Out of the DarknessTaken by the Panther – Book 1

by V. M. Black

Aethereal BondsAetherealBonds.com

Swift River Media GroupWashington, D.C.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 V. M. BlackAll Rights ReservedNo part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

Book Description

Curvy Tara Morland has always known there was something different about her, but she never knew why. Then one day, the panther took over her mind and transformed her body, and her world was forever broken.

Former SEAL and panther shifter Chay “Beane” Bane has made a career of rescuing other shifters in difficult situations, secreting them in his vast compound far from the prying eyes of the government. But when rescues her from a military facility, he isn’t prepared for what he finds. Tara is twenty-four years old, older than any natural-born panther shifter should be.

But to find answers, Tara will have to learn to control the beast within herself. And Chay must grapple with discovering what he thought he’d never have.

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Taken by the Panther (100 to 200-page novellas)Start with Out of the Darkness

Chapter One

“Miss Morland,” the professor called, looking down at his seating chart. “Miss Morland,” he repeated, “you seem to be having quite the lively conversation. It must be about the topic at hand, so please explain to the class the significance of the Glorious Revolution on British Parliamentary history.”

Tara jerked her eyes to the front, processing what Dr. Butros had just said. The chairs of the lecture hall rose up in ranks around him so that Tara, at the top of the hall, was treated to a view of his shiny scalp through his thinning hair as he bent over the roster.

She’d done her reading the night before, but this morning, it was like nothing had stuck to her brain. She cleared her throat, looking at Sylvie, as if the answer were written on her friend’s forehead. But all she could remember were the words she’d just said.

I feel kind of funny. Like something’s not right. Sylvie had replied, Do you think you need to go to the health center?And Tara had said, No, I just feel kind of funny. Like something’s not right. Or

maybe…like it is, or it’s going to be and it isn’t yet .…And then the professor’s voice had cut through their whispered conversation,

stridently calling her name as he asked a question about the Glorious Revolution.“Please stand up, Miss Morland,” Dr. Butros said. “Class rules, yes?”Slowly, Tara stood, feeling every eye in the lecture hall on her and hating the

crazy professor and his crazy rules. What kind of college course had a seating chart, anyway? She looked down the tiers of seats, all the other students’ faces turned up to look at her. She opened her mouth.

“The Glorious Revolution.”She stopped. She’d just been telling Sylvie how she felt. Kind of funny, she’d

said. Yes, that’s exactly what she’d said. Not sick, exactly, but like she was looking at the world through a water glass or maybe through someone else’s eyes. Now her own voice sounded strange to her, hollow and distant. And the other students just stared, a girl tittering down near the front.

“The Glor-i-ous Re-vo-lu-tion,” she said again. The words slurred and tangled.“Yes, Miss Morland, the Glorious Revolution,” the professor said impatiently.

“Now, Miss Morland, if you please.”Dr. Butros seemed suddenly very far away and very close all at once. A student

dropped a pencil near her, and the clatter sounded like a gunshot.Revolution. Revolution.

“The Revolution,” she said. Her head was swimming, and she raised her hands to her cheeks as her face flushed hot, then cold. Her hands didn’t feel right. Under her skin, they didn’t feel like they belonged to her. The bones—they were changing, even under her fingertips as her muscles slid across them. She felt them growing broad and heavy, and she jerked her hands away and hunched her shoulders—no, her shoulders weren’t hunching, they were moving forward as her chest deepened. She held out her hands and watched her fingers shrink back toward her palms as hair, thick and black, sprouted from the backs of her hands.

From somewhere, she heard shouts and a high-pitched keening noise that she realized was coming from her own throat. She realized then that it wasn’t hair growing from her skin, it was fur, and her hips shifted under her weight, dropping her forward onto her hands. She tried to reach out for Sylvie for help, but her friend was screaming, screaming, and the hand that Tara extended ended in claws, and the sound coming from her mouth was a hideous yowl as her throat stretched and changed. Her clothes were so tight she thought her bones would break—and then they were gone, torn, falling from her sleek black body in shreds.

All around, people were running, scrambling up and down the tiers of desks and pouring toward the exits. Tara wanted to escape, too, escape this terrible thing that was happening to her. She gave a mighty push with her back legs, and she felt her new claws catch against the carpet. She flung herself down the tiers of the lecture hall, toward Dr. Butros, who stood motionless with one hand on his laptop and his eyes bulging out. He was in charge—he could help, some lingering part of Tara’s brain thought. He had to help. That was his job.

But he smelled like fear, like fear and sweat and the animal smell that was meat, and as she flew toward him, her thoughts became garbled in the assault of his scents.

She was bounding over the tables now, down toward the front of the hall. She had no attention for the screaming students, not even when one of her leaps clipped one of them and slammed his body too hard against his desk.

“Help me!” she cried, but from her throat came only a hideous yowl. “Help me!”

She was at the front of the hall now, Dr. Butros still frozen mere feet away. Tara grabbed for him.

“What’s happening to me?”But her scrabbling hands were now unsheathed claws, and she slashed him

across the chest, tearing down through fat and muscle so that his sudden screams joined with hers. The beast in her mind jumped forward at her terror, taking control, the bright coppery smell of blood and meat driving her mad. All she wanted was that terrible noise to stop, for the bright blood of her prey to stop flowing.

Her jaws snapped shut once with a crunch of cartilage. Then she was running, running around the room with her own screams echoing against the empty walls,

the human lost, and the beast seeing only a cave she could not escape.The smell of people, hundreds of people who had just left the room drove a

spike of fear into her brain. Danger, danger, was her thought—a thought not of words but of terror.

But there was no way out. She jumped and ran among the tables, sending up plumes of blue-lined papers, heavy textbooks pinwheeling to the floor. She ran until her legs failed her, and then she slumped, stunned, to the floor just as the doors burst open and a flood of men came in.

“Fire!” one of them shouted, and the small part of her brain that was still Tara tried to make her move, make her call out for mercy, but the cat’s body was spent, and it was all she could do to lift her head as the dart slammed into her side, looking down at the bright orange streamer with a kind of astonishment even as darkness slid over her eyes.

***

An hour earlier…

“Hey, you,” Sylvie chirped, falling in step as Tara stepped off the bus.Despite her headache, Tara smiled at her friend. Like her, Sylvie was an older

undergrad—her mother had suffered a stroke during Sylvie’s senior year of high school, and Sylvie had spent the next two years helping her mother through rehabilitation while her father worked two jobs, one to keep their family insurance and the second to cover the rest of the medical bills. Despite that tragedy, Sylvie was one of the most upbeat people Tara knew, and her enthusiasm was contagious.

Sylvie had chosen to double major in psychology and biology because she wanted to be an occupational therapist and help people like her mother lead better lives. Tara had chosen psychology because she hoped to figure herself out, which, she was the first one to admit, made her sound as self-centered as a gyroscope in comparison.

“You ready for another dose of the seventeenth century?” Tara asked.Sylvie rolled her eyes. Unlike Tara, she wasn’t much of a history fan. “I just

hope that Dr. Butros doesn’t call on me. I feel like I’m back in high school in that class.”

“At least he let us pick our seats,” Tara pointed out.The day was brilliant and beautiful, one of those crisp fall days where the sky

seemed like a cut crystal bowl and the bite in the air made the trees blaze with color. Tara was honest enough with herself to admit that she’d chosen the College of William and Mary out of the list of in-state schools largely for its campus. The old buildings gave it a kind of dignity that reminded her, just a little, of the distinguished European universities she’d walked through.

“There is that,” Sylvie said, perking up again.Tara adjusted the weight of the book bag on her back. She’d always been a

loner. Maybe it was from growing up as a military brat and moving every few years, though that had hardly seemed to impact her older sister’s social life. Maybe it was just her. But Sylvie was one of the few people that she felt truly comfortable around. Sylvie took it for granted that she and Tara would be great friends, and almost to Tara’s surprise, they were.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Sylvie asked.“I don’t know.” Tara’s answer wasn’t entirely honest. She had a good idea of

what she’d do—hide in her studio apartment, or maybe take her wreck of a car out to York River State Park and wander around on the trails for the afternoon. If her headache got worse, she might go all the way out to Shenandoah National Park on Friday afternoon and lose herself in the hills for the weekend, which usually made her feel better by Monday.

But this headache seemed worse than usual, a dull pounding in the base of her skull that was echoed in her chest, in her bones. She had a giddy sensation for just a moment that she was looking at herself from the outside, or maybe behind her own eyes instead of through them.

Tara shook her head to clear it and dragged her fingers through her springy curls.

“You don’t look so great today,” Sylvie said, her eyes narrowing.“I don’t feel so great,” Tara admitted. “I guess I just need some rest.”“Rest from what? You never do anything.” At Tara’s expression, Sylvie

immediately added, “Sorry. That sounded bad. I just meant that you’re not exactly the hard-partying type.”

“I don’t know.” Tara decided to answer the question and ignore the rest of her friend’s commentary. “Maybe I’m just coming down with something.”

Something. Her head throbbed a little harder. But this wasn’t really new, was it? She’d felt this for as long as she could remember. And she wasn’t really sick. Or at least, she didn’t think that she was. It was just worse now, the thing she’d always had in the back of her head. It felt wrong.

“I hope you’re better by midterms,” Sylvie said.“So do I.” They were only a week and a half away now.Sylvie brightened and changed the subject. “Did I tell you what Gavin said last

night?”Tara chuckled. “Tell me.” Gavin was Sylvie’s newest boyfriend, and she was in

the stage where absolutely everything he said was brilliant, which, in Tara’s experience, came roughly three weeks before everything he said would become unbearably stupid.

As Sylvie began recounting their conversation, they mounted the steps to the front of the hall and passed into the building where their class was held. It was one of the few big lecture classes that Tara had taken at William and Mary, and stepping into it suddenly seemed like a monstrously difficult task. But she smiled and nodded and tried to follow along with Sylvie’s story as the flood of students

leaving the previous class flowed around them. And silently, she steeled herself against the hour to come.

Chapter Two

“I’m telling you, I didn’t hear anything about a prisoner transfer,” the man said, squinting at Chay Bane’s badge and giving him and his three team members a suspicious, raking look.

Chay gave the man a too-toothy grin. He knew he didn’t look like a Fed—not like a Company man, certainly, and not even like the Homeland Security agent he was now impersonating. His hair, in tight twists, fell nearly to his shoulders, and the upper part was held back from his face with a black tie. Most govvies took a dim view of that kind of individuality, but he knew the man couldn’t fault his suit—coal black, with tie to match over a crisp white shirt and perfectly polished wingtip shoes.

“Check again, Kevin,” he said, taking note of the man’s name badge.Without taking his eyes from Chay, the man raised his phone to his ear. “This is

Beecham,” he said. “I’ve got a William Smith here with three guys saying that the prisoner’s being transferred.”

