Despite her fears, the road behind her remained clear. Carly breathed easier when she reached the tangle of Austin traffic and turned from the narrow highway to the 290, approaching the heart of Austin from the north and east. She went south on I-35 and got off on a frontage road near Ben White, driving onto back roads that led around the warehouses.
These were active warehouses with trucks and men working, some of whom stared at Carly as she went by in Yvette’s Fusion. Good thing Yvette had come to the gallery independent of Armand, and Carly hadn’t had to use the BMW. That would have been remembered.
She saw Tiger waiting in the shadow of a warehouse, right where he said he’d be. He’d covered his striped hair with a baseball cap, and she couldn’t see his Collar under the high-necked T-shirt he wore under a flannel shirt. Lounging against the side of the building, he looked like just another Texas boy waiting to go back to work.
Carly pulled over. She popped the locks on the doors, and Tiger slid inside, lifting Carly’s large purse and settling it on his lap.
“We need to go somewhere and talk. Somewhere safe, where they won’t find us.”
“All rightee.” Carly’s fingers shook. “You’re scaring me, Tiger. What happened? How did you get here?”
“I talked to Walker. He drove me a ways, and I walked the rest. Do you know where to go? Not your house.”
Carly thought rapidly. “Yes. Yes, I do. It’s a bit of a drive.”
“Good. But not in this car. Park it, and we’ll take another.”
Carly stared at him. “You want me to steal a car? It’s one thing to borrow Yvette’s—I can convince her I needed it—but you’re talking about grand theft.”
“You’ll be found in this one. Park it.”
She stared at him a moment longer, then she shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Carly put the car in gear and drove it around the corner from the warehouses to the line of chain hotels that faced the freeway. She parked Yvette’s car in a back lot among similar-looking vehicles, locked the car, and dropped the keys into her purse.
She and Tiger walked through the lot, Carly trying to match Tiger’s ability to look purposeful and nonchalant at the same time. He didn’t bother telling Carly why he’d called her out there, what had happened, what was wrong. Any question was met by silence.
Tiger stopped by a car that looked a bit older and well used, and stood with his back to it while he tried the door handle. That car was locked, but a few rows and a couple more tries later, he found another well-used one that was unlocked.
“What do we do now?” Carly asked. “Hot-wire it?”
The parking lot was deserted except for the vehicles. The sun beat down, reflecting on the metal, fiberglass, and asphalt. Beyond the squat hotels, the freeway ran heavy, the day drawing to its close.
“Connor taught me,” Tiger said.
He opened the driver’s-side door, but Carly forestalled him. “I’ll do it. I can’t think what they’d do to a Shifter if you were caught driving a hot-wired car.”
His gaze flicked to her. “You know how?”
“I was a rebellious teen, and I hung out with other rebellious teens. We weren’t all that bad, but we were mischievous.” Carly slid into the driver’s seat while Tiger went around the other side.
“Lucky us,” Carly said. “He left the keys in it.” She laughed a little as she moved the worn gearshift and brushed at least a year’s worth of crumbs off the dashboard. “Maybe he doesn’t care about it being stolen.”
“He?” Tiger asked, his brows drawn. “How do you know a male owns this?”
“Because only a guy would let his car get this dirty. The windows are tinted, that’s good. If I could only roll . . . mine . . . all the way . . . up.” The window stuck three quarters of the way, and Carly stopped trying. But the stuck window proved to be convenient, because the air-conditioning didn’t work.
Carly drove carefully out of the lot, and as she had when she left the gallery, she avoided driving past the fronts of the hotels. She went back into the warehouse area, then onto Ben White again, heading west.
The car held the stench of old cigarettes, old coffee, mud, and other things Carly didn’t want to identify. When she could move down the road at a decent speed, air blew through the half-open windows, even if the air was oven hot. When she had to stop for a light or for backed-up traffic, however, the stuffiness made her gag. Perspiration trickled down her face and between her shoulder blades.
