Out of Her Mind Read online

  Out of Her Mind

  Taken by the Panther – Book 3

  by V. M. Black

  Aethereal Bonds

  AetherealBonds.com

  Swift River Media Group

  Washington, D.C.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 V. M. Black

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Book Description

  Tara Morland was doomed from the moment she first shifted into a panther. But Chay Bane will stop at nothing to save her—even after all traces of humanity appear to be gone.

  Yet will even his love and his vast resources be enough to save her, or will he be forced to end her suffering?

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  Aethereal Bonds Series

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  Cora’s Choice (100 to 200-page novellas)

  Start with Life Blood – FREE

  Cora’s Bond (100 to 200-page novellas)

  Start with For All Time

  Shifter Serials

  The Alpha’s Captive (60 to 85-page novelettes and novellas)

  Start with Taken – FREE

  Taken by the Panther (100 to 200-page novellas)

  Start with Out of the Darkness

  Chapter One

  Chay jerked around at Agosti’s curse—and instantly clutched his head because the motion nearly sent his morning coffee rocketing from his stomach out onto the floor of the spook shop. He blinked to focus on the commotion at the far end of the room. Eddie Agosti and Niall and Seamus Mansfield were crowded in a tight knot around the chair where Tara sat, eyes wide open and unseeing with the mind-net clasped tightly around her head.

  Swearing, Chay lurched across the room, dodging the maze of folding tables in the middle of the spook shop just as she started to scream. The sound hardly seemed like it could come from a human throat, a desperate, primal howl that tore from her over and over again.

  “I advise that you remove the device as quickly as possible,” Dr. Torrhanin said over the noise, standing apart from the fray.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Chay snarled, shouldering aside the Mansfield brothers to reach Tara’s side. “I’ve got you, bae girl,” he told her, but if Tara could hear him, she gave no sign.

  The circlet was pressed so tightly to her head that his fingers couldn’t gain purchase. Chay dug his nails into the edges where it met her skin—

  Torrhanin reached past him to touch the jewels that glowed among the mind-net’s silver wires in a swift pattern. Lights blinked inside the gems, and instantly the circlet loosened, coming away in Chay’s hand as he ripped it from her head. But Tara still shrieked and thrashed, her eyes blank with fear and horror even as he gathered her against his chest.

  “You’re here. You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.” Chay hardly knew what words he was saying as he held her body against his. He just kept talking, hoping that something he said would reach her human mind. Her eyes focused on him as Torrhanin took the mind-net from Chay’s numb grasp, and she stopped screaming. She opened her mouth again, and from it came the pitiful, miserable whimper of a shattered heart.

  “Stay with me, now, Tara. It’s going to be all right,” Chay soothed.

  But a second later, the human girl had fled from her face, and he was looking into the yellow eyes of the panther as her body stretched and grew and changed in his arms.

  “We’re losing her,” Eddie Agosti snapped.

  “No,” Chay said, despite the evidence of the body that was twisting in his arms. “I’m holding you, bae girl. Don’t go away. I’m right here!”

  But Tara was already gone, and the wild cat batted him savagely with a paw of unsheathed claws, tearing through clothes and flesh as she raked across his chest and sent him flying hard into the nearest table with a force that knocked the wind out of him.

  Then she leaped straight for Torrhanin.

  Niall and Seamus reared up, their clothes shredding as their frames expanded into their massive bear forms, and Agosti’s wolf darted forward. They were all too slow, far too slow, because the panther was already flying at the elf.

  Chay blinked through the daze of hot agony, calling out a warning that he knew would come too late as her muscled, sleek body shot through the air. Torrhanin stepped back, raising an arm that would be no defense against teeth and claws—and Tara fell to the ground in a heap of limbs and slick black fur as Torrhanin stood over her, holding a hypospray and wearing a thoughtful expression.

  “Are you all right?” Chay stumbled back onto his feet.

  Chay’s shirt was tattered and soaked with so much blood that it was almost purple. The artery under his arm that Tara had hit had already closed, and as he put his hand to his injured shoulder, he felt the muscles knitting back together under the skin. He’d lost a lot of blood, though, enough that his vision went dark and fuzzy when he moved too quickly. Fighting off the edges of unconsciousness, he crossed to where the panther lay as Agosti sat back on his wolf haunches and the two bears nosed against her limp form.

  The elf lifted a shoulder. “I am unhurt,” he said. “I came prepared.”

  Something about his too-calm demeanor struck a note of terror in Chay’s heart. “She’s not—” But he cut himself off almost instantly because he could see the panther’s chest rising and falling in sleep.

  “She didn’t shift back,” Torrhanin observed.

  That simple observation made Chay’s blood run cold, his stomach lurching.

  No. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t let it be.

  In his panic, the meaning of Tara’s panther form hadn’t registered with Chay. When unconscious, shifters always reverted to their human shape. They might shift in the middle of a dream just like full humans might sleepwalk, but when they went from a conscious state to an unconscious one, whether through injury, sleep, or death, it was their human shape they resumed.

