by V M Black
“All right,” he said to Torrhanin. “Wake her up.”
Torrhanin nodded and crossed to the IV stand, and with a couple of taps, the occasional whir coming from it stopped. He reached for the girl’s hand, which lay neatly on top of the crisp white sheet, and took it in his own to slide out the IV. She looked so peaceful, lying there, but Chay didn’t miss the red line of blood under her fingernails.
The elven doctor turned her arm to expose her elbow and produced a syringe and bottle from the black bag he carried, measuring out the proper sedation antagonist and injecting it straight into her vein.
It had been bad, the reports had said. Arterial spray splattering the front desks. Six kids wounded—one in critical condition—and the professor dead on the scene. Government psychologists were working overtime trying to convince the kids they’d all suffered from mass hysteria, coaching them with stories of confusion and the strangeness of the attack, of the panther that had slipped inside somehow, unseen, until it burst out behind Tara Morland and killed her and their professor.
No matter how many hallucinogens they fed those kids, Chay doubted that many of them would buy the story. The media had, though, and that was what Homeland Security really cared about. A couple hundred kids who believed in shifters was one thing. The nation believing—that was quite something else.
Another panther, Chay thought as the young woman’s eyes began to flutter and Torrhanin worked quickly to remove her feeding tube and catheter. That was another big clue that she wasn’t some kind of late-shifting genetic sport. As far as he knew, panthers like him were exclusively the product of government research—and, of course, the natural-born shifter children of the first generation.
But Tara wasn’t in the registry that he kept, and though there was always a chance that her mother hadn’t been entirely honest about the source of her pregnancy, one look at her age made that possibility even more remote. The panther project had begun little more than twenty years ago, and the oldest natural-born panther shifter that he knew about had just turned eighteen.
“Who did this to you, bae girl?” Chay whispered, so softly that the Feds just inside the door couldn’t hear.
Her eyelids opened slowly to reveal bright green eyes whose gaze went straight through him. And at that moment, he knew he’d do anything in his power to save her.
Anything at all.
Chapter Three
The face swam in Tara’s vision, blurred and uncertain. It had dark skin and broad, angular features, like it had been cut from obsidian. The lips moved, and a moment later, the words reached her ears.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
Those words were ridiculous somehow, an echo of something she’d heard before, but in that confused moment, they were the only thing she had to cling to. There had been a dream, a terrible dream of changes and blood, and she grabbed onto the hand that he extended as something real and tangible in the swirl of things that couldn’t possibly have happened, things she couldn’t possibly have done.
She was pulled upright, and little booties were pushed onto her feet and a soft robe thrown around her shoulders.
“Put it on.”
She listened to that voice and obeyed, pushing her clumsy arms through the sleeves. She looked down and saw a kind of smock in an institutional sort of blue. A hospital gown, she realized, recognizing it from TV. She was wearing a hospital gown. Did that mean she was sick? She’d certainly felt sick, standing in the lecture hall, trying to answer Dr. Butros’ questions. Or maybe she was crazy, because all the things her brain told her had happened, they’d all been impossible.
She looked at the face, all planes and dark, calm eyes. There were others in the room, too, but his face was the one she trusted. “Am I crazy?” she asked.
His hand tightened around her shoulders as he helped her slide down to her feet. “No, bae girl, you’re not crazy. We’re getting you out of here, and everything will be okay.”
Tara nodded and leaned into his strength with the sense that finally, there was someone who had answers. Someone who could help her.
“Let’s go now,” he said.
She nodded again.
Her legs shook under her, but there were people on each side, propping her up.
“Are you sure she should be walking around like that?” a new voice asked. “Chemical restraints are standard in such situations.”
“We know what’s standard.” The man who had been speaking to her cut the woman off. “We have our own protocols, and the director will expect that you follow them.”
“Yes, sir,” the other voice said quickly.
She had an impression of white halls and florescent tube lights and a wide lobby with a broad glass front, and then Tara was outside, half-hustled into the back of a white van. Inside were seats and lights and more people, and Tara was still blinking at them when the voice that she trusted said, “Sorry, bae girl, but they’re right. Just one more quick nap, and when you wake up, it will all be over.”
He was nodding to another man, and Tara had just managed to understand his words through the haze of drugs that still lay on her brain when she saw the needle in his hands.
“No!” she said, trying to lunge away, but there were so many of them, their hands all over her, and even as her bones and muscles began to twist under their grip, she felt the bite of the needle in her upper arm, and everything went dark again.
***
Chay caught Tara’s body as she went limp and eased her down onto the bench next to him, pillowing her head in his lap.
“How’d it go?” Annie Liu’s cheerful voice piped up from the driver’s seat.
Chay used fox shifters like Annie as his drivers on delicate missions like this one. Short of a vampire or someone using elven technology, there were few creatures as charming. Annie could talk her way past a police barricade—and had. And when things went wrong, as they occasionally did, there were few who had a fox shifter’s reflexes.
