TYGER, TYGER

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

Christopher Golden’s story “Tyger, Tyger” begins a few months after the final Sookie novel. Quinn, my favorite weretiger, is having a very bad day, which promises to get much, much worse.

—

Quinn watched the speedometer, kept the needle pinned at the limit, and tried to stop his hands from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. He had punched in a classical station on his satellite radio that played mostly baroque music, a secret pleasure. He liked all sorts of music but prided himself on maintaining an even temperament, and when stress or anger threatened to get the better of him, the beautiful strings of some of those baroque arrangements soothed him.

Soothed the savage, he thought, with an expression that was half snarl and half grin. If someone else had said that to him, he would’ve been offended, but he had to be honest with himself. He was a full-blooded weretiger, after all. In the right circumstances, he had savagery to spare.

His cell phone rang. He’d stuck it into the console between the seats but had forgotten that it was linked into the car via Bluetooth, and now the number showed up on the little screen at the center of the dashboard. Quinn made his living as an event planner and the caller was a client.

He tightened his fingers on the wheel, knuckles going white as he waited for the ringing to cease. When it had, he reached into the console and plucked out the phone, then tried gamely to keep his eyes on the road as he powered it off and tossed it onto the seat beside him. No clients today.

Quinn steadied himself, then glanced down to see that he’d let the car creep up to nearly eighty miles per hour when the speed limit was sixty-five. As he eased off the pedal and the speedometer needle dipped, he spotted the nose of a Louisiana state police car ahead, half-hidden behind the supporting column of an overpass.

“Stay right there, my friend,” Quinn said as he drove past the police car, checking his speedometer again.

Sixty-eight miles per hour. The cop stayed on the side of the road. Good for you, Quinn thought. Good for both of us.

Not that he was in the habit of starting fights with police officers, but if there was ever going to be a day when it would be easy to rile the tiger in him, it would be today.

Ever since the world’s shifters had revealed their existence to the public, things had changed. When vampires had done it, fear and curiosity had raged, but the typical human expected to be able to look at a vampire and notice that he or she was something other than ordinary. It wasn’t that simple, but many humans comforted themselves with the idea that it could be. Now that the two-natured—beings who could shapeshift between a human form and that of an animal—had stepped into the light, human society was more unsettled than ever. There was virtually zero chance that your mailman could be a vampire . . . but could he turn into a wolf or a dog? A distinct possibility.

That unsettled the hell out of people.

Incidents of violence had begun on the first day. Though new laws protected his kind, Quinn had heard many stories of persecution. He didn’t worry for himself, but for his mother and his sister, Frannie, not to mention his girlfriend, Tijgerin, and their baby. He comforted himself with the knowledge that it was easier for weres to live among humans than it was for vampires. Most people had at least one two-natured friend or relative and never even knew it.

Today, his mother was foremost on his mind. Unlike vampires, Quinn’s people suffered the tribulations of aging, and as they grew old and infirm they needed to be looked after in a safe environment. Once, it had been necessary to hide them, to keep their true nature a secret. Now aging and ailing shifters were kept apart from their human counterparts purely to ensure that they did not put themselves or anyone else in peril.

Vicki Quinn had spent a long time in nursing homes specifically for the two-natured. She suffered delusions and sometimes violent schizophrenic behavior stemming from psychological trauma, but recently her condition had deteriorated further. When she had begun to experience deepening dementia, the doctors at her previous residence had recommended a move to Evergreen Manor, a newer facility that offered treatments that might slow the progression of her illness.

Quinn turned off the highway and followed dimly remembered directions that, minutes later, brought him along a narrow, tree-lined street where a black wrought-iron fence guarded the grounds of Evergreen. For the sake of the residents, the facility’s director would have said, to keep them from wandering off. But the fence was as much for the safety of the humans living near the property as for the patients. Either a werewolf with senile dementia or a pup going through the madness that sometimes gripped them during their teen years could do plenty of damage.

Tense and flushed with frustration, he gave his name to the guard at the booth and was waved through the gate. He said nothing to the guard about the circumstances of his visit but sensed the man’s uneasiness. Would he call ahead and alert the administration that a big, bald, pissed-off were had arrived? Quinn thought he might.

The grounds were a lovely, rolling green, with flowers around the base of each tree and around the Roman fountain at the center of the lawn. Quinn inhaled the many rich scents of the place, and it calmed him a bit. He was here now. They could dodge him on the telephone but they couldn’t ignore his physical presence. The time had come for his questions to be answered.

The home had a valet, but he ignored the service and parked the car himself. It tweeted as he thumbed the locking mechanism, and he headed for the ornate front steps without looking back.

