She emerged from her bedroom, dressed in a clean knee-length T-shirt and leggings, and padded out into the rest of the apartment. There were two men she recognized sitting on the couch, a tiger sleeping on her floor and a stranger in her kitchen. The stranger, another dark-complected, black-haired gorgeous specimen, looked up and smiled.
“Hey! She’s up,” he announced. His voice was a resonant and clear baritone, and she could imagine him singing.
Raja raised his head from his cat nap and Chance asked, “How are you feeling?”
She smiled. “Better.” She turned to the man in the kitchen. “You must be their brother.”
“Shashi,” he nodded. “I bought some food and thought I’d make us brunch. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind? I know how much these guys can eat.” She sat down on the couch between Pangur and Chance. “Besides, that’s the first time anybody’s done any cooking in that kitchen, so have at.”
“You’ll be happy you said that,” Pangur told her. “Shashi owns a restaurant in Bismarck called Taj Mahal.”
“I’ve eaten there with my best friend! The food is incredible.”
“I’ll tell the chef.” Shashi grinned. “The chef says thank you. Oh, wait! I’m the chef.”
He winked one honey-brown eye at her and laughed as he returned to his chore. Eliza shook her head.
“Wow. Okay. I’m not in denial anymore, exactly, I don’t think. I’m ready to hear whatever story you have to tell me.”
“No stories before food,” Shashi objected.
Pangur rolled his eyes. “Cooks.”
Both Chance and his brother were wearing jeans and buttoned-down white shirts, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. They were barefoot and looked extremely comfortable. Raja shifted into his human form and turned to sit in front of her, his legs stretched out.
“Put on some clothes, you nudist,” Shashi scolded from the kitchen.
Raja called back, “I’m magnificent this way.”
“You are,” Eliza agreed. “You are all magnificent, cat or human, clothed or not. But… I’d kind of like it if you could please get dressed.”
He pouted, but she knew from the sparkle in his eyes that it was just for show. “Fine,” he said with a sigh.
Pangur sighed theatrically. “Poor put-upon kitty.”
“Oppressed. I’m oppressed.” Raja reached into a small suitcase that was sitting against the wall and retrieved a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt with the logo for Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant on the front. It matched the one that Shashi was wearing.
Eliza slouched in her seat, crossed her legs and interlaced her fingers around her knee. “Thank you all for helping me. I seriously think he was going to kill me.”
“He doesn’t want you dead,” Raja told her.
Pangur nodded. “He wants you as his Mate. So do the rest of us, but unlike Ghostie, we’re willing to give you a choice in the matter.”
Her head went into overdrive again. “You all want… but…” She was about to ask, ‘what about what I want,’ but Pangur’s words penetrated the fog in time to stop her from being foolish. She swallowed. “That’s… surprising.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Chance told her. “You’re the only rakshasi we’ve seen in years that we’re not related to. Plus you’re gorgeous and kind, and that’s a hard combination to ignore.”
“I don’t want you to ignore me.”
The words came out before she could stop them, and before she’d even given them any thought. It wasn’t like her to blurt, but there it was, something she would never have said if she’d been more cautious and less honest.
“I… shouldn’t have said that.”
Pangur smiled. “It’s okay. We can all detect the scent of your desire for us. It’s a nice ego boost.”
She felt hot and regretted sitting so close to these two incredibly sexy men. The couch was wide enough for three, but narrow enough that it forced their bodies to touch, and the firm muscles of their thighs pressed against her hips. She knew that as cats they were the most perfect examples of their individual species she’d ever seen, and she had seen enough of them last night - and this morning with Raja - to know that the description was still apt in terms of their human forms. She couldn’t deny that she was powerfully attracted to them, but this was not the time or the place.
Shashi called from the kitchen, “Brunch is ready. There’s no table, but I guess we can just sit around the living room.”
