by Isabel Wroth
She left tucked up under his arm, clinging to his massive body in a way that made her heart flutter with relief. Glad, that Ohlen made her feel that safe. That cherished. She hoped he wasn’t a dumbass and didn’t tell Andi things that he thought she didn’t need to know, or wouldn’t understand. “Commander Brennaugh said he was preparing his warriors, I don’t know how long it will take, but if there are warriors aboard who react to your scents, I expect they’ll be brought over quickly to meet us. I gave the guy a serious talking to about what not to do with humans, he gave his word of honor that any female to be called would be given full disclosure. I don’t know why I trust that he’ll keep his word, but I do. I’ll leave that up to you to decide for yourselves. We’ll reconvene in the morning, see what Andi has for us.”
Most everyone nodded, but Gwen and Cassie remained at the table with her, looking just as pissed and upset as she felt. “So,” Cassie said tightly, her hands folded on the table top so tightly that her knuckles were white, while Gwen sat there rubbing the heel of her hand into her sternum. She wondered if the other women had felt that punishing snap, the loss of feeling from their men along that fragile bond. “What are we going to do about our trio of dickheads?” She shook her head and went for it, lay it out there for the two women in the same boat as her. “I’ve lost the majority of trust in mine. I felt the bond growing between us, snap. He didn’t seem to understand why I was so pissed, but certainly felt the absence of my emotions.”
“I thought it was just me.” Gwen murmured painfully, and Cassie bravely bluffed her way through it. “I’m thanking the stars right now that I’m back in my own god damn head. Don’t know what you’re so upset about. I’m glad now that asshole won’t get to be peeking inside my head uninvited. Using that sexy growl and shit to tempt the fuck out of me.” She turned bright pink when she realized she’d said that last bit out loud.
It made her lips twitch, but feeling as low down as she was right now, she couldn’t muster much spunk in her. Gwen didn’t seem to have any such problem. She slapped both her hands down on the table with a little shriek. “Who the fuck do they think they are? Who the fuck does he think he is? I’m the god damn human doctor that’s been treating humans for almost ten years, he’s been discovering humanity for the past ten days! And he just brushes me off like I’m a nonsense little bit of fluff? I don’t fucking think so!” Gwen struggled to breathe then, a shaky indrawn breath while her tears warred with her rage, and when Ga’rae’s voice immediately barked out over the intercom, demanding to know what was wrong, her pretty face nearly turned purple with fury. “You mean you can’t feel me, moose?” She cooed, and Ga’rae growled, “I have asked that you not call me that, my one. What I did ask was a question, your vital signs are extremely erratic.”
She squealed such a shrill little shriek, that she winced in reaction. Gwen stood up, literally hopping mad. Her hair bounced with her, and she looked a little funny screaming at her wrist, but it was nothing if not effective to get her point across that she was pissed off. “You want to know what’s wrong? You! But don’t let my erratic vital signs stop you, moose, you go right on teaching that medic all about your ten day’s worth of human physiology. What would I know? My being human and having been a human doctor for nearly half my life, apparently means absolutely fuck all. I’m just good for a good chase through the woods that you woefully neglected to tell me about, and a hot fuck in the grass after. So I guess I’ll just sit here, like a good little piece of ass while daddy does all the work.”
Gwen peeled her wrist unit off, flung it across the room and sat down heaving with her fury. She looked at Cassie, Cassie looked at her, and she bravely asked Gwen if she felt better. Gwen huffed, shoved her hair out of her face and took a deep, calming breath. “Yep. Mom always said a good mad on was just the thing to soothe the soul. Your asshole is probably hiding up in his command post, with his tail between his legs, watching us like a pervert.” She told Cassie, and Cassie snorted indelicately, “Probably so. Hope he’s enjoying the show, because I don’t plan on speaking to him any time soon. Do they even realize that we’ve never even seen a forest before?”
