Especially when you toss a few firearms into the mix.”
The air vibrated tension and Jake wanted badly to scan minds, but memory of the underlying vibrato in Allie’s anguished screams wouldn’t let him risk it.
The yard was quiet. A bad sign. Too many predators lurked in this yard. Small night creatures watched, waited for the coming confrontation. Who would blink first?
Behind him, a slight shifting in the air, the sensation of a snake uncoiling crept up Jake’s spine. Their smallest problem had decided to move in.
Jake started to turn his head, but Seth signaled him to hold with the slightest shift of his own. “Sometimes you just need to get a closer look at what you’re up against.”
“That’s right, cowboy.” The voice had a hard edge, a nasal accent, rather than the local Southern drawl Jake had grown accustomed to. “Hands away from your sides. Both of you.”
Around them shadows shifted as four other men closed in. Not too many problems to take on, but if there was an easy way out, something quick, Jake was willing to wait. A fight would bring the women running.
“So what am I up against?” Seth asked.
“You’re up against me, cowboy. What the fuck you doing in my girl’s apartment?”
His girl? Jake couldn’t picture it. The guy was maybe an inch shorter than Allie, his hair slicked back and gleaming like dark oil. He had pointy, ratlike features. There was nothing about him, except that he dressed all in black, that suggested a connection to Allie. Jake wrote off relative. If not a relative then what? The gun in his hand, no bigger than a deck of cards, gleamed silver in the faint light cast by street lamps.
“I’m her lawyer,” Seth said.
“Why does she need a lawyer? And what about the rest of the gang in there, they paralegals?”
“You’ll have to ask her why she needs me. As for the rest, some friends of hers, helping to take care of a sick pet until Allie gets back.”
“I would ask her, but she hasn’t come home. Crowded in there tonight. She hates crowds.”
Jake glanced at the blind, the shadows moving back and forth. The birthing had them so focused they remained oblivious to the tension in the yard.
Seth didn’t reply.
“What do you mean, your girl?” Jake asked.
“I’m asking the questions, hoss. Why does it matter what I call her? You hang around here too much.” The barrel of the gun changed angles from pointing at Seth’s chest to pointing at his. “If you were thinking of making her yours, forget it or die.”
That wasn’t a place Jake wanted his thoughts to go, Allie as his. They went there anyway. He wanted to crush the little rat’s skull with one hand.
“Name’s Jake,” he said, letting hostility drip from each syllable.
Seth shifted and drew attention back to him.
“You’d be smart to hold still, cowboy. Smarter still if one of you told me where my daughter is.”
“Daughter?” They both said it together.
“You can’t…” Jake trailed off. Marcus had warned him Allie’s father was trouble. All they knew about him was his first name, which made it hard to track him down. No way was this guy a shifter. Okay, so he didn’t know every member of every tribe. But a guy this protective of his daughter would not let her live alone among humans.
“What trouble is she in? Why does she need a lawyer?” He was training the gun on Seth again, but Jake knew there were other guns in other hands. He could smell the scent of gunpowder lingering on one of them, evidence they didn’t hesitate to use them.
“It’d be easier to show you than explain,” Jake said. “And if you’re really her father, you’ll know why it’s best not to bring your friends along.”
Something flashed in the guy’s eyes. Jake knew in his gut the guy knew. He understood exactly what kind of trouble Allie was in. Jake’s hope that the claim of daughter was either lie or mistake was crushed.
“Tell me what she’s done,” he said. He looked away from Jake just long enough to spit at Seth’s feet. If he was trying to rile Seth, he’d have to work a lot harder.
Seth was looking at Jake, waiting see just how close to the truth Jake would take it.
“It’s not so much what she’s done, Mr…”
“Say it or die, fucker.”
The corner of one of Seth’s lips quirked up just a hair, he raised an eyebrow. He didn’t need telepathy to know what Seth was thinking. It’d be something like, why don’t you tell him your name again. Jake wasn’t going to rile easy either. He couldn’t afford to let Seth or Eddie get to him. “It’s not what she’s done. It’s more like who she is. Or what.”
