Tiger Bound

by Tressie Lockwood

  He took a shower and changed clothes. Naked in his room, he considered whether he wanted to dress and drive over to Buck’s place, watch TV, or fall into bed and sleep until it was time to get up again. His empty stomach growled. Come to think of it, he hadn’t eaten since that morning. Deja flashed through his mind, and then something else occurred to him. Did she know they were still exclusive, that this time apart didn’t mean their arrangement was over? What if right then, some other man thought he could touch her? He jerked his cell phone from the jeans he’d worn that morning and punched the button that would dial Deja. She took too long to answer, and he snapped, “Where are you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He pressed his lips together and breathed deep through his nose. Dropping his tone down low, he said, “I want to see you.”

  “Oh is that right?” she teased. “What if I’m busy?”

  “I will come and find you.”

  She laughed. “I know you better than you know yourself, Heath Hunter. You’re scared I’m over here with another man. I am not a whore. I don’t jump out of bed with one man and into it with another.”

  “Then why haven’t I seen you all week?”

  “Hm.” She made the noise, but took her time answering. Heath recognized his jealousy for what it was, and he knew he behaved like a child. His eyes itched to see her, and his palms to touch her. Before they were intimate, Deja occupied his thoughts a large part of his free time, but he took it in stride and didn’t stress over it. Being inside her put the feelings he had for her on steroids, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  “Deja.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming over now if you want. Kind of late.”

  “Stay the night?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, I’ll go out and pick something up to eat.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll get it on my way, and Heath?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you too.”

  The line went dead. He stumbled over and sat on his bed, staring at nothing in particular. She loved him? The words tumbled from her lips in the same joking manner she always used with him. She teased nonstop, and he liked that about her, but did she mean what she said?

  After he wasted enough time sitting there thinking about the situation, he hitched his shoulders and stood up. He would judge Deja’s mood when he saw her and leave it at that. Pondering her feelings for him would do no good right now, and his weariness of mind and body made it impossible either way.

  After he lowered a shirt over his head and yanked on a pair of sweats, his front door opened and Deja shouted down the hall. The scent of fried chicken and potato salad hit his nose, and his stomach stirred once again. The only place she could have picked up the food was the diner, which he didn’t mind.

  Her head popped in the doorway to his room. “Hey, hope you’re hungry.” She stepped farther into the room and held up a plastic bag, filled, he assumed, with takeout containers. Something new stirred in him, and it had nothing to do with food. She wore a denim minidress he had seen her in before, which had thin straps that crisscrossed over her bare back. The dress reached down just past the tops of her thighs, making her legs look longer, and a zipper down the front would give him easy access to her breasts.

  He approached her. “I could eat.”

  Her eyebrow slid toward her hairline, but she offered no snarky reply. He put his hand in hers, and they walked together to the living room like two high school kids on their first date. Heath took the bag from her in front of the couch and turned her to face him. He drew her into his embrace and then slanted his mouth over hers. Just as he remembered, she tasted incredible, and the curve of her body pressed close hardened his cock a little bit more. Heath left her sweet mouth and planted kisses on her shoulder. Because he could, he ran a hand over her ass and lifted her dress. She stopped him when he would have ventured into her panties.

  “Heath, we have to eat,” she chastised him.

  “I intended to.”

  She smacked his hand and sat down to bring the food out of the bag. Heath had no choice but to join her. Soon enough, he would get what he’d been reliving in his mind all week.

  “You still haven’t looked in that?” she asked, breaking his train of thought.

  “What?” She indicated the box.

  Heath took the offered container, opened it, and ate a good portion of his food before he answered. “No time like the present, I guess.”

  Leave it to Deja to get him moving when he put things off. He finished his food and tossed the trash into the plastic bag. Then he washed his hands. The old metal box weighed more than he thought when he had pulled it free from its hiding place. He assumed his dad had stashed old porn magazines in it given he didn’t bother dating after Heath’s mother passed. He hoped it also contained information on his medicine. As a last resort, he would see a doctor and give him or her a couple of pills to examine so they could match the prescription or offer something better.

  Heath examined the lock and frowned. He needed a key he didn’t have, and after packing away all of his dad’s things, he was pretty sure he hadn’t come across any. “I got you,” Deja announced, and disappeared from the room. When she returned, she held a hammer. “Want me to do it?”

  He chuckled. “I think I have it. Thanks.” With a well-placed bang, he broke the lock and twisted it off. Anticipation quickened his breathing as he opened the lid.

  “Is it porn?” Deja asked, her eagerness clear in her tone.

  “Deja.”

  “What? You know you’re thinking the same thing. How freaky would it be if we found out your dad liked, I don’t know, um, grannies in sexy panties?”

  He had to pause before searching the contents at the picture she drew in his mind. “Only you would suggest something like that.”

  She shrugged. “I’m just saying you never know.”