There was a pause, and Chay’s smiled widened. Will Smith. It was such a common name, one that no one would dare even joke about even though the comparison practically begged to be made. It was one of his most common aliases when he played a man in black—of whatever stripe. It distracted people, made them uncomfortable as they kept thinking about it, especially since Chay’s favorite trick was to travel with Agosti, a grizzled older man with pale skin and dark hair that he wore slicked to his head. Outdoors, they often wore rectangular sunglasses to make the comparison even more irresistible.

Being ridiculous in just the right way was a powerful tool to make him seem more legitimate. Because, really, who would take the name Will Smith while pretending to be a Fed?

Kevin’s eyes glazed over slightly as he listened to the response at the other end of the line. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, that’s news to me. If you’re sure it’s all in order— Right. Right. Of course not. Thanks.”

He hung up. “Well, Mr. Smith, it looks like word just hadn’t gotten to us yet,” he said, looking suddenly like he wanted to be anywhere else. “The Director sent a note personally, so I don’t know what the hang-up was, but I’m very sorry.”

“Oh, no,” Chay said easily. “I’ll tell her that you’re all very keen here, on mark. Check up on everything, just like you should.”

“Right,” Kevin agreed, looking almost comically relieved.“So we’ll be taking charge of the prisoner right now.”

“Um,” Kevin said. “Do you have the facilities? I mean, she’s still sedated.”“Dr. Banner here will take care of that,” Chay said, nodding over his shoulder

to the elf Torrhanin. The elf blinked his large eyes at Kevin Beecham, who looked even more nonplussed.

“Right,” Kevin said again. He surveyed Chay’s team one more time, then gave a quick nod. “Come right this way.”

With Kevin Beecham in his pocket, all bureaucratic resistance melted away, and Chay and his three team members breezed through a series of security doors, collecting more paper-pushers and doctors along the way.

Chay looked up at one of the video cameras in the corner of the hall outside the holding cell and smiled. God bless the digital age. He’d already introduced a script into the system that was preventing the saving of the streamed video feed without disrupting the viewing of it live. And he knew what the descriptions of him would turn into, with the name William Smith planted firmly in Kevin’s mind. They didn’t have a prayer of proving his involvement—even though there were many who would instantly know that he was the plan’s mastermind.

After a word from Kevin, the guards unlocked the solid metal door and swung it open, stepping back quickly. Chay’s team moved as planned, the bear shifters Agosti and Liam Mansfield stationing themselves outside the door just in case things went pear-shaped while Chay and Torrhanin went inside.

Dammit. Chay’s stomach lurched at the sight of the girl in the bed.Damn, damn, frakking damn.This would be way more than a standard rescue operation. The girl—woman,

really—wasn’t a child at all, not even a typical college student. She was solidly in her mid-twenties, strikingly pretty, with her honey-highlighted brown curls spilling across her pillow even though her olive skin was unnaturally colorless under sedation. And she had all the curves of a woman under the stark white sheet.

Far too old for a natural first shift. Too old to risk a medically induced shift, too, if the people in charge of the program had any sense—though there was no legitimate program that Chay knew of that took any women at all.

“All right,” he said to Torrhanin. “Wake her up.”Torrhanin nodded and crossed to the IV stand, and with a couple of taps, the

occasional whir coming from it stopped. He reached for the girl’s hand, which lay neatly on top of the crisp white sheet, and took it in his own to slide out the IV. She looked so peaceful, lying there, but Chay didn’t miss the red line of blood under her fingernails.

The elven doctor turned her arm to expose her elbow and produced a syringe and bottle from the black bag he carried, measuring out the proper sedation antagonist and injecting it straight into her vein.

It had been bad, the reports had said. Arterial spray splattering the front desks. Six kids wounded—one in critical condition—and the professor dead on the

scene. Government psychologists were working overtime trying to convince the kids they’d all suffered from mass hysteria, coaching them with stories of confusion and the strangeness of the attack, of the panther that had slipped inside somehow, unseen, until it burst out behind Tara Morland and killed her and their professor.

No matter how many hallucinogens they fed those kids, Chay doubted that many of them would buy the story. The media had, though, and that was what Homeland Security really cared about. A couple hundred kids who believed in shifters was one thing. The nation believing—that was quite something else.

Another panther, Chay thought as the young woman’s eyes began to flutter and Torrhanin worked quickly to remove her feeding tube and catheter. That was another big clue that she wasn’t some kind of late-shifting genetic sport. As far as he knew, panthers like him were exclusively the product of government research—and, of course, the natural-born shifter children of the first generation.

But Tara wasn’t in the registry that he kept, and though there was always a chance that her mother hadn’t been entirely honest about the source of her pregnancy, one look at her age made that possibility even more remote. The panther project had begun little more than twenty years ago, and the oldest natural-born panther shifter that he knew about had just turned eighteen.

“Who did this to you, bae girl?” Chay whispered, so softly that the Feds just inside the door couldn’t hear.

Her eyelids opened slowly to reveal bright green eyes whose gaze went straight through him. And at that moment, he knew he’d do anything in his power to save her.

Anything at all.

Chapter Three

The face swam in Tara’s vision, blurred and uncertain. It had dark skin and broad, angular features, like it had been cut from obsidian. The lips moved, and a moment later, the words reached her ears.

“Come with me if you want to live.”Those words were ridiculous somehow, an echo of something she’d heard

before, but in that confused moment, they were the only thing she had to cling to. There had been a dream, a terrible dream of changes and blood, and she grabbed onto the hand that he extended as something real and tangible in the swirl of things that couldn’t possibly have happened, things she couldn’t possibly have done.

She was pulled upright, and little booties were pushed onto her feet and a soft robe thrown around her shoulders.

“Put it on.”She listened to that voice and obeyed, pushing her clumsy arms through the

sleeves. She looked down and saw a kind of smock in an institutional sort of blue. A hospital gown, she realized, recognizing it from TV. She was wearing a hospital gown. Did that mean she was sick? She’d certainly felt sick, standing in the lecture hall, trying to answer Dr. Butros’ questions. Or maybe she was crazy, because all the things her brain told her had happened, they’d all been impossible.

She looked at the face, all planes and dark, calm eyes. There were others in the room, too, but his face was the one she trusted. “Am I crazy?” she asked.

His hand tightened around her shoulders as he helped her slide down to her feet. “No, bae girl, you’re not crazy. We’re getting you out of here, and everything will be okay.”

Tara nodded and leaned into his strength with the sense that finally, there was someone who had answers. Someone who could help her.

“Let’s go now,” he said.She nodded again.Her legs shook under her, but there were people on each side, propping her

up.“Are you sure she should be walking around like that?” a new voice asked.

“Chemical restraints are standard in such situations.”“We know what’s standard.” The man who had been speaking to her cut the

woman off. “We have our own protocols, and the director will expect that you follow them.”

“Yes, sir,” the other voice said quickly.She had an impression of white halls and florescent tube lights and a wide

lobby with a broad glass front, and then Tara was outside, half-hustled into the back of a white van. Inside were seats and lights and more people, and Tara was still blinking at them when the voice that she trusted said, “Sorry, bae girl, but they’re right. Just one more quick nap, and when you wake up, it will all be over.”

He was nodding to another man, and Tara had just managed to understand his words through the haze of drugs that still lay on her brain when she saw the needle in his hands.

“No!” she said, trying to lunge away, but there were so many of them, their hands all over her, and even as her bones and muscles began to twist under their grip, she felt the bite of the needle in her upper arm, and everything went dark again.

***

Chay caught Tara’s body as she went limp and eased her down onto the bench next to him, pillowing her head in his lap.

“How’d it go?” Annie Liu’s cheerful voice piped up from the driver’s seat. Chay used fox shifters like Annie as his drivers on delicate missions like this

one. Short of a vampire or someone using elven technology, there were few creatures as charming. Annie could talk her way past a police barricade—and had. And when things went wrong, as they occasionally did, there were few who had a fox shifter’s reflexes.

“Smooth as silk,” Agosti said, patting his sunglasses where they rested in his shirt pocket. Though he looked every one of his fifty years, he was a bear shifter like Mansfield, and his barrel chest was sheer muscle under his pelt of salt-and-pepper hair.

Annie shifted the van into gear. “Not expecting a hot pursuit?” She almost sounded disappointed.

“No,” Chay said firmly.Dr. Torrhanin capped the used needle carefully and slipped it back into his old-

fashioned black doctor’s bag. As the van lurched into motion, he pulled out a pen light, opened the girl’s eyelids, and checked her pupils.

“Good,” the doctor said briskly, dropping the light back into the bag before he slipped out of his lab coat and stuffed it into the straps of the case.

“Good?” Chay echoed.“There is every sign that I used right dosage of the sedative cocktail,”

Torrhanin explained. “These things are always chancy with new shifters. You never know whether to dose for the human or the animal, and a miscalculation.…”

He tilted his head, the elven equivalent of a shrug. Torrhanin had lived long enough outside of elven society that he had lost the archaic speech markers and

quirky constructions that often marked elven English, but nonverbal habits were more engrained.

He continued, “I have a bag valve mask in my bag for a reason, as well as adrenaline and more antagonist. But it won’t be necessary. She’s sedated but not truly unconscious, though she shouldn’t remember anything.”

“The less the better,” Chay said, looking down at her slack-limbed body. The sense of protectiveness that stirred deep in his gut was familiar to him, repeated every time he took in another of his strays. But this time, the sense had a sharper edge, almost hungry, reaching deep down into his panther self in ways he didn’t care to examine.

“Was it her first shift?” Torrhanin asked. “Are you certain?” The doctor took a seat on the bench opposite Chay and the girl, wedging himself between the burly form of Liam Mansfield and the grizzled Agosti.

“It had all the markers,” Chay said. “We won’t know for sure until she wakes up, though.”

“Then it might be kinder if she didn’t,” the elf said flatly.At those words, Chay saw a flash of a vision—his panther-claws reaching out

and ripping the doctor’s body from throat to belly. Mercilessly, he beat it back, telling himself that Torrhanin was saying only what he believed was best. Elves had a peculiar sense of ethics at the best of times, which became even more peculiar as they aged. Torrhanin was old enough that his jet-back hairline was receding slightly and deep grooves were worn on either side of his mouth. With all the genetic tinkering that the elves did, Chay didn’t even care to speculate how old that made him. Older than a lot of vampires, that was for sure, and vampires didn’t exactly have the most stable moral compasses, themselves.

“We have to give her a chance,” Chay said aloud.Torrhanin frowned down at her. “She’s already killed one man. And the boy in

ICU is not likely to make it, either.”Chay understood his point of view—to him, it was simple mathematics. Twice

she’d killed, and it was a distant hope to suppose that she might be able to control the urge to kill again, given her age.

