While the other werebears were nodding their heads in agreement, Arcan said, "Which begs the question of why Donovan didn't just use Nikki to open that portal when he had the chance."
"I don't understand that either," Max agreed, "but that's a worry for another time. We have enough to concern ourselves with now."
"Oh, we most certainly do." Arcan turned his back on Max, and started off in what Nikki assumed was a random direction.
Her eyes followed the way his ass flexed and damn it but she could not keep her mind on anything but the naked male flesh around her.
Deep breath girl, she told herself. You're on an alien world about to try and kill a nightmare. You can work out your horny some other time.
Max's hand on her arm made her jump. "I didn't want to pull you into this."
She smiled up at him, leaning up on her tip toes to kiss his cheek. "Thanks but I'm a big girl."
"I know you can handle yourself. That's not what I meant."
Her heart did a little flutter. "You're sweet."
Arcan snuffed loudly. "Sweet will get you killed. Come on. Let's go find the Primus Secor."
***
No sun. No stars. No way of telling time. It seemed like they had been walking forever. Maybe it had been fifteen minutes, maybe it had been two hours. It probably hadn't really been forever but it felt that way to Nikki.
The ground here was a thin layer of loose, dry dirt that barely covered jagged and sharp rocks underneath. Nikki lost track of how many times she had stepped down only to pull her foot back quickly before it could get slashed on the edge of some huge stone. The few trees they passed were bony and scraggly things that reached out to claw at their faces. Dry grass crunched underfoot, threatening to cut her nearly as easily as the rocks did. It was a barren, frightening place. The backdrop to some child's nightmare.
Which was fitting because somewhere out here was the main character of those nightmares.
Somewhere, meaning some place other than any place they had already looked.
"I don't understand," she said in exasperation. "Where is he?"
"He should have been here by now," Forl said.
"Not like him at all," one of the others agreed.
"Like you would know," Arcan snapped.
"Would," the werebear insisted. "Came up against the Primus Secor once. Once was enough."
"We've all had our run-ins with him," Max whispered. "There's no Ursallin who hasn't been affected by his evil."
"So where is he now?" Arcan said, his voice getting louder. "Is he hiding from us? If he has no fear of the Ursallin, then where is he!"
Nikki nearly walked into the Ursallin in front of her when he stopped abruptly.
Suddenly, everyone was looking at everyone else.
"What?" Nikki asked. "What did I miss?"
With exaggerated slowness, each of the Ursallin turned to face each other, hands held out in defensive posture, eyes tracking everyone at once. They backed up until they were in a perfect circle ten or more feet away from their nearest friend.
Nikki was on the outside looking in. She didn't like this at all. They were acting like one of them was the enemy…
Oh.
"Max?" she asked, a world's worth of questions in that one word.
"Just stay there Nikki," he answered her without taking his eyes off the others. She noticed that he didn't bother keeping his voice down anymore.
"No," Arcan countered. "Run, Nikki. Get as far away from all of us as you can. As soon as you're away, open a portal and leave."
Max glared at him, teeth bared, but then he swallowed and nodded curtly. "He's right Nikki. You'll be safer away from us."
"The Hell I will," she said, crossing and uncrossing her arms, not sure what to do with her hands. "I'm not leaving here just to get picked off by Donovan later."
"You won't need to," Forl told her, his hard Black face tight with concentration. "He could pick you off right here. One of us is him."
Hearing that put into words made it worse for Nikki. She had figured out what they were doing, why they were squaring off on each other, but until Forl had actually said it she had been able to believe it was a mistake. Just everyone's edginess getting the better of them.
Now the fact hung in the air like a poison viper, ready to strike them down one at a time.
Her included.
"We need to find out," one of the other werebears, the White ones, asked, "which of us is the Primus Secor."
"Brilliant, Zonsur," Arcan scoffed. "Just how do you propose we do that? Maybe we can kill each other one at a time? The last one standing is Donovan?"
Zonsur lowered his head, his pale face dark with a scowl. He took his eyes away from the circle as he did.
Which was when the Primus Secor struck.
A black swirl of slimy, oily flesh lashed out around them, tendrils and spiky appendages coiling around the circle until Nikki couldn't see if any of the men were still standing. Where had it all come from? She screamed and went to help them and then stopped herself because she was just her and what possible help could she be?
That thought paralyzed her and held her feet still on the stony ground long enough that the black nightmare vortex collapsed back into itself with lightning speed and then there were four Ursallin standing, where there had been five before.
Zonsur lay dead on the ground, torn apart like he'd been put through a meat grinder. His arms were severed and his legs shredded into stringers of flesh and the only way she knew it was even him was because no one else standing in the circle was.
"Oh, my God," she breathed.
Max. Max was still alive. That allowed her heart to beat again and her lungs to draw breath. If he had been killed, she didn't know what she would do.
"Nikki," Arcan said sharply, drawing her attention to him. "Don't look. Don't look at him. He's dead. We can't help him. You have to run, now."
"That's pretty harsh, Arcan," Forl growled. "Zondar was our friend, if you remember."
