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

So why was it that she had wanted more? That she’d demanded more? And where did he get off, taking advantage of her situation? Because Chay was right. If she shouldn’t have reached for him, he absolutely shouldn’t have responded. He was her jailer. He could pretty it up with fancy words, but for the moment, she really was a prisoner, and he was in charge. They should absolutely not be having sex.

Then why, a tiny part of her brain whispered, couldn’t she regret it? Not really. The whole thing was such an epically bad idea that she couldn’t even put words to how bad it was, but even as she thought that, she couldn’t manage an ounce of regret.

Maybe she really was going crazy.

Tara pushed to her feet and went over to the door that she’d probably already spent an hour staring at. Bracing herself, she summoned all of her courage and twisted the lever handle.

It turned at her touch, the dogs sliding back into the frame. Tara blinked at it for several seconds, hardly believing that she’d been left alone with an unlocked door. Hesitantly, she opened the door half an inch and peered out.

There was a hall there with metal walls, a cement floor, and a purple stripe down its length. She opened the door a fraction wider and stuck her head out. She could see three more doors like hers before the hallway disappeared into darkness on either end. In fact, only the light bulb immediately outside her door was lit.

She remembered what Chay had said about children being in the facility and pulled back again quickly, shutting the door and turning the lever back to the locked position.

Tara wanted to think that she wouldn’t hurt a kid no matter what. But she knew that was a stupid kind of thought to have confidence in. She’d killed her professor, and she’d have sworn that she wouldn’t do something like that. And there’d been others she’d hurt in her panic, and she couldn’t claim that they were entirely accidents, either.

No, kids weren’t safe from her. Not right now. But whether Chay’s trust of her actually meant anything—or if her unlocked door was behind another locked one or if he was just sure that he could come and put her back in her cell if she tried to escape—she was intensely glad for that open door.

A knock came then, and biting her lip, Tara twisted it open. Behind it was...an elf. There really was no other word for what he was. He had almond eyes, and he was tall and slender, his pale skin almost glowing with a kind of bluish cast. But most striking were the pointy ears. Actual, real pointy ears, not Ren Fest ears created with the right kind of jewelry.

“You’d be easy to dress for a Star Trek convention,” Tara said inanely as she stepped back into the room. His face was definitely familiar. She remembered him from the place where Chay had rescued her—except he hadn’t looked like an elf then. At least, she was pretty sure that she would have remembered if he had.

“Yes, I have heard that,” the elf said dryly, stepping over the high threshold and into the room. He was wearing a kind of dress—well, a robe, Tara corrected, because it appeared to be a masculine sort of outfit, for all that it was covered with silver embroidery, and over it, he wore a second robe, this one white and open in the front with long sleeves that hung loose around his wrists. He even had a circlet on, complete with a large blue cabochon-style jewel in the center of the front that Tara took to be a sapphire before she realized that it actually wasn’t a jewel at all but some kind of electronic...something or other.

Whatever. It was weird. And the fact that the elf was carrying a bag that looked for all the world like an antique doctor’s bag made it even weirder.

“Dr. Torrhanin,” the elf said, extending his right hand.

After a second, Tara realized that he meant her to shake it. Gingerly, she took it and gave it a tentative kind of shake.

The elf smiled and closed the door behind him. “I understand that you have some reproductive health concerns.”

“Um, yes?” she ventured. “I have an IUD, and Mr. Bane didn’t know whether that could be a problem. With the shifting,” she added to clarify, because she definitely didn’t want to get into what other types of trouble it might be.

“I see,” Dr. Torrhanin said. “An IUD would definitely not be my choice. Shifts can be unpredictable, and a hard piece of plastic internally...at best, it could get damaged.”

“At worst?” Tara prompted.

“It could pierce the uterine wall,” he said seriously. “Did you have fillings before your first shift?”

“Fillings?” Tara asked, nonplussed.

“Fillings,” he repeated. “Dental fillings.”

“Sure. Who doesn’t? I have a crown, too,” she added. “Bad teeth when I was a kid. Too many antihistamines, my dentist said.”