Going into the operation, Chay had assumed that Tara would be another kid to rescue, an eighteen-year-old college freshman or, more likely, an underage high school graduate. Twenty-somethings just didn’t shift for the first time. Not if they were natural-born.

Born shifters could begin shifting from just a few months old to the end of puberty. Even for those born with the animal in their veins, the later the shift, the more dangerous the balance between man and beast, and the more likely it was that the beast would win. When the beast won, people died, and there was often no recourse but to imprison the shifter for life—or, more mercifully, put him or her down.

Maybe Tara wouldn’t mean to kill anyone else—at least not as her human self—

but by saving her, Chay might be damning those who would become her victims.How old was this woman? Twenty-two? Twenty-five? She was well beyond any

trace of puberty, and the rational part of him wouldn’t give a nickel for her chances of ever mastering the animal that was even now fighting within her.

But the rest of him rebelled from the thought that she might be doomed—the rest of his mind and also something much more visceral, instinctual, that wanted to scream at the very thought of her losing her fight.

He would save her. He was saving her. Damn reason and damn statistics and damn everything, he wouldn’t let this one go.

Chay realized that he was stroking her hair, over and over, as if that could soothe the monster inside her. He forced his hands to still.

“I know, Torrhanin,” was all he said aloud.The elf nodded and settled back against the back wall of the swaying van. He

had his race’s deep respect for protocol and precedence, and Chay was Torrhanin’s recognized superior. He would not go against the were-panther’s orders.

“Is it even possible that she’s a natural?” Chay asked him, shifting the conversation. An expert in the field with decades of experience, Torrhanin knew better than practically anyone the limits of shifting. “That she’s second-gen?”

Torrhanin shook his head. “Many things are possible, but there are few records that attest to a first shift so long after the end of puberty. It stretches belief.”

“Is there a way to find out?” Chay prompted.“I will need a blood sample.” The doctor looked at him expectantly.Chay nodded. “Do it, then.”The elf dropped to his knees beside the limp woman and opened his black case.

Chay’s stomach lurched at the thought of him sticking her with another needle, and his protective instincts reared up again. He wasn’t used to rescuing other panthers. Especially not adult females. With a careful breath, he suppressed the feeling and tore his eyes away from Torrhanin’s preparations.

Instead, Chay leaned forward so that he could see between the passenger’s and driver’s seats and out the front windshield. The van was just passing through the gates of the air force base unchallenged. He allowed himself a smug smile.

Someone, somewhere would soon realize that the credentials of Chay’s team were all forged. But now that Chay was no longer on government property, he would be well positioned to deal with the outfall. It would take time for the news to ripple up the chain of command and back down again—but not much, not for this.

As if summoned by that thought, the phone in his pocket began to ring with a patriotic Sousa march. Annie’s giggle floated back from the front seat, and even Chay grinned as he flipped the phone face up to reveal the director’s name that he’d just used in vain—the director who happened to be, not incidentally, a retired full-bird colonel.

Damn, but he liked jerking the chains of those who believed that they were his keepers.

“That was fast,” he said, leaning back against the side wall of the van.“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Beane?” Col. Wilkins snapped, using

the handle that Chay had invented for himself back in childhood.“What do you think?” Chay returned. “I told you I wanted her.”“And I told you that you absolutely could not have her,” the colonel said, her

voice rising to a pitch that Chay had not often heard from the usually unflappable Director of Internal Operations—the slightly sinister, slightly bland-sounding name of the department that dealt with all nonhuman aethereal affairs on U.S. soil.

“That’s not the deal,” he returned, his voice flat. “I help when you call, and every shifter who gets into trouble belongs to me. Every shifter. Not just the ones you feel like sharing.”

“You forged documents,” she said. “Faked clearances. You committed at least a dozen federal crimes, and some of them could have you locked up for the rest of your natural life.”

“Nothing new about that,” he returned. “But the interesting thing is that usually I’m committing the crimes on behalf of your little organization. If you’re going to charge me with this, I might not be able to stop you, but I can certainly make sure I get charged for every crime I’ve committed. Don’t count on being able to get the judge to seal it.”

“I’ll haul you in front of a court martial,” she ground out.“No, you won’t. You lost that right when I retired after my ten years—with full

honors and half-pay,” he said. “And if you think you’ll be able to pull me up on war crime charges…well, good luck to you on that one. I’m sure the media would just love to hear my story because the only wars I’ve fought have been yours.”

Despite Wilkins’ fury, Chay knew that there was no substance behind her threats. There was just too much too lose—on both sides. Chay was well-known in certain very private, very elite government circles as a traitorous patriot or a patriotic traitor, depending on whom you talked to, but however he was regarded, the team he’d constructed over the past six years had become a critical and nonreplicable component of the federal government’s intelligence community. For his part, Chay regarded the government of his country with the same suspicion that it regarded him—as a dangerous, barely controlled force that was also both extremely useful and better than any of the alternatives.

Chay knew exactly how far he could push the government—and the government had damned well better learn how far it could push him.

“One of these days, Beane,” Wilkins said, the threat bare in her voice.“Let me know when you no longer need a shifter liaison,” Chay retorted. “Let

me know when you decide to solve the aether problem with guns and bombs. Because the day that happens, I’m burrowing so deep you’ll never see me again, and this country will be thrown into a war the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

“There are some who want that day to come now,” Wilkins said. “When you pull stunts like this, it only encourages those factions.”

Chay snorted. “Those factions only exist because they’re impotent. Mount a credible threat, and the vampires will have their brains scrambled before breakfast, and you know it. You’re stuck with the aethers, Colonel, and you’re stuck with me. Keep your side of the bargain, and I won’t have to play these tricks. Break your side, and I’ll get what I want, anyway.”

“The balance of power will shift,” Wilkins warned.“It always does,” said Chay. And somehow, the shifters never ended up on the

top of the heap. “Goodbye, Colonel.”“Goodbye, Beane,” the colonel said, suddenly sounding weary. “And watch out

for that girl. I’ve seen the cellphone videos. You don’t want her hurting anyone else.”

Chay swallowed a laugh. He hadn’t bothered with the videos, but he well knew what they’d show. He’d seen it himself, many times—he’d lived it, as a lab-created biological weapon. The violence and power that made the generals and admirals nod in approval was only horrifying to them when it was the wrong people being torn limb from limb. But the harsh fact was that the panther didn’t care.

“I take care of my own,” Chay promised. He tapped the phone to break the connection.

But looking down at the limp woman in his lap as he wedged the phone back into his pocket, he could only hope she wasn’t beyond the point that the only help that he could render was a bullet in her brain.

Chapter Four

Tara opened her eyes, rolled sideways, and threw up.“Sorry about that,” said a voice. But it didn’t sound sorry at all.She blinked and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and as her vision

cleared, she realized that someone was holding a bucket at the side of the bed to catch her vomit. She jerked her eyes away from its contents and took the room in. Cement floors. Flat gray walls, bubbling with layers of paint. Narrow bed, dresser, small table, chair.

Prison, a part of her brain supplied. She must be in a prison. Someone had called her a prisoner. She remembered that much from the confusion between the beginning of her history lecture and this.

And there was the man, sitting on the chair and looking at her patiently. He took a plastic cup off the table and offered it to her. Tara took it automatically.

“The sedation cocktail makes some people’s stomachs upset, but it’s got a fast recovery time,” he said.

“You were in that other place,” Tara said. “The white place, with all the men.”She looked in the cup. It looked like water, but she didn’t know what to trust,

not now. He’d told some guy to stab her with a needle, she knew that much.“Guilty as charged. Rescued you, in fact,” he said.She looked around the room. She didn’t feel rescued.“Where am I?” she asked, grimacing at the taste in her mouth. “Where was I?

What happened?”“You’re in my own personal secret lair,” the man said. “I call it Black Mesa. I

couldn’t decide between that and Cheyenne Mountain, but then I figured, why not name it both? I mean, the mountain needs a name, too, doesn’t it?”

Tara shook her head. Nothing that he’d said made any sense to her.“Anyway, it’s a few hundred miles from where you were, which was in deep

trouble—deep trouble on Andrews Air Force Base, if you want to be exact.”“Why?” Tara asked. “Why was I taken there?”The man looked at her steadily. “I think you know.”Tara took a shuddering breath, squeezing the cup. The muscles, sliding over

her changing skeleton, the fear and the blood, all the blood .… “None of that happened.”

“I can tell you now that it did. And the sooner you accept that, the better for us all.” The man nodded at the cup. “Drink. It’s just water. It’ll clear your mouth.”

She looked down into the cup again. If he wanted to drug her, he didn’t need

that. He could just tell one of his friends to stab her with a needle again, and what could she do?

She felt a small stirring in her body, a subtle shudder that ran through her bones, which seemed suddenly as malleable as clay. She was going to do something, maybe. Something crazy and impossible .…

The man snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, and she jumped, losing the sensation.

“Hey, I need you rational right now, okay? Just drink the damned water.” He plucked the cup from her hands, took a big swig, gargled noisily, and swallowed. “Safe, all right? I’m not going to sit here with your mouth inches from my face, smelling like sick, thanks all the same.”

And his face was inches from hers, all right. Far, far too close for comfort. He was, she told herself firmly, way too old for her—probably ten years older, maybe more. He wasn’t having any effect on her at all. He couldn’t. It was just her insides, still jiggly from the drugs and whatever else had happened to her.

She nodded stiffly and took a sip. It tasted like slightly stale, slightly rusty water. She took a deeper drink and swished it around self-consciously, clearing her mouth of the last traces of bile.

The man took the empty cup from her hands. “Much better. I have a rather sensitive sense of smell, you know, and I much prefer the version of you without barf-breath.”

“Thanks?” Tara said distrustfully.The man had answered all of her questions without ever really answering any

of them, she realized. Well, except for where he’d found her. That answer had been straight enough, if not exactly enlightening.

“Will you just tell me what’s going on?” she asked. “I was in my Intro to Western History course, and then…everything went sideways.”

“So that had never happened to you before?” he pressed.She frowned at him. “No, I’m not really in the habit of having psychotic breaks,

but thanks for asking.”His face went very still, all except for a sadness that glimmered in his dark

eyes. “Oh, bae girl. I had hoped—” He broke off and shook his head slightly, the ends of the twists of hair that fell just below his shoulders trembling at the motion.

Then, with careful deliberation, he said just two words: “You shifted.”

Chapter Five

The woman’s confusion was written across her face—and it was absolutely genuine. She really had no idea what had happened to her.

A new panther shifter. A woman, not a girl-child, for all the confusion in her eyes. Something he’d never imagined that he’d find. If someone had told him a unicorn would be showing up at his door, he would have been less surprised.

