by Laney Kaye
CAT SHIFTERS OF AAIDAR
- ENDINGS -
Jag & Aren
Laney Kaye
&
Christina Wilder
CAT SHIFTERS OF AAIDAR: ENDINGS
Copyright © 2018 Laney Kaye & Christina Wilder
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews. This book
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events,
and incidents are a product of the
Author’s imagination. Any resemblance to an actual person,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ASIN: B07KT4W9BN
Jag
Like the rest of my band-of-brothers, my guns, fangs, and claws are for hire–but I have a reputation for caution. Pragmatism. Methodology. The Cap, Herc, relies on me for my prudence. But now, with the world collapsing around us and danger pressing in on every side, I’m crazy in lust with Aren, the leader of the Refugees. For the first time, caution seems over-rated.
I don’t know what the Hells is going on. Jaguarkin don’t bond. We mate. Rut to produce offspring. Then move on. So why does this feel like more than that? I can’t afford to allow a distraction in the form of one little human. One mysterious, desirable woman with the ability to rock my world—and, if I don’t handle it right, rock all the worlds.
Aren
My life has been dedicated to one mission: to kill my father. After that, I’ll die, either in a Regime prison, or from my own pair-blade—fulfilling a promise to follow my dead husband, Tracin, to his grave. When Herc & Maya and the crew need someone to infiltrate the Regime army and steal a communicator they need to contact the Aaidarian government, I see my chance. Jag will go with me, pretending to be Tracin. Which means he’ll need surgical alterations, and he won’t be able to shift or his disguise will be revealed.
And I’ll have to have sex with him to ignite the blades. Shouldn’t be too bad, right? A quick round in bed in exchange for a chance to finally see this through. Except, one touch from Jag sets my skin on fire. And I’m falling for him fast. How will I satisfy my Dragarian pair-blade’s thirst for my blood if I’m bondmated with Jag?
Books by Laney Kaye & Christina Wilder
CAT SHIFTERS OF AAIDAR SERIES:
ESCAPE
ENGAGE
ENSNARE
ENDINGS
By Laney Kaye:
HOOK: THE LURE OF THE MER Book One
LINE: THE LURE OF THE MER Book Two
From The Wild Rose Press, 2019
And Amazon
By Christina Wilder:
MY BIG FAT POMPEII ROMANCE
Legally Blonde meets Gladiator in this
romantic comedy with a historical twist
on Amazon
DRAGON MATED
A steamy, humorous novella series
CAPTURED BY A DRAGON
HUNTED BY A DRAGON
CLAIMED BY A DRAGON
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my husband and family, who’ve never stopped believing I could do this. Your encouragement means the world to me.
To Stephanie: thanks for reading an early copy! I always love hearing your thoughts. And to my critique partners, who offer solid advice, laughter, and endless support. I couldn’t have done this without you, ladies. And to all the other authors whose words I’ve studied. You’ve shown me how to better my craft and take my writing to the next level.
~ Christina
For Taylor, who cheerleads and chastises with equal enthusiasm.
With special thanks to Anne and Lindsay for their unblushing input and advice, and with gratitude to all my critique partners, whether they worked on this story or others.
~ Laney
Chapter One
Jag
Aren strode toward me along the rock-walled tunnel, her dark, cropped hair glinting under the solar-powered halolights set at regular intervals into the stone, the knife strapped to her thigh clinking against the sheath at each step.
Once they’d realized my brothers and I were firmly aligned with them, the Resistance had dropped their insistence on disarming all who entered their massive underground complex. Not that they could ever totally disarm a cat shifter; they could take our weapons but, with fangs and claws at the ready, Herc, Leo, Khal, and me were always prepared.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’d learned Aren was always prepared, too. Not that she had any shifting ability, unlike Khal’s mate, Lyrie. But whether we were in the desert or the Resistance headquarters, she always carried the curved Dragarian blade, revealed with each stride as her loose, desert-colored robe billowed around a lithe form that was far from soft.
Despite the missions we’d run together, rounding up the Refugees—a scattered band over which Aren seemed to hold unofficial leadership—I’d yet to see if she knew how to use the knife.
The underground fortress we traveled through could be overrun at any moment by the Regime forces. Though we could hold the attackers back for now, that could change in an instant. Everyone here, down to the last child, needed to know how to fight. Time would come that Aren would need to rely on that blade. Somehow, I’d have to figure a way to get her to allow me to instruct her, so she could at least protect herself when I wasn’t around.
Glia had been at war for a decade, with the Queen publicly beheaded by the resource-hungry alien invaders, the Regime. The Glian survivors had been torn apart, splitting into three groups; the Resistance fled to the desert, building an underground stronghold, where they’d been led by Lyrie for the last decade.
Other Glians remained in the Regime compound, many clicks to our south, either working for the invaders, or barely subsisting as beggars and purchase-mates at the sleaze-easies that peppered the army base.
