Tempted by the Jaguar #1: Transformation (Riverford Shifters)

by Cristina Rayne

  TEMPTED BY THE JAGUAR #1: TRANSFORMATION

  A Riverford Shifters Serial

  CRISTINA RAYNE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2014 Cristina Rayne

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kylie Moore pulled her backpack from the backseat of her car and was in the process of straightening when she heard it, the soft scrape of a shoe slipping slightly on some loose gravel somewhere in the parking lot behind her. Freezing instinctually, she started to turn just as the back of her head was roughly pushed forward, and her temple slammed against the top of the doorframe. For one endless moment, it felt as though her entire skull had shattered as the inky blackness of the night exploded in a flash of white-hot pain across her vision.

  Her backpack and keys fell from fingers gone slack from shock, and Kylie staggered back a step, blinded by pain and her mind a swirl of confusion. A sense of vertigo hit her as her world tilted sideways, only to feel the side of her body hit the pavement hard a second later.

  A cry was torn from her lips as the sudden jolt caused what felt like a dozen knives to stab into her head. Then hands grabbed her arms and yanked them away from where she had been cradling her head, and her watery vision darkened almost completely in a sudden wash of pain as someone began dragging her along the asphalt away from her car, her body as limp and unresponsive as a ragdoll’s.

  Dazed thoughts of being carjacked melted into panicked, disjointed thoughts that, no, something much worse was happening, and Kylie tried to struggle. However, her consciousness was fading fast, and she just couldn’t seem to make her body do anything.

  Then her head banged into the edge of something hard…and the next thing Kylie knew, she found herself folded up into a very uncomfortable semblance of a fetal position, her hands stuck up behind her neck. She tried to flex her fingers, but both hands felt dead, as though she had been lying on them for quite some time.

  It was pitch black, the air smelling heavily of motor oil and something rotten and sickly as though she was lying next to either a garbage can or a pile of vomit. The floor beneath her body vibrated, and a slight roaring filled her ears. Both the back of her head and one of her temples was throbbing something fierce, and she couldn’t help the small moan that fell from her lips.

  What the hell was going on? Her head pounding, confusion, her mouth dry—it was as if she had just woken up in the weirdest place ever with the worst hangover in existence. Only, she didn’t drink.

  Kylie tried to move both her arms and legs, trying to remember what she had been doing. She’d had a study group for genetics class today. She was sure she had left the university library; she could remember getting into her car and driving off towards the freeway with the intention of going back to her apartment. Then…then…

  Something rough and sturdy painfully dug into her bare ankles and upper thighs simultaneously as she tried to straighten her legs, and her wrists met that same barrier as she tried to bring her arms down from her head. It was only then that the fogginess of her mind suddenly evaporated into terror. She was freaking tied up!

  Now in a panic, Kylie yanked her wrists hard against what she now knew to be coils of rope and nearly choked as the sharp movement caused an unnoticed cord of rope to tighten around her neck. Rather than just tied together, a length of rope had also been connected to the bindings around her wrists and then wrapped around her neck, insuring that any pulling on her part would only lead to strangling herself.

  She frantically thrashed her body around in an effort to free her legs, but the thick rope cut painfully into her skin and only seemed to tighten. Whoever had tied her up had done their job extremely well.

  In some remote part of her mind not yet touched by hysteria, Kylie desperately hoped that this was just some cruel, horribly misguided prank someone was playing on her while the more practical part of her brain was screaming that she was in shit so deep she was already drowning. Someone had to have hit her over the head. Her temple throbbed too sharply to attribute it to even a migraine.

  A memory surfaced, one she wished she didn’t know. For the past year, half a dozen women had gone missing from various places within the city, even a freshman from her own university. No bodies, no clues from security footage or witnesses, nothing was ever found of them again, as though they had all literally vanished from the face of the earth. The last one had vanished a couple of months ago.

  No—not a couple of months, today if I don’t figure out how to get the hell out of here!

  Kylie managed to roll her body to the left, but immediately hit a barrier. After a bit of a struggle, she succeeded in rolling herself in the other direction only to immediately roll onto what felt like a shovel. She froze even though the metal edge was digging uncomfortably into her shoulders, on the verge of a full-on panic attack. The vibrating floor and the smells now made horrifying sense. She was in the freaking trunk of a car!

  She began to struggle and strain against her bindings with a frenzied effort, nearly biting through her tongue in an attempt to keep the anguished wails of terror at bay. It was obvious she had been knocked out at some point, and even though her mouth had not been covered, there was no way she was about to possibly alert her abductor that she was now awake.

  They were probably driving on a freeway or highway, so there was little to no chance that anyone would be able to hear her screaming above the normal rumble of travel and passing cars. She had no idea how long she had even been unconscious. Her only chance would be to either free herself before the monster, or monsters, opened the trunk, or if failing that, screaming her lungs out when the car stopped.

