The Tiger’s Obsession (The Shifterverse #6)

Prologue - Warrick

Friday. Seven hundred and eighty Fridays.

I could do the math in my sleep, had done it, actually, on the nights when sleep didn’t come.

Fifteen years. Fifty-two weeks a year. Seven hundred and eighty drives down the same stretch of highway, watching the sun bleed out over the horizon, pressing my hand against the same dead rock, and getting the same fucking answer.

Nothing.

A sane person would have stopped. A therapist would have had a field day with this: the compulsive behavior, the inability to deviate from the ritual, the weekly pilgrimage to a rock formation in the middle of an Illinois state park that I’d somehow convinced myself was a doorway to another dimension.

If I’d been my own client, I’d have referred myself to a specialist.

But I wasn’t a client. I was a tiger Shifter from another world, and this was the only thread of my own world I had left. So every Friday, I drove to Starved Rock.

As I pulled off the main road onto the unmarked gravel path that wound deeper into the forest, my phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Scott.

Alcott case docs on your desk. Client meeting next week.

I typed a quick reply:

Got it.

Scott was a tiger Shifter, but, unlike me, he was earth-born; he’d never even been to our planet.

It gave him an advantage over those of us who came through the gate.

He grew up here, knew instinctively how to blend in with humans.

He handled the office side of things, the phones, the clients, the paperwork that made a PI business actually run.

I handled the more physical side of things.

Five years we’d been in business together and we made it work.

The gravel crunched under my tires as I pulled into the small clearing where I always parked.

Hunt? my tiger murmured in the back of my mind. He was a low pulse of awareness, not urgent. The forest called to him the way it always did, but he was subdued tonight. Tired, maybe. Even apex predators got tired of the same routine.

Not today.

He huffed. You always say that.

He was right. I always said that. Hunting meant Shifting, and Shifting meant being fully tiger, and being a four-hundred-pound white tiger in an Illinois state park meant risking some hiker with a camera and a social media account turning me into a viral sensation.

I cut the engine and sat for a moment, watching the last light filter through the trees, shadows pooling between the oaks and hickories. Night sounds reached me: cicadas, the rustle of squirrels foraging among the leaves, the warning call of an owl.

I got out of the truck, stretched, then started walking.

No flashlight; I didn’t need one. The creek to my left ran shallow.

I could tell by the pitch of it, higher and thinner than it sounded in spring.

Limestone still held the day’s heat underfoot.

A rabbit had died recently in the underbrush to the north, already going sweet and wrong in the warm air.

This had become my territory in a way I had never intended. I knew every fallen log, every game trail, every hollow where deer bedded down. The predators that lived here, the coyotes and occasional bobcat, gave me a wide berth. They sensed what I was and wanted no part of it.

Smart.

The path wound uphill, then down into a small ravine before climbing again to the ridge where the gate stood.

It was a dark shape against the sky, tall as a man and twice as wide, its surface rough and weathered.

Once, it had shimmered with light. Gold and red, pulsing like a heartbeat, promising passage to somewhere else. To my home.

Now it was just rock.

I paused in front of it. My hand rose, pressing flat against the cold surface. The same spot. Always the same spot.

Home, my tiger whispered.

Hope rose inside of me, that traitorous thing that wouldn’t stay buried no matter how many times I crushed it. Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe years of coming here would finally mean something. Maybe the shimmer would appear, and I could go back and—

I waited.

The stone stayed cold under my palm, rough and dead.

I dropped my hand.

Next week.

Next week, I agreed. Because that was our deal. That was the only thing keeping both of us sane—the fiction that next week might be different. That seven hundred and eighty failures didn’t predict a seven hundred and eighty-first. Even when I knew, deep down, that was bullshit.

I didn’t leave right away. Instead, I sat with my back against a tree at the edge of the clearing and watched the stars emerge, like someone was poking holes in a blanket.

The night my father died, the sky had looked like this. Clear. Cold. Full of stars that didn’t give a damn about the blood on the ground or the boy who’d lost everything.

I was thirteen. Old enough to remember every detail. Too young to have done a fucking thing about it.