Damn. Too old. Too dangerous.Doomed.Yet even as he had those dark thoughts, Chay was uncomfortably aware that

she was even more striking awake than she had been asleep, her heart-shaped face framed by a tumbled mass of brown curls that just brushed her shoulders. Her delicate Cupid’s-bow mouth made her seem younger than she was, and her huge eyes were a brilliant green that was made even more striking by her olive skin. Even under the heavy robe, the abundant curves of her body were evident.

Chay suddenly felt a thousand years old. He’d had this conversation too many times, with too many people, most often parents with their children, though occasionally the child himself alone. Those were the saddest cases, when a child would shift and his parents would reject him as a freak, happily turning him over to the first apparent authority that showed up.

He also dealt with the shifter outlaws, those who had gone rogue under whatever stresses their life had presented. Some were just plain evil. Nothing about being a shifter made them nobler than ordinary humans, and there were a lot of urges and temptations that a shifter faced that ordinary humans never did. But many others acted out from confusion or simply broke under the pressures the shifters uniquely faced. For those who needed it, he offered a safe haven and a place to put themselves back together. For those who were beyond saving, Chay offered the most merciful death.

His judgment was final, and for those who chose death at Black Mesa rather than a life sentence in the darkest corners of the federal detention system, Torrhanin’s people ended their lives with the same quiet efficiency that the elves worked to save others.

Chay’s network consisted of many different threads—with many friends in places high, low, and in between. Tug on the right thread, and he could make countries dance. But his own, private crusade had been making “problem” shifters disappear for five years through a system that didn’t officially exist at all. Usually, he’d get a call from one of his contacts, and someone would make arrangements on

his behalf and release the shifter into his care. The government—or those in the government who knew about his existence

unofficially—generally considered that work a public service. Given the other work that he did for the various three-letter agencies, they were usually willing to help him out even when a case created a bit of a jurisdictional headache.

But after the attack at William and Mary, he’d made his usual calls and was met with a wall of resistance. This was too big. There had been too many witnesses. She’d killed someone, injured others. They were going to have to let the army have this one.

That was the kind of answer Chay couldn’t tolerate. He didn’t need his contacts. They made everything easier, of course, and kept his operation away from the wrong kinds of attention. But when push came to shove, making a single girl disappear from a military base was hardly a challenge.

So he’d done it, and when the inevitable calls had come, a cascade of them following Col. Wilkins’, he’d simply told them all coldly, calmly, that every shifter he chose to claim was a shifter who belonged to him. That if they didn’t like it, then he and they could part ways because that was the deal that he offered and the only one he’d accept.

And they’d backed down. Each one, for his or her own reason, had backed down, because they all knew the cost if they cut him loose.

So now he had Tara Morland in the decommissioned military installation that he’d hidden from the government he’d bought the base from with money he’d both earned and stolen from it.

A panther, like him, though very definitely not a child. A panther that someone had foolishly, recklessly made.

“So, what do you think happened?” he asked her, trying a different tack than the one he normally took.

Tara swallowed, looking at her hands as if she couldn’t be entirely certain they were hers.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was standing in my lecture, and I thought…I thought .…”

“No. You didn’t just think. You saw. You felt,” Chay said. “Because it happened.”

“It couldn’t have,” she protested. “It’s impossible. And Dr. Butros—” Her eyes widened, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, biting down.

“It was an accident,” Chay said, catching her hand and pulling it gently away from her cruel teeth. He could feel the muscle and bone shiver beneath his hands, and he kept his voice pitched to a reassuring tone. “No one blames you.”

It hadn’t been an accident. Not really. He knew it hadn’t been because he knew how it felt to be that animal with that terrible power coiled inside his skin, longing to be released. He knew how it felt to be surrounded by too many humans, soft-bodied, weak, and stinking, driving him mad with their screams.

And he knew how it felt to stop those screams, forever.But she must think of it as an accident, a fluke, if she was ever to get control.

She had to think of the panther not as herself but as a co-resident of her body, one that must always be kept in check.

Tara shook her head. Her face seemed to ripple, her forehead bulging slightly, and with great deliberation, Chay freed a hand, reached out, and put it on her shoulder.

“Deep breaths, now, Tara. You’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”If she changed now, in this state, she’d probably try to bite him in half, and

with every uncontrolled change, she’d slip a little farther down the slope of no return. He could change faster than she could, if he had to, but his shift would surely trigger hers in such a state, and he had to give her every chance possible to stop herself.

Nodding, she turned her hand in his, her grip tight and desperate. She took deep breaths, one after another. The movement of her bones and muscles under his hand on her shoulder ceased, and she was an ordinary woman again. At least on the outside, if only for the moment.

“It’s never happened before,” she said, a note close to hysteria in her voice. “You have to believe me.”

“I do,” he said grimly.Her green eyes pleaded with him. “I’ll stop it. I promise. It’ll never happen

again.”He steeled himself. The truth was cruel, but lying was even crueler. “That’s not

possible. But you can learn to control it, Tara. You have to.”The girl looked stricken. “I can’t do that again. I killed—oh, I can’t!”“Listen to me, Tara. You have to learn to control it. If you don’t, it will control

you.” Every word was heavy with conviction, but she was too terrified and distraught to take it in.

“Tell me how to stop it,” she pleaded, her words slurring slightly even as her eyes tried to slide sideways on her broadening skull.

Chay tightened his grip on her shoulder, trying to keep her attention focused on him with the strength of his gaze. “Right now, calm down. Breathe. It won’t be like that every time,” he assured her. “If we’re lucky, it won’t be like that even once again.”

And what were the chances of that? his inner voice mocked him. He’d seen it too many times before among eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds—the beginning of the devolution of their humanity, the uncontrolled shifts that came closer and closer together, the brain that turned to animal even in human form instead of the reverse.

She was older still—she didn’t have their resilience. Her adult brain had lost its neuroplasticity. Under stress, it would simply break. It wasn’t a matter of will but of simple biology. Every change that was driven by the panther brought her closer

to that point.But that was a terminal diagnosis that Chay would not, could not accept

unchallenged, even as he looked at her and realized that she was losing the battle already.

“No. You’re wrong,” Tara said, her voice rising suddenly. “It’s not real. It’s not going to happen again because it didn’t ever happen. It was just a dream. I’ve never killed anybody!”

With the last word, she shoved him away with enough strength that he rocked back in his chair. She jerked to her feet and ran clumsily to a corner of the room even as her joints tried to change orientation.

Tara was breathing so heavily that he could see her shoulders heaving with the effort, her head bent low—and lower still, because it was moving, her neck and shoulders shifting under the robe that she still wore.

With a muttered curse, Chay shoved the bucket of vomit under the bed with one foot and stood, stripping off his clothes as fast as his hands could move, stepping out of his loafers, dropping his coat and tie, and working down the buttons on the front of his shirt.

She turned, and her eyes, already slitted like a cat’s, widened in a face that was broadening as he watched.

“What are you doiiiiiiiirrrr—” The last of her question turned into a panther’s yowl as her vocal cords went, hair sprouting at once all across her body, and she stalked forward, a cat’s brain behind her now-yellow eyes.

There was no time left. With a mental apology to the tailor who had crafted his bespoke suit, Chay shifted fast. The pants tore from his body, and he sprang forward just as she leaped, meeting her midair and batting her down with a powerful swipe of his paw.

The panther hit the cement hard, tangled in her clothes, the breath going out of her body in audible huffs. Right now, she was hardly Tara at all—her human mind was buried, and the predator was in control. She rolled over back onto her feet, her claws tearing the remains of the hospital gown and the robe from her body. She jumped again, high, and again Chay batted her from the air, her lighter female body no match for his bulk and coordination.

The female panther hit the floor again, and this time, she didn’t try to get back up. Instead, she bunched her paws under her body, her tail lashing angrily and her ears pressed back against her skull as she made a low, angry noise in her throat.

Chay settled back on his haunches in front of her, wrapping his tail around his feet. The cat inside him was half-mad with the sight of the defeated female in front of him. Never before had it encountered a mature she-cat, and his feline mind hardly knew what to do with it, whether to drive her away or to claim her as his own. The smell of her beat against the lower reaches of his brain, her human and panther scents mingling.

But Chay was the master of his inner beast, however uneasy the control was at

times, and he betrayed no signs of the animal’s reaction, even inside the animal’s own skin. He controlled just as fiercely the very human feeling of despair at the sight of her, entirely given over to the animal, growling and panting in the corner, her heavy tail lashing back and forth.

Chay was willing to wait however long it took for Tara to come back. And she would come back. However strongly the panther had a grip on her now, the habit of years would drag her body back into human shape, and when it did, her mind would come, too.

This time.The seconds ticked by, one after another, and then slowly, the noise in Tara’s

throat got softer, intermittent, until it stopped entirely. The muscles that were visibly bunched beneath her skin gradually relaxed, her ears easing up. A small shiver seemed to run through her. As quiet as a whisper, she shifted back again and curled into a tight ball in the middle of the floor.

Chay bent with an iron control around his instincts, butting his head gently, reassuringly against her shoulder. With a small shriek, she curled tighter, her entire body wracked with shivers of fear as she screwed her eyes shut tight.

“Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me! I didn’t mean to do it.”That was not the response he’d meant to get. He shifted back hurriedly, his

muscles and bones sliding back to their familiar places, to squat at her side.“Hey, hey,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.She gave a little gasp and her eyes flew open as she turned back toward him.“I really don’t think—” he started. But it was too late. She’d gotten a good

eyeful of him, stark naked as he was, and she gave another gasp.“Sorry about that,” he said as neutrally as he could, willing his body not to

react to her nakedness and the luscious curve of her ass that he was trying extremely hard to ignore. This was most certainly not an appropriate time. “Clothes don’t survive shifting very well.”

Tara looked down at her own body and yelped, curling up even tighter.“Here, let me .…” He went to the bed, tugging the sheet from it, and he

brought it back to where she lay against the cold floor. He wrapped it over her shoulders and draped it across her body.

“Thanks,” she said faintly, keeping her eyes carefully fixed to the opposite wall as she sat up.

Oh. Right. His pants were in shreds on the concrete floor, so he ducked quickly into the adjoining bathroom and snagged one of the towels that hung there, tucking it around his hips.

“Better?” he asked.He offered her a hand, and she took it, blushing furiously. It made her seem

even more pitiful somehow.“And thanks for that,” she said as she stood up, adjusting the sheet more

tightly around her body. She looked at the tatters of their clothes that lay on the

cement floor. “You’re one, too. A…thing.”“Been that way for a while,” he said. “We generally call ourselves shifters. Bit

more specific than ‘thing.’”“It’s real, then,” she said, her voice dull, numb. “Not a dream or a…a psychotic

break.”“Completely real,” he agreed. “Do you know what you are?”Her face was still completely blank, her green eyes flat and unresponsive. “I

think…I think the same as you. A really big cat,” she said.He wanted to bring the life back into her eyes. He wanted to see the strength

that he’d seen when she’d first woken. Now she just looked spent, like she was already defeated.

