Out of the Darkness: Taken by the Panter #1 (Taken by the Panther, #1)

by V M Black

  Chay shrugged uncomfortably. Though there were security cameras covering every inch of the facility he’d named Black Mesa, he normally kept the ones in the bathrooms turned off, and Annie Liu, the resident fuzzy logic expert, had built in some safeguards that made the cameras go automatically to privacy mode when people were undressed.

  As a high-risk new intake resident, though, Tara Morland required more supervision. So the cameras in her quarters were set to stay on, as well as the alarm on her door. Chay had long since become indifferent to most social niceties and privacy matters when other things took precedence, so he was well used to keeping an eye on any new high-risk guests of whatever age and gender with all the impartiality of a medical professional.

  But Tara had already done something to him, gotten into his head...or something...in a way that no one ever had before.

  He was telling Ford the truth, though. His attention was in no way voyeuristic. Not that he was immune to the smooth contours of her body and her perfect olive skin that gave the merest hint of exotic ancestry. But his attention was far more reflexive than sexual. He almost could not physically look away from her.

  “She’s a panther shifter, you know,” he said, straightening in front of his section of the twenty-foot stretch of counter that served as a single long desk running down the length of the nerve center of the underground complex. Its nickname was, appropriately enough, the spook shop, since that was where Ford, Annie Liu, Liam and Seamus Mansfield, and the others created their various spy-tech toys.

  “Uh, yeah, dude, I know that,” Ford said. “So am I.”

  Chay snorted. “You’re also twenty-six.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Ford asked, rolling his eyes.

  Chay shook his head. Ford was twenty-six, and the oldest natural-born shifters, the oldest girls, were approaching twenty. Chay was thirty-four. Too old for them—far too old. He’d never imagined that he’d lay eyes on a female panther shifter anywhere close to his own age.

  Not unless he made one himself, which was something he would never do.

  Chay grabbed an empty Funyuns bag and tossed it toward the nearest trash can. It unwadded in the air and fell short.

  “Man, you’ve got to get a janitor down in here,” Ford complained, distracted for the moment.

  “Authorized personnel only,” Chay said.

  “So authorize someone. Old Mrs. Olsen isn’t doing much for her keep, and she’d as soon betray her own children as hurt you.”

  Chay didn’t point out that old Mrs. Olsen shouldn’t have to do anything for her keep, not after the number of times her son had saved Chay’s hide. Chay had come back from that last mission. David hadn’t. So keeping Mrs. Olsen in cigarettes, curlers, and house shoes was the least he could do.

  Instead, he said, “She cleans.”

  “That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

  “No, I mean, she cleans everything. She moves things. She...straightens. Notes. The lab tables. Transistors—did you know that I had like sixty set out, grouped as I needed to use them, and she dumped them all into an empty peanut butter jar?”

  “You hadn’t touched that in months,” Ford said. “It was all covered in dust.”

  “So?” Chay demanded. “I like to have things at my fingertips.”

  “Whatever,” Ford said. He shook his head. “You act like being undomesticated will save you from the curse.” He wiggled his fingers in a manner that was probably meant to convey spookiness.

  “What curse?” Chay said. He’d turned back to his monitors and was bringing up all the information on Tara Morland that he could find. Basic background search, plus a few more wormholes into various systems that he’d gained—some through legitimate channels, and some through not-so-legitimate ones.

  “The shifter curse.” Ford crunched an empty Coke can in his hands and lobbed it at the recycling bin, and it landed with a clatter among the others. “You know, the whole mating thing.”

  “You’re very funny,” Chay growled, scrolling through the pages of information.

  Tara Morland’s life was remarkably uninteresting up until that point. No arrests. A few parking tickets. One traffic ticket. No record of military service. Of course, those were sometimes sealed, but with the access he had...and anyhow, at least the VA would have a record of her and whatever benefits she was entitled to. Concealing one’s service for the sake of patriotism was one thing, but people didn’t sign away their benefits.