Yet others, the Refugees, wandered the desert, unwilling to affiliate themselves with either the Resistance or the Regime. But, starving in the increasingly arid, hostile climate and decimated by disease and injury, they had, at Aren’s urging, slowly started to trickle into the Resistance stronghold. Most sought protection, but some were willing to join the war against the Regime forces, who now massed in a force of hundreds outside our guarded walls, preparing for one final purge of the Glian rebels.
“Jag.” Aren nodded as she greeted me, though we’d only parted ways a couple of hours earlier, exhausted and dehydrated from our latest mission and sorely in need of the brief shower the strict commune rules allowed us. Sleep would’ve been a welcome luxury.
Damned if my heart didn’t kick as her gaze roved over me. I could never tell whether she was checking me out as a man, or assessing what weapons I carried. Despite our many nights in the desert, her customary reserve meant I knew little about her, except what my own eyes told me; the nomadic life wasn’t what she was accustomed to, and she had neither the carriage nor cunning of a natural hunter, a survivor. Yet there was an alertness, an underlying anger to her disposition that made me wonder what motivated her. And, though she showed no overt control, her commands always terse and almost disinterested, her people remained ridiculously faithful to her leadership, despite their lack of home or hope. As though they clung to the memory of a different woman, and trusted her to lead them in from the wilderness of their choosing.
Aren wouldn’t share her past, simply regarding me in sullen silence when I’d tried to initiate some sort of campfire conversation. Yet I’d have to be blind to miss the fact that the knife she carried was a pair-blade, and, more importantly, the blu
e gleam signified the bond had been activated; she was paired to a Dragarian warrior.
Which made no sense. Leo’s bondmate, Janie, had told me that Aren’s man was dead. Nothing unusual in that—hells, people were dying like teezter flies out here, picked off by the Regime’s laser-armed drones and scouts, the sand vipers and armor spiders vying to feed on the weak and injured left behind.
But the thing was, Dragarian soulmates didn’t survive without one another. When one died, the glowing blade would be used to speed the reunion of their souls, the blue fire quenched with blood.
Then again, though Aren’s skin was achingly pale—protecting it from the murderous desert sun probably accounted for the long robes she customarily wore—she clearly wasn’t Dragarian, lacking their distinctive ice-blue eyes and snow-blond hair.
I pulled to a halt in front of the room we’d been summoned to. Damn it, I shouldn’t have given a thought to what lay beneath her robe. But there was something about this woman, something that made me want her. A purely instinctive, animal urge.
As Jaguarkin only came together for breeding, I knew that sure as hell wouldn’t fly with Aren, any more than it would with most non-Jag women.
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my dun-colored uniform pants, to hide the evidence of the fact that my mind was intent on lingering on the image it had conjured. Was all Aren’s flesh that remarkable translucent color, the veins creating a tracery of purple and blue clearly visible through her fine, smooth skin? The Jaguar in me growled hungrily at the thought. Though no Felidaekin had tasted human flesh for generations, I wanted to eat her.
But it wouldn’t involve my teeth.
I ducked my head in a terse nod, scowling. As Aren’s elongated, teal eyes unflinchingly met mine something about her stirred a faint memory, whispering against my brain like the brush of a wint’s flight. Trying to force the recollection into focus, I couldn’t stop damn well looking at her.
Didn’t hurt that she sat mighty easy on my eyes.
Ripping my gaze away, I thrust open the door to the strategic planning room and followed her in to the conference, pretending I wasn’t trailing her so I could inhale deep of her womanly perfume. There were sure as beetric shit more important things that should be on my mind.
“Cap.” I nodded at Herc, who leaned over a three-dimensional model of our surroundings. Not our immediate surrounds, buried, as we were, like lorkus beneath the desert. But of the topside; the ragged, parched mountain region the cave system was entombed beneath, and the surrounding leagues of desert, with the distant Regime-held compound sprawled across the southern fringe of the tableau.
Even hunched over the map, Herc towered over his bondmate, Maya. Damned if I knew how the two of them had ever managed to get it on—not that I spent a great deal of my time thinking about it, though it’d been hella-fun to stir Herc when he was in the throes of bonding. Not that he’d moved on from there, much. Guess love—or lust—had found a way.
“How many did you bring in this time?” Lyrie asked from the far side of the table. Although, after her mother’s murder at the hands of the Regime, she’d been acknowledged as queen and ruler of the Glians, no one person in the strategic planning room held more sway than another. We were all fighting for our lives.
“Twenty-six,” Aren said. “Mostly elderly. Not much use to your cause.” She tossed the words as though they were a challenge, but I had to wonder if it was because she felt a shade of guilt that the followers she brought to the caverns were more burden than bolster to the Resistance forces.
“Indeed,” Lyrie agreed.
“Selina—I mean, Lyrie,” Maya chided, clearly still confused by her sister’s name change. Lyrie had chosen to keep the pseudonym, which she’d adopted to honor their dead mother, while a captive of the Regime. “The classrooms can always use some mature input. Keep the kids on the right path.”
