Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) (8 page)

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.

T
ara didn’t know how much later it was when she came awake again. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, her limbs sluggish and heavy, and the panther in the back of her head was growing restless. She wondered how long she’d slept. It didn’t feel like nearly long enough.

Tension flowed into her body as her dreams came back to her—nightmare after nightmare about what had happened and, worse, what might happen next. The dream about ripping that nosy, snippy fox shifter limb from limb was the most pleasant of the bunch. And no matter whom it featured, when dismemberment counted as one of her better dreams, Tara would confidently label it a rough night.

Reluctantly, she peeled her eyes open—only to find herself staring at the very well-defined contours of a handsome chest.

Oh.

She registered the pressure of the arms around her, the warmth of the long body—which was, she realized, wearing some kind of soft pants, which covered the leg that was nestled quite comfortably between her thighs.

She was acutely aware that she was still wearing nothing at all.

Tara tipped her head back to discover chocolate brown eyes looking down at her.

“You’re awake this time,” Chay said.

This time. Tara remembered her chaotic dreams.

“I didn’t keep you from sleeping, did I?” she asked, chagrined.

“Why would you think that?” he said, such an obvious deflection that Tara didn’t even bother to retort.

“I was...shifting in my sleep, wasn’t I?” she asked. “Trying to, I mean. I kept dreaming that I was a panther again. Really a panther. Not like the panther was in my head with me but that I’d become her. It,” she corrected, wanting to distance herself from the lingering shadows of her nightmares.

“You didn’t shift. That’s what’s important,” Chay said.

She could feel his voice in the rumble in his chest against her body. Her naked body. The intimacy of their position was impossible for her to ignore, and from the insistent hardness against her thigh, neither could he. She freed one of her arms, which had been trapped between them, and put a hand on his shoulder. It didn’t even cover half the bulge of muscle there.

“I didn’t shift because you were here,” she said. “Holding me. Is that the plan, then? You’ll just...hold me forever?” She could feel the panther just waiting for a chance to break through.

“No. Only until you learn to control your shifting,” he said lightly.

She searched his eyes for the source of confidence behind his words, hoping it wasn’t just bravado. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to do that. When she—it—comes out, it wins. Every time. You can send it back, but otherwise, I just have to wait until she feels like leaving again. I’ve never won against her. And I don’t know how. You might as well be asking me to learn to fly.”

“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Tara reached inside her own mind and tried to find something, anything that she might be able to use to fend the panther off if she came back again. But it was like looking for weapons in an empty room. “How long did it take you before you could win?”

She saw the pain in Chay’s dark eyes, and her stomach sank even before he spoke. Because she knew the answer in his reaction. And it held no hope for her.

“I never lost,” he said. “Not fully. For minutes together at first. But I always beat him back in the end.”

“What about the others?” she asked, hardly trusting her voice to speak. “Annie and Liam and Luke. What about them?”

“Luke is the only one of that group who isn’t natural-born,” Chay said.

“So what about him? And the others who aren’t natural-born? What about them?” she pushed.

“They all won, too,” he said. “They can lose themselves at times. Any shifter can. But in the end...the human always wins.”

“But not for me,” Tara whispered. “When I turned the first time, I shifted back because I got knocked out. And the second time and third times, I shifted because the panther decided to let me go. She...stepped back. I’ve never fought her off and won. What does that mean, Chay?”

“It depends on who you ask.” His arms tightened around her.

“What would most people say?” she pressed.

It was a very long time before he answered. “That you’re already lost. That, at best, I’m delaying the inevitable. At worst, I’m torturing you by not letting you go sooner and putting you out of your misery, and I’m deluding myself.”

Tara blinked back the tears that threatened to run over. She’d never been the pity-party type before, but then again, she’d never been told that she was terminal. “And what would you say?” she asked around the lump in her throat.

“That you’ll find a way. Somehow. We’ll figure it out, or maybe, Torrhanin will, or something,” he said.

“Why didn’t you just lie to me?” she asked.
Dammit.
One tear escaped her eye, overflowing down her cheek and making a pathway for another. “Why are you telling me the truth? No one at that Air Force base was ever going to tell me the truth, even if they’d let me wake up for more than a few minutes at a time.”

“I’ve done enough to hurt you already. I can’t lie to you, too.”

Those words just made the tears come more quickly, and Tara turned her head to the side. But Chay caught her chin, tilting her head back, and he softly kissed the tears away.

“Hush, now, bae girl,” he said, his lips so close to her skin that they brushed across it as he spoke. “It’ll be all right. You’ll make it right.”

She laughed through her tears. “Why do you call me that?”

He pulled back enough to meet her eyes. “I guess...I heard it in a song. Or maybe scrolling through Twitter. Or Instagram.”

“Snooping on people, you mean. Like you’ve snooped on me. Because you’re a...a spook,” she said, remembering the word.

“Yeah, that,” he said.

“Because I don’t think ‘bae girl’ is actually a thing,” she said. “Bae, sure. But not bae girl.”

He blinked, and for a fraction of a second, he looked a little offended. Then he blinked again, and it was gone. “You don’t like it, then?”

She smiled despite everything. “No. I love it. It makes it more special to me.”

“Because some out-of-touch old geek remembered something wrong?” he asked.

“No. Because I’m the only person in the world who gets that name,” she said.

A small smile tugged at the corners of his beautiful lips and lit his eyes. “Tara, I swear ....” He broke off.