21. I Dreamed About Riding You
TWENTY-ONE
I DREAMED ABOUT RIDING YOU
Seven
D on’t you dare leave me alone!
I gulped in air, staring down at his prone form. He was still breathing. I could see that barrel chest of his expanding and contracting.
Shaking, my palms clammy with sudden sweat, I crouched and rolled him onto his back. His face was crusted with dirt and dried blood from the fall he’d protected me from, but his injuries were gone.
He looked so very young.
He’s not immortal yet , the whisper reminded me. His body needs time to regenerate after healing from that many injuries.
I can’t be out here alone, I thought, the panic clawing its way through my chest, up my throat. There was too much air. Too much … light. Too many sounds that were so foreign to me. Whooshing sounds. Rustling sounds. Scuttling, squawking, chirping sounds.
Were they animals? Or Pureblood Shifters spying on us? Or something else entirely, something I knew nothing about?
How long before Baxter’s people caught up with us? I had no idea how far we’d run.
I was outside.
I was outside .
My fingers twitched. My legs trembled. My stomach clenched.
Shift , the whisper insisted sharply, snapping me from my panic. Shift, NOW! Let me help you cope with this. It’s the only way to get us to safety.
I pulled in the deepest breath I could manage. The whisper was right. I had to do something. I couldn’t just stand here, over his unconscious body, losing my shit and waiting for an agent to find us and take us down. I needed him. I hadn’t the first clue about what the world was like out here. He did.
My skin tingled, and I hurriedly tugged off my boots, my jumpsuit. I couldn’t rip my clothes—they were the only ones I had out here.
Outside .
I shuddered and gave in to the shift.
Our body lengthened, shoulders and hips reconfigured, hair sprouted over our back, chest, and stomach, and a tail grew. We marveled at how fast and painless it was. We felt drug-free, properly drug-free, for the first time since they’d moved us into R Block.
We must have run the last vestiges of it off during the night.
Our feelings of panic at the sheer size of the world subsided. The outside didn’t seem to bother us so much in our shifted form. The wildness of our animal self took over, and all those human emotions became superfluous.
On all fours, we skulked forward to snuffle at the male lying under the trees. Our shifted form was so much bigger and stronger than our human one, but even in his human form, Jack was still a very large male. And a dead weight. How were we supposed to get him onto our back, to take him anywhere?
We nudged at him with our muzzle, thinking hard.
He snorted and sat up.
We skittered back, a low growl rumbling in our throat.
He blinked at us, his eyes unfocused.
“Seven?” he mumbled.
We nodded once. He tilted his head.
“Are you a fucking … tiger right now? Jesus, how’d you get such a cool spirit monster?”
Something inside us fizzed. We forced it aside as he swayed. We padded closer, pressing our side against his teetering form.
“I feel fucking woozy. Like … the world is spinning. It’s like a Forest Lake kegger all over again!”
None of the words he was saying made any sense. We huffed out a breath, willing our voice box to shift back just enough to let us talk to him in this form.
“My back … get on,” we grated, our voice ragged in the partially shifted voice box. We didn’t have time for this stupidity. We needed to get somewhere he could sleep … a place where we could feel some semblance of confidence that we’d be safe from Baxter.
“You want me to … get on your back?” he repeated, his words slurring. We remembered those days before the immortality settled, when we’d been injured. It would sometimes take us days of sleep to recover our strength after our body healed itself. The fact that he was still conscious was impressive.
“Yes,” we growled. “Hurry, we have to move.”
He rolled forward, catching himself on his hands and knees, and then, with a great heaving sigh, he pushed himself upright. We moved closer as he took two shaky steps and then collapsed again, thankfully draped over us.
“Straddle me,” we huffed. We were trembling, although we couldn’t work out why. He was heavy, but we were strong in this shifted form. His body was warm, but the way his muscles moved against our body as he slowly shifted himself into position made us shiver.
We want him , we thought. And in this form, at least, we were in agreement. But we couldn’t think more on that yet. Because we needed to focus on our immediate needs.
Safety and rest.
Finally , we thought, when his legs were on either side of our body, and his arms were slipping around our neck.
“Hold on tight,” we warned him gruffly, then let our voice box return to its fully shifted form. We didn’t need to be wasting energy holding a partial shift when we had to move fast to get us somewhere safe. As far away from Baxter and his minions as possible. We swiftly scooped our bundle of clothes into our mouth.
“When I dreamed about riding you, it wasn’t like this,” he mumbled, his hot breath somehow finding our skin even through our thick coat. His fingers tangled into our ruff.
Our feline stomach was apparently not immune to his semi-conscious ramblings. It flipped, but we pushed that sensation aside.
Focus.
Safety and rest.
Everything else had to wait.
H e’d fallen asleep again about half an hour after he climbed onto our back. That half hour had been him mumbling incoherently, his fingers twisting and flexing in our hair.
And then his breaths had evened, and his fingers relaxed. He was fairly evenly balanced against us, so we slowed to a measured trot, focusing more on not letting him fall than on speed. It would take us longer to get him back on again if he was truly out of it this time, than it would to move slower.
