Then again, he was certain Hiss wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The sooner they had their chat, the sooner he could return to more important matters.
“Let’s get this over with,” he muttered, stomping his way past the nearest line of trees.
Hiss was swiftly at his side, the musk of his cat filling the air.
“I thought your lack of social skills was because you were locked in a cage,” he complained.
Blade sent his companion a warning glare. “Don’t push me, Hiss. It’s only because I owe you for getting me out of that cage that I haven’t kicked your ass.”
Hiss stiffened, an ancient pain darkening his eyes. “You don’t owe me, Blade. Not ever.”
Blade’s guts twisted at the words, and he lost all bluster. No matter how much this Pantera male—or any of the Pantera, for that matter—pissed him off or pushed him too far, bottom line—they were family. Always there for one another. Ready to fight. Ready to draw blood.
Or spill it.
Stopping in the center of the small clearing, Blade turned to face the older male.
“Tell me what you want.”
Hiss studied him for a long minute, as if searching for something in Blade’s ever-guarded expression. Then, at last, he answered the question.
“Raphael’s worried about you.”
Blade’s brows drew together. “Worried? Why?”
“You were expected to return to the Wildlands after you were freed from Benson’s lab.”
Blade’s jaw tightened. He didn’t do well with expectations. Not anymore. It’d been over two months, but there wasn’t a night that went by he wasn’t waking up covered in sweat, his brain still reeling from the nightmare that he was underground again, caged beneath the clinic in Baton Rouge.
“I did return,” he said.
Hiss snorted. “For two nights.”
Blade shrugged. He’d gone home to heal. His puma had needed to be surrounded by the magic of the Wildlands, where he could shift and run free. But it was a process that took less time for him than for most Pantera, since his role as Diplomat meant he spent long periods traveling around the world. His cat was used to being away and without its spiritual fuel, so to speak.
“Unlike the hell I came from, the Wildlands aren’t a prison,” he groused. “I’m free to come and go as I please.”
Hiss scowled. “Of course you are, but you also have a duty to your people.”
The words scraped against Blade’s raw nerves. He was trying not to think about his duty. Or how he was turning his back on his kind when they needed him the most. Screw Hiss for reminding him, digging at him.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to talk about duty to your people,” he snapped, only to instantly wince in regret. Hiss had spent years working with the enemy, been labeled a traitor—but he’d paid for his sins. Hardcore. And if the guilt that flared through the male’s eyes now was any indication, he was still paying. “Shit, I’m sorry,” Blade rasped.
And he was. Not only because Hiss had been the one to finally free him from that lab of horror, but because Blade was in no position to judge anyone.
“You’re right,” Hiss breathed, his voice harsh with pain. “I’m trying like hell to repair a portion of the damage that I caused, but I will never be able to fully pay for my sins.”
Blade curled his hands, fighting the guilt of his own assholery while the anxious need to return to his hunt hummed powerfully through his body.
Christ, he felt like a string that had been pulled to the point of snapping.
His eyes flickered past Hiss to a pair of rabbits. Ears up, alert, they stared at him for a moment, then took off into the woods. “That’s what I’m doing,” he uttered.
“What?” Hiss asked.
His gaze returned to the Suit. “Dealing with the sins of the past.”
Hiss studied him in confusion. Around them the breeze rustled through the boughs of the pine trees, scenting the air with a potent tang. A bird trilled a high-pitched song just above Blade’s head, perhaps calling for a mate.
“Talk to me, Blade,” Hiss urged.
Blade hesitated. Despite the nightmares, the cold sweat, the rage in his heart, he’d refused to discuss his time in Benson’s lab. It was almost as if he feared that giving words to the horror he’d endured and seen would somehow grant it power over his life.
But he didn’t have to explain to Hiss.
The male understood.
Granted, he’d been there only a short time. But that’s all it took, really.
Blade cleared his throat and forced himself to speak.
“You know Benson was attempting to create some sort of super solider using our blood.”
“Yeah.” Hiss’s features hardened with fury. “Goddess only knows how many Pantera and humans he killed in his Frankenstein labs.”
The Pantera had been so distracted by the erosion of the Wildlands over the past fifty years they’d failed to realize that the true danger came from the humans.
In particular Christopher Benson, a madman who had been using Pantera blood to build his empire. Not to mention keeping himself alive well past his expiration date.
“That’s not the only way he tried to create his soldiers,” Blade said.
Hiss nodded. “So we discovered. We have several Pantera females who were forcibly impregnated with human semen.”
“And human females impregnated with our semen,” Blade added.
“True.” Hiss jerked, as if he’d just been hit with an unseen blow. “Oh, shit. You’re talking about what happened to you.”
Blade gave a stiff nod. “Yes.”
Hiss cleared his throat, trying to disguise his discomfort.
Blade’s lips twisted. Yeah. There weren’t many things more uncomfortable than two dudes talking about bodily fluids and having them forcibly removed from their private parts.
“Look, what happened in those labs wasn’t your fault, Blade,” Hiss at last said. “You were a victim.”
