Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Lucy
We ran.
His hand locked around mine, dragging me through the dark behind the shelter and into the service road that cut along the back of the industrial strip.
He moved like he was part of the night; silent, precise, every step placed with a predator’s economy.
I was less graceful. My scraped palms burned.
My knee throbbed from the asphalt. My heart was doing something stupid and unhelpful at roughly two hundred beats per minute, and I was fairly sure the men behind us could track me by the sound of my breathing alone.
But Warrick adjusted to my pace. Guided me around things I couldn’t see. Kept me close.
His hand was warm. Impossibly warm. Like he was running a fever, except he’d been a tiger a couple of minutes ago, and I knew tigers ran hotter than humans, and I was thinking about thermoregulation while fleeing for my life, which was either a sign of remarkable curiosity or the early stages of a complete psychological break.
We ducked behind a shipping container. The metal was cold against my back. I could smell oil and rust and underneath both, sharper, wilder: him.
“I need to address something,” I whispered.
“Now?”
“You have clothes. Well, jeans, at least.”
He looked at me. Even in the darkness, even with flashlight beams cutting between buildings, I could see the corner of his mouth lift.
“Yes.”
“You were a tiger. A very large tiger. Tigers don’t wear clothes.”
“No. They don’t.”
“But now you have clothes.”
“It took me a long time to learn that trick.” He kept his voice low, his eyes still moving across the dark. “The Shift absorbs what I’m wearing. Reconstitutes it after. Of course, I find the whole clothes-ripping thing can be very terror-inducing in the right circumstances.”
“That’s—Okay, you know what, the clothes are not the priority right now. The priority is the tiger thing. The very large tiger thing that just —”
“Keep your voice down.”
“—that just mauled two people,” I finished in a whisper that wanted very badly to be a scream.
“Killed,” he corrected. “Didn’t maul. Mauling implies I left them functional.”
I stared at him. “Did you just make a distinction about the quality of your violence?”
“It seemed important to be accurate.”
A flashlight beam swept past the container.
We pressed flat against the metal. His body was between me and the light, shielding me, and I could feel his heartbeat through his back—slower than mine, steadier, the resting rate of an animal three times my size.
That was the thing my vet tech brain kept snagging on.
Not the fur, not the teeth, not massive apex predator that had been standing in the parking lot five minutes ago.
The heart rate. A domestic cat at rest runs at a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty beats per minute.
A tiger sits around forty to fifty. And Warrick’s heart was beating like he’d just finished a nap.
He’d killed two men, and his body thought he was resting.
The beam moved on.
“Come on. We have to move.” He took my hand again. “Stay behind me.”
We ran, slipping between warehouses, crossing open ground in bursts, pressing into shadows.
“So? The tiger thing?”
Warrick’s voice dropped low. “Do you want me to tell you that you were drugged and have been hallucinating? Or do you want the truth?”
I considered it for two seconds. “The truth.”
“I’m a tiger Shifter. From another world.”
I blinked. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but that wouldn’t have even made my top fifty guesses.
“Oh, and you’re my mate,” he adds.
Somewhere east, a flashlight swept between buildings and kept going.
“Run that by me one more time.”
“Tiger Shifter. Different dimension. Fated mates.”
I didn’t even know where to start with that. And I was going to table the mate comment until after I’d stopped having a mental breakdown.
“So, just to clarify, you’re an alien?”
He frowned at me. “What? No, I’m not an alien! Aliens come from outer space. I’m from a different world.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Okay, I heard it when I said it. But aliens are like—” he waved one hand in the air, “little green people with long limbs. I’m human. Well, mostly. I just turn into a tiger whenever I want.”
“I’m going to need you to unpack that.”
“There’s a gate. Was a gate. It opened here in Starved Rock. A doorway between this world and mine. My family controlled it from our side.”
“You said ‘was.’ So there’s not a gate there now?”
“My father destroyed it. Enemies of our family tried to take control. They caught us at the gate. To save me, my father threw me through and sealed it behind me.”
“How old were you?” I whispered.
“Thirteen.”
A boy. He’d been a thirteen-year-old boy, thrown through a doorway between worlds by a father who loved him enough to destroy the only way home.
And he’d been here ever since. Years on the wrong side of a sealed door, building a life out of nothing, and I wanted—God, I wanted to stop running.
I wanted to put my hands on his face and say something that could reach back through all those years and find the kid alone in the forest and tell him he wasn’t alone anymore.
But the flashlights were sweeping closer, and the men with guns were not going to wait for me to have feelings.
“Are you the only one?” I asked as we moved. “Here, I mean. The only Shifter?”
“No. There’s a community. A few dozen, spread across the Midwest. Some came through the gate before it was destroyed. Others were born here.” He checked around the corner of a warehouse, then pulled me forward. “The man who leads them—Davan—he took me in after. Raised me.”
