by Aja James
Used to have a heart.
The twine was woven out of her Pure Mate’s hair, the color of raw honey, with the luster of the finest amber. Even after all these millennia, the rope still glittered when it caught fragments of light, just like the gorgeous, wavy mane of her only love.
She’d already lived centuries before she met him. At the time, he’d only just reached adulthood.
Animal spirits were so rare in Pure Ones, Dark Ones and humans alike, that when she found him, her first reaction had been relief.
As if she’d finally found home.
He’d been painfully shy, as leopards were wont to be, blushing and ducking his head at every overture she made. And she’d flirted blatantly, relentlessly, mixed with just enough teasing to coax him closer.
But her pursuit of him had been desperate and serious, as if she knew deep inside that he was the light to balance her darkness.
She had to have him.
He hadn’t capitulated to her conquest readily. He hadn’t led her on a merry chase. He’d held back with a wisdom that defied his tender years, for he saw the cruelty in her smiles, the ugliness beneath her beauty.
When he did accept her, he did so with quiet dignity and solemnity. As if he knew that his path with her would not be easy, but he resolutely chose to give her his light.
They’d shared only a few years of peace and joy together.
Fox spirits were mercurial, capricious creatures by nature, and she was no different. There was both good and mischief within her; different situations brought out different sides.
But with him, she’d only wanted to be good.
There was a purity to his smile and an abandonment to his laughter. There was no darkness within him, only the sweetest joy.
Every female who looked upon him felt the attraction, even if it wasn’t carnal. Males were drawn to him as well. He inspired cheer and honesty, generosity and kindness, wherever he went, whoever he was with.
She was ever jealous of his attention, though she shared it grudgingly.
For in the end, he belonged only to her. Only she had ever had the privilege of possessing his body, his heart and soul.
But all that changed in the blink of an eye.
Her world was shattered.
Her soul shriveled and died, never to be revived.
She recalled clearly when Queen Ashlu had approached her Mate with the poisoned dagger in the end.
The greatest vampire queen of all time had fallen under his spell too.
It was not just obsession she felt, lust and greed for his body. She’d been captivated by his spirit, his heart, even though the terrible things she’d done to him had threatened to break them.
The Dark Queen had been desperately in love.
The fox spirit knew. She only had to look in the mirror to see the truth in Queen Ashlu’s eyes.
The vampire queen had been weeping as she approached her Pure Blood Slave, sentenced by her own Council to end his life or be dethroned and embroil the empire into a bloody civil war.
She’d been racked with shuddering sobs she couldn’t suppress, tears streaming down her heart-shaped face.
The fox spirit in her human servant skin had been the only witness present. The queen had dismissed all of her inner Council despite their bid to stay and watch the proceedings. To make sure she carried out the sentence.
The Blood Slave had stood still, simply waiting for her to come to him. No restraints had held him; there had never been a need. For, once the queen had made him her Blood Slave, his blood and body obeyed her every command.
“I love you,” Queen Ashlu had said to him when she was within striking distance.
The fox spirit was certain that was the first time she’d ever uttered those words.
The Blood Slave said nothing in reply, continuing to hold her gaze.
Calm. Accepting.
His eyes had held sadness and perhaps just the smallest sympathy for the female who had enslaved him and taken him against his will. He was pure goodness to the very end; it wasn’t in him to hate.
“Please,” the mighty queen had begged. “Please tell me that you love me too. Just a little. Lie, if you must.”
He’d turned his face away from her then, denying her this last request.
In doing so, he’d looked directly at the fox spirit in her human guise, standing in the shadows of the chamber like a marble statue, ignored and insignificant.
He’d unveiled his feelings then, and the pain and torment that he’d endured for the months that the vampire queen had held him glittered like glass shards in his deep golden eyes.
The queen hadn’t broken him.
No, his heart had been broken by her.
Because he’d known all along that she watched everything from the sidelines.
He’d felt her disgust and abhorrence at what was done to him.
Of him.
Though he’d been helpless to stop it. Though he’d sacrificed himself to save his Mate and young. Though his spirit shriveled every time the vampire queen took his blood and abused his body.
He’d held the fox spirit’s gaze when the queen finally plunged the dagger into his heart. He’d closed his eyes as a tear leaked onto his cheek, and his body unraveled into a shower of stars.
The fox spirit had felt nothing upon the witness of her beloved’s death.
She’d inured herself to feeling by then. There was nothing but coldness and hate, vengeance and wrath.
Just like now.
The female researcher replaced the cord of bells around her ankle and straightened with emotionless efficiency.
Monstrous howls disturbed the perfect silence of the labs from farther down the hall.
She got up to check things out.
One or more of her experiments must not be adjusting well to their latest injections.
Five rooms down, she spent several seconds entering the security protocols to unlock the airtight seal of the bullet-resistant, fiber-glass encased steel doors.
Upon entering, she was immediately bombarded with the cacophony of thrashing, growling, whining, and screaming. There were also loud pops from bones breaking, joints snapping, muscles tearing.
