The moment she did, she discovered the cats certainly didn’t have their undivided attention. The steady beat of the drums drowned out most of the comments so that they blurred into an incomprehensible mumble, but she heard enough ‘yeah, baby!’ and ‘bring it on, mama!’ to assure her she’d recaptured their attention. She gyrated around to one side so that those on either side of the audience could get a better look at her assets, tucking her chin as if she was gazing down at herself and cutting her eyes at the tiger.
She had his full attention, too, she discovered, feeling her heart leap. His gaze was slumberous, but riveted on her nevertheless. Her heart was in her throat as she danced a little closer to him and pretended she was trying to entice him, moving sinuously while she felt herself up.
He studied her movements with an unblinking stare for many moments before he lifted his head and met her gaze. She tensed as he did, unable to prevent herself from meeting that golden stare, even though she had a bad feeling it was the wrong thing to do. Tearing her gaze from his after a moment, she turned away from him and moved slowly closer to the lion. As if she was trying to make up her mind of which to choose between the two, she turned from the lion after a few moments and moved back toward the tiger, inching a little closer each time. She’d made the circuit twice when she discovered Panas the Prick watching her from the wings—glaring at her actually, and motioning imperiously with his hand toward the animals.
Their fucking paws weren’t nailed to the floor, she reflected with a burst of anger fed by fear—drugged and chained, or not, they hadn’t shifted more than a hair, but both cats seemed way too mesmerized by her for Kate’s peace of mind. By the time she’d danced to first one cat and then the other again, the audience was shouting directions she didn’t want to understand and Panas looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel.
She slithered down to her knees that time, more because it felt like her knees would give out than because she wanted to comply with Panas’ demands. Crawling toward the lion cautiously, she lifted a shaking hand and settled it on his side, hoping his reach wasn’t long enough to knock her head off of her shoulders if he felt inclined to slap at her.
She felt a vibration filter through her palm as she stroked his fur from his belly to his hip. For several moments, her mind was so perfectly blank with terror, she couldn’t figure out what the vibration was.
Then she realized he was purring.
It heartened her, but not by a hell of a lot.
Realizing her legs were too weak for her to actually regain her feet, she crawled across the stage to the other cat, approaching him warily. He tensed when she touched him and her heart tried to choke her. Almost as if he forced himself to relax, the muscles beneath her hand eased. She stroked her hand through his fur, feeling a rumbling purr begin from deep inside of him, but she couldn’t work up the nerve to move closer.
She was supposed to rub herself on them.
She didn’t think she could do that.
Trying to assure herself that Panas wouldn’t beat her to death for deliberately ignoring his orders, she moved back to the lion and stroked him again. He began to purr again almost the moment she touched him, shifting almost restlessly, as if he wanted to turn to draw closer to her. Thankfully, the chain kept him from getting close enough to sniff her. She could see his nostrils flaring, though, knew he was ‘tasting’ the air for her scent.
Panas was making motions with his hands again when she dared a glance in his direction.
As she moved back to the tiger once more, the tiger watched her every move. The moment she reached out to begin stroking his belly and hip again, however, he lay down completely, settling his head against the floor and stretching his great body out as if inviting her to rub his belly.
Slightly reassured by the fact that his head, and those frightening jaws, weren’t hovering over her, she inched a little closer and rubbed her face along his belly.
As quick as lightening, he hooked one great foreleg around her shoulders and dragged her full length against his belly. Before she could even remember her voice to scream, his huge head settled next to hers and she heard a rumbling, threatening growl directly in her ear.
* * * *
Sergei struggled against the effects of the drugs in his system, even though he’d learned by now that the fight was useless—worse than useless, actually. They’d brought him down with the drugs. When he’d wakened in a cage, he’d loosed his fury on the people who’d captured him, battering at the bars that imprisoned him until they’d raced to get more of the drug and used it to take his will to fight. He hadn’t been lucid enough since that time to manage much more than eyeing them with deadly promise every time they came near his cage to feed him or drug him again.
He knew, though, that he was far, far from his home. Despite the drugs, he’d been aware of the passage of time in the elevation of the stench around him, the number of times he was fed and hosed down to cleanse the offal from his cage, which was barely big enough for him to turn around in much less to distance himself from his own excrement. The incessant heaving and rocking beneath him that made him too sick to attempt to fight even if not for the drugs had finally translated in his mind to ‘ship’ even though he’d never been on one before—had not traveled in any of the machines of man since he’d eschewed that side of his nature in favor of the wilds when he’d finally realized it was safer, both for him and for the man-children, for him to stay as far away from them as possible.
He was not of their kind, even though he had walked among them during much of his early years, nor yet of the beasts that was his other side. In truth, he belonged nowhere, but he preferred the honest savagery of his beast kindred to the brutal lies and deceptive nature of the man-children.