“With tales of a lost history, you mean?” Aren sneered, her arms crossed over her chest, one leg thrust forward through the slit in her long shift, revealing her thigh and the dagger.
The beautiful purple tracery of veins in pale skin extended all the way up.
I coughed to hide the growl that surged in my throat.
Maya lifted a shoulder. “Isn’t all history lost? That’s why we teach it. To learn from our mistakes.”
“Are the new residents with Janie?” Leo interrupted. I guessed he didn’t need to know, but saying her name gave his mind permission to focus on his bondmate.
Aren’s gaze flicked to him, and she gave a tight smile. She seemed to have more time for him than she did for the rest of us, and damned if that didn’t stick a thorn in my paw. It was probably because he’d brought her in from the wilderness. And, the way I’d heard it, she’d been the one to keep him and Janie together. “Yeah. She’s doing the med checks. Sorry, Leo, you won’t be getting her back anytime soon.”
Commander Fen picked up his cup of cava. “None of us will be finished here anytime soon, anyway. Did you two eat?”
I’d shoveled in some cold roast pillion that the hunters had trapped, but Aren shrugged disinterestedly. Could mean anything, but I’d learned on patrol that she rarely ate. Said she had no need, when her people were starving.
I poured a cup of cava, threw in a spoonful of beejuz and added a splash of milk, from the dairy beetrics kept deep in the bowels of the mountain and sustained by an ingenious underground system of lights and ventilated fresh air. I handed the cup to Aren, ignoring her scowl, and poured myself a cup, straight black, as Fen addressed her.
“Will you be able to get out there again?”
Aren grabbed a handful of desert thorns and used them to widen the broad arc of prickles around the southern foothills of the mountains on the three-dimensional map. “Regime have reinforced along here. It’s getting too risky to run any more rescues, try to bring anyone else in. What remains of the Refugees will be better off taking their chances in the desert, now.”
She broke off and the flash of tears deepening the blue-green of her eyes disconcerted me for a second. I spoke quickly. “We need to switch focus to reconnaissance patrols, keep an eye on the Regime forces. Although they’re still massing, the livestock supplies they’ve brought in are dwindling. Tennant will have to attack soon, before his army starts losing condition.”
Lyrie nodded, staring down at the map. It was still new to her, she’d only been back in the caverns for days, but the rest of us had memorized it over the weeks, adding details to enemy numbers and placement each time we returned from a sortie. For weeks the enemy had milled, bringing in arms and supplies, and had seemed to be settling in for a long siege. Which suited us fine. With a hidden aquifer below our caverns and a robust agricultural system the Resistance had designed and nurtured, we could wait them out. They’d fry in the desert before we starved. But now Intel told us that their general, Tennant, had arrived, and it looked like things were about to start happening.
Khal had moved behind Lyrie and, her focus still on the model, she leaned back into him. His hand moved to cup her belly, an odd, almost protective gesture. All three of my surviving brothers-in-arms had bonded with women from this gods-forsaken planet. Khal and Lyrie were different from the other couples, though. Almost volatile, both strong and opinionated. Guess that was to be expected when you mixed a cheetahkin and a griffin.
Lyrie took a deep breath. “What are our comparative forces?”
Fen looked grim. “Not something that we even want to compare. While our entire population might rival the force gathered at our gates, our fighting ability is sadly lacking. We’re compromised by lack of trained forces and inferior firepower.”
“So we just stay underground?” Lyrie said.
Fen shook his head. “We could outwait the Regime, hidden in the caverns, but eventually our people will be affected by the lack of natural light and the fact that they are incarcerated, despite how large and well-appointed the surrounds. Once madness strikes one resident, it will spread quic
kly.”
Lyrie shuddered, and Khal tightened his grasp around her emaciated form, dropping a kiss onto her hair.
Maya patted at her sister’s hand. “Before you came…home”—though this wasn’t the palace the two princesses had grown up in, they were equally determined to make this the new home of the true Glians—“we’d decided that we need to go on the offensive. But, to be honest, we didn’t expect Tennant to commit basically all the forces from the compound to this attack.”
Herc rubbed a hand over his drawn face, the bristles rasping against his palm. “Though we have the sheer numbers, as Fen said, the bulk of our people are not fighters. They’ve no training, and no gut instinct for the fight. The Regime is battle-ready and they’ve those damned armed drones, heat-seekers, remote cameras, lasers. We’re pretty much down to rocks and knives. Without access to better tech, any forces we commit are nothing but cannon fodder.”
“But Aaidarians have tech,” Khal interrupted slowly.
Leo lifted an open palm. “Yeah, bro. And other than us four—who, in case you’ve not noticed, are remarkably tech-free—the Aaidarians are on Aaidar.”
“Right where the Regime is desperate they should stay!” Lyrie interrupted breathlessly, swiveling to Khal. “That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Hartlin’s fear?”