Pangur rose to help their brother bring in the food and silverware, and Raja took his place on the couch. He told her, “You have no need to fear us. I know that we’re not what you’re used to, but if you give us the chance, we can show you that we’re better than anything you’ve known.”
Chance laughed. “God, what an ego!”
“I don’t play games,” Raja defended, “and I know what I am. What we all are.”
“Hungry cats with a hungry kitten to feed,” Pangur said. He handed her a plate of bacon and eggs, and she accepted it with a smile.
“Oh, no.” Raja took his plate from Pangur, too. “This lady is no kitten.”
Shashi handed Chance a plate, and then he and Pangur sat down on the floor facing the couch. While they ate, Shashi started to talk.
“We were born in Las Vegas. Our whole family are part of a performing troupe called Jangalee.”
Pangur said, “We’re dancers and musicians.”
“Jangalee… that means feral in Hindu, doesn’t it?”
Shashi shrugged with a grin. “A little hyperbole never hurt anyone. What we did was traditional dance fused with jazz and hip-hop.”
Chance laughed. “And we’re the best cat wranglers you ever saw. Tigers in our act, can you believe it?”
The brothers laughed, and Raja commented, “Better than Siegfriend and Roy.”
“It was a great way to make a living and have some fun with the tourists,” Shashi continued with a shrug. “We had a lot of fun. Mom and Dad bought a big house off the strip. It was happy. We were happy.”
Raja’s voice dipped down into a growl. “Then the Collector came.”
“He saw our show. We knew what he was the second we saw him in the crowd.”
She frowned. “And what is he?”
“The same thing your Dr. Armstrong is. Asuras. Semi-divine beings of chaos. They want to control and harness the natural world to their own ends so that they can fight against the devas.”
She had heard of devas from her mother’s work. They were like angels, good-aligned supernatural beings who fought beside the gods. Sometimes rakshasas fought with them, and sometimes they fought against them in the continual battle of good versus evil.
“I heard in my mother’s stories that rakshasas can be bad,” she said carefully. “One of them tried to poison Krishna, and the others live in cemeteries and eat people.”
“There can be bad rakshasas, like there can be bad asuras and bad humans. But there can be good people of all three races, too,” Pangur explained. “We’re the good kind, I assure you.”
She wanted to believe that, and she had no reason to doubt them.
“The bad rakshasas you’ve heard of are the ones who are under the bad asuras’ control.” Shashi stirred his scrambled eggs with his fork. “That’s what the Collector and Dr. Armstrong wanted to make us. They wanted us to be their own personal army.”
She frowned. “To what end?”
“Honestly? I have no idea.”
Chance said, “We didn’t give them the chance to get that far.”
“The only one of us they were really able to affect was Ghostie,” Pangur said. “He’s our littlest brother.”
“Let’s tell the story in order,” Raja suggested. “Shashi, go on.”
He took a breath. “So, anyway. We were performing in Vegas when these two asuras came in. We knew right away that we were in trouble. We were on stage, in the middle of the act, and the show must go on, right? So we finished the performance
and then tried to high-tail it out of there - no pun intended. The asuras were ready for us, though, and had hired a team of mercenaries with tranquilizer guns to knock us out. When we woke up, the family was in chains in the back of a van.”
“Our father was so strong,” Chance said, his voice both sad and proud. “He shifted into his lion form and broke the handcuffs. He freed Shashi next, because they were sitting together, and then our mom and our sister, Lakshmi. The driver of the van figured out what we were doing when he saw movement in the rearview mirror, and the passenger turned around with a pistol. He shot Dad in the face, but Mom and Lakshmi and Shashi got away.”
“We were going to come back for you.”
“Oh, my God. Your Dad…”
“He was alive, but he’d never be the same again.” Chance looked down at his hands. “His brain was damaged by the bullet.”
Raja spoke softly, his voice redolent with regret. “Our mouths were free. I put our father out of his misery.”
Eliza gaped at him, shocked by the horrible and tragic story. What scars must something like that leave on a son’s psyche? she wondered. “You killed your own father.”
