Gingerly, she pulled off the ridiculous excuse for clothing they called a hospital “gown” and proceeded to pull on her jeans, shirt, and hoodie. She then pulled her hair into a bun at the back of her head. Despite the weight of her hair, it was easy right now because her hair still had lake water in it and was sticky because of it. The socks and shoes came next, and every move she made with her injured arm made her want to scream, but she placed her bottom lip between her teeth and held it there for ransom until she was finished.
All she needed to do was fool anyone glancing her way into believing she was a family member and not a patient, and she could walk out the front door without raising a brow. The doctor who’d worked on her was probably busy with another patient anyway, and she’d been the only medical professional to see Sam.
Sam made her way back to the door, listened for footsteps to pass by and fade, and took a deep breath. She pulled her hood over her head, opened the door and stepped out. There was no one in the hall. So far so good. She put her head down, shoved her hands into her pockets, and had a flashback.
She was a teenager walking swiftly across a parking lot, terrified that everything would blow up in her face before she got somewhere safe to spend the twenty or so bucks she’d just swindled. She was running.
She’d been running then, and she was running now. Would she ever stop running?
When she looked up to find that she’d made it out of the ER and into the parking lot without incident, she had an epiphany. The sun was setting. She’d been in the ER all night and all day and she could feel that lost time as if it were precious sand seeping through cracks in an hour glass.
Enough time had passed. Things were coming to a head, and there wasn’t going to be any more running.
For better or for worse.
*****
Through an opening between the window blind slats, Raven watched her friend cross the street and duck into the darkness of an alley. When she was gone, she frowned. “You sure about this?”
Her aunt was behind her, and though Raven couldn’t see her nod, she knew she’d done so. “I am. This has been going on too long.”
“It’s not my job to judge what ‘too long’ is,” said Raven. She dropped the blinds and turned around. “It’s just my job to keep her safe.”
“I think this is the safest thing,” said Janet. “I honestly believe that if he really is the doppelshifter, he won’t have anything but her best interests at heart.”
Raven took a deep breath. Her gut was telling her the same thing. And she wondered why her gut was telling her this now. Not five years ago, not ten. But now. It was as if the fates had wanted Sam to grow up, to become a woman, and to find herself in her own time before facing off with the man who was supposed to be her soul mate.
“If I were to judge,” she said slowly as she turned back to the window and glanced once more outside. “I’d say she’s been running long enough. And that now she needs to face the doppelshifter. For better or for worse.”
Chapter Sixteen
Samantha O’Neill raised her arm to run a shaking hand through her very curly hair and closed her eyes as a jab of pain from her shoulder snaked through her arm and across her chest, making her woozy. She leaned against the wall. “Damn,” she whispered. She’d forgotten her hair was in a bun anyway.
Out of sheer frustration and the need to do something, she used her good arm to loosen the knot of her hair, and long curly locks poured down around her shoulders and the length of her back. The sound of the subway train shaking the rails hummed through the platform. The overhead lamp buzzed and flickered, its fluorescent bulb hissing that it was on its last watts.
Sam breathed. She opened her eyes and scanned the platform across the tracks. An empty phone booth was missing its phone book, and frankly Sam was surprised the booth even existed any longer. It had been decorated by a handful of gangs and a few winsome artists. But other than those splashes of color, the platform was devoid of life.
Overhead, a camera whirred and moved. Sam glanced up at the small black dome. A normal person wouldn’t have been able to hear that tiny internal movement. But she did. Transit authorities in cities across the country had installed a lot of new cameras in the last few years, and Chicago was no exception. This looked to be one of the new ones. She made a note of it and quickly looked away.
She was cold. Night had rolled in, deep and hollow, and the autumn air was chilling her damp clothing into a sticky cardboard-like sheet of goose-bump chafing material. She gritted her teeth and tried not to make a miserable sound. She had no phone – had lost it in her escape from the candy shop. She had no money, no credit cards, no nothing. She was also lost.
Raven’s transport had brought her somewhere on the outskirts of town; that much she could tell just by the height of the buildings around her, the amount of traffic, and the style of car being driven. She was also west of town, which she’d been able to tell when the sun had set behind her an hour earlier. But for a city the size of Chicago, that wasn’t much to go on.
In fact, she had no ticket to ride the El. But she was hoping it would be one of those that ran automatically or didn’t have a driver in them or something similar. She was there for direction, for a warm place to sit and think, and because it was supposed to be safer than wandering the streets at night alone.
The sound of something whizzing through the air made her momentarily freeze. Her senses went on high alert, and her already tender nerves pricked to attention. The whizzing sound was followed by the crack and chimes of glass breaking and cascading to the ground. Sam spun to face the camera behind her. The dark dome around it had been shattered, and the camera inside was askew in its sockets, clearly broken.
What… the… hell…. She slowly backed up, preparing to shift.
“Samantha.”
She spun, her heart did a cartwheel, and stars swam before her eyes. In the midst of that spinning, whirling cosmos, he stepped out of the shadows of a stairwell. He was a tower of darkness, wrapped in black clothing from his black boots to the hard, cold strip of leather that covered his left eye.
