by Tate James
“Taking what seriously?” I hissed at the Native American supermodel with the personality of a porcupine. I was pretty sure he was about to tell me about how I was being held for ransom or being sold into a sex trafficking ring or maybe just being moved into another state so that it would take longer for someone to find my chopped up remains.
So, I didn’t really know how to respond when he leveled a stare at me like I had the IQ of a block of cheese and told me in a patronizing voice, “The fact that you made a magically binding agreement to take us with you on your journey. You did this, drunk or not, so don’t go crying about it now. Trust me, I wish you hadn’t done it, too.” This last part was muttered under his breath as he turned his attention back to his book.
For a long moment, I just stared at the top of his head, then flicked my gaze to Hunter—still half asleep in my bed—then finally to Boden in my driver’s seat. The three of them had kept up the whole “we’re magical creatures” joke all night, from what I could remember, but I’d figured it was just an elaborate metaphor for... uh... life?
“Okay, so that whole thing was entertaining last night, but it’s just creepy now. Cut the shit and tell me what the hell is going on!” Anger, or possibly fear, was making me tremble, and I hugged my arms in a lame attempt to hide the shaking from my abductors.
Hunter groaned again from my bed, and his sleep-disheveled head popped up out of the pillows. “Cleo, babe, I explained this to you about sixteen thousand times last night. It’s not a metaphor. Magic is real. We are your fated guardians to protect you against Bast and her minions.” Hazy memories of him telling me this between shots flashed across my brain, and I cringed.
“Uh-huh.” I laughed nervously, still pretty sure they were messing with me. “And I need to be protected because...”
“Because you’re the descendant of Queen Hatshepsut, who was—”
“—gifted the Amulet of Light by Ra in 1501 BC,” I cut Hunter off and finished his sentence in a horrified whisper. “That’s not...” I trailed off and rubbed at my pounding head. This whole trip had been an utter clusterfuck so far, and now I’d drunkenly agreed to pick up three hitchhikers with mental problems.
Rubbing the amulet in question, I peered at the three of them one by one, praying someone would start laughing and admit the whole thing was one big joke. When no one spoke, though, my heart sank.
Why were the pretty ones always so crazy?
“Okay, listen,” I started, licking my dry lips and keeping my voice as calm as possible, “I can see you’re all very invested in this story, but you sound certifiably insane and I’m just not comfortable traveling with you. I’m grateful that you fixed Candy Jack, but I think it’s best if you just invoice me for the work and I drop you off at the next bus station, okay?”
“Doesn’t work like that, Margaret,” Raze sneered, and his cold gaze flicked over me like I was a moron. “Hunter tried to warn you last night, but you went ahead and accepted the deal before he outlined the consequences. So now you’re stuck with us like we are with you.”
“Stop calling me that,” I growled, anger making my teeth clench. I was only accustomed to hearing my real name from my mother, and even then it made me want to punch a wall. “And what the hell do you mean? I never signed any contracts in blood nor did I marry anyone—that I’m aware of—so no one is stuck with anyone. I changed my mind, end of story.”
A cruel smile pulled at Raze’s sexy mouth. “Actually, Maggie, you did one better. You bound us in magic, and if you break the deal, then you’ll suffer the consequences.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes. “Oooh, magical consequences. Of course. Let me guess, I will turn into a toad and need the kiss of a prince to turn me back?”
Boden made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh covered by a cough and ducked his face out of view when I shot him a suspicious glare.
“That’s actually a pretty solid guess,” Hunter mumbled, then yawned heavily. He had finally surfaced from my bed and was sitting, totally shirtless, on the edge of the mattress as he blinked at me with those sleepy brown eyes of his. “Except I think the magic was cued to rodents not amphibians. I don’t totally remember because, let’s be honest, we were already pretty drunk by that stage.” His cheeks took a pink tint, and he ran a hand through his messy brown hair as though embarrassed.
“Huh?” I squinted at him, sick of repeating “what does that mean” every three seconds.
