She caught hold of Max' s shoulder and turned him to her. “You told me you killed him!”
“I never said that,” Max corrected her. “I was lucky to get out of there with my life last time, Nikki. There wasn't time to do anything else.”
Laughter filtered down to them. “Oh, you hurt me plenty, Ursallin! I haven't forgotten what you did to me.”
Another shape leapt out from that window. This time it was clearly misshapen, clearly meant to mimic a human being even though it didn't quite manage. The man-thing jumped down those six stories and landed on the pavement below in his steel-toed work boots, right in the muck that used to be Cirillo the Ursallin. With no effort at all he bent into the abrupt stop, and then stood up. Nikki recognized the clothes or what was left of the impression of clothing. The top half of the Shift was a swirled mess of white skin and black flesh and shreds of clothing that were actually melted into everything else. Its arms were stretched out like saltwater taffy and its long neck was coiled up, a snake about to strike.
Its head was a smeared version of what Chris McCann used to look like. Now his human face looked like a bad latex Halloween mask that had been melted in a dryer and then torn and pasted back together. The yucky black color of its true Shift self oozed through the cracks in McCann's once handsome white boy looks.
Nikki felt like throwing up.
“Heya Nikki,” McCann said in a voice that was not human, even if it was recognizable as his. It was tinny and sounded like his throat was full of phlegm. “You ready for our date now?”
Not if you were the last man on Earth, was the response that came immediately to Nikki's mind. He wasn't a man, though, so that kind of made it the wrong thing to say.
He flowed sideways, his legs not moving so much as oozing side to side. “You two Ursallin can leave,” he said. “And be glad that I'm making the offer. All we want is the girl.”
She wanted to scream that he couldn't have this girl but she was so scared that all that came out was a little squeak. Max interpreted it correctly, though, and stood in front of her with his arm outstretched protectively. “You can't have her,” he said for her. “Now, how about you be the one to leave before we see how far a Shift's skin can stretch?”
The thing that had been McCann—and yes, she'd asked him out on a date once—stretched its wide, thin mouth open in a hissing laugh. “You don't make the orders here, Ursallin. I do.”
“There's one of you,” Arcan said, squaring off his feet and resting one hand on the flap of his shoulder bag. “There's three of us.”
McCann-thing sneered at Arcan. “Check your math again, shapeshifter.”
From the shadows all around them, black things moved. Slinking into the dim illumination of the security lights back here in the alley, formless and impossible, rising from the darkness like they were shedding a second skin. Shifts. Nikki tried to count them even though they seemed to flow into each other. She got to ten and then stopped. After that did it really matter how many of them were here?
No. No it did not.
They were dead.
No, wait. Max and Arcan were dead. The Shifts wanted her alive. Alive to do…things to her.
There was no way she was going to let that happen.
No way in Hell.
Chapter 12
Nikki Bryant knew what fear looked like.
It looked like a smeared oil painting. One that had been painted by a lifelong resident of an insane asylum.
McCann, a man Nikki had known as a drop-dead gorgeous private detective once upon a time, now stood crowding into her space in his distorted and torn body. He was a shapeshifter, but he was injured, and those injuries had left him disfigured and grotesque and Nikki could kick herself for every time she'd imagined herself spread out under him with his naked body performing naughty deeds on hers.
She pulled a face. Now he looked like he'd walked away from a trip through a blender. Parts of him were human and most of him was not and it was all mixed up into something that would give Stephen King nightmares.
"Don’t like what you see?" McCann asked her in that voice like a broken auto tuner. "Don't worry. I'll heal. Eventually. It might take longer for us Shifts to fix ourselves than your Ursallin boyfriends, but we're damned near immortal."
"Not the ones I killed," Nikki said with a little smirk.
McCann's grotesquely stretched mouth curled in a sneer, but her comment had shut him up. For now.
In truth, Nikki was terrified. The elevator made its slow ascent to the top floor of the skyscraper with her and the Shift in it but her mind was on Max and Arcan. Were they even still alive? Her big, strong werebear protectors had surrendered instead of fighting the small army of Shifts that had swarmed them at the back entrance to this building. They had given themselves up on a promise that she wouldn't be hurt.
That didn't mean they wouldn't be hurt. Or worse.
With a little ding the elevator jerked to a stop, and the doors slid open.
McCann took her by the arm to push her out. His touch was slick and cold. She pulled back from him but his fingers simply reached out for her and drew her back in to his grip. Oily blackish skin mixed with the flesh of his former disguise. His true form was showing through.
A Shift. A monster from the darkest pits where childhood nightmares come from. They were shapeshifters who could mimic any living thing and had a habit of replacing real people and infiltrating society, living and moving among the real human beings without being noticed.
Then, in the blink of an eye, they could morph back to their real selves. Oil-colored creatures with coiling limbs or overlong necks or faces that were all teeth and eyes and horrible expressions. They could stretch and change shape at will, and Nikki still wasn't sure if they had bones or were just filled with the green ick they used for blood.
She'd spilled the blood of more than a few of them. Turned out, she had a knack for killing Shifts. All her life she'd thought she was human. The sad, scary truth was that she was a lot more.
