Bodyguard

by Jennifer Ashley

  Elizabeth understood his point. They positioned the tarp so that Elizabeth and Ronan had plenty of airflow, their skill telling her they'd done this before.

  The tented truck bed was warm in the night, Elizabeth cuddling against her bear. Elizabeth held on to Ronan as the pickup bumped down the long dirt track, Ronan grunting in pain every time the truck hit a rut on the washboard road.

  Elizabeth held Ronan close and buried her face in his fur. He smelled of blood but also of warmth and himself. She'd fallen hard in love with him, but that was not so surprising, she thought as she stroked him. Ronan had helped her at every turn and never asked anything of her. He never did, from anyone.

  She was quietly crying by the time Ellison pulled up at Ronan's house and shut off the engine. Rebecca came running out as Ellison untied the tarp, Cherie, Mabel, and Olaf following. Mabel pulled Elizabeth into an embrace while Rebecca helped Spike and Ellison get Ronan out of the truck. Rebecca instructed them to put him in the Den--there was a big bed there, she said, and they wouldn't have to try to get him upstairs.

  Ronan shifted back to human as he came to his feet. He tried to stagger inside on his own, but Ellison and Spike ended up half-dragging him between them.

  Ronan groaned as he hit the bed. His face was wan from too much blood loss, the bite and claw marks again oozing blood. His breathing was shallow, his pulse too rapid.

  Elizabeth and Rebecca covered him, and Rebecca brought out bandages and antiseptic. But who knew what was going on internally, or what damage the shocks from the Collar had done?

  "He needs a hospital," Elizabeth said.

  Rebecca shook her head. "The human medical world still hasn't figured out Shifters. They might kill him trying the wrong thing."

  "We have to do something . . ."

  Elizabeth broke off as the door darkened and Sean Morrissey strode in, the Sword of the Guardian on his back. Both Rebecca and Cherie jumped to their feet, eyeing Sean with similar looks of terror.

  "No, Sean, not yet," Rebecca said, pleading. "We don't need the sword yet."

  "I know that, lass," Sean said. "But you do need my mate."

  Andrea stepped inside, her pregnancy evident behind her loose, light shirt. Without a word, Andrea came to Elizabeth, gave her a brief hug, and then sat on the bed next to Ronan. In silence, she peeled back the sheet, laid her hands on Ronan's bare chest, bowed her head, and closed her eyes.

  She stayed in that position for a time, unmoving except for her brows drawing together in concentration. Cherie buried her face in Rebecca's shoulder. Mabel, next to Elizabeth, squeezed her hand. Olaf said, in his loud, child's voice, "Ronan will die?"

  "No, lad," Sean said. "Not tonight."

  The sword on Sean's back emitted a soft ting. Elizabeth's gaze went to it, but the others in the room didn't seem to notice. Maybe it was supposed to do that.

  Andrea drew a long breath. Then, to Elizabeth's amazement, the big cuts on Ronan's throat started to close. As she watched, the wounds narrowed, dried, and fused, leaving long scabs in place of the chewed and serrated flesh.

  The bruises and cuts on Ronan's face and around his Collar started to fade, and Ronan's breathing eased. After a long time, he let out a sigh and opened his eyes.

  He looked around at the people who encircled his bed--his family, Elizabeth and Mabel, Sean and Andrea, Spike and Ellison--and he flinched. "Oh, this is embarrassing."

  "Better embarrassed than dead," Andrea said, patting his arm. "Stop doing this, Ronan. I'm getting tired of patching you up." She started to rise, then winced and put her hand on her distended abdomen.

  Sean was at her side. "All right, love?"

  "Fine." Andrea rubbed her belly. "There's a lot of kicking going on down there. I think she wanted to help me and was mad that she couldn't."

  "Oh, can I feel?" Mabel asked brightly. "I love babies."

  Andrea let Mabel place her hands on her stomach, while Sean looked on, both fond and protective.

  "Hey, what about me?" Ronan asked. "I'm the fallen hero, here."

