“You sure he’s going to be okay?” Niall asked the elf, his tone dripping with suspicion.
“Of course.” Torrhanin sniffed.
“He’d better,” the bear shifter muttered.
Tara looked at the mind-net. It was connected to the internet, the elf had said. That meant that she could email her parents and her best friend Sylvie, who had been in the lecture with her when she’d had her first out-of-control shift and the panther in her had gone crazy. She could tell everyone she was all right—and she could make sure they were all right, too.
Chay was bent over the sink, noisily splashing water across his face, and everyone else in the room was distracted by him. In a few hours, he’d be fine, the elf had said. Even if the same thing happened to her, it’d be a small price to pay to finally contact her family.
Making a decision, she grabbed the glittering mind-net and plopped it down over her springy curls. Nothing happened except that Eddie Agosti’s attention was attracted by her movement, and his glance at her turned into a stare as his eyes widened at what she’d done.
“Beane,” he snapped.
Something in his tone must have alarmed Chay, because he turned from the sink with water still streaming from his face. And his expression of horror was the last thing that Tara saw before the net tightened around her head and she was plunged into a blue-streaked void.
She had no body, and yet she was falling, falling faster and faster into the void that was somehow both pitch-black and bursting with light. She tried to squeeze her eyes closed, but of course she had no real eyelids here, and she shut nothing out.
I’m like Alice, she thought giddily, thinking of the old Disney cartoon, falling and falling. Except I don’t know that I’ll ever land.
But Chay had, somehow. The internet. She was going to use the internet to contact her parents. She fixed the image of them firmly in her mind, her mother with her sandy hair, her father’s duskier complexion, and she repeated their names to herself, over and over.
Suddenly, out of the cacophony of light, there came a different kind of glimmer. Tara reached for it, and she found herself shooting out of the void toward a single bright point. Was it an email service, so she could contact her family? She hoped so, but what would that even look like here?
With an abruptness that made her stomach lurch, Tara found herself staring at a picture she had never seen before—her parents, hugging one another and holding a recent photo of her that had been printed off Instagram and framed.
It was an article, she realized, an article about them and about her. She didn’t read it. Instead, the entirety of it dropped into her head.
After the tragedy at William and Mary, Walter and Carla Morland struggle to make sense of the events that took their daughter Tara from them and were left with more questions than answers ....
The article went on and on, talking about their grief and those of the others whose friends and relatives had been injured or killed in the attack. She had known that she had killed Dr. Butros, but there was another, a guy whose face she vaguely recognized but whose name she hadn’t known, who had later died of his wounds. Of the wounds that she had caused him.
But he wasn’t the only one. Five others had been hurt. There were pictures of bandaged arms, students in hospital beds or on crutches. And Sylvie .... There was a picture of Sylvie, wearing a surgical dressing across one side of her face. Beautiful, beautiful Sylvie, whose straight blonde hair and model-perfect looks had always caused Tara a little jealousy.
I didn’t do that, she thought desperately even though Sylvie’s account had been dropped straight into her brain—her friend looking like she’d turned into a panther and catching her with her hind legs as she leaped away, throwing her into the deck with such force that she’d shattered her eye socket and required six hours of surgery to put it back together again.
“But they tell me that I was confused, that the panther actually killed Tara first,” Sylvie Norton said.
Tara could almost hear Sylvie’s voice say those words, and the deadness in her unbandaged eye told her that Sylvie didn’t believe even one of them. I didn’t do it, she thought desperately. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t really me ....
Except that it had been her. The panther was her, in her, and it had been her for as long as she could remember. She should have known that she was dangerous, that there was a ticking time bomb inside her own skin.
She tried to shove away the image of Sylvie’s ravaged face, of her parents’ grief, of all the statements of the witnesses of her savage attack. But she had no eyelids to close here, and their words swam in her head: animal, beast, monster.
The panther came roaring out of her head. It had nowhere to go here except Tara’s own mind, and it raged around it, screaming with fury—
Tara realized that the screams were coming from her own throat as the mind-net was ripped from her head and flung aside. She was in the center of a circle of people—the elf, the other men, and Chay, who was holding her against his chest.
“It’s all right,” he was saying. “It’s going to be all right.”
But it wasn’t going to be all right ever again. Tara’s throat was raw from screaming, but she shouted again as she shoved away from Chay, hard. He didn’t let go. But she didn’t care anymore. All she wanted was not to be—and the panther was there, ready to spring, ready to take her mind as she fled from her own self-awareness.
Her bones were changing even as Chay held her, yelling at her, begging her to hold on. But she didn’t want to hold on. There was nothing to hold on for. She’d destroyed her own life, hurt those closest to her, and she was going to keep on destroying the things she cared about most. Better to let go now, to give in to the beast and allow it to suffer the punishment that she knew that it deserved—that she deserved—while she ran away forever. Because she couldn’t fight it. Not forever. And it was better that she give up now than it come back and defeat her and hurt the people around her again.
And that was her very last thought before she surrendered to the panther, let go, and fell into the darkness beyond the edges of her own mind.
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Taken by the Panther – Book 3
Aethereal Bonds
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Tara Morland’s world was shaken the fateful, bloody day the panther rose up inside her, transforming her body and taking control. Chay Bane rescued her from the military installation in which she’d been imprisoned—only to take her to his own secret lair, where she is locked up until she can learn to tame the beast within. But her time is running out, because with each uncontrolled shift, she comes closer to losing herself forever.
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