“A panther,” he corrected. “A jaguar, to be exact.”“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, and 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 puffy 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.”

Chay shrugged uncomfortably. Though there were security cameras covering every inch of the facility he’d named Black Mesa, he normally kept the ones in the bathrooms turned off, and Annie Liu, the resident fuzzy logic expert, had built in some safeguards that made the cameras go automatically to privacy mode when people were undressed.

As a high-risk new intake resident, though, Tara Morland required more supervision. So the cameras in her quarters were set to stay on, as well as the alarm on her door. Chay had long since become indifferent to most social niceties and privacy matters when other things took precedence, so he was well used to keeping an eye on any new high-risk guests of whatever age and gender with all the impartiality of a medical professional.

But Tara had already done something to him, gotten into his head…or something…in a way that no one ever had before.

He was telling Ford the truth, though. His attention was in no way voyeuristic. Not that he was immune to the smooth contours of her body and her perfect olive skin that gave the merest hint of exotic ancestry. But his attention was far more reflexive than sexual. He almost could not physically look away from her.

“She’s a panther shifter, you know,” he said, straightening in front of his section of the twenty-foot stretch of counter that served as a single long desk running down the length of the nerve center of the underground complex. Its nickname was, appropriately enough, the spook shop, since that was where Ford, Annie Liu, Liam and Seamus Mansfield, and the others created their various spy-

tech toys.“Uh, yeah, dude, I know that,” Ford said. “So am I.”Chay snorted. “You’re also twenty-six.”“What’s that got to do with anything?” Ford asked, rolling his eyes.Chay shook his head. Ford was twenty-six, and the oldest natural-born shifters,

the oldest girls, were approaching twenty. Chay was thirty-four. Too old for them—far too old. He’d never imagined that he’d lay eyes on a female panther shifter anywhere close to his own age.

Not unless he made one himself, which was something he would never do.Chay grabbed an empty Funyuns bag and tossed it toward the nearest trash

can. It unwadded in the air and fell short.“Man, you’ve got to get a janitor down in here,” Ford complained, distracted

for the moment.“Authorized personnel only,” Chay said.“So authorize someone. Old Mrs. Olsen isn’t doing much for her keep, and

she’d as soon betray her own children as hurt you.”Chay didn’t point out that old Mrs. Olsen shouldn’t have to do anything for her

keep, not after the number of times her son had saved Chay’s hide. Chay had come back from that last mission. David hadn’t. So keeping Mrs. Olsen in cigarettes, curlers, and house shoes was the least he could do.

Instead, he said, “She cleans.”“That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”“No, I mean, she cleans everything. She moves things. She…straightens.

Notes. The lab tables. Transistors—did you know that I had like sixty set out, grouped as I needed to use them, and she dumped them all into an empty peanut butter jar?”

“You hadn’t touched that in months,” Ford said. “It was all covered in dust.”

“So?” Chay demanded. “I like to have things at my fingertips.”“Whatever,” Ford said. He shook his head. “You act like being undomesticated

will save you from the curse.” He wiggled his fingers in a manner that was probably meant to convey spookiness.

“What curse?” Chay said. He’d turned back to his monitors and was bringing up all the information on Tara Morland that he could find. Basic background search, plus a few more wormholes into various systems that he’d gained—some through legitimate channels, and some through not-so-legitimate ones.

“The shifter curse.” Ford crunched an empty Coke can in his hands and lobbed it at the recycling bin, and it landed with a clatter among the others. “You know, the whole mating thing.”

“You’re very funny,” Chay growled, scrolling through the pages of information. Tara Morland’s life was remarkably uninteresting up until that point. No

arrests. A few parking tickets. One traffic ticket. No record of military service. Of

course, those were sometimes sealed, but with the access he had…and anyhow, at least the VA would have a record of her and whatever benefits she was entitled to. Concealing one’s service for the sake of patriotism was one thing, but people didn’t sign away their benefits.

Ford was enjoying himself openly. “Come on. You had bets on Harris trumping it. Said it was conditioning, since most shifters are born into shifter families. Self-fulfilling prophecy, you said.”

“Well, Harris was still more traditional than I thought, I guess,” Chay snapped.“I saw the way you looked at that girl,” Ford said. “You’ve never looked at

anyone like that.”“I’m not dead,” Chay said. “Mostly, we’re rescuing little kids and confused

people. PTSD vets. That kind of thing. It’s not often that I end up with my arms full of that.” He nodded back up at the monitor that had the video feed just in time for a full view of her rounded hips and rear as she bent over to put on her pants.

Ford just snorted.Chay opened up her school records. She’d enrolled late, which was why she

was only a junior at twenty-four. He shook his head. The seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds put through the SEAL program had problems enough. Too many of them, like Chay, were never able to live a fully normal life again. He’d spent the first twelve years of his life in Detroit, living in a townhouse on a street that was never quiet, full of voices and kids and dogs and teenagers and the constant growl of traffic and punctuated by the louder rumble of trucks, the wail of distant sirens, and even the occasional gunshot.

But now, even the thought of going into a city made him itchy under his collar. Every time he took a personal role in one of his own rescue operations, he spent an hour beforehand lying still with his eyes closed while he sorted through the contents of his brain to identify the pieces that belonged to the panther and lock them away. He had to or he wouldn’t be able to concentrate at all when he was subjected to the noise and commotion of a hospital or an active army base.

He hadn’t even been one of the washouts. Some of those went out into the mountains and came back down for supplies once or twice a year. Others lost themselves entirely in Montana or Idaho or Alaska. Chay had heard whispers that some of those who disappeared never turned human again.

And some of them lost themselves to the beast immediately, and within six months, every human trace was gone.

As for Tara Morland .… She was twenty-four, not seventeen or even nineteen. And she was a woman, which meant that she’d finished puberty earlier than a man would. He’d told her she’d get out of that room, but he had no idea how he was ever going to keep that promise.

“Nubile,” Ford said abruptly.“What?” Only half-listening to his friend, Chay pulled his attention back to the

screen. Tara had made good grades in high school—she was on the honors list

published in the local newspaper pretty much every grading period—and should have been an easy admission into William and Mary. He found a feature about her in the Flat Hat News dated nearly three years back. After high school, it said, she’d taken two years off to work in refugee camps in the Sudan, and then she’d traveled for another year.

Finding herself, he guessed. He well knew what an eighteen-year-old had to be lost from.

As far as he could tell, nowhere in the last six years had she been anywhere or involved in anything that should have gotten her dosed with a drug reserved for only a small subset of servicemen in two groups in the military—never mind that those groups were entirely restricted to men.

“She’s nubile,” Ford repeated. “That’s the word. Saw it in a crossword puzzle once.” Ford was rocking back and forth in the chair again. His specialty was surveillance equipment—its development and deployment. Right now, they were between contracts that made use of his particular skills, so he’d spent the past week bouncing between video gaming, playing with his newest toys, and generally giving everyone else a hard time.

“You and your damned crossword puzzles. What’s that supposed to mean, anyway?” Chay asked.

“Fuckable,” Ford said succinctly. “I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.”“Classy,” Chay said. Tara had a Facebook profile, which was set so that only her friends could see

her posts. He made a couple of attempts on her password, then after the easy guesses were worn out, he deployed a tool that harvested the IDs of her friends and launched a script to try to hack their accounts.

“It’s a classy word for fuckable,” Ford said. “That’s kind of the point.”Chay ignored that comment. Finally, one of the account hacks worked, and

Chay logged on and jumped over to Tara’s wall, where he scanned through her posts. And, just his luck, she’d only joined Facebook after starting college—mostly to organize events with her friends, it looked like. Nothing there gave any hint of a place she might have been exposed to the panther shifter factor.

It should have happened recently, if the experience of any of those in the program was something to go by. The shifter factor didn’t always “take”—and no one was really sure why—but when it did, the first shift usually happened between two weeks and three months later, six months at the outside.

Maybe she hadn’t been dosed with the military’s shifter factor, or maybe the factor hadn’t been pure. He needed to talk to Torhannin about what was possible. He wasn’t comfortable around the elven doctor, but then again, he wasn’t very comfortable around much of anyone, anymore. But he trusted Dr. Torhannin, and the elf knew far more than any human ever could about shifter factors and induced genetic mutations and any related topic.

Everyone said it was the elves who’d developed the first shifters for their

vampire paymasters. Not that they admitted or even denied their part in it—not to outsiders, at any rate.

“Chay,” Ford said abruptly, a warning in his voice.Chay looked up and followed Ford’s gaze to the monitor that displayed Tara’s

room.The woman’s face was twisted in an expression of terror, her hands tightening

and loosening rhythmically and convulsively around the comb she held. Frak. It was more than terror that was twisting her face. She was shifting

toward panther and back again to human, a muzzle trying to bulge from her face, her forehead broadening and then shrinking back again. The last time had been less than an hour ago. She was already devolving—and fast.

Chay felt his own panther rise in his body at the thought, instinctively trying to take control.

“Dammit,” he muttered, pushing away from the desk.“You going there or you want me to?” Ford asked.The panther inside snarled at the suggestion, but Chay shoved it down and

managed to keep his voice level as he strode to the door. “I’ll go. She already knows me. It will be safer.”

He jerked the door open and sprinted down the corridor toward the nearest ladder, cursing himself for putting the secure rooms so far from the spook shop. He grabbed the pole that ran down the center of the ladder hole and slid down, flashing past the green and blue levels all the way to purple.

His feet hit the mat at the bottom of the pole, and he ran until he reached her door, grabbing the lever handle and stopping himself with it even as he wrenched the bolts out of their slots with his weight. He pushed inside—

And as pain seared down his arm, he jumped back again fast, shutting the door and twisting the handle to lock the dogs in the frame an instant before the weight of the angry panther slammed against it.

Stupid. He stared at the gray metal of the door, his arm throbbing and his nerves jangling at what he’d almost done. Jumping through the door when he had no idea what was on the other side, when he knew what was on the other side might be something that would want him dead .…

The panther on the other side of the door screamed in fury, and the solid metal shuddered under her weight as she struck it again.

Chay always thought a dozen steps ahead. He was a frakking chess master. He could outmaneuver mob bosses and governments. He sure as hell should be able to anticipate the actions of a girl locked in a room who wasn’t even making an attempt to trick him.

But she’d done something to him, had gotten under his skin so that when she was in trouble, he didn’t think at all. He just reacted. If he kept that up, he’d get himself killed and seal her fate in the process.

He stepped back from the door deliberately and examined his injured arm,

which throbbed in time to his heartbeats. It was pretty bad, he admitted. His shirt was shredded from the elbow down, and in the tears, he could see the layers of skin and the underlying fat and muscle flayed open like a cross-section of the human body. His own hand was slick with his dark blood.