  "You are going to be fine," Andrea said. "You're good inside; the wounds are only surface ones, thanks to your thick bear fur. You'll have one hell of a hangover, but that's your own fault for agreeing to fight a feral."

  "A fight I won, woman. You should have seen the other guy. What happened to him, by the way, Sean?"

  "He's with Dad," Sean said. "For now. Dad will take him to Liam for debriefing in the morning."

  "Poor bastard," Ronan said. "Better him than me."

  Everyone started talking, weighing in with opinions about the fight or the feral, or asking for details about it. Elizabeth strode into the middle of the group.

  "Out. Everybody, out. Ronan needs to rest."

  Instead of arguing, they obeyed, to her surprise--instantly, quietly, and quickly. Mabel was the last to go. She paused to hug Elizabeth.

  "Congratulations, you two. I knew you were up to nookie in here last night. I'll have a Shifter for a brother-in-law. That is so cool."

  Another squeeze, a wave to Ronan, and Mabel banged out the door.

  Elizabeth came to the bed. She started to sit at Ronan's side, then gave in to her emotions and lay down next to him, wanting his arms around her.

  "News travels fast," she said. "Mabel wasn't at the fight--at least, she'd better not have been. How does she know what happened with the mate-claim?"

  "All of Shiftertown knows, love." Ronan ran a bandaged hand through her hair. "Half of them heard you stand up and declare that you accepted me, and you'd better bet half of them got on their cell phones right away to spread the word. Matings are a big deal around here. Shifters love them, and they love to gossip. 'Course, now Liam knows everything too. He's not going to let me hear the end of it."

  "Tell him to get in line." Elizabeth lost the rigidity that had been holding her up all night. "You almost died tonight. Damn you, Ronan. And don't tell me everything's all right, because you won. You almost didn't win."

  Ronan kissed her hair. "I won because of you, Lizzie-girl. Because the mate bond wouldn't let me die."

  "Mate bond . . ."

  Ronan twined his fingers through hers and brought their joined hands to his heart. "I feel it right here. It means that you and I belong together, that we have a bond no one can break. I hope, in time, that you feel it too."

  He sounded so quietly hopeful that tears stung Elizabeth's eyes. "I do feel it, Ronan. I love you. I've never felt like this about anyone before. You're funny and warmhearted and strong and brave and generous, and I love you. And wonder of wonders, you love me back."

  "You bet I love you back." Ronan's eyes darkened. "You rescued me, Elizabeth."

  "No, you did a lot of saving my butt. Andrea is the one who healed you . . . how did she do that?"

  "Fae magic." Ronan said it offhand, as though Fae magic was a common thing to find lying around. "Andrea's half Fae, and the magic manifested in her as a healing gift. Lucky for us. But that's not what I meant."

  Elizabeth raised herself on one elbow. "You've done so much for me. All the Shifters have. I've done so little in return."

  "No," Ronan said. "I've been alone a long time, Lizzie-girl. Even living here with Rebecca and taking in the cubs--I've still been alone." He released her hand and brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheek. "I'm not alone anymore."

  Elizabeth pressed a feather-light kiss to his lips, her heart full. "Neither am I."

  Ronan slid his hand to the back of her neck, rising into the kiss. They explored and touched for a little time, in the newfound wonder of feeling.

  "You know," Ronan said, smoothing her hair. "I think I'm feeling a lot better."

  His sudden, wicked smile made Elizabeth's blood heat. She ran her hand down the blankets until she found a very large bulge under them. "I can see that."

  "Mmm, did you lock the door behind my nosy friends?"

  "I did."

  Ronan chuckled as he pushed back the covers and rolled his warm weight over
her. "I knew I picked the right woman."

  "You did." Elizabeth smiled into his kiss and wrapped her arms around his broad body. She was safe and warm beneath him, not ready to go anywhere for a long time. She licked his ear and then nibbled it.

  "My bodyguard," she whispered. "My mate."

  End

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  January 2012

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  Wild Cat

  Shifters Unbound

  Book Three

  by Jennifer Ashley

  Chapter One

  Heights. Damn it, why does it have to be heights?

  Diego Escobar scanned the steel beams of the unfinished skyscraper against a gray morning sky, and acid seared his stomach.