“He means that if you try to break your word to take us with you, then you’ll turn into a rat,” Raze explained in a painfully dry voice.
Before I could start laughing hysterically, a loud bang sounded from outside the van and the screech of brakes filled the air. Flinching, I covered my ears, but the gesture was pointless when something heavy slammed into the side of Candy Jack and sent me flying back into Raze’s lap for the third time.
This was different, though, and his strong arms wrapped around me tightly, shielding my body as my van was hit again. Whatever it was that had slammed into us hit harder this time, and Jack was no match for its superior weight or strength. For a suspended moment, we teetered on two wheels, and then we were falling.
Over and over my van rolled. Shit flew out of cupboards, and the four of us bounced around like popcorn in a microwave for what seemed like an eternity, until it all stopped.
Throughout it all, Raze remained locked around me like a human shield, and when everything fell still, his whole frame remained tense and alert.
Stunned, I didn’t try to move. Instead I just lay there underneath the heavy motherfucker while my breathing quickly escalated to the edge of hyperventilation. Thousands of fractured questions zapped across my brain, fighting for supremacy, but only one managed to complete itself.
What the fuck just happened?
“Calm down,” Raze ordered me, his chest vibrating against my cheek where my face was smooshed against him. “Maggie, seriously, calm the fuck down, or you’re going to pass out.”
He was right; of course, he was right. But how the fuck was I supposed to calm down when someone had just trashed Candy Jack with me inside? For the love of cats, I was lucky to still be alive!
“Cleo, are you hurt?” Boden called out from somewhere nearby, and I considered his question. Was I hurt? I couldn’t feel my legs. Holy shit, I couldn’t feel my legs!
“I’m paralyzed!” I squeaked in terror. “I can’t feel my legs! Oh my god, I’m never going to walk again!”
“She’s fine,” Raze snapped, peeling himself off me and standing up on what was once Candy Jack’s window and was now the floor. “I took the worst of it.”
Now that he’d removed his considerable weight from my body, the blood rushed back into my legs, and I was hit with the reassuring pins and needles that proved I wasn’t paralyzed.
Phew.
“Jesus Christ Supercat, there is a massive chunk of glass in your back, Raze,” I exclaimed when he turned slightly and I spotted the easily ten-inch shard protruding from his flesh. Blood was pooling around it and running down his blue T-shirt, causing it to stick to his body in a disturbingly sexy way.
Yeah, okay, I was a little bit fucked up. I could own up to that.
Raze glanced at the glass over his shoulder and grunted his displeasure. He didn’t even seem all that concerned by the situation, just displeased. More to the point, how the hell were we all alive?
“Guys, what the ever-loving fuck just happened? How are we still alive? Surely bones should be broken or... something. And Jack! My poor van!” I scrambled to my knees and tried to orient myself. From what I could see, Jack was on his side and there was considerable damage to the side above our heads. So much that the back end—where Hunter had been sitting on my bed—was crushed like a tin can. “Hunter!” I blurted out, staring wide-eyed at the remains of my “bedroom”.
“I’m fine,” the Australian mumbled, crawling out from under a pile of my clothing, which had previously been stacked nicely inside my littl
e wardrobe. “But it’s nice to hear your concern, Cleo babe.”
I rolled my eyes at Hunter’s constant flirtation, but quietly I breathed a sigh of relief. Psychopaths or not, these three were sort of growing on me, and it would have been a shame to see them dead so soon.
“We need to get out of here,” Boden said, stating the obvious. “It’ll only be a matter of time before those assholes follow us down here to finish the job.” Crouched over to avoid the cabinets hanging open and my bar fridge halfway out of its home, Boden made his way to Raze and just wrenched the shard of glass out like it was a flipping toothpick or something.
As I stared—horrified and fascinated—the wound in Raze’s back just... closed. Like it had never been there. If it wasn’t for the residual blood coating his shirt, I would have thought I’d imagined the whole damn thing!
“What the—” My stunned exclamation was cut short by all three men turning their sharp, somewhat glowing gazes on me. Seriously, though, their freaking eyes were freaking glowing!
