Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) (4 page)

Tara’s arms still felt heavy, but they were not the immoveable blocks they had been moments ago. She flexed her hands, then rubbed her lower arms. It wasn’t actually cold in here, but the drab gray seemed to suck some of the life out of the air, especially after the brilliant glow of the place—the hospital wing?—where she had just been.

They stopped in front of a door that pierced the purple-striped wall, and Dr. Marishataen turned the lever that slid the bolts back on the door, which swung open to reveal her cell.

Not much for décor,
Tara thought, taking a steadying breath against the spurt of panic that threatened to overwhelm her at the sight of the place where she’d been confined.

“Can you stand?” Dr. Rho asked.

“I don’t know,” Tara said honestly, but she pushed back the blanket that covered her lower body and swung her legs over the edge of the gurney, which helpfully sank under her with a soft hiss of air until her sock-clad feet touched the cement floor. Experimentally, she pushed off the edge of the mattress, and she was pleasantly surprised when her legs only wobbled slightly under her weight.

“Very good,” Dr. Marishataen said, as if impressed by the efforts of a small child.

Tara went to the door’s threshold, which was high like that on a submarine, and stepped over it carefully to avoid rapping her shin. She turned back to the elves, awkward in her calf-length hospital gown. Her eyes were dragged inevitably to the gurney that she’d just climbed off. She’d assumed the reason the gurney had stopped was because of the high threshold, which would be impossible for wheels to roll over.

Stupid her, because she’d assumed that the gurney would have wheels...instead of hovering a foot above the ground with nothing but air under it.

“Um,” she said, unable to look away.

“Yes?” Dr. Rho raised an eyebrow.

“It’s floating,” Tara said. “The bed, I mean.”

Dr. Marishataen giggled, then quickly hid her smile behind her hand as she regained her composure.

Dr. Rho didn’t twitch. “I can understand how it might seem that way to you.”

Tara waited for more of an explanation, but there didn’t seem to be one forthcoming. So after an awkward silence, during which she stared at the two elves and they looked patiently back at her, she asked, “Now what?”

“What do you mean?” returned Dr. Rho.

Did elves really mean to be that infuriating? “What happens next?” Tara pushed.

“Why, I haven’t any idea.” Dr. Rho smiled, and the door swung shut under an unseen power, leaving Tara alone.

L
urking in the empty intake room, Chay looked the screen of his smart watch, which showed an image of Tara entering her quarters. He felt like the biggest asshole in the world.

“I’m still not so sure about this,” he muttered.

“We understand that physical contact between the two of you has prevented her from shifting in the past.” Dr. Torrhanin’s voice was slightly flat and tinny as it came through the watch. “It’s important to know whether she is equally responsive to other human contact.”

“She’s not a guinea pig,” Chay snapped. He could call this off. He was in charge. It was his decision.

But he knew that Torrhanin was right.

The doctor had come to find him as soon as he’d sedated Tara again in the high-handed way that he had. Sometimes, he thought that Torrhanin believed that he was the one doing Chay a favor by allowing him to create the elven quarters of Narnia within the confines of Black Mesa.

Dammit, but he was supposed to be winning Tara’s trust—actually earning it, not just tricking her or hoodwinking her into trusting them. Stressing her out so that she felt the need to shift was not an excellent step in that direction.

But Torrhanin had, in his cold, analytical way, warned Chay that Tara might develop a kind of psychological dependence on him. And that was best prevented as early as possible. Hence allowing Annie to introduce herself to Tara.

Not that Chay had asked Annie to stress Tara out or trigger an uncontrolled shift. But that was pretty unnecessary, with Annie. The fox shifter was many things, but diplomatic and sensitive she was not. So Chay had just pulled Annie aside before she set out to introduce herself and told her that it was very important that Tara not lose control and that physical human contact seemed to help her maintain it.

Annie, with her usual tact, had wrinkled her nose and said, “You don’t expect me to screw her, do you? Because I’m not equipped in the same way for that and, really, I’ve never been a switch-hitter.”