“Good afternoon, sir,” a well-groomed young man said as Quinn walked through the door. He sat behind a desk, pompous and proper, as if he were a concierge instead of an ordinary clerk. “Can I help you?”

Quinn glanced around the marble lobby with its churchlike vaulted ceilings and studied the residents being slowly escorted here and there. He examined the faces of doctors and nurses and physical therapists and recognized none of them, which wasn’t a huge surprise, since he’d only visited his mother there twice before. To his knowledge, his sister, Frannie, who waited tables out in New Mexico, had never bothered.

“My name’s John Quinn,” he said. “I’m here to see my mother.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said with a broad smile. “And her name?”

“Quinn. You have a lot of Quinns here?”

The clerk—the little plastic tag on his chest identified him as Andrew—smiled more thinly. Even less convincingly than before.

“I don’t know, sir. Let me just look her up for you,” Andrew said, tapping away at his computer keyboard. After a moment, his eyes lit up. “Ah, yes, sir. According to her schedule she’s in physical therapy at the moment. I’ll call up and let them know you’re here, if you’d just like to take a seat.”

Quinn’s pulse thundered at his temples. He breathed deeply, rising to his full six and a half feet, and glared at the clerk. Women always seemed to love the purple of his eyes, but when he was angry they grew darker, almost black.

“You know, most days I’m as polite as can be,” he said, “but I won’t be taking a seat today.”

The clerk blinked nervously. “Sir?”

Quinn sniffed the air, breathed deeply again. He frowned as he glanced once more around the lobby. Then he stared at the desk clerk.

“You’re human.”

Andrew nodded vigorously. More blinking. “Yes, sir.”

“The old place was staffed by two-natureds. When I was at Evergreen last, the same was true here. Now I smell humans all over the place. What is going on?”

The clerk gave a sheepish shrug. “It’s becoming more and more common, Mr. Quinn. Ever since weres went public and piqued the curiosity of humans, we get volunteers. People are intrigued and want to help.”

Quinn snarled. “Gawkers. That’s what you’re talking about.”

“No, sir. Psychologists and nutritionists and orderlies and physician assistants, even a doctor or two.”

Quinn waved him away. “I want to see my mother, and I want to see her now. I’ve been calling for days and am constantly told she’s sleeping or in PT or in the bath or out on the grounds with her minders.”

“Bad timing, I suppose,” Andrew offered. “And again today, sir. But if you’ll take a seat, I’ll have my supervisor come down and speak with—”

Quinn brought his fist down on the desk hard enough that a cup of pens spilled over and the surface cracked, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the lobby.

“Bullshit!” he snapped. “I’m tired of the runaround. This is my mother we’re talking about. You people have a lot of explaining to do, but you can’t keep me from seeing her. You’re going to take me to her—”

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said from behind him.

Quinn spun to see a young, broad-chested security guard approaching. The guy unsnapped the holster on his hip and drew out a Taser gun.

“Please step away from the desk and put your hands behind your head.”

Quinn glared at him. “You must be joking. If you want to call the police, please do so. I’d like to speak with them myself. But I’m the wronged party here, kid, so you just stay where you are.”

“Sir, I’m not going to ask a second time,” the security guard said, coming toward him, ready for a fight, the Taser aimed at Quinn’s chest. He thrust the Taser forward, about to pull the trigger. Quinn snarled, grabbed his wrist, and slammed him against the wall, shaking the Taser from his hand.

“Anyone else want to try keeping me from my mother?” he growled.

The tick-tock of high heels echoed off the linoleum and Quinn glanced over to see a tall, shapely woman approaching. She had ginger hair and wore a well-tailored skirt and jacket combination with old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses.

“Not at all, Mr. Quinn,” she said. “I’m Dr. Sondra Delisle, the new director of resident services. I’m sorry for the delay and I understand your frustration. Your mother’s in our newly renovated dayroom with some of her friends. If you’d like to follow me, I’ll take you to her.”

“I thought she was in physical therapy,” Quinn said, glancing at the clerk.

Dr. Delisle smiled thinly. “The therapist is out today. I’m sorry, Mr. Quinn, have we given you some reason to distrust us?”

Quinn stared at her, heart pounding, teeth still gritted but feeling foolish. He released the security guard, happy he hadn’t broken the guy’s wrist.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m usually in better control of my temper.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Delisle replied. “A man only has one mother. Come this way.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Quinn tried to give her his most charming smile but thought it must have come off as awkward. He shoved his hands into his pockets as if they were just as embarrassed by their actions as he was and accompanied her down a corridor, up a short set of steps, and then into another side corridor, where their footfalls echoed oddly off the walls. He frowned as he listened to their steps, surprised that he couldn’t hear the voices of the residents in the dayroom yet.

“How far is the dayroom?” he asked.