Blade’s teeth clenched. He refused to think of himself as a victim. It was too passive. He was a survivor.
And now, a Hunter.
“It doesn’t matter who was to blame,” Blade told his companion. “The only thing I care about is my young.”
Hiss looked instantly confused, as if he was having major trouble processing what Blade had just said.
Blade could sympathize. It’d been weeks since he’d learned about the female carrying his child and he was still trying to digest the stunning information.
“You have a cub?” Hiss pressed.
The word fisted around Blade’s heart. Always did. It was a terrifying and wonderful kind of magic. “There was a female who was impregnated with my seed.”
“What? Are you sure?” Hiss held up his hand in an apologetic motion. No doubt he could sense that Blade’s cat was pressing close to the surface. He might not be able to shift outside the Wildlands, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do some serious damage if he snapped. “Sorry. I mean, we scoured through every medical file we could get our hands on and they showed a very low percentage of females who actually became pregnant.”
Blade shuddered. If he closed his eyes he could still feel the crack of his bones as the guards beat him with their beloved metal baseball bats. True, they’d known they couldn’t kill him, but they took perverse pleasure in making him suffer for his disobedience.
“Yeah, they weren’t slow to express their frustration with the whole breeding program,” he rasped.
Hiss tilted his head to the side, his puma visible in his eyes. “I never asked, and if you don’t want to go there again I get it, but—”
“What did they do to me? What did they want from me?” Blade growled softly. “How did they go about getting it?”
Hiss remained silent, but his jaw tightened.
“I don’t mind talking about it. Every Pantera should know their enemy and what it’s capable of.” He inhaled sharply and looked up at the trees,
swaying in the breeze. “When they first captured me they spent most of their time just trying to keep me contained. I was…” A grim smile curved his lips. “Uncooperative.”
Hiss snorted darkly. “I can imagine.”
Not many things pleased Blade, but he took fierce pleasure in the knowledge that he’d managed to kill at least two of the guards and severely disabled a half dozen more. He’d also destroyed everything in the lab, ripped the bars off all the windows, and made his Pantera battle cry heard to the rest of the prisoners on the floor before they’d managed to force his ass in that cage.
“There’s always payback, of course. They drugged me with malachite to the point where I could barely function. Just breathing was a fucking chore.” Malachite was the one certain way to weaken a Pantera. It was their kryptonite. And with males like Blade, the guards liked to double, even triple the dosage. “I’m not sure how long I was there. Maybe a few weeks, maybe months; the days all blended together. But eventually they discovered the perfect amount of malachite to use on me—to control me—to force the seed from my cock.”
A dark, fierce growl rumbled in Hiss’s chest, the air heating with the power of his cat. “They don’t deserve to continue breathing.”
“Many of them don’t breathe. Not anymore, thank the Goddess.”
“It’s still not enough.”
“No. It’s not.” Blade struggled to contain the fury that pooled like lava in the depths of his being. He feared that one day he would explode and all the anger and bitterness housed within him would spew to the surface and he would have no control, no reason. These days, he truly did everything he could to keep his emotions tightly leashed.
It was the only way to remain focused on his goal.
“I don’t know why,” he continued coldly. “Maybe they believed human females needed a male close, needed our musk to become fertile, but they put me in the same room with this one for her procedure.” He flared his nose. “I had to watch as they used tools to impregnate her. I had to watch as she struggled against the drugs they gave her to keep her compliant, my body unable to move, to fight.”
Hiss sucked in a deep breath, making a visible effort to regain command of his inner beast. It wasn’t easy. For a Pantera male not to be able to care for a female, fight for her, protect her… There was nothing worse.
Except perhaps if that human female carried a cub, Blade thought darkly, and there were two out there in the world he couldn’t get to, couldn’t protect.
“And they call us animals,” Hiss growled.
“Now you see...understand...what I’m doing here. Why...”
“Yes. But, brother, even if you were in the same room with her, you can’t know if the procedure worked. Our noses are sharp, but they can’t detect anything that early.”
“I remember her scent,” Blade said succinctly, refusing to add that the soft floral smell of her caramel skin was forever emblazoned on his soul, along with the vision of her perfect oval face, which was framed by long, sable hair and golden eyes. Eyes that had been both fierce and fearful as they’d tried to focus during the procedure. “And when you returned to free us, my cat picked up that scent once again. Along with a new one. One she carried with her.”
Hiss seemed to know instinctively what Blade was talking about. “She was pregnant,” he uttered.
Blade’s heart gave that same aching twist whenever he tried to imagine his child growing in the female’s womb.
A cub…
His cub.
“Yes.”
Hiss reached out to squeeze Blade’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you bring her to the Wildlands?”
“I lost her. She disappeared during the battle against Benson’s guards.” He made a low sound of frustration. His first instinct had been to follow her. Screw everything but his overriding need to protect his young. But the sounds of his brothers and sisters in battle as they fought to rescue those still in cages had lured him away. “I tried to track her down, but my instinct, my skills were too weak. I was forced to return home and heal my cat. But once I was strong enough, I resumed my hunt.”