Annie, a completely different type of shifter from Tara, was the first plan, to see if any human contact could help Tara maintain control. Luke Ford, another panther, was the second line of defense. He was sitting cross-legged on the center of the bed in the intake room, typing away unconcernedly on his laptop as Chay paced up and down. If human contact wasn’t enough, perhaps another shifter would work.

Chay was the fallback. And as Torrhanin said delicately—and Ford less so—banging her human was not, in fact, a viable long-term strategy. So he had been advised to refrain from that particular approach—as if he needed to be warned.

He raised his wrist again as he turned at the wall to pace back the other way. On the screen, Tara shrugged into a t-shirt. Both man and panther reacted to the sight, even though it revealed no more than a bathing suit might.

Okay, fine, so maybe he did need to be warned.

Chay shook his head, not knowing how he expected to get out of this mess. Or, even more frighteningly, if he wanted to.

***

T
ara got dressed for lack of anything better to do, discarding the hospital gown in a corner of the room since there didn’t seem to be any other place to put it. She picked through her hair with the wide-toothed comb again, then found some hair elastics in the drawer and twisted her hair into some semblance of a style. Dressed from head to toe, she felt a little more human, though she missed her usual routine of Bath & Bodyworks citrus lotion.

And now...what? She stared around the bare room. An ereader. Chay had said there were books on an ereader, but a quick inspection told her that it was one of those types that wasn’t any good for surfing the web. No phone. No laptop. No way to tell her parents that she was okay. No way to check up on Sylvie to make sure that Tara hadn’t injured her ....

A noise from the bathroom distracted her from those thoughts, and Tara jumped and spun around in time to see a fox poke its head around the doorway.

“Mrs. Olsen?” Tara asked incredulously.

The bright red fox treated her to a wide lupine smile—and shifted. Not into the older woman but into someone who looked only slightly older than Tara herself did.

“Not
Mrs. Olsen,” she said. The older woman had had a hint of Eastern ancestry in her eyes and jaw, but this woman was decades younger and fully Asian, from her stick-straight black hair to her flawless oval face and almond eyes. She had delicate features and a long, straight nose, which she crinkled as she smiled.

She was also completely naked, and Tara blushed so hard that she felt the heat up to her hairline.

“Oh, you’re a prude,” the girl said in a disappointed voice. She had an Anglo-Chinese accent that was every bit as winsome as she was. She stood and stretched, displaying her perfect, slender body, then sauntered through the doorway and into the bathroom.

“I was just coming to welcome you,” she said, her voice echoing against the tile. She walked out again wearing a towel and a bright smile. “I told Beany baby that I was going to bring you towels, but really, I just wanted to say hi. And to ask you how he is in the sack because,
wow,
that looked hot.”

Tara gaped. “You know...I mean, you
saw ....
”

“Of course I saw,” the fox shifter returned, laughter in her voice. “You’re monitored constantly. Did you ever imagine that you weren’t?”

For some reason, that revelation seemed like the greatest violation of all. She’d been drugged three times now, once while naked as a panther and another time that she was stripped after. She’d discussed her birth control choices with a near-stranger and with a doctor chosen by him and had had her IUD taken out by yet another doctor not of her choosing. And she’d had sex with someone who really had no business touching her at all in this state, though she hadn’t exactly been innocent in that whole thing, either. Now whatever shreds of her privacy that she imagined were left to her had been stripped away, and this woman was treating it like it had been a big joke.

“Don’t worry,” the fox woman piped up. “The system’s got a pretty good automatic censorship program. All the wobbly bits were blocked out before it ever got to the screen.”

“Awesome,” Tara said weakly. Then she frowned. They’d been in the bathroom. “Does that mean that the toilet...?” She broke off. She couldn’t even say it.

“Censorship program again.” The woman sniffed and flipped her straight black bob. “I don’t understand why people care, but whatever. It really is for your protection, you know. In case you start shifting out of control. Hopefully, it will give us time to react and stop it before you’re too far gone.”

“Then what’s this for?” Tara asked, tugging the pendant that Mrs. Olsen had given her out from under her shirt.

