Blood of Life: Cora's Choice 1-3 Bundle

by V M Black

  But he smelled like fear, like fear and sweat and the animal smell that was meat, and as she flew toward him, her thoughts became garbled in the assault of his scents.

  She was bounding over the tables now, down toward the front of the hall. She had no attention for the screaming students, not even when one of her leaps clipped one of them and slammed his body too hard against his desk.

  “Help me!” she cried, but from her throat came only a hideous yowl. “Help me!”

  She was at the front of the hall now, Dr. Butros still frozen mere feet away. Tara grabbed for him.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  But her scrabbling hands were now unsheathed claws, and she slashed him across the chest, tearing down through fat and muscle so that his sudden screams joined with hers. The beast in her mind jumped forward at her terror, taking control, the bright coppery smell of blood and meat driving her mad. All she wanted was that terrible noise to stop, for the bright blood of her prey to stop flowing.

  Her jaws snapped shut once with a crunch of cartilage. Then she was running, running around the room with her own screams echoing against the empty walls, the human lost, and the beast seeing only a cave she could not escape.

  The smell of people, hundreds of people who had just left the room drove a spike of fear into her brain. Danger, danger, was her thought—a thought not of words but of terror.

  But there was no way out. She jumped and ran among the tables, sending up plumes of blue-lined papers, heavy textbooks pinwheeling to the floor. She ran until her legs failed her, and then she slumped, stunned, to the floor just as the doors burst open and a flood of men came in.

  “Fire!” one of them shouted, and the small part of her brain that was still Tara tried to make her move, make her call out for mercy, but the cat’s body was spent, and it was all she could do to lift her head as the dart slammed into her side, looking down at the bright orange streamer with a kind of astonishment even as darkness slid over her eyes.

  ***

  An hour earlier...

  “Hey, you,” Sylvie chirped, falling in step as Tara stepped off the bus.

  Despite her headache, Tara smiled at her friend. Like her, Sylvie was an older undergrad—her mother had suffered a stroke during Sylvie’s senior year of high school, and Sylvie had spent the next two years helping her mother through rehabilitation while her father worked two jobs, one to keep their family insurance and the second to cover the rest of the medical bills. Despite that tragedy, Sylvie was one of the most upbeat people Tara knew, and her enthusiasm was contagious.

  Sylvie had chosen to double major in psychology and biology because she wanted to be an occupational therapist and help people like her mother lead better lives. Tara had chosen psychology because she hoped to figure herself out, which, she was the first one to admit, made her sound as self-centered as a gyroscope in comparison.

  “You ready for another dose of the seventeenth century?” Tara asked.

  Sylvie rolled her eyes. Unlike Tara, she wasn’t much of a history fan. “I just hope that Dr. Butros doesn’t call on me. I feel like I’m back in high school in that class.”

  “At least he let us pick our seats,” Tara pointed out.

  The day was brilliant and beautiful, one of those crisp fall days where the sky seemed like a cut crystal bowl and the bite in the air made the trees blaze with color. Tara was honest enough with herself to admit that she’d chosen the College of William and Mary out of the list of in-state schools largely for its campus. The old buildings gave it a kind of dignity that reminded her, just a little, of the distinguished European universities she’d walked through.

  “There is that,” Sylvie said, perking up again.

  Tara adjusted the weight of the book bag on her back. She’d always been a loner. Maybe it was from growing up as a military brat and moving every few years, though that had hardly seemed to impact her older sister’s social life. Maybe it was just her. But Sylvie was one of the few people that she felt truly comfortable around. Sylvie took it for granted that she and Tara would be great friends, and almost to Tara’s surprise, they were.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” Sylvie asked.

  “I don’t know.” Tara’s answer wasn’t entirely honest. She had a good idea of what she’d do—hide in her studio apartment, or maybe take her wreck of a car out to York River State Park and wander around on the trails for the afternoon. If her headache got worse, she might go all the way out to Shenandoah National Park on Friday afternoon and lose herself in the hills for the weekend, which usually made her feel better by Monday.

  But this headache seemed worse than usual, a dull pounding in the base of her skull that was echoed in her chest, in her bones. She had a giddy sensation for just a moment that she was looking at herself from the outside, or maybe behind her own eyes instead of through them.

  Tara shook her head to clear it and dragged her fingers through her springy curls.

  “You don’t look so great today,” Sylvie said, her eyes narrowing.

  “I don’t feel so great,” Tara admitted. “I guess I just need some rest.”

  “Rest from what? You never do anything.” At Tara’s expression, Sylvie immediately added, “Sorry. That sounded bad. I just meant that you’re not exactly the hard-partying type.”

  “I don’t know.” Tara decided to answer the question and ignore the rest of her friend’s commentary. “Maybe I’m just coming down with something.”

  Something. Her head throbbed a little harder. But this wasn’t really new, was it? She’d felt this for as long as she could remember. And she wasn’t really sick. Or at least, she didn’t think that she was. It was just worse now, the thing she’d always had in the back of her head. It felt wrong.

  “I hope you’re better by midterms,” Sylvie said.

  “So do I.” They were only a week and a half away now.

  Sylvie brightened and changed the subject. “Did I tell you what Gavin said last night?”

