by Karin Shah
Roan closed his eyes and sank onto his couch. “I just . . . everything hurts, and everything sets me off.”
Lu draped her arms against the plastic and particle board covered burners behind her. “I’ve been thinking.”
Weeks ago, he might have said, “Don’t hurt yourself.” But he was too far gone to joke.
She licked her lips and continued, “I think your anger issues are caused by whatever was done to you. We know what city you woke up in. With that information, we can search for clues about who did this to you and what we can do to stop it progressing.”
Roan stared at Lu. “But what if whoever did this comes looking?”
Lu cracked her knuckles. “I’m a good enough hacker to spoof our IP address, and I’ll make sure I don’t give any details.”
A spurt of hope warmed his chest. What did he really have to lose? “It’s better than just waiting to go off the deep end.”
Lu grinned and rubbed her hands together. A dimple winked in her cheek. “Besides, we’ve seen what you can do. If whoever kidnapped you does find you, they’d better watch their six.”
~ ~ ~
Later that evening, Thalia stared at her computer screen, afraid she was imagining the words floating in front of her eyes. “Holy shit!”
Her husband and mate, Gideon Damek, had been upstairs putting the kids to bed, but spoke directly to her mind. What’s wrong?
The next second, he appeared next to her, looming over her chair. She shoved at his arm. “Stupid vampire hearing and speed! Everything is fine. Go back to reading.” Their daughter had a tendency to get wound up. If her bedtime routine were interrupted, it was almost impossible to get her to sleep.
“M is asleep. I just wanted to finish the chapter.”
“Oh, okay.”
Gideon smiled in that way that still made her heart skitter. “You going to tell me what’s got you so excited?”
She bit her lip, almost afraid if she shared the news it would turn out to be another dead end. “I just got an alert on some of the search terms I put in to help find Caleb and Roan.”
Gideon crouched to look at the screen, his ebony gaze skimming the text and then returning to her face. “Holy shit!”
~ ~ ~
Hank Holcomb sipped his coffee, then yanked the mug away before he could burn his lip even more. Shit. He’d forgotten he was waiting for the boiling liquid to cool. The cause of his distraction? The message he’d found a few seconds ago. The fruit of his labor for the now-defunct Kincaid group had finally peeked its head out from hiding—metaphorically speaking.
The collapse of the Kincaid group had led to the discrediting of the scientists who’d worked there. The only job he’d been able to get since was as a lowly lab drone.
If he could find his former subject, he could kiss filling endless rows of pipettes with the DNA of curious idiots for a pitiful thirty thou a year goodbye.
Subject B was worth millions. He’d never agreed with the decision to cut it loose.
He studied the short posting on the screen.
Username: F1amab13
“Searching for information about or others with the following symptoms: progressive symmetrical outgrowth of bone, increased strength, scaly appearance to skin, extreme height, eye-color change and elongation of the pupils, and increasing volatility of mood, partially in the area of anger.”
If Subject B was still alive, it was possible it exhibited some or all of these symptoms.
Holcomb rubbed his hands together. Now, all he had to do was find it.
Chapter 9
“I didn’t want to distract you during rehearsal, but I got a response from the posting we made.” Lu patted her slick neck with a snowy white towel as she spoke.
Roan had been mopping his face with his T-shirt and paused with sweat still clinging to one side. “You did? Damn, that was fast.” Excitement wrestled with pragmatism. They’d only posted yesterday. Was it possible they’d gotten an answer this quickly? It seemed too good to be true.
She nodded, her eyes big. “Come on.”
He let her haul him to her trailer, a tiny battered airstream. There was only room for one chair in front of her laptop, and she crammed him into it.
The screen displayed the bare geometric bones of a generic gray and white message board. The black, unadorned text seemed to swim in front of his eyes.
He wiped his palms down his shirt and leaned closer.
Username: That5W1tch2U “I might be able to help you. There may be actors with bad intentions monitoring the Internet. Continue to obscure location and don’t give any details that could reveal identity.”
Lu placed a hand on his shoulder, drawing his focus. She rolled her eyes. “Duh. We kind of figured someone could be looking for you.”
Roan sliced an impatient look her way and returned to the posting. “1. Does patient exhibit resistance to flame? 2. Do growths have the glossy appearance of bone or shell? 3. How long have symptoms persisted?”
Roan quickly typed an answer to each question and rocked back in the flimsy chair when a new message popped up immediately.
Username: That5W1tch2U “This may come as a shock and I don’t know whether you’ll even believe me, but what you have isn’t a medical condition. It’s magic.”
Roan found Lu’s eyes. Her face was pulled tight in disbelief, an expression that should be echoed on his own features, but somehow, he couldn’t dredge up the automatic rejection she seemed to find so easy.
Her eyes grew wide as she took in his reaction. “What? Are you saying you actually believe in magic?”
He shook his head. “Whoever that is.” He gestured at the screen. “They’re not wrong. I should have burned the other day. That’s not normal. Everything burns.”
Lu’s forehead pleated. “You said we put it out fast enough.”