“Smooth as silk,” Agosti said, patting his sunglasses where they rested in his shirt pocket. Though he looked every one of his fifty years, he was a bear shifter like Mansfield, and his barrel chest was sheer muscle under his pelt of salt-and-pepper hair.
Annie shifted the van into gear. “Not expecting a hot pursuit?” She almost sounded disappointed.
“No,” Chay said firmly.
Dr. Torrhanin capped the used needle carefully and slipped it back into his old-fashioned black doctor’s bag. As the van lurched into motion, he pulled out a pen light, opened the girl’s eyelids, and checked her pupils.
“Good,” the doctor said briskly, dropping the light back into the bag before he slipped out of his lab coat and stuffed it into the straps of the case.
“Good?” Chay echoed.
“There is every sign that I used right dosage of the sedative cocktail,” Torrhanin explained. “These things are always chancy with new shifters. You never know whether to dose for the human or the animal, and a miscalculation....”
He tilted his head, the elven equivalent of a shrug. Torrhanin had lived long enough outside of elven society that he had lost the archaic speech markers and quirky constructions that often marked elven English, but nonverbal habits were more engrained.
He continued, “I have a bag valve mask in my bag for a reason, as well as adrenaline and more antagonist. But it won’t be necessary. She’s sedated but not truly unconscious, though she shouldn’t remember anything.”
“The less the better,” Chay said, looking down at her slack-limbed body. The sense of protectiveness that stirred deep in his gut was familiar to him, repeated every time he took in another of his strays. But this time, the sense had a sharper edge, almost hungry, reaching deep down into his panther self in ways he didn’t care to examine.
“Was it her first shift?” Torrhanin asked. “Are you certain?” The doctor took a seat on the bench opposite Chay and the girl, wedging himself between the burly form of Liam Mansfield and the grizzled Agos
ti.
“It had all the markers,” Chay said. “We won’t know for sure until she wakes up, though.”
“Then it might be kinder if she didn’t,” the elf said flatly.
At those words, Chay saw a flash of a vision—his panther-claws reaching out and ripping the doctor’s body from throat to belly. Mercilessly, he beat it back, telling himself that Torrhanin was saying only what he believed was best. Elves had a peculiar sense of ethics at the best of times, which became even more peculiar as they aged. Torrhanin was old enough that his jet-back hairline was receding slightly and deep grooves were worn on either side of his mouth. With all the genetic tinkering that the elves did, Chay didn’t even care to speculate how old that made him. Older than a lot of vampires, that was for sure, and vampires didn’t exactly have the most stable moral compasses, themselves.
“We have to give her a chance,” Chay said aloud.
Torrhanin frowned down at her. “She’s already killed one man. And the boy in ICU is not likely to make it, either.”
Chay understood his point of view—to him, it was simple mathematics. Twice she’d killed, and it was a distant hope to suppose that she might be able to control the urge to kill again, given her age.
Going into the operation, Chay had assumed that Tara would be another kid to rescue, an eighteen-year-old college freshman or, more likely, an underage high school graduate. Twenty-somethings just didn’t shift for the first time. Not if they were natural-born.
Born shifters could begin shifting from just a few months old to the end of puberty. Even for those born with the animal in their veins, the later the shift, the more dangerous the balance between man and beast, and the more likely it was that the beast would win. When the beast won, people died, and there was often no recourse but to imprison the shifter for life—or, more mercifully, put him or her down.
Maybe Tara wouldn’t mean to kill anyone else—at least not as her human self—but by saving her, Chay might be damning those who would become her victims.
How old was this woman? Twenty-two? Twenty-five? She was well beyond any trace of puberty, and the rational part of him wouldn’t give a nickel for her chances of ever mastering the animal that was even now fighting within her.
But the rest of him rebelled from the thought that she might be doomed—the rest of his mind and also something much more visceral, instinctual, that wanted to scream at the very thought of her losing her fight.
He would save her. He was saving her. Damn reason and damn statistics and damn everything, he wouldn’t let this one go.
Chay realized that he was stroking her hair, over and over, as if that could soothe the monster inside her. He forced his hands to still.
“I know, Torrhanin,” was all he said aloud.
The elf nodded and settled back against the back wall of the swaying van. He had his race’s deep respect for protocol and precedence, and Chay was Torrhanin’s recognized superior. He would not go against the were-panther’s orders.
“Is it even possible that she’s a natural?” Chay asked him, shifting the conversation. An expert in the field with decades of experience, Torrhanin knew better than practically anyone the limits of shifting. “That she’s second-gen?”
Torrhanin shook his head. “Many things are possible, but there are few records that attest to a first shift so long after the end of puberty. It stretches belief.”
“Is there a way to find out?” Chay prompted.
“I will need a blood sample.” The doctor looked at him expectantly.
Chay nodded. “Do it, then.”
The elf dropped to his knees beside the limp woman and opened his black case. Chay’s stomach lurched at the thought of him sticking her with another needle, and his protective instincts reared up again. He wasn’t used to rescuing other panthers. Especially not adult females. With a careful breath, he suppressed the feeling and tore his eyes away from Torrhanin’s preparations.