“Now isn’t the time, Cleo,” Boden told me firmly, giving me the pretty solid impression he was actually the one in charge of this merry band of nutcases. “We need to get you out of here before they catch up. Let’s haul ass, boys.”
Without waiting for any further arguments from me, Raze stooped forward and snatched me up in his arms like I was a naughty child. My squirms and protests did me absolutely no good as he carried me out of the wreckage of my beautiful Candy Jack, then deposited me onto the grass below a tree some distance away.
From where he put me, I could see the hill we had just rolled down. More importantly, I could see the big rig parked at the top, which must have been responsible for pushing us off the road. Beside it, several figures stood arguing—if the wild hand gestures were any indication.
“Guys,” I murmured, not taking my eyes off the people at the top of the hill for a second. “Are we still in danger here?”
None of the three responded, but Boden’s sharp gaze followed my line of sight, and he grimaced.
“Okay, stupid question, huh?” I laughed nervously. “What do we do now?”
“Now we get you the fuck out of here,” Hunter replied, wincing as he shook broken glass out of his hair. He was still shirtless, like he had been when he woke up, and only sported a tight pair of boxer briefs on his lower half.
As fucked up as the timing of it all was, I couldn’t help checking out his package for a brief moment before focusing on the facts that we’d all almost died and it was looking like it had been pretty damn intentional.
“Take her,” Boden ordered Raze, jerking his head toward the dense forest behind us. “Head north, and we’ll catch up after we sort this lot out.”
Raze’s jaw clenched, and he opened his mouth to argue with the blond-haired mountain man. Luckily though, my ears were spared his complaints when the dudes on top of the hill fired something at us and a tree to my left exploded.
Literally. Exploded.
“What the fuck was that?” I screamed for what felt like the millionth time. I was really starting to sound like a broken record, but who wouldn’t under the circumstances?
“Shit,” Boden cursed, then got no further words out as the next shot fired from above hit him in the shoulder and sent him flying backward three yards.
Raze turned to me with a fierce look on his face, one that left no room for arguments.
“Run,” he ordered me, his voice low and underlined with an animalistic growl. “Run now and don’t look back.”
Even if his words hadn’t inspired enough primal fear in me to turn tail and run for my cats-damned life—they had—my mind would have been made up by the barrage of shots raining down on us. Puffs of dirt exploded all around us, and in the distance I saw our would-be killers begin to make their way down the hillside.
Panicked, I scrambled to my feet and took off in the direction both Boden and Raze had pointed me in. Stupidly, though, I did exactly what Raze had told me not to do.
I looked back as I ran.
I looked back just in time to see Hunter leap onto the twisted remains of Candy Jack, his human form distorting and twisting as he flew through the air. When he landed on the side of my van, he was no longer the lean, muscular Aussie who had picked me up on the side of the road.
He was a freaking cat. A huge-ass freaking cat.
Chapter Four
It was only through some miracle of self-preservation that I kept running and didn’t pass right the fuck out due to shock. Hunter had just turned into a cat. Not a small, cute, and fluffy pussycat either, he had turned into some sort of wild cat with fangs and claws and weighing probably the same amount as an average-sized tiger.
Holy fuck, was he a tiger?
No, that didn’t make sense; he hadn’t looked anything like the tigers I’d seen at the zoo. His fur, from the brief flash of it I had seen before getting the hell out of Dodge, had been a chocolatey brown, and he had a series of darker stripes across his back. The general shape of him had been more mountain cat–like and less tigery, though.
Ah hell, I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. The guy I’d been considering fucking had just shifted into the body of a large cat. End of story.
Shit. Would that make it bestiality? Ew. So much ew.