Roan glanced over his shoulder and tilted his head, lifting his eyebrows. “And if I’d told you I can’t be burned, Señora Flores might have gotten wind of it. She’d want to make a spectacle out of my ability, and whoever kidnapped me might find me again. I don’t remember much about my captivity, but I remember the pain. I’m in no hurry to be their guinea pig again.”
“But if this”—Lu showcased his whole body with her hand like a game show model—“is the result of magic, why would someone need a guinea pig? If they did this to you, couldn’t they do it to anyone?”
Roan shrugged. “Good point. Let’s see what That5W1tch2U has to say.”
Their mysterious contact responded as quickly as before.
“You’re a chimera.” They elaborated further, explaining chimeras’ triple nature and mentioning it was possible to get stuck between forms.
“Shapeshifting? Dragons?” Lu asked. “Lions? Come on!”
But some inner sense rejected her incredulity. The information rang true. It felt right.
Just as relief settled into his joints, the person on the other side of the curtain knocked all his calm away. “Chimeras must find and accept their mate around age thirty or they’ll go feral. That is, they succumb to their wild natures. They become stuck in either their dragon form or their lion form, losing their human mind. A feral chimera is indistinguishable from an animal.”
The words raised the tiny hairs on his nape and made his pulse gallop. His fingertips panged as if shards of glass pressed through the skin. He didn’t have a mate and looking like this how could he find one?
Liar. His inner voice interrupted his incipient panic. You have a mate. You recognized her the other day when Sven was dragging her around.
He reeled in his seat. As crazy as it seemed, he had thought that.
He shook his head, his hand trembling as he typed. “How will I recognize my mate?”
“You’ll feel it. A chimera
always knows.”
His gaze flicked over the earlier post. Meet and accept. He’d met Sofia and every second he thought about her he was more certain she was his mate, but meeting her hadn’t slowed his progression into—what? A dragon?
In fact, if he thought back, his new additions, and the growing protuberance of his cheekbones, had started after she’d arrived. His unstable temper had only worsened since she’d been present, as well.
His fingers shook on the keys and he had to backspace over several typos. “What exactly does accept mean?”
This time, the answer took a couple minutes before it appeared. “You must accept each other in the most intimate way possible. You have to have sex.”
Lu chuffed. “Wow! Even if I believed this, where are you going to find a mate? You’re not exactly a playboy.”
Roan rocked back in the chair hard enough that the metal groaned precipitously. “I’ve met my mate.”
Lu stared at him. “You did? Who is it?”
He released the painful breath stretching his lungs. “Sofia.”
Lu grasped her head in both hands. “Oh, man! Are you sure?”
He nodded.
She screwed her lips together. “Damn!” She grimaced, her face almost comically regretful. She scratched her protruding collar bone. “After the other night, I’m pretty sure she hates you.”
Lu considered him for a moment, then reached into her fridge, something she could do from almost anywhere in the compact trailer. Glass clinked inside for a minute and then she brandished a chilled bottle of Stolichnaya. “I was saving this for a special occasion, but if we’re going to think of a way to get Sofia to fall for you, we’re going to need all the lubrication we can get.”
~ ~ ~
Sofia scanned the parking lot and flicked her hair over her shoulder to cover her nape, scrubbing away the odd sensation of foreboding she’d been unable to shake since she’d awakened that morning.
The bench risers had finally shown up. She smothered a yawn. They might be on an earlier schedule than when they were in operation, but the performers still liked to stay up late and they weren’t exactly quiet.
She nodded at the trucker, a stocky older woman, with graying curls poking out from under a grungy baseball cap, and finished scrawling her signature with the stylus.
The feeling lingered despite the mundane surroundings, and she squinted into the slanted morning sun as if she might sight a predator overhead, then faked a polite smile to the truck driver.
The risers had arrived on a big rig. The eighteen-wheeler exhaled a ton of chemical-smelling exhaust into the cool air, surrounding her in a cloud. She resisted the urge to wave her hand in front of her face. “You might as well turn off the engine. We weren’t expecting you this early. It’s going to take a few minutes to gather a crew to unload.”
The woman jerked her chin and swiped at her nose with her knuckles. “Can’t be helped. I’ll wait in my cab.”
Not wanting to keep her from getting back on the road, Sofia jogged into the campground and began banging on roustabouts’ doors. A few minutes later, a couple grumbling men and Sue stood before her.
A few roustabouts were missing. “Where is everybody else?”
A rangy cowboy type they’d picked up in Gainesville cleaned his ear canal with the nail of his pinky finger. “They went into town last night and they’re not back.”
Awesome. Sofia looked for patience in the blue, cloud-streaked sky. Such was the nature of a carnival, people came and went. It was possible the men would be back soon, but she couldn’t hold the trucker indefinitely.
She could go get Slim, but he wasn’t as strong as he used to be.
She sighed. With this little help, there was only one man in the sideshow strong enough to get the aluminum risers unloaded.
Roan.
She closed her eyes for a minute and shook her head, her heart doing an odd little jig. She hadn’t spoken to him since she’d almost fired him.