Tiger wouldn’t talk. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and slouched against the door as though he wasn’t worried as Carly made her way through the streets.
At one point, Carly’s cell phone rang. She wasn’t moving at the time, stuck in a merge of cars coming off Mopac. She grabbed the phone from her purse, but the number had no name attached to it, and she didn’t recognize the number.
“Connor,” Tiger said looking at it.
“This phone has a GPS tracker,” Carly said. “If they can use that to locate us, we’re screwed.” On the other hand, she had no intention of throwing an expensive smartphone out the window. Whoever picked it up would have access to all her contacts and maybe her bank account, she didn’t know. Or maybe they’d so helpfully call all her friends and family until she was found.
Tiger yanked the phone from her and ended her inner debate by closing his massive hand around it. The ringtone squeaked and went silent, and bits of black plastic rained down to join the junk on the floorboards. Tiger sifted through the wreckage until he found the chips, and he broke those too.
“Well, I guess that’s one solution,” Carly said. The traffic started, and she drove on, her mouth dry.
“You have any more cell phones?” Tiger asked. “Or gadgets? Connor says other things have locators in them.”
“Not with me. They’re at the house.”
“Good.” Tiger went back into his relaxed state against the door, and Carly hoped the door was solid enough to take his bulk.
She drove on, winding through streets, heading for the Bee Cave area. No one seemed to be following her, though the few people they passed in more affluent neighborhoods turned heads as the old car sputtered by.
Carly turned off a little north of Bee Cave into a neighborhood that was fairly new, with large houses and winding streets. She made it to the house she needed as shadows were lengthening, afternoon finally turning to evening.
“Hang on,” she said, opening the car door in the driveway. “I’ll run in and open up the garage. We can’t leave this pile of junk on the street. It will definitely be noticed.”
Tiger was alert now, his eyes changing to the golden sparkle they took on when he was thinking about changing into the tiger. “Who lives here?”
“My sisters. Don’t worry, they’re in Mexico. I have the keys. I’ll hurry.”
Before Tiger could argue, she shut the door and tripped up the small flight of steps through the landscaping to the front door. A key on her ring fit the locks, and Carly pushed her way inside.
A beeping sound startled her, and for one panicked moment, Carly forgot the alarm code. Her fingers knew it, though, and soon the alarm was off.
Carly went out through a back passage to the garage and punched the control to open the garage door. Then she drove the car into the garage, Tiger still in it, turned off the ignition, and closed the garage door.
She coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. “This thing really stinks.”
Tiger didn’t answer. He followed Carly as she got out of the car, entered the house again, and led him through the back passage to the main part of the house.
“Your sisters live here?” Tiger stopped to look around the giant kitchen and the high-ceilinged living room beyond. “How many?”
“My two oldest sisters. They and my mom and my other sister all went to Mexico to shop. I didn’t go because Armand needed me for the exhibit opening.” Carly huffed. “See how well that worked out.”
“So much room for two people,” Tiger said, turning to take in the echoing space.
“True, but they earned it. My sisters run a decorating business together. Althea and Zoë, that is. The one just above me in age, Janine, is married and a teacher. I’m the youngest.”
Tiger pulled off his baseball hat and dropped it onto a chair, combing his fingers through his hair, ruffling it and making it look sexy. The black and orange strands no longer seemed odd to her.
“Why don’t you live here with them?” he asked. “It would be safer for you.”
Carly opened the refrigerator. Sneaking out of the gallery, stealing a car, and fleeing across Austin—very slowly—had given her an appetite.
“Like I said, I’m the youngest. I wanted to go out on my own, see if I could do it without everyone looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. We’re close, my sisters and me, but they do tend to be a bit overprotective, and at times, downright bossy. Ooh, pasta salad.” She drew out a plastic container, popped the lid off, sniffed it. “Seems okay. Someone needs to eat this before it goes bad.” Carly plopped it onto the counter, then dove back into the refrigerator. “There’s plenty of lunch meat in here. Want me to make you a sandwich? And while I’m at it, you can explain to me why you told me to steal Yvette’s car and duck out of the gallery without alerting Spike or Connor.”
