Authors: Sylvia Frost
ROSE
I
needed a plan
.
I’d spent a lot of my life without concrete goals. Instead of “become an editor at Publishing Firm X” I’d chosen “get an English degree, move to New York, and pray a job appears.” Instead of “try and find a boyfriend I actually like by going out and meeting people,” I’d taken the “go out on a date with the first guy who asks me” option. I’d thought if I never wished too hard for any specific thing, I wouldn’t be disappointed when my dreams didn’t come true, but as a result now I was stuck in a nightmare.
I rolled to my right, surprised by the range of motion I could get with my hands tied to the sides of the bed. My hands weren’t tied in front of me. In
Mates of Darkness
Naomi had gotten very good at undoing bindings by breaking them over her knees, but my captors were smart enough to tie my arms to the guard rails.
Captors
, Sweet Jesus. This really was happening to me. A paralyzing wave of fear uncoiled from my stomach and slithered up my throat. For the first time I noticed the clock right above the doorway. The red second hand ticked at what had to be a regular interval, but what felt faster and faster.
Ten minutes. What would I do if I even got my hands free? What was the point?
I closed my eyes, looking for respite from all the white, sterile surfaces. I tried to remember Daniel’s warm, raspy voice whispering my name, his arms around me, the heat that radiated from his masculine body. But I couldn’t. My imagination couldn’t capture how he made me feel. Not completely. If I kept lying here, doing nothing, that was all he’d ever be. A dream that I’d forget upon waking.
I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t. Not just because he resembled my fantasies, with his admittedly chiseled body, but the ways he didn’t, like his smile. The tender way he spoke to me. The way he had taken me last night, fierce and wild, just like I’d asked. The way he had run out into the street like a rabid dog, just because he wanted to protect me.
I opened my eyes, and let out a startled croak of a laugh.
I loved him.
Maybe it was just the hormones from the matemark, but wasn’t that all human love was when it came down to it, too? Chemicals and neurons firing. Mine were just a little stronger, but in the end it was still about a choice. I had a choice now. Fight Lonan or give in and let him break the bond.
God knows, maybe if I fought I wouldn’t win. But, for the first time in my life I wasn’t going to let the complete certainty of failure stop me. I was going to try.
I stared at the plastic guard rails on either side of me. I was not a small girl, and they looked like could barely keep a toddler contained. I’d been thinking like one of those skinny helpless girls in romance novels, but I wasn’t them. I had the force of my superior mass on my side. It was time I used it.
First I tried rolling, but I only got halfway there before the the handcuffs on my other hand dragged me back to the center of the bed. I’d needed another plan. If only I had better upper-body strength.
The one time I had actually used the personal trainer Mamma bought me in an effort to help me “get healthier” he’d said that the only muscle I had that was in fighting shape was my brain, with my legs running a distant second.
My legs! I kicked my feet like I was in a swimming pool trying to get up a big splash. The sheet fluttered up in response before drifting back down. A slow, uncertain smile tightened my cheeks.
They hadn’t tied down my legs. Mistake. Or at least I hoped it was. My nose twitched to the right as I sucked in a breath, bringing back my leg until my upper thigh pressed against my elbow.
“Here goes,” I muttered.
And then, like a pissed-off frog, my foot shot out toward the plastic guard rail.
“Agh,” I grunted, as my heel glanced off the plastic. My bed vibrated, but the rail didn’t budge. Christ this always looked so much easier than the movies.
I shut my eyes to keep any tears from falling. Then I tried again, harder. My ankle twinged in pain from the assault, but the guardrail didn’t give. Outside I heard footsteps, getting faster, even as the ticking of the second hand stayed the same.
“Jesus, come on!” I pled. I hadn’t been to church in years and wasn’t sure after the whole werebeast thing what I believed anymore, but still.
Third time was the charm. That was what always happened in fairy-tales wasn’t it? That last-ditch effort that comes through. I took in all the oxygen I could, bracing myself, and tried one last time.