That was something she was only starting to accept. It wasn't every day you learned you were the child of two shapeshifters. Would have been nice if Mom or Dad had mentioned that even once.
"I'm coming," Nikki snapped at McCann, trying to get her arm back from him again and failing. She was five-foot-nine-inches of sultry Black female, but McCann towered over her, his long and curling neck bent over on itself to lower his cracked and twisted face close to hers.
"Don't push me, Nikki," he said to her in a hiss. "Donovan wants you alive. I don't. I haven't forgotten what you and your boyfriend did to me."
"Max should have bitten your head off," she told him, twisting her arm and rolling her hips and sidestepping this way…
And just like that, she was free.
Surprise kept her from running, which allowed McCann to grab her again. "Nice," he said, his voice amused. A long tongue slid out of his mouth, licking her wrist where he held it tight. "You do have skills. Maybe you really can do what Donovan says you can."
"I won't help you!" Nikki screamed, kicking at him with her new pink and black sneakers. Every strike connected, but McCann was ready this time. His flesh bent and stretched with each impact until finally it clenched around her leg, sucking at her jeans, and held her fast.
Then he pulled her close, and his lopsided gray eyes focused intently. "We'll see. A lot of women have done a lot of things for me. With the right persuasion."
A third eye popped out of his head, a black and bulbous orb that constricted and narrowed.
Nikki couldn't believe she'd ever found him attractive. Yuck. A quick flash of them having sex now, like this, crossed her mind. She puked a little in her mouth.
McCann shuffled and slid down the hallway on legs that were partly human and mostly black muck. His ability to shapeshift had been interrupted, somehow, back when Max had torn him up. The only pity to that in Nikki's mind was that Max hadn't killed him dead.
Now it might very well cost him his
own life. His and Arcan's.
Nikki grunted against McCann's painful hold and tried not to worry about those two. They were both Ursallin. A race of people who could change into bears and back again at will. If anybody could hold out against the horde of Shifts that had taken them captive, it was Max and Arcan.
"You promised me you wouldn't hurt them," Nikki reminded McCann. "If you break that deal, I'll—"
"You'll what?" he sneered, wiping a wiggling tentacle across his lips where drool had started to collect. "You can't do anything to us. Not now. Try it, and I'll give the word for Max and Arcan to be killed immediately."
That meant they were still alive at least. That made Nikki feel a little bit better. Of course, he could be lying just to keep her compliant. That was the same reason they were holding Max and Arcan. They needed the leverage.
Because they were scared of her.
Looking over at McCann now, she saw the part of his face that was still human twitch. He was trying to keep her from noticing, but even in that mess of twisted cheek bones and tiny sharp teeth, she saw the stress. Saw the fear.
There had never been anyone like her before.
That was what had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
He led her down the hallway at a fast, albeit shambling, pace. She'd never been up to this part of the building before. She used to work down on the fifth floor, back when she had been an aspiring lawyer and not a ninja assassin of monsters. The walls up here were bare, painted a dull green, with no doors and no windows and not even a painting to break up the emptiness. It didn't seem much like a place for conducting business. It seemed like a place people went to disappear and never come back.
At the far end of the hall was a large metal door with bolts the size of Nikki's wrists down one side and an electronic screen to the right of it on the wall. Nikki was pretty sure that dungeons had less serious doors in them than what she was seeing here.
McCann pushed her up flat against the wall, his body shrinking back down nearly to his human self, his hands becoming hands again, the clothes she had last seen him in forming out of his Shift skin, his face putting itself back in order…almost. She saw the effort it cost him to make that change. His nearly human face was etched with lines of stress and cords stood out at the sides of his neck. "Stay here," he said, feeling at his face with tentative fingertips. Obviously he was happy to be back to himself again.
Shifts heal slower than other Shapeshifters, McCann had said, but they do heal.
Damn it all.
Shoving her against her shoulder one more time he turned to the door, a triumphant expression on his face, and slapped his hand down on the blue electronic screen.
The color of his hand darkened to the color of pitch and melted into a stringy mess that slid down the wall with a loud, slow squeak.
Nikki giggled. He was melting, melting…
Rage boiled over on McCann's face, literally bubbling and seething through his human flesh in roiling waves that made his skin shimmer and shiver until he burst into his Shift form again, ballooning out and stretching into a monster with a patch of writhing tentacles at his left shoulder and an absurdly muscular right arm with seven long clawed fingers at its end. His legs thickened into three jointed appendages as big around as Nikki's waist. He whirled on her, his head a huge black egg shape with seven sagging black eyes.
Every one of these things that Nikki had ever seen had been uniquely ugly. No two were ever alike, and each one was worse than the last. McCann here was worse than any others she had seen.
He railed for a few long seconds, and Nikki pushed herself down along the wall hoping he wouldn't notice if she just, you know, left.
She never did know what tiny sound caught his attention but when he turned to her again his face was pure liquid rage and his hand swung at her, the fingers stretching out all around her in a sort of webbing that held her in place from her waist down. She pushed at him with her hands but he just bent and twisted under her grip.
"Told you to stay still!" he roared, his voice no longer even slightly human, his mouth a wide and gaping black hole.