“Same thing. You know, so you’ll give us a heads up before you start actually changing shape. It goes to both the spook shop and to Beany’s personal device,” she said casually, patting her hair.

“Spook shop?” Tara echoed, feeling dizzy.

“That’s, like, our HQ, you know,” the woman said, even though Tara didn’t. She went over to the dresser and started poking through the drawers. “Ugh. Beany’s such a cheapskate. There are pallets of this crap, you know. New intake peeps are going to be wearing these outfits until 2050 at this rate. You walk around the halls, and sometimes you think it’s like a knock-off version of
Star Trek
, where everyone wears solid-color shirts and the same unflattering pants.”

Tara frowned as she watched the woman paw through the clothes—
her
clothes, for all that they’d been issued to her with the impersonality of a military uniform. She didn’t feel quite so overwhelmed anymore. In fact, she knew exactly what she felt now. And she knew why.

She felt mad. Spitting, furiously mad.

Tara had always considered herself an easy-going sort. Adventurous, sure, but she’d always prided herself for her level-headed nature. Perhaps it was because she’d never felt fully settled in her own body. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. She didn’t consider herself to have “body image issues,” as the popular phrase went. It was just that ever since she could remember, she had felt like some part of her wasn’t quite connected to the body that she lived in. So she’d had an extra level of detachment that had always made her the stable one, the practical one of any group.

So the discovery that she was now furious came as quite a surprise.

“Leave those alone, please,” she said in a rock-steady voice. But something of her emotion must have come out in her tone because the fox woman slid the drawer shut.

“Of course!” the woman said breezily. “I’m Annie, by the way. I didn’t say that, did I?”

“No. No, you did not,” Tara said crisply. “You didn’t ask if you could come in, either. You didn’t ask if you could use the towels I’m going to dry my naked body with—”

“Oh, I brought plenty of extra!” Annie said brightly, leaning against the dresser. “That’s what I was doing, you know. Bringing back your shoes. Changing out your linens. Well, the linens you didn’t destroy, at least.”

Tara ignored the interruption. “You also didn’t ask if you could poke through my dresser.”

“Well, it’s not as if they’re exactly personal things,” Annie said. She didn’t roll her eyes, but her amusement was clear in her voice. “It’s all just regular stuff from supplies.”

“I. Don’t. Care.” Tara didn’t know why this was the last straw, but after being drugged and imprisoned and spied on and interrogated, she was done. A white-hot fury filled her, and she could feel every beat of her heart in the flushing of her face. She physically shook as she stalked toward the slender woman, who carefully backed away toward the center of the room.

“Okay, okay!” Annie said, holding up her hands defensively. “Don’t get so bent out of shape. I’ll leave it alone.”

And then the panther surged up, smelling the scent of the fox, and it matched Tara’s fury with her own so that she didn’t know where one ended and the other began. She felt her bones twist inside her, and she knew how to ride it this time, so she let it come—

“Hey, sorry, wrong choice of words!” Annie yelped. She reached out and took Tara’s hand, which was more than half paw. “I’m sorry I upset you, but it’s
really
not a good idea to go shifting like that, you know.”

Tara didn’t want to care—but she knew that the woman was right. With a groan that came out of her throat as a yowl, she tried to push the panther back. But it was entrenched now, its anger and her own an indeterminate, seething mass, and it fought for control of her body—to make her body its own.

“Oh, shit,” Annie said, her eyes going wide, and in two seconds flat, she was a small, red streak darting toward the safety of the acrylic block that was still in the far corner of the room.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Tara had every reason in the world to be angry. She had a right to her feelings. But that damned panther had gotten into her freaking head, and now—

Her thoughts broke up as the panther pushed them out. Tara was still mad—mad this time at the panther, but it wasn’t helping because the panther was taking her anger and making it her own.

The door flew open, and Tara spun around uncertainly on legs that wanted to become a different shape. Chay. There was someone else with him, someone with bright blue eyes and the smile of a movie star. The second man came first and grabbed both of Tara’s hands.

“Tara,” he said in a clear voice, staring straight into her eyes. “Tara, can you hear me?”