“Had,” Dr. Torrhanin corrected.

“What?”

“You had a crown. It would have popped out at your first shift. When you returned to your human form, the tooth would have been repaired, more or less.”

Tara opened her mouth to explain how ridiculous that was, but as she did so, she probed the crown with her tongue and found that it wasn’t there. Instead, there was smooth enamel—not quite in the shape of her proper, original tooth but close enough that she hadn’t noticed.

“What. The. Hell,” she said, which was the most intelligent thing she could come up with on the spur of the moment.

“A few shifters have had metal plates or other internal prosthetics when they first turned,” Dr. Torrhanin said. “Those are often particularly unpleasant and can require extensive surgery to remove.”

“How do you do that?” Tara asked weakly. “Chay showed me how fast shifters heal.”

He smiled. “Very, very quickly.”

Right.

Tara had a sudden surreal feeling. Here she was, discussing birth control options with an actual elf because she kept turning into a big cat at the drop of a hat.

Why was it that she’d thought she probably wasn’t crazy, again? She was having a hard time remembering.

“Okay. So, I should get rid of the IUD,” she said. “What can I use, then?”

“Most women prefer oral birth control,” Dr. Torrhanin said as if he were having the most ordinary conversation in the world. “You would have to make sure to be in human form to take it on time, though, so in your current state, that might not be the best choice. The ring is soft, so it’s an option, but again, it doesn’t work if you spend more than an hour or so in your shifted form at one time. Shots are generally foolproof. DepoProvera is quite effective, though we prefer a better slow-release version that we’ve developed specifically for shifters with fewer side effects. Essentially, any drug that exists in your bloodstream will survive a shift.”

“Does that mean that the panther will be on birth control, too?” Tara asked with a horrified kind of fascination. “If she...you know ....”

Dr. Torrhanin gave her a severe look. “I recommend that she not.”

“But if—”

He cut her off. “Your menstrual state is not synced with that of the cat. For your shifted form to achieve estrus, you would have to spend some months in cat form without ever shifting back to human.”

“I’m not really sure what that means,” Tara admitted.

“Heat,” he said bluntly. “When you shift, you will always return to a form that is months from going into heat. The panther may seem like an actual animal to you, but let me assure you that it is a multidimensional biological construct. Its mind and body are real, but they are not natural. If you remain in the panther form long enough to go into heat, there would be nothing of your human mind left. Therefore, I do not recommend it.”

“And if she’s not in heat—” Tara asked tenaciously.

“No panther sex, and no panther babies,” he said. “She—or you—will not be interested in intercourse in that form. Directly,” he added.

Directly, because the panther sure as hell was interested once both she and Chay were human.

Please, kill me now,
Tara thought.

“All right, then,” she said aloud. “I guess I’ll choose the shot, if that’s the most foolproof. But I’d rather have, you know, a woman doctor.” A woman elf doctor? Tara assumed that there were female elves, but at this point, she probably shouldn’t take anything for granted.

“That will not be a problem,” the elf said, setting the black bag on the table next to her tray of lunch. “Are you ready now? The sooner the IUD is removed, the better.” He flipped the latch on it, and it fell open.

“I’m ready, but I said a woman doctor,” Tara repeated. “Not a man doctor.”

“I know,” he said, pulling something from inside the bag.

“Then what are you doing?” she asked, belated alarm rising within her.

The elf looked at her calmly, holding up an oblong object. “Ensuring the safety of my staff.”

And before Tara could do more than curse, his hand darted out and the autoinjector got her in the arm. The elf steadied her easily as she wobbled on legs suddenly too rubbery to hold her up.

“You’re not putting a radio collar on me, you know,” she managed thickly through the darkness that was already gathering before her eyes.

The elf’s chuckle was the last thing she heard before the world went black.

“A
nd they call
me
a fox,” Annie said as Chay entered the spook shop.

Chay treated her to his best quelling glance, but Annie was immune to any attempt at intimidation.