Music to her ears.
She surveyed her handiwork with a small smile tilting her lips.
In one cage, there were two half-formed wolf-men. One was already dead on the ground, either from his transformation gone wrong or because the other one had killed him.
The one that was still breathing likely wouldn’t live through the night. Its body was broken from the forced change in many places, and it was a hideous, disfigured mess of part wolf, part man.
She made a mental note.
Lupine genes apparently didn’t mix well with humans, Pure and Dark Ones. She’d tried for many centuries, with many different strains. The results were always half-baked, ugly and uncontrolled.
Well, what did she expect? Dogs weren’t the smartest of animals.
In another cage, a naked young woman huddled in a corner. A college student brought to one of the researcher’s clinics in Chinatown by her family in a last ditch effort to cure her late-stage leukemia.
The researcher had “saved” the girl—by turning her into a vampire, one of a handful of successes in recent years.
But after a while, something in the girl’s body had started to break down. So, the researcher brought her back to the facility to experiment some more. She injected some feline genes into her blood to strengthen it.
So far, so good. The girl’s condition had stabilized, but she hadn’t shown any signs of transformation. She just kept to her corner and hissed whenever anyone came near.
Toward the back of the chamber were various caged animals the researcher kept for tests. Most of them were predatory felines, but there were a few birds of prey, poisonous reptiles and the occasional wolf, such smelly creatures.
Thus far, the researcher achieved the most success with feline genes, some success with serpent DNA, and very little w
ith the birds.
Wolves, jackals, hyenas and even foxes were hit and miss. Mostly miss.
She’d tried just about every other species there was—stag, rhino, buffalo, bear, shark, croc—the list went on.
Insects were the worst. Disgusting things that had the lifespan, if successful, of at most a few hours.
She supposed this made sense, because the natural shifters she’d encountered over the many millennia of her nine lives had all been felines, serpents and birds—kings of their respective domains—land, sea and sky.
She huffed an impatient sigh.
She’d have to dispose of the lupines. Or perhaps she’d hand them over to the U.S. government who provided some of the funding for her work. Even a mangled half-man-half-wolf was proof that her research yielded results.
Provided they lived, of course.
What the human government did with these creatures she could care less about. All she wanted was their money, to bankroll the experiments for the subjects that remained—
The most formidable predators to fill the ranks of Medusa’s ever-expanding army.
*** *** *** ***
Six hours later, Maximus and Agent Kyles were still climbing the rocky northern face of the Koryak mountains, heading toward the tallest peak.
Good thing Maximus had slept almost the entire journey from NYC to Siberia, over twenty hours in the air.
It was around noon when they’d parachuted out of the plane. He hadn’t felt the sleep-inducing effects of the daytime sun at all.
Perhaps because he’d already slept so much, perhaps because of the adrenaline from the jump. And, too, he was millennia old, powerful enough to operate normally during the day, especially when he was at full strength.
But the simple truth was, the sun had never bothered him as much as it did others of his Kind. He just never saw any point in widely sharing this fact.
Now, darkness had already descended, and the night was indeed wintry cold. They’d focused on making as much progress as possible up the mountain toward the cave Agent Kyles had located, rather than divert time hunting game. She’d called back earlier that they could always make do with the MREs in her pack.
That’s right, she’d called back to him. Because, dammit! He was indeed lagging behind a wisp of a human woman.
He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had occasion to climb mountains.
All his existence, he’d unconsciously avoided harshly cold locales. When he appreciated landscape, he liked lakes, rivers and oceans the best, forests and meadows. He’d trekked across deserts many times, even braved a few jungles.
But mountains were new. His muscles weren’t used to the continuous climbing, and up the steepest part of the range, no less. Especially muscles that, as of four nights ago, had been mostly dead.
The high altitude didn’t help either.
Maximus gritted his teeth and put one boot in front of the other.
He was determined not to slow them down. His dented male pride aside, there was the harsh reality that they needed to reach shelter soon.
The temperature was falling fast. The air was getting thinner. He wouldn’t be the weak link between the two of them that put her in danger.
“We’re almost there!” Her voice carried faintly back to him as a gusty wind kicked up.
“Just around the corner!”
She didn’t lie, thank the Dark Goddess, for a few minutes later, they found the entrance to the cave and practically threw themselves within to hide from the merciless wind outside.
Maximus took in his surroundings with a swift glance.
The cave was about twenty feet in diameter and ten feet in height, just enough room for the two of them to stretch out around a small fire.
Perfectly in tune with him, she went about starting one, unpacking the magnesium and other materials from her duffle.
And it hit him just then that she’d been carrying a utility pack on her front, a large duffle on her back the entire time they’d been climbing. She’d given him a pack to carry as well, but she’d taken the bigger load.
He didn’t know whether to kick himself in the ass or to beat his chest in pride for her.
What a woman!