“Beane?” Ford’s normally cavalier voice was sharp with concern.“I’m fine,” Chay said.“You don’t look fine. There’s a freaking puddle of blood in the middle of the

hall there. And you’re tracking your stupid shoes through it,” he added as Chay stepped backwards. “I’ll send Torrhanin—”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Chay said. His body was already trying to heal around the fragments of cloth that had been forced into the long, jagged wound.

“If you’ve got bits in there, it’ll be surgery for you, you know,” Ford warned. “I can deal with them.” Setting his jaw, he pulled out the shreds of his shirt,

then watched as the muscle and then the skin finished knitting closed again. “See?” Chay added, holding his right arm up to display it to the nearest black button of a camera.

“You’re the one who’s risking sepsis, not me,” Ford grumbled. “Be more careful in there. I didn’t have any idea that your brilliant plan was to charge in like a bloody werewolf.”

Chay snorted, but he didn’t disagree with that assessment. “Sorry. It got to my head.”

“Might as well have screamed ‘Leroy Jenkins’ before jumping in,” Ford added tartly, throwing in another of his gaming references.

“Fine, sure,” Chay said. “Hang it up, okay? I’ve learned my lesson, but I’ve got to go in there, all right? Use the electric locks to shut the door behind me.”

“Be careful, idiot.”“Right. Go away,” Chay ordered.The speakers fell silent, and Chay turned his left wrist to see the inch-and-a-

half-wide screen he had strapped there, on a stretchy band of Agosti’s design that accommodated shifting—his own smart watch, but it was really far more, acting as a terminal that accessed the system that ran Black Mesa from the vent fans and sump pumps to his testing framework to his dedicated hacking server farm. Most of his trusted team carried something like it, but only his had complete access to everything, and it was keyed to respond only to his voice.

“Cortana, two-way audio, Violet 2-63-A,” he ordered, reading the room number off the purple letters spray painted on the door. He’d chosen the name for his voice-recognition interface years before Microsoft had had the same inspiration.

The snarling of the panther grew suddenly louder as they were also piped out of the tiny speakers on the screen at his wrist. Chay winced and turned it down.

“Cortana, visual, same room,” he said. The display on his wrist flashed over to an interior view of the bedroom, and Chay shook his head. The mattress, which was encased in a ballistics cloth cover, was askew and unharmed, and everything

that was bolted to the walls was still intact. But the pillows had been disemboweled, coating the room in a fine layer of down, and the sheets and her clothes were in tatters.

Still growling, the panther paced in angry circles around the room, kicking up flurries of feathers with every stride that came wafting slowly down again behind her. The muscles bunched and slid under her sleek fur. She was a thing of perfect beauty and perfected danger. She was what shifters had been first created to be—a weapon of flesh and bone.

And she was losing herself.“Tara,” he said softly, knowing that his voice would be sent into the room on

the other side of the door. “Tara, it’s me. I’m fine. You didn’t hurt me.” It was a lie, but it was a small one.

A twitch of the panther’s ear was the only indication that she had heard him.“I know you’re angry,” he continued. “And I know you’re frightened. But you

need to shift back now. I know you’re in there, and I know you can hear me and understand me. It’s time to come back. I’m coming in, okay?”

At that, the panther’s head whipped around, and she let out a yowl.Chay released a small, tense breath. That was the most positive sign he’d

gotten from the creature yet that Tara was still rational somewhere inside its skull. “You’re not going to hurt me,” he promised. “I’ll be in panther form, too. I’m going to stop talking to you now so I can shift, okay? Then you’re going to shift back again, and so will I, and we’re going to talk together then. And I’d really appreciate it if you could manage to try not to kill me, okay?”

He’d already put action to his words, toeing off his Vans and loosening his belt and fly. He stripped quickly, before Tara could get herself worked up again, and wearing only his smart watch, he let go of the reflexive, iron control he always held on his own mind.

And the panther rose up inside him.

Chapter Eight

Door. The word pushed through the panther’s brain. It wasn’t an impression of a word or a feeling of a thing, but an actual English word that came as she stared at the shape in the wall. Door. The door and…the man.

Tara, yes, she was Tara, and she was waiting for the man to come through the door.

To help her.Her tail lashed, and the panther inside her head fought back, understanding

with an animal’s instinct that what was meant was that she’d be tamed, caged, contained.

But Tara clung to every thought that gave her purchase in the panther’s head, behind the panther’s eyes. She spun out new thoughts as hard and as fast as she could, as if each were a lifeline that held her mind together and apart.

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 her 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.

“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.

The corridor operated like an airlock, either the end that led to the rest of the base or the one that led to the labs open but never both at once. Chay had asked what would happen if they were both open at the same time, and the elf had looked thoughtful for a very long moment before simply saying, “Something bad.”

The door to the labs slid open as Chay reached it, and he stepped through.“Greetings, Beane,” Dr. Torrhanin said as Chay stepped inside, always more

formal in his own domain. He had traded his human street clothes for a loose white robe with long sleeves that hung over a kind of knee-length tunic in a pale blue that glittered with embroidery.

Staying in the lab always gave Chay a headache, and he was never afterward fully able to explain what the place was like. White and glittering in the intensity of

the light, with peculiar undulations and pockets, the room—or rooms—somehow gave the impression of being both a wide-open space and a kind of honeycomb of individual alcoves. He and Torrhanin were most definitely alone, and yet Chay also was convinced that they were in a still spot in the middle of a great swirl of activity.

Chay had given up understanding it all long before, but he was still disturbed by the fact that hardly any time seemed to pass outside the lab when he was within it. Others in the installation had noticed, too, which had earned it its nickname of Narnia.

Torrhanin had once explained that the elves’ apparent mind-powers and magic were nothing of the sort, that they merely had a type of pseudo-neurons attuned to the various dimensions and levels of reality that they were able to manipulate. That had been one of the many things that the elven leader said that sounded plausible for a moment before Chay realized that they really didn’t make much sense.

“Greetings,” Chay returned stiffly. He still often wondered if he was betraying not only shifters but the Earth itself by giving Torrhanin this place and protecting him from those who would take it away. Chay exacted his payment in the help he received for his people—in the form of individual cures and also treatments for conditions that were peculiar to shifters. And sometimes, Torrhanin even surprised him with a gift, which made Chay all the warier because the elves had a reputation for their gifts always having a fatal catch.

Torrhanin gestured, and Chay noticed that there was a chair an arm’s length away—whether there had been one a moment before or not, he wouldn’t hazard to guess. It was those kinds of thoughts that led to his headaches, and so it was far easier just to sit rather than to question as the doctor took the matching chair opposite him.

“I have had the opportunity to examine the blood,” Torrhanin said, folding his hands into the opposite sleeves of his robe. “Tara Morland was indeed exposed to a shifter factor. There is no question.”

“Can you tell from where?” Chay asked.Torrhanin hesitated. “That is where it becomes peculiar. I would have assumed

that it was the most recent version of the panther factor used by the Navy. And yet it’s a much older version, one that was discontinued more than eighteen years ago.”

“So you think that someone stole it from storage?” Chay asked, relaxing slightly. The U.S. government, like any organization, was merely the sum of the individuals involved. Given that it involved literally millions of people, there was almost nothing that it wasn’t capable of, assuming that the cooperation of only a couple of people was required. But Chay hadn’t liked to think of an entire department of the government being responsible for inoculating Tara and however many other college students with panther factor.

“That is one possibility, yes,” Torrhanin granted him. “But shifter factor

doesn’t store very well. Not over decades. I would expect that it’s more likely that she was dosed with a recent batch—a recent batch of the old strain.”

“Why would anyone do that?” Chay demanded. “Whoever they are, wouldn’t it be easier to get a hold of a new batch rather than manufacture an out-of-date variety?”

“Not having a knowledge of their particular circumstances, I couldn’t say,” Torrhanin said. “But I am confident in the accuracy of my findings. She is a medically induced shifter, and she was given an old version of the panther factor drug.”

“What does that mean for her?” Chay asked.Torrhanin shrugged. “Very little has changed. She is a twenty-four-year-old

female who has undergone her first shift. Her prognosis is poor. And that is all I have for you.”

That was as clear a dismissal as anything.“Thanks for the info,” Chay said, standing. “I’ll let you know if I have more

questions.”“And if I have answers, I will provide them,” Torrhanin said, gracefully rising

from his own chair.“Right,” Chay repeated, and with a curt nod, he left with more questions than

he’d entered with.

Chapter Eleven

Some time later, the lever on the door turned again. Tara had been staring at it—for how long, she didn’t even dare to speculate—but it still took her by such surprise that she started and jumped to her feet.

But it wasn’t Chay on the other side of the door this time. Instead, two huge, burly men entered the room carrying a clear, acrylic-looking box between them. It seemed heavy; they puffed with the effort of maneuvering it, and the plastic looked to be at least an inch thick with an odd kind of baffled entrance at one end.

Tara backed away nervously into a corner, not so much scared of them as scared of hurting them. The panther in her head didn’t like their being there, didn’t like the scent of them. It was anxious to be out, and she battled silently against it. The men nodded at her but said nothing, setting the box in the corner opposite from her with the baffled entrance facing out.

“That’ll do, dears,” said a voice then, one that was roughened with age but still perfectly steady.

The men left, and the owner of the voice stepped into the room. She was a small woman with wild, bright-red dyed curls and a chain smoker’s face to match her smoker’s voice, the slightest hint of East Asian ancestry around her eyes. She was carrying a plastic cafeteria tray loaded with food.

At the scent, Tara’s stomach grumbled loudly, and she realized she was starving. How long had it been since she’d eaten? Days, probably. She started toward the woman before she realized what she was doing and recoiled at the thought of getting that close to another human being.

“I’m Mrs. Olsen,” the older woman said warmly. “And you must be Tara. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Does Chay know you’re here?” Tara asked.“Chay sent me,” Mrs. Olsen said, one eyebrow shooting up so high that it

disappeared under her fringe of carrot-colored hair.“So you’re…” Tara trailed off, feeling ridiculous asking the question aloud.“A fox shifter. Also called a fox spirit or a kitsune,” she added helpfully. “Fox,” Tara repeated. “But I’m—”“A panther,” Mrs. Olsen interrupted, setting the tray down on the small table

at the head of the bed. She stepped out into the corridor for a moment and returned with a broom, dust pan, and bag and set to work in the far end of the room, sweeping—or rather, herding, because most of the feathers skittered away before her broom came into contact with them—the clouds of down toward the

opposite wall.“I don’t think it’s safe for you to be here,” Tara said. “Being a fox. A panther is

a lot bigger than a fox.”The older woman just shook her head. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll be across the

room and in the panic box before you’re halfway shifted.”Tara looked at the box again, and this time, she imagined how the slender body

of the fox could navigate the baffles—and a panther’s paw couldn’t follow.“Oh,” she said.Mrs. Olsen smiled. “Yes. Oh. Now eat your food, or you’ll waste away, and we

can’t be having that.”Tara got up the nerve to retrieve the chair from the middle of the room where

Chay had left it and bring it over to the tray of food, edging carefully around the fox shifter. On the tray was standard cafeteria fare—a sort of mix that was probably called something like “Asian Chicken and Vegetable Medley” but had little resemblance to food that was actually eaten in any Asian country. A perfect dome of rice sat in another of the divided sections, but then the Asian theme fell through, because the rest of the compartments held a can of Coke, fruit cocktail, and a big square brownie.