She looked up into the festering flesh of his face and that switch in her mind kicked on. The switch that had been implanted in her DNA, dormant until Max had come into her life. Now, whenever she was in serious danger, the part of her that had been buried all these years surfaced and she became a whole different person. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. She knew she could do it.
And she wasn't scared any more.
"Blow it out your ass," she told him.
Then she cocked her right fist back and threw it into the gaping maw of his mouth, scraping her knuckles on his hooked teeth, and smashing through the back of what should have been his skull.
She literally tore his head apart with one punch.
McCann, the thing that had once been a drop dead gorgeous private dick working in the offices below hers, now sagged all over her, dropping dead in a gooey mess that puddled at her feet, rolling off her skin in sticky stringers.
"Ew!" she groaned. "Like, seriously. Ew!"
When Shifts died, they returned to whatever primordial goo they had sprung from. According to the story that Arcan and Max had told her about their origins, the first Shift had been a shadow that tore itself away from a werebear. The first werebear. What the Ursallin called their Primus. The first Shift became the Primus Secor, and spawned all these evil monsters after his own image. Somehow. Thankfully she had been spared the details on how Shifts made babies.
The point was that the Primus Secor, the first of the Shifts, was still around today. Still looking to take revenge on the Ursallin by wiping them out of existence down to the very last werebear.
Worse, the Primus Secor was here in this building, now, in that office at the end of the hall.
Her old boss. Mister Donovan.
Nikki did not want to meet the thing that had spawned all of these other monsters. She didn’t want to be within twenty feet of him.
She was about five feet away from that door now.
Time to go.
Shaking drops of McCann off her sneakers and pants and shirt she turned back down the hallway, racing for the elevator. There had to be a stairway entrance here somewhere but she didn't see any other doors and she didn't have time to search around for anything. She had left Arcan and Max in the hands of those other Shifts and while she trusted their strength in most cases, no way could two werebears take out two dozen Shifts. Not without one of them dying.
She was in love with Max. Her feelings for Arcan were strong as well but she had made her choice. Max was the better, uh, man of the two. Either way, she didn't want either of them to die. Not if she could save them.
There was a very good chance she could do exactly that. As weird as it was for her to admit, she wasn't just the simple Black woman from Manhattan that she had grown up thinking herself to be. Not anymore.
Now, she was like Superwoman. Or something.
She made it to the elevator and pushed the button over and over with her thumb. "Come on, come on!"
Back at the other end of the hall, the big metal door opened with a loud, screeching shriek.
Superwoman jumped two feet in the air, almost messing in her pink panties.
Another dozen jabs at the elevator button still didn't get the doors to open.
"I've shut it off from my office, Miss Bryant," a smooth, rich voice said to her.
She knew that voice very well. Bryson Donovan stood in a very relaxed posture, his back up against the frame of his massive steel door. In a tan business suit and brown tie, and with his thick gray hair coiffed just so, he looked like the very image of a powerful businessman. His pale skin was so lifelike that it was easy to forget he wasn't human.
Primus Secor. The first of the monsters.
Nikki knew then that she wasn't getting off this floor. At least not with the elevator. "Uh, hi Mister Donovan," she tried. "I know I'm late for work…"
&nb
sp; He looked down at the floor, where the melted remains of McCann lay. Then his eyes turned back up to her. "Made a bit of a mess too, I see."
"Couldn't be helped, sir. He was making a pass at me that I had to refuse."
Donovan blinked at that comment and then burst out laughing so hard that he doubled over at the waist. "Ha! Oh, that's good. Very good, Miss Bryant. I knew I liked you. That's why I hired you."
"Oh really? I thought you hired me because you knew I was part Shift and part Ursallin? That whole needing me to be a bridge into the Ursallin world thing?"
His smile slipped. After a moment, he shook his head sadly. "Seems someone has been telling stories out of school. You weren't supposed to know about that."
"Hey, I'm a smart woman."
"A smart Black woman. Yes. I always liked you, Miss Bryant. You're going to help us do great things. I just know it."
"Not in this lifetime," was her answer.
In a flash, quicker than thought, his human form was gone and he was a collection of writhing…things that her mind simply could not put a name or a shape to, all of him the color of a starless night sky, shimmering with electric silver lines of energy. He thrust himself down the hall at her without moving from where he stood and then a face that was one giant, circular hole within another within another lined with tiny spikes hovered bare centimeters in front of her eyes.
She didn't have time to scream.
"We'll see what you think after we talk," the Primus Secor said to her in a voice like death.
Chapter 13
Nikki had been afraid of a lot of things in the last few weeks. Things that no human being should ever have to see, let alone be scared of.
Nothing frightened her as badly as the Primus Secor.
Any time she dared to make herself look directly at him her mind cried and begged for mercy until she had to turn away.
""Do I displease you that much, my dear?" Donovan slurred at her.
She kept her eyes down and pulled at her bonds again. Her wrists were starting to chafe against the metal cuffs that Donovan had put on her. They were secured to short chains from high up on the wall that kept her hands up over her head. She had to keep up on her tiptoes to keep her shoulders from being painfully wrenched from their sockets.
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 39