My bones hummed as I made full-on contact with the guard rail. It gave a little underneath my toes, and for a second I was so sure it was going to work. That it was going to pop off like the plastic packaging on a limited edition action-figure.
But it didn’t.
Failure burned in my nose like the scent of the hospital the day Daddy died. I remembered sitting next to him in a bed just like this one, wondering why he wouldn’t wake up. I remembered crying so hard I couldn’t speak when Mamma entered the room. It had been easier to cry than to get angry at the fact that the man who had done this to us would never suffer. That people like him and Lonan got to ignore their own mistakes and build societies founded upon our pain.
“I don’t care,” I said, and was surprised to find my own voice harsh with tears. They slipped down, staining my cheeks with their hot sting. Thick wet, embarrassing tears burned all the way to my lips. But I deserved to cry.
“I don’t care!” I yelled, finally letting the anger bubble out of me into a righteous wail. And then, without even thinking about it, I thrashed against the plastic guardrail. My foot pounded against it, as if I could stomp out everyone that had ever hurt me or Mamma or Daniel. As if I could end it all right here, right now.
And, in a miracle sent from some place I didn’t understand, the fourth time was the charm. The guard rail detached from the bed and skittered to the floor. My hand was still attached to it, but now I had a range of motion. Another kick and I had popped off the other rail too, and I was free and standing up. I let out a subdued whoop of victory.
My whole heart swelled with joy. I was going to drop-kick the rest of my way out of here. I put aside any worry that they might have guns. I was on a fire.
Wait! I glanced down at the sheathed replica of Naomi’s sword nestled on my chest. Fire. I was an idiot. If I could get out of this room and then start a fire somewhere else in the facility, I could use that as a distraction to escape. It was a ridiculous idea, but at this point in my life I didn’t need my plans to be perfect, I just needed them to happen.
I started to the door, steeling myself for whatever was about to come, but then I noticed the clock had stopped. The second hand stalled right before a new minute.
I grabbed my necklace for comfort, as if it was powerful enough to actually help in any real way.
Then the lights went off.
DANIEL
T
he fluorescents flickered once
and then went out. Now the only light in the maintenance hallway of the abandoned hospital came from between the slats of the boarded-up windows. Thanking the gods I could see in the dark, I slipped through the shadows and around the empty laundry carts. My matemark was hot and prickling on the back of my neck. Rose was close. There was only one problem.
“Did you just turn off the lights, Loxely?” Ms. Briar asked into her Bluetooth ear piece.
“Yep, lights and security are on the same circuit. Sorry. GPS on the guard’s phones say they’re on the floor below you, with another four heading to the basement to check what I’m sure they think is a blown fuse. I sent my team to deal with them. I’d say you’ve got ten minutes. Fifteen, if you want me to do some more hacking magic.”
“I think I’ve had more than my share of magic for one day.” Tapping her ear piece again to hang up, Ms. Briar’s heavy footfalls echoed through the hallway as she hurried to explain to me what I’d already overheard. One of the security team had given her work-boots after I patched her up.
I held up a hand and shook my head to silence her. It was bad enough that she was tromping around, a recap was the last thing I needed. If her fox-shifter hacker hadn’t been the only one able to open the service entrance back door, I would’ve never risked Ms. Briar’s safety by letting her come.
Ms. Briar surprised me by closing her mouth and shifting her grip on her pistol to keep it cocked into the shadows, guarding our flank.
Safe, for the moment, I focused on my matemark. The tingling was more intense. We were getting closer to Rose. I motioned us forward and Ms. Briar followed, a little quieter this time as we rounded the corner.
Past the laundry room stretched a line of identical doors. Faded multicolored plastic flags rested above the frames, not labeled with doctor’s names. My slitted, golden eyes caught no human forms in the shadows, either. I stopped at the first door, my fingers running down the grain of the wood.