“I mentioned it to Tarek. Loudly. He was unfortunately pretty stuck on the whole severed bond, thing.” She managed to force out, wanting to rub her own aching sternum. But more, she wanted to crack her neck, scratch at her skin and wipe the sweat from her forehead and neck. “Did they turn the thermostat up in here?” Gwen shook her head but was sweating a little too, “I hate it when I get this mad, I get itchy!”
“It is pretty hot in here.” Cassie agreed, “And I’m itchy too. My bones hurt a little,”
“Joints?” Gwen panted, and Cassie nodded. “Me too. Clary?”
“All of the above. My heart is racing.” And she was starting to get scared. From how round Gwen’s eyes were, she was right there with her, “Med lab. Now.”
They pushed up from the table and hurried to the exit, only to find two of Tarek’s warriors trying to bar them from leaving. Their reason? Tarek’s orders because there were new warriors aboard. That made very little sense to her, because they were all his warriors, so why would she and her people need to be confined? “Look here, you big…mountain of a moron,” Gwen panted, “The three of us are experiencing abnormal symptoms, I am a fucking doctor, and you will either take us to the med lab, or be responsible for any harm that comes to us. Do you get me, soldier?” Her last word was a visceral snarl that made both warriors jerk, taking almost a step back as their nostrils flared, “You smell…strange,” One said, and then they were running, with the warriors barking into their wrist communicators for Falken, Tarek and Ga’rae to be advised of their situation.
Gwen shoved through them, literally bowling the two of them out of the way to get into one of the med bays. Shoved them out of the way and they were so startled that they didn’t recover fast enough to make it under the glass partition that slid down upon her activation. “Clary, symptoms, go.” She ordered, fingers flying over the display screen of a larger tablet, totally in emergency doctor mode. “Joint pain, overheated, my eyes are watering, sweating, itchy. Like I want to scratch my skin off.”
“Cassie?”
“Same. Stomach cramps just started.”
“Me too. Did we eat anything differently?”
They listed off everything they’d eaten, drank, none of them had had the same thing. “Can’t be environmental, or poison, oh my god, my eyesight is fucking up. Red, I’m seeing red, are my eyes bleeding?” She shook her head, gripping the table edge as the joint pain got worse and the stomach cramps started tearing at her. “No, but it’s happening to me too. Oh god,”
“Get on the table!” Gwen snarled, fighting her own pain and helped push her up on the table, “Initialize scan!” She ordered, and this was the moment all three of their Sarazens slid into the med bay and slammed up against the glass partition.
Her eye sight shifted from normal colors to red, then streams of yellow and green, then back to normal. She could see Tarek beating at the glass, right alongside his men, his mouth moving and a hollow thud came along with every bang of his fists on the door, “Muscle mass exceeding normal limits, bone density increasing, heart rate, god…” Gwen groaned and bent in half, fighting to stay with her and Cassie, but all three of them were suffering and going down in the same sinking boat. “Adrenaline, off the charts,” Gwen shrieked then with pain and dropped to the ground, the sound of something popping that should not have popped. “Raise the shield, Clary! Raise it now!”
She heard his voice, and she wanted to obey him, wanted him to help her. She stretched for the console, but Gwen gripped her arm in the vise of her hand and snarled, “No! Could be….biological…toxin.” She wanted to shove Gwen off, some sort of rage born of fear overtaking her, but the breath she drew to snarl back at her was lost in a scream as her spine felt like someone was wrenching it with both hands, in the opposite direction. The pain was unimaginable, she’d never in her life experienced anyth
ing like it, and over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears, she could barely make out Tarek and his warriors shouting something about overriding the shield doors.
