by V M Black
“You look better like this,” he said.
“Better like what?” Tara considered whether she should be insulted.
“Well-kissed,” he said, his words a murmur that was barely audible over the rush of the water. He dipped his head to her ear. “Well-used.”
Tara’s breath hissed between her teeth at that. “We were talking about you peeing.”
He raised his head, his eyes sparking with humor. “Yes, and before that, we were talking about you peeing. You seem to like to talk about peeing a lot.”
Tara started to open her mouth for a blistering retort—and then gave up. There really was no point. It wasn’t like she hadn’t already known that whatever sense of privacy he had was outweighed by his paranoia, and she wasn’t getting anywhere with arguing with him.
So instead, she grabbed a handful of his twisted locks of hair and used the leverage of her elbow and weight to drag his mouth down to meet hers.
Before she knew what was happening, he was driving her back, out of the stream of water and against the cold wet tile of the shower wall. He forced her head back with a thumb under her chin, his mouth as hungry as if it hadn’t just covered her body in kisses, his other hand under her ass, pinning her.
He pulled back.
“So what are you going to do about it?” she challenged, wriggling against his spent cock.
His eyes flared. “I think I can keep you busy for another ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” She arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you super-human?”
That slow, hungry smile spread across his face again. “Now that you mention it...yes, I am.”
And he kissed her again, deeply, slowly, then moved down to her neck, finding the place just beneath her ear that sent tingles of sensation through her body and made her clit ache to the rhythm of his mouth, her mind going pleasantly blurry at the edges even as messages from lower were becoming more demanding.
As if he could sense what she felt, he slipped a hand between them, his thumb finding her clit as his other fingers lay flat against her folds, working in time to his mouth. There was nothing urgent about his movement—in fact, he was taking his time, winding her up slowly, as if he could read every breath and shiver that she made.
When her climax came, it was long and slow and almost peaceful, more like high swells than crashing waves—until he moved his fingers, just parting the folds to make way for his cock as he pushed inside her, until he could go no farther.
Tara made a small, strangled noise of protest. That was not at all what she’d had in mind for his next erection. But it was too late. His hands were already under her rear, boosting her up against the wall as if she weighed nothing at all as he stroked into her in the midst of her orgasm, pushing her deeper into it just as he invaded her deepest place.
Chay, Chay, Chay. With every stroke she thought his name, as if it were crucially important, the most important thing in the world.
And since his touch was the only thing that could keep her human right now, as far as she knew, maybe it was.
His shuddering stop was smaller this time, and he stepped back from her, letting her slide gently down the wall.
“Oh,” she said, feeling a deep, contented lassitude fill all her limbs.
“Oh?” he shot back, a gently mocking tone in his echo.
She blinked and focused on him again. He had an expression of complete smug self-satisfaction on his face.
“Taking all the credit, huh?” she said, pushing back into the main stream of water, where she used his bar of soap to scrub quickly and vigorously.
“I thought I might be rusty,” he said. “It’s good to know that I’ve still got it.”
“Why?” Tara asked. So far, she’d only seen two women in the complex, Mrs. Olsen and the grating Annie, but the place was huge, so she’d bet there were plenty more. And anyway, however exasperating she found Annie, Tara was smart enough to realize that most men would be falling over themselves to be with her—and Annie didn’t seem to be the type to be stingy with her charms. “I mean, it’s not like you don’t have opportunities.”
“Maybe they’re not the right ones,” he said.
“Annie’s not your type?” Tara couldn’t resist the question as she stepped out of the shower, grabbing the nearest white towel to wrap herself against the chill of the air.
Chay barked a laugh as he stepped into the stream. “I’ve only made the mistake of banging a spirit fox once, bae girl, and let me tell you, it’s not one I’m going to repeat.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Tara said dubiously.
“The sex? Hell, no. That woman was a Yakuza-trained courtesan. She could do things ....” He broke off. “Let’s just say that I learned a few tricks during that brief fling. No, it was what she did outside of the sack that was the problem. As a Yakuza-trained courtesan, stirring up trouble was something she did even better than sex.”
Tara felt a faint stirring at those words. Jealously? It shouldn’t be. Whatever they had, it shouldn’t be anything to get jealous about. She would blame it on the panther, who was well and truly roused again now that they were no longer touching.
“How many people live here?” she asked, more to distract herself than because she wanted to know.
“At the moment?” He lifted his wrist, where he still wore the watch-like thing that he always had on his wrist. “Cortana, what’s the population of Black Mesa?” He spoke directly to it.
A tinny voice replied. “The actual population of Black Mesa is currently four hundred twenty-three. The expected population is four hundred twenty-one.”
“There you go,” he said, grabbing the bar of soap and sudsing up his body.
“Um. Who are the two extra people?” Tara asked, leaning back against the sink.
He laid the soap back in its dish. “Oh, that’s just because of Narnia—the part of the facility I’ve given to the elves. The heat-source counter just doesn’t work right there.”