“He sounds important.”
“He is.”
Warrick went still. Listening. Then he turned to me, and in the thin light from a distant streetlamp, his eyes had gone amber again.
He scanned the area, then pulled me into a loading dock behind one of the warehouses—a concrete bay set deep into the building where delivery trucks backed in during the day. The metal overhang blocked the light. The walls rose on three sides. It smelled like cardboard and motor oil.
“Stay here. Don’t move.”
“What are you—?”
“I need to clear the way to my SUV.” His voice was calm and practical and terrifying. “I’ll come back for you.”
“And if you don’t?”
He paused. Turned back. I couldn’t see his face, but I heard him smile.
“Then you’ll wait till it’s quiet, head two blocks east, order an Uber, and have a very interesting story for Dani.”
Before I could answer, he melted into the dark like he was made of it. I pressed myself against the back wall of the dock and tried not to breathe.
The first sound came from somewhere east. A cut-off shout. Then silence.
I counted my heartbeats. Got to fourteen before the second sound, closer this time.
Not a shout. Wet. Final. I didn’t let my brain think about what kind of action produced that particular acoustic signature, because I was clinging to sanity by my fingernails, and some doors, once opened, did not close.
Three blocks north. The truck is three blocks north.
I slid down the concrete wall until I was sitting with my knees drawn up. The dock was deep enough that the flashlight beams couldn’t reach me unless someone walked directly into the bay. I could see a narrow slice of the service road from here. A dumpster. The corner of a shipping container.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I nearly bit through my lip. Fumbled it out with shaking hands and killed the brightness before the screen could give me away.
Dani: ok so I’m on S3 and I need u to tell me right now if they kill off Damon because I WILL stop watching
I stared at the screen. Somewhere out there in the dark, a man who turned into a tiger was hunting other men, and Dani wanted to know about Damon.
Dani: luce
Dani: hello?
Dani: I know ur awake ur read receipts r on
I couldn’t answer. My hands were shaking too much to type, and also because I had absolutely no idea what to say. “Sorry, can’t talk, my maybe-boyfriend is murdering people in an industrial park. Hope ur enjoying the show”?
The third sound was a voice. Someone calling out, not to me, to the others. “Regroup! He’s picking us off. Regroup at the—”
The voice cut off.
I was keeping count. I didn’t want to be keeping count, but my brain had decided this was a math problem, and it was going to solve it whether I liked it or not. Ten men. Four sounds. Four down. Six left.
My phone buzzed again.
Dani: fine ignore me but if Damon dies I’m blaming u!
I almost laughed. It came out closer to a sob, and I pressed my fist against my mouth to kill the sound.
A crash to the west, metal on metal. Someone yelled.
Then a sound I couldn’t put a name to, low and resonant, half snarl and half roar, and I felt it in my sternum before I heard it with my ears.
The kind of vocalization that bypassed the auditory system entirely and went straight to the part of the hindbrain that remembered being small and soft and very, very edible.
Then nothing.
I decided the silence afterward was worse than the sounds. Silence meant Warrick was moving through them so efficiently that screaming was a luxury his targets didn’t have time to indulge in.
His targets. I was thinking about people as targets. People with lives and names and probably families, and I was counting them down like items on a grocery list while the man I’d kissed this morning erased them from the world.
I should have been horrified.
I reached for the horror. Went looking for it the way you’d check a drawer where you always keep your keys. It should have been right there: the revulsion, the moral crisis, the part where I questioned everything I thought I knew about myself and the choices that had led me to this loading dock.
The drawer was empty.
What I found instead was the simple, terrible recognition that those men came to the shelter to take me. That Buzzcut had looked at me like I was something to be used. And that Warrick was out there in the dark, making sure none of them ever got the chance.
I wasn’t okay with violence. I was okay with him.
And I didn’t know what that made me, but I was going to have to figure it out later, because right now I had bigger problems than a moral inventory. Footsteps sounded. One set, steady and unhurried, coming closer.
I held my breath.
Warrick appeared at the mouth of the loading dock. There was a dark smear along his jaw. He wasn’t breathing hard.
“We’re clear.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
I got to my feet. “Are you hurt?”
A flash of surprise crossed his face. He’d expected me to be afraid of him. He’d walked back to this dock, braced for me to flinch or run.
I hadn’t.
“No,” he said. “I’m not hurt.”
“Good. The SUV’s three blocks north?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go.” I held out my hand.
He looked at it. Looked at me. Took it.
His palm was still warm. Still impossibly warm. And I held on tight, because a man who’d been alone since he was thirteen had just come back for me, covered in blood, and the least I could do was let him know I wasn’t going anywhere.