  Tara chuckled. “Tell me.” Gavin was Sylvie’s newest boyfriend, and she was in the stage where absolutely everything he said was brilliant, which, in Tara’s experience, came roughly three weeks before everything he said would become unbearably stupid.

  As Sylvie began recounting their conversation, they mounted the steps to the front of the hall and passed into the building where their class was held. It was one of the few big lecture classes that Tara had taken at William and Mary, and stepping into it suddenly seemed like a monstrously difficult task. But she smiled and nodded and tried to follow along with Sylvie’s story as the flood of students leaving the previous class flowed around them. And silently, she steeled herself against the hour to come.

  ***

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t hear anything about a prisoner transfer,” the man said, squinting at Chay Bane’s badge and giving him and his three team members a suspicious, raking look.

  Chay gave the man a too-toothy grin. He knew he didn’t look like a Fed—not like a Company man, certainly, and not even like the Homeland Security agent he was now impersonating. His hair, in tight twists, fell nearly to his shoulders, and the upper part was held back from his face with a black tie. Most govvies took a dim view of that kind of individuality, but he knew the man couldn’t fault his suit—coal black, with tie to match over a crisp white shirt and perfectly polished wingtip shoes.

  “Check again, Kevin,” he said, taking note of the man’s name badge.

  Without taking his eyes from Chay, the man raised his phone to his ear. “This is Beecham,” he said. “I’ve got a William Smith here with three guys saying that the prisoner’s being transferred.”

  There was a pause, and Chay’s smiled widened. Will Smith. It was such a common name, one that no one would dare even joke about even though the comparison practically begged to be made. It was one of his most common aliases when he played a man in black—of whatever stripe. It distracted people, made them uncomfortable as they kept thinking about
it, especially since Chay’s favorite trick was to travel with Agosti, a grizzled older man with pale skin and dark hair that he wore slicked to his head. Outdoors, they often wore rectangular sunglasses to make the comparison even more irresistible.

  Being ridiculous in just the right way was a powerful tool to make him seem more legitimate. Because, really, who would take the name Will Smith while pretending to be a Fed?

  Kevin’s eyes glazed over slightly as he listened to the response at the other end of the line. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, that’s news to me. If you’re sure it’s all in order— Right. Right. Of course not. Thanks.”

  He hung up. “Well, Mr. Smith, it looks like word just hadn’t gotten to us yet,” he said, looking suddenly like he wanted to be anywhere else. “The Director sent a note personally, so I don’t know what the hang-up was, but I’m very sorry.”

  “Oh, no,” Chay said easily. “I’ll tell her that you’re all very keen here, on mark. Check up on everything, just like you should.”

  “Right,” Kevin agreed, looking almost comically relieved.

  “So we’ll be taking charge of the prisoner right now.”

  “Um,” Kevin said. “Do you have the facilities? I mean, she’s still sedated.”

  “Dr. Banner here will take care of that,” Chay said, nodding over his shoulder to the elf Torrhanin. The elf blinked his large eyes at Kevin Beecham, who looked even more nonplussed.

  “Right,” Kevin said again. He surveyed Chay’s team one more time, then gave a quick nod. “Come right this way.”

  With Kevin Beecham in his pocket, all bureaucratic resistance melted away, and Chay and his three team members breezed through a series of security doors, collecting more paper-pushers and doctors along the way.

  Chay looked up at one of the video cameras in the corner of the hall outside the holding cell and smiled. God bless the digital age. He’d already introduced a script into the system that was preventing the saving of the streamed video feed without disrupting the viewing of it live. And he knew what the descriptions of him would turn into, with the name William Smith planted firmly in Kevin’s mind. They didn’t have a prayer of proving his involvement—even though there were many who would instantly know that he was the plan’s mastermind.

  After a word from Kevin, the guards unlocked the solid metal door and swung it open, stepping back quickly. Chay’s team moved as planned, the bear shifters Agosti and Liam Mansfield stationing themselves outside the door just in case things went pear-shaped while Chay and Torrhanin went inside.

  Dammit.

  Chay’s stomach lurched at the sight of the girl in the bed.

  Damn, damn, frakking damn.

  This would be way more than a standard rescue operation. The girl—woman, really—wasn’t a child at all, not even a typical college student. She was solidly in her mid-twenties, strikingly pretty, with her honey-highlighted brown curls spilling across her pillow even though her olive skin was unnaturally colorless under sedation. And she had all the curves of a woman under the stark white sheet.

  Far too old for a natural first shift. Too old to risk a medically induced shift, too, if the people in charge of the program had any sense—though there was no legitimate program that Chay knew of that took any women at all.

  “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.

  From the Author

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  Bad Blood

  Cora’s Choice – Book 3

  by V. M. Black

  Aethereal Bonds

  AetherealBonds.com

  Swift River Media Group

  Washington, D.C.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Bad Blood Table of Contents

  Life Blood

  Blood Born

  Bad Blood

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Afterword

  Chapter One

  I got out of the dead car and stepped into the biting winter night. My stomach was knotting so hard I had to force myself to stand up straight, shivers wracking my body even as I turned to face down the three SUVs that came bouncing up the dirt road toward me.