Hiss frowned. “You could have gone to Raph and told him what had happened. He would have understood your need. Hell, he would have sent a dozen Hunters to help with your search.”
Blade gave a sharp shake of his head. “That’s exactly why I didn’t say anything. I have to do this alone.”
“I used to believe that too, but I was wrong, my brother.” Hiss gave Blade’s shoulder another squeeze. “We need each other. Now more than ever.”
“Not with this.”
“We’re family.”
Blade held up a silencing hand. “No.” His voice was hard. Unrelenting. “You don’t get what they did to this woman. She was tied to a gurney, drugged, her legs forced apart, terrified out of her mind while they forcibly inseminated her.”
“Shit.”
Blade’s lips twisted at Hiss’s horrified expression. “Yeah. If I come charging in with a dozen Pantera, at best she’s going to freak the fuck out, try to run. At worst, she could try to fight and get herself and our cub hurt.”
Hiss offered a grudging nod of agreement as the wind around them picked up and sent the trees listing sideways. “How do you intend to find her?”
“I went to Baton Rouge first, but they’d already torched the clinic.”
“They’re growing annoyingly predictable.”
The Pantera had discovered that Christopher Benson had a habit of covering his tracks by immediately setting any evidence of his terror on fire. He’d burned at least a dozen properties in the past few months.
“I did, however, manage to track down one of the lab techs who was stupid enough to remain in town,” Blade said.
Hiss arched a brow. “Did he talk?”
Blade snorted. The human male had startled babbling the second Blade kicked in his door. No honor among thieves was the philosophy of Benson’s goons.
“He did better,” Blade told his companion. “He had a laptop he’d stolen from the clinic before it was destroyed, no doubt hoping to cash in somehow.”
Hiss stepped forward, anticipation sizzling in the air. “You have files from Benson?”
Blade grimaced. He’d been as excited as Hiss when the human had tossed the laptop at him before jumping out the window in a futile attempt to escape justice. It’d taken less than ten minutes to discover that his excitement had been premature.
“Most of the files had been corrupted,” he admitted. “I’m assuming that someone triggered a virus to wipe out the information.”
Hiss growled. “Of course they did. Fuck!”
Blade released a short, humorless laugh. Nothing had been simple when trying to track down and destroy Christopher Benson.
“But I did recover a file that contained a list of the human patients who were admitted to the clinic over the past year,” he said.
“Did you find your female on the list?”
“I’m still not sure.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never heard her name.”
“Oh, hell.” Hiss grimaced, no doubt recalling the fact that they’d all been identified with a combination of numbers and letters. Like they were fucking lab specimens.
“How many names on the list?” Hiss asked.
“Thirty females.”
“And you’re tracking down each one?”
Blade nodded. The list had only given names and addresses. There were no ages or identifying descriptions that might have allowed him to narrow down the search.
“I’ve already found twenty of them.”
“Ten to go,” Hiss murmured, his expression revealing he was struggling against his instinctive urge to offer his help.
Pantera possessed a primitive need to protect. Especially each other. On any other day, with any other situation, Blade would’ve been grateful for the help.
But this...her...
“I’m getting closer,” Blade muttered, his attention suddenl
y distracted as the breeze once again changed direction.
There was something in the air. Something familiar. Something…floral.
“And when you find her?” Hiss asked.
Blade was already turning away, his senses on full alert. “I’m claiming my cub.”
Chapter 2
The café at the end of Main Street looked like something out of a classic TV show. Black and white tiled floor, with a long counter and stools that had seats covered with red vinyl. A small eating area with booths that was next to a long front window, and a half-wall that divided the café and the kitchen, allowing the owner and cook, Fran Meyer, to keep an eye on her customers.
Nearing her fortieth birthday, Fran kept her long hair dyed a bright red and her lips a glossy pale pink. Granted, no one referred to her as pretty with her short, square frame, hooked nose, and small eyes, but she was kind as well as brisk and efficient. And she always had a smile for her customers.
The young waitress Valli Landry, on the other hand, was young and beautiful, with her dark hair pulled into a thick braid that fell down her back and wide, golden eyes. She was taller than most women in the small town of Bonne, and reed slender, although it was hard to tell with the smock top she’d started to wear with a pair of stretchy yoga pants.
She’d explained her fashion choice to Fran by claiming that the lifesaving treatments she’d received during her time in the Baton Rouge clinic had left her skin too sensitive for the traditional uniform she used to wear.
She wasn’t prepared to tell anyone the truth. Hell, she barely wanted to claim it herself.
Massaging her lower back, Valli glanced around the empty dining room. It was that quiet time between the lunch and dinner crowd, which meant that it was a perfect opportunity to wipe down the tables, mop the floor, and replenish the glass case that they kept filled with Fran’s amazingly delicious cakes, pies, and muffins.
Grabbing the mop, she got to it. Work like this, mindless yet physical, was her utter salvation. With each swish of the cotton ropes, each wring-out of the rag, from dirty to clean, she felt as though her recent past was far away. And at times, that it no longer existed. That she was still the carefree, innocent young woman she’d been before.