Cougar Bait

  “Bitch,” he moaned when he saw Samantha watching him. “You . . . killed me! Blew my . . . dick off!”

  “No, you did that to yourself,” Samantha snapped. She realized she was still clutching the hematocrit centrifuge and let it drop from nerveless fingers. It clanged on the floor and came to rest on its side in the pool of Lounds’s blood.

  So much blood, she thought distractedly. The bullet must have nicked the femoral artery and he’s bleeding out. He’ll be dead soon—nobody can survive that kind of blood loss.

  Normally when she saw someone in pain or a life-threatening situation, she felt drawn to them, and her mind immediately went into trauma-surgeon mode. But looking at Lounds, bleeding his life away on the cold tile floor, she had absolutely no urge to save him.

  He was an evil man—he’d forced her body into a process it never would have gone through otherwise. Moreover, he had planned to harvest the byproducts of that process before raping and probably killing her once he had gotten as much as he could from her artificially stimulated body. Then he would no doubt have gone out to find another woman with a latent Shifter Gene and repeated the process.

  Let him die, whispered a cold little voice in her brain, and Samantha was inclined to agree with it.

  “You . . . bitch,” Lounds rasped out again. To Samantha’s alarm, she saw he was again fumbling with the gun. He might be on the way out but apparently he was determined to take her with him.

  Samantha turned and fled, leaving bloody footprints on the sterile white floor tiles of the lab. She looked frantically for the way out. She didn’t think about bringing food or water or trying to find clothes. She didn’t even think of trying to get to a phone to call for help—the fight or flight impulse controlling her was too strong to leave room for rational thought.

  All she could think was, Out! I have to get out of here now!

  Later she would realize that there was no way Lounds could have gotten to her. Even if he’d managed to get the gun, he wouldn’t have been able to come after her and shoot. But at that moment, when she saw an exit door with a silver push bar attached to it, she simply ran for it and jammed both hands against the bar as hard as she could.

  The door flew open and she was suddenly outside, suddenly free.

  Chapter 15

  The homing instinct that was leading him to Samantha pulled Keller southwest, right into the Everglades. He took the road as far as he could but finally had to stop when the track he was following turned first to dirt, and then to mud.

  Cursing himself for renting such an impractical vehicle, he pulled the silver Porsche over to the side of the muddy track he was following and got out. He was on foot from now on, and the feeling that Samantha was in danger was getting stronger all the time.

  It was getting dark by this time, and Lady Moon, still mostly full, was beginning her slow climb across the sky. Keller decided he would go faster in Shifted form—and he would definitely be more ready to take on the Hyena that had kidnapped her.

  He stripped and left his clothes in a neat pile on the front seat inside the impractical Porsche. The keys he left tucked inside the driver’s-side wheel well.

  Then he stood naked in the moonlight and took a deep breath. Looking up, he breathed, “Lady Moon, help me.”

  Then he closed his eyes and let the moon take him, pulling his body into another shape—the shape of his Cougar. The process was agonizingly painful, as always, but Keller bore it stoically, knowing it was necessary.

  As he let himself Shift, his bones and muscles changed and thickened. His torso elongated and he found himself down on the ground, on all fours. His ears moved up to the top of his head and his eyes could suddenly see much further in the deepening twilight. His canine teeth grew until they were six inch long fangs protruding from a snarling upper lip and his mass increased until his body was roughly the size of a large horse. Finally, a coat of tawny fur ran over his massive frame, covering him completely.

  He wasn’t turning into an ordinary cougar—he was becoming a beast of the Paleolithic era—a creature from the last ice age, when mammoths and mastodons roamed endless icy plains of tundra. His Cougar was an apex predator from a time of giants—a creature to be feared and respected.

  Keller lifted his head and roared, a deep, reverberating sound meant to strike fear in the heart of any who heard it.

  The female—have to find the female! Find her . . . save her. Mine, she’s mine!

