“It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” she insisted, a slight southern twang left in her cadence as she spoke, no matter how hard she tried to sound as though she had been local to the area. It sparked the question of where she had come from, prior to having to hit the road and run when her family split up for the girls’ safety.
After another glance around, I made sure there weren’t any hang-arounds or club whores present. Knox noticed what I was doing and spoke up. “Just brothers here right now. We sent everyone else on their way, including prospects.”
I tipped my head in acknowledgment. “Did you find anything?” I asked as I turned to Wooly and Mammoth, both of whom had been silent during introductions.
“Picked up on some blood that obviously didn’t belong to her,” Wooly answered in his no-nonsense way. Mammoth just nodded his head. Our resident bear shifters were notoriously good trackers and usually our go-to men when someone or something needed hunting. “The leopard, must have been hurt in the alley before you showed up.”
“Were you able to follow it?”
“Only so far as the oil slick the assholes left behind from the vehicle they took off in. Seeing that evidence made it pretty clear to us why they stopped there to begin with. Whatever they’re driving won’t last much longer. Something happened to damage it.” The guys looked to my woman for answers.
She shrugged her shoulders, causing her breast to rise and fall across my lower ribcage. It took everything in me not to throw her over my shoulder and take her back to my room to ravage her once more. Jesus. “Fuck!” I hissed under my breath. Some of the men noticed and chuckled. I glared at them while adjusting my dick. “Fuck off!” The words may have been muttered, but their laughter was not.
“I don’t know what they used, or how they managed it, but I was knocked out for almost all of it.”
“Almost?” Knox asked as he moved in closer to us.
Chantal chewed on her lip again, which I was coming to realize happened to be a nervous gesture on her part. “I woke when they were,” she started to say, but was cut off by the mewling noise in the back of her throat at the memory. “When they,” she tried again, clearing her throat and squaring her stance a bit. “When they tried to take my pelt, I woke up,” she finally managed to get out.
“Fuck!” Mammoth hissed as he turned away from her.
“How much did they get?” I didn’t even recognize who spoke. Instead, I was more concerned with my woman’s distress as she attempted to hide her perceived weakness from the men gathered around us. I wished I could take the anxiousness away from her, but it would take time for her to get to know and trust the men of the MC. I was so lost in thought about how to make that happen that another voice, distant member, damn near startled me when he spoke up.
“Below the knee, both feet,” the doctor Knox had brought in the room earlier explained. He was a member of the club, from another chapter, and I wasn’t too familiar with him. My spine tingled as he eyed my woman up and down. “How did everything look once you changed?”
I sighed at that. The bastards wouldn’t be able to focus and get to work until they saw for themselves. I knew that. “You in a place where you’re okay showing them, babe?” I whispered the words in her ear to give the feeling of privacy, even though we both knew better. The room was full of shifters. There was no getting around the preternatural hearing they possessed.
“I can do that,” she assured me before stepping slightly away from me. One moment she stood there a woman, my mate, my beautiful silver-eyed beauty. The next, she was on all fours, paws clearly a diminished version of the incredible pelt that covered the rest of her sleek, feline body.
“Holy fuck!” “Jesus!” “She’s amazing!” I couldn’t really distinguish who said what because there were too many different awed comments being flung around to keep track.
“I will cut your fucking fingers off,” I growled as I noticed a hand coming close to my woman. I needn’t have worried though, Chantal turned her head, snapping her teeth at the idiot who dared to touch her.
Brace snatched his hand back and laughed like a maniac. “Sorry, sweetness, it was just so pretty, I couldn’t resist.”
At that, my woman purred. Her cat moved over to him and brushed her fur quickly against his fingertips before she made her way back to my side. I watched, knowing her intention was just to be friendly. Still, I had to calm my inner beast at the awed look on Brace’s slack-jawed face. “Shit! That felt like touching the night sky,” he offered to the room when he was able to pull himself together again.
“Come near my woman with your greedy little paws again, and I will end you!” The words sat heavy in the room as every man there took a solid step back away from us where before, they had been leaning in, many tempted to try just what Brace had.
The dumbass in question simply glanced down at his hands. “My paws aren’t little. You take that back, right now!” His feigned upset helped to ease some of the tension he caused a the men in the room laughed at him.
Again, I needn’t have worried about the mounting tensions anyway because even if Brace hadn’t used humor to do it, my woman had it handled. Chantal’s cat moved from my side to go greet each man in the club. She sniffed at them, and then allowed her fur to brush through limply hanging fingers before moving on to the next. If they even appeared as though they would touch her on their own, or push for more, she moved away quickly. When she got near the doc, she sniffed, turned her nose up, and came back to my side. He scowled at her as she did so.
“Think you offended her earlier, Doc,” I told him. He just huffed and turned his back on all of us in order to down the drink he had left sitting on the table behind him. Some of the men, I noticed, were busy looking at their hands in disbelief. She really was something, all midnight and moonbeams. Chantal stayed in her leopard form once she changed. That was for the best as there was no way I could handle her shifting back in front of my brothers. Most shifters had no problem with nudity amongst us. That really wasn’t an issue for our kind. The problem, and one I knew she clued in on, was that I just had her fall into my lap. I’d only seen her fully nude once, there was no way I was ready to share that experience with anyone else just yet. Beyond that, I didn’t think Chantal was ready for it. She hadn’t lived among many shifter communities since she had been trying to remain in hiding most of her life.
