Out of Control Read online

  Out of Control

  Taken by the Panther – Book 4

  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

  All panther shifter Chay Bane wanted was to save Tara Morland from the beast that threatened to take over her mind and body. But the deal that he was forced to make had catastrophic consequences, locking Chay and Tara in another plane while the Earth is threatened with invasion by an ancient and relentless enemy.

  Can he cross space and time to save not only Tara but the world itself?

  AetherealBonds.com

  Visit aetherealbonds.com to sign up for the Aethereal Bonds Insider newsletter, where you will get exclusive access to sneak peeks, first notification when a new book is released, series announcements, and more.

  At least one installment will be published every month, so don’t miss out!

  Aethereal Bonds Series

  Vampire Serials

  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

  Tara shifted impatiently as the door to the elven domain finally slid back to reveal a glowing white corridor. It was smooth and tube-like except for the flattened floor, and it seemed almost sinister in its perfection after the well-worn dinginess of the hallways in the rest of the decommissioned underground Army base.

  “It gets very…weird in here,” Chay warned.

  “Mind-net-type weird?” she asked, half joking. She recognized the place—or at least, she was as close to recognizing it as she could get when what she was remembering was the absolute featurelessness of the walls and ceiling. She’d been pushed through this corridor on a floating gurney after her appointment with the elven doctors—that corridor or one very much like it.

  “Something like that,” Chay said.

  Tara frowned at the hallway, feeling a flutter of fear in the pit of her stomach. She only had the most confused memories from her last few days as a panther, and the panther had never possessed a good sense of time. But she was able to piece together a reasonable picture of what had been happening right before the elves’ suppression device had allowed her human self to return.

  Her panther form had taken over her consciousness and driven her human mind out beyond recovery, and Chay had been ready to give her a merciful death rather than watch her continue to waste away slowly as an animal in captivity. She’d been seconds from the end when the elven leader Torrhanin had chosen that instant to intervene.

  She knew that Chay didn’t trust the elves, and she trusted them even less. They’d played her imminent death as a trump card in their obscure game, using it to wrangle major concessions from Chay. Though she had no proof, Tara was certain that they’d deliberately waited until the last possible moment. No one had timing that good.

  Which raised a host of other concerns, because it meant that the elves had already had some access to the surveillance systems in the Black Mesa facility—access they shouldn’t have had.

  Chay stepped over the threshold, and with a small shiver, Tara grabbed his hand before following. He led her down the smooth white hallway. The absolute, flat consistency of the glow from the white walls was disorienting. It chased away shadows and, with the gently curving walls, made her feel like she was floating at the end of his arm.

  “Why are you bringing me along?” she asked quietly. There was no reason for her to be there. Not really. Chay was the owner of the Black Mesa facility, and she was nothing but an involuntary guest. There was no reason to take her with him to what was basically a private business meeting, no matter how it impacted her. She knew she was more of a data point than a decision maker in his plans.

  “You don’t want to come?” he asked.

  Tara laughed. “Let’s see. A meeting in magical elf land. Of course I want to come. I just don’t know why you’re letting me tag along.”

  “I just got you back,” Chay said flatly. “Right now, I don’t want to ever let you go.”

  Tara’s heart stuttered, and she stumbled very slightly beside him. She cast her eyes sideways at the man who had just tossed those words off as casually as an observation about the weather. He was a remarkable specimen, with broad shoulders and ropes of muscles under his skin, though the angles of his face and body had been sharpened by his suffering. Beautiful, with his dark eyes, so unlike his panther’s yellow ones—strikingly dark, like portals leading to another world. As he glanced at her, she wanted to fall into them and be lost forever.

  And here she was, former aid worker, current student. Murderer.

  She pulled herself back from those thoughts and found both her equilibrium and her sense of humor. She said, lightly, “I’ll take that in the most non-stalkery way possible.”

  He shrugged, and again her heart seemed to trip inside her chest. “Take it however you will.”

  They reached the closed door at the end of the hall—which had taken far longer to traverse than it had any reason to. Tara looked back over her shoulder. The door they had come through, which had shut silently behind them, seemed impossibly close, as if she could reach it in only a few steps. Then she blinked, and it seemed much too far away.

  Chay had said it would be weird. This definitely qualified.

  Chay’s smart watch buzzed, and Tara dropped his hand so that he could check it. He frowned at the watch and then the door in front of them. There didn’t seem to be any sign of a knob to open it. She ran her hands across its white, undifferentiated surface, trying to feel for some irregularity.

  “Is there a button?” she asked. “Doorbell, maybe.”

  “No. It’s always opened immediately before,” he said. His forehead creased in concern. “Sometimes you have to wait for the outer one to close because only one door is ever open at a time. But when that one is shut, this one always opens right away.”