“You sure this isn’t a prison, after all?” Tara asked, trying not to wrinkle her nose.

Mrs. Olsen chuckled. “I always tell Chay that his food’s terrible, but he got a bargain price for a lot of that stuff, and he won’t change until he’s used it all up. Plus, he won’t allow deliveries up here, so that nice boy Liam always has to go down the mountain with a team of bears to load up the delivery from the greengrocer and the butcher. All that means that unfortunately, they tend to lean toward options that come in a can.”

“Ugh,” Tara said, but she was far too hungry to be picky. She picked up the fork and dug in, and to her surprise, the food didn’t taste half as bad as it looked or smelled.

Or maybe she was just too hungry to care.“I could get that,” she said guiltily around a mouthful of Asian medley and rice

as the older woman swept the floor. “You don’t have to clean up after me.”“Oh, pish-posh,” Mrs. Olsen said cheerfully. “You’ve been through enough

today. It’s the least I can do.”“And what is today?” Tara asked. “I don’t even know.”“Monday,” the woman said, still sweeping.Monday. It had been Wednesday when she’d gone to that fateful class. She’d

lost at least half a week. Maybe a week and a half, come to think of it—The panther stirred abruptly, and Tara’s fingers shortened around the fork she

held.No, she told it firmly, pushing it back. After another moment in which it pushed

against the edges of the mental wall she put around it, it subsided again.

Mrs. Olsen was watching her out of the corner of her eye, she realized. As Tara regained control, the older woman leaned the broom against the edge of the bedframe and fished into the pocket of the loose, button-fronted dress that she wore. She pulled out something flat and disk-shaped on a long chain and held it out to Tara.

Tara took the disk tentatively, turning it over in her hands. One side was solid black, and on the other, it was divided into halves, one red, the other green.

“It’s a panic button,” Mrs. Olsen explained. “Chay asked me to bring one to you. Kind of like those old commercials—‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’”

At Tara’s perfectly blank look, she sighed.“Kids,” she muttered softly. She raised her voice to a normal volume again.

“Wear the necklace. If you think you’re going to shift, hit the red button, and someone will come.”

“What good will that do?” Tara asked bitterly, but she put the necklace around her neck anyway.

“You can’t think of anyone who could help you keep from changing?” Mrs. Olsen asked, picking up the broom again. “No one at all?”

Tara was about to deny it, but then she remembered what had happened when Chay’s panther had nuzzled hers.

“Chay,” she said. “Maybe. But he didn’t help when I first woke up. I changed even though he was here.”

Mrs. Olsen shrugged, her broom moving busily. “He can’t stop it for you. No one can. But he may be able to help.”

Tara nodded and took another bite. “Why are you here? Same thing as me?”“Oh, dearie, no,” she said, smiling. “My son David knew Chay when they were

in the Indigo Squadron together.”“There were fox shifters in the Indigo Squadron?” That didn’t sound so

intimidating. Not like bear or panther or wolf shifters.“No. He was a cull,” Mrs. Olsen said, looking wistful. “The shifting genes

skipped him. And he always felt like he’d been left out somehow, especially when he was around his cousins. Enlisting was his chance to become a shifter, too. He chose the panther platoon. And one mission, he just didn’t come back. Not alive, at any rate.” The corners of the woman’s mouth drooped for a moment before she pasted on another grin. “Well, that was a long time ago, but Chay was a good boy, and he promised to take care of me. I don’t need taking care of, but a lot of people here do, you know, and I like taking care of other people more that I like being taken care of.”

“That seems very nice of you,” Tara said almost automatically, trying to process all that. It was a window into a world she hadn’t imagined existed just a few days before. She took a gulp of her Coke before chasing down the last couple of grains of rice with her fork.

“It is what it is.” Mrs. Olsen shrugged cryptically, then dropped the dustpan.

After a moment of fruitlessly trying to corral the feathers into it with the broom, she discarded her tools and started grabbing big fistfuls of down and shoving them into the trash bag.

Tara turned her attention to the fruit cocktail, eating it slightly slower as the edge of her hunger was dulled.

“I can bring you another tray, if you’d like,” the older woman said as she shook the last of the down into the bottom of the bag. “Shifting whets an appetite like nothing else.”

“I think I’ll be okay,” Tara said, a little embarrassed to ask for more from someone who’d shown her kindness in this strange place. Then, more practically, she realized she had no idea how long it would be until the next meal. “But if I do want something later .…”

Mrs. Olsen nodded to the necklace that Tara now wore. “Green button.”“Oh,” Tara said, feeling a little stupid.The older woman picked up the shredded remains of Tara’s clothes, the sheets,

the blankets, and the pillows and shoved them into the trash bag as Tara looked on guiltily.

“Be back in a moment,” Mrs. Olsen said, and then she stepped out of the room again.

Tara had just long enough to wonder if she was really going to return when she came back in with a pillow covered with the same black fabric as the mattress that had resisted the panther’s claws, along with a stack of folded linens.

“Do try not to tear these up, too,” Mrs. Olsen admonished, setting them on the center of the bed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tara said meekly.The woman shook her head, surveying the room. “You’ll be chasing down

feathers for the next week as it is,” she added.A week. Because Tara was going to be here for at least a week, trapped in this

room, fighting the panther—It rose up inside her again at that thought, and Tara clapped both hands to her

face as she felt it try to change.“Thank you,” she managed, forcing the animal down. “I really appreciate it. I

have to go to the bathroom now, so if you could excuse me .…”The woman’s dark eyes glittered with compassion. “Of course, dearie,” she

said.As silently as a whisper, she left, closing the door behind her.The sound of the dogs sliding home in the doorframe propelled Tara to her

feet, and she bolted into the bathroom, where she splashed water on her face, breathing hard. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, willing it to be familiar, to stay familiar.

But even as she watched, her reflection started to morph, to stretch sickeningly as if the mirror had turned into something from a fun house.

“No,” she told it, but her body wasn’t listening. The panther was coming, and this time it was coming faster, strong, pushing her back out of her own brain with more expert skill.

It was winning, and when it won completely, Tara would be gone.Fumbling at her neck, Tara yanked the disk’s chain. She pawed at it half-

blindly, hitting the buttons. Instantly, a voice crackled from the speakers in the ceiling, and Tara jumped.

“Hang on, bae girl. I’m coming.”

Chapter Twelve

Hang on, Tara thought half-hysterically, leaning over the sink. Hang onto to what?“I’m coming right now,” Chay’s voice continued, still coming from the ceiling.

It was slightly breathless, like he was running. “I’m coming straight to you. Can you talk to me, bae girl? I need you to talk to me now.”

“Yeah,” Tara managed. Oh, God, her face and her shoulders and her hands…oh, God, her hands—

She screwed her eyes shut. “I can talk to you,” she said. She tried to think about other things, about her parents and her sister and Sylvie—suddenly, her heart froze in her chest. Sylvie. What had happened to Sylvie when the panther had come out? Had Tara hurt her?

“Tell me that I’m not losing you, bae girl.”The words cut through Tara’s panic, and she took a shuddering breath. “You’re

not losing me,” she said. “You’re not.”“I’m almost there. Hold on, now.”“I am, I am, I am, I am,” Tara said, repeating the words over and over again as

if they could keep her vocal cords from changing, as if they could keep her human. “I am, I am.”

Suddenly, there was a noise from the direction of the bedroom—the lever being thrown back.

“Tara?” Chay’s voice no longer crackled through the speakers. Instead, it came from the bedroom, reverberating against the hard walls and ceiling with the force of his alarm.

“I’m in here,” she managed, unable to push upright from the sink that she was clinging to.

In an instant, he was in the doorway, wearing cargo pants and a muscle shirt now, his brow furrowed and his eyes burning with intensity. The smell of him hit her like a physical force—not that of the panther but his own personal scent, something not fully human that was every bit as masculine and compelling as his feline musk. Suddenly she felt that she would know him anywhere from that scent alone, and she realized that she was lost.

“Don’t let it win, Tara,” he warned.She gulped and nodded. It wasn’t helping, his being here. It wasn’t stopping

the change. She felt herself slipping away more and more with every second that passed.

He grabbed her bare forearm, and an electric reaction rippled through her—his skin against her skin, his human body touching hers, and for an instant, the

animal was beaten fractionally back. Frantically, Tara grabbed his other hand, holding it so hard in hers that her

bones hurt. The panther was driven back a little more.“Tara,” he repeated, a statement, a call to her human self.“Touch me,” she said—no, not said. Begged. She put his hand to her face, and the bulging, shifting bones and muscles there

went still. But the panther was still in her head—and angry now, because Tara knew how to defeat her, if only for the moment.

“You have to touch me,” she said again, sliding her hand so that they were in contact down the length of their arms.

Chay’s face was twisted now, his dark eyes unreadable. He swore, long and inventively, using words Tara had never heard before. Then he bent his head to her upturned one and kissed her.

It was as if someone had taken the chaos in Tara’s head and set it on fire. Even as her body’s external changes were quelled, her mind exploded. A shot of lust went through her, raw and untampered by the kinds of human thoughts she was used to, and she made a noise in her throat—a panther’s growl through her own lips.

His tongue was in her mouth, stroking it to the rhythm of his body, to the rhythm he forced on her as she rode his thigh that pushed between her thighs even as her ass came up against the cold porcelain of the wall sink. His hot mouth tasted so good she thought she could get drunk on it.

Her hands slid under his shirt, skimming the contours of his belly, his chest, slipping around behind him to pull him harder against her. She knew this was all wrong—that this man whom she barely knew, whom she’d just met, should not be breaking off his kiss only long enough to jerk her shirt and bra off over her head together.

But that voice was very faint now. It belonged to the Tara from before, not to the panther that beat against her brain and throbbed in her veins or to the Tara that was merely an avatar of herself, the human form.

She yanked his shirt up, exposing his chest and belly, and he pulled it off over his head before he kissed her again, hard and rough and demanding, bruising her lips. The place between her legs was hot, throbbing, swollen, and she needed him there more than she had needed anything in her life. The panther was not defeated, merely contained, and what it wanted this body to do was what this new Tara must have.