  Her wrists burned as she strained, but her abductor had left almost no wiggle room. The ropes might as well have been zip ties for all the progress she had made. By now her hands were so dead she couldn’t even wiggle her fingers, and her legs were screaming with pain.

  It was no use.

  Kylie fell limp and clenched her jaw against the sob of despair that wanted to break loose. There was a very good chance that she was about to die that day, and damned if she was going to give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing her tears, the fear that was threatening to choke the breath from her. She had to save her strength, keep her mind as clear as her throbbing headache allowed, her eyes sharp. She took a long, shuddering breath, trying not to gag on the smells that were coming from the trunk’s carpet, trying to calm the pounding of her heart that sounded as loud as gunfire in her ears.

  By the time the car started to slow down, Kylie felt as though she had been trapped in that trunk for days. She had debated back and forth on whether or not to pretend to still be unconscious or to try screaming the moment the car stopped, and now that the moment of truth was almost here, Kylie’s panic returned with a vengeance. What if she screamed and that was the thing tha
t doomed her? What if she kept her eyes closed, pretended to still be unconscious, and she missed seeing the only chance to escape she would get?

  The moment the car came to a complete stop, something in Kylie snapped, and she was screaming for help before she even realized that she was going to do it. Bellowing at the top of her lungs, she managed a dozen “help me’s” before the trunk was wrenched open and three more after before a large, dark figure abruptly filled her vision. An equally large, sweaty and calloused hand roughly slapped over her mouth mid-scream.

  Kylie instinctually tried to bite at the hand. However, it lifted before she could really sink her teeth into anything, and a second later her mouth exploded with pain as that same hand backhanded her with brutal force before she could even think to scream again. She felt the soft tissue of her bottom lip slice across the sharp edges of her teeth, and a trickle of hot blood began to flow into her mouth.

  She only had just enough time to suck in a shocked breath before she was wrenched out of the trunk by her shoulders and promptly dumped face-first onto the ground into a cluster of tall weeds, jarring her head and causing pain like a knife stabbing into her skull to shoot through her temple. Kylie gritted her teeth and immediately forced her body to roll onto its side.

  “Somebody! Help me!” she screamed over and over as soon as her face was free of the weeds even though the only things she could see were darkness and the dark silhouette of dozens of trees.

  It was hopeless. Now that she had seen the trees and knew that he had brought her into the forest that surrounded Riverford, a forest that went on for miles in all directions, it was pretty much game over for her. Yet, she just couldn’t make herself stop crying out for help. She couldn’t give up on the slim hope that someone else just might be nearby, just might be able to hear her screams, because dammit! She couldn’t die now! She couldn’t die without ever knowing what had happened to her parents! Hadn’t fate shit on Paul and her enough!

  So Kylie screamed and screamed and writhed within her bindings, probably doing terrible damage to her legs and wrists as she strained to break the ropes, but not even her anger and desperation was enough to free her. It was only after she had screamed her voice to almost nonexistence that she realized that her abductor was standing only a foot away from her head, just—standing there with his head down, watching her futile struggles.

  There was no moon that night, so even her dark-adjusted eyes couldn’t make out more than the outline of his body. He was tall, looming over her still and quiet like one of the phantom trees surrounding them. Was he smiling? Smirking? Or worse, did he have no expression at all. The thought of her possibly giving him exactly the show that he wanted made Kylie immediately stop her thrashing.

  For the space of what felt like an eternity, the only sound was the rustle of the wind flowing through the multitudes of tree branches and her ragged breathing. That he hadn’t said one word to her was more terrifying than if he had been reciting a list of horrible things he was about to do to her.

  Kylie told herself she wouldn’t scream, that she wouldn’t move until she saw an opening. Tied up the way she was, he had only left her two possible weapons. Now that one of them, her voice, had obviously failed to bring her help, she had only one possible, one very sharp way out of this as her cut lip and the taste of blood in her mouth could attest. He only had to get close to her, or more specifically his neck, in just the right position. One tiny hope; one try.

  She had to wait; she had to stay sharp. Kylie could almost hear her father whispering those words to her again, words that she had lived by, that she had clung to as her anchor for the past twelve years.

  However, when he sank down onto one knee and she saw the large pair of metal scissors moving towards her stomach, Kylie couldn’t help flinching with a small cry of alarm. Her abductor’s free hand shot out of the darkness to wrap around her neck, squeezing with just enough pressure for her to feel the rope coiled around her neck begin to bite into her delicate flesh but not enough to strangle. A warning.

  He was now close enough to her that she could see the whites of his eyes, could see him staring directly at her with unblinking dark eyes that sent a shiver up her spine. There was nothing human in that gaze, nothing even remotely resembling an emotion. Just what kind of monster was she at the mercy of?