“I needed to get myself a fan, watching that,” she continued, waving her hand in front of her face.

“No one said you had to watch,” Chay snapped.

She giggled. “You’re joking, right?”

Chay bit back his response. Annie was a fox shifter down to her very bones. Some of those raised in less traditional families had their mischievous tendencies more tempered by the mores of mainstream society, but Annie was practically a walking stereotype. At this point, it was no use expecting her to change. “Is Dr. Torrhanin with her yet?” he asked instead. He’d used his smart watch to call the elf as soon as he’d stepped out of Tara’s quarters.

Annie nodded to the screen. “See for yourself.”

The two of them were standing in the middle of the bedroom, Tara looking distinctly uncomfortable as she kept rubbing her upper arms over and over as she talked. The mics were off, and Chay didn’t turn them on. She deserved that much privacy.

“So, how’d she get dosed?” Annie asked. “Or were you too busy to ask?”

“She doesn’t know,” Chay said curtly, sinking into the indentation that he’d worn into the faux leather of his cheap rolling chair. He’d tried one of the fancy Aeron ones that Luke Ford and Annie both used, but he’d concluded that his broken-in old thing was too much like a part of him.

“Well, that’s not very helpful.”

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. Ophelia Prescott was on the duty roster for this hour, but her chair was still pulled up to her section of the long desk. “Where’s Ophelia?”

Annie shrugged. “One of her kids has a bug. She’s playing nursemaid.” Her tone hovered between sympathy and disgust. Annie didn’t have room at this point in her life for children, and she regarded them as particularly gross aliens.

Chay felt a sudden burst of gratitude at that. However much Annie would tease him about what he’d done, it was nothing like Ophelia’s tongue-lashing.

“And no one came to fill in?” Chay asked.

“Oh, Seamus came,” she said, “while you were...otherwise engaged. So he left again.”

Damn. None of the Mansfield brothers were going to be the least bit happy with him.

Couldn’t be helped, now. It sure as hell should have stopped him then. He’d put so much on the line for a moment of...what? Passion? Self-indulgence? None of those words quite seemed to fit. He’d risked not only Tara but the respect he had from the rest of the team he’d built so slowly and carefully over the years.

Frak. There was no undoing what he’d done. And going forward .... His mind shuddered away from any promises of what he’d do in the future. It wasn’t like he’d planned what had happened, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to keep it from happening again.

She was too young for him. Too vulnerable. And she was in a position where he was most definitely taking advantage of her. So what he had done was wrong, wrong, wrong no matter what way he looked at it. And it wasn’t like he even knew what he felt for her. He’d had crushes before—and the euphoria of early love. But this wasn’t that. It was like Tara was under his skin, inside of his head in a way that didn’t even have a name.

She was attractive enough. Hell, she was gorgeous in an earthy sense—not model material like Annie’s carefully bred perfection but stunning in her own way, with those brilliant green eyes and her olive skin. But his admiration for her physical attributes was somehow separate from the kind of psychic itch that she made him feel when she was around.

And even when she wasn’t.

Chay blew out a puff of air. None of this was going to answer his questions about what had happened to her. Tara clearly had no idea—or else she was keeping things from him. But she didn’t seem to be. He suspected that she was absolutely as bewildered as she appeared, and while shifters couldn’t read minds, his nose was excellent at smelling the cascade of stress hormones pouring through her.

So. There were two possibilities. Either something had happened to her at the College of William and Mary, or it had happened to her before, on vacation or maybe even before college, and something about how she’d been given it had delayed the onset of her first shift.

Neither of which made sense. But he’d just have to roll with what he knew until he had enough pieces of the puzzle to put them together.

“Did you do the full background on her?” Chay asked Annie.

Annie was a woman of many talents. She could drive or fly practically any machine ever built, and she was wicked fast with lock picking and safe cracking. But having been largely confined to Black Mesa over the past three years when she wasn’t in the field, she’d been one of a handful on his team who had taken to coding like they’d been born to it.

And Annie’s interest was in identities—both ferreting them out and creating new ones.