My bare foot snagged on a tree root, and I went crashing to my knees. It was only then that I realized I’d been running blindly through the forest with zero idea where I was or where I was going. Add to that the fact that someone had just tried to kill me, probably had killed Boden—holy shit—and Hunter had turned into a huge-ass furry animal, and I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Or maybe I’d already had a mental breakdown, and this was all in my head? Shit had really gotten bad when the most logical explanation was that I’d lost my sanity and was actually locked in a padded cell somewhere.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, panting heavily. I was in shape, sure, but I was no long-distance runner. Sweat coated my body, and now that I was stationary, my legs quivered with exhaustion. How far had I come? Was anyone following me? Had the guys all been killed?
My mind flashed back to Boden flying across the grass, and I couldn’t work out if my imagination was adding the blood pooling under him when he landed or if that had really happened.
Before someone had tried to kill us, I had been just about to eject the three of them onto the side of the road. So why did the idea of them being dead make my head spin and my hands shake? Without even noticing what I was doing, I’d pushed myself back out of the dirt and started making my way back the way I’d come. I needed to see if they were okay...
A thud sounded, and I froze.
Slowly, I turned to see what had made the noise, praying it wasn’t one of the men who’d run us off the road and then shot at us with weapons I could barely even describe.
Thankfully, it wasn’t. Instead, I found a giant, golden-furred cat sitting on its fluffy butt and watching me with obnoxiously intelligent blue eyes. I mean, that in itself was a pretty damn obvious sign that this was no normal cat. What sort of mountain lion had blue eyes, for fuck’s sake?
Okay, once again, I had no idea. Maybe mountain lions did have blue eyes, but I was pretty sure they didn’t have the exact shade of blue that Boden had.
“Seriously?” I laughed nervously, eyeing the enormous creature as his tail swished back and forth. “So this whole magical creature thing wasn’t bullshit? You’re really...” I trailed off as the words stuck in my throat and my vision swam. Maybe I was going to pass out after all?
To make matters worse, the big cat, who I could only assume was Boden, stood its enormous ass up and padded across to me. Up close, he was even bigger than I’d really given him credit for. If I were so inclined, I could ride him like a pony—he was that huge.
Well... that even sounded dirty inside my own head.
The air around him seemed to shimmer, like I was looking at him through a gas leak, then his shape shifted, rea
rranged, and settled back into human form. Tall, muscular, tanned, and totally naked human form.
“So, you’re not dead. That’s always good,” I mumbled, squinting at him as my vision blurred and swam again. “I think I might pass out now, okay?”
“Not okay, Cleo,” Boden scolded, deftly catching me in his arms as my knees buckled and I started to swoon. I shit you not. I made like Scarlett O’Hara and swooned. “You might have a concussion from the crash. It’s not safe to pass out until we can be sure you don’t.”
“Just a little snooze,” I argued, gluing my exhausted eyelids shut and letting him carry my sweaty butt for a bit. “Wait.” My eyes flew back open, and I frowned up at his handsome face. “Where the fuck are you taking me?”
His lips pulled up in a grin, and I noticed a few fine lines around his blue eyes. “Are we back onto the serial killer thing, Cleo?”
“Can you blame me?” I scowled up at him. “We are in the middle of goddamn nowhere, someone just tried to murder us all, I’m wearing nothing but a tank top and panties, and you’re...” I paused and ran a hand down his body and over his strong ass to double-check my eyes hadn’t deceived me. “You’re naked. So yeah, Boden, we’re back on the serial killer thing!”
He sighed but didn’t put me down. He also didn’t lose the grin, and I was trying real freaking hard not to melt under the force of it. “You just saw me turn from a lynx into a person, and you’re worried about whether I have a fetish for knives and pretty, tattooed girls’ flesh?”
I frowned, painfully aware of the absurdity now that he’d said it out loud. “I was thinking more like strangulation, but that’s interesting that you think I’m pretty.”
Oh. My. Cats. Did I seriously just say that?
I was starting to come around to my mother’s opinion that I was a bit of a hot mess. Here I was casually discussing murder techniques with a were-lynx, if that was the correct terminology, and all I could latch onto was that he thought I was pretty. Fucking what?
“Maybe I do have a concussion,” I muttered, rubbing at my forehead. “Put me down, Boden, I can walk.”