“Just at the end of the hall and through a set of doors. Wait till you see it. The residents have all sorts of games, computers for their own use, a separate reading room . . . and the upgrades continue. We’re putting in a new gym, specially tailored to the needs of our less able residents . . .”

Quinn inhaled, frowning deeply. He smelled something unpleasant. In a nursing home, that in itself was far from strange, but this was something else. A musk. A pheromonal scent he hadn’t expected to find here—true fear. Not the confusion of madness or the dark dread of illness and death, but something inching closer to terror.

As they reached the end of the hall, the double doors swung open. Quinn started to back away, but too late, as a man stepped through with a rifle aimed at him and pulled the trigger, firing three shots.

Quinn tried to throw himself out of the way, but the corridor left little room to move. He hit the wall and slid to the floor, twisting to look at the darts that stuck out of his side and leg.

Tranquilizers.

Quinn roared, lurching up at Dr. Delisle. “You bitch,” he slurred. “Where’s my mother?”

The man shot him with two more darts.

“You’ll see her soon,” Dr. Delisle said with a beatific smile, as blackness swam in at the edges of Quinn’s vision.

Then he was out.

He did not dream.

Heavily sedated, his muddled thoughts buried under a thick blanket of drugs, Quinn sensed consciousness somewhere above him, as if his mind were a deep lake and he had begun to drown. Again and again he swam toward the surface of the lake, toward the world and reality, toward the tangible thing that meant awake. Time after time his fingers broke the surface and more than once he managed to get a sip of the air of awareness before being dragged down again into the gray, muzzy depths of numb nothingness. In those moments when he strove to wake, he felt panic and desperation and—beneath all of it, at the very bottom of the lake of his muffled thoughts—rage.

How long had he been out when his eyes fluttered open?

Quinn didn’t know.

What he did know was hunger.

An IV drip hung by the bed, maybe keeping him sedated but also hydrated. He blinked and tried to move but his body felt as if it weighed twenty tons, and at the same time as if it weighed nothing and he might just float away.

“Hello, Mr. Quinn,” a voice said, gentle and soothing as a caress.

His head lolled to one side, barely in his control. Dr. Delisle stood over him, smiling and lovely, her ginger hair framing her face. Quinn tried to reach for her, intent on breaking her neck, but his wrists were bound and he heard the clank of metal restraints. Normally he could have broken free, but the drugs sapped his strength just as they sapped rational thought.

His vision swam and faded for a moment, but he took a deep breath and stared at Dr. Delisle, forcing himself to see her clearly.

“You have the prettiest eyes,” she said to him. “I’ve never seen that shade of purple before. But then, you’re not just anyone, are you, Mr. Quinn?”

“Mmffhh,” he said. All he could manage.

“I’ll bet you’re hungry. You must be. You’ve had a long couple of days.”

Quinn’s throat felt dry. His lips were chapped and he ached all over.

“My mother . . .” he managed to groan. “If . . . you . . .”

“Hush,” Dr. Delisle said, and her smile vanished. She stepped back from his bed. “Your mother is an uncooperative bitch, Mr. Quinn. She has been unwilling to give us what we wanted, but that’s all right. We knew that eventually you’d come to look in on her and we’d have a fresh opportunity.”

Darkness pulsed at the edges of his vision, exhaustion and hunger and the drugs all dragging at his thoughts. He shook his head to clear it and saw the three men who were in the room with them. Two were big guys with guns, one scarred and bearded with the air of a hunter, and the other neatly groomed and hollow-eyed, a soldier or mercenary. Quinn had met his share of hunters and mercenaries before. The third man wore a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a green tie with a diamond stickpin. He had silver hair and smelled like money.

“Enough,” said the man who smelled like money. “There’s no value to mystery here, Dr. Delisle. Can he understand me?”

The man had a slow drawl Quinn thought hailed from Alabama, but what did he know? He was doped to the gills.

“I’m not sure how much he’ll remember, but he’ll understand what you’re saying,” Dr. Delisle said.

“Kill you,” Quinn growled low in his chest.

“See?” Dr. Delisle observed, smiling. Pretty as a picture.

“Mr. Quinn,” the man said, “I’ll give it to you plainly. I represent a . . . consortium . . . of private military contractors who have been attempting to utilize the creatures referred to as ‘the two-natured’ for combat. Combat for hire, essentially.”

Quinn’s fingers opened and closed. He felt his skin bristle, felt his nails lengthen, and he snarled, thinking that he had begun to change. But when he ran his thick tongue over his teeth, vision blurry, he realized that he had not changed at all. Perhaps his teeth were a bit sharper, but he was still human. He could not focus enough to will himself to shift.

Go to hell, he thought, and tried to say. It came out a groan.

