Chay ducked back into the bathroom to brush his teeth and check his hair. The twists were starting to fray—he’d need to comb them out and twist them back again soon. He wasn’t vain about his hair, but it was his little rebellion against all his years following other people’s rules. Despite the six years that separated him from his life in the Navy, he still got a small spurt of satisfaction from breaking their rules.
“Got a toothbrush for me, too?” Tara asked from the doorway. She looked so completely normal and human. It was hard for him to believe that she was living under a death sentence.
And impossible for him to accept it.
“I forgot to order it,” he admitted, tapping through on his smart watch and doing just that. “Should be here in a couple of hours.”
“Couldn’t you just get it?”
He patted her ass on the way back into his bedroom. “Sure. But why would I?”
She pushed her hair behind one ear and wrinkled her nose at him. “So I don’t have to wait a couple of hours?”
“You’ll survive.”
“I’d like my own things,” she said. “My real own things, I mean. The stuff from my dorm. And my phone. I want to call my parents, tell them I’m okay. I haven’t spoken to them since my shift at school, and they’ll be worried.”
“Later,” Chay said. He couldn’t let her talk to her parents. Not when they thought she was dead. Not when they could tell her things about what she’d done that might make her wish that she was dead, too.
Chay led the way into the front room of his suite. Tara paused just inside the door, and he turned back questioningly.
“So this whole thing ....” Her wave encompassed both of them and, presumably, what they’d done over the last nine hours. “It wasn’t exactly subtle. What we were up to, I mean. At least for part of it,” she amended.
She didn’t look like the lost young woman who’d first looked up at him with confused green eyes. She looked comfortable in her own skin, intelligent, competent, if placed in a very difficult position without the resources with which to prevail.
And even more desirable than before, dammit.
“Not subtle,” he agreed.
“Your friends won’t be happy. I mean, they didn’t seem happy before, so ....”
“Don’t worry. They were mad at me, not you,” he said.
“Why? Because I can’t control my shifting yet?” She folded her hands across her chest.
“Something like that,” he said. Because they think you’re doomed. Because they think that this can’t end well.
She hadn’t shifted in over twelve hours. That was something, wasn’t it? When she first woke up, she hadn’t made it even an hour. Since that first uncontrolled shift, she hadn’t shifted again. That was progress.
But she’d nearly shifted half a dozen times since then, many of those in her sleep. And all it really took was one bad shift, one shift that went so far that she could never come back.
He slammed the doors down on those thoughts.
“It’s already been taken care of,” he said.
“Has it?” she asked. “It didn’t seem that way last night...or yesterday...or whenever it was that I was awake last.”
“Early this morning,” Chay provided. “Anyway, I dealt with it after you went to sleep, if you have to know.”
“Dealt,” she echoed. “So they’re not mad now?”
“Dealt is dealt,” he said firmly. “Come on. I’ve got work to do. And you’ve got a panther not to change into.”
“Okay,” she said in a voice that said it wasn’t okay at all, but she followed him to the door to the spook shop and stepped through it behind him.
The next shift was in—Niall and Seamus were there, along with Eddie Agosti, who was tinkering among the maze of white tables in the main part of the room.
The Mansfield brothers looked up as one, and Chay read the confusion on Tara’s face with amusement as he blinked at the two burly men. Liam, Niall, and Seamus were each two years apart in age, but they looked so much alike that they were at times mistaken for triplets.
“Tara, whether or not you remember it, you’ve met Eddie Agosti before,” Chay said. “He was there when we picked you up.”
“Afternoon.” The wolf shifter smoothed his black, slick-backed hair before turning back to his work.
Chay continued, “And those other two monsters here are Liam’s brothers, Seamus and Niall. Niall isn’t a spook, but he watches the monitors for us.”
The brothers nodded and grunted greetings, their faces inscrutable under their short-cropped beards.
“Hi,” Tara said to all three.
“Breakfast is in the fridge, and then you can amuse yourself with whatever you’d like,” Chay concluded.
“All right,” Tara said, in a tone that said it wasn’t all right at all. “And what are you going to be doing?”
“What I do every morning,” Chay said.
“Afternoon,” Agosti corrected.
Chay ignored him. “Put out fires.” He turned off the “do not disturb” flag on his smart watch—and instantly the screen flooded with messages. With a sigh, he sat down at his workstation and began sorting through them, firing off one response after another.
“Want coffee?” Tara called.