“I had to.”
“We couldn’t let him live that way,” Chance said. “When he fell, he was twitching, and his… He…”
Pangur leaned over and squeezed his brother’s foot, offering slender comfort. “There was no choice, Eliza. He would have died slowly anyway.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Shashi put his plate aside. “Thank you.”
Pangur took up the tale. “They tranqed us again, and when we woke up, we were in cages.”
Raja spoke with barely-contained rage. “They tested us. They took our blood, put us through exploratory surgeries, bent our minds. They tormented us, spiritually and physically. Ghost was overcome and turned to embrace their darkness.”
“Stockholm Syndrome,” Chance said bitterly. “He was the youngest of us. He was just a kid.”
“He looked like a grown-up to me.” Eliza put her plate aside as well.
Pangur collected the dirty dishes. “They first captured us ten years ago. Ghost is an adult now.”
“He was only fourteen when they started in on him,” Shashi said sadly. “It’s not a surprise that they were able to break him.”
Her heart ached for them. “That’s so horrible.”
“Ten years of captivity. Ten years of pain.” Raja looked at Shashi. “Ten years of hopeless wandering.”
“I looked for you for so long, and so hard. Mom and Lakshmi lost the will to live and wasted away, no matter what I did.” Shashi ran a hand over his head. “I did my best to keep them alive, but they didn’t want to stay. Mom couldn’t live without Dad. Lakshmi was just… traumatized.”
Pangur looked stricken, and the two tigers went pale.
“I didn’t know,” Raja said. “I suspected, but…”
Chance looked away, and Pangur swallowed hard. They sat in heavy silence for a long moment.
“I’m sorry that I told you that away,” Shashi whispered. “I thought you knew, although not that I think about it, there’s no way that you could have. We’ve been parted for ten years.”
Eliza asked, “So you’ve been alone all this time?”
“Yes.” He looked at his brothers. “But I never stopped looking.”
“Our oldest brother, Dev, pretended to be turned like Ghost, hoping they’d take him to wherever they’d taken our little brother to,” Pangur told her. “I have no idea if he found him, or where he is. We have to find him.”
“And we need to find Ghostie,” Chance said. “We can bring him back. We can save him from what they turned him into.”
Eliza shuddered. “I really don’t think I want to see him again.”
“I don’t blame you,” Shashi said, “considering everything he’s put you through. But he’s our brother, so we have to try.”
“You’re very loyal.” She could respect that.
“We’re family. And we rakshasas are rare.” Shashi sighed. “We have to stick together, or we’re done for.”
She spontaneously reached out and took hold of Raja’s and Chance’s hands. Raja squeezed her fingers gently.
“I have so many questions,” she admitted. “What can I do to help you, and how do I fit into all of this?”
Chance smiled and stroked her hand with the pad of his thumb. “Well… we told you that you’re the first rakshasi we’ve seen who isn’t a relative. Like, ever. And we’re all in need of a Mate, because the breeding drive and instinct are strong. Because you’re only half rakshasa, like we said, you have the option of choosing any Mate you want.”
“Or more than one,” Pangur said, and she couldn’t help but hear the hopeful tone of his voice.
“Are you guys going to fight over me?”
“Only a little,” Shashi said. “In the wild, it’s not unusual for a female to mate with more than one male. But that’s just sex. The Mating bond, which isn’t present in regular cats, is strong in rakshasas. That’s part of why our mother died. Her bond with our father was overwhelming.”
“I don’t have a lot of luck with guys,” she admitted. “I thought I was in love once, but it didn’t work out.”
Raja nodded. “Pete.”
“You knew?”
“People talk in zoos, especially around the dumb animals,” he said, and again bitterness colored his tone. “We hear. And we listen.”
She frowned, and a nervous fear occurred to her. “When Pete called your brother a ghost cat, that meant he knew his name. Is he in on any of this? He came to me about the serum, so I thought he was okay.”
