Her bravado didn’t impress him. “How often do you shift?”
“What?” It had been a while, and didn’t that make her feel itchy? “When I can. I don’t always have the opportunity.”
“Do it at least twice a week. Run it off.” Eric brushed a stray bit of chocolate from her lower lip. “But when you do go out running, you call me. It’s dangerous out there without a Collar, and you need protection.”
“Sure, Eric. But who protects me from you?”
Again the laugh, dark and warm. “I’m your alpha, love. You have no clan or pride, so I’m it by default, as ranking Feline in the area. I protect you—from everyone. Including myself.”
“Now, why doesn’t that make me feel better?”
“You call me.” Eric handed her the bag of chocolate, and she felt another twinge of disappointment. Him feeding her had been… delectable. “Now, I’m taking you home.”
“I’m meeting my friends.”
“Call them and tell them you’re going home.” Eric leaned in again. “There’s bad stuff out there, Iona, and bad people. You have no natural defenses against them.” The look in his eyes was one of true worry, not just the you-obey-me-because-I’m-dominant crap. “I don’t want you dying on my watch.”
“Dying?”
“Yes, sweetheart. The Collars don’t mean we’ve given in to the humans. We chose captivity to save ourselves, and some of those without the Collar are getting wilder and wilder. If they let the animal take over, they go feral. Not a good thing. You feel the wildness though, don’t you?”
Of course Iona didn’t. She’d grown up like a normal girl—playing with toys, skateboarding, jumping rope, riding horses. Although the horses had always been a little nervous with her. Then she’d become a teenager and discovered that she liked clothes, makeup, shoes, and boys.
Normal. Sure.
Iona smelled the chocolate, winding around the hard craving inside her, and she shivered.
“You feel it,” Eric said.
Damn him. “How do I make it stop?”
“It will stop when you mate. When you and your chosen spend days together. When your body is convinced it’s doing the job it was made to do, which is to produce cubs.”
She stared at him. “How nineteen fifties of you. I have a life, a career.”
“You can still have a life. Just one with lots of sex. And cubs.”
“Oh, sure. While the men do whatever they want. I’ve heard that before.”
Eric leaned to her again, and her mouth watered. Need chocolate!
“Males have the same frenzy, sweetheart,” he said. “I have the frenzy.” He traced her cheek. “So whenever you feel the need to dampen it a little, you come and find me. We can help each other.”
He was offering to help her ease the pain with lots and lots of sex. Iona should be insulted, not tempted.
She was tempted.
“Give me another piece of chocolate,” she said.
Eric plucked her cell phone from her purse and started punching buttons, one-handed. “I’m putting in my number. When the need gets bad, you call me. If you want to go running around as a wildcat, you call me. You want anything at all, you call me.”
“I want the chocolate.”
Eric laughed. He slid the phone into to her purse and took back the bag of chocolates. He found one laced with citrus and held it up to her. Iona put out her tongue and drew the chocolate into her mouth.
Eric’s eyes went dark as he watched her, but he didn’t try to kiss her again. She craved the kiss, but she didn’t let herself reach for him.
“Come on,” Eric said once she’d finished. He took her arm and kept hold of the bag of chocolates. “You’re going home.”
Diego gunned the jeep straight through the Shifters. Wildcats, wolves, bears—there were so many of them.
The Shifters leapt out of his way. Diego fishtailed as a wildcat tried to jump on the back of the jeep. The wildcat became dislodged, but not the bear that reached for Cassidy.
Shane roared, half changing, clothes ripping, and went for the bear. Diego saw Cassidy stripping off, heard her growls.
If Diego could get the jeep up to speed, they could beat the Shifters back to the plane. Even Shifters could run only so fast. But the jeep, ancient and worn out, gasped and chugged along. Diego drew his pistol.
A bear charged out of the darkness straight for the side of the jeep. Xavier brought up his shotgun and fired.
At nothing. The Ursine hit the dirt, the shot missing. The bear, a giant of a thing, regained his feet and swiped the shotgun out of Xavier’s hands.