“Heat-source what?” she echoed.
“It detects bodies,” he explained as he rinsed off. “Anything larger than a rat. And it’s got some extra software tweaks that keep it from counting space heaters or stoves, engines, stuff like that.”
“So, about those elves,” Tara said, turning the conversation back on itself. “I know that Dr. Torrhanin was there when you picked me up at the Air Force base. And I think I would have noticed if he had pointy ears and bluish skin then. I mean, I was out of it, but I wasn’t that out of it.”
Chay chuckled as he turned off the water. “It’s their glamour. They turn it on when they go out of the facility. Even shifters can’t really see through it that well—not until we realize that our eyeballs are itching and start to wonder why.”
“You know that none of that actually explained anything to me,” Tara said.
“They can make themselves look different,” Chay explained, stepping out of the shower and grabbing the other towel off the rack.
“Like, not an elf?” she pushed.
“Depends on who you ask,” Chay said. “They’re pretty closed-lipped about the whole thing, but the rumor is that they can look like anyone at all.”
That was a thought. “So maybe sometimes Torrhanin isn’t Torrhanin?”
Chay groaned. “I really try not to think about it too much. They do their thing most of the time, and I do mine.”
He tossed the towel back over its hook and went back into the bedroom. Tara trailed behind him.
“Why do you let them stay here? I mean, you seem like a pretty”—paranoid—“uh, cautious guy. Why would you let them stay if they can look like anybody they want to? If you don’t even know if they can look like anybody they want to?”
She looked around for the clothes she’d discarded the day before—and instead, she found a neat, folded stack of fresh ones in her size, sitting on top of Chay’s dresser. She grabbed the underwear and stepped into it one leg at a time.
Chay was already pulling up
his pants. “They know more about shifter physiology than anyone. Ancient elves created the first shifters thousands of years ago—the natural-born shifters are descendants of these. Those arts have been forgotten, but most people suspect that the government has at least a few elves on their development team now. They know about your birth control situation. Torrhanin’s people treat all of us when we need it. And sometimes, the needs are pretty unique.”
“Like if a shifter has implants before his first shift,” Tara said, shuddering slightly as she adjusted her bra.
Chay pulled his shirt over his head. “Or the whole issue of different types of shifters and birth defects.”
“Um...what issue is that?” Tara asked, pausing for an instant with her pants around her knees.
“Every shifter carries a gene unique to his alter species,” he said. “Everyone has two copies of each chromosome, and all it takes is one copy of the gene to be a shifter.”
“Okay,” Tara said, having no idea of where he was going with that.
“If you have two shifter genes of the same type, it’s the same as having one, as far as you’re concerned. But if you have two shifter genes of different types, well, those babies all die either shortly after birth or in the third trimester.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“If each parent just has one copy of the shifter gene, then a quarter of their kids die,” Chay continued. “If one has two and the other has one, then half die. If they both have two copies—”
“Then they all die,” she filled in. “Got it.” She tugged her shirt down and slipped on her socks and shoes.
“Right,” he said. “But Torrhanin figured out how to suppress the shifter genes in sperm. So if the man takes the suppression therapy, his kids only get the mother’s shifter gene, and all is well.”
“That seems like a pretty big thing,” Tara said. “So he works for you?”
“Not exactly.” Chay looked uncomfortable. “He...helps. In return for space here. And now you’re going to ask me why does he want space here, and I’ll admit that I don’t have a clue. He came to me about a year after I bought this place and offered me a deal: room and board and space for his people, and he would help out.”
“Didn’t you ask him why?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, asking elves only gets as far as they want it to.”
“If he was able to help with suppressing the shifter genes before ....” She didn’t quite dare to put her question into words.
“I’ll ask,” Chay said. “They’ve never said anything about being able to help with this, but they never said they can’t, either.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate it,” Tara said.
Chapter Twelve
Chay ducked back into the bathroom to brush his teeth and check his hair. The twists were starting to fray—he’d need to comb them out and twist them back again soon. He wasn’t vain about his hair, but it was his little rebellion against all his years following other people’s rules. Despite the six years that separated him from his life in the Navy, he still got a small spurt of satisfaction from breaking their rules.
“Got a toothbrush for me, too?” Tara asked from the doorway. She looked so completely normal and human. It was hard for him to believe that she was living under a death sentence.
And impossible for him to accept it.
“I forgot to order it,” he admitted, tapping through on his smart watch and doing just that. “Should be here in a couple of hours.”
“Couldn’t you just get it?”
He patted her ass on the way back into his bedroom. “Sure. But why would I?”
She pushed her hair behind one ear and wrinkled her nose at him. “So I don’t have to wait a couple of hours?”
“You’ll survive.”
“I’d like my own things,” she said. “My real own things, I mean. The stuff from my dorm. And my phone. I want to call my parents, tell them I’m okay. I haven’t spoken to them since my shift at school, and they’ll be worried.”
“Later,” Chay said. He couldn’t let her talk to her parents. Not when they thought she was dead. Not when they could tell her things about what she’d done that might make her wish that she was dead, too.