Tiger sat on a stool on the other side of the breakfast bar, which was open to the rest of the room, and leaned his arms on the counter.
“I will tell you everything, Carly. From the beginning. Stop, and listen.”
His face was grave, mouth turned down. Carly ceased her flustered puttering, dropped the fork she’d taken up into the pasta salad, and waited for him to start.
Tiger’s position, leaning forward toward her, made his T-shirt open at the neck, but the shadows were such that Carly still couldn’t see his Collar.
Then she frowned. She reached out, hooked one finger around the ribbed neckline, and pulled it down. Her heart beat faster.
Tiger wasn’t wearing a Collar at all. His skin bore a thin red crease across his throat, but the Collar had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Tiger saw the fear flare in Carly’s eyes as she realized she was alone with an un-Collared Shifter, nothing to control him, nothing to restrain him.
Her lips parted as she reached to him and brushed one fingertip across the abraded skin. Her touch, that one caring stroke, untightened something inside him.
“You took it off?” she asked in wonder. “Looks like that was painful.”
“Yes.” He didn’t lie. Removing the false Collar had hurt, because Liam had made it to embed into Tiger’s skin, so it would better resemble the real ones. “But not as much as it could have, because I never had a Collar on at all.”
Carly stared at him for a heartbeat then her brows drew together. “What are you talking about? It was right there.” She brushed her fingertip across the line again.
“It was a fake.” Full disclosure, that was the term he’d heard. If Carly was to trust him and help him, Tiger had to give her all the information he could. Nothing held back. “I will tell you all of the truth. When I’m done, if you want me to leave, I will. You’ll never see me again, and I’ll make sure you aren’t bothered because of anything I asked you to do today.”
Carly’s eyes widened. “I think it’s a little late for that. I just parked a stolen car in my sisters’ garage.”
“They made me in a research lab in a place the humans call Area 51,” Tiger said, ignoring her and plunging straight in. “They were trying to create Shifters artificially. Shifters are born Shifter—they aren’t humans who turn into Shifters because they’re bitten or whatever, like in the movies Connor laughs at. I don’t know how they made me—they might have used Shifter DNA, or only animal and human. They never told me. I was the twenty-third Shifter they made. The others all died when I was still a cub.”
He told her about the long days he’d been left alone in his cage, then taken out only to be shot full of chemicals or given electric shocks or other things, then observed to see how he reacted. His reaction had usually been screaming agony. Tiger told her about the days they’d chain him to a treadmill and make him run for forty-eight hours without a break. They’d alternately starve him and force-feed him to see what he could take, then they’d enact an interrogation scenario, torturing him when he couldn’t answer their questions.
Carly watched him with her beautiful green eyes as Tiger revealed the horrors in his flat voice. They’d let him see his cub once, he related, before they took it away. When Tiger had asked to see his boy again, begged them, they’d told Tiger the cub had died. The grief of that had been worse than any torture they could ever manufacture.
Tiger had talked until his voice grew hoarse, he who rarely said many sentences together. “Walker said that when Eric destroyed the building in Area 51, it was investigated, and the investigators found files and notes that didn’t get burned. At first they thought I’d died either in the experiments or in the explosion, but Walker kept an eye out. When he found out there was a Shifter in Austin who came from nowhere, he started watching me. Today he told me that the Shifter Bureau wants to start the research again, officially. The Area 51 people were trying to create Shifter soldiers, off-book. Shifter Bureau now wants to see if the project is still viable, if they can make Shifters who will be controlled soldiers, using me as the prototype.”
Carly had gone very still, her gaze fixed on him in shock as he’d told the tale. Now rage flared in her eyes. “Dear God. I’m guessing they aren’t asking you to volunteer.”