In the next second, the bear had swept Xavier out of the jeep. Xavier fell and hit the ground, rolling, rolling. He’d try to get to his feet, snatch out his pistol, fire.
Diego hit the brakes, and the jeep swung around. The biker in the passenger seat held on, swearing and praying, his eyes closed.
Cassidy was out, her wildcat racing back to help Xavier. Shane rose on his hind legs, scraps of clothes clinging to him, the grizzly roaring his rage.
Diego grabbed his shotgun and jumped out, weapon ready, as he ran back to Xavier. Xavier made it to his feet, but the bear and now several wolves surrounded him.
Xavier didn’t want to shoot. Diego saw that in his stance. He liked Shifters, now that he’d gotten to know some, and he didn’t view them as dangerous animals that needed to be contained. He wanted there to be a way out that didn’t involve death.
Cassidy and Shane simply attacked them.
Shane hit the bear that held Xavier, and Cassidy went for one of the wolves. Diego ran on toward them, his heart in his throat.
Cassidy’s Collar went off as soon as she landed on the back of a wolf, her claws extended, but she kept on fighting. Shane, same thing.
But they’d tire, and the pain of the Collars would break them soon. The other Shifters were many, strong, and not restricted by Collars. Shane and Cassidy were like declawed tabbies trying to fight a horde of angry alley cats.
Diego heard the jeep behind him roar to life. The drug runners. Of course they’d steal the jeep and run out of there to save their own asses.
But they weren’t fast enough. A few bears broke off and rushed the jeep. They didn’t try to stop it or grab the men inside, they just tipped the damn thing over.
The engine whined, gurgled, and died. The bikers tried to run, but the bears and wolves were on them.
Diego took aim at the Shifters surrounding Xavier and fired. One bear fell, moaning. Diego cocked the gun one more time before it was knocked out of his hands. He found himself facing a wild wolf, with crazed eyes, brown teeth bared, its breath horrific.
Diego fought. His body took over, the lessons and experience of hand-to-hand combat closing down his brain. To think meant to die.
He’d never in his life gone hand-to-hand with a gigantic wolf, but the same principles applied. Go for the vulnerable spots, take down the assailant as fast as you can.
The wolf’s muzzle was vulnerable—if Diego could get past the teeth. Likewise the throat, the legs.
The wolf’s front claws tore open Diego’s skin, raising welts of pain. Diego ducked and came up under the wolf, jabbing a hand into the wolf’s throat. It fell back, choking.
Cassidy’s Collar shocked and arced in the darkness. She howled as another wildcat and bear joined her fight to keep Xavier safe. Xavier was firing now, Shifters screaming as he hit them.
Diego dove for his shotgun. It was snatched out of his reach by a bear, who half shifted and rose to his full height. The thing smelled like urine.
Diego rolled into the darkness. Like hell he was getting shot in the stomach twice in his lifetime by the same kind of gun.
The Shifter brought the gun around like a club and caught Diego on the temple. Diego ducked in time to keep the blow from doing full damage, but the world spun around him.
Shane knocked the half-shifted bear away from Diego, but Diego felt himself losing consciousness. The last things
he saw before he passed out were at least a dozen Shifters dragging his brother away, followed by Cassidy’s wildcat sprinting after them into the darkness.
“Shifter woman, I claim you.”
The speaker was a bear Shifter, in human form now. The gigantic man’s skin was covered with tattoos, his shaggy hair and beard touched with gray. At least he’d put on a pair of pants, tattered BDUs.
All the Shifters in the abandoned building wore clothes of some form or other, but none had offered clothing to Cassidy. She’d chased them and tried to get Xavier away from them, but she’d been beaten down by five Lupines and a Feline, plus the shocks from her damned Collar.
The Collar was silent now, and Cassidy sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, holding in the Collar’s aftermath pain. Xavier lay on a blanket next to her, unconscious, his head caked with blood.
Cassidy looked up at the bear Shifter, meeting his eyes. It was difficult to lock gazes with him, because he was definitely the leader here, and he had dominance. Plus he was just so tall, and her neck hurt. But Cassidy knew that if she looked away, if she betrayed any submissiveness to him, she was done for.