  Heights had never bothered him until two years ago, when five meth-heads had hung him over the penthouse balcony of a thirty-story hotel and threatened to drop him. His partner, Jobe, a damn good cop, had put his weapon on the balcony floor and raised his hands to save Diego's life. The men had pulled Diego to safety and then casually shot them both. Diego had survived; Jobe hadn't.

  Diego's rage and grief had manifested into an obsessive fear of heights. Now, going up even three floors in a glass elevator could give him cold sweats.

  "Way the hell up there?" he asked Rogers, the uniform cop.

  "Yes, sir."

  Shit.

  "Hooper's pretty sure it's not human," Rogers said. "He says it moves too fast, jumps too far. But he hasn't got a visual yet."

  Not human meant Shifter. This was getting better and better. "Hooper's up there alone?"

  "Jemez is with him. They think they have the Shifter cornered on the fifty-first level."

  The fifty-first level? "Tell me you're fucking kidding me."

  "No, sir. There's an elevator. We got the electric company to turn on the power."

  Diego looked at the rusty doors Rogers indicated, then up, up, and up through the grid of beams into empty space. He could see nothing but the gray dawn sky between the crisscross of girders. His mouth went dry.

  This cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere--which was to have been an apartment complex, hotel, office tower, and shopping center--had been under construction for years. The project had started to great fanfare, designed to draw tourists and locals away from the heavily trafficked Strip. But construction slowed, and so many investors pulled out that building had ground to a halt. Now the unfinished skyscraper sat like a rusting blot on the empty desert.

  Tracking Shifters wasn't Diego's department. Diego was a detective in vice. He'd responded to the call for help with a trespasser because he'd been heading to work and his route took him right by the construction site. Diego figured he'd help Rogers chase down the miscreant and drive on in.

  Now Rogers wanted Diego to jaunt to the fifty-first level, where there weren't any floors, for crying out loud, and chase a suspect who might be a Shifter. Shifters were dangerous--people who could become animals. Or, maybe animals who became people. The jury was still out. In any case, they'd been classified as too dangerous to live with humans, rounded up into Shiftertowns, and made to wear Collars that regulated their violent tendencies.

  Diego had heard that regular guns didn't always bring them down, Shifters having amazing metabolisms. Shifter Division used tranquilizers when they needed to shoot a Shifter, but Diego was fresh out of those. Rogers, rotund and near retirement, watched Diego with a bland expression, making it clear he had no intention of going up after the Shifter himself.

  A high-pitched scream rang down from on high. It was a woman's scream--Maria Jemez--followed by a man's bellow of surprise and pain. Then, silence.

  "Damn it." Diego ran for the elevator. "Stay down here, call Shifter Division, and get more backup. Tell them to bring tranqs." He got into the lift and shut the doors, blocking out Rogers' "Yes, sir."

  The lift clanked its way up through the few completed finished floors, then onto floors that were nothing but beams and catwalks. The elevator was an open cage, so Diego got to watch the ground and Rogers recede, far too rapidly.

  Fifty-first level. Damn.

  Diego had been chasing criminals through towering hotels for years without thinking a thing about it. He and the sheriff's department even had followed one idiot high up onto a cable tower two hundred feet above Hoover Dam five years ago, and Diego hadn't flinched.

  A bunch of cop-hating meth dealers hang him over a balcony, and he goes to pieces.

  It stops now. This is where I get my own back.

  Diego rolled back the gate on the fifty-first level. The sun was rising, the mountains west of town bathed in pink and orange splendor. The Las Vegas valley was a beautiful place, its stark white desert contrasting with the mountains that rose in a knifelike wall on the horizon. Visitors down in the city kept their eyes on the gaming tables and slot machines, uncaring of what went on outside the casinos, but the beauty of the valley always tugged at Diego.

  Diego drew his Sig and stepped off the lift into eerie silence. Something flitted in his peripheral vision, something that moved too lightly to be Hooper, who was a big, muscular guy who liked big, muscular guns. Diego aimed, but the movement vanished.