Eighteen
The pain became everything, her focus, the fear of it, but she was running out of fight, running out of breath, feeling her body twisting and things popping inside her, how her muscles rippled and felt like they were being torn apart. Fire poured through every vein, trying to escape from under her fingernails in red rivulets, from her mouth, she could taste it from where she’d seized and bitten into her tongue. She was sobbing, trying to anyway, but mostly it just felt like choking on the very air she was trying to breathe. She saw Gwen from the corner of her eye, trying to drag herself across the floor to her, something clutched in her hand. Her vision did that weird thing again, and Gwen’s shape turned into a red blob. The sting she felt in her thigh was like a fly bite in comparison to the rest of the pain, “Cassie,” Gwen gasped out, slapping something into her palm, a syringe.
A small bit of clarity came to her as a cool flood of relief hit her, a moment enough to understand that Gwen had probably just saved them. It made her feel like heaving up her guts when she rolled to her side, rolled off the table to hit the floor hard. She lay there for a second, but at the sound of her scream, she made herself move to stab the syringe into Cassie’s convulsing body. She felt them ease almost immediately under her hand, all three of them now lying on the cold floor, feeling the blessed chill seeping into their bones. She hoped whatever Gwen had stabbed her with killed her, because she wasn’t ready to go through that again. “Clary, can you hear me?” She sniffled, managing to open her eyes as tears leaked down her cheeks in what felt like a river, “Yes.”
“Look at me, my one.”
She blinked, whatever was in that syringe had numbed her body, separated her from the pain, but she could still feel her body convulsing, the heat flaring just beyond the cool numbness. She saw him then, on his knees on the other side of the glass, one hand pressed to it, his claws uselessly digging into the surface and didn’t even leave a scratch. His other hand was near his mouth, speaking to her through his wrist unit, and even drugged she could see the rage, the agony on his features though he tried to hide it. Be strong for her. “You are so strong, my one,” He told her hoarsely, dragging his palm down his face, the hand on the glass curling into a tight fist. “We are trying now to raise the shield, but your little medic has activated the biohazard protocol.”
“Something’s wrong,” She slurred, “Don’t open the door. Contagion,”
He rocked forward to brace his forearm against the glass, his brow resting there too, his eyes stroking over every inch of her, “There is no contagion, my heart. Ga’rae believes the blood we have given you, to Cassie and Gwen changing you. Gwen was pulling up your earlier medical files, the scan she was able to take suggests a mutation of your cells.”
“Wha?”
“You asked me earlier if giving you my blood would make you change into a cat. Apparently this is possible, and it is what’s happening to you now. To all of you.”
“Andi?”
“Yes. Ohlen is with her, she was the first to shift, moments ago. Fully shift, my one. We will discuss the miracle of this later, but if you continue to fight your change, you will die. I need you to trust in me. I need you to listen now.”
“Don’t trust you,” She heard herself say, and his lips peeled back from his fangs, “We will discuss this also. But you will obey me now, all of you. I will not allow you to die, not like this, not when I know that your Andi has the ability to do it. Our young go through pain such as this on their first change, I did so, and I remember it vividly. You must not fight. The pain medication Gwen has given you will wear off soon. Can you all hear me?”
Gwen and Cassie gasped out a yes, and Tarek praised them while Falken and Ga’rae continued to work on a control console at the wall near the shield on their side. “You must breathe now, long and slow. Close your eyes, when the pain comes, you must let it flow over you, like water running downhill.”
He fought to keep his voice deep and soothing, remembering his sire coaching him through his first change, but what he was witnessing, his mate lying on the other side of the shield, so far away but close enough to touch, was testing every reservoir of control to its limit. She was bleeding, fucking dying because she fought so hard. Cassie and little Gwen were in no better shape, but Cat’s Teeth they were strong! Even in the grip of what he knew to be unholy amounts of pain, Gwen had managed to think clearly enough to dose herself with a powerful tranquilizer, then in its thrall crawl to Clary, given her the same, and Clary had given one to Cassie.
She’d saved all three of their lives.
