Tiger's Dream (Tiger's Curse Book 5)

by Colleen Houck

  There was a newspaper article on how he had reacted to the sad news of the passing of his beloved grandfather, Anik Kadam, and his brother, Sohan Kishan Rajaram. I let out a sigh when I read about the fabricated story of our deaths. Apparently we’d been the victims of a plane crash in the Indian Ocean. The plane went down and our bodies were never discovered.

  Ren wasn’t wasting any time in taking over the company or settling into a normal human life. Envy snuck its dastardly way though my veins but I stomped it down mercilessly. It had been a long time since I felt jealous of my brother over material things. I could care less about the company. What I needed to know was what was going on with Kelsey.

  Scrolling through other headlines and company announcements, I froze when I saw Rajaram Industries Head, Dhiren Rajaram, Takes a Bride! I clicked on the article.

  Multibillionaire and heir to the Rajaram Industries corporation, Alagan Dhiren Rajaram, is engaged to marry American college student Kelsey Hayes in a ceremony that will take place right here in Japan on August seventh! The wedding will be a private celebration but various VIPs and Rajaram Industry officers have been issued invitations to the couple’s reception, which will take place at the top of the esteemed luxury hotel, the Rajaram Grand Towers, which is owned by the groom.

  Alagan Rajaram inherited the corporation upon the death of his grandfather, Anik Kadam, who essentially ran the company through his niece Nilima Mehta. Reclusive and media shy, Anik Kadam was known only to a few of the members of the board, and even they didn’t know that he had grandsons until he introduced them to the company less than a year before his death.

  It is unfortunate that just as the Rajaram family was being discovered, the world lost both the president of the company, Anik Kadam, as well as Dhiren’s co-heir and younger brother, Sohan Kishan Rajaram, but as Nilima Mehta, acting president, states, “Everyone at Rajaram Industries is waiting eagerly for the handsome young heir to the Rajaram fortune to take his position as president. I, for one, am looking forward to taking a long vacation after he gets settled in. For now, I wish him and his new bride happiness as they begin their life together.”

  When we asked how the billionaire bachelor met his future bride, the young Mr. Rajaram joked, “At a circus, of course.” Perhaps one day we’ll be lucky enough to hear the real story of how an unknown American girl-next-door was able to take this catch of the decade off the matrimony market.

  We, too, wish them luck and a happy union and hope that their newfound contentment in each other will offset the grief of losing a brother and a most honored ancestor!

  I sat back in the chair quietly absorbing the news of Ren and Kelsey’s impending wedding. This time I let the jealousy I felt run rampant. Not only was Ren gifted with humanity but he got my girl too. And me? I got to run around the jungle with my tail between my legs.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t expect him to propose to Kelsey. I knew Ren loved her and I had asked him to take care of her. It was just so soon. They were marrying less than two months after they returned. Had she forgotten me that quickly? Was she happy? The fact that maybe she felt she didn’t have any other options came to my mind. I fixated on the idea and didn’t let it go.

  My thoughts were so set on Kelsey that I didn’t even hear Anamika approach.

  “What it is, Kishan?” she asked softly as she placed her hand on my arm. “You are troubled.”

  It wasn’t until she came around in front of me and perched on my desk to look me in the face that I acknowledged her presence. Running a hand through my hair, I backed away from her, stood, and went to the window. My hand tightened into a fist and I brought it up to the glass. But instead of breaking it like I wanted to, I rested my forehead against my fist and said brokenly, “She’s getting married.”

  Chapter 5

  Voyeur

  “You mean Kelsey is marrying Dhiren,” she said flatly.

  I nodded without turning and stared at my reflection in the glass. I hadn’t aged in over three hundred years, but my eyes were old, tired. The sting of disloyalty pierced my heart. Even though I knew that Kelsey had never stopped loving Ren, at least not fully, I’d still kept alive the hope that she might have chosen me if she’d had the option.