Should have fired him. His temper had had people scrambling out of his path even before he’d manhandled Sven hard enough to draw blood.
No. It was better to stay away from him. She woke up Slim and a few of the stronger performers for good measure, including Sven. He’d been on his best behavior since the ruckus at the party.
Slim quickly got his crew in position and eventually the six stacks of risers were safely on the irregular surface of the parking lot.
The trucker slammed and latched the heavy rear doors and pulled out.
Before the crew could begin moving the risers into the storage trailer, several pickups loaded with men fishtailed into the lot where she and her people stood, spewing gravel and dirt. Dust sifted down as brakes screeched and the trucks came to a stop.
Chapter 10
Shit. Sofia’s pulse thrummed in her head. Her throat was too dry to swallow the sudden knot inside. Was this the cause of her unease? She almost snorted. She’d never been particularly prescient before or her love life would have been a lot less abysmal. Still, this couldn’t be good.
Men jumped down from the beds of the trucks and doors clicked and slammed as more exited the cabs.
They turned back to the closest truck and tugged three heavy bundles from the bed. No, not bundles, damn it. The three missing roustabouts. They were dumped on the ground. They looked the worse for wear but, thankfully, they were moving.
An enormous man with a steel-gray crew cut and a neck seared raw by years of sun advanced on her. The other men followed as if they were backup.
The man, who appeared to be in charge, spat at her feet. “These . . . boys belong to you?”
Sofia smothered the angry words she would like to respond with. “They work for this outfit. Yes.”
“Well, keep ‘em away from our women.”
Sofia searched for the words that would placate the irate and possibly still inebriated townies, but she hadn’t counted on Sue’s temper.
She stalked forward and stuck her work-roughened finger in the man’s face. Sue was not small herself, perhaps six feet, and not much younger than the man confronting Sofia. A former nurse, she’d fallen on hard times when medicine prescribed for surgery pain dried up and she’d turned to heroin.
She’d been with the carnival as a roustabout since she gotten clean about four years earlier. “We got as much right to blow off steam as anyone. If you can’t keep your women away from us, it’s no fault of ours!”
Sue’s approach had distracted Sofia, and as Sue finished speaking, Sofia realized the other roustabouts had come up behind her.
Still, the angry townies outnumbered her people two to one.
Sofia raised her hands to calm the situation, but a townie threw a punch and it was on.
Sofia didn’t even have time to laugh at the absurdity of a dustup at seven a.m. in the morning, a large fist flew in her direction and she jumped back.
She thought about calling the police, but chances were in this small town, all that would do was get her and her people thrown in jail.
Sue was giving the beefy leader a run for his money, but otherwise the townies’ superior numbers had them fighting a losing battle. A lanky, but muscular, acne-spotted youth who looked enough like the ringleader to be his son, vaulted toward her. Pinned against the plastic-wrapped piles of risers, Sofia had no choice but to try to push past the kid.
Her hands impacted firmly on his sternum, and he reeled back. She would have been in the clear, but the loop of her sneaker lace caught on an exposed riser edge.
She stumbled, and he pounced. His rough hands closed around her wrists. She attempted to lift her knee, but she couldn’t get enough force and speed with the riser behind her.
She shot her arms forward, forcing his fingers up to the wider part of her forearms, breaking h
is grip, and feinted for his genitals a second time, using his focus on protecting his family jewels to jam her palm heel against his nose. The impact stung her hand. He howled and jerked away, blood spurting from his nose, and she shoved him back again, but her lace was still caught and she had to stoop to extricate it.
He grabbed for her again, this time burying his hand in her hair, sending shafts of pain shooting down from the roots. Tears lanced her vision.
He forced her to her knees. The gravel bit through her jeans. She scanned the parking lot for help, but those who weren’t down traded blows with the remaining townies. Her heart rate zoomed into the stratosphere. She had to break free.
Suddenly, a roar she recognized reverberated through the campground.
Roan! Her breath caught in her throat.
She couldn’t see him because of her position, but he was coming. Some part of her relaxed and almost preened. This guy was going to be sorry.
Roan leaped—leaped—over the barricade of the risers, as if they were no higher than his knee instead of shoulder height, and landed beside Sofia and the townie who held her.
The youth whitened beneath his sunburn.
Roan growled. His teeth gleamed fang-like in the morning light. She thought she saw the pointed edges, but that must be a fear-induced illusion. The younger man whipped his hand away from Sofia as if burned. He took a step back, fumbling under his T-shirt hem.
Roan’s roar and his feat of supernatural agility had drawn the attention of all the combatants, but he had eyes only for her.
He clutched her shoulders gently, hauling her to her feet. “Are you okay?” His voice sounded shredded. She found herself lost in his eyes for a second.
How could she have thought he looked alien a few weeks ago? In that moment, she didn’t see the inhuman scales, features, and eyes. The concerned expression folding his features seemed all too human. A current coursed from the warm touch of his hands on her shoulders down to her stomach. Her hand almost lifted to his cheek to reassure him, but she stuffed it in her pocket.
