Tara soon fell into a deep sleep, and Chay freed himself from her limp body, which he covered with a blanket before getting dressed and turning on the video feed. He stepped into the spook shop to be met by the gazes of three of his team members. Annie’s expression was merely amused—she was always interested in any kind of drama, even the catastrophic kind. But Luke Ford’s face was a study in neutrality, and Liam Mansfield didn’t bother to hide his frank disappointment.
“Just like the good old days, huh, Beane?” Luke offered in a perfectly noncommittal voice.
Chay snorted. He’d done more than his share of partying when he’d first gotten out from under the thumb of his government keepers. The fact that he’d been only eighteen hadn’t even slowed him down—with the kind of resources he’d amassed through his various legitimate and not-so-legitimate contacts, getting a fake I.D. for himself and his buddies had been trivial. And as soon as they were out of basic training and free from the shifter induction program, he had cut loose.
Dives just outside of American bases, upscale clubs in San Diego and Norfolk, and taverns and bars and pubs in half the port cities across the world—he’d hit them all, indiscriminately, for a solid year every time he got leave. Those months were nothing but a blur of missions punctuated by alcoholic hazes in between. Being drunk quieted the panther—and it also, in his stupid, teenage mind, established his own independence from everyone and everything that had bound him in for the last six years of his life. And he hadn’t restricted himself to alcohol, either. He’d stayed away from the hardcore stuff, like crack and meth, but he’d dipped his toes into many illegal waters.
It was only his shifter resistance that had kept him from brain damage or worse, given the amounts he’d consumed. It also kept him from contracting any number of diseases from his other, indiscriminate activities. His changed metabolism insured that he’d pass any drug screening, and even if he failed, at that point in his life, he’d stopped caring.
He’d stopped caring about pretty much anything.
Chay had been handled, bullied, cajoled, lied to, and manipulated for years, and he was tired of it. He knew that the Navy had put too damned many resources into the members of the Indigo Squadron to do more than slap his wrist. So he’d called their bluff, and he’d walked away without a smudge on his record even though he was damned sure that his superiors had a very good idea what he’d been up to.
He had proven his point, and the partying had quickly proven tedious. But he hadn’t let up until one night when an incident with a drunken brawl and a speeding cab had almost ended in catastrophe for one of his teammates.
“It’s not hurting the team,” he said to Luke, remembering that episode. “And I don’t see as it’s any of your business.”
“Seeing as she might turn into a huge cat at any moment and try to eat me, I think it’s my business,” Annie said, jabbing a finger at the acrylic safety cube that had appeared while he’d been gone. There was a pile of clothes on top of it—Tara’s clothes. “I kept them from bringing in the other bed. You had your ‘do not disturb’ status on, and anyhow, I didn’t think you’d need it. Will you?” She raised her eyebrows innocently.
Chay was too damned tired to rise to the bait. “I think we’ll be able to manage without. Annie, will you excuse us for a moment?”
Annie’s lips turned down in a small moue of a pout. “If I have to.” She shifted as she stood and slipped out of her robe, the white-tipped brush of her tail held high like a flag as she trotted to the door.
There, she shifted back just long enough to pull the door open. Casting a coy look over one naked shoulder, she said, “Later, boys,” and shifted back to her fox form as she trotted through, the door swinging shut behind her.
With Annie gone, the tension in the room rose a notch. Chay leaned back on one of the folding tables, his arms propped on either side of his hips, and regarded his friends.
“She’s not going to make it,” Luke said flatly.
“We don’t know that,” Chay shot back.
“You think banging her is going to help?” Luke’s smile was tinged with irony.
Chay narrowed his eyes at his old friend. “It doesn’t seem to be hurting. It’s not interfering with how I run my facility, and even if it did—it’s my facility. I don’t often throw that around. And I don’t really want to now. But when push comes to shove, it’s the truth.”
Luke balled up a piece of paper and threw it at Chay’s head. Chay caught it out of the air.
“I don’t care what you do, asshole,” he said in a friendly tone. “I’ve rolled you out of your own vomit more than a couple of times. I just wanted be perfectly clear that you know what you’re getting into.”
Liam broke his silence, his voice a low rumble. “The woman’s one thing. I’m worried about you, Chay. What will happen when she’s gone?”
“I’ll survive. I’ve already survived worse. Both of you know that,” Chay said, crushing the wad of paper against his palm as his body tried to deny what his brain already knew. “Maybe I’ll only have a few weeks with her. Maybe only a few days. But I want this. And it’s been a really long time since I’ve done something just because I want to.”
Liam’s expression was still grave. “I don’t want to put you back together if this breaks your heart.”
That surprised a laugh out of Chay. “My heart? You’re talking like it’s a teenage crush or something. This has nothing to do with my heart.”