  He stepped softly across the board catwalk, moving into the deeper shadow of a beam. The catwalk groaned under his feet. There were no lights up here, just the faint flush of morning and the glow from the work lights down on the ground that the power company had turned on.

  Diego saw the movement again to his left, and then, damned if he didn't see a similar flit to his right.

  Son of a bitch--two of them?

  A sound like the cross between a pop and a kiss came from down the catwalk the instant before something pinged above Diego's head. Diego hit the floor instinctively, trying not to panic as his feet slid over the catwalk's edge.

  His heart pounded triple-time, his throat so dry it closed up tight.

  What the hell was he doing? He should have confessed his secret fear of heights, gone to psychiatric evaluation, stayed behind a desk. But no, he'd been too determined to keep his job, too determined to beat it himself, too embarrassed to admit the weakness. Now he was endangering others because of his stupid fear.

  Shut up and think.

  Whatever had pinged hadn't been a bullet. Too soft. Diego got his feet back onto the catwalk and crawled to find what had fallen to the boards. A dart, he saw, the kind shot by a tranquilizer gun.

  Uniforms didn't carry tranqs, and Shifter Division hadn't showed up yet. That meant that one of the Shifters he was chasing up here had a tranquilizer gun. Perfect. Put the nice cop to sleep, and then do anything you want with him, including pushing his body over the edge.

  Diego moved in a crouch across the catwalk to the next set of shadows. The sun streaked across the valley to Mount Charleston in the west, light radiant on its snow-covered crown. More snow was predicted up there for the weekend. Diego had contemplated driving up on Saturday night to sip hot toddies in a snowbound cabin, maybe with something warm and female by his side.

  On the other side of the next beam, Diego found Bud Hooper and Maria Jemez. Maria was fairly new, just out of the academy, too baby-faced to be up here chasing crazy Shifters. The two cops were slumped together in a heap, still warm, breathing slowly.

  Diego heard footsteps, running fast--too fast to be human. He swung around as a shadow detached itself from the catwalk in front of him and rose in a graceful leap to the next level.

  Diego stared, open-mouthed. The thing wasn't human--it had the long limbs of a cat, but its face was half human, like a cross between human and animal. Did Shifters look like that? He'd thought they were either animal or human, but as he watched, gun ready, he realized he was seeing one in midshift.

/>   The Shifter landed on open beams on the next floor up, then its shape flowed, as it ran, into the lithe form of a big cat. Morning sunlight caught on white fur and the flash of green eyes. Snow leopard? It sprinted along the beam, never losing its balance, and vanished back into the shadows.

  Diego heard a step behind him. He whipped around in time to see the flash of a rifle barrel in the sunlight, aiming directly at him. He heard the pop as his reflexes made him dive for the floor.

  He came up on his elbows to return fire, but there was nothing to aim at. Whoever had the tranq rifle had vanished back into the shadows.

  All was silence. Nothing but rising wind humming through the building.

  Diego reassessed his situation. He had a Shifter running around up here, plus one asshole with a tranquilizer gun. Someone hunting a Shifter? Could be. The laws about humans hunting un-Collared Shifters--those Shifters who had refused to take the Collar and live in Shiftertowns--had loosened in the last couple years.

  But this Shifter hunter had pegged Jemez and Hooper with tranqs, and was trying to shoot Diego too. Why, if the guy was hunting the Shifter legally?

  Another pop had him rolling out of the way just before a dart struck the catwalk where Diego's head had been.

  As he scrambled up again, the catwalk, loosened and dry-rotted from years under the desert sun, slid out from under his feet. Diego lunged at the nearest steel beam, the metal burning his skin as he tried and failed to grab it.

  The catwalk's boards splintered and came away from the bolts. Diego's heart jammed in his throat as his body dropped. Splinters rained past him. At the last desperate moment, he got one arm hooked around a girder, and he hung there, stuck like a bug fifty-one stories up.

  Son of a fucking--

  He couldn't swing his feet around to get them back on the girder. His arm shook hard. He realized he still held his Sig in his other hand, but for some reason, he could not make himself open his fingers and let it go.