Chay led the way into the front room of his suite. Tara paused just inside the door, and he turned back questioningly.
“So this whole thing ....” Her wave encompassed both of them and, presumably, what they’d done over the last nine hours. “It wasn’t exactly subtle. What we were up to, I mean. At least for part of it,” she amended.
She didn’t look like the lost young woman who’d first looked up at him with confused green eyes. She looked comfortable in her own skin, intelligent, competent, if placed in a very difficult position without the resources with which to prevail.
And even more desirable than before, dammit.
“Not subtle,” he agreed.
“Your friends won’t be happy. I mean, they didn’t seem happy before, so ....”
“Don’t worry. They were mad at me, not you,” he said.
“Why? Because I can’t control my shifting yet?” She folded her hands across her chest.
“Something like that,” he said. Because they think you’re doomed. Because they think that this can’t end well.
She hadn’t shifted in over twelve hours. That was something, wasn’t it? When she first woke up, she hadn’t made it even an hour. Since that first uncontrolled shift, she hadn’t shifted again. That was progress.
But she’d nearly shifted half a dozen times since then, many of those in her sleep. And all it really took was one bad shift, one shift that went so far that she could never come back.
He slammed the doors down on those thoughts.
“It’s already been taken care of,” he said.
“Has it?” she asked. “It didn’t seem that way last night...or yesterday...or whenever it was that I was awake last.”
“Early this morning,” Chay provided. “Anyway, I dealt with it after you went to sleep, if you have to know.”
“Dealt,” she echoed. “So they’re not mad now?”
“Dealt is dealt,” he said firmly. “Come on. I’ve got work to do. And you’ve got a panther not to change into.”
“Okay,” she said in a voice that said it wasn’t okay at all, but she followed him to the door to the spook shop and stepped through it behind him.
The next shift was in—Niall and Seamus were there, along with Eddie Agosti, who was tinkering among the maze of white tables in the main part of the room.
The Mansfield brothers looked up as one, and Chay read the confusion on Tara’s face with amusement as he blinked at the two burly men. Liam, Niall, and Seamus were each two years apart in age, but they looked so much alike that they were at times mistaken for triplets.
“Tara, whether or not you remember it, you’ve met Eddie Agosti before,” Chay said. “He was there when we picked you up.”
“Afternoon.” The wolf shifter smoothed his black, slick-backed hair before turning back to his work.
Chay continued, “And those other two monsters here are Liam’s brothers, Seamus and Niall. Niall isn’t a spook, but he watches the monitors for us.”
The brothers nodded and grunted greetings, their faces inscrutable under their short-cropped beards.
“Hi,” Tara said to all three.
“Breakfast is in the fridge, and then you can amuse yourself with whatever you’d like,” Chay concluded.
“All right,” Tara said, in a tone that said it wasn’t all right at all. “And what are you going to be doing?”
“What I do every morning,” Chay said.
“Afternoon,” Agosti corrected.
Chay ignored him. “Put out fires.” He turned off the “do not disturb” flag on his smart watch—and instantly the screen flooded with messages. With a sigh, he sat down at his workstation and began sorting through them, firing off one response after another.
“Want coffee?” Tara called.<
br />
“Sure. Black,” Chay said, aware of the gazes of the Mansfield brothers boring into the side of his skull. “My mug’s the Zelda one. The plain ones and the ones with flowers don’t belong to anybody.”
A minute later, she crossed over with two mugs. “Here.”
“Thanks. New chair for you,” Chay said as he took his mug, amused to see that she’d had no trouble identifying it.
“Looks a lot better than yours,” she said, setting her mug down in front of it before crossing back to the kitchenette.
“They all look better than mine.” Chay forwarded six emails in rapid succession to the correct department heads. Then he read the title of an email from Torrhanin and stopped dead.
“Shiny,” he said. “Seamus, Torrhanin says he’s done it.”
“Really?” Seamus asked. “I’m going to have to see this. That’s like Matrix shit, there.”
“Yeah. He said he’s coming by with it...well, now, in fact.” Chay fired off an email telling the elf that he was ready.
“Coming by with what?” Tara asked, crossing the room with a plate of last night’s stir fry.
“His mind-net,” Chay said. Torrhanin had been promising it for several months, but he’d never told Chay that he was close to a working prototype.
She frowned as she dug into the stir fry. “I don’t know what that is.”
He grinned. “Neither does anyone else, but we’re dying to find out.”
“It sounds like a neural computer interface of some type,” Niall rumbled. “The best that I can make out. Not my area of interest, but even if it were, you wouldn’t catch me dead putting something on my head that’s going to muck with my brain.”
“You’re trying to reason with the guy who signed up to have shifter factor injected into his veins,” Agosti said. Like the Mansfield brothers, he was natural-born, and though he would never want to be anything else, he’d frequently expressed wonder at Chay undertaking the risk to become a panther shifter at eighteen.