  With that thought firmly in mind, the huge beast Keller had become lowered his head and bounded into the tangled, marshy woodland.

  * * *

  Samantha felt like she had been slogging along for hours, picking her way across the marshy land with only the light of the moon to show her way.

  When she’d first gotten out of Lounds’s secret lab, she’d been ecstatic.

  “I’m out,” she’d whispered to herself. “Oh my God—I did it. I made it. I got out!”

  And then reality had begun to set in. Yes, but out into what? Where the hell was she?

  When she calmed down enough to take stock of her surroundings, Samantha had realized she quite literally was not out of the woods yet, because the woods were all around her.

  In the back of her mind, she’d been thinking that Lounds was probably lying to her. The secret, hidden lab wasn’t really in the middle of the Everglades. It was probably on one of the Florida Keys. There were several smaller islands in the chain that would be an ideal spot for a research facility, in terms of privacy without sacrificing accessibility to civilization.

  But Lounds hadn’t been lying or exaggerating. Looking around in the light of the setting sun, Samantha was treated to the sight of flat, marshy swampland with tangles of cypress trees and palmetto bushes as far as the eye could see. Lounds’s jeep was parked around one side of the research facility, but the lab was the only building in sight.

  Her first thought was to get into his jeep and drive away. But of course the keys were with him inside the lab. And the lab was locked.

  “Damn it!” Samantha had tugged on the door in frustration. Once reason and logic had overridden panic, she was reasonably certain it would be safe to go back inside to get some supplies and call for help. Lounds couldn’t live for long with the amount of blood he’d been losing. The trauma surgeon in her was sure of that—he was probably already dead.

  But she’d let the door snick shut behind her when she came tearing out of the lab in a blind rush to get away from the Hyena Shifter, and she soon found there was no way back in.

  All the doors were locked, and as for windows—well, there were none. So all the resources inside the lab were out of reach—ditto the keys to Lounds’s jeep.

  Samantha soon realized she was stuck in the middle of the Everglades, stark naked, with no food, no water, and no way to call for help.

  What a mess.

  To make things worse, she was in serious pain. Her headache was coming back, but that was the least of her worries. Her nipples and pussy ached and stung from the industrial-strength suction Lounds had applied to them. Even worse, she was leaking—the pale golden liquid Lounds had called “nectar” was still flowing sluggishly from both nipples and the place between her thighs. Samantha was covered with the sweet, sticky stuff.

  In addition to becoming her own personal maple-syrup factory, she could feel other forces at work in her body. She felt like she was just about to get really sick with a high fever. Was it the breeding heat coming on her?

  If it was, she was going to die.

  Either that or become one of the Unformed—Samantha didn’t know which was scarier.

  Great going, girl, whispered a sarcastic little voice in her head. You just killed the one male in a hundred-mile radius that could help you through this process—the one Alpha that could breed you.

  The thought made a sick shiver of revulsion run through her. Though it might mean her own death, Samantha knew she didn’t regret leaving Lounds to bleed out. Even if she died in agony, it wou
ld be better than letting him breed her.

  Have to get back to civilization, she told herself. She was in full Rejuvenation now—she needed to get someplace with a phone and call for help. Maybe Sadie would know what to do—or if not, maybe the wise woman-slash-pharmacist, Fiona could help. Sadie had said she was a wealth of information about the Shifter reproductive process.

  If only Keller were here, she couldn’t help thinking. Wouldn’t mind so much being bred by him. . . .

  An image flashed before her mind’s eye—On my hands and knees, thighs spread wide, ready for him. And Keller behind me, his thick shaft thrusting long and hard and deep, filling me up, making me his. . . .

  No! Samantha pushed the idea aside resolutely, despite the tremor of desire that seemed to shake her entire body. Keller wasn’t there—he couldn’t help her, so there was no use wasting time wishing for something that could never be. Plus, even if he had somehow magically appeared right in front of her, she still didn’t want to be pregnant, which was the likely result of breeding. Having a baby and a relationship would put a serious crimp in her career. She hadn’t spent years of her life studying and perfecting her surgical technique just to give it all up.