  When he opened the lid, he discovered no magazines had been squirreled away inside. A stack of papers, bound together with string, lay on top. Under those, a couple of journals, and at the bottom, an envelope addressed to him. Heath pulled it out and stared at it. Deja slipped off the couch where she’d been sitting and curled beside him on the floor. She looped her arm through his and waited in silence. She always knew when he needed her the most.

  From the dullness of the paper and dog-eared edges, he concluded the envelope wasn’t new, but flipping it over, he found it unsealed. He wondered if that meant his dad never finished whatever he wrote inside or intended to include it in a will to give to him after his death. Over the years, it was as if his dad never intended to own anything in life, so he neglected to leave a will. A plot of land bought at the cemetery years ago and a small insurance policy paid for the funeral. “When I go, don’t do anything elaborate,” his dad had always told him. Heath declined to talk about it, but promised his dad after he harangued Heath about it enough times. Against the old man’s wishes, he’d purchased a better quality casket than the style already paid for with the plot. That was the least he could do.

  Heath laid the letter aside. “I’ll read that after going through this. I’m hoping he included information on my medicine.” He undid the string on the papers. “You take some, and I’ll take the rest.”

  “Deal.” Deja scanned quickly over the words. He knew her ability to process written information came from being so long on her job. “What kind of work did your dad do?”

  “You know what kind,” he told her, not looking up. “He was an assembly line worker at a car factory. Nothing important. By the time I came along, he’d retired.”

  “Well, this is really weird then because these notes look like a doctor’s.”

  “That might be it, the information about my medicine. The doctor who prescribed it might have given him a copy of the report.” He laid his pages aside and glanced over her shoulder.

  “No, this is your dad’s handwriting. I know because I always thought it was funny how he wrote so much neater than any m
an I’ve seen, and he came in like clockwork every month with a letter to mail. For a couple years, I worked in the back at the post office, so I knew when his letters came in. I mean, there’s not much else around here to entertain us, so on slow days, we made up stories about what people wrote others about. I learned a lot of different people’s handwriting that way.”

  Heath nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. His dad’s notes all referred to one “subject” with a long number as an identification, and page after page including the name of an organization he’d never heard of before.

  “What’s Spiderweb?” Deja asked, echoing his thoughts.

  “I don’t know, and I’m beginning to wonder if I knew my dad as well as I thought.” The stress of thinking that way brought pain to his temples, and he rubbed them, closing his eyes. He willed himself to relax, but a sensation like being struck by lightning shattered his peace, and he winced.

  “Let me get your pills.” Deja jumped up and ran for the bathroom. She returned with a glass of water and two pills. He took them from her with his thanks, but he set them on the table along with the glass.

  “I’m going to try to hold out a bit. So far, I haven’t come across anything useful.”

  Together, they scanned each page one by one. Deja pointed to the top of a sheet to a square with writing inside it like someone had stamped it. “What’s this? ‘Original sent eight twenty-four.’”

  “‘No evidence observed. Human,’” Heath continued from another line on the page. “I think that box is noting the date he sent this information to someone—maybe to Spiderweb. This other part I don’t get.”

  Deja shivered. She dipped her head, and he put down the papers and wrapped an arm around her. When she hugged him back and nuzzled into his chest, he lifted her chin to look into her eyes. The fear he saw there stirred inside him as well, but so far, he had nothing concrete to blame the sensation on.

  “Some of the words in there are medical terms, complicated medical terms. I don’t know about you, but seriously, I would never in a million years believe your dad would know them to toss all around his notes. He always encouraged you to read, but I never saw him pick up a book, I mean nothing complex.”

  “Almost as if he wanted us to believe he was no more than the average Joe,” Heath agreed.

  She clutched his hands, and he both felt and saw the tremor in them. Deja wasn’t shaken easily. Nothing seemed to faze her, especially when it came to getting on his ass about whatever didn’t please her. What did get to her was anything that affected him negatively. This mystery had the potential of displacing everything he knew about his dad. He knew she recognized the fact and didn’t like it.

  “I think it’s time for you to read that letter, Heath. It might take care of all the questions and clear up this mess to the point that we’re laughing about getting all nervous.”

  “You might be right.”

  She leaned up from his embrace, and he set the papers aside to pick up the envelope. Inside were several sheets of writing paper, but only the first held his dad’s tight, neat script. Just as he thought, the letter hadn’t been finished. He probably thought he had plenty of time to get everything down before the accident took his life.

  Heath swallowed and began to read.

  “Dear Heath,

  Before I get into the secrets I’ve kept from you all the years of your life, I have to say this first. Do not take another pill. No matter how bad the pain gets, ride it out, son, because if I am gone and you’re reading this letter, you will need to be all you were born to be—”

  “What the flippin’ hell?” Deja interjected.

  Heath put the letter down and stood up. He paced the living room floor, running fingers through his hair over and over again. Glancing at the pills still sitting on the table, he wondered what his dad had been feeding him all these years and why he needed to stop now.

  “The words in this sentence are all underlined and traced over several times,” Deja told him. She repeated the words, and their meaning sank into his understanding like bombs, detonating on impact. Bile rose in his throat, and his head spun. Why? What did it mean, and why did his father give him the pills in the first place if they did something to him other than quell his pain?