  Ford was enjoying himself openly. “Come on. You had bets on Harris trumping it. Said it was conditioning, since most shifters are born into shifter families. Self-fulfilling prophecy, you said.”

  “Well, Harris was still more traditional than I thought, I guess,” Chay snapped.

  “I saw the way you looked at that girl,” Ford said. “You’ve never looked at anyone like that.”

  “I’m not dead,” Chay said. “Mostly, we’re rescuing little kids and confused people. PTSD vets. That kind of thing. It’s not often that I end up with my arms full of that.” He nodded back up at the monitor that had the video feed just in time for a full view of her rounded hips and rear as she bent over to put on her pants.

  Ford just snorted.

  Chay opened up her school records. She’d enrolled late, which was why she was only a junior at twenty-four. He shook his head. The seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds put through the SEAL program had problems enough. Too many of them, like Chay, were never able to live a fully normal life again. He’d spent the first twelve years of his life in Detroit, living in a townhouse on a street that was never quiet, full of voices and kids and dogs and teenagers and the constant growl of traffic and punctuated by the louder rumble of trucks, the wail of distant sirens, and even the occasional gunshot.

  But now, even the thought of going into a city made him itchy under his collar. Every time he took a personal role in one of his own rescue operations, he spent an hour beforehand lying still with his eyes closed while he sorted through the contents of his brain to identify the pieces that belonged to the panther and lock them away. He had to or he wouldn’t be able to concentrate at all when he was subjected to the noise and commotion of a hospital or an active army base.

  He hadn’t even been one of the washouts. Some of those went out into the mountains and came back down for supplies once or twice a year. Others lost themselves entirely in Montana or Idaho or Alaska. Chay had heard whispers that some of those who disappeared never turned human again.

  And some of them lost themselves to the beast immediately, and within six months, every human trace was gone.

  As for Tara Morland .... She was twenty-four, not seventeen or even nineteen. And she was a woman, which meant that she’d finished puberty earlier than a man would. He’d told her she’d get out of that room, but he had no idea how he was ever going to keep that promise.

  “Nubile,” Ford said abruptly.

  “What?” Only half-listening to his friend, Chay pulled his attention back to the screen. Tara had made good grades in high school—she was on the honors list published in the local newspaper pretty much every grading period—and should have been an easy admission into William and Mary. He found a feature about her in the Flat Hat News dated nearly three years back. After high school, it said, she’d taken two years off to work in refugee camps in the Sudan, and then she’d traveled for another year.

  Finding herself, he guessed. He well knew what an eighteen-year-old had to be lost from.

  As far as he could tell, nowhere in the last six years had she been anywhere or involved in anything that should have gotten her dosed with a drug reserved for only a small subset of servicemen in two groups in the military—never mind that those groups were entirely restricted to men.

  “She’s nubile,” Ford repeated. “That’s the word. Saw it in a crossword puzzle once.” Ford was rocking back and forth in the chair again. His specialty was surveillance equipment—its development and deployment. Right now, they were between contra
cts that made use of his particular skills, so he’d spent the past week bouncing between video gaming, playing with his newest toys, and generally giving everyone else a hard time.

  “You and your damned crossword puzzles. What’s that supposed to mean, anyway?” Chay asked.

  “Fuckable,” Ford said succinctly. “I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.”

  “Classy,” Chay said.

  Tara had a Facebook profile, which was set so that only her friends could see her posts. He made a couple of attempts on her password, then after the easy guesses were worn out, he deployed a tool that harvested the IDs of her friends and launched a script to try to hack their accounts.

  “It’s a classy word for fuckable,” Ford said. “That’s kind of the point.”

  Chay ignored that comment. Finally, one of the account hacks worked, and Chay logged on and jumped over to Tara’s wall, where he scanned through her posts. And, just his luck, she’d only joined Facebook after starting college—mostly to organize events with her friends, it looked like. Nothing there gave any hint of a place she might have been exposed to the panther shifter factor.