  In the end, Samantha decided the best thing she could do was to put all thoughts of breeding out of her mind and just follow the jeep’s tire tracks in the muddy ground. Hopefully if she walked far enough, she could find her way back to a main road and flag someone down. Of course, she really didn’t look forward to hitchhiking naked and covered in her own syrupy secretions, but it was the best idea she could come up with. So she started to walk.

  And now, several hours later, she was lost.

  “Where am I?” Samantha muttered to herself, slapping at yet another bug that had come to feast on her naked body.

  When she’d first started her long walk, she’d been mostly afraid of running into an alligator or maybe a python of some kind. She kept hearing news reports of people who had bought Burmese pythons for pets and then, when the reptiles got too big, released them into the wild. These snakes, which were an invasive species, found their way to the Everglades where, at least according to the news report Samantha had watched, they were taking over. Supposedly they grew to huge sizes, even getting big enough to tackle some of the biggest gators.

  So far she’d been lucky and hadn’t run into any huge, apex predators like pythons or alligators. But as she soon found out, the larger animals weren’t the ones she had to worry the most about. It was the smaller animals—the insects—that were really driving her crazy.

  It was the damn nectar she was leaking that was drawing them to her—Samantha was sure. The sticky stuff wouldn’t stop flowing—it turned her into a walking honeypot. She was constantly swatting at buzzing mosquitoes, biting flies, and about a hundred other things she didn’t even have names for.

  “Son of a bitch!” she snarled, slapping a particularly bloodthirsty horsefly that had landed on her inner thigh. “That hurts!” If she didn’t die of thirst and exposure, she was sure that the biting, stinging pests would finish her off.

  It was the insects that kept her moving, even though she’d lost the jeep’s tire tracks over an hour ago in the wavering moonlight. Samantha was certain if she stopped in one place too long the ants would find her along with the flies and mosquitoes and she would be eaten down to the bone by morning. So though she was lost, she continued to slog her way over the increasingly marshy land, picking her footing as carefully as she could in the dim light, hoping she wouldn’t take a wrong step and wind up neck deep in muddy, fetid water.

  So tired . . . so thirsty . . . and so hot!

  Back in Lounds’s frigid lab she’d been certain she would never warm up again. But the Everglades, even in autumn, were steamy and hot. Even at night it didn’t seem to cool down. Samantha felt like she was sweating more with every step. Along with the gluey nectar all over the front of her body and her inner thighs, this made her feel dirtier, stickier, thirstier, and outright more miserable than she ever had in her life.

  “I just wanna go home,” she moaned, swatting at another fly. The heat and humidity were unbearable. But inside she heard a little voice asking if it was really the heat that was making her so hot. True, the Everglades were steamy, but was the outside temperature the only reason she was feeling overheated? Hadn’t Sadie said something to her about getting really hot when the breeding fever came on her?

  “Fine, I’m fine,” Samantha muttered to herself. “I can make it. I’ll be okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”

  The word ended in a piercing shriek because she had stepped on something. Something that hissed and struck at her so fast, all she saw was a silvery streak as moonlight skittered down its scales.

  There was a blinding pain in her thigh as fangs dug into her flesh.

  Samantha screamed and fell down, right on top of a muscular coil of slithery flesh. There was another angry hiss, and before she knew it, a loop of something that felt like a long, flexible arm was wrapped around her knees.

  “What the—” Samantha rolled over and sat up, leaning over to push at the scaly coil. But to her horror, she couldn’t get it off her. It was tight and getting tighter, squeezing her knees and calves together so fiercely, she swore she could feel her bones rubbing together.

  “Get off me!” she gasped, pushing harder, desperate to be free. Instead, another loop coiled around her upper thighs, and then another wound around her waist.