His right eye was a blue glowing sea, bottomless, enticing, deadly.
“Stay away,” she begged, her words quivering as she backed away. He was one of them. He was a Hunter. It made no sense; he was a shifter too, and more shifter than most. But she’d seen it with her own two eyes. He’d been with them. He was one of them!
Run, she told herself.
“Sam,” he repeated softly, a warning and a whispered caress. How could her name sound so perfect rolling off his tongue? She shook her head, and he slowly held up his hand. “The worst thing you can do right now is run from me,” he told her with a tilt of his head and a gleam in his eye. “Don’t do it.”
He took a slow, careful step toward her, and Sam’s heart was now beating so hard, so fast, she didn’t fully realize she was walking backward. She didn’t realize it – until he glanced down at her feet, and his expression hardened. He turned his head to look across the tracks, and she followed his line of sight out of sheer instinct.
On the other side was that phone booth she’d noticed earlier. But what she saw now, the second time she looked, was what he saw – the camera bubble in the corner of the building, the twin to the camera that was on her side.
Colton knew she was about to shift. He knew it as well as she did but had enough sense to care about video recordings. Or… he was going to shift himself.
Oh gods, she thought with a hectic sense of panic. I can’t outrun him if he does!
That hectic sense of panic notched right up and broke her internal thermometer when she turned back to find that in the brief split second it had taken her to process all of that, he’d cut the distance between them by half. Sam inhaled sharply, shocked into near hyperventilation that he was now so close. She could feel his nearness; it had a presence as solid as he did, as if it might reach out and touch her – grab her.
“Don’t do it,” he warned
again, his tone lowered in warning. “Sam, all I want to do is talk. Hear me out.”
Hunter, her mind insisted. He’s hunted you for twenty years! Now you know why! RUN!
But she was already running. Once more, her body knew to do what her mind figured out on its coattails. As she ran, she shifted. It was such a natural reaction to danger, she didn’t even have to think about it. Behind her came the hard and fast footsteps in pursuit that she knew would come. To her left, she heard a familiar whizzing sound followed by a crack and shatter as the second camera went.
In the next instant, she was surrounded by the warm white light that took her form and changed it into another. Her star bright body went supernova, everything was chaos for a miniscule fragment of time, and then she was running on all fours.
Her paws beat out an impossible rhythm, metronomed by the pain in her front right shoulder. It kept time for her, kept her running, kept her focused. Just behind her, a beast followed, a predator with fangs and claws, an animal hell bent on taking her down. She could feel him there, all shadow and sinew, muscle and magic. Panic rushed through her bloodstream, carried to her extremities by a frantic heart.
She sped through the El station, ducking beneath signs and jumping fences until she was erupting into a city sidewalk with no sense of direction and no idea where she was going. She could still feel him behind her, and damned if she couldn’t hear him breathing too.
Something moved up ahead, a shadow separating and dividing into two, and Samantha faltered. Her speed slowed just a touch, her vision zeroing in. Her hearing focused on what was ahead rather than behind. A shifting sound, claws on a sidewalk, and two rapid heartbeats.
Shifters. Waiting to cut her off, as if they’d known she would run! Colton was one step ahead of her and despite his warnings, he’d been fully aware of what she would do.
A growl erupted hot on Sam’s heels, and in quiet, crazy desperation, Samantha shot violently to the right, taking a leap into the street.
A car horn blared, lights blinded her, and something slammed into her from behind. Warmth wrapped hard and tight around her, turning her in the air. She heard a thump, felt it vibrate through her body, and was shoved further across the street. A moment later, she was hitting the ground and rolling, protected on all sides by the layer of another body.
When they stopped rolling, Sam tried to turn in her protective embrace, finding it difficult. With great effort, she got her paws beneath her and managed to glance over her screaming shoulder.
A huge black panther with a scar through its left eye lay unmoving in the middle of the street.
Chapter Seventeen
Colton, Sam thought, her own inner voice a mere whisper in her head. A strange, unexpected pang in her chest brought her up short. She found herself raising a paw, nearly placing it on his shoulder. She was still in her shifted form, and from the spots running along the length of her forearm, she was guessing a cheetah. She was surprised Colton had been able to keep up with her.
But then she took in the sleek, muscled body of the giant black cat and scrapped the theory. The animal honestly seemed larger than life and capable of anything. He’s breathing, she thought as she watched the animal’s massive chest rise and fall. He’s alive. It felt like a reassurance.
He saved me, she thought next. He’d wrapped himself around her to take the brunt of the impact, protecting her from what might have actually killed her in her weakened state.
The night seemed to stretch for long, revelatory seconds around them, filled with that silence that yawned in the wake of something horrible. It was the silence that hummed in eardrums and was rhythmically punctured by the pounding of a racing heart. In that silence, the door of the car that had hit them popped open. That sound cut through the night like a gunshot. Sam glanced up, her feline instincts pricked and her hackles raised. As a man unfolded from the driver’s seat, her body coiled, ready to run once more despite the red warmth now spreading thick and soaking the fur of her right shoulder.
