Mine to Possess

CHAPTER 2

“Hello, Clay.”

Air rushed back into his body with the force of a body blow. A roar built in his throat, but he didn’t release it, violently aware of the acrid fear scent coming off her in waves.

Son of a bitch! Tally was scared of him. She might as well have taken a knife to his heart. “Come here, Tally.”

She rubbed her hands on her thighs, shook her head. “I came to talk to you, that’s all.”

“This is your way of talking to me? By taking off?” He told himself to shut it, to not snarl at her. This was the first conversation they had had in two decades. But it felt as if they had spoken yesterday, it was so natural, so effortless. Except for her fear. “Were you going to stop the car anytime soon?”

She swallowed. “I was planning to talk to you at the bar.”

The leopard had had enough. Moving with the preternatural speed of his kind, he was an inch from her before she could draw in the breath to scream. “You’re supposed to be dead.” He let her see the rage inside of him, rage that had had twenty long years to ferment. Ferment and spread until it infused every vein in his body. “They lied to me.”

“Yes, I know…I knew.”

He froze in sheer disbelief. “You what?” All this time while he’d been tracking a ghost, he’d been absolutely certain that he had been lied to, and without Talin’s knowledge. It had destroyed him that she was out there thinking he’d broken his promise to return to her. Never once had he considered that she might have been a willing participant.

Eyes the color of storm clouds met his. “I asked them to tell you I was killed in a car crash.”

The knife twisted so deep, it carved a hole in his soul. “Why?”

“You wouldn’t let me be, Clay,” she whispered, torment a vicious beast in those big gray eyes ringed by a thin band of amber. “I was with a good family, trying to live a normal life”—her lips twisted—“or as normal as I knew how to live. But I couldn’t relax. I could feel you hunting me the second you left juvie. Twelve years old and I didn’t dare close my eyes in case you found me in my dreams!”

The leopard who lived inside of him bared its teeth in a growl. “You were mine to protect!”

“No!” She fisted her hands, rejection writ in every tense line of her body. “I was never yours!”

Beast and man both staggered under the vicious blow of her repudiation. Most people thought he was too much like the ice-cold Psy, that he didn’t feel. At that moment, he wished that were the truth. The last time he’d hurt this badly—as if his soul was being lacerated by a thousand stinging whips—had been the day he’d gotten out of juvenile hall. His first act had been to call Social Services.

“I’m sorry, Clay. Talin died three months ago.”

“What?” His mind a blank, his future dreams wiped out by a wall of black. “No.”

“It was a car crash.”

“No!”

It had driven him to his knees, torn him to pieces from the inside out. But the depth of that hurt, the cutting, tearing pain, was nothing to this rejection. Yet in spite of the blood she’d drawn, he still wanted to—no, needed to—touch her. However, when he raised a hand, she flinched.

She couldn’t have done anything designed to cause more harm to his protective animal heart. He fought the pain as he always did—by shutting away the softness and letting the rage out to roam. These days, he rarely stopped being angry. But today, the hurt refused to die. It clawed through him, threatening to make him bleed.

“I never hurt you,” he grit out between clenched teeth.

“I can’t forget the blood, Clay.” Her voice shook. “I can’t forget.”

Neither could he. “I saw your death certificate.” After the first shock had passed, he’d known it for a lie. But…“I need to know that you’re real, that you’re alive.”

This time, when he raised his hand to her cheek, she didn’t flinch. But neither did she lean into his touch as she’d always done as a child. Her skin was delicate, honey-colored. Freckles danced across the bridge of her nose and along her cheekbones. “You haven’t been staying out of the sun.”

She gave him a startled look followed by a shy smile that hit him like a kick to the gut. “Never was much good at that.”

At least she hadn’t changed in that respect. But so much about her had changed. His Tally had come running into his arms every day for five of the happiest years of his life, looking to him as her protector and friend. Now, she pushed at his hand until he dropped it, the silent reiteration of her rejection searing a cold burn across his soul. It made his voice harsh when he said, “If you hate me so much, why did you find me?” Why couldn’t she have left him his memories—of a girl who had seen in him only goodness?

Those memories were all he’d had left in his fight to stay in the light. He had always carried darkness inside his heart but now it beckoned every waking minute, whispering silvery promises of the peace to be found in not feeling, not hurting. Even the powerful bonds of Pack were no longer strong enough to hold him, not when the lure of violence beat at him night and day, hour after hour, second after excruciating second.

Talin’s eyes widened. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”

“Answer the question, Talin.” He wouldn’t call her Tally again. She wasn’t his Tally, the sole human being who had ever loved his misbegotten soul before he’d been dragged into DarkRiver. This was Talin, a stranger. “You want something.”

Her cheeks blazed with fire. “I need help.”

He could never turn her away, no matter what. But he listened impassively, his tenderness for her threatening to twist into something that wanted to strike out and hurt. If he betrayed the depth of his fury, if he sent her running again, it might just push him over the final deadly edge.

“I need someone dangerous enough to take on a monster.”

“So you came to a natural-born killer.”

She flinched again, then snapped her spine straight. “I came to the strongest person I’ve ever known.”

