Mine to Possess

“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.”