  Without moving his gaze from her face, he began to slowly cut away at the hem of her blouse. Kylie lay frozen on her side, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe as she felt the cold metal of the scissors brush against her skin as they slowly moved up her abdomen.

  It was in those dead eyes. She could see it as plainly as if he had announced it. He would not be satisfied with just cutting all her clothes off. He wouldn’t be satisfied because he had never intended to violate her body in the way she had feared. No, this was a monster the likes of which she could have never imagined.

  Kylie could feel a scream welling up in her throat. In a second or two it would break free and with it, very likely her sanity. Kylie opened her mouth, and a sound emerged that she had never heard come from a human throat, a long, drawn-out keening of pure despair that seemed to come directly from her soul.

  …and something deep within her entire being shattered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A wave of what felt like the biggest muscle spasm she had ever had washed through Kylie’s entire body a split-second before every inch of her began to contract and expand as though she was a balloon being inflated to the brink of bursting. For a painful beat, the ropes around her wrists, neck, ankles, and thighs cut excruciatingly into her flesh before inexplicably snapping as though they were made of straw. Her strange keening also began to change in pitch, to expand until the roar of an apex predator filled the once eerily silent night.

  Rage, fear, and a sense of blood lust filled her mind. An enemy was here! An enemy was hurting her! With a deafening roar, Kylie lunged at the figure that had fallen back onto his ass, that was frantically trying to scoot away from her. She could now see him as clearly as though it were twilight. She felt huge; she felt powerful as two large paws of golden, black-spotted fur slammed onto his chest, claws sinking past layers of cloth that felt as flimsy as silk and tearing into that soft, soft flesh as her enemy was flattened to the ground with a shriek of pain.

  The coppery smell of blood and another acrid scent of something she had never smelled before filled her nostrils, and the rage that saturated her every pore instantly doubled until all she could think about, all she wanted was the taste of that blood on her tongue. She opened her jaws wide and went for her attacker’s throat just as what felt like a battering ram hit her squarely on the side, causing Kylie to tumble uncontrollably off the bleeding body until she landed in a heap onto her side.

  With a roar, she scrambled onto all fours, hunching low into a defensive stance and her tail lashing sharply like the crack of a whip behind her. Her mind was so lost to the rage, to the fear of being attacked that she didn’t even stop to wonder why she was on all fours, that she roared, or that she actually had a tail to lash behind her. Her entire world had narrowed down to the large spotted feline standing challengingly between her and her prey that was currently staggering off into the protection of the trees, its eyes flashing with a bit of night shine as it stared her down but did not try to move closer.

  Kylie lashed out at the much larger great cat, swatting at the air between them warningly with her claws, before backing up a couple of steps and resuming her defensive stance with a series of sharp chuffs. That was her prey! How dare the other, one of her own brethren, try to take it from her!

  She let out another angry chuff and clawed the ground. The other cat blinked its large eyes and then tilted its head in a manner that her senses were screaming was utterly wrong—unnatural.

  Slowly it sat back onto its haunches and then before her alarmed eyes, the spotted cat’s entire body began to ripple in an utterly unsettling way before the mass of its body began to shrink down and rearrange itself. Spotte
d fur rapidly melted into smooth, human skin until everything settled and the body of a man crouched in its place.

  Her mind in its current state just could not comprehend what it had just seen. A naked, black-haired man now crouched before her, but he still smelled the same. He still smelled like the great cat of before.

  The man stared back at her warily, moving to sit with his knees bent up, and then he carefully rested his arms onto them.

  “It’s all right,” he said softly in a deep, nonthreatening voice. “Be calm. Be calm. I’m not angry. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Kylie snarled at him and took a cautious step back. What was he saying? He attacked her! He let her prey escape!

  “You’re okay,” he cooed in that same, soft voice. “There’s no danger here. I just want to help you. Will you let me help you?”

  Help her? Some of her rage subsided as utter confusion began to creep into her mind. What had just happened here?

  “Can you shift back now? So we can talk?” the man asked, his eyes wide and imploring.

  Kylie paused in the process of baring her teeth, the word “shift” tickling the edges of a distant memory even as a surge of fear washed over her, effectively snuffing out the uncontrollable rage of before. It was him, she realized suddenly, this stranger who had turned from cat to man before her very eyes. It was him she was afraid of, afraid that he was going to find out about—

  —that I’m a—

  Her eyes flickered down to the ground, to her two spotted paws with claws fully extended and the fur matted with blood, and she abruptly let out a sound of dismay that did not at all sound like something that should have come out of any kind of feline’s throat.

  Shit! I’m a jaguar! Kylie suddenly screeched in utter shock within her mind, a mind that was now once again completely her own. She scrambled back in a panic until her rump hit a tree, looking with horror at the unknown naked man who had suddenly jumped to his feet.