He snorted. “You wanted to talk. So talk.”

She looked out past his shoulder. “Could we do it somewhere more private? People might drive up here.”

“I don’t take strangers to my lair.” Clay was pissed and when he got pissed, he got mean.

Talin tipped up her chin in a gesture of bravado that sent flickers of memory arcing through his mind. “Fine. We can go to my apartment in San Francisco.”

“Like hell.” He occasionally worked in DarkRiver’s business HQ near Chinatown, but that HQ was built for cats. It didn’t hem him in. “I spent four years in a cage.” That didn’t count the fourteen he’d passed in the small boxlike apartments he and his mother had called home. “I don’t do well inside walls.”

Naked pain crawled over her features, turning the stormy gray of her eyes close to black and eclipsing the ring of amber fire. “I’m sorry, Clay. You went to prison because of me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. You didn’t make me rip out your foster father’s guts or tear off his face.”

She pressed a hand to her stomach. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” he pushed, a caustic mix of anger and possessiveness overwhelming his fiercely protective instincts where Tally was concerned. Again, he reminded himself that this woman wasn’t his Tally, wasn’t the girl he’d have split his veins to keep safe. “I killed Orrin while you were in the room. We can’t ignore it like it never happened.”

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“You used to have more spine.”

Color flooded her cheeks again, bright against the fading daylight. But she took a step forward, anger vibrating through her frame. “That was before I had a man’s blood spray across my face, before my head filled with his screams and a leopard’s roars.”

A predatory changeling could hunt in complete quiet—in either human or animal form—but he had felt such rage that day that the animal in him had risen totally to the surface. For those blood-soaked minutes, he’d been a human insane, a leopard on two feet. They had had to shoot an overdose of animal tranqs into him to pull him off Orrin Henderson’s mutilated body.

The last thing he’d seen as he lay on the floor, his face pressed into still-warm blood, was Tally curled up in a corner, face flecked with blood and other things, pink and fleshy…and gray, lumps of gray. Her eyes had looked through him, her freckles stark dots against the chalk white skin visible between all that red. Some of the blood had been her own. Most had been Orrin’s.

“You used to have more freckles on your cheeks,” he commented, caught in the memory. It wasn’t horrifying to him. He was animal enough not to care about anyone outside of his pack, especially not those who dared harm his packmates. Back then, Tally and Isla had been the sole members of his pack. He’d always known he would kill to protect either of them.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. Your face was the final thing I saw on the outside.” He brushed a finger over those freckles of hers. “They must’ve faded or moved as you grew up.”

“No, they didn’t,” she snapped, and—for the first time—sounded exactly like the girl he’d known. “They’ve multiplied, spread. Damn things.”

“You own them now,” he said, amused as always by her antipathy toward those tiny spots of pigment. “They’re yours.”

“Since the creams don’t make them disappear and I don’t want to have laser surgery, I guess they are.”

He almost relaxed, caught in the echoes of a past long gone. Oh, the power Talin had over him. She could make him crawl. The realization of his continued weakness for a woman who found the violent heart of him repulsive, turned his next words razor sharp. “Give me your key.”

She took a wary step back. “It’s stalled. I can—”

“Give me the fucking key or find another fool to help you.”

“You didn’t used to be like this.” Big, haunted eyes, soft lips pressed together as if to withhold emotion. “Clay?”

He held out his hand. After a taut second, she put the flat computronic key on his palm. Most cars were keyed to the owner’s print, but for that very reason, rental places gave out a preprogrammed key instead of spending half an hour coding in each new customer. It saved time, but it also let thieves steal the vehicles. Idiots. “Get in.”

He stalked around the Jeep without another word and took the driver’s seat. By the time she stopped sulking and jumped in, he had the vehicle running. He gave her only enough time to belt up before reversing, turning, and heading back the way she’d come.

The bar was on the outskirts of Napa, close to the massive forests that edged the area, forests that were a part of DarkRiver’s territory. He headed toward the cool privacy of those trees, doing his best to ignore the spicy feminine scent of the woman who sat so close. Intriguing as that scent was, there was still something off about it, and it confused the leopard. But right then, he wasn’t in any mood to analyze his reaction. He was running on pure adrenaline.

“Where are we going?” she asked ten minutes later as he drove them off-road and into the shadows of the huge firs that dominated the area. “Clay?”

He growled low in this throat, too damn pissed with her to care about being polite.

Talin felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise in primitive warning. Clay had always been less than civilized. Even trapped in the claustrophobic confines of the apartment complex where they had met, his animal fury contained beneath a veneer of quiet intensity, he had walked like a predator on the hunt. No one had ever dared bully Clay, not boys twice his age, not the aggressive gang-bangers who lived to terrorize, not even the ex-cons.

But that was then—his current behavior was something else. “Stop trying to scare me.”

He actually snapped his teeth at her, making her jump in her seat. “I don’t have to try. You’re scared shitless anyway. I can smell your fear and it’s a fucking insult.”