  “It’s not opening now,” she said.

  “I noticed.” He looked back, and he said, “Maybe we should go back and try again later.”

  There was a tightness in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment before, and she looked at him sharply, freezing in place.

  “Is there something wrong?” she asked carefully, not sure what she should do if there was.

  He started to reply, but the door in front of them slid open so suddenly that Tara, leaning slightly against it, had to jerk back so that she didn’t fall through.

  “Apparently not,” Chay said, grabbing her arm with his unnaturally fast reflexes and steadying her as she straightened.

  He stepped inside, and as she followed, she gasped involuntarily at the sight.

  Mind-net weird? The hallway, maybe, but this wasn’t weird at all. It was impossibly lovely. Exquisite, even.

  The room that she was in was as wide as Black Mesa’s echoing cafeteria—perhaps even wider—and it was many times as long, constructed entirely of a white stone that looked like some kind of slightly translucent marble. There was
a broad center aisle framed by slender columns that shot up in clusters to support ribbed arches far overhead. Tara craned her neck to take in the geometric ceiling, where narrow, pointed windows marched in orderly pairs on either side to allow sunlight to stream inside.

  “It’s beautiful!” she said. She gave a lightheaded little giggle and let go of his hand, taking a few steps deeper into the room. Sunlight! It was night outside Black Mesa. But somehow she knew that in this place, it was always day, and the glimpse of the sky through the crystalline windows would always be such a pure and perfect blue that she thought it might break her heart.

  She said, “It really is a palace. Oh, my God. I never thought—”

  Tara laughed again. There were people all around. She’d been so taken with the room that she’d hardly noticed them at first. Not human people—elves. They wore layered robes like she’d seen on Torrhanin and the doctors, though now that she was seeing so many at once, she could tell that the clothing of the men and the women was well differentiated.

  The women—ladies, it seemed better to say—wore inner robes with wide necklines that revealed up to a handspan of skin beneath their collarbones. Those inner layers were fitted to the waist beneath their longer outer robes that brushed the floor in their wake. The men’s robes were high-necked and stopped midcalf, the same length as their outer robes.

  Both genders wore their hair long and flowing, the men as long as their waists and the women often much longer, and jewels flashed on their foreheads and at their wrists and throats. They were moving quickly through the echoing hall, mothers holding the hands of children tightly, some pushing delicately engraved sledges that floated in the air like the gurney Tara had been riding on when she’d woken from sedation.

  Tara spun back around to face Chay, who walking across the flawless white floor in her wake with a bemused expression on his face. She realized that she could actually look into the stone and see shapes within it, almost like engravings except that they moved gently in a way that was almost alive.

  “Thank you for showing me this,” she told him.

  “You see…details?” Chay demanded, following her deeper into the room. “A palace? Really?”

  “Yes, of course. But everyone seems to be in an awful hurry. Are elves always like this?” She looked around again. No one spared a glance for either of the intruders. And in fact one of the sledges seemed to be coming—

  Tara yelped and dodged out of the way as the elf pushing it jerked towards her, not seeming to notice that she was there.

  Chay grabbed her arm, pulling her toward him hard enough that it hurt and she unbalanced into his arms.

  “What was that for?” she demanded.

  And then she froze as she took in the expression on his face—one she’d never seen before, one of sheer, naked fear.

  She jerked her gaze away, seeking the source of his terror. Torrhanin was approaching. Where had he come from? They were many yards away from any kind of shelter that could conceal a doorway allowing him to enter the hall unnoticed. And yet here he was, only a few dozen feet away and coming closer quickly.

  Except…he didn’t look like the Torrhanin she knew. This elf had Torrhanin’s face, certainly, but he was far too tall and imposing. As he walked, he swung a silver staff as tall as he was with every step. He looked incredible, impossible, like something out of a movie, the silver staff so bright it was almost impossible to look at, the jewel encased in a cage at the top glittering with a hard, sharp light.

  “It’s happened,” the elf said, and Tara felt his voice more than heard it. “We were too late to stop them. You must not be here! It’s too dangerous for your kind.”

  Too late. Tara’s lips started to form those words as she tried to tease a meaning from them. But even as she did, the elf stopped and stood with his feet planted shoulder width apart, grasping his staff in both hands and bringing it down on the floor.

  The entire room rang with the sound, harmonics shivering up into the higher reaches. The other elves weren’t just hurrying now. They were running, dropping bags and abandoning sledges to flee. The dazzling room seemed suddenly darker as the merest hint of a shadow flickered through the translucent stones, like the shape of a shark through the waters of the sea.

  The staff came down a second time, and another sound rang out, and then a third. Chay jerked around, and Tara was pulled with him as if she were on the end of a whip. Before her disbelieving eyes, the door they’d just come through appeared—not at the end of the palatial hall where it belonged but halfway between the far end and where they now stood. As she watched in disbelief, the door began to slide open haltingly, disappearing as it passed into the frame and revealing a narrow sliver of the corridor they’d just come down.

  “Run!” Torrhanin roared.

  Chay ran, and Tara was dragged behind in his iron grip, her feet moving as fast as she could force them. The shadows were no longer faint. Now they surged across the high windows through which only blue sky had shown before—not clouds, because they also flitted through the translucent white stone from which the building had been carved, darting across the walls and frighteningly close to Tara’s feet.

  People were fleeing, screaming, mothers in elaborate, trailing dresses dragging wailing children behind them, and from somewhere came a deep roar, like a waterfall or a freight train. Tara lurched to the side as one of the dark, massed shadows in the floor reached out a tendril toward her. She didn’t know what would happen if her foot struck the stone where the darkness had already consumed the light, but she didn’t want to find out.

  Now the shadows were in front of them, too, moving through the stone. It was hard to run, as if something were pushing against them, even though she knew the air was still, and the sounds of the screams grew more piercing and frantic.

  More tendrils of darkness flowed through the bright stone, pulsing in an inky puddle around the doorway that stood in the middle of the floor. The door was nearly halfway open now, and the bright white of the corridor, unsullied by the shadow, beckoned to them.

  “We’re not going to make it!” Tara shouted. Or at least she thought she’d shouted, but the words never reached her ears.

  Then, all at once, the darkness leaped out of the stone, shooting up both sides of the doorframe. When it met at the top, the door was gone, and the darkness stood in its place, a seething, roiling mass that began to move across the floor under its own power. More shadows streamed through the stone and into it, feeding it until Tara could begin to make out shapes in the billowing black cloud—a black mask of a face here, an armored leg there.

  A noise was beating in her ears, and the force that had been pushing her back buffeted her now in truth, whipping her hair around her face and blinding her in the strength of its wind.

  “What do we do now?” Chay bellowed, hauling her back toward where Torrhanin stood under the very peak of the arch. Whatever force it was that tore at Tara’s clothes left the elf untouched, his long hair lying flat down his back even as other elves around the room were knocked to the ground.

  “We fight,” the elf said in a voice that rolled like a deep bell over the screaming wind. “Or we die.”

  Chapter Two

  Instantly, Chay dropped Tara’s arm. “Get on me!”

  He shifted so fast she hardly saw the change. One instant, he was striding as a man; the next, he was leaping as a panther, the shreds of his clothes falling from his body.

  Tara flung herself at him, gripping fur and hide to haul herself onto his back and then plastering her body along his.

  The cat moved as if his spine were made of rubber, compressing and releasing with every bound. But the shadows in the stone were faster, running alongside them to dart together and cut them off in front. Chay’s body bunched, and his rear paws sent them hurtling over the blackened floor and into the white circle that Torrhanin had kept around himself.

  Tara hurriedly slid off Chay’s back and stood beside the elf. He didn’t seem to notice eit
her one of them. His staff was still planted in front of him, but it was standing now under its own power as he made a soft kind of singing sound under his breath. He moved his fingers rapidly in the air in front of him, calling up electric blue lines in geometric patterns that he manipulated with swift skill, thin lines of text in some alien script flashing across the air.

  He’d better have a plan, Tara thought. Outside the circle, the creature in the midst of the darkness was becoming more and more solid as it advanced. She saw no mere glimpses now but definite shapes of a tall figure in angular, blackened armor. And it wasn’t the only one. Behind it, billows of blackness were twisting out of the floor to coalesce into more dark shapes.

  All the other elves were gone now. Tara wanted to think that they had all escaped, but the pitiful piles of clothes that dotted the room told her that this was probably a vain hope.

  “Chay,” Tara said tensely, as if he could do something about the situation.

  The panther just crowded against her legs and growled deep in its throat.

  “I hope your friend knows what he’s doing,” she muttered to him, not looking away from the blackened warriors as they slowly but inexorably advanced.

  The white circle on which Torrhanin stood grew wider, the edges pulsing as it pushed back against the darkness. It seemed like a weak kind of effort against the army in charred black armor that was getting closer and increasing in size with every moment that passed.

  Torrhanin’s voice reached a crescendo, and suddenly, a spray of light ran down the staff and into the floor, where it burst out from the circle and sliced through the cloudy darkness to surge up into the lower parts of the columns along the room.

  From their sudden blazing purity stepped a line of elves, emerging from the column bases themselves. They were clad in blocky suits of armor made of the same silver metal as the staff. That armor caught the remaining faint rays of light in the room and threw them back out into the darkness, pushing against the inky clouds with their blazing brightness.