“Sure. Black,” Chay said, aware of the gazes of the Mansfield brothers boring into the side of his skull. “My mug’s the Zelda one. The plain ones and the ones with flowers don’t belong to anybody.”
A minute later, she crossed over with two mugs. “Here.”
“Thanks. New chair for you,” Chay said as he took his mug, amused to see that she’d had no trouble identifying it.
“Looks a lot better than yours,” she said, setting her mug down in front of it before crossing back to the kitchenette.
“They all look better than mine.” Chay forwarded six emails in rapid succession to the correct department heads. Then he read the title of an email from Torrhanin and stopped dead.
“Shiny,” he said. “Seamus, Torrhanin says he’s done it.”
“Really?” Seamus asked. “I’m going to have to see this. That’s like Matrix shit, there.”
“Yeah. He said he’s coming by with it...well, now, in fact.” Chay fired off an email telling the elf that he was ready.
“Coming by with what?” Tara asked, crossing the room with a plate of last night’s stir fry.
“His mind-net,” Chay said. Torrhanin had been promising it for several months, but he’d never told Chay that he was close to a working prototype.
She frowned as she dug into the stir fry. “I don’t know what that is.”
He grinned. “Neither does anyone else, but we’re dying to find out.”
“It sounds like a neural computer interface of some type,” Niall rumbled. “The best that I can make out. Not my area of interest, but even if it were, you wouldn’t catch me dead putting something on my head that’s going to muck with my brain.”
“You’re trying to reason with the guy who signed up to have shifter factor injected into his veins,” Agosti said. Like the Mansfield brothers, he was natural-born, and though he would never want to be anything else, he’d frequently expressed wonder at Chay undertaking the risk to become a panther shifter at eighteen.
“It’s supposed to be fast,” Chay said. “That’s what I care about. Speed. Working at the speed of thought.” Whatever distrust he had for the elf, Torrhanin knew what Chay would do the most to have—and had promised it to him on a silver platter.
That was the other problem with elves. When they made bargains, it was almost impossible to say no.
Niall just grunted, but if he’d intended to say something, it was interrupted by a knock on the door of the spook shop.
Chay glanced at the video feed to assure that it was Torrhanin before slapping the button to let him in. The elf stepped inside. Today, his tunic was silver embroidered with blue under his long robes. In his hands, he held a white velvet pillow, on which perched something that looked like a crown if Picasso had been into coronation wear. It was bright silver with blue elven gemstones, a thicker band running around the bottom edge and a crazy scribble of stiff wire forming a jewel-dotted dome above.
“Greetings, Beane,” the elf said deferentially.
“Afternoon,” Chay returned. “That’s it? Where’s the plug?”
“It’s interdimensionally powered,” Torrhanin said, setting the pillow in a clear space on the desk between a paper plate with pizza crust on it and a crumpled Coke can. He lifted the device almost reverently, offering it to Chay. “It’s currently synced with your own computer systems.”
Chay hesitated for a moment. Torrhanin had proven to be a valuable and trustworthy ally so far, but that didn’t mean that Chay fully understood, much less trusted, what his objectives really were in the symbiotic relationship they had. And the last time he’d jumped into an offer of superhuman powers, he’d ended up with way more than he’d bargained for.
“If I put this on, I’ll be able to take it off again, right?” he asked. “And it’s not going to scramble my brains for good?”
The elf did not smile, but Chay could hear the suppressed humor in his voice. “The effects are both safe and reversible. As soon as you take off the mind-net, you’ll be as you were before.”
Chay looked at the net, then at the elf. Torrhanin was standing in a room with no less than five deadly shifters. If he tried to pull anything, one of the others would tear the elf apart before he could get to the door.
Probably.
Did he trust the elf, or didn’t he? It really boiled down to that. That and Chay’s curiosity, which was probably far too strong for his own good. All his natural paranoia and caution got thrown to the wind when faced with something interesting enough.
Screw it.
“So I just put it on,” Chay said, turning it over in his hands.
“You might need to make adjustments with your hair,” Torrhanin said. “The sensors do not have to touch the scalp, but being close helps.”
Right. Well, here goes nothing ....
Chay placed it on his head, threading his twists through the gaps in the wires. The mind-net sat loosely on his head. Agosti was smothering a smile, and catching a reflection of himself on one of the blank monitors, he could see why.
“I look ridiculous,” he said. “And nothing’s happening.”
Then, without warning, the mind-net tightened, and the world blew up.