  Again I berated myself for allowing Ren to leave with her. What choice had I given her, really? I’d pretty much thrust her into his arms and said, Have a nice life. I flattened my hand against the sun-warmed window and imagined the power and energy of the yellow light flowing into my fingers. It filled me with a resolve, one I dared not voice aloud, but the idea filled my mind.

  I thought of the young version of Kelsey and knew she’d seen something in me even then. She’d believed I was her protector, relied on me entirely. She had needed someone then, just as I had needed her to bring me from the darkness into the light. Kelsey never gave up on me, and one thing was certain, I wasn’t about to give up on her or just leave her to her fate. I needed to know if marrying Ren was something she really wanted to do or if she was just taking the easy road.

  Anamika interrupted my thoughts. “She is marrying Dhiren, isn’t she?”

  I rubbed my jaw before replying. “We’ll see.” Determination rushed through my blood and spurred me to action. Spinning, I grabbed her arm and said, “It’s time to go.”

  Wrenching her arm from my grasp, Anamika backed away, eyes blazing fury. Her hair fell in long sections as my weak effort to contain it failed. She looked beautiful, like a goddess shedding her human form. Power rippled from her skin as she narrowed her eyes at me and said, “You do not seize me in that manner.”

  When I dropped my hand, the anger in her slowly diminished and she lowered her lids so that her long lashes fanned out against her cheeks. More quietly, she added, “No man does.”

  “I…I’m sorry, Goddess.” An emotion radiated from Anamika, one I’d never sensed in her before. Embarrassment…shame…with a twinge of…fear? I drew a step closer and lifted her chin with my finger, gently, so she could move away and break contact at any time. When her green eyes met mine, I said, “You do not need to fear me, Ana.”

  “I do not fear you, Kishan.”

  “Then what is it that frightens you?” I asked.

  Her face softened for a moment and it appeared as if she would confess what was bothering her, but then her back stiffened and she closed the emotional connection between us. “My past is my own, black tiger. It is something I do not choose to share with you.”

  I stepped back and, after perusing her for a moment, nodded. There was something vulnerable about her right then, and I felt an overwhelming urge to comfort her, but the goddess Durga did not want comfort. She didn’t like showing vulnerability either. That much I already knew.

  Ready to leave, I offered her my hand and she took it after only a second of hesitation. She placed her other hand on my forearm as I instructed the amulet to take us home.

  When we returned to our stone palace in the mountain, she asked, “Why did you choose to materialize in the park and go through the trouble of disguising yourself if we could have simply appeared in your room of glass?”

  Rubbing my neck, I shrugged. “It was safer to assume they had given my office to someone else, I suppose.”

  I could see her mind ticking, trying to understand the full meaning of office and the transitory state of such a thing. “I wish to thank you for taking me there,” she said. “I liked walking through the…”

  “Park?” I offered.

  “Yes. Park. I enjoyed the flowers and fountains.”

  “I’m glad.” Truthfully, a part of me had wanted to walk through the park with the goddess on my arm. I liked the idea of wandering with her through Kelsey’s era, a place where we were unknown. No one there clamored for our attention or lined up with gifts for the goddess. We could just be ourselves. Two people enjoying a leisurely stroll. I’d almost felt content when we were there. Until I learned about Kelsey’s impending wedding, that is.

  As I used the scarf to switch fro
m an Asian auditor in a business suit back into my normal black clothes and my own face, Anamika eyed me shrewdly. “I do not understand why you needed the information from the picture box on your table. Could you not discover the news of Kelsey’s marriage simply by asking someone or perhaps by listening in on conversations between Kelsey and Ren themselves?”

  “I—” Why didn’t I want to go directly to the source? I suppose a part of me, a piece that I didn’t want to admit existed, was uneasy about the idea of seeing them together. I wasn’t ready to risk the possibility that Ren was who Kelsey had wanted all along, because if that was true, then my whole future, the life I’d begun planning for myself from the moment I learned Kadam was Phet and cradled a young Kelsey in my arms would be destroyed in an instant.