Tara bit down on Chay’s lip as she found his belt, jerking it loose. He pushed her hands away and tipped her head back under his, urging, forcing her jaw open farther with his fingers hooked around her neck, his thumb on her chin.

His tongue shoved deep into her mouth. A tiny, distant part of her was dazed by the fierceness of the pleasure that it brought to her. Her clit and her nipples and her lips and her brain all throbbed with it as his other hand slid under the

waistband of her pants and the elastic of her panties, across the triangular patch of curls to plunge deep inside of her with a shock that stole her breath and crackled down to her toes.

He stroked her with his hands and tongue, rocking her with him. Her body was now entirely hers again, but her mind was alive with a kind of feral energy that drove her desperately deeper into his power. But even that wasn’t enough, and she regained enough control of her hands to jerk his belt open, twisting his button free and sliding his zipper down the fly.

“Tara—” He broke away long enough to say her name. It was a warning this time, but even as he spoke, his fingers inside her kept urging her toward the edge.

With a small cry, she leaned her head forward, against his shoulder, as the first tremors of her approaching orgasm overtook her.

“Please, Chay,” she demanded shamelessly as her hand encircled the hard girth of his cock, not knowing or caring whether she was fighting or submitting to the beast inside her head.

“Oh, frakking hell,” he said, and he freed himself just long enough to yank her pants down, over her knees and ankles so they tangled on her shoes. He stepped into the circle formed by her leggings, and she grabbed for his waistband again. But he caught her wrist, his hands slick from her wetness, and angled his cock into her body.

Tara gasped as his body came up against hers. His hand under her ass boosted her onto the edge of the sink, and she wrapped her legs around his waist convulsively. He was so hot inside her, his thick length filling her body and searing into her brain.

He drove into her hard, almost hurting her, and she took his mouth, biting his lip again in return. A kind of small tremor went through him, and he thrust into her again and again, building speed until she had to break her kiss. Her breaths matched his, and her fingernails scored deep lines along his back under the assault of sensation as she leaned against the solid wall of his chest.

Her orgasm finally came, and it came so hard that it ripped a keening wail from her throat, a victorious declaration of her certainty in the body that was now the only thing in her world—

Apart from him, Chay, the man whose very smell went straight into the base of her brain, whose hands and body were everywhere on her, around her. As she was coming down, he shuddered as he came, deep inside her, still pumping against her body to play out the last waves of her climax.

Finally, he stilled, and for a suspended, indefinite moment, Tara just clung to him, her eyes shut tight, pushing away the thoughts that she knew would come. Eventually, though, the spell was broken, and he stepped away, pulling free of her.

Tara looked up into his dark eyes and breathed into her very human lungs. “What the hell did we just do?” she said.

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The story continues in…

Out of ChancesTaken by the Panther – Book 2

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Chay Bane’s years of experience tell him that Tara Morland is doomed, destined to lose against the panther who took over her mind and transformed her body. But even though the former SEAL panther shifter has made a career of rescuing other shifters in trouble, his connection to Tara goes far beyond his role in freeing her from the military prison where she’d been confined. And from the moment he lays eyes on her, Chay is determined to save her—whatever the cost.

All Tara wants is to master the beast inside of her, and she finds herself as dependent on the brilliant hacker Chay as she is attracted to him. But there are terrible secrets in the Black Mesa facility where Chay spirits her away—secrets that can threaten her hard-won sanity and her life.

Want to keep reading in the Aethereal Bonds world? The billionaire vampire awaits you. Try Life Blood—for free!

Life Blood by V. M. Black – Now Free!

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She wanted life. He needed her blood.

Cora Shaw will do anything to live. Diagnosed with terminal cancer in her senior year of college, she is given a choice: Call hospice, or seek out a mysterious man who promises an impossible—and insanely dangerous—cure.

She knows him only as Mr. Thorne, a reclusive billionaire who seems full of contradictions. A man with strange, impossible powers over her.

A man, she discovers, who is not a man at all.

In the Vampire’s Office .…

“Cora Ann Shaw. T-cell prolymphocytic leukemia. Terminal. Is that correct?”The cold summary hit me like a blow. I opened my mouth, and for a moment

nothing came out. He raised his gaze to meet mine. His eyes were icy blue, and they seemed to look right through me.

“Yes,” I breathed. “That’s right. Dr. Robeson said you could help me.”“You must understand that you are first required to pass the initial tests,” he

said, his brow low and stern. “I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t.Mr. Thorne opened a drawer and took out a small black case. He stood and

circled the desk until he stood above me, so close that I might have reached out and touched the hem of his pinstripe suit jacket. He was, I thought, quite tall.

He set the case on the edge of the desk and unzipped it, opening it to reveal a

kind of blood collection kit. I sat up straighter. With the last round of medication, I’d become used to regular injections, but I still wouldn’t say that I was exactly blasé about needles.

And anyhow, blood collection? In an office? That was…unconventional.“The results of the screening will indicate if you are a good candidate for the

procedure,” Mr. Thorne said. He selected a needle from the array inside the case, locking it into a holder. “But you must know, even if the outcome is encouraging, the treatment is only successful in a small minority of cases.”

“How small?” I asked, as much to distract myself from his preparations as out of a desire to know the answer. I could always Google for details later.

“One in a hundred,” he said. “Perhaps less.”“Oh,” I said in a little voice. “That is small.”“And if the procedure is unsuccessful, it always results in death,” he continued.“Wait, what?” What the hell kind of procedure was that? “So a one percent

chance of cure, and a ninety-nine percent chance of death? That doesn’t sound like smart odds to me.”

He looked up from the needle. His gaze pierced me, his eyes deep and hollow under his straight black brows. As handsome as he was, he didn’t exactly look the picture of health, either. “What are your chances now?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. My chances were exactly nil. Put that way, gambling on an outside chance didn’t seem quite so insane.

“That is why we only select terminal patients,” he said, pulling out a glass blood collection tube.

“What about relapse?” I demanded. As a cancer patient, I’d learned that the disease could lurk in my body for months or years, undetectable until it spread out again to kill me.

“There is no risk of relapse. If you are cured, you are cured.” That mesmerizing gaze caught me again. “Forever.”

He dropped to one knee next to my chair, and my heart did an unexpected backflip. Oh, God, he was a beautiful man, more beautiful than he had any right to be. I tried to think about something else, anything else, because this certainly wasn’t the right kind of response of a patient to her doctor. But this close, I could smell his cologne, all sandalwood, leather, and musk, and my mind refused to obey my order to find something else to dwell on. Pink elephants, pink elephants, pink elephants...

How old was he? I wondered. He carried the authority of an older man, but this close, I could see that his pale skin was almost inhumanly flawless, not so much young as...perfect.

Damn.At least it was too dark for him to see my furious blush.He held out a hand. I stared at it for a moment before I realized that he wanted

my arm.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” I asked.“I am not at risk of blood contamination,” he said, sounding unaccountably

amused.For some reason, I believed him, even though I had no reason to. I gave him

my arm, inner wrist facing upwards. His fingers touched my skin, cool and commanding, as he slid the sleeve of my sweater up to bear the crease of my elbow. It sent a deep shiver through me, a tightening in my center that made me blush even harder. My jacket slipped from my lap to crumple on the floor between us. I tried not to look at him, but I could not stop myself from staring at the top of his head with such intensity that I was half-surprised that his impeccably combed hair didn’t combust.

He’s about to stick you with a needle, you idiot, I snarled at myself. Don’t you have any sense or dignity at all?

He looked up at me, one side of that delicious mouth quirking, and my breath tangled in my lungs. No, no I don’t, I thought distantly. No sense or dignity at all.

Mr. Thorne wiped the inside of my elbow with an alcohol-soaked swab. The smell of evaporating ethanol turned my stomach a little.

“It won’t hurt,” he said, discarding the swab and taking up the needle. “I promise.”

I started to protest such an absurd claim, but just then, the needle met the skin above my vein. Something else happened at the same moment—some sensation that came from the touch of his hand against my wrist. It spiraled outward, up my arm and deep into my center, rippling back up into my head so suddenly that I gasped. The needle pushed through my skin at the same moment that a heady wave welled up to carry the pain of the needle and turn it into a deep, twisting sensation that sent my heart racing as heat flooded my groin.

I stared at the needle in my arm as the shivering reaction swept over me. My skin was burning, my body flushed against the impossible coolness of his fingers. The blood collection tube was almost full. Swiftly, Mr. Thorne pulled it free, then slipped the needle from my vein.

“No—” I said involuntarily as the sensation was cut off. I needed—I needed it back. I needed him.

What was wrong with me?I turned my bewildered gaze to Mr. Thorne. His face was still as pale as ivory,

but there was a dark glitter in his hooded eyes that matched my need and sent my heart skittering out of control.

“What did you do to me?” I whispered.“You would say yes,” he said, the dark hunger of his voice tinged with an

infinite sadness as he stood and discarded the used needle, setting the blood collection tube upon the desk. “If I told you right now that I knew you would die, you would still say yes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, even as my body said, I would

—to anything, anything at all...He bent over me, and I tried not to notice the scent of him. He touched the

bead of blood that had formed upon the needle’s exit. I could hear his breathing now—irregular as mine had become. With the tip of his forefinger, he scooped up the droplet, holding it suspended just as he held me with the force of his regard.

A shudder went through his frame, and he curled his fingers into a fist, smearing the blood across his palm. Suddenly, he seemed to grow, as if some darkness were uncurling inside him, extending past the limits of flesh and bone.

“Go,” he ground out. “Go now, before I damn my best intentions.”It was as if some invisible bonds that had been holding me to my chair had

been broken. I sprang up, snatched up my jacket, and fled, banging through the tall mahogany doors and not stopping until I jabbed the down button on the elevator.

“Goodbye, Miss Shaw,” the secretary said unconcernedly from behind her desk. “You can expect the results within a week.”

The door slid open, and I stumbled into the elevator compartment, slapping at the ground floor button frantically until the doors finally, reluctantly closed.

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About my booksMy shifter novella serials usually come out on the first Tuesday of every month. Start with Taken: The Alpha’s Captive #1.

My vampire serials come out on the third Tuesday of every month. Start with Life Blood: Cora’s Choice #1.

I’m currently working exclusively in the Aethereal Bonds world, which I’ve mapped out to be big enough to let me tell all the different kinds of stories I want to share with readers. It’s got vampires, demons, weres, faes, and more—all sorts of creatures that are great fun to play with.

About meI live near Washington, D.C., with my family—the usual husband and kids contingent, with extended relatives who pop in and out of the house from time to time. A proud geek, I love fantasy, romance, science fiction, and historical fiction. I’m a compulsive dreamer, and I feel spoiled to be able to be able to make a career out of imagining things!

Table of Contents

Book DescriptionAethereal BondsChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveAfterword