Sleeping Beauty and the Lion: A Shifter Fairy Tale Retelling of Sleeping Beauty (A BBW Shifter Fairy Tale Retelling Book 3) (10 page)

“
H
ello
, Merrymen Security? Yes, this is Alycia Briar. I’d like a team sent to my current location as soon as possible. Yes, I want your boss to come.”

I ignored Rose’s mother pacing behind me, speaking a low stream of commands into a Bluetooth device hidden under a wave of her hair. Considering the scene, she was surprisingly calm.

The door to Rose’s apartment, the one I knew,
knew
didn’t have a strong enough lock, was flat on the floor. It’d been bashed in, and there were splinters around the edges. Silver burned in the air, thick as tear gas, making my lungs feel tight and head pound.

There is no blood, be grateful for that
, my lion snarled.

Although
he
clearly wasn’t grateful enough to stay still. He pushed at the edges of my body. Every time I moved a change flickered. There a claw, here a fang, my hair halfway between a mane and human. My pulse raced like it could outrun the pure terror building in my lungs and between my ribs.

They had taken Rose.

And you will find her. Focus.
My inner lion promised.

I paced from the entryway to Rose’s bedroom door. Also broken down. Here the silver nitrate was thickest. The carpet had turned from pink to a muddy magenta from the vinegary liquid, and I knew that if I was barefoot, I’d end up with welts on the soles of my feet. There was not a hint of Rose’s lilac scent.

Ms. Briar’s voice rose to a sharp cry. “No, I do not care about how much it costs, now are you going to keep yammering in my ear or are you going to do what I pay you to do?”

Rose’s bed sheets were still rumpled, dresser drawers hanging open and clothes thrown everywhere. She had struggled. She had fought. I would fight, too.

I closed my eyes, feeling for our bond. It was there. Faint and far away, but there. If it wasn’t, I’d be much less calm and in severe pain. The question was where was it leading me? If I was unlucky, they’d have taken Rose to another country. That would be too far for me to follow. The farther from the city she got, the lower my chances of finding her became, but if I just concentrated hard enough…

“Good, I’m hanging up now. If I don’t see you in ten minutes or less, I’ll expect a full refund for this years services. Thank you. Goodbye.”

Footsteps behind me, not the tap of heels but the
shh
of stockings against thick carpet. My gaze caught on Ms. Briar’s feet. She hadn’t put on her heels as she ran and her stockings were ravaged by the glass. Little red footprints dotted her wake. Blood.

She didn’t seem to notice the pain. “You know where my daughter is, Dr. Ward.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m not sure.”

“That is not even close to good enough. You know where she is through whatever voodoo magic you have and you’re going to take me to her.” Her formerly immaculate eye makeup was smudged on the edges, her eyes ringed with red, as if she had been crying. “M-my security team is on their way and…” She looked up swallowing, holding back the tears through sheer force of will.

Business-like, she wiped her eyes and went on, “And once they get here, you’re going to lead them to Rose’s location.”

“Ms. Briar, your feet need medical attention.”

She looked down as if noticing the bleeding for the first time. The pain still didn’t register on her face. “Not important.”

“Please,” I commanded, low. “We’ve got a few minutes before your team arrives. I’m a doctor, this is my job. You won’t be able to find Rose with glass shards lodged in your skin.”

She grimaced. “Fine.”

“I’m going to check Rose’s medicine cabinet. I’ll be right back.”

She nodded mutely and checked her watch. She was probably ready to fire her security team if they didn’t get here in the next five minutes. I set myself into an empty professional auto-pilot as I wandered to Rose’s medicine cabinet. I knew where the band-aids were already, because I had come to this very room just last night to get a towel before I claimed Rose. Deftly, I grabbed a small carton of bandages out and the tweezers next to them. I forced myself to ignore all the little signs of Rose dotting the bathroom.

A pile of books was stacked haphazardly by the toilet. A staggering number of creams for her soft skin were scattered by the sink. There were even a few knick-knacks, bookmarks and pieces of jewelry in the shape of moons dangling from corners. I closed the mirror of the medicine cabinet, ready to leave, but then I caught myself staring at my reflection.