I heard nothing on the other side.
Silently, I moved to the next door and then the door after that. The farther I got along the hallway, the faster the warmth spread down my neck. When I reached the last door, I felt Ms. Briar’s hand on my shoulder. She probably thought I couldn’t see the fear in her wide brown eyes or how her lips were corkscrewed into a grimace, but I could.
Careful not to scare her away, I grabbed her hand and squeezed. She started back, confused for a second, and then relaxed, offering me a grateful smile. I nodded to the door. Ms. Briar nodded back. Then we entered.
Right away I knew I’d made the correct choice. Rose’s scent of lilacs burst through the sterile numbness of the silver nitrate like roots breaking through concrete. A second after I registered her scent, I spotted her.
My mate was crouched in the center of the room like a little cub about to strike. Her hands were imprisoned in cuffs still linked to the plastic guard rails from the bed. The rails dragged behind her like carcasses from a kill. In her right hand she wielded her miniature magnesium sword, and with her left hand she held the scabbard perpendicular over her weapon. With her wild box-braids dancing around her face and brown eyes gleaming, it wasn’t clear to me whether she was going to start a fire with the scabbard or throw her tiny weapon at the first person to cross over the threshold.
We stared each other for a moment, my heart swelling. Her body may have been soft and lusciously curvy, but her eyes held fire. I had never loved her more.
Then her jaw dropped, eyes widened, and a smile broke over her features. “Daniel!” she cried.
“Rose.” Without thinking, I swooped her up in my arms, kissing the first bit of her I could reach, which was the top of her head.
She sighed against my chest, hands scrabbling at my shirt. “Oh, Daniel. God, am I glad to see you!” She noted her mother behind me and rose to her tiptoes to get a better look over my shoulder. “Mamma? How the hell are
you
here?”
“Language, Rose,” Ms. Briar said through a sucked-in breath of disapproval, but her eyes weighed my expression carefully. She was worried I’d tattle on her stalking.
I wouldn’t. That was her secret to tell. I busied myself cutting Rose free of her plastic handcuffs with my claws.
Rose didn’t seem to notice, she was too busy rolling her eyes at her mother. “Sweet Jesus, Mamma. I’ve been kidnapped by a crazy corporation, now is not the time to care about me swearing. We have to get out of here.”
“But,” her mother echoed, shocked at her daughter’s defiance, but with the tiniest hint of approval. “I guess you’re right.”
“I love you, Mamma,” she said, laughing, as her eyes met mine. “And I love you too, Daniel.” She sank to the ground, her hands sliding off my shoulders and down my arms, tender warmth softening her face for just a moment.
“I love you, Rose, too.” Bowing my head, our lips met, and I relished her sweet wet mouth. I counted my pulse, making sure I didn’t steal too many seconds of bliss before we had to run again.
The lights went on.
My eyes flew open and I pulled Rose against me instinctively, caging her in my embrace. Ms. Briar had raised her gun to point it at the door.
“Loxely,” she hissed into her Bluetooth receiver.
I heard footsteps on the other side of the door. More than one pair. Three at least. I glanced at the window. We were at least two stories up, but my strong lion’s bones could handle the fall if I shifted. Cat’s always landed on their feet. Rose and her mother were another matter, but maybe if they held on tightly…
The doorknob began to turn, we were out of time. Reaching deep inside of myself, I tried to pull out the change, but I was too slow. By the time I felt fur piercing my skin and the burning nausea of my organs rearranging themselves, the door had already opened, and through it walked a nurse, three armed guards and Lonan Brown.
ROSE
T
hree guns wielded
by men in body armor, a short blonde nurse holding a metal stand decked out with a full, cloudy IV bag, and Lonan Brown. The small army that stormed through the hospital door was enough to make any girl meekly sit back down on the bed, and say, “Oh well. Guess I’m done for.” But I wasn’t just any girl. Not anymore.