“There were two ways to go about it,” the man went on. “We could recruit existing weres or try to create our own. Recruitment bore some fruit initially, werewolves and a handful of panthers, even two bears, but few of those who willingly signed on to our program had any prior military experience. Not good with authority outside their own packs.

“Creating our own two-natured has been more reliable in that we can draft volunteers from a pool of existing Special Forces military personnel, enlisting our recruited weres to bite the volunteers, passing on their nature. As you know, that process can be long and frustratingly unpredictable.”

“My mother,” Quinn managed, glaring at the man, thinking about the ways he might kill him if only he could clear his mind . . . and control his limbs.

He blinked, realizing that he had begun thinking a bit more clearly, that Dr. Delisle must have cut back on the sedatives feeding into his system. Quinn bared his teeth but purposefully did not focus on his visitor, this military contractor. He didn’t want the man to know that he had begun to regain his focus.

“It might take being bitten three times for an ordinary human to become two-natured, or it might take considerably more,” the man said with a thin, humorless smile. “But then, I don’t have to tell you that, do I, Mr. Quinn?”

The were population was hardly plentiful. Only the first child born of a coupling between two full-blooded shapeshifters would be two-natured and able to shift at will. Any further offspring would be human, with maybe a little enhancement. One could become a shapeshifter by being bitten, but the bitten weres could not manage the full transformation from human to animal, only something in between, and could only change during the three nights of the full moon.

“Soldiers who’ve been bitten would be perfectly suitable for our needs,” the man went on, “if their ability to change form weren’t tied to the full moon. That’s a bit of a handicap, don’t you think? Yes, the bitten have their uses . . . but my employers are thinking more long term, planning for the next generation.”

The man bent over and peered into Quinn’s face. The smell of garlic and onions on his breath was wretched.

“In the meantime, though,” the man said, “we’ll have to make do.”

“I want to . . . see my mother,” he managed to rasp, his head lolling slightly. His heart thumped in his chest and he willed adrenaline to surge, anything to give him the power to kill this son of a bitch, but chemistry defeated him.

“And you will!” the man pronounced. “All we ask is for a bit of indulgence from you in the meantime.”

“You want me to . . .” Quinn began, blinking and shaking his head, forcing his lips to form words. “Want me to go to war for you? Not a . . . not a chance.”

Dr. Delisle tutted and came nearer to the bed. “We’ve done a thorough background on you, Mr. Quinn. We know you’d never be a willing recruit. But you’re a weretiger, sir. You and your mother are the only weretigers we’ve encountered.”

“You see,” the garlic-breathed man said, “a small squad of soldiers who could transform themselves into tiger-men—even if only one night a month—would be invaluable to a mercenary force. Our clients would pay millions for the efficiency a kill team like that would achieve.”

Dr. Delisle sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on Quinn’s leg, as gentle as a lover, but her smile might as well have been carved from ice.

“We have the trained mercenary volunteers, Mr. Quinn,” she said. “All you have to do is bite them.”

Quinn felt a terrible, dawning horror. “Where . . . where is my mother?”

The man gave him a lopsided smile. “Ah, the lovely Mrs. Quinn. You’re wondering why we didn’t just get her to do the job for us. The mad old thing’s crazy, after all, so you’d think she’d be snapping away at every orderly, never mind people we’d actually want her to bite. She had a history of nipping at the staff at her last residence, so you’d assume, wouldn’t you?”

His smile turned to a sneer. “But no. She flatly refused. No matter what we did to her.”

Quinn roared, straining against his bonds, and the man jerked back a step. Dr. Delisle stayed where she had seated herself, stroking his leg.

“What did you—?”

“She’d already lost many of her teeth,” the man said. “It shocked us all when she smashed the ceramic edge off her bathroom sink and used it to break the rest. Just to thwart us. She’s mentally unstable, your mother . . . but she’s still got enough of her wits about her to be quite the bitch when she—”

Quinn roared again. This time he could feel his teeth elongating and the familiar ripple on his skin as fur began to sprout.

Dr. Delisle jumped from the bed. “Let me adjust that,” she said nervously, rushing toward the IV.

“Not yet!” the man snapped. He crossed to the door, opened it, and stuck his head out. “Bring her in!”

Heart full of fear and worry for his mother, who had already endured so much cruelty in her life, Quinn strained at his bonds, trying to see out into the corridor.

The man leaned over and whispered into his ear.

“She’s no good to us now, you understand,” the man said. “Except as leverage.”

Quinn heard his mother yelp in the hallway, then heard her roar, crying out without words. Savage and desperate. The door banged open fully and three men dragged the tigress in, each using a control pole that ended with a noose around her neck. The fur of her muzzle was matted with blood and her shoulder had an open gash. They surrounded her, forcing her through the door and into the room.