"We'll lose a lot more of our friends before this is over," Arcan said levelly. "There's no hope for it. This is the Primus Secor we're talking about, and this is why I didn't want us coming here after him. We'll all be dead, soon enough."
"Why don't I just make the portal now?" Nikki asked, her voice shaking. "I can make the gateway and we can all get out of here together."
"That's what he wants," Max told her. Forl shifted his weight and Max's head snapped toward him and for just a moment she was sure that innocent action was going to get Forl killed. She saw Max visibly relax and then he turned his head in her direction. "You have to get away from here first. Make the portal away from here."
"Why doesn't he just take the girl if he wants her so bad?" Forl demanded. "It's not like he couldn't!"
Arcan looked at her, too, his eyes thoughtful. Then he spoke to her in bear-speak and to her surprise, she understood.
I know why he he's keeping his distance, he said to her. You scare him.
Whether she was just guessing at his facial cues or whether she had been around Arcan and Max so much that she had picked up their secret language she wasn't sure but either way she knew what he was saying. She held power the Primus Secor couldn't imagine. She could do things that even she didn't know about, yet. Donovan wasn't attacking her, because he thought there was a possibility she could kill him.
That was her edge.
She had the upper hand.
Wow.
"Donovan, listen to me!" she shouted, taking a step forward before her nerve could falter. She felt gooseflesh stippling her everywhere, making her arms shiver and her nipples tighten. Let them men stare, she decided. She was strong, she was Black, and she was proud.
She was naked and scared is what she was, but she couldn't let that show.
"You want me?" she demanded, raising her voice. "I'm right here. You want me? Huh? Do you?"
She took another step forward.
"Nikki," Max said in a startled voice, "what
are you doing?"
"I'm challenging this coward Donovan to face me. He got me once by surprise, but this time I'm ready for him. He's seen how my powers have grown." Another step forward. "Hell, I brought all of us here. That was me! Can you believe it? I am invincible!"
As she ranted, she actually began to believe what she was saying. She was stronger than she knew. She had access to powers that mere mortal women didn't. She was the baby of a Shift and an Ursallin and as whacked out as that was going to make family reunions from here on out it made her who she was and who she was, every inch of her Black self, was beautiful!
Another step.
This time, Forl backed away from her.
"There!" Arcan cried, and lunged at Forl. Midleap, he transformed from a sleek Black man to a heavy and huge black bear, claws out, teeth bared, his voice an angry animalistic assault on Nikki's ears.
The other Ursallin transformed the same way, and the fight was on. Forl tried to transform, Black flesh turning hairy and muscled and his head lengthening into a bear's snout, but the attack from the others kept him down and kept him from retaliating. It was brutal to watch.
Then Max had her by her waist and was running away with her, away from the circle of friends now turned enemies, away from danger and toward safety.
Held over his shoulder like this, her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs spread around his bare waist, she could see behind them. She saw the way the tide turned and now Forl was attacking Arcan and the other. It was a fight that had already left all three of them bloody.
Nikki watched it in the weird black light of this Jakal world and let Max carry her away.
It wasn't until the other werebears were almost out of sight that it hit her. Forl hadn't morphed into the nightmare creature, the formless thing that was everything and nothing all at once. He hadn't ever once become the Primus Secor.
He had become his bear self. It was getting him killed, and he still hadn't tried to become something worse.
Which meant, he couldn't become anything else. Because he was an Ursallin.
Forl wasn't the Primus Secor.
One of the others was.
Oh. Damn.
Chapter 16
"We have to go back," she told Max.
"What?" he huffed, stumbling to a stop, twirling her around to land softly on her feet in front of him. Traveling across this ground didn't seem to bother him at all. "You must be joking. I'm not going back to fight with Donovan until I know you're safe. When we're far enough away I'll make the portal for you so that I know you'll end up in Gallandrian and not some other random place."
"Max, you don't understand. That isn't what's going on back there."
"What?"
She wrung her hands together, pacing a few steps left and then right and wishing she could just bear-speak to him so he could understand quicker. She could read the language now, apparently, but she was pretty sure she couldn't speak it yet and this wasn't the time to find out. "They are not fighting the Primus Seedcoat back there," she grated out, knowing she was getting the name wrong and not caring. "Forl isn't the bad guy. He's not Donovan. I mean, Donovan didn't take Forl's shape. For all I know he didn't take anyone's shape and we're just all fighting each other!"
When she paused for a breath he caught her and stopped her from pacing. His hands held her arms gently, tiny feelers of electricity humming at his touch, and she wished they were anywhere right now where they could just hold each other and be in love. There was no time for that here.
"Nikki, what are you talking about? You saw what happened back there."
"Yes," she told him, "I did. But did you? Did you see how Forl was fighting? No, of course not. You were too busy running away with me." She broke away from his hold, suddenly angry. It had been building up for a while now, this anger, maybe in response to the crazy things going on around her that she had no control over.
Now, she knew she had the power to take control.
She was a force to be reckoned with.
Then why was she so scared?
Max was looking at her strangely. She saw the moment when understanding dawned in his eyes. In this dim light it looked like ghost flames had lit up behind his pupils.