  It should have happened recently, if the experience of any of those in the program was something to go by. The shifter factor didn’t always “take”—and no one was really sure why—but when it did, the first shift usually happened between two weeks and three months later, six months at the outside.

  Maybe she hadn’t been dosed with the military’s shifter factor, or maybe the factor hadn’t been pure. He needed to talk to Torhannin about what was possible. He wasn’t comfortable around the elven doctor, but then again, he wasn’t very comfortable around much of anyone, anymore. But he trusted Dr. Torhannin, and the elf knew far more than any human ever could about shifter factors and induced genetic mutations and any related topic.

  Everyone said it was the elves who’d developed the first shifters for their vampire paymasters. Not that they admitted or even denied their part in it—not to outsiders, at any rate.

  “Chay,” Ford said abruptly, a warning in his voice.

  Chay looked up and followed Ford’s gaze to the monitor that displayed Tara’s room.

  The woman’s face was twisted in an expression of terror, her hands tightening and loosening rhythmically and convulsively around the comb she held.

  Frak. It was more than terror that was twisting her face. She was shifting toward panther and back again to human, a muzzle trying to bulge from her face, her forehead broadening and then shrinking back again. The last time had been less than an hour ago. She was already devolving—and fast.

  Chay felt his own panther rise in his body at the thought, instinctively trying to take control.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, pushing away from the desk.

  “You going there or you want me to?” Ford asked.

  The panther inside snarled at the suggestion, but Chay shoved it down and managed to keep his voice level as he strode to the door. “I’ll go. She already knows me. It will be safer.”

  He jerked the door open and sprinted down the corridor toward the nearest ladder, cursing himself for putting the secure rooms so far from the spook shop. He grabbed the pole that ran down the center of the ladder hole and slid down, flashing past the green and blue levels all the way to purple.

  His feet hit the mat at the bottom of the pole, and he ran until he reached her door, grabbing the lever handle and stopping himself with it even as he wrenched the bolts out of their slots with his weight. He pushed inside—

  And as pain seared down his arm, he jumped back again fast, shutting the door and twisting the handle to lock the dogs in the frame an instant before the weight of the angry panther slammed against it.

  Stupid. He stared at the gray metal of the door, his arm throbbing and his nerves jangling at what he’d almost done. Jumping through the door when he had no idea what was on the other side, when he knew what was on the other side might be something that would want him dead ....

  The panther on the other side of the door screamed in fury, and the solid metal shuddered under her weight as she struck it again.

  Chay always thought a dozen steps ahead. He was a frakking chess master. He could outmaneuver mob bosses and governments. He sure as hell should be able to anticipate the actions of a girl locked in a room who wasn’t even making an attempt to trick him.

  But she’d done something to him, had gotten under his skin so that when she was in trouble, he didn’t think at all. He just reacted. If he kept that up, he’d get himself killed and seal her fate in the process.

  He stepped back from the door deliberately and examined his injured arm, which throbbed in time to his heartbeats. It was pretty bad, he admitted. His shirt was shredded from the elbow down, and in the tears, he could see the layers of skin and the underlying fat and muscle flayed open like a cross-section of the human body. His own hand was slick with his dark blood.

  “Beane?” Ford’s normally cavalier voice was sharp with concern.

  “I’m fine,” Chay said.

  “You don’t look fine. There’s a freaking puddle of blood in the middle of the hall there. And you’re tracking your stupid shoes through it,” he added as Chay stepped backwards. “I’ll send Torrhanin—”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” Chay said. His body was already trying to heal around the fragments of cloth that had been forced into the long, jagged wound.

  “If you’ve got bits in there, it’ll be surgery for you, you know,” Ford warned.

  “I can deal with them.” Setting his jaw, he pulled out the shreds of his shirt, then watched as the muscle and then the skin finished knitting closed again. “See?” Chay added, holding his right arm up to display it to the nearest black button of a camera.

