Mine to Possess (3 page)

“You snarled at me to get lost and said you liked to crunch little girl bones.” It was a trick of hers, this memory. She could remember everything from the moment of birth and sometimes before. It was how she'd learned to talk before others, to read before she could talk. “You said I smelled like soft, juicy, delicious prey.”

“You still do.”

The comment made her bristle in spite of her wariness. “Clay, stop it. You're being adolescent.” He was also succeeding in ramping up her fear—did he even realize how intimidating he was? Big, incredibly strong, and so damn angry it almost felt like a blow when he turned his eyes on her.

“Why? I might as well get some fun out of this visit. Tormenting you will do.”

She wondered if she'd made a mistake. The Clay she had known, he'd been wild, but he'd been on the side of the angels. She wasn't so sure about this man. He looked like pure predator, without honor or soul. But her too soft heart told her to keep pushing, that there was more to him than this incandescent rage. “You belong to the DarkRiver pack.”

No answer.

“Was that your father's pack?” Isla had been human. It was from his father that Clay had gained his shape-shifting abilities.

“All I know about my father is that he was a cat. Isla never told me anything else.”

“I thought, maybe—”

“What? That she'd changed her mind, become sane on her deathbed?” His laugh was bitter. “She was probably mated to a cat and he died. I'm guessing she was fragile to begin with. Losing her mate broke her completely.”

“But I thought you didn't know if they'd been married.”

“Mated, not married. Hell of a difference.” He turned down a pitch-black path, the fading evening light blocked out by the canopy. “I knew shit-all about my own race back then. Unless doctors intervene—and even then it's a crapshoot—leopard changelings aren't fertile except when mated or in a long-term stable relationship. No accidental pregnancies, no quickie marriages.”

“Oh.” She bit her lower lip. “DarkRiver taught you about being a leopard?”

He threw her a sidelong glance and it was nothing friendly. “Why the sudden need for conversation? Just spit out what you want. Sooner you do, sooner you can disappear back into the hole where you've been living for twenty damn years.”

“You know what? I'm no longer sure I came to the right man,” she snapped back, reckless in the face of his aggressiveness.

The air inside the car filled with a sense of incipient threat. “Why? Because I'm not as easy to handle as you remember? Your pet leopard.”

She burst out laughing, her stomach hurting with the force of it. “Clay, if anyone followed anyone, it was me tagging along after you. I didn't dare order you around.”

“Load of shit,” he muttered, but she thought she heard a softening in his tone. “You fucking made me attend tea parties.”

She remembered his threat before the first one:
Tell anyone and I'll eat you and use your bones as toothpicks
.

She should've been scared, but Clay hadn't had the “badness” in him. And even after a bare three years on the planet, she'd known too much about the badness, could pick out which grown-ups had it. Clay hadn't. So, wide-eyed, she'd sat with him and they had had their tea party. “You were my best friend then,” she said in a quiet plea. “Can't you be my friend now?”

“No.” The flatness of his response shook her. “We're here.”

She looked out of the windscreen to find them in a small clearing. “Where?”

“You wanted privacy. This is private.” Extinguishing the lights and engine, he stepped out.

Having no choice, she followed suit, stopping in the middle of the clearing as he went to lean against a tree trunk on the other side, facing her. His eyes had gone night-glow, shocking a gasp out of her. Dangerous, he was definitely dangerous. But he was beautiful, too—in the same way as his wild brethren.

Lethal. Untouchable.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“It's in DarkRiver territory. It's safe.”

She folded her arms around herself. Though the early spring air was chilly, that wasn't what made her search for comfort. It was the cold distance Clay had put between them, telling her what he thought of her without words.

It hurt.

And she knew she'd brought it on herself. But she couldn't pretend. What she'd seen Clay do had traumatized her eight-year-old mind into silence for close to a year. “You were brutal,” she found herself saying instead of asking for what she wanted, the reason she'd fought the vicious truths of the past and tracked him down. She needed him to understand, to forgive her betrayal.

“You were my one point of safety, the one person I trusted to never lose himself in anger and hurt me,” she persisted in the face of his silence. “Yet you ended up being more violent than anyone else. How could I help but wonder if the violence wouldn't be directed at me one day, huh, Clay?”

His growl raised every hair on her body.

Run!
her mind
screamed.

Talin didn't run. She was through with running. But her heart was a drumbeat in her throat.

“You always knew what I was,” Clay said, tone full of a bone-deep fury. “You chose not to think about it, chose to pretend I was what you wanted me to be.”

“No.” She refused to back down. “You
were
different before.” Before he'd discovered what Orrin had done. Before he'd killed to keep her safe. “You were—”

“You're making up fairy tales.” The harshest of rejoinders. “The only thing different about me was that I treated you like a kid. You're not a kid anymore.”

And he wasn't going to sheathe his claws, she thought. “I don't care what you say. We're still friends.”

“No, we're not. Not when you're quaking in your boots at the sight of me. My friends don't look at me and see a monster.”