  As long as they still had a human shape to go back to.

  Chapter Two

  “Maybe it’s the drugs. Maybe they kept her from shifting,” Chay said, staring at the great black beast.

  “Beane.” Seamus had shifted back to his human form at some point—it was a testimony to how distracted Chay was that he hadn’t even noticed. The man now touched Chay’s good shoulder lightly. “She’s gone.”

  “No,” Chay said, shrugging his hand off. He knelt beside the panther’s still form, splaying his hands against her warm, sleek side and feeling each breath. “She’s there. In there, somewhere. We’ve got to get her out again.”

  He looked up at the circle of faces around him, Torrhanin with his usual elven inscrutability, Niall and Seamus looking serious under their close-cropped beards, and Agosti still in wolf form but managing to communicate his deep skepticism nevertheless.

  None of them thought she could be saved. Not now. But then again, they never had.

  All it took was a brief moment of weakness, one thing that made an out-of-control shifter want to be anywhere but where they were, and they were lost forever. It wasn’t so much the moment-by-moment struggle that doomed them but the aggregate of thousands of moments, each balanced on the edge of a knife blade.

  And Tara had fallen off.

  “I’ll put her some place safe, whe
re she can’t hurt anyone,” Chay said stiffly.

  “Beane—” Seamus began, but Niall gave him a silencing nudge in the ribs.

  Chay didn’t care. He just kept stroking the panther’s fur over and over, feeling its shallow breaths, its animal warmth, and believing that Tara had to be there, somewhere.

  “The brig,” Niall suggested. “She’ll be safe there.”

  But it would drive the panther mad, that tiny nine by nine cell. Tara wouldn’t have a chance against its mind, worked up into a frantic state.

  As Chay looked around the room, he realized that his teammates here thought what everyone else would—that he was just delaying the inevitable, extending her suffering by not putting her down immediately. And there were others on his team who were no stranger to the cold calculus of life and death who might take it upon themselves to make the choice for him, seeing his lack of decisive action as nothing but a weakness.

  He needed her safe. He needed her sane. So he needed her close to the spook shop that was the nerve center of his hidden, secret facility.

  “Not the brig,” Chay said. “Agosti, you go make a new door for my bedroom—clear, with a slot for sending her food and water. She’ll stay there. For now. Until she’s back to herself.”

  The wolf wagged his tail once slowly—agreement to perform the task, not agreement on the wisdom of Chay’s request.

  Seamus shook his head with disgust and turned away abruptly, grabbing one of Annie’s silk robes to cover his naked body. At any other time, the elaborate Chinese peony pattern wrapped around the bear-shifter’s burly form would have elicited at least a smile from Chay. Now Chay had more important concerns.

  “I’ll get clothes for everybody,” Seamus snapped before jerking the door of the spook shop open and stepping into the hall.

  Chay looked at Niall. “If anything happens to her, anything at all, there will be consequences,” he said quietly. “Spread the word.”

  Niall’s jaw tightened briefly under his beard, but he nodded shortly.

  Agosti had shifted back to his human form and was busy tapping away at his workstation. “I’ve ordered the supplies,” he reported. “Reinforced hinges and bolts, ballistic-grade laminated polycarbonate, the works. I can have it built in three hours.” He glanced down at his naked body. “Once Seamus comes back with my pants.”

  “How long will she be out?” Chay asked the elf.

  Torrhanin shrugged. “One and a half hours? Two?”

  “Then I have to ask you to stay with her until the door is finished.” Ask—because even though Torrhanin’s people lived in his Black Mesa facility, they weren’t under Chay’s orders, and any favor asked of an elf could have dangerous strings attached.

  After a moment, Torrhanin nodded. “I will do that, friend.”

  A tiny shiver went up the back of Chay’s neck at that word, and he knew that one day, Torrhanin would come to collect the debt. “Right. I’ll get her in there, then.”

  He slipped his arms under the heavy body of the panther and grunted as he scooped her up, the edges of his vision going dangerously dark. Her shifter-form was bigger than that of a true jaguar by a good twenty-five percent and correspondingly heavier, and Chay was still lightheaded from blood loss. He averted his eyes from the dark red puddle, where the blood was seeping between the edges of the raised tiles to drip into the space above the cement subfloor where all the wires ran. It wasn’t his injury that made him queasy but the thought of how little control it showed that she had.

  “I’ll get it,” Niall volunteered, going quickly to open the door that separated the spook shop from Chay’s private quarters.

  Chay nodded and gritted his teeth as he crossed the room with the slack weight of the panther’s body against his chest, its black hair sticking to the blood that soaked his shirt. He could ask for help with carrying her. But he didn’t want anyone else touching her, anyone near her who didn’t absolutely have to be.

  He passed through his outer living area without pausing, going straight into the bedroom and setting her down gently on the bed. The bed where, a scant two hours before, Tara had woken in his arms and kissed him. The bed where they’d made love twice—and where he’d promised that he’d save her.