“Let her go!” Quinn cried.

When the tiger heard his voice she swung her big head around and stared at him, just for a moment giving up her fight against her keepers. All the breath seemed to go out of her and she changed before his eyes, slowly and painfully, bones shifting and fur withdrawing . . . and then she was just his mom, covering her naked body with her arms as the three men glared at her, using the control poles to make certain she couldn’t attack them.

“Baby boy,” she breathed.

Quinn slumped against the bed, no longer struggling against his restraints. An abyss of despair opened up within him. He turned toward the man, tongue still thick, thoughts still blurred. I’m going to kill you, he thought. But those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.

Instead, what he said was, “Tell me . . . what you want me to do.”

The next time he woke, he was in chains. Better safe than sorry, they told him. The man with the garlic breath had a name, as it turned out—Bartholomew Teague—but Quinn saw him only rarely. Teague and Dr. Delisle kept him drugged despite his acquiescence, and the days blurred into nights. Doctors came and went, some with their faces hidden behind masks. They took blood and tissue samples. Orderlies brought him food, gave his chains just enough drag so that he could feed himself, and changed his bedpan. On the first day, when a nurse woke him by roughly inserting a catheter, he clawed her arm purely by accident. He didn’t see that nurse again.

There were five volunteers—four men and a woman, each of them dead-eyed, stone-faced soldiers whom Quinn wanted to hate. Instead, he marveled at their courage. To put out their arms or bare their shoulders and willingly allow him—half man and half tiger in those moments—to bite into their flesh, knowing that he could have shifted further and snapped his jaws shut, taking the limb or the shoulder completely off . . . that was impressive. Not that he respected them. Those four men and that one woman knew that he was a captive, that whatever he did was done under duress, but they cared nothing for the distinction. He admired their courage and wished them dead, all at the same time.

For his mother’s sake, he would not harm them any more than Teague wanted them harmed.

Almost constantly, Quinn pondered the question of how long it would take before his half sister, Frannie, or his girlfriend, Tijgerin, would wonder why they had not heard from him. Frannie had started a new and busy life with her husband in New Mexico and Tij was in seclusion, as was the custom of weretiger women when they had recently given birth. Tij intended to raise their son in secrecy, and though it hurt his heart not to see his child, Quinn had acceded to Tijgerin’s wishes out of love for her and for the sake of the baby.

His clients would have noticed his absence fairly quickly, but when he did not return their calls or appear for events, they would be more likely to contact the parent company of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events than the police.

A prisoner, he slept. Sometimes the supply of drugs they were feeding him would run thin and his thoughts would crystallize enough for him to put his will into devising an escape, but he could not conceive of one that did not leave either himself or his mother—or both of them—dead.

So Quinn obeyed. It killed him to do it, made him strain against his bonds and roar at the ceiling in the middle of the night, but he obeyed. The drugs made it seem almost acceptable, blunted the edges of his hatred enough that submission began to seem a strategy instead of a defeat. Other times he screamed his throat raw demanding to see his mother, but they would never bring her back to visit him.

He bit the soldiers on Teague’s command and they bled, and then he ate and he slept, trying not to wonder where they would be sent when his bites transformed them. Whom they might kill, these children of his violation.

The irony was not lost on him. It sickened him. Once, many years before, his mother had been raped by a group of men and she had lost her mind. His mom had never been the same again. Now dementia had crept in to add insult to that injury, and a new group of tormentors had torn down all the reassurances she had built up over the years to persuade herself that those terrible men were not still out there, waiting for her.

Quinn would endure whatever torture, perform whatever task was asked of him, if only to protect his mother from any further pain or indignity.

One morning, after he had lost track of the days, the clank of the door latch made him open his eyes. His mind had gone sluggish, just like his limbs. It felt like thoughts and muscles were both trapped deep in thick mud. His mouth hung open and he felt drool on his stubbled cheek and for the first time since his captivity, instead of fury, he felt shame.

“Mr. Quinn,” Teague said, “you’ve been holding out on us.”

Quinn wished he could kill him with a glance. He stared hate at Teague, thinking the man would smile and cajole and make light of that hatred, as he always did. But there were no smiles from Teague today.

“Did you hurt her?” Quinn asked, his voice a rasp, his lips curling back as he thought about how deeply his teeth would bite into Teague’s flesh and bone if he could only get the man close enough.

Teague arched an eyebrow. “Your dear old mama? Her condition is unchanged. But she has been chatty lately, the old dear. Her mind drifts, as you know. This morning she mistook me for some old acquaintance or another. Maybe the accent triggered some precious memory. All she wanted to do was boast about her children, about her beautiful daughter and her handsome son, the successful entrepreneur.”

Quinn blinked, trying to make sense of Teague’s demeanor.