Falken and Ga’rae were tearing at the console in the wall, desperately trying everything they could think of to override the biohazard controls, his warriors on the bridge doing their best to help as well, but so far the room remained locked to them. Their precious mates trapped and alone inside. He watched the tranquilizer begin to wear off as their metabolism mutated along with their cells. Watched his mate curl into a little ball and sob as the pain came again, but she didn’t beg or plead, none of them did, and their strength utterly terrified him. “Clary, you will obey me! All of you, will obey!” He roared, pushing every ounce of power his beast held to sway theirs, seeing them twitch in reaction, their beasts already trying to do as he commanded.
He sucked in a breath as he saw Clary’s talons emerge. They weren’t like his, and they were in fact unlike any Sarazens that he knew of. They weren’t black as the vast vacuum of space, they were a milky white shot through with prisms of color, sparkling under the smear of blood like white gems. “That’s it, let her come. She is part of you now, feel her fur sliding under your skin, feel how she stretches inside you.” Clary, then Gwen, then Cassie rolled to their hands and knees, and he held his breath, waving his arm to catch the attention of Falken and Ga’rae, not wanting them to miss a moment of this. They all waited breathlessly, watching how their bodies stretched and twisted, felt their agony keenly as they moaned in pain, but now they did not fight.
Clary tossed her head back suddenly, her sweaty hair flying back around her body like a crimson sheet. She twisted, her lips peeling back in a grimace to show him four dainty little fangs in her mouth, how her glorious green eyes turned even brighter while her pupils slit vertically. “That’s it, just…let her roll through you, accept her, my one and the pain will stop.” He turned off the communicator for a moment, not daring to take his eyes off of her for a second, “They’re doing it. They are strong enough to accept the change.” He told his warriors, getting tight nods, sharing their terror and their agony at not being able to help their females through this. From one heartbeat to the next, his mate went from stunning human female, to a Sarazen cat so unique and glorious, he was utterly in awe.
Like her talons, her fur was a pristine white, so pure that under the bright lights it almost hurt to look at her. But the white was broken from the tip of her nose to the end of the tail that no other Sarazen possessed, by a red stripe the same crimson as her hair. She stood on all fours, claws dug into the floor while her whiskers pulsed as she panted, her sides heaving as she quivered. He could barely stand to take his eyes off of her, but he did for a split second to see that Cassie had made it through her transition, and was a silky looking black cat, Gwen, a soft grey. They looked absolutely nothing like much larger, bulkier males in full shift, but they were sleek and looked like they would be fast and able to move like mist over the forest floor.
But now, they all just crashed to the ground after trying to take a few wobbly steps around the floor, and didn’t get up. Clary’s wrist unit was on the floor near her trembling form, she blinked when he called her name, “My heart, you’re tired, I know you are, but we can’t get past this shield to help you. You must deactivate the biohazard protocol. I need you to get up.” That made her lips curl up with a clear display of anger, but she drug her
self up to all fours, legs splayed wide to find her balance. “Turn around. The blue button at the back of the room, your eyes will tell you it is yellow.” She wove like she was drunk, staggered, crumpled to the floor beside Cassie, nudging her with her nose, and the panting female cracked an eyelid to nod. Clary licked her white furred muzzle, half crawling, half dragging herself to Gwen to check on her next.
She ignored him to check on her people, and only when she was satisfied that Gwen was responsive, did she try to get back up to reach the back wall. His heart hurt with how much it swelled, his pride in her limitless at this point. She got there and rested her head against the wall, swaying a little for a moment. Then one elegant paw pushed up, and her crystal colored talons actually dug into the wall, which was impossible. Those were blast panels and not even laser fire could penetrate the material. “Remarkable,” Ga’rae breathed, watching her pull herself up to dig in the second set of her talons, her sides heaving from the exertion and the unfamiliar sensation of her new form. She missed the button the first time, the second, but slapped it on the third try and the shield hissed up right as she collapsed again. “Get them to my lab, now.” Ga’rae ordered, his mate already in his arms, flopped like she was dead as he carried her from the room.