For one moment, I saw myself how Rose must’ve. My shoulders were broad as any human sports hero, my golden eyes were so saturated with color they looked like contacts and my body was a sculpted form of muscle and power designed with only one purpose: protecting her. And I had failed.

My fist shot out, although by the time it made contact with the mirror, it wasn’t a fist anymore. Claws
screed
over the glass, sending fissures of cracks across my reflection like thin ice breaking on a pond. The pain was welcome, as sharp, clear shards splintered into my paw. The thrumming of my pulse pushed a number too high to keep track of.

I need to meditate. I need to calm down. I need to take care of Ms. Briar.

No
, my inner lion purred quietly.
You need to take care of yourself.

All my thoughts dissolved as I sank onto the closed toilet, my elbows pushing her rack of toiletries off the back. It wasn’t just the world I’d spent all these years hiding from. It was myself. But there was no meditating away this suffering. If wanted to find Rose, I had to allow myself to feel pain. I closed my eyes, taking in a deep breath, and felt the hollowness of missing Rose, of everything I’d lost.

It washed over me like a cold wave, tightening my throat until I couldn’t breathe. I let the shadows close in on the sides of my vision. I let myself remember my father’s voice. My brother’s face. My mother’s smell I let my body ache and acknowledged the pit that had been gaping inside of me since the moment I was put in the cage.

And only then, echoing in that hollowness, did I feel Rose. I knew where she was. I felt it like a string on the back of my neck, tugging me from far, far away, like a fishing line going into the deep.

In my other hand, the cardboard box of bandages crinkled between my fingers. Standing, I plucked the thorns of glass from my paw and watched as it slowly morphed back to human.

Then, at lion speed, I swept back to the bedroom. “I know where she is— ”

I stopped on the threshold. Ms. Briar wasn’t alone anymore. Standing next to her was a lanky man with a shock of red hair and a green T-shirt that read, “Merrymen Security: Your EL33t Firm.” The logo looked like a jaunty green cap with a red feather in it, done in pixilated video game style.

But while that hardly screamed professionalism, the shirt wasn’t what made me pause. It was his smell—hot and slightly acrid like the inside of a greenhouse.

The man halted mid conversation with Ms. Briar and gave a wide, jagged smile. “Hey, the doctor’s here!” He thrust out a hand overdramatically. “Robin Loxley of Merrymen Security, at your service.”

I didn’t take his hand. He smelled like piss. Fox piss. Rose’s mother’s security firm were shifters. That shouldn’t have been possible. Besides my family, I was, as far as I knew, the only shifter still left alive. There were always rumors of wolves, but foxes and bears were thought to be well and truly gone.

“Oookaaay,” Robin drawled and lowered his hand. His smile didn’t budge, but I could tell from his narrowed eyes that he smelled who I was, too.

Good
, my inner lion thought,
now he knows who’s the bigger predator.

I smiled, not in the human way, but the lion one, baring both of my canines at him to make my point clear. “I’m not sure you can help us, Robin. I know where Rose is and I’m going to find her. You’d just get in the way.”

“And tell me, once you find Rose, how are you going to get access the building if it has, say, security codes?”

Through force of will and sheer endurance
, my lion snarled.

I stayed silent.

He nodded. “Thought so. You need me.” Smirk still in place he thrust a phone in my direction, waggling it back and forth. “Well, really, you need this.”

“And what’s that?” Rose’s mother asked.

“This is why you pay me the boo-koo bucks, my lovely Alycia.” He waggled the phone once more for emphasis. “With this wonderful little tool, I can get us in anywhere.”

L
onan glanced down
, sighed, and said, “I understand your frustration, Rose. But you don’t have all the facts right now.”

He raised the remote and unpaused the T.V. Triumphant orchestra music began to blare from the speakers, and the two logos disappeared into what I expected would be an informational video, but what turned out to be grainy security footage. The orchestra muted, until there was no sound at all.

“Nothing you could show me would change my mind,” I growled.

He shook his head. “Just watch Rose.”