“I told you we were thinking long term, Quinn,” the man said slowly. “About the next generation. I told you that full-bloods were more useful to us. That mother of yours might be a few clowns short of a circus, but her little episode this morning has more than made it worth my while to keep her breathing.”

In the deep mud of Quinn’s brain, a thought began to form. A terrible, terrible thought.

“No,” he rasped.

Now Teague smiled. “Oh, yes. Congratulations, Mr. Quinn. Mama told us you’re a new daddy.”

The smile slid away, vanishing slowly until Teague looked feral.

“You will tell me where to find this infant, Mr. Quinn. In return, I will not order my people to torture your mother. I will not order them to kill her. I will not order them to torture you. Your son will be raised well, if strictly, and he will grow to be a great warrior—in the service of the highest bidder.”

Quinn stared death at him.

“Tell me, and you will all live,” Teague said. “Even your son and his mother.”

“You would have to kill me,” Quinn snarled. “And you would have to kill his mother.”

“You drive a hard bargain, but okay. We’ll kill you and we’ll kill your wife, or whatever she is. But your mother will live.”

“No, I . . .” he mumbled, fighting the effects of the drugs. “You think I . . . No. You will never touch my child. Never see my child. Even I do not know where he is.”

Thank you, Tij, he thought. Thank you so much for your insistence upon tradition.

Teague actually laughed. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

For several seconds they only glared at each other, and then Teague threw up his hands in frustration.

“All right. Honestly, I hoped it could be done simply, but it isn’t as if I expected you to just tell me, even with all the ugly things my people will do to your mother.”

“Don’t—”

Teague shook his head. “Be serious, Quinn. I have a job to do. You haven’t left me any choice.”

They made no attempt to torture Quinn himself—at least not physically. Teague had to know that no amount of physical agony would have persuaded him to willingly surrender his infant son. Instead, the man in charge was as cruel as his word. That afternoon, they tapered off the sedative drip just enough so that he could clear many of the cobwebs from his mind. He still couldn’t focus enough to make a full transformation, but he could watch as they brought his mother into the room with the same control poles. They humiliated her, spat on her, and kicked her. She was not as sedated as he had been during his weeklong haze, but they had drugged her enough that she could not fight back as they cut her skin.

Quinn roared at first. In time, he wept. When Teague brought in an electric branding iron of the sort ranchers used for cattle, he hurled himself against his bonds. The chains clanked and strained and he heard the creak of metal stressed to its limit, and one of Teague’s men chambered a shotgun round and aimed at his mother’s face.

“Sit back, Mr. Quinn,” Teague said. “Sit back or her life ends now.”

“Do it, then!” his mother roared, whipping her head up to face the shotgun.

Quinn held his breath, staring, the little boy he had once been crying out inside at the sight of his mother tormented . . . again. Images cascaded through his mind of the night years ago when she had been beaten and raped . . . the night he’d killed the men who had done that to her. He had vowed then never to allow her to come to harm again.

“Mom,” he said.

Perhaps she heard a hint of surrender in his voice. Quinn didn’t know where his girlfriend and their baby were living, but he had his suspicions. He could tell Teague what he knew just to stop his mother’s anguish and then wait for an opportunity. Figuring out where Tij was and actually finding her were two different things. Speaking now would spare his mother and buy him time. He could escape somehow, kill Teague . . .

“Stop!” he shouted.

His mother whipped her head up and met his gaze. Despite whatever sedatives they had given her, the fog of madness and growing dementia had cleared. Her eyes were vivid purple, almost like his own, and brightly alert. Perhaps pain had given her clarity.

“Not a word, boy,” she told him. “I’ll suffer any pain to keep that baby safe. Death for me now would be victory. Don’t take that from me.”

Quinn’s blood ran cold and he felt his heart go still. He exhaled and eased back down onto the bed, giving his chains a rest as warm blood ran from his wrists and ankles where he had strained against the metal.

Teague saw the moment pass between them. As mother and son made peace with whatever came next, the man screamed out his own rage, so much more savage than Quinn had ever been. He knew now that he would never get what he wanted from them.

“Enough!” Teague snapped. He turned on his men. “Take the bitch out of here.”

Quinn watched him in silence. No taunts. No threats. No pleas.

“You will give me what I want,” Teague told him before he followed the torturers out, not waiting for a reply.

When he was alone again, Quinn kept working at his bonds. The blood from his wounds lubricated the shackles, and he thought that might be enough to help him slip free. But then an orderly came in and turned up the flow of drugs into his IV. He thrashed, attempting to tear the needle loose, but in seconds he had drifted into darkness again.

When he was allowed to emerge from the narcotic fog, the torturers had returned. There were no control poles this time. No nooses. Such measures were not necessary for an ordinary human, a defenseless woman.