She couldn't say anything to that. She did fear him, maybe more than she feared anyone else on this planet. Clay had almost destroyed her once, was the sole person who could do that even now. “I'm sorry.” Sorry that her weakness had made him a murderer, sorry that she wasn't strong enough to get past what she'd seen in that blood-soaked room. Sorry that she'd come here.

No
.

She wasn't sorry about finding him. “I missed you.” Every single day without him, she had missed him. Now, he was a shadow in the darkness. All she could see clearly were those cat eyes of his. Then she sensed him move and realized he'd crossed his arms. Closing her out.

“This isn't going to work,” she whispered, conscious of something very fragile breaking inside of her. “It's my fault, I know.” If she had come to him at eighteen, he might have been angry at what she'd done, but he would have forgiven her, would have understood her need to grow strong enough to deal with him. But she had waited too long and now he wasn't hers anymore. “I should go back.”

“Tell me what you want, then I'll decide.” The roughness of his voice stroked over her in a disturbingly intimate caress.

She shivered. “Don't give me orders.” It was out before she could censor herself. As a child, she had learned to keep her opinions to herself. It was far safer. But half an hour with Clay—a Clay who was almost all stranger—and she was already falling into the old patterns between them. He was the one person who'd gotten mad if she
had
kept her mouth shut, rather than the other way around. Maybe, she thought, a bright spark of hope igniting, maybe he hadn't changed in that way. “I'm not a dog to be brought to heel.”

A small silence, followed by the sound of clothes shifting over skin. “Still got a smart mouth on you.”

The tightness in her chest eased. If Clay had told her to shut up…“Can I ask you some questions?”

“Auditioning me for your job? Sorry, Talin, I hold the power here.”

The emotional taunt hurt more than any physical blow. They had always been equals—friends. “I want to know you again.”

“All you need to know is that I'm even more deadly than I used to be.” He moved far enough out of the shadows that she could see the unwelcoming planes of his face. “I'm the one who should be asking the questions—tell me, where did you go after they took me away?”

His words opened another floodgate of memory. A groggy Clay being hauled to his feet by black-garbed Enforcement officers, his hands locked behind his back with extra-strength cuffs. He hadn't resisted, had been unable to do so because of the drugs they had shot into him.

But his eyes had refused to close, had never left her own.

Green.

That was the color that drenched her memories of that day. Not the rich red of blood but the hot flame of incandescent green. Clay's eyes. She'd whimpered when they'd taken him away but his eyes had told her to be strong, that he'd return for her. And he had.

It was Talin who had dishonored their silent bargain, Talin who had been too broken to dare dance with a leopard. That failure haunted her every day of her life. “There was media attention after Orrin's death,” she said, forcing herself past the sharp blade of loss. “I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I went back and researched it.”

“They wanted to put me down. Like an animal.”

“Yes.” She dropped her arms and fisted her hands, unable to bear the thought of a world without Clay. “But the Child Protection Agency intervened. They were forced to after someone leaked the truth about Orrin…and what he'd been doing to me.” Bile flooded her mouth but she fought it with strength nurtured by a sojourn through hell itself.

She couldn't erase the past, her eidetic memory a nightmare, but she had taught herself to think past the darkness. “It became a minor political issue and the authorities charged you with a lesser offense, put you in juvie until you turned eighteen.”

“I was there. I know what happened to me,” he said, sardonic. “I asked about you.”

“I'm trying to tell you!” She squared her shoulders in the face of his dominating masculinity. “Stop pushing.”

“Hell, I have all night. Take your time. I'm here for your convenience.”

“Sarcasm doesn't suit you.” He was too raw, too earthy, too of the wild.

“You don't know me.”

No, she accepted with another starburst of pain, she didn't. She had given up all rights to him the day she'd let him believe that she'd been crushed to death in a car wreck. “Because of the media attention,” she continued, “lots of people came forward with offers to adopt me.”

“I know—it was in the papers.”

She nodded. “My old social worker was fired after the media discovered he'd spent most of his work hours gambling.” With the very lives he had been entrusted to protect. “The new guy—Zeke—had a little girl my age. He went above and beyond, personally vetted all the applicants.”

Clay was silent but his eyes had gone cat, perilous in the extreme. And she remembered—it was Zeke who had lied to him about her death.

She met the eyes of the leopard who stood opposite her, afraid, bewildered, stupidly
needy
. Sometimes, it felt as if she'd been born needing Clay. “He placed me with the Larkspur family, deep in rural Iowa.” The space, the endless fields of green, the constant supply of food, it had been a severe shock to her system. “You'd like it at the Nest—that's what the Larkspurs call the farm. Plenty of space to run, to play.”

It seemed to her that his stance became a fraction less aggressive. “They were good to you?”

She nodded, biting down hard on her tongue before she could give in and beg him to go back to the way things had been before the day everything shattered. Orrin had split her lip, broken her ribs, but it was seeing Clay being hauled out the door that had destroyed her. “I was damaged, Clay.” No getting around that. “I was damaged even before Orrin died. That just pushed me over some edge in my own mind. But the Larkspurs took me in, didn't judge me, tried to make me a part of the family. I suddenly had two older brothers, one older sister, and one younger sister.”