"We need to go," he said, and it occurred to Nikki exactly how often she'd been hearing that exact phrase recently. "We need to go right now."
He twisted his torso and brought his arm up and around all in one movement, poetry in motion, a living sculpture meant to represent the perfection of Man. His arm morphed as it moved into a heavy, shaggy bear's forearm and paw and claws, and the air began to rend in front of him in blinding slashes of light.
Which was when the entire world reared up from under their feet.
Darkness, whole and complete and impenetrable, lifted up from the world of Jakal. It was as if everything around them was all one being, one creature, spread out and over and through all that there was. It rose like a tidal wave of thick sludge and as it came it threw Max and her both off their feet, to the ground that was running and oozing and pouring into the creature forming above them.
The light of Max's portal winked out with an audible snap, and was gone.
Their escape was gone.
And somehow, the Primus Secor was drawing on the essence of the world itself to build himself, to add to his body, to make himself…more.
Max had a hold of her then, by her hand, and the two of them ran. This was a good plan, Nikki decided. Running away. Great plan. Fantastic plan.
Streamers of black ick wrapped themselves around her feet and Max's legs and then she was pitching forward and throwing out her hands to stop herself only to have those hands sink into the body of the Primus Secor laid out around her.
Dumb plan. Stupid, idiotic, dumb plan.
Max was hauled upward, into the air above Nikki, held tightly by his feet and dangling from what looked like a cross between a shark's mouth and the writhing body of an anaconda sprouting up from the world itself. Laughter echoed all around them. It was a hissing, spitting sound that stabbed into Nikki's brain with sharp and slicing pain.
"Not yet, Maximillian." Donovan's voice vibrated at them through the air. Nikki tried to cover her ears to dampen the volume of it but her hands were still held fast in the black ick. "I can't have you slipping away again and leaving me here. No. That would not do at all."
He began swinging Max back and forth, back and forth, and Nikki saw the way the big Ursallin struggled to free himself, all for nothing.
"Hello again, Miss Bryant." Donovan's cheerful voice boomed from close by as a mouth formed out of nothingness in the belly of this beast, dripping stringers of gore. It was nearly the voice of her old boss again. The old boss who had run a law firm and hired Nikki not because she was some fabled offspring of two ancient races, but because she was just a simple up and coming attorney. That was back before she had known he was bent on wiping out Max and his people.
If she'd known that, she would have turned down his job offer and gone to flip burgers or something.
"Can't have you leaving me in some other world again, either, Miss Bryant," Donovan thrummed angrily as he continued to shake Max, shaking him violently for a few seconds. Max's arms and head and even his limp cock flung wildly, helplessly about, and when the massive Shift stopped his playful torture, Max hung limp and still.
With a sneer of contempt, Donovan dropped Max on his head into the spreading mass of his body below.
"Of course," Donovan went on, "I have to thank him for dumping me here. Him and that other one. Arcan, wasn't it? I have to thank you, too, Nikki Bryant. If I hadn't been brought here, to Jakal, I never would have become as strong as I am."
He flexed his body and Nikki's mind strained to comprehend the sheer scale of what she was seeing. The mash-up of body parts. The affront to life that was fluid animal parts combined with insect-like protrusions and things that had no words to describe them because they simply couldn't exist.
"I wouldn't be this," h
e said, "if these bastards hadn't brought me to a world of night and left me here. It was this power that I sensed when we first came, Nikki. That was why I left your body. I had to experience it. I had to become one with it. Letting you three escape wasn't part of the plan, of course. The plan was to soak this all in, become the true terror I am, and then devour each of you from the inside. Use you like puppets to open up every hole in space and time that ever existed and conquer not just the Ursallin, but everything!"
He looked down at her now, and Nikki had to turn away from the fright of that misshapen, broken face.
When he shrugged, it was the whole world that hunched up. "Oh well. Plans change."
Nikki knew she should run, but there was nowhere to run to.
She found herself violently twisted around, landing on her back, her hands and feet clenched in squishy feelers and held fast, her knees pulled painfully apart, spreading her, exposing her even more. She screamed with pain, sure he meant to rip her apart like a wishbone at Christmas dinner.
"See, things have a way of working themselves out," his voice droned on. She could feel him moving closer to her, sense whatever part of him was his actual consciousness easing itself toward her. "I have my power, and instead of being stranded I only had to sit and wait for you all to come back to me. Oh, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. You are a prize, aren't you? All that raw power in you, and no idea how to use it. I will so enjoy absorbing you again. And again."
The bulk of his face lowered itself right over her. "And again."
She heard herself scream, loud and hoarse, a sound of purest terror. His skull was full of spikes and knobs and pockets of puss that had torn open and now wept grayish-green liquid. His body was rising up her legs and she knew, she just knew, what came next.
He was going to rape her.
"Smart girl," he mocked her. "Figured it out, have we? I get to use your body until it breaks, and then I get to use it some more to make me a portal. It's too bad you won't live long enough to do it for me yourself, but I promise you I'll make you orgasm a few times after you're dead." He laughed again in that hissing way. "Won't that be nice?"
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 43