The vehicle was a taxi cab. Though the colors were odd, she readily recognized the shape. The man stood beside his door and looked at her, then looked at Colton’s massive black feline form, and then he stuttered. “Is-is, tha-that c-can’t be… a cheetah?” His voice was crisp and clear, and his Indian accent spoke his harried words in clear disbelief. “And what is th-that? A cougar? Leopard?” He grabbed his head in disbelief. “Oh my god,” he said loudly, “what is going on here?”
He was human, and it was shifter instinct to never change form in front of a human. But sometimes it was necessary, especially when shifters were running the risk of contracting the Stayme if they didn’t.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Sam had no time to consider her options before she sensed the others. She glanced back over her wounded shoulder. Shadows were separating from the walls of nearby buildings and stepping out of the shadows of the alleys between them. Long and lithe, dark and dangerous, their vibrant eyes reflecting the headlights of the idling taxi.
Wolves. The shifters working with Colton had become wolves. They were the same men who had been prepared to cut her off earlier.
Run.
Her voices of reason and instinct piped up, and an internal argument commenced.
But he saved me.
Run, damn it. Now is your chance!
I can’t outrun them. She heard a low, low growl, a reverberated warning that cautioned against so many things. She met the gaze of the closest wolf. He was an alpha; she could smell it, she could see it, she knew it as only a shifter could know it. His eyes seemed familiar, a vibrant green she could have sworn she’d seen before. They were glowing, stark and all-encompassing in the deep black of his fur.
Sam took a step back, moving further across the street. Her eyes slid to the panther, which now stirred. The very confused, very frightened taxi driver began to fumble in his pockets for a phone. It was a rare stroke of luck that he was the only driver to pass on that road so far. More would be along any second, and they were all in the street.
The wolves slunk closer. The growls became louder.
Run, Sam! You’re a cheetah! You can outrun them! Think of the human! Get them away from the human, or the human will surely die tonight!
But Colton… she looked down again at the Panther, who was now moving, getting his legs beneath him. He opened one eye, one piercing arctic blue eye, and it pinned Samantha to her soul. She turned and bolted.
The human taxi driver gave a startled cry, the wolves growled and took chase, and more car horns blared as she was proven right and they appeared on the scene, barely missing her and the others.
She made an animalistic, pain-filled sound of her own as she leapt over a mailbox and dove into an alley. She moved at blinding speed, barely seeing what appeared in front of her in time to avoid it. As she maneuvered at this impossible speed through a dark labyrinth of danger, her mind spun. She shoved thoughts of Jack and the taxi and the Hunters out of her mind and concentrated on her own body. She needed to shift again – something with wings would get her out of this mess faster than anything.
But the reason she hadn’t shifted into something avian in the first place was because of her injury. With her gunshot wound, her wing would be useless. She would have to somehow get past the pain and force it to work or she would fall from the sky, assuming she was able to get off the ground in the first place.
You have no choice. Do it.
I can’t! she screamed uselessly back. She knew it was useless because she was right. She had no choice.
You must.
The alley came to a sudden split, breaking off to the right and left. Sam took a chance and dodged left, shooting down a narrower channel and into darkness. From behind her came the sudden flash of light and reverberation of booted footfalls that told her some of the shifters in pursuit had changed back into their human forms. She realized the reason for it a split second too late as the alley came to a brief halt, ending in a tall chain link fence, to
pped with barbed wire.
Sam cried out in surprise, her body flashed, and she raised her arms to stop her mad-dash into the metal of the fence. She shut her eyes tight for the impact, but the impact never came. Instead, she was grabbed from behind by her upper arms and spun around, her speed turned into outward momentum. Again, she was crying out as her shoulder was jarred violently, and she felt stitches popping.
The stars were back again, nausea swam in her gut, and she started to go down.
“She’s hurt, you goddamn idiot! Get your hands off her!”
Whoever had her in his grip was ripped away, and she stumbled backward only to be caught by someone else, this time more gently. She squeezed her eyes shut, blinked several times, and tried to see through the blurriness. Unseen hands helped her stay on her feet.
Two figures moved in front of her, the taller one dressed all in black, the shorter in jeans and a blue tee-shirt. The man in black had the other man up against the brick wall, his thick muscled forearm to the shorter man’s throat, his face two inches from the other’s.
“I’m sorry boss! I’m really, really sorry!” cried the shorter man. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, I swear.” The man in blue pleaded, trying to put reason into his tone. His feet dangled half a foot off the ground, and Sam could smell his fear. Her senses were holding over from her transformation, leaving them heightened. The man in blue was absolutely, positively terrified.
She could also smell anger. Rage. It had a scent like burning metal or rocket fuel. And there was something else… it was his scent. It smelled like leather, men’s shower gel, some kind of shampoo, and deodorant, and just a hint of blood and revenge.
It was the man in black. It was Jack Colton. If all of that hadn’t been enough, there was the eye patch.