Like his sister, Frannie.

Wide-eyed with terror, Frannie had fresh bruises on her face and neck. The left side of her mouth was swollen and her lip had been split. Blood trickled from a cut just above her eyebrow on the same side. They had her on her knees, these men, one with a shotgun aimed at her head and the others only waiting.

“John?” she whispered.

His little sister, now a grown woman, happily married and living her peaceful human life. Until now.

Hatred seethed in Quinn’s heart. The tiger awoke.

Teague waited nearly ten minutes before entering the room, perhaps purposely giving him that time to contemplate what came next.

“You don’t need to say a word,” Quinn told him. “Just listen. I have an idea.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Frannie said unhappily, staring at him with the sad eyes that had always been able to change his mind and heart.

The thrum of the airplane’s engines created a constant white noise around them, and the pressurized air in the cabin made his ears feel as if they were about to pop. Quinn sat in his seat, shackles on his wrists. They were overkill—the men with the guns knew he wouldn’t try anything as long as his sister’s life was in peril. That was why they had brought Frannie with them in the first place.

The private jet had eight rows with a single seat on either side of the central aisle. Quinn sat about halfway down the left side of the plane with his sister in the seat in front of him. Across the aisle were three gun thugs, one adjacent to each of the Quinn siblings and a third one row up, just for good measure—three killers in a row.

“Do you really think this is somehow your fault?” he asked, frowning. “You didn’t get me into this, Fran. You’re here because of me.”

The man sitting across from Quinn raised the gun from his lap and aimed it at him. “Shut up.”

Frannie had been half turned so she could talk quietly with her brother, but now she slid around to face straight ahead, like a schoolgirl who’d been scolded.

Quinn forced himself to exhale his rage, to stay calm. Even in shackles, he could have killed the man in seconds, gun or no gun. Perhaps he would be shot, but he thought the odds were with him. Trouble was, the two guys who were covering Frannie would shoot her instantly. He’d never be able to disarm them all before they killed her.

Quinn glanced at the man to his right, at the gun resting on his lap.

“You know,” he said, “you’re going to have to take these cuffs off when we get there. No point in keeping me like this.”

The man gave him a sidelong glance, almost a sneer. “I’ve got my orders, man. Just like you. We’ll both follow them and maybe everyone comes out of this alive.”

Quinn grunted. “Maybe.”

The guard in Frannie’s row turned to stare back at Quinn. “You gonna make a move? Are you that stupid?”

“I won’t endanger my sister’s life.”

The man smiled thinly. The one guarding Quinn seemed all business, but this one took sadistic pleasure in their circumstances. The urge to twist his head off was strong. Quinn inhaled again and caught the scent of fear. Remarkably it came not from Frannie but from the final guard, the man in the row ahead of Frannie’s. He glanced back nervously, clearly terrified of being in an enclosed space with a weretiger.

You’re the smartest one, Quinn thought.

“I really am sorry,” Frannie said quietly.

The guards all glanced over at her. The one across the aisle from Quinn seemed about to object, but then he settled down, perhaps deciding that he no longer cared, that conversation between brother and sister would not change the outcome.

“You didn’t put me here,” Quinn said, his voice a low growl. “That bastard Teague did this.”

“Teague forced your hand,” Frannie agreed, “but you suggested this setup to protect Mama and me, and the baby.”

Quinn said nothing. He would never blame Frannie or his mother for the cruelty, greed, and savagery of other people. Faced with the threat of harm to his family, or the nightmare of his boy being enslaved to murderous combat like some ancient gladiatorial beast, he had made a different offer to Teague—Quinn would become the weapon they sought. They didn’t have to wait twenty years for his son to be their tiger-warrior; he would serve them now, go anywhere and kill anyone as long as they abandoned any effort to take and use his son, and as long as they left his mother and sister alone.

They had kept him in a cell for more than another week, only lightly drugged and with the threat that if he attempted to escape, Frannie and his mother would die. As the days passed, he had realized that they were waiting for the full moon, thinking that he would be stronger then, and that he would be less able to control his own ferocity. On those counts, they had been correct.

Quinn glanced out the window of the plane. The sky had begun to darken as they hurtled toward the horizon, the clouds sifting away below them. Soon they would fly into nightfall and the moon would shine.

“I don’t even know where you’re taking me,” he said.

“A place where the people won’t obey, and the tyrant who rules wants to set an example. The company is being paid very well for your services.”

Frannie had been brought along as a reminder of what would happen if he did not fulfill his promise. Teague’s employers had not tried to recruit Quinn initially because they did not believe they could count on his cooperation even if he agreed, but that was before they had learned of the existence of his son. This assignment would be a test run. If he made one wrong move, disobeyed a single order, they would kill Frannie on the spot and begin anew the search for Tij and the baby. The guard in the row ahead of Frannie’s had a massive tranquilizer gun—they would kill his sister but keep Quinn alive, drugged and enslaved.