Lonan halted when he saw Daniel, Mamma and me, his hand flying to his own waist reflexively where there was now a standard military issue handgun.
I did not doubt it had silver bullets.
“Well, okay,” Lonan drawled, looking us over. “I can’t say this is unexpected, since I’ve currently got a squad engaged in a firefight downstairs with a mean-looking croc shifter with a hook for a hand, but you did find Rose faster than I would’ve thought.”
“Tell your men to put away their weapons,” Mamma said calmly, her gun pointed directly at Lonan, ignoring the soldiers with their scarier-looking rifles.
God, I loved Mamma.
She always knew who the people with real power were and how to take them down. After she lost the court case against the sheriff who killed Daddy, she found in her records of Amazon Glam that the sheriff had been buying lingerie for his mistress two towns over for years. All she had to do was post the receipts on the local bulletin board and the town busy-bodies did the rest. It wasn’t justice, but at least he suffered a little.
Unfortunately, it’d take a more than the rumor mill to stop Lonan.
Lonan nodded, and the three soldiers raised the muzzles of their automatic rifles. “Sorry. I can’t do that.”
I squeezed my hands into fists, concealing my mini sword and scabbard. Both were useless. Mamma was the only one with a weapon, and Daniel…
I glanced at him out of the side of my eye and my mouth went dry at what I saw. His nose, which I once thought wide and slightly African, had now expanded fully into a lion’s snout. Whiskers pierced his cheeks, fangs curled over his lip, and his hair had exploded into a full bright orange mane, although he still had human feet, hands, and eyes.
Lonan must’ve caught him halfway through the shift, and now he was afraid if he completed it, Lonan would shoot me or Mamma. I could see in Daniel’s eyes that he didn’t care if he died himself.
Mamma glanced between us, her eyes wide at Daniel’s transformation, but she didn’t lower her weapon. “I don’t take orders from people who break the law,” she spat at Lonan.
Lonan’s smile tightened. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my company is with the government. We are the law.”
Mamma squared her shoulders and stepped closer to the line of loaded assault rifles, her face twisted with decades of suppressed fury. “The last time the law messed with me I let them, and I regret it every day of my life. If you so much as harm a hair on my daughter or her freaky boyfriend’s head, I will blow a hole through your skull and I will smile. Got me?”
Lonan’s eyes narrowed. “I think we’d get a bullet through your daughter’s skull first, Alycia.”
I could almost feel the icy horror sliding between my Mamma’s lips at Lonan’s words. She flinched, her gun wavering just a centimeter. I couldn’t let him do this to her.
“You wouldn’t.” I pushed my Mamma back with one arm without thinking about it. “You kidnapped me to give me a treatment. You can’t do that if I’m dead.”
Lonan sighed and fidgeted with his expensive watch. “Your point is?”
Beside me Daniel was growing more and more agitated. His hands were paws now. If given only a few more moments he would pounce.
“Tell the werebeast to stand down,” one of the soldiers grunted to Lonan, his body armor clanked as he shifted the grip on his gun to brace it on his body.
“Dr. Ward, you’ll stop shifting, if you want your mate to come out of this alive,” Lonan commanded.
“When did you know?” Daniel’s voice was garbled, half-animal, half-human and all pure feline fury. “About me. About her.”
“I just follow orders and collect a paycheck. But my understanding is we’ve known about you for a while,” Lonan said. “Going to med school doesn’t exactly qualify as living off the grid. Even if you did change your last name.”
“Then why didn’t you come after me again if you knew where I was?”
Lonan’s fingers ran up and down the holster for his side-arm thoughtfully. “I’d bet recapturing you had a price-tag the board of directors didn’t feel comfortable paying. They’d gotten everything they needed from you scientifically, and you were too busy hiding to hook up with even your family, let alone more dangerous werebeast elements and pose a real threat. In summary, revenge isn’t a solid business strategy.”