A male might hesitate to force an alpha female who was not afraid to fight him, because she could do him a lot of damage. But he’d not hesitate to force a submissive. A feral wouldn’t anyway.
“When my alpha comes for me, you’re not going to be happy,” Cassidy said. “Trust me.”
“Your alpha has to be a thousand miles away,” the bear said. She’d heard one of his trackers call him Miguel. Whether that was his true name or one he’d taken when he’d come to Mexico, she didn’t know. “You have a Collar,” Miguel said. “That means you don’t live nearby. No one around here is Collared. They wouldn’t dare take a Collar.”
Cassidy clasped her knees to her chest, but she kept her voice nonchalant. “Felines, Lupines, Ursines, living together in the wild. Unheard of.”
“We’re just doing what you did,” Miguel said. “Coming together, putting aside differences, only we didn’t bow to humans to do it. The humans bow to us. No Collars. Just Shifters.”
Living in a half-ruined building in the middle of nowhere in Mexico, terrorizing the locals and hiding like fugitives. No access to any stashes of wealth, it looked like. They either killed their food or had the local eateries give it to them free.
“Looks… cozy,” Cassidy said.
“You’re pretty strong. When you’re my mate, we’ll get that Collar off you, and you can be my second. Or third. Depending on how well you fight my alpha mate.”
Cassidy rolled her eyes. “I reject your mate-claim. That’s a no-brainer.”
Miguel laughed. The two Feline trackers who were sitting as his bodyguards did too. The only other Shifters with them at present were another bear and a wolf guarding Xavier and Cassidy.
“Females around here don’t reject mate-claims,” Miguel said. “There are only so many females to go around, and you’ll be mate-claimed by more than one male. But the first cubs are mine. After that, you can fuck whoever you want.”
Cassidy wrinkled her nose. “Way to romance a girl.”
“Romance is for humans.”
Cassidy thought about how Diego whispered beautiful words as he made love to her. She’d take human romance with Diego over Miguel’s disgusting statements any day of the week.
“I’m not standing up with you under sun and moon,” Cassidy said. “Forget it.”
Miguel laughed again. “None of those rituals exist here. We just mate.”
“Taking off my Collar might kill me,” Cassidy said. “Then I wouldn’t be much good for producing cubs, would I?”
“I’ll let you push out a few first, just in case.”
Cassidy pretended to ignore that. Her heart was pounding, but she tried to suppress all emotion. No rage or fear. Miguel would be able to scent her fear and use it to break her.
Cassidy glanced around the barren room again. Wind blew through chinks in the ceiling high above. “This works for you, does it? Coming together, living in harmony, all Shifter races as one. Are you having more cubs, then, a better rate of survival? If so, where are they all?”
The slightest flicker of Miguel’s eyes told her much. They weren’t having the number of cubs they thought they would.
Because they’d gone feral. Feral didn’t mean the same thing as wild. It meant the animal instincts taking over, the human side being suppressed until the animal ruled, no matter what form the Shifter was in. Shifters were half beings, at their very best when each aspect of them worked in balance. Going too far in either direction wasn’t good at all.
These Shifters had probably found each other after humans started forcing Shifters to take Collars. They’d have escaped before Shifters were put into Shiftertowns, choosing to stay wild, thinking they could beat the humans at their own game.
Nice idea to try to make it together. Shifters taking the Collars had found, to their surprise, that living in communities, even restricted ones like Shiftertowns, let them stop fighting for survival and learn to live. Shifters together had gotten stronger, their fertility rates higher, the incidence of losing females in childbirth much lower. Cubs had safe places to grow up now.
These Shifters had tried the same idea, but without Collars to keep the fighting down. Different species instinctively fought each other, but Collars, Shifters had found, let them live side by side in some kind of peace. That way Shane and Brody and their mother could be friends next door instead of Eric and Cassidy having to fight them every time they walked out the door.