  How empty those words rang now.

  There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he set the limp animal body among the tangled blankets. He stroked the blunt shape of her heavy skull, but she didn’t even twitch. Straightening, he looked at Torrhanin, who had followed him into the room.

  “Make sure she doesn’t wake up until Agosti is finished,” he ordered reflexively. Then, realizing that he had just treated the elf like one of the hundreds of people under his command, he added, “If you would, please.”

  There was a ghost of a smile on the elf’s lips. If he was the least bit rattled by the panther’s attack, he gave no sign. “Of course,” he agreed.

  Chay nodded, feeling again like he had the short end of the bargain even though he couldn’t quite bring to mind what kind of bargain, if any, might have been struck. He went to his dresser and began hauling out his clothes in great armfuls and carrying them into the front room. Then he set to work emptying the closet. Whoever Tara had been before she shifted, she wasn’t that person now, and once she regained consciousness, he wouldn’t have access to those things.

  Most of what he cared about was in the outer room already—the things that mattered, like a framed photograph of the Indigo Squadron right before his first engagement in combat, and also the things from his past that had simply accreted around him, like the trophy from his Boys and Girls Club Little League Team that had followed him around for more than twenty-five years. He hadn’t even been good at softball, but that participation trophy had been packed by his mother in one of the three boxes that had come from the Detroit row house bedroom that he’d shared with his brother, and it had stayed with him ever since.

  He cleared off one of the plastic tables in the front room and stacked his clothes there—underwear, pants, shirts, belts, with the shoes beneath. Tara’s went into the corner. He retrieved his toiletries from the bathroom and returned to the bedroom to sit down next to the unconscious form of the cat and wait. Torrhanin stood silently across from him, a pale sentinel in the corner of the room. In time, there was a commotion in the front room, and Agosti came through with two brawny wolf shifters, directing them in the creation of a secure door.

  Chay said nothing, merely cradling the panther’s head on his lap and stroking it, as if that could call Tara back from where she’d gone.

  He was making the wrong decision. Not just a selfish decision but a stupid one, too. All his years of experience told him that Tara was gone past recovery now, and all he was doing was extending a life after true human intelligence and sentience had been lost. He’d told his team that he wasn’t slacking on his duties at Black Mesa for her sake—but now, less than a day later, he was.

  His smart watch chimed over and over again, the flood of messages with which he normally dealt as a matter of course now going unanswered. There were hundreds of people who depended on him, and there were others out in the world who, like Tara a week ago, needed his help and didn’t even realize it. His work had always consumed every waking hour—and would have consumed much more, if he’d had more time to give. But he was neglecting it all because of her. Tara. A lost cause. A girl who was already as good as dead.

  And most mystifying of all, he didn’t even love her. Not with the stomach-fluttering, lightheaded sensation that he’d always associated with love. He’d known her for only two days, and what he felt had none of that headiness. None of the joy. What he felt instead was something deep in his bones—a kind of recognition of her spirit that couldn’t be made sense of with those kinds of convenient labels.

  He couldn’t possibly love her. So why was it that the thought of living without her made him wish that he could die, too? Why didn’t anything matter if he couldn’t save her?

  Chay looked down at the glaze
d eyes and the heavy, slack-muscled head in his lap. He’d told Tara that he’d hold her every night for the rest of her life if that was what it took to keep her human. Now he only wished he could have that chance.

  The sounds of the men’s power tools echoed off the hard walls, and the blood that soaked his shirt slowly dried, gluing the fabric to his body.

  You don’t even know her favorite color, a part of his mind whispered. Her favorite food.

  But he knew that she was fierce and brave and generous. He knew that she was a fighter and that she cared deeply about those that she loved. And that was, he was sure, what had doomed her. She could face anything except what she’d done to them.

  He’d kept her off the web for a very good reason. The news was full of reports of the attack at William and Mary, each more sensationalized and emotional than the last. He didn’t know which one she’d found, but it hardly mattered whether it was a tribute to Dr. Butros’ life or a teary interview of Gavin Mead’s parents and friends. Any of them would have upset her fragile mental balance. One moment of weakness was enough to let the panther take control.

  Forever.

  The panther’s legs twitched, and she snorted softly in her sleep. Dr. Torrhanin stepped forward, the elf’s feet silent in his soft shoes even to Chay’s shifter ears. Hypospray in hand, Torrhanin bent to press it against the panther’s neck, and it went limp again.

  “I will come if you need me again,” the elf said.

  “Thank you,” Chay said, hoping that it wouldn’t come to that. “If you can do anything to save her, I think you know what it’s worth to me.”

  The old elf gave a nod and drifted from the room.

  The construction of the new door took almost exactly as long as Agosti had predicted, and under his direction, the men cleaned up the debris, gathered their tools, and exited the quarters without a word. Agosti gave Chay a single long look from the doorway, but when Chay refused even to meet his disapproving gaze, he followed the others, shutting the door to the front room behind him.