The background of the video was taken up by rows of technical machines: hulking refrigerators, big circular machines that looked like giant drums, and at the far end a computerized microscope that took up half a room. In the foreground was a cage.

They had kept Daniel in this cage
, I realized. This was how he got the scars.

The bile rose up farther in my throat, and the only reason I didn’t scream at Lonan to let me out was because I was afraid I might throw up.

One of the men stooped in front of the metal cage. He had something in his hand. Food maybe, or papers. It was hard to tell. But a couple of seconds later he stumbled backward and the cage began to rock. Slowly at first, but then the man waved an arm over his head, signaling someone from off camera.

Claws pierced through the silver bars. Silver was a relatively soft metal, but one that was deadly to werebeasts. Just touching it would’ve burned Daniel’s skin and made him sick to his stomach. Using his claws to rip through the cage? I couldn’t imagine the pain.

The man on the screen was jogging backward now, one hand on his walkie talkie, but it was too late. The claw turned into the full body of the lion as Daniel pushed through the cage. With the bars cut, the top half of the cage was collapsing onto the bottom half. The lion pushed back the top, leaping outward.

I’d seen so many grainy videos of werebeasts before but nothing looked like this. In the fake videos there was always a lot time spent on the transformation. The people who made the special effects could never resist showing off and so would linger on the smoke snaking up around the wolf’s paw, or the face twisting and morphing into a bear’s. But this wasn’t a movie. One moment there was a man with a claw, scratching his way out of hell, the next there was a lion. Roaring out big enough to show all of his fangs.

It wasn’t a beautiful change like I thought it would be. It was horrible. And that, more than anything else I’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, made me believe that Daniel was telling the truth.

The lion was on the scientist in less than a heartbeat, his jaws at his throat. Ripping. I was glad for the low definition and the lack of color, because I couldn’t see the blood. But even in low light with the lion and the man nothing more than a pixilated figures, there was no mistaking the way the man flopped to the ground, his head hanging at an unnatural angle.

Lonan pressed pause.

I was talking before he could lecture me anymore. “That man died because you were stupid enough to keep a werebeast in a cage.”

Lonan crossed his arms, settling farther back into the chair, regarding me stonily. “And the rest of the men and women in the facility?

“There’s nothing you could do to convince me that
this
is okay.” I tilted my head at the hospital room and then at my restraints. I would not let him convince himself that he was the good guy here. I wouldn’t!

“Not even if I told you that,
that
was your boyfriend.”

“I’m aware,” I sneered, but kept my voice low and even. Screaming and yelling would just make him feel more vindicated. “Any procedure you do to me will be without my consent. If you’re doing this because you think its best for me, it’s not.”

“I know,” Lonan said. “But this isn’t just about you, Rose. We’d like to start offering this not just to high-risk cases , but to any girl we see who grows the mark.”

“They’d never even know they had a mate.” Everywhere except my neck felt suddenly cold, sterile, like his mouthwash.

He nodded. “That’s right. But right now we haven’t tested it on enough to people to use it except in high-risk cases, like yours. That’s why we waited until after you had completed the bond to collect you. Even if you don’t want it, other girls might.” He bowed his head, like he actually was entreating me. “You’re doing this for them.”

“No.” I shook my head so violently my neck ached. “I’m not doing this. And if you make me, when I wake up I will sue your sad little self into oblivion. Or are you just going to kill me afterward?”

His brow crinkled in pity. “Do you really think no one has tried to sue us before? Besides the fact that you’ll have a hell of a time fighting the Department of Defense in court, you won’t have much of a case by the time you wake up.”

“By the time I wake up?’

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” He adjusted his watch and stood. “In ten minutes a nurse is going to come and administer a solution of silver intravenously. You’re going to slip into a coma, much like the one you experienced after your car accident. When you wake up, well, if you wake up, there’s a possibility you’ll have minor to severe brain damage. At the very least you’ll suffer significant short term memory loss.”

“What?” I said, dry-mouthed, even though I’d heard every word perfectly.

Lonan broke, rolling his eyes, finally fed up with me. “You won’t be able to sue us, Rose, because you won’t remember.”