The gray light seemed brighter up ahead. We slowed to a tentative walk, sniffing the air. The trees were thinning. Had we reached the edge of our cover? Being out in the open was less than ideal.
Memories of during the night came. Of the menacing ‘dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub’ sound that flying vehicle had made overhead.
Of the way he had pressed us into the shadows, his huge body, still partially shifted, shielding us from the spotlight shooting through the trees. The way we’d felt like we needed to simultaneously push him away and dig our claws in deeper, drag him closer.
No.
We couldn’t think about that.
Because it made us want to shiver, and if we shivered, we’d drop him.
We were getting close to the limit of how far we could carry a dead weight of easily over two hundred pounds. We’d lose our shift soon, and then we’d be completely screwed. Stuck wherever we dropped him.
We kept walking towards the brighter light.
The cover of trees abruptly halted. We staggered to a stop, feline eyes roving the clearing. Open to the sky, the ground was carpeted with some form of swaying vegetation, around shoulder height on our tiger form.
And there was a building.
It was small, nestled against the treeline on the far side of the clearing. It looked silvery with age, a covered overhang shadowing what we assumed would be a door.
We needed that shelter. We needed the protection it offered from flying vehicles. We needed a safe, dry place to put Jack down until he awakened from this healing sleep he was in.
We needed the closed walls for when we shifted back, and all the human emotions overwhelmed us.
The outside was bigger than we had ever imagined.
So, keeping to the trees but maintaining sight with the small structure, we edged our way around the clearing.
We paused when we were close enough to see the door, barely visible in the gloom of the overhang. We froze, watching.
Jack’s weight was beginning to burn, but we weren’t about to just go barging in that door if we weren’t sure that the place was deserted. Not with him unable to defend himself and us at the very end of our own strength.
No movement.
We sniffed the air. No scents …
Well, actually an absolute bombardment of scents. All the things we’d been trying not to fixate on since we shifted. Rotting vegetation. Animal droppings … and the animals they belonged to. The scent of the trees was sharp and tingly in our nostrils.
We thought we could smell Pures … Shifters … but the scent wasn’t fresh, so we dismissed it.
And then there was the ever-present damp earth and salty air that permeated every one of our cells. The scent that we wanted to bathe in.
But we couldn’t smell any humans, which was what we’d been mostly worried about.
Our legs were about to give out. We were spent. Exhausted.
With a deep breath, we stepped out into the open.
L egs trembling from fatigue, we nudged the cabin door open, sniffing tentatively. We sneezed at the dust, the bundle of clothing we’d been carrying for hours bursting from our mouth.
It was deserted.
With every muscle shuddering with the promise of relief, we dragged the unconscious Jack inside.
We should have scouted the interior to be extra certain we were alone. But the shift was almost at its limit. Soon, we would be forced back into our human form, and we, too, would need to sleep.
So in the end, we zeroed in on the bed in the corner. It was barely more than a mattress on a wooden pallet on the floor, but it looked like a dream. Thanking our good luck that we stumbled across this shelter, we padded over, climbing gingerly onto the bed, then twisting to dump the deadweight of Jack into the center of the mattress.
He didn’t even stir.
We yawned, and the numbness of burnout overtook us. As the shift reversed, and pins and needles flooded our changing body, we quickly trotted to what looked like a small kitchen with a sink in the far corner of the room.
We were so thirsty.
With a paw that was more hand now, we managed to grasp the tap and twist. Pipes groaned and brown water burst from the tap. But after a few moments of sputtering, the water ran clear. And we leaned into the sink, lapping frantically, our muzzle becoming a human nose and jaw.
I must regenerate , the whisper told me. I will need to leave you. Do not fret about the outside .
My mind went silent. My beast, my whisper, gone.
I wrenched the tap until the water reduced to a drip and then stopped altogether. I looked down. Naked, human breasts. Bare, human skin. Knotty, auburn hair tangling around my shoulders.
Exhaustion dulled the anxiety that I’d felt before the shift, but not enough. It was all well and good for the whisper to tell me not to fret. But I’d traipsed through the forest for hour upon hour, and the vastness of it was incomprehensible.
I dropped to my knees, crawling to where my clothes lay in their tangled heap, still damp with tiger saliva. I didn’t care. I needed to cover myself, needed the relative protection that layer of fabric between me and the world offered.
But it wasn’t enough. I was alone. No Jack—he was still completely unconscious. No whisper to reassure me.
Just this dank, dusty hovel … and the vast outside beyond.
The urge to crawl onto that mattress with him, to feel the heat of him against my body, to feel something that was familiar, was an almost visceral longing.
But the familiarity of him was the last thing I wanted to explore. I shuddered, embarrassment flaring my cheeks as I recalled being on my knees for him, my parts exposed.
He’d gotten hard seeing me.
The outside was vast … but he was vastly more terrifying.
I staggered away from the mattress, heading for the corner furthest from any window. There, I curled up as small as was possible, my back braced by the wall, my knees forming a barrier between me and the infinite outside.
And only then, when I could not make myself any smaller, did I let exhaustion claim me.