“Sounds like too much to handle.”

“For a while, it was.” Overwhelmed by the loud, laughing family, she had curled up in corners and hidden. “Then one day, I realized I'd been there for a year and no one had hurt me. By the time you were released, I was twelve and functioning fairly well.” Nightmares only once or twice a week, acting out at school less and less.

“So you decided to leave me in the past.” A bitter laugh. “Why the hell not?”

“No. It wasn't like that.” She reached out to him, dropping her hand in midtouch when he withdrew even deeper into the darkness. “I just—” How could she possibly explain the tortured confusion that had driven her? She'd known she wasn't yet strong enough to stand up to Clay, to face the horrors of the past, but she had worried for him, too.

“I stole four years of your freedom. I was determined not to be a burden on you for the rest of your life.” Barely twelve years old and she'd known he would give up everything to keep her safe. “I didn't want to force you into bondage, into caring for me because I was too weak to care for myself. You'd already spent most of your life doing that for Isla.” That fact had twisted the relationship between mother and child, turned it into that of caretaker and patient. The thought of Clay putting her into the same category had made Talin distraught. It still did.

“Don't lie to me.” It was a lethal warning. “You were scared so you ran.”

“I'm telling the truth.” She swallowed. “But yes, I was scared, too. You didn't see what I saw, Clay. That day in Orrin's bedroom, you turned into someone I didn't know, someone more vicious than anyone I'd ever known.” She waited for him to say that he'd done it for her, but he didn't. Her guilt intensified. “Why don't you blame me? It would make this so much easier. Blame me, yell at me, God damn it!”

“For what, Talin? What did you do? Be my friend. That was your only crime.” He remained unmoving, so much a part of the forest that she could hardly tell where he began and the night ended. “These Larkspurs—why aren't you going to them for help?”

“I brought darkness into that family. I can't bring evil.”

“They're your pack, they would stand by you.”

She was startled at his word usage. “My pack? No, I don't think they are. I—I was a visitor. I made myself a visitor, left the family at sixteen after getting a full board and study scholarship.” Even their name, she had borrowed only until adulthood—long enough to blur the waters and dead-end any search Clay might have mounted. “I never let them in.”

“Why not?”

“Do you let your pack touch your soul?” she asked, desperate to learn about his new life, his new world, years of hunger coalescing into this single moment.

“DarkRiver cats have a way of adopting you even if you don't particularly want to be adopted.” It was a snarl. “If I bleed, they'll come to my aid. They would kill for me.”

She shivered at the wild violence of his statement. But there was also a seduction in that kind of loyalty. It made her wonder about bonds of a far different sort. “Do you…do you have someone in your pack?”

He went very still. “I don't scent a mate on you.”

“Me?” Her voice came out high, startled. “No. I—No.”

He remained silent.

She coughed. “I don't want to get in the way of a relationship by involving you in my problems.”

“Leave my relationships to me.”

Her insides twisted. “Fine.”

Clay waited. Juvie had been hell, but it had taught him to contain emotion, to hold his anger inside until it was needed—then use it like a weapon. The Psy scientists who had come to observe “captive animal behavior” had been his unwitting teachers.

At the time, he'd been the lone predatory changeling under long-term incarceration—changeling packs usually dealt with their own without Enforcement involvement. But not only had Clay not had a pack, he'd crossed a racial boundary in his crime. Orrin had been human.

Yet instead of subjecting him to hard study and learning things—things that could have given the Psy Council an edge in the cold war it was currently waging against the changelings—the Psy had treated him as a curiosity, an animal behind bars. It was the animal who had watched and learned. Now he watched as Talin shifted from foot to foot before folding her arms around herself again.

“I work with kids in San Francisco,” she said without warning. “I've been doing it ever since I graduated. But not here. I was in New York until the start of this year.”

“Is one of them in danger?” He felt the embers of his fury flare into life at the realization that she'd been in his territory for close to three months. All those times he had caught a hint of her scent in Chinatown or down by Fisherman's Wharf, only to find himself trailing a stranger; he'd thought it a sign he really had gone over the edge.

“Not like that.” Dropping her arms, she looked at his eyes, which he'd allowed to go night-glow. “Clay, please. Stop doing the cat thing and come out so I can see your face.”

“No.” He wasn't ready to show her anything. “Did you know I was in the city?”

“Not at first. I had no way to track you after you got out of juvie.” She kicked at the grass. “Then one day, a few weeks ago, I thought I saw you. Drove me crazy—I thought I was hallucinating, making up fantasies of what you would've looked like as an adult.”

He didn't respond, despite the near-echo of his earlier thoughts.

She blew out a breath. “I swear—” The abrasive sound of teeth grinding against each other. “I went back to where I thought I'd seen you, realized it was the DarkRiver business HQ, and looked them up on the Internet. I still wasn't sure—there was no photo and you changed your last name to Bennett.”