Instead, Chay leaned forward so that he could see between the passenger’s and driver’s seats and out the front windshield. The van was just passing through the gates of the air force base unchallenged. He allowed himself a smug smile.
Someone, somewhere would soon realize that the credentials of Chay’s team were all forged. But now that Chay was no longer on government property, he would be well positioned to deal with the outfall. It would take time for the news to ripple up the chain of command and back down again—but not much, not for this.
As if summoned by that thought, the phone in his pocket began to ring with a patriotic Sousa march. Annie’s giggle floated back from the front seat, and even Chay grinned as he flipped the phone face up to reveal the director’s name that he’d just used in vain—the director who happened to be, not incidentally, a retired full-bird colonel.
Damn, but he liked jerking the chains of those who believed that they were his keepers.
“That was fast,” he said, leaning back against the side wall of the van.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Beane?” Col. Wilkins snapped, using the handle that Chay had invented for himself back in childhood.
“What do you think?” Chay returned. “I told you I wanted her.”
“And I told you that you absolutely could not have her,” the colonel said, her voice rising to a pitch that Chay had not often heard from the usually unflappable Director of Internal Operations—the slightly sinister, slightly bland-sounding name of the department that dealt with all nonhuman aethereal affairs on U.S. soil.
“That’s not the deal,” he returned, his voice flat. “I help when you call, and every shifter who gets into trouble belongs to me. Every shifter. Not just the ones you feel like sharing.”
“You forged documents,” she said. “Faked clearances. You committed at least a dozen federal crimes, and some of them could have you locked up for the rest of your natural life.”
“Nothing new about that,” he returned. “But the interesting thing is that usually I’m committing the crimes on behalf of your little organization. If you’re going to charge me with this, I might not be able to stop you, but I can certainly make sure I get charged for every crime I’ve committed. Don’t count on being able to get the judge to seal it.”
“I’ll haul you in front of a court martial,” she ground out.
“No, you won’t. You lost that right when I retired after my ten years—with full honors and half-pay,” he said. “And if you think you’ll be able to pull me up on war crime charges...well, good luck to you on that one. I’m sure the media would just love to hear my story because the only wars I’ve fought have been yours.”
Despite Wilkins’ fury, Chay knew that there was no substance behind her threats. There was just too much too lose—on both sides. Chay was well-known in certain very private, very elite government circles as a traitorous patriot or a patriotic traitor, depending on whom you talked to, but however he was regarded, the team he’d constructed over the past six years had become a critical and nonreplicable component of the federal government’s intelligence community. For his part, Chay regarded the government of his country with the same suspicion that it regarded him—as a dangerous, barely controlled force that was also both extremely useful and better than any of the alternatives.
Chay knew exactly how far he could push the government—and the government had damned well better learn how far it could push him.
“One of these days, Beane,” Wilkins said, the threat bare in her voice.
“Let me know when you no longer need a shifter liaison,” Chay retorted. “Let me know when you decide to solve the aether problem with guns and bombs. Because the day that happens, I’m burrowing so deep you’ll never see me again, and this country will be thrown into a war the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
“There are some who want that day to come now,” Wilkins said. “When you pull stunts like this, it only encourages those factions.”
Chay snorted. “Those factions only exist because they’re
impotent. Mount a credible threat, and the vampires will have their brains scrambled before breakfast, and you know it. You’re stuck with the aethers, Colonel, and you’re stuck with me. Keep your side of the bargain, and I won’t have to play these tricks. Break your side, and I’ll get what I want, anyway.”
“The balance of power will shift,” Wilkins warned.
“It always does,” said Chay. And somehow, the shifters never ended up on the top of the heap. “Goodbye, Colonel.”
“Goodbye, Beane,” the colonel said, suddenly sounding weary. “And watch out for that girl. I’ve seen the cellphone videos. You don’t want her hurting anyone else.”
Chay swallowed a laugh. He hadn’t bothered with the videos, but he well knew what they’d show. He’d seen it himself, many times—he’d lived it, as a lab-created biological weapon. The violence and power that made the generals and admirals nod in approval was only horrifying to them when it was the wrong people being torn limb from limb. But the harsh fact was that the panther didn’t care.
“I take care of my own,” Chay promised. He tapped the phone to break the connection.
But looking down at the limp woman in his lap as he wedged the phone back into his pocket, he could only hope she wasn’t beyond the point that the only help that he could render was a bullet in her brain.
Chapter Four
Tara opened her eyes, rolled sideways, and threw up.
“Sorry about that,” said a voice. But it didn’t sound sorry at all.
She blinked and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and as her vision cleared, she realized that someone was holding a bucket at the side of the bed to catch her vomit. She jerked her eyes away from its contents and took the room in. Cement floors. Flat gray walls, bubbling with layers of paint. Narrow bed, dresser, small table, chair.
Prison, a part of her brain supplied. She must be in a prison. Someone had called her a prisoner. She remembered that much from the confusion between the beginning of her history lecture and this.
And there was the man, sitting on the chair and looking at her patiently. He took a plastic cup off the table and offered it to her. Tara took it automatically.