“Then. Why. Take. Her?” Daniel’s shoulders hunched and his eyes flashed into a cat’s narrow pupil in his anger.
“I’d keep on explaining, but time is money, and I’m not going to waste more of either on you.” Lonan rolled his shoulders as if getting rid of a muscle cramp and then motioned to the soldiers. They pressed forward in a single lock-stepping stomp.
His gaze zeroed in on Mamma. “Now, Ms. Briar, we have two options. One, we shoot you and Daniel here ‘in the skull’—” he put quotations around the last word and did a horrible southern parody of Mamma’s accent, even though she’d lost her twang years ago, “—and then perform the therapy on your daughter. Two, you stand down, let me do my job, and I promise that I won’t hurt your daughter or her mate.”
Lonan’s beady green eyes bore into mine to see if I’d contradict him. He knew that I knew that not only would the treatment in the IV bag cause me significant brain damage, but that breaking the bond couldn’t be good for Daniel. But if I confessed what I knew, Daniel and Mamma would charge the soldiers and end up dead.
I needed another plan. I clenched my jaw. My palms were doused with sweat by this point, which was reacting with the magnesium of the sword in a bubbling fizzle. Naomi’s meteorite sword would’ve never done that, it would’ve glowed and been the size of a real weapon. If I had that, I could’ve sliced Lonan’s head off.
“Well?” Lonan asked the three of us, his voice cold as a credit debt collector. “What am I working with here?”
Daniel’s back arched, his Werehawk’s T-Shirt was beginning to bust open as his muscles grew. All my life I’d dreamed about seeing a werebeast transform in person. I thought it would be beautiful. And it was. But it was also sickening, because I knew if he finished transforming, in the end all there would be was a corpse of a lion on the ground. I’d never see Daniel’s human face again.
“Wait!” I called. “I’ll do it.”
Everyone in the room looked at me. The last glimmer of humanity in Daniel’s eye flashed like the color a setting sun.
“You’ll do what, Rose?” Mamma said, voice rough. “What are you going to do?”
I swallowed, my throat aching from pain and tears. I loved this world so much. I loved my mamma, I loved my stupid Brooklyn apartment that I’d worked my butt off to call my own, I loved all the books and all the stories about brave women doing brave things. Maybe that’s what stories were for, so that even when you did something brave and you couldn’t remember it, other people could, and you’d live on that way.
And I loved Daniel. I loved him most of all.
I smiled at him, wishing I could bring his lips against mine one last time and whisper that I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t hurt him and that I needed him to help take care of my Mamma if I didn’t wake up, or if, after I woke up, I wasn’t myself anymore.
One of the soldier’s chins rose as he evaluated me. I recognized him. He was the same man with the weak coffee eyes and the squished jaw, the one who had broken into my house. He was not a man who would stop from pulling the trigger just to let me have a goodbye kiss.
So I squared my shoulders, ignoring the pain in Daniel’s face. I’d rather hurt him now, than have him dead.
“I’ll take the treatment,” I said.
“And the rest of you?” Lonan asked.
Mamma looked at me hopelessly and Daniel couldn’t meet my eyes at all, Just saying it once wasn’t enough. I had to tell them that this was my choice, even though it was anything but. I had to affirm what Lonan always thought, that causing pain was the only way cure me.
I glared at the IV bag dangling from the metal stand, as if I could set it on fire with my eyes. The liquid inside wasn’t completely clear, and I swore I could see the silver poison swirling around the water, waiting to take everything away from me. In my palm, the magnesium sword had stopped fizzling against my hot, sweaty hands.
Wait.
Magnesium plus water equaled a sizzle, because magnesium is crazy reactive. That was why I always wore the sword in sheath. Magnesium was dangerous. It might not have been able to slice anyone’s head off, but it wasn’t powerless. If I were able to put the magnesium into the silver mixed with the water, I could cause an explosion. I could take the very thing they wanted to use to hurt me and turn it against them.