  No. It wasn’t enough to see if Kelsey was happy now. I needed to be fully convinced that she was happy from the beginning. If Ren was truly the right man for her all along, then it would be obvious. I needed a new perspective. Rewinding the past and taking a second look couldn’t hurt. Besides, there was a desperate itch in my brain that screamed what if. To silence that voice, I’d have to study it from every angle. Only then, when I knew for certain that Ren was without a doubt the one for her, would I resign myself to my fate.

  Anamika still waited for my reply. “I have reasons for my actions, Ana, and my reasons don’t concern you.” It was an evasive, somewhat cold answer, but the goddess understood bluntness.

  “I see.” She blinked as if waiting for me to add something more, but then sighed and said, “Will you be giving me the Damon Amulet now?”

  Lifting my hand to the object, I wrapped my fingers around it. “Not just yet. There’s something…something I must do first.”

  Anamika stared at me for a long minute before inclining her head and leaving. I knew that she was giving me a gift. Even if she didn’t approve of what I wanted to do, she was allowing me the freedom to make my own choices, and I appreciated it. In a way, her gesture surprised me. It was as if she had resigned herself to the life of a goddess but she didn’t wish me to have to suffer the same fate. Perhaps there was a way out for both of us, I rationalized, feeling guilty about leaving her behind.

  Before she disappeared around the corner, I called out, “Keep the weapons nearby. The amulet will be too far away for you to draw from its power.”

  She didn’t acknowledge my comment but turned the corner and disappeared into the area of the palace leading to her chambers.

  I decided to get started immediately.

  ***

  My first stop was the jungle where I met Kelsey for the first time.

  Wind whipped around my body as I reappeared in the Indian jungle. The scents of the forest surrounded me as I switched to my tiger form in a dense copse of trees. I knew that Ren and Kelsey would be making an appearance soon, so I watched for them on the trail I knew he would take. Before long I heard the noise of a hiker and moved stealthily through the brush so I could watch. Ren came along first and kept his nose pointed in the wind, but I was careful to remain downwind as much as possible.

  He paused occasionally and I wondered if he had caught my scent, but he kept moving forward. If I were in human form, I would have laughed at seeing Kelsey plodding along behind him with obvious frustration on her beautiful face. She was tired and didn’t have the physical stamina to hike in the jungle for hours yet. That didn’t come until later, after we started training together.

  When they struck camp, I sat there patiently listening to him wax poetic about butterflies of all things and then heard him explain that his purpose was to find me. It was obvious to me fairly quickly that though he was very interested in beginning a relationship with Kelsey, he was unsure as to how to go about the process. His attempt at courtship seemed to include two things—touching her at every opportunity and trying to make her as comfortable as possible on their quest.

  I kept vigil through the night, though I knew there weren’t any predators in the jungle that would have rivaled me. I’d declared this jungle my territory centuries before, and no other creatures had dared cross paths with me for at least fifty years by the time Kelsey made an appearance. The truth was that I wasn’t even sure how many tigers were left in this century. Kadam had mentioned that they’d been hunted almost to extinction.

  Rubbing my jaw, I realized that I hadn’t met any dominant males in my jungle since the 1950s, give or take a decade. The idea saddened me. Tigers were noble creatures. Intelligent. Perfect predators. Of all the beasts I had worked with as a prince and all the animals that I’d come across in my jungle wanderings, the tiger was the one I respected the most.

  Despite my jealousy over Ren getting to lead a normal mortal life, I had to admit that I embraced the tiger aspect of myself much more readily than he did. Even though I didn’t need to assume the form of the black tiger any longer, I still did. I preferred dozing in the afternoons as a tiger, and hunting with teeth and claw focused me in a way nothing else could, other than Kelsey.

  The next day I trailed Ren as he supposedly was searching for me. Instead, I found him trying to pick flowers only to strip the petals from the stems as they were crushed in his tiger jaws. He spat petals and leaves and sneezed often, growling softly before giving up. Eventually, he settled on bringing her mango fruit. He harassed monkeys in a mango tree until they began pelting him with the heavy orbs.