My father, Janos Kassar, was the leader of our world and the strongest Shifter I’d ever known.

He’d taken me hunting that day. Just the two of us, in the northern forests.

He was teaching me to track kaldra—massive, antlered herd animals, similar to earth’s smaller elk.

He was training me to read the land, to be the leader I was supposed to become someday.

We’d been hunting near the gate, a doorway between our world and this one, guarded by the Kassar line for generations, the only line to produce white tigers.

My family controlled the crossing. A few times a month, my father would take a small trading party through.

They’d buy goods and medicines that this world produced, and ours didn’t.

Back home, those goods bought influence, loyalty, alliances.

The Shifters who controlled the gate controlled the only supply line that mattered, and that made us powerful.

It also meant we had enemies, though my father never believed that until it was too late.

Torek and his allies believed the gate was a corruption, that contact with the human world was poisoning ours, that the Kassars were selling our people out for trinkets from a world overrun by the humans he called vermin.

He’d been saying it for years, that Earth humans were prey to be hunted, not traded with.

My father had dismissed it as bitterness and jealousy.

Torek’s Shifters ambushed us at the treeline.

The first one came from the left. I didn’t even see him, just heard the crack of undergrowth and then my father’s snarl, deep and raw, as he pushed me out of the way.

There was a spray of blood, hot across my face, and a sound like wet canvas tearing as my father opened him from throat to belly.

I tried to Shift, but I was shaking too hard, and all I got was claws punching through my fingers and bones screaming as they tried to decide what shape to be.

“Run,” my father roared.

I didn’t. I planted myself beside him and slashed at the nearest tiger with my hands.

I felt fur and skin part under my fingers, felt the hot wet of blood that wasn’t mine.

The tiger spun, turning on me with a snarl that vibrated through my chest. Then my father was between us, and the tiger was on the ground with his jaw hanging wrong and his eyes going glassy.

Two down. Eleven still coming. The third was a female.

She was fast. She went for my father’s throat and almost made it; her claws raked his shoulder open to the bone before he caught her by the scruff.

She twisted, screaming, slashing at his face, his chest, opening new wounds with every swipe.

He grabbed her head between his hands and twisted.

I heard the vertebrae give, not a clean snap, but a grinding, wet crunch, and her body spasmed once under him and went still.

My father was bleeding badly now. There was a gash along his side that I could see muscle through.

One ear had been torn half away. Claw marks across his chest wept red.

There was blood everywhere, the ground slick with it, the air so thick with the smell of copper and torn meat that I could taste it.

I remember that moment so clearly. The way his eyes swept from the attackers to me to the gate.

I watched him do the calculation. Then he picked me up and sprinted.

I thought we were trying to outrun them.

Then I saw where he was taking me. The gate.

It was shimmering, open. And I knew what he planned to do.

“No!”

I dug in, grabbing at him. Nothing I tried slowed him down.

Torek skidded to a halt ten feet from us, his hands up in a peace gesture. “Stop, Janos! It doesn’t need to end this way.”

My father paused, his body between the rest of them and me, blood dripping from his chest onto the frozen ground.

“It’s over.” Torek’s voice was calm. “You must see you’ve lost.”

My father’s hand tightened on my arm.

“Have I?” Even bleeding, even outnumbered, his voice was steady. “You brought all these fighters to kill me and a cub, Torek. Yet, three of them are already dead.”

Torek’s expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes went still.

“How many more are you willing to spend on this?” my father said. “Because I promise you, I’m not done.”

“And I haven’t even started yet. But I didn’t come here to spend lives, Janos. I came to end something that should have been ended years ago.”

“The gate.”

“The gate. The dependency. The slow rot of a people who forgot how to survive without human scraps.” Torek’s eyes moved to me, then back. “I’m doing this for Leeath.”

I didn’t recognize the name, but my father went rigid.

“Timoth’s research team was eighteen months into a cure for the wasting,” Torek said.

“Eighteen months. They were close, Janos. And then your merchants came back through the gate with a human treatment that worked well enough, and the council cut Timoth’s funding overnight.

Why spend resources developing our own solution when we can just import one? ”

“That wasn’t our—”