“Leopard blood, you said?” I attempted to direct everyone’s focus back on the men who abducted my woman and tried to skin her alive.
“Yeah, we were hoping you could bring your woman back to the scene, maybe see if she picks up on something we might have missed. Who knows, it might trigger a memory that she didn’t realize she still held onto?” Mammoth questioned. He didn’t take a step back from me as he explained what they needed, but he looked damn ready to. That was odd for him, as the bears were always so stoic.
“I get it.” My reassurance went a long way toward him relaxing in front of me. I glanced down at the beautiful leopard by my side. “You okay with that?” Her head bumped my hand once, and I took that to be her acquiescence of the request. “We’ll go get ready. I’m going to need some clothes for my woman since she just trashed hers.” I pointed to the mess she left behind on the floor when she shifted.
“I’ll walk back to the room with you. Let me know what sizes she takes, I’ll nab something from the support shop stock,” Knox told me. We turned to leave the room, all eyes still on us as we moved, same as when we had arrived.
“Feel like a circus freak right about now,” I grumbled while thinking about the story Chantal had told me earlier about her time with a circus full of shifters and other oddities. Knox, not knowing that portion of my mate’s history laughed at my expense.
“It’ll pass. It feels different to them. There aren’t many mated pairs around here just yet. I think half those fuckers are hopeful as hell now that two brothers have fallen. The rest of them are scared shitless that it will happen and they won’t know what to
do about it.”
Chantal made a noise that sounded an awful lot like what I imagine a cat snickering would sound like. “Think that’s funny, do you?” I asked. Her answer was a purr and a head bumping into my thigh as we walked.
“You’re one lucky fucker,” Knox told me as I opened the door for Chantal to go inside my room. Before I could even move inside, I felt a disturbance in the air momentarily, telling me she had just shifted back to her human form.
“I need a medium shirt and a size 6 pants.”
“Yes ma’am,” Knox called out and trotted off before I could thank him. I closed the door behind me as I entered the room and took in her natural beauty.
“Need to know what you were sniffing for when you scented each of those men out there before allowing them to touch you.”
She giggled. “Honestly?”
“Yeah, Moonbeam. Always honest.”
“Well, truth be told, I wanted to see if any of them smelled of the men who abducted me, but the real reason was just to piss off the doctor. He made me feel like a weird science experiment when he was in here and I wanted to give him a dose of his own medicine.”
I threw my head back and laughed at that. “Remind me never to piss you off, babe.”
The little minx winked at me and then turned her back to walk towards my bed where she proceeded to sit. “I don’t think that will be a problem, Gray. You seem like a smart man.”
I pulled her body toward mine just as there was a knock on the door. “Got your clothes,” Brace called out.
“How the hell did your number one fan end up being a panther, of all things?”
“Heard that!” Brace chuckled as he called out to me through the door. I opened the door a smidge, just enough to allow him to pass the clothing through to me. “We’re going to be the best of friends, sweetness!” he called out to my woman while grinning like the lunatic he was at me. In a whispered tone, he told me what the boys had going down. “Get her ready to ride. Knox sent Bomber ahead to her apartment to make sure no one is watching it.”
“He fly or ride?”
“Flew, man. Probably already there knowing his crazy ass.”
I tipped my chin up at Brace and then shut the door. “Give us a couple of minutes.”
A couple of minutes turned out to be no more than we needed. Chantal dove into the clothing I handed her with a purpose. She didn’t bother going to the bathroom, looking in the mirror to see if she was presentable, or fussing over makeup she didn’t have available. Not that she needed it, but after dealing with the women who hung around the club, it was a refreshing as fuck change to have a woman who could just toss some clothes on and go when necessary.
11
The first time I ever rode on the back of a motorcycle had been one of the dirt bikes that a boy, in the circus we were living with, used for his performance. When my grandmother saw me on his bike, she threw an ungodly fit and ripped me a new one right there in front of everyone about ‘safety’ this and ‘responsibilities’ that. Later, in private, she laid into me again about how stupid it was to allow myself to be that close to another other-worldly creature. I never did find out what that boy was. I don’t think he was a shifter, but it didn’t matter. He was afraid of my grandparents and never bothered to come around me again after that incident.
That little ride around the corn field near where we set up the traveling circus was nothing compared to sitting on the back of Gray’s Harley, pressed tightly to his back as my arms reached around and held on tight. The earthy scent his leopard gave off had me lulled into such a state that I may as well have been tranquilized. He jest smelled of home. “Mine,” my inner cat growled as I leaned in and sniffed right at the edge of his hairline before I brushed my cheek against him.
Gray squeezed my thigh with his right hand before resting back up on the handlebars again. “Stop that or I’ll pull over and fuck you right on the side of the road in front of everyone who happens by.”