  Snatching up several in his mouth and dropping some along the way, he made his way back to camp. I was watching from the top of a tree in my human form and delightfully tortured him by using the power of the amulet to raise large boulders or move fallen logs in his path to thwart his progress.

  He’d stop and smell the freshly unearthed rocks and then head around them until he picked up the scent of his trail again. When he offered up his sad, slobbery gift, I had to stifle a snicker, especially when Kelsey said she didn’t really want them. If only Kelsey knew the pains he’d undergone in tiger form to bring her back so simple a present.

  They swam together near the waterfall, and when the rock fell, I had to hold back from saving Kelsey myself. After a few hours of intense speculation, I decided that Ren saving her there might have been the catalyst for her to fall in love with him. She’d seemed largely indifferent to and perhaps a bit afraid of Ren before the waterfall rescue, but after he saved her from drowning, it became rather obvious that she was starting to feel something more than sympathy for him.

  Impatient with the long hours, I found out I could skip ahead in time, fast forwarding like one of Kelsey’s movies. The sun set in a matter of seconds; stars moved as if someone pulled a dark blanket full of shining lights across the sky. My stomach lurched with the process, but it didn’t affect me for more than a few seconds. Adjusting to the discomforts of time travel couldn’t happen fast enough.

  Around midday, when they sat together again by the fire and Ren was in human form, I slowed time to normal. Ren was saying the last lines of a poem. I rolled my eyes and listened.

  …Thee, O slender maid,

  love only warms;

  but me he burns;

  as the day-star only stifles the fragrance of the night-flower,

  but quenches the very orb of the moon.

  This heart of mine,

  oh thou who art of all things the dearest to it,

  will have no object but thee.

  “Ren, that was very beautiful,” Kelsey said.

  She spoke softly and I couldn’t quite hear everything, so I used the amulet to move a bit closer and rematerialized just as Ren was saying, “…permission…to kiss you.”

  Black intent filtered through my body. Even knowing their history, I wanted to strangle my brother. It took me a minute to calm down and realize that nothing was happening. Kelsey closed her eyes expecting him to kiss her, and he just sat there like a lump of breakfast porridge.

  When she realized he wasn’t going to make a move and began lecturing him about being old-fashioned, I felt happier than I had in months. I
actually laughed out loud, caught myself, and used the power of the amulet to turn myself invisible. Ren, who had stalked off angrily into the forest, looked around suspiciously but soon wandered off after seeing nothing.

  I watched the camp long enough to see Kelsey meet me for the first time. I heard her say she knew that I was Ren’s brother, the one who had betrayed him and stolen his fiancée. Though it was true, I winced. Ren had already soured her against me in the beginning, and my refusal to go with them on the quest didn’t help either. For a moment I considered revealing myself to the black tiger I used to be.

  A swift kick and a brief explanation might be the trick to get my stubborn self to help them get the Golden Fruit. Also my presence on that quest would serve to dampen Ren’s romantic intentions. But Kadam had declared in overdramatic fashion that to meet up with our old selves would trigger a tragic result such as the collapsing of the universe.

  Since that was definitely not my purpose, I sat there pondering the ramifications of altering history, but ultimately decided that this was an information-gathering trip. If I was going to change anything, I’d do it after I’d collected all the facts.

  Unwilling to take the chance on sending my past self on the first quest, I again berated myself for being an idiot and used the power of the amulet to shift to the next place on my agenda—Kishkindha.

  This time I appeared at night, and my dark clothes hid me from the light of the small campfire. When I felt the trees around me come alive and send their slithering vines toward me, I used the Damon Amulet to freeze them. An audible snap and a crack from the dangerous sapling nearby made Ren lift his head and peer into the trees, but he soon settled back down next to Kelsey.

  Irritated at seeing him act that possessive of her so quickly, and unwilling to watch him sleep next to her for hours, I bent time. I sped through the minutes and they fell away quickly. The power of the Damon Amulet flowed through my limbs and raised the hair at the nape of my neck. My skin tingled as time flowed over and around my body like fall leaves brushing past me in a stiff wind.