“He’s in Armstrong’s pocket, but he’s just a useful idiot,” Raja told her. “He’s heard Armstrong mention that a ghost cat is in the area, and that’s what he parroted. He’s not a threat. He’s too stupid to be anything like that.”
“He isn’t stupid. I mean, he’s a fully licensed vet.”
“Yeah, maybe, but he let you go, didn’t he?” Chance countered. “That’s not a big plus in the smarts column.”
She felt herself blushing, and she smiled. “Sweet talker.”
Pangur chuckled. “You have no idea.”
Eliza looked at the four men, and they looked back at her. She asked, “So… now what?”
“Now we go back to Bismarck and get set up in my house. Then we try to find our brothers.”
“Easier said than done, probably,” she said.
Raja nodded. “Nothing worth doing is ever easy. We won’t fail.”
Pangur told her, “Don’t worry, Eliza. Just because we want to bring him back to himself doesn’t mean that we won’t defend you if Ghost comes calling again. We won’t let him hurt you or take you against your will.”
She was relieved. “Thank you. And if you can’t bring him back to himself, as you call it? What then?”
Raja answered grimly, “Then I will do what I have to do.”
His brothers looked away, and Eliza’s heart went out to them all, but especially to Raja. She squeezed his hand tightly.
“You’re a good man,” she told him. “Cat. Rakshasa.”
“All of the above,” Pangur said.
Raja forced a smile. “Thank you. Now… let’s get going. There’s much work to be done.”
Chapter Six
Eliza drove with Pangur and Chance while Raja rode with Shashi. The drive to Bismarck wasn’t terribly long, only half an hour or so, but it seemed forever. Pangur and Chance were silent on the drive, and Eliza was mulling over the information she had received. She couldn’t believe that her mother had failed to tell her something so very important, and she resolved to call her and demand the truth. But then, she supposed she knew the truth already.
Shashi’s house was a conventional suburban two-story in a tidy subdivision. She wondered what his neighbors would think if they knew who and what he really was. She still wasn’t even sure what she thought about it all.
She start
ed to park beside Shashi’s car in front of the two-car garage, but he got out of his vehicle and waved her into the other spot, so she pulled in. Everything about the garage was so devastatingly normal that she couldn’t believe a rakshasa lived there.
Pangur’s voice spoke in her head, startling her. -What did you expect? Some sort of cave with sides of beef hanging from the ceiling?-
She turned to look at him. “You can read my mind?”
“That’s part of being able to speak telepathically,” he smiled.
Chance agreed. “Wouldn’t be much of a conversation if we couldn’t hear your half of it.”
“But I wasn’t speaking to… er, thinking to you. It’s rude to eavesdrop.”
Pangur shrugged. “It’s rude to project. There are ways to keep your thoughts to yourself around us, and we can teach you. You and Pete and humans in general just sort of think through loudspeakers.”
“So that’s how you knew about me and Pete. It wasn’t that he was talking about it, it was that he was thinking about it.”
“You both were,” Chance said. “It was pretty sad.”
“Well, he made his choice, and he’s going to have to live with it.”
She opened the trunk of her car to get her luggage, but Raja beat her to it. He smiled at her as he took her suitcase and headed toward the door to the house that Shashi had already opened.
“Thanks,” she called after him. She followed him inside, while the other brothers brought up the rear.
The main door led through a laundry room into a breakfast nook. The kitchen was to the left and a step down on the right led into a family room, whose far wall was dominated by a fireplace. On the mantel was a vivid sculpture of a Hindu monster with tusks, tiger stripes and a wickedly curving sword. The house was decorated in a colorful fusion of Indian and American elements, and it was cozy on first glance.
Raja put down Eliza’s suitcase and walked to the mantel to look at the sculpture. “They never make us very pretty,” he commented drily.
“Well, that’s the way the sculptors are taught,” Shashi shrugged. “I don’t take it personally.”
Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection Page 36