“In the future,” Teague had said, “I don’t think we’ll need your sister to go along. But this first time, having her with us might help you focus.”

The future, Quinn thought, jaw tight as he hung his head and clenched his fists. I am their killer, forever. He studied the curls of his sister’s hair that stuck out beside her seat.

So be it, he thought, sighing deeply. Whatever it takes.

“John?” Frannie said quietly, turning again in her seat so she could see him.

The guards all glanced warily at her. The one across from Quinn kept watching, but the other two looked away.

“It’s getting dark,” Frannie rasped. It sounded as if her voice were full of emotion. “Whatever they’re going to have you do, it’ll be soon.”

“I guess.”

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Quinn frowned. “I’m not going to die tonight, Fran. I’ll be back. Tell me then.”

“It has to be now. There’s a reason I haven’t visited Mama in a while. A reason I haven’t seen you in months. Something I’ve been dealing with.”

The guard across from Quinn glanced away, apparently sensing a moment of intimacy between brother and sister. It seemed he had decided to allow it.

“Go on,” he said.

“Her mind . . . You know how she gets,” Frannie said, an angry furrow on her brow. Her chest rose and fell and she gritted her teeth as she tried to keep that anger in. “I tried to visit her regularly, tried to lift her spirits, but sometimes she would barely know me. She’d be lost in some awful memory or just confused, and if I tried to touch her, she’d lash out.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn said thoughtfully, studying her, wondering at the source of the anger he saw. “I know I should have visited more. It’s been a complicated year.”

Her left hand gripped the side of her seat as she peered back at him. Her hair hung down, veiling part of her face, but her eyes glinted with dark light.

“You saw that she’d knocked out some of her teeth?” Frannie rasped, voice hitching, lowering her gaze.

Quinn frowned. They had told him that Mama had knocked out the rest of her teeth, but that she’d been missing many of them before that.

“Yes.”

“She started that because when she was lucid, when the madness and the growing dementia retreated, she would realize what she’d done.”

“What had she done?”

Frannie’s upper lip curled back and she practically snarled the next sentence.

“Sometimes,” his sister said, “Mama would bite me.”

Quinn went cold. His breath caught in his chest. “How many times did this happen?”

Outside the plane, it had grown dark. The full moon shone brightly through the oval windows.

His sister glanced up at him with tiger’s eyes.

“Enough,” she growled, as her teeth began to lengthen and sharpen and elegantly striped fur began to push slowly through her skin.

The thug in Quinn’s row noticed first.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, raising his gun as his eyes went wide.

He aimed at Frannie, and that was his mistake—taking his focus off the man he was supposed to be guarding.

Quinn lunged across the aisle at superhuman speed, shattering his handcuffs as he slammed the gunman against the inner wall of the plane, gripped him with hands beginning to sprout their own fur, and broke his neck. In a death twitch, the man’s finger pulled the trigger on his gun but the dart punched into the floor and lodged there.

By the time Quinn twisted around to go after the others, still only beginning to change, Frannie had killed the man with the cruel smile. She lifted her head—half human and half tiger, only able to achieve that partial transformation, like other bitten weres—and her muzzle was soaked with the gunman’s blood.

The third man—the frightened one—threw his gun on the seat cushion and raised his hands in surrender, backing up the aisle toward the pilot’s cabin.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said, voice quavering. “Please, just don’t—”

Brother and sister roared in unison and a jet of urine streamed down the man’s leg, soaking his pants.

In the thrall of the full moon, Frannie had no control over her rage. She killed him there, in the aisle, blood soaking into the thin airplane carpeting.

Quinn halted his transformation and willed himself to revert to human. He felt the full moon’s sway but had spent his life mastering it.

“Frannie,” he said.

She glanced up from the dead man, chunks of his flesh in her jaws, tiger eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

“Stay here,” Quinn said, moving past her, stepping over the dead man. “Do you hear me? Stay here while I go and talk to the pilot.”

He thought of Teague and Dr. Delisle and of the things they had done to his mother—the things they had threatened to do to his wife and son.

Just before he banged on the cockpit door, Quinn glanced back at Frannie. He had never wanted this for her, never wished this life upon her, and he knew that it had never been her desire. Yet he could not help feeling a deeper love for her now. They had always been brother and sister, but now they were a different kind of kin, connected not only by their own blood but by the moon, and the blood they had spilled.

“We’re going back,” Quinn promised.

His sister, her lovely orange and black fur dappled with blood, purred contentedly and went back to her meal.