Eddie underwent an instant attitude adjustment. He slipped his gun in his pocket. “Head, we’re going for a ride. I’m not back in an hour, see to it the friends inside are sorry about that.”
Head, three times the size of his boss, but not as big as Jake or Seth, nodded and consented with a grunt. His eyes spit hatred.
“We can take my car,” Allie’s father said, waving Jake and Seth to the backseat of his Cadillac. The scent of a little pine tree air freshener was overpowering, but it didn’t quite cover the scent of fear-laced sweat, the kind of scent that permeated the air around a man about to die. The back doors were like the ones in police cruisers—they didn’t open from the inside. Bullet-proof glass separated the front and the backseats. The Cadillac was the cliché of a mobster mobile, right down to the sliding window, which Allie’s father opened when he joined the driver in the front seat.
“Let’s have some directions, hoss. The faster we get there and back the happier your friends will be.”
Chapter Fourteen
Allie was holed up in the back corner of the van. Ben had positioned himself close enough to the door to keep an eye on her, but far enough back that she tolerated him.
Was it the right choice to bring Eddie here? Jake had never felt so isolated. The weight of the responsibilities dumped suddenly on him made it hard to think, to breathe. He wanted the woods, solitude, a long run and a lot of howling. He was certain Allie wanted the same things. Well, not howling.
He wished he could touch her mind, but it had been pretty obvious at the warehouse that touching her mind caused her pain. He wished he could raise Marcus, or simply ask Ean or Adam how they had managed their mate the first time she shifted. How had they eased her into managing a body so foreign to the human form she was accustomed to? Allie must have had at least some exposure to her beast side if Eddie understood the hint Jake had dropped. Why was she so disconnected from this half of herself?
Jake headed for the van with Eddie trailing until Eddie’s imitation of the soft chirr a mother cat used to call kittens toward a cub had Jake swinging ’round to stare. Eddie passed him up and closed in before Jake could warn him back.
A sleek female snow leopard filled the doorway, her green eyes the one giveaway she was not your typical snow leopard. Her fur glistened, her tail rose to full mast, twitching.
Eddie froze. “What’s this shit?”
At the sound of Eddie’s voice Allie sat, tipped her head. She mewed, a soft, questioning sound.
Eddie went still, squinted in the darkness. “Kitten? That you?”
Allie mewed again.
“Holy shit. What’d you do to her?”
Jake wasn’t sure how to proceed. The guy wasn’t acting like a shifter. Yet there were el
ements of behavior suggesting that he knew something. Jake looked at Seth, who shrugged. It would be easier if so many lives didn’t depend on the decisions he had to make. Jake was quite happy being the leader’s loyal assistant. He’d never had the slightest aspiration to carry the weight Marcus willingly shouldered to protect the Pantherians. Jake decided to say as little as possible, see what might be revealed. “What do you mean?”
She acts like she knows me, but— Last time she did this she was a kid, a kitten.”
“Kittens grow up,” Jake said.
“Not into that,” Eddie said. “Why would you think that’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know if this is your daughter. This is the woman who lives in the apartment you insisted belonged to your daughter. I saw her turn herself into this.”
“Yeah, so how come you didn’t piss yourself on the spot? How come you act like this is an everyday thing?” Eddie’s voice rose, fear gave it a quivery quality.
“She acts like she knows you, bud. Could we get her out of the van and inside before someone notices all the activity out here and calls the cops?”
“Too late,” Seth said, pointing a finger at a window in the building next door, the curtain shifted and fell back into place.
“Shit,” Eddie said again. “You got something red, a blanket, a towel? When she was little I used to lay one out. She’d come to me, lie down on it, and turn back into herself.”
Jake looked at Seth. “I got a red plaid jacket on a hook in back of the shop.”
Seth bowed to Jake’s taking charge of the situation without batting an eye. He was gone, covering the ground in long strides, breaking into a run as soon as he was out of Allie’s line of sight.
“Kitten?” Eddie asked again, inching closer. “Where you been, baby girl?” He squatted on the ground a yard from her. The guy had balls. Jake gave him that. Allie could be on him in one leap. He knew what he was about too, making himself smaller by crouching. Less threatening.
