Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) (11 page)

“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.

T
he light was blinding, rushing past in an electric blue and white. Chay was falling, falling into an endless light-streaked hole, his stomach lifting up into his throat. Energy crackled around him, and he reached out his arms—no, not his arms, because he didn’t have arms here. He had a thought of arms, only, but he reached them out as he fell and grabbed for the lightning that crackled all around.

With a lurch that almost made him lose his lunch, he was no longer falling but was in a kind of stream. A stream of data, he realized, moving through the servers not just in Black Mesa but all around the world.

“You’ll probably find the internet port first.” Torrhanin’s voice came from far away. “They are at the highest levels of the interface because I felt that web surfing might be the easiest transition for you.”

Surfing...this truly was like surfing, jetting across tiny packets of information as he called them up from around the world. He decided to plunge into the DOD’s servers—always a challenge, even with his back doors, because it wasn’t one system but dozens, some archaic, some highly vulnerable, and some locked down like a digital Fort Knox. He stretched out and somehow the information sieved through him, and in an instant, his mind was launching across thousands of miles, skipping over oceans of darkness to the bright hubs of the major server farms until he found his objective: A virgin network, one he’d never attempted to enter before. It rose like a slippery, black wall before his mind.

He reached out another thought, and all his intrusion tools sprang into his control. Laughing, he launched them with a flick of a thought-hand. Then the flood of information truly came.

He found he could dance above it, somehow plucking the important bits from the flood as effortlessly as breathing. The strengths, the weaknesses...he began to understand not only the tools but the wall itself, its solid surface dissolving into a jagged landscape.

A landscape with holes. He put his hands into one of them, felt its edges and the fatal fault line that ran from its edge. He opened his mind more and more, getting drunk on the sea of data that floated all around him. Chay took hold of the edge of the hole and he
pulled.

The wall collapsed around him, on top of him, buffeting into his wide-open mind and sending him rocketing back across the network until he slammed back into his own brain with enough force that it knocked the breath out of him.

Chay blinked and discovered that his eyes had been open the whole time and that he was standing exactly as he’d remembered in the middle of the spook shop in front of his battered favorite chair. The only difference was a throbbing headache that followed the line of the band around his head.

Tara’s eyes were wide with alarm. “Chay?” she asked.

“Wow,” he said. “I’m back.”

“I was saying that you should be careful with how wide you open your mind,” Dr. Torrhanin said, looking stern. “The recoil can be severe.”

“Yeah, I didn’t hear that,” Chay said, lifting the mind-net carefully from his head. Not only was his head pounding, but his stomach roiled in reaction to what he’d just been through.

“While any reactions are purely psychosomatic and temporary, they can be quite uncomfortable,” the elf continued.

“Yep. Got it,” Chay said tightly. Taking the damned contraption off hadn’t helped any.

“Cold water and a dark room often help. In a few hours, you should be able to try again.” The elf plucked the mind-net from Chay’s hands and set it back on the pillow.

“Looking forward to it,” Chay said in a strangled voice, and he staggered toward the sink in the kitchenette, where he jerked the water on.

“Y
ou 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 ....