  “No! No!” All Samantha could think of was a National Geographic special she’d watched once, about life in the Amazon. One segment showed an anaconda with a thick, swollen middle section as wide around as a good-sized tree. The villagers killed it and cut it open, revealing an adolescent boy who had gone missing earlier. He was dead, of course—being digested in the belly of the snake for days by the time they found him.

  Which was exactly where she was going to be if she couldn’t get this damn thing off her!

  Samantha pushed and wiggled desperately, but the massive snake was too strong for her. It was like fighting a living rope made of muscle—it just wouldn’t stop. Another coil wrapped around her rib cage and began to squeeze.

  She shrieked again, and then found she had no more air for shrieking. Brilliant white stars began to explode before her eyes and she gasped desperately, trying to fill her lungs with air, trying to get just one more breath. . . .

  Dying, she thought deliriously. I’m dying—it’s suffocating me. Can’t . . . breathe!

  Suddenly something huge leaped out of the rustling palmetto bushes and cypress trees. To Samantha’s fading vision, it looked as big as a horse—if a horse had six-inch-long fangs protruding from its mouth.

  The creature snarled menacingly and leaned over her to bite at the muscular coils encircling her body. Samantha felt its hot breath against her body, but she had no more air for screaming or crying. Even though the new animal was attacking the snake, she was till having the life squeezed out of her. She could feel her ribs creak, and she couldn’t breathe.

  The animal—Cat, it’s some kind of big cat, her mind whispered—growled in frustration and tried another approach. Going down to her feet, it located the waving end of the enormous snake’s tail and bit down hard.

  The snake, which must have been one of the escaped pythons she’d read about, hissed angrily and writhed, a motion which moved her whole body. The cat thing—cougar? Is it a cougar?—bit down again, this time appearing to sever the tip of the big snake’s tail completely.

  There was another angry, possibly pained hiss, and finally, finally the pressure on Samantha’s lungs eased as the snake released her from its coils. It started to slither away, but the horse-sized cougar went after it, growling angrily, its eyes glowing like two pale-green lamps in the darkness.

  Somewhere in the back of Samantha’s mind a little voice was pointing out that horse-sized cougars with six inch long fangs weren’t exactly the norm, even in the wilds of the Everglades. In fact, there was only one that she was perso
nally acquainted with.

  Is it Keller? It must be. But how would he get here? How could he find me?

  The questions arced across her mind like shooting stars—there and gone so fast she couldn’t answer them.

  And then everything faded to black.

  Chapter 16

  She woke up because someone was rubbing her all over with a warm, wet, and extremely rough washcloth.

  “Hey,” Samantha muttered as whoever was washing her dragged the rough wet fabric over her cheeks and throat. “Hey, what are you . . . ?”

  She didn’t finish the question because the washcloth was dragged over her sensitive right nipple, making her flinch in pain.

  “Hey, that hurts!” she muttered, trying to roll away from the insistent washcloth. Something heavy and soft at the same time pressed down on her shoulder, keeping her in place, and the washing resumed, with the rough cloth rubbing between her breasts. “Haven’t you ever heard of fabric softener?” Samantha complained. “Why don’t you just let me take a shower and wash myself? It would be—”

  Her voice died in her throat as her eyes finally flew open.

  Leaning over her, his eyes still shining like pale-green lamps, was the immense cougar that had saved her from the snake. He was holding her down with one huge paw and lapping her all over. In fact, what she’d thought was a warm, rough washcloth was actually his tongue.

  Samantha held her breath as the deadly jaws opened again, baring those incredibly long fangs. They were only inches from her throat, and so sharp she was certain the cougar could bite off her head with one chomp.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, her heart jack-hammering in her chest. “Oh my God . . . Keller?”

  The Cougar looked up at her for a moment, then went back to the business of washing her with his tongue. Because that was what he was doing, Samantha realized when her heart finally stopped trying to pound its way out of her chest. There was nothing sexual or lascivious in the way the big cat was licking her—he was simply washing her, the same way a mother cat might wash her kitten.