She’d saved his life, healed his body, even seared steaks for him—just the way he liked them, more raw than rare.
And let’s not forget, she’d eaten his cock like there was no tomorrow.
What more could a male ask for?
She slanted him a toothsome smile, the fire she kindled blazing to life.
“I have many gifts,” she acknowledged. “Before long, you’ll be wondering how you ever survived without me.”
But that was the thing.
He felt like she’d been with him for much longer than the past few days. She’d just been in a different body.
He looked at her across the flickering flames as they sat on the hard ground to rest their weary limbs.
She was digging into her duffle for food and water, not looking back at him.
As the firelight danced over her face, throwing intriguing shadows upon her pale skin, Maximus tried to see something of Simca in her features. Her gestures and personality reminded him so much of his eternal familiar.
But that was ridiculous, he knew.
How could a human woman look anything like a black panther?
And yet.
Her choppy black hair sported bluish glints just like Simca’s sleek, satiny hide. Her cheekbones narrowed to a pointy chin, making her face almost triangular in its sharpness, the hollows emphasized in firelight.
She glanced up at him as she handed him a couple of MREs and a canteen of water.
Her eyes. Her eyes were Simca’s.
In this moment, Maximus truly understood the adage “eyes are the windows to the soul.” He could see Simca so clearly in Ariel Kyles’ thickly lashed, tilted, golden green eyes.
He saw shared experience in them.
Kinship. Affection. Trust. Mischief.
Simca loved to tease and play. She’d always been able to make him laugh, get him to relax after a long stressful night.
But there was also something new swirling in the Chartreusian depths.
Hunger.
It was true that Simca had always looked at him with a strange kind of hunger.
There had been times when they were together that Maximus wondered whether Simca wanted to make a meal of him.
He’d felt the prickle of danger lift the hairs on the back of his neck whenever she stared at him a little too long, a little too consideringly. But she’d never so much as scratched him in two millennia.
Now…
Now that hunger was fully exposed, raw and pulsing. Like a living thing that loomed between them.
It had a purpose. It had a name—
Lust.
Agent Kyles licked her lips slowly in that familiar way, holding his unblinking stare.
He felt it too. The almost irresistible need to mate with her.
He dropped his eyes and quickly finished his portion of the food and water, before lying down on his side, facing away from her.
There had been blatant invitation in her eyes, which he rejected without words.
His body was burning with unfulfilled need, his staff stone hard and screaming in protest.
But his mind was a mess of confusion and doubt, and his heart still throbbed with stabbing pain. From the barely healed physical wounds, his loss, and the haunting dreams.
He didn’t know what he felt any more. What he wanted.
He hardly recognized himself.
He was so close to coming apart at the seams.
Her feet shuffled in front of his face.
“It’s cold. You’re hot. Do you mind if I share your body heat? I promise not to pounce on you in the middle of the night.”
Without answering, he reached up and grabbed a calf, roughly pulling her down to lie against him, her much smaller body curled into his, his arms enfolding her snugly, her butt t
ucked into his aching groin.
She sighed with contentment as his delicious body heat cocooned her. A low, vibrating purr rumbled from her throat as she fell almost immediately asleep.
It felt right to hold her like this.
Yet, it also felt wrong.
Since he met Simca, Maximus had seldom slept alone.
There were never any blankets on his bed, for, between the two of them, they practically singed the mattress with their body heat. The AC was always on at full blast, even in the winter.
Simca was a pillow hoarder, though, and didn’t like to share space. Half the time, Maximus found himself dangling off the side of the bed because the panther had thrown herself across it diagonally and hogged as large an area as she could.
The other half of the time, she liked to lie directly on top of him, belly to belly, her tucked legs keeping most of her weight off him.
Despite the magnified heat of the two of them pressed together, she seemed to enjoy the closeness. Like a human voluntarily enjoyed the sauna, even though the steam was sometimes uncomfortable.
When she lay on top of him, she often indulged in a ritual of meticulously bathing his face and neck with her tongue while purring up a storm. And then she’d tuck her muzzle in the crook of his neck, and her eyes would squeeze shut with bliss.
Cats only closed their eyes with people they trusted, Maximus knew. There’s a reason why felines always looked like they were smiling when they slept.
They were truly content in those moments. Comfortable and safe.
Though she wasn’t lying on top of him now, though she was in a different form, Maximus knew that he held both Ariel Kyles and Simca in his arms.
She was purring just like Simca did, and he’d bet she had the exact same smile on her face.
And after a while of holding her, as Maximus drifted into sleep as well, it didn’t feel wrong any more.
It only felt right.
2nd century, AD. Ancient Rome.
It took many weeks for the boy to find his opportunity.
Getting the keys to the tiger cage and its shackles was the hardest part. Mistress Circe carried them on her person at all times, on the belt of her stola.
Like little trophies.
The only time she took them off was when she bathed. But as she was always surrounded by vampire guards, and always kept an eye on those keys, the boy couldn’t find a way to snatch them up.