  After he calmed down a bit, he sat and retrieved the letter from Deja to continue reading. “Son, I first want to tell you I love you, more than I have a right to—just as I loved your mother. They expected me to do my job and nothing else, but how can I be a human being without love? How can I live so many years with another person and not come to care? It’s impossible, and I wonder how they expect compliance, knowing that’s the case. I take that back. I don’t wonder. I know. They expect compliance because they enforce it, and that is why I am writing this letter. So you know what you’re dealing with and so you won’t be ignorant when they come.”

  “When who comes?” Deja croaked. While he read, she had taken hold of his arm, and the further along the mystery entwined, the deeper her nails sank into his flesh. Heath pulled her hand away and set it in his lap. She clung to his side while he puzzled over what this all meant.

  “I think he means Spiderweb. The next paragraph explains it. ‘There is a powerful organization that is in the business of creating superhumans. I say superhumans, but what I mean is they are manufacturing shape-shifters, men and women who can morph into animals. The chosen favorite is the tiger—a rare white tiger. I worked for this organization as a geneticist, and on the day I helped your mother escape from the facility over thirty-five years ago, she was pregnant with another man’s baby. I did so on the order of my superiors.’”

  “Geneticist,” Deja shrieked.

  Heath paused for a moment and moved to the fireplace mantel to study the pictures he had placed there. He would get back to the letter when he collected his thoughts because he needed to know everything. The man he knew as his dad turned out to be a liar, and if he understood the words correctly, Tate Hunter was not his real father.

  Tate smiled from the picture with an arm slung about Heath’s mother. Heath had her blond hair and blue eyes. He looked nothing like Tate, but then that wasn’t impossible to happen. Plenty of kids took on the characteristics of one parent and not the other. Maybe this was some elaborate joke his dad planned and he intended to spring it on Heath then tell him it was all make believe after he got Heath worked up.

  “But Dad wasn’t the joking kind,” he murmured.

  “Huh?”

  He ran a hand over his aching eyes. His head still hurt, and he almost spun around to go to the table and scoop up the pills, medicine formulated to do what? “Nothing. I guess I should call him Tate since he wasn’t my father.”

  “Oh, Heath, baby.” Deja came over to him and encircled his waist from behind with her arms. Her soft breasts pressed into his back, and if he weren’t so thrown with the news, he could enjoy the sensation. She kissed the valley between his shoulder blades, and he derived some comfort from that, but not much. “He’s still your dad because he raised you and loved you. He said that at the beginning of the letter, and I believe him. No man could care for you the way he did if it was only a job. I don’t understand everything he talked about, but there must be a reason it happened. I mean, does he give more information?”

  Heath skimmed the rest of the letter, which amounted to little more than a paragraph. Even the last sentence hadn’t been completed, as if someone interrupted him while he wrote. Heath recalled where he found the box and realized why it looked so worn. Tate had it no doubt for thirty-five years, as long as he’d been alive.

  “This must be hard to comprehend, but I have to be blunt to be sure I get it all down. First, Spiderweb is powerful and dangerous. They will kill to keep their secrets and kill to keep their people in line. I have told them that you are human with no traces of the tiger in you. I’ve sent them blood samples every month along with my reports.”

  “He took your blood?” Deja interrupted.

  “No.” Heat
h’s mouth went dry. His vision blurred, but it wasn’t because he wept or because he would faint. He didn’t want to see the words that sealed his fate, that told him the hope he felt when he first held Deja in his arms and kissed her sweet lips was about to be taken away from him by a dead man that he never knew. He steeled himself and blinked a few times. The words swam before his eyes, and he took a few more moments to calm his mind using the techniques Tate had taught him. I can never think of him as my dad again. He read the last few words in a monotone. “‘You are not human, Heath. I lied to Spiderweb. I took your blood to be sure, and I perfected a formula I had been developing for many years at the corporation to suppress what you are. You are a shape-shifter, and without the pills, you will change. The facility you were conceived in has been destroyed, but there is another at Logan City. There are…’”

  Deja moved around from behind him. “There are what?”

  “That’s all. He must have been interrupted, probably by me, and he had to put it away for another time. That time never came.”

  Heath held himself stiff, a wash of emotion rolling over his being until he wasn’t sure he could continue to stand beneath the impact of it. Deja made a comforting noise and raised her hands to his face, but he caught them and lowered them to her sides. “Please…don’t.”

  Her eyes widened, and the hurt he saw in their depths cut a hole in his heart. “Heath.”

  “Don’t you see, Deja?” He willed her to understand his confusion and the devastation resulting from the news. “I’m not human. I’m an animal.”

  “That’s bullshit!” she railed. “Heath, these are the ramblings of an old man. Your dad was like eighty-five when he died. He probably imagined all this espionage nonsense and took it all paranormal and crap. It’s not true. You’re no more an animal than I am.”