But what did it have to do with? Was he really just so desperate that all he cared about was the fact that she was another panther? When those bright green eyes had first fluttered open, that hadn’t been his first thought or even his third. But there had been many other people, many other women who had needed and gotten his help. And none of them had affected him like this.
Liam turned away, raising one shoulder in a half-shrug. “If you go down this road, when she has to have a bullet put in her brain, you should the be one to do it. She deserves that much from you.”
Those words hit Chay like a blow to the gut, and his brain rebelled against them even though he knew they were nothing but the truth. But he smoothed his face to cover his reaction and changed the subject to something he could tolerate thinking about.
“She told me something that might be useful,” Chay said, taking his chair. It was next to a brand new one, brought up from supply. Tara’s chair, for now.
“Since you just rolled a minus five to intelligence, are you sure you can understand it?” Luke said, needling him.
Chay ignored the teasing. “She said she’s felt different for as long as she can remember, and that’s why she went to Sudan and did her world tour and the rest.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “So? I read Torrhanin’s report. She’s definitely a medically induced shifter.”
“Definitely,” Chay said. “No question, according to Torrhanin.”
The elf was very unlikely to be wrong. He could, though, be lying. For some reason, Chay never could fully trust an elf. All their generosity seemed to come with some kind of fatal catch. He knew it was sheer prejudice to paint Torrhanin with the same brush just because of things that his kind had done in the past. But the fact was that he wasn’t human. Dogs were loyal. Cats often aloof. And it was a trait of elves for their help to always have strings attached.
But why would he lie about this? And anyway, Tara herself had said that she didn’t think it was possible that anyone in her family had shifter blood. Sure, it could hide for generations sometimes, but when Torrhanin simply corroborated her experience ....
He cut that thought short. There was no point in doubting his people without good evidence. Even if one of them was an elf.
“So you’re thinking that she got exposed to shifter factor when she was younger?” Luke asked. “Maybe even as a kid?”
“Exactly,” Chay agreed as he began to type, delving through the files that Annie had found. With her usual thoroughness, she’d pulled records from before the time window that he had requested from her.
The first flag was from her passport records. Before her work abroad, she’d lived in Germany for eighteen months as a kid.
Interesting. There were dozens of reasons she might be there, of course, but it most often meant ....
His hands flew across the keyboard. Yes, there it was. Her father was—had been—Army. Rangers, actually. She’d grown up all over the States, bumped from one base to another every few years. She was lucky that he’d only ever been stationed overseas once...or unlucky, seeing that jumping abroad was the first thing she’d done when she’d graduated from high school.
He searched for her father. Wallace Morland, Jr. Made it to lieutenant colonel before retiring with full honors after twenty years. Had a slightly above average number of awards and commendations to his name.
Now he was a swim coach at a public university, looking for another twenty years and a second pension, most likely. Good work, if you could get it.
She’d been a military brat, and she’d been dosed with military shifter factor. It couldn’t be coincidence. Could it? But how did a program that was reserved for the most secret, most elite groups in the armed forces end up exposing a kid to an experimental drug?
He quickly explained what he’d found to Luke. “I want a list of every place that her father was stationed from the time she was born,” Chay said. “And I want to know if there’s any evidence of any other unexpected panther shifters who might have been connected to them around the same time that she was there.”
“On it,” Luke said. “It’ll take a while. Lots of newspapers from back then aren’t digitized. And if they are, you’re talking scans from microfilm, OCR if you’re lucky.”
“I know,” Chay said. “Do your best.”
He glanced at the monitor that displayed Tara’s sleeping form. The woman moved restlessly in her sleep, her face creasing in a frown. No, her face was doing more than just creasing. It was shifting slightly toward panther and then back again. Chay stood up.
“I’m crashing. I’ll check your report when I wake up,” he said.
“It’ll be waiting for you,” Luke replied. “Can I call Annie back to help now? Or is she temporarily banned from the spook shop?”
“Call her back if she’ll come,” Chay said, crossing to the door to his quarters. “If she doesn’t want to, don’t force it. The last thing we need is for her to stir up trouble just because her nose is out of joint.”
“I hear and obey,” Luke said, giving an exaggerated salute.
“Thanks,” Chay said, and he turned off the video feed as he went inside the room.
By the time he made it to the bedroom, Tara was tossing and turning in the blankets, her body’s edges blurring as the panther came through. Chay bent quickly and touched her shoulder, and her movements instantly became less frantic, her bones less plastic under her skin.
He turned off the video monitors before stripping off his shirt for the sake of the skin-to-skin contact and sliding into the blankets next to her. He snugged the length of her curves against his body. She nuzzled against him, then stilled, her form settling back into its fully human shape as she fell into a deeper sleep.
Chay felt one definite step closer to finding an answer to what had happened to her. But even knowing how she’d been dosed didn’t make him any closer to saving her from the beast within. His mind circled around his galling powerlessness as the minutes ticked by and she slept, limp and oblivious, in his arms.
And only after a very long time did he dream.