At least the beasts he lived among only killed for survival—to eat, to protect, for self-preservation—never merely for amusement or vindictiveness. They would not hunt him down and kill him only because he was different as they had his parents because they had been foolish enough to believe they could pass undetected among the man-children.
It had settled in his mind after a time that, if they hadn’t killed him outright, they had a reason for allowing him to live. They had plans for him and that meant he still had the chance to live. All he had to do was bide his time. Sooner or later they’d slip up, become too confident, and when they did, they would pay for it with their lives and he would be free again, free to return to his life—such as it was.
The hunger to find another of his kind had eaten at him for years, the need for companionship, the need to mate. It had gone unfulfilled. In his beast form, he’d ranged far and wide and never sensed the presence of another like himself at all, let alone a female of his kind.
It was the need that had finally driven him back to the villages of man-children to walk among them, the hope that he’d find another of his kind there, living among them as he and his parents once had, but that hope had not only soured, it had gotten him captured.
He could only bear the constraints of his human skin for short periods before the itch to roam the wilds became nearly unbearable and it was his proximity to the man-children that had caught the notice of the hunters, he knew.
The irony was that those who’d captured him had brought him closer to another of his kind than he’d been since the deaths of his parents.
The South African was closer than he’d come before, at any rate. He was man-beast. He was feline—unfortunately not tiger, but it had given rise to renewed hope that he might know where others of their kind were.
He would find out when he found a way to free himself—for they had no way to communicate when they did not dare take their human forms—and if the lion knew of others, maybe he’d help him escape, as well.
And if he did not—maybe he would anyway.
He’d curbed his fury after a while, once it had finally settled in his thick skull that fighting them was not only useless, it encouraged them to keep him too drugged to use his
wits. They still gave him far too much to have much mind about him, but at least he was awake part of the time now. At least he could see what was going on around him. At least his rambling thoughts connected from time to time.
As they had when he’d been brought to this place.
He was to be sold to a zoo, he’d discovered, but they hadn’t found a buyer yet. They’d decided to make him ‘earn his keep’ by entertaining in their club/casino.
The first discovery had increased his rage to the point where he’d had difficulty pretending he was still too drugged to hold his head up, let alone alert enough to try to fight them.
The second discovery had made him glad he’d managed to contain his fury.
They were going to take him out of his cage.
When they did, he would have his first real opportunity to escape—if he was lucky.
He’d underestimated their wariness of him. Despite the fact that he’d pretended to be more than half asleep, they’d taken no chances. They’d shot him up with more of the hated drugs, waiting until they were certain the drugs were pumping through him before they’d opened the cage.
He’d tried to gather himself to launch an attack anyway, but had discovered he could barely stand. Reality had blurred around him as they fixed the collar around his neck and half dragged him from the cage, poking and prodding him until he’d stumbled to his feet. He’d had to splay his legs wide to remain standing once he’d gotten up and the drug had skewed his perceptions, making it almost impossible to walk. It had required absolute concentration to put one foot in front of the other and move when they’d started dragging on the chain and choking him with the collar around his neck.
Impotent rage had risen to life inside of him, but deeply, too deeply to summon it to his aid.
And then he’d seen her.
From the moment he’d spied her his entire focus had shifted to her. A hunger he barely recognized rose instantly and began gnawing at his gut, flooded his already drugged mind with a drug far more potent. He’d thought she wasn’t real at first, tried to shake the image, tried to convince himself he was seeing things, and then he’d caught her scent and that had only confused him more. The drugs, he wondered? She looked like a she-beast, but she smelled human. Was she both, as he was? Or only human?
He struggled to recall the scents of his parents, to remember if they carried the smell of both man and beast, but he couldn’t seem to remember. It seemed possible, though, that she would have the scent of man-child when she was in half-shift.
He didn’t know, but he discovered he didn’t care. Hunger pervaded him as he stared at her. Need surged through his body, setting it on fire. His man side wanted her with a feverish need that had him fairly quivering with the restraint he had to struggle to hold on to. His beast side decided he would have her.
The lion-man, he realized fairly quickly, wanted her, too. He could see the hunger in the other beast-man’s eyes—smell it on him.
Savage possessiveness moved through him. He wanted her and he would have her. If he had to tear the lion-man’s throat out and crawl over his bloody carcass to get her, he would!
She made it easy for him. After teasing him until it was all he could do to remain perfectly still and wait for his chance, driving him more mindless by the moment with the promise of her undulating body, her scent, and tentative touch, she made the mistake of moving within his reach.
He caught her, dragging her close enough he could finally wallow in her scent, immerse himself in it, the scent that had been driving him steadily closer and closer to madness. He could feel the warmth and softness of her and the instant he did, he lost his hold on his last tenuous thread of reason.
Of Unknown Origins:
Wolf
By
Madelaine Montague
Chapter One
Cole surveyed the jungle below them through his night-vision glasses, searching the terrain for any sign that they might have company. He wasn’t completely satisfied when he saw nothing. His gut was telling him that it had been way too easy and that was always a bad sign.