  “You’re the one who’s risking sepsis, not me,” Ford grumbled. “Be more careful in there. I didn’t have any idea that your brilliant plan was to charge in like a bloody werewolf.”

  Chay snorted, but he didn’t disagree with that assessment. “Sorry. It got to my head.”

  “Might as well have screamed ‘Leroy Jenkins’ before jumping in,” Ford added tartly, throwing in another of his gaming references.

  “Fine, sure,” Chay said. “Hang it up, okay? I’ve learned my lesson, but I’ve got to go in there, all right? Use the electric locks to shut the door behind me.”

  “Be careful, idiot.”

  “Right. Go away,” Chay ordered.

  The speakers fell silent, and Chay turned his left wrist to see the inch-and-a-half-wide screen he had strapped there, on a stretchy band of Agosti’s design that accommodated shifting—his own smart watch, but it was really far more, acting as a terminal that accessed the system that ran Black Mesa from the vent fans and sump pumps to his testing framework to his dedicated hacking server farm. Most of his trusted team carried something like it, but only his had complete access to everything, and it was keyed to respond only to his voice.

  “Cortana, two-way audio, Violet 2-63-A,” he ordered, reading the room number off the purple letters spray painted on the door. He’d chosen the name for his voice-recognition interface years before Microsoft had had the same inspiration.

  The snarling of the panther grew suddenly louder as they were also piped out of the tiny speakers on the screen at his wrist. Chay winced and turned it down.

  “Cortana, visual, same room,” he said. The display on his wrist flashed over to an interior view of the bedroom, and Chay shook his head. The mattress, which was encased in a ballistics cloth cover, was askew and unharmed, and everything that was bolted to the walls was still intact. But the pillows had been disemboweled, coating the room in a fine layer of down, and the sheets and her clothes were in tatters.

  Still growling, the panther paced in angry circles around the room, kicking up flurries of feathers with every stride that came wafting slowly down again behind her. The muscles bunched and slid under her sleek fur. She was a thing of perfect beauty and perfected danger. She was what shifters
had been first created to be—a weapon of flesh and bone.

  And she was losing herself.

  “Tara,” he said softly, knowing that his voice would be sent into the room on the other side of the door. “Tara, it’s me. I’m fine. You didn’t hurt me.” It was a lie, but it was a small one.

  A twitch of the panther’s ear was the only indication that she had heard him.

  “I know you’re angry,” he continued. “And I know you’re frightened. But you need to shift back now. I know you’re in there, and I know you can hear me and understand me. It’s time to come back. I’m coming in, okay?”

  At that, the panther’s head whipped around, and she let out a yowl.

  Chay released a small, tense breath. That was the most positive sign he’d gotten from the creature yet that Tara was still rational somewhere inside its skull. “You’re not going to hurt me,” he promised. “I’ll be in panther form, too. I’m going to stop talking to you now so I can shift, okay? Then you’re going to shift back again, and so will I, and we’re going to talk together then. And I’d really appreciate it if you could manage to try not to kill me, okay?”

  He’d already put action to his words, toeing off his Vans and loosening his belt and fly. He stripped quickly, before Tara could get herself worked up again, and wearing only his smart watch, he let go of the reflexive, iron control he always held on his own mind.

  And the panther rose up inside him.

  Chapter Eight

  Door. The word pushed through the panther’s brain. It wasn’t an impression of a word or a feeling of a thing, but an actual English word that came as she stared at the shape in the wall. Door. The door and...the man.

  Tara, yes, she was Tara, and she was waiting for the man to come through the door.

  To help her.

  Her tail lashed, and the panther inside her head fought back, understanding with an animal’s instinct that what was meant was that she’d be tamed, caged, contained.

  But Tara clung to every thought that gave her purchase in the panther’s head, behind the panther’s eyes. She spun out new thoughts as hard and as fast as she could, as if each were a lifeline that held her mind together and apart.