She’d forgotten that aspect of his changeling abilities. For more than twenty years, she had lived among humans and nonpredatory changelings, deliberately increasing the space between her and Clay. But what had it gotten her? Here she was, right back at the start…having lost everything that ever mattered. “You said that the first time we met.”

He had been this big, tall, dangerous boy and she’d been more than terrified of him. All her short life, people had hurt her, and he had seemed like exactly the kind of person who would. So she had kept her distance. But that day when she’d seen him fall and break his leg in the backyard of their complex—a junkyard, not a park—she hadn’t been able to leave him to suffer alone.

So frightened that her teeth had threatened to chatter, she had walked out into the living room and to the phone. Orrin had been on the couch, passed out. Somehow, she’d managed to make a forbidden call outside—to the paramedics. Then, unlocking the door, she had run down to sit with Clay until help came. He hadn’t been happy. Nine years to her precocious and fully verbal three, he’d been a creature of pure danger.

“You snarled at me to get lost and said you liked to crunch little girl bones.” It was a trick of hers, this memory. She could remember everything from the moment of birth and sometimes before. It was how she’d learned to talk before others, to read before she could talk. “You said I smelled like soft, juicy, delicious prey.”

“You still do.”

The comment made her bristle in spite of her wariness. “Clay, stop it. You’re being adolescent.” He was also succeeding in ramping up her fear—did he even realize how intimidating he was? Big, incredibly strong, and so damn angry it almost felt like a blow when he turned his eyes on her.

“Why? I might as well get some fun out of this visit. Tormenting you will do.”

She wondered if she’d made a mistake. The Clay she had known, he’d been wild, but he’d been on the side of the angels. She wasn’t so sure about this man. He looked like pure predator, without honor or soul. But her too soft heart told her to keep pushing, that there was more to him than this incandescent rage. “You belong to the DarkRiver pack.”

No answer.

“Was that your father’s pack?” Isla had been human. It was from his father that Clay had gained his shape-shifting abilities.

“All I know about my father is that he was a cat. Isla never told me anything else.”

“I thought, maybe—”

“What? That she’d changed her mind, become sane on her deathbed?” His laugh was bitter. “She was probably mated to a cat and he died. I’m guessing she was fragile to begin with. Losing her mate broke her completely.”

“But I thought you didn’t know if they’d been married.”

“Mated, not married. Hell of a difference.” He turned down a pitch-black path, the fading evening light blocked out by the canopy. “I knew shit-all about my own race back then. Unless doctors intervene—and even then it’s a crapshoot—leopard changelings aren’t fertile except when mated or in a long-term stable relationship. No accidental pregnancies, no quickie marriages.”

“Oh.” She bit her lower lip. “DarkRiver taught you about being a leopard?”

He threw her a sidelong glance and it was nothing friendly. “Why the sudden need for conversation? Just spit out what you want. Sooner you do, sooner you can disappear back into the hole where you’ve been living for twenty damn years.”

“You know what? I’m no longer sure I came to the right man,” she snapped back, reckless in the face of his aggressiveness.

The air inside the car filled with a sense of incipient threat. “Why? Because I’m not as easy to handle as you remember? Your pet leopard.”

She burst out laughing, her stomach hurting with the force of it. “Clay, if anyone followed anyone, it was me tagging along after you. I didn’t dare order you around.”

“Load of shit,” he muttered, but she thought she heard a softening in his tone. “You fucking made me attend tea parties.”

She remembered his threat before the first one: Tell anyone and I’ll eat you and use your bones as toothpicks.

She should’ve been scared, but Clay hadn’t had the “badness” in him. And even after a bare three years on the planet, she’d known too much about the badness, could pick out which grown-ups had it. Clay hadn’t. So, wide-eyed, she’d sat with him and they had had their tea party. “You were my best friend then,” she said in a quiet plea. “Can’t you be my friend now?”

“No.” The flatness of his response shook her. “We’re here.”

She looked out of the windscreen to find them in a small clearing. “Where?”

“You wanted privacy. This is private.” Extinguishing the lights and engine, he stepped out.

Having no choice, she followed suit, stopping in the middle of the clearing as he went to lean against a tree trunk on the other side, facing her. His eyes had gone night-glow, shocking a gasp out of her. Dangerous, he was definitely dangerous. But he was beautiful, too—in the same way as his wild brethren.

Lethal. Untouchable.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“It’s in DarkRiver territory. It’s safe.”

She folded her arms around herself. Though the early spring air was chilly, that wasn’t what made her search for comfort. It was the cold distance Clay had put between them, telling her what he thought of her without words.

It hurt.

And she knew she’d brought it on herself. But she couldn’t pretend. What she’d seen Clay do had traumatized her eight-year-old mind into silence for close to a year. “You were brutal,” she found herself saying instead of asking for what she wanted, the reason she’d fought the vicious truths of the past and tracked him down. She needed him to understand, to forgive her betrayal.

“You were my one point of safety, the one person I trusted to never lose himself in anger and hurt me,” she persisted in the face of his silence. “Yet you ended up being more violent than anyone else. How could I help but wonder if the violence wouldn’t be directed at me one day, huh, Clay?”

His growl raised every hair on her body.