Tiger shrugged. “Officially, I don’t exist. I’m not a registered, Collared Shifter. Feral Shifters, un-Collared, can legally be hunted and killed.”
She planted her fists on the counter. “This is all bullshit.”
“As a research subject, I’m perfect, because it doesn’t matter if I die.”
“It damn well does matter,” Carly snapped. “And Walker told you all this? Why, because you were nice and let him go?”
“He doesn’t like what the idea has been turned into. The Shifter Bureau sent a soldier out to wreck the car and shoot me as part of the experiment. The mission risked civilians, and Walker doesn’t like that.”
“How sweet of him. Well, consider me risked. Along with Ellison. And they had you shot in cold blood. Why didn’t they scoop you up and take you with them right then, if they wanted to watch what would happen to you?”
“They thought they could scoop me up anytime they wanted, and they didn’t want to pay for the medical care.”
“Let the Shifters foot the bill and spend the time taking care of you while the Shifter Bureau sits back and watches?”
“But now they’re ready to take me in. I’m pretty sure Liam will let them—and he won’t be given a choice.”
“Why would Liam let them take you?” Carly asked. “He seems pretty protective of the Shifters, at least from what I’ve seen.”
“The other Shifter leaders want him to put a real Collar on me. Or kill me. Liam’s choice. Except he told me to make the choice. He might see handing me to the Shifter Bureau and their special team as a way out of the problem.”
Carly blinked. “Liam told you to choose between putting on a Collar or letting him kill you? What the hell?”
“Liam’s job as Shiftertown leader is to protect all Shifters. I’m a threat, a danger to the Shifters in his Shiftertown. He has to contain the danger any way he can.”
“Tiger.” Carly pointed a polished fingernail at his face. “Don’t you even sit there and tell me that he’s right. If Liam’s supposed to protect all Shifters, that means all Shifters. Individually. You as well as all the others. None of this needs of the many crap.”
She was so beautiful, her eyes flashing, her face pink with anger and indignation. Carly was angry for him, at Liam and the Bureau, not at Tiger.
When Walker had called him and told him the Shifter Bureau wanted
to start experimenting on him again, Tiger’s instincts had told him to run and never stop running. He could have simply disappeared, using his incredible ability to survive to see him through.
But Tiger had a mate now. He couldn’t go and never see Carly again. He knew he risked exposure and capture by calling her and coming here with her, but Tiger needed her. He needed to breathe in Carly’s scent, and touch her skin, if only one last time.
Carly came around the counter and leaned on it beside him. The stance pushed her breasts toward him through her thin dress and washed him in her scent.
“So, what are we going to do?” she asked. “You can’t go back to Shiftertown, obviously—that’s why you had me give Spike and Connor the slip. I’m betting the guy who shot you before will be after you too.”
“The Bureau doesn’t realize I’m gone yet. Walker met me on the edge of Shiftertown and gave me a ride halfway to where I met you and told me to disappear. I didn’t tell him I was going to call you.”
“I’m glad you did.” Carly leaned to him and slid her arms around Tiger’s shoulders, her warmth soothing the shaking deep inside him. “We should be safe here for a while, but eventually they’ll start checking with my friends and relatives. I’ll have to pull some cash if we’re going on the road, because credit cards are too easily tracked. And we have to get a different car. That one won’t hold up fifty miles. I bet the guy left his keys in it hoping it would be stolen.”
She wanted to come with him. Tiger sat in stunned silence as he realized that Carly was calmly planning how they could get away from Austin and anyone after him.
But the cruel fact was that Tiger could move faster and farther without her, could cover his tracks in ways she couldn’t imagine. He’d survive, but he’d have to do it alone.
Alone. Without his mate. Or his cub.
Tiger touched Carly’s lips. “You are my mate. You always will be and no other. But you will stay here and be safe, and I will go. Once I am gone, and they know you don’t know where I am, they will leave you alone.”
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