Being shifters, I was able to hear him over the roar of the wind in my ears and I simply chuckled in response as I hugged tighter to him. It wasn’t about teasing him then. The closer we made it to our destination, the more anxious I felt. I knew it wasn’t necessarily real, but I felt a tingle in my lower legs, as if the worry that it would happen again lingered in the very air around me. “Bomber is there on look out,” Gray assured me, obviously picking up on the fact that I had stiffened and held tighter to him.
“I’m sorry, worrying is something I can’t seem to let go of. If you hadn’t been so close that night, it might have been the end of me.”
“Let’s not dwell on that, Moonbeam. You’re fine. You’re mine. Even though you’ll always feel that piece of you missing, the events that led up to that night are what brought us together. I’d give my own pelt to replace what you lost if it were possible, but I can’t regret being brought to you.” As he said that last bit, he squeezed my leg again and from that moment, I simply rested my head against his shoulder blade and hung on for the rest of the ride.
As we rode, I would occasionally giggle as a bug smacked into Gray. “You need a windscreen,” I told him at one point.
“Windscreens are for pussies,” he roared back just as another bug splatted against his knuckles. “Fucking hell,” he muttered to my complete amusement. I gave him a quick snuggle by tightening my hold on his midsection, but that did little to placate him after I had laughed about his circumstances.
By the time we grew closer to our destination, I was giddy with excitement from the ride itself. The wind, the road, the press of bodies, and the vibrations of the bike itself had me all tied up in the best kind of knots, while also feeling as though my soul was soaring. I just knew that this must be the feeling of elation one might experience when they flew. Maybe flight offered an even better feeling, but since I was a mere feline shifter, that would never be my lot in life.
Unlike the man perched atop my building like a frightening gargoyle watching over us from above. I wished, for a moment, that Bomber had been in his skin, but that would have been pretty obvious to anyone passing by. Instead, he appeared to blend with the building as he kept watch from his lofty perch.
12
We managed to get to Chantal’s apartment in about 45 minutes, thanks to a break in traffic. We took the bikes in order to get there quicker, knowing that the prospect who had been with us when we first brought Chantal in was coming up behind us in a cage in order to grab anything Chantal might need to take with her. The life she had before she was abducted wasn’t something she could go back to now.
Having a woman on the back of my bike was a new experience too. Her warm body pushed up against my back, the light giggles I could hear coming from her, and the slight cinnamon-vanilla smell were a heady mix every time we stopped and I got a moment to just appreciate the sensations wrapping around me. My woman. My mate. My whole fucking world had changed over the course of an extremely short amount of time. Then there was the reason behind the abrupt change that meant we couldn’t just enjoy it. We were knee deep in shit and sinking fast. The longer it took to track down the men who attempted to hurt Chantal, the bigger the head start they had on disappearing. Failing to find them wasn’t an option.
Bomber was perched on top of the condo when we rolled up. He was in his human form, and we could probably be thankful for the overcast day that allowed him to travel unseen as his dragon. Bomber wasn’t a small creature when he transformed. I tapped into his mind to check in with him. It was something he could block me from doing if he chose to, but at the moment it gave us a tactical advantage over any adversaries in the area. He let me know in his own way that everything had been clear so far on the outside. That didn’t mean there wasn’t someone lying in wait inside before he arrived.
“You want to leave her with the kid?” Knox asked me while tipping his head toward Chantal.
“No! She comes along.” When it seemed as though he’d argue I gave him a look that said I wasn’t fighting about t
his. “She’s safer with us than out here with a prospect. Bomber can’t keep a lookout while watching out for the two of them at the same time.”
Knox nodded and took the lead into the condo. It was a well-kept space with two floors. Wooly, Mammoth, and Brace took off up the stairs to clear the second floor, which housed a bathroom and two bedrooms. Knox and I cleared the lower level with Chantal and the prospect. Once the entire place had been checked, I sent Chantal upstairs to pack some bags while we took a good look around.
I wondered how Chantal managed a place like this. It was a condo, but it seemed a bit upscale for a teacher’s salary. Knox gave me the eye and I felt that he was thinking along the same lines. The furniture appeared new, but held a more classic, vintage appearance. The whole condo was adorned in Earthy green and brown tones, and the smell that welcomed me at the door was a lot like Chantal- homey, with a hint of vanilla. There were plants everywhere that I looked, except for the desk in the corner, which appeared to be covered in students’ work that Chantal must have been in the middle of grading.
There were muddy footprints toward the back door that looked like they belonged to a man’s boot. Actually, it seemed similar to the motorcycle boots the men of our club tended to favor. “Mammoth?” I called out to him and waited until he showed up to point out the marks on the floor. “Were those here earlier?”
“Nah, no marks earlier.”
“Looks like someone was here between when you left and when Bomber showed.”
He nodded as he notably sniffed the air, trying to pick up a scent from the trail left behind. Whoever had left their boot prints behind either wasn’t very cautious, smart, or was in a hell of a damn hurry to get in and out of the condo unnoticed. Once Mammoth was secure in the scent he had picked up, he was out the back door in a flash. The patio area was a small space divided from neighbors on either side by a six foot tall block wall. Chantal had a few plants growing out there around it where she was obviously trying to give the space a little added warmth.
Ridden by Darkness Page 5