Particularly when he knew from their first fly over that there was an encampment of guerrillas less than ten clicks from the site where the spy sat had gone down. It had to have sounded like a 747 coming down considering the amount of jungle the damned thing had cleared. It bothered the shit out of him that they hadn’t seen any sign that the racket had stirred up the guerrillas.
Shaking his uneasiness, he patted the pilot on the back and signaled for him to drop the stealth chopper lower. They had a hell of a job ahead of them. The quicker they could clean up and hump it to the coast with the debris, the better.
Signaling his best men—Maurice ‘Beau’ Beauregard, Remy Cavanaugh, and Gabriel ‘Hawk’ Hawkins to take point—he killed the light and checked his harness one last time as they bailed from the chopper and repelled to the ground. The minute they passed the halfway mark, the next wave bailed from the chopper.
Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, Mac to his men, surveyed the perimeter one last time before he hooked up and leapt from the chopper, noting that the other chopper had already dropped its load on the other side of the clearing and begun to peel away.
“See ya when ya get back to base,” the co-pilot said.
Nodding, Mac gave him a thumbs up and leapt out.
As many times as he’d repelled from a chopper, it still gave him a rush. He welcomed it, scanning the jungle with his heightened senses as he dropped. The men had already begun laying out a grid when he hit the ground. Issuing a low, warbling whistle, he signaled to the men designated to keep watch to take their positions and then moved to the other men, urging them to form small groups and begin scouring the broken brush for pieces.
It wasn’t his job to question his orders, but he sure as shit couldn’t figure out why the hell it made any difference if they left a little debris as long as they made sure they got everything important. That was the order, though, and he had the men search each grid in pairs for the tiniest scraps of what was left of the spy satellite that had mysteriously dropped from orbit and crashed in the jungle. They started at all four sides of the grid, worked their way to the center and then crossed, working outward again.
Mac checked his watch when they reached the halfway point, cursed under his breath, and surveyed the jungle around them, listening intently.
He doubted there was a fucking piece of the son-of-a-bitch more than an inch square. It had still been smoldering when it hit the ground and churned up the jungle floor.
Twenty minutes passed. The men finally reached the outer edge across from where they’d begun. He strode to check their discoveries. Garbage! Shit! He couldn’t tell from looking at it whether it looked like it might’ve once been an entire satellite or not. Just to be on the safe side, he had men fan out and walk a line on either side of the grid that had been laid out.
A half dozen of the men returned carrying bits of the satellite that had been thrown from the main impact site into the jungle. It didn’t make him feel any better, but they’d already spent nearly an hour searching. If the guerrillas weren’t dead, or stone deaf and blind besides, they could be breathing down their necks any minute.
He uttered another warble, the signal to recall the men, and checked his map and compass heading as they formed up. Disgust settled in his gut when he saw the awkward bundles that had been gathered up.
Trust command to overlook the fact that they were going to be slogging through heavy jungle! He hesitated, but they were going to have problems lugging such awkward bundles at best. At worst, they were going to be sitting ducks if they got into a firefight.
Striding to the two squads that had formed up, he told the men to remove anything non-essential from their packs and divide the debris between them. The men gaped at him, no surprise since they hadn’t actually brought anything non-essential with them, but they fell to emptying their packs when he set his own down, tossed out his emergency supplies—everything but his wea
pons and ammunition—and began stuffing as much of the debris as he could into his pack.
His pack was heavy as a son-of-bitch when he slung on his back again, but he still felt better for having divided the load. He signaled for the men to move out, designating Rider, Mullins, and Mercer to take point and ordering Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh to guard their rear.
They hadn’t been humping it to the coast more than ten or fifteen minutes where their pick up awaited them, he hoped, when the men guarding the rear passed the word up that they had company moving in from the east. He didn’t have to encourage the men to move faster. Nobody wanted to tangle with guerrillas in such an indefensible position.
Waiting until most of the two squads had passed, he tapped the last three on the shoulder. They dropped back, joining him, Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh.
“Want me to get around them and get a head count, Sarg?” Hawk volunteered.
Mac considered it and dismissed it. “The orders are to get this shit out of here—no matter what—and that means every scrap of it. We stick together. No shooting unless they get too close. We’re still a good ten clicks from the pickup.”
Nodding, the men paced themselves, trailing the rest of the two squads.
Sweat, from the humidity, the rough terrain, and nerves began to trickle between Mac’s shoulder blades, from his brow and into his eyes, and down his belly and into his crotch, adding to the misery of biting insects. The itch and sting was maddening. He felt as if fire ants were crawling over him, but he was so tense with expectation of a barrage of bullets that it wasn’t nearly as hard keeping his focus, despite the irritants, as it would have been otherwise. By his reckoning, they were still five clicks from the pickup when a shot cracked through the jungle like thunder.
He hit the dirt and scrambled on his belly across the ground and over a fallen tree.
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