The dominance fights in this Shifter enclave must be horrific. And ferals were even worse at reproducing than Shifters who’d lived alone in the wild. Life was hard on a female Shifter, as was childbirth.
“This is how you introduce fresh blood, is it?” Cassidy asked, as though simply curious. “Kidnapping females and mate-claiming them?”
“We went out to defend our town against incomers,” the bear said. “You were an opportunity.”
Cassidy had been trying to save Xavier’s life. The last thing she’d wanted was for Diego to watch his brother die.
She glanced around surreptitiously, taking in the floor space, the exits. Windowless walls rose around them, with only one main doorway leading out into the night. The ceiling soared above her, pieces of it missing. It had to be a sixty-foot climb to the top. The light came from battery-operated lanterns, and the cooking fire was a gas camping grill. All stolen, she surmised.
A dark doorway stood beyond Miguel and his guards, the farthest point from Cassidy. The smell behind it was stuffy, enclosed, and it was also filled with pungent fear. Cassidy’s hackles rose, instincts telling her she did not want to go in there.
Miguel nudged Xavier with his foot. “Who’s the human?”
“My pet,” Cassidy said. Shifter females in the wild had sometimes taken human male lovers, referring to them as pets. She figured Xavier wouldn’t mind the lie if it kept him alive, if he were even awake to hear it. “You don’t get to have him.”
“Maybe I’ll just kill him,” Miguel said.
Cassidy coolly met his gaze. “If you let me keep him, I’ll consider the mate-claim.”
“You don’t consider anything, Feline. I mate-claim you, and that’s that.”
“But if I get to keep my human male, I might be nicer to you and not hurt you as much.”
Miguel chuckled. “I like you, Feline. We’ll see. You be good, and you can keep your pet.”
“How about some clothes?” Cassidy asked. “It’s getting cold.”
“I don’t have any to spare. I’ll have one of my females get you some tomorrow. If you’re cold, you’ll have to stay shifted.”
Cassidy didn’t want to shift. She could think more clearly as a human, and she knew that the way to win with Miguel would be to outthink him. The feral bear had the edge on her in terms of animal strength, plus Miguel was smart. How else would he have maintained dominance here, keeping three species of Shi
fters from killing each other? He’d have to be cunning and a quick thinker, even if things hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped.
Cassidy sighed. She stretched, letting her cat take over, and ended up sitting on her furry haunches.
She tamped down her fighting instincts with great effort. Her wildcat wanted to attack, but the minute she did that, Miguel and his boys would be on her, and five against one wasn’t good odds. As much as these Shifters needed females, she sensed that they would kill her to stop her escaping. Even if they wouldn’t mean to kill her, she’d be just as dead.
Cassidy closed her throat to keep herself from growling, and she lay down next to Xavier. He was still out, his face pale, and she wanted to growl again in worry. She curled around Xavier to give him as much of her body heat as possible, but she remained awake, and watchful.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Come on, Diego. Wake up.”
A huge hand batted Diego’s face, and Diego cracked open his eyes.
He found himself on a dark dirt road, a jeep on its side not far away, with two men in biker vests lying limply next to it. A naked and mud-streaked Shane stood above Diego, about to hit him again.
“Stop,” Diego said, voice hoarse. “I’m awake.”
“Those ferals took Cassidy.” Shane sounded like he wanted to cry. “And your brother. Cass could have gotten away, but she stayed with Xavier.”
Son of a bitch.
Diego got himself to his feet. His head hurt, badly, but he wasn’t dizzy. Yet. The shotgun lay not far from where he’d fallen, and Diego scooped it up as he walked toward the jeep.
He looked down at the drug runners he’d come to arrest. “Are they still alive?”
“Yeah. Bastards tried to leave us here.”
“They know all about running away,” Diego said. Adrenaline was flowing through him, dulling pain, honing Diego’s thoughts to focus on one goal.
Get Cassidy and Xavier back.
Diego checked the ammo in his pistol, then started pulling the ammo boxes from the back of the fallen jeep. The jeep was dead, no fear of fire, but still he wanted all that explosive potential away from the gas tank.