Beast Within (6 page)

“I turned into a fucking cat and you have the gall to say
‘it’s all right’ and ‘we can work it out’? Why the hell is this happening to
me?” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I’m going to kill
the people who did this to me!”

Haley lunged across the bed and grabbed his shoulders. She
leaned all her weight against his tense back and slid her arms around his
chest, holding him to her.

“Dylan, listen to me. I don’t know how this is happening or
who did it to you.”

“I do,” Dylan said. “And I’m going to hunt them down and
kill them.”

Haley shuddered to hear the cold, bleak determination in his
voice.

“Dylan, right now, as much as you want to hurt whoever did
this to you, you have to first accept what’s happening.”

“I don’t have to accept it. I want to be me. Not some
wildcat.”

“Dylan,” Haley leaned over one rock-hard shoulder and got in
his face.

Now her shudders came from pure sexual energy. Her breasts
pressed against his bare back, her nipples ached to feel his skin instead of
her silk pajama top.

His mouth was set in a tight line she wanted to ease with
her mouth and tongue, but she continued to try to persuade him to see some
logic. “If you accept it, maybe you’ll be able to learn to control it. Once you
learn how to keep from changing, then we’ll be better equipped to hunt down the
why, how and who were responsible for this mess in the first place.”

“
We’ll
be better equipped?” Dylan snapped her words
back to her.

“Yes,” she agreed. “We. You’re not in this alone. I can
help. What’s been done to you is wrong. If you don’t let me come with you, I’ll
track you on my own. But whether you take me with you voluntarily or I follow
you, I’ll be your backup. If you wanted the ability to change species at will,
that would have been your choice. But the way it is now, they’ve taken your
freedom from you. I joined the Amazons because I wanted to be able to fight
those who take away others’ freedoms. Personal freedom for all is still my
goal. If you know who’s responsible, I’ll help you hunt them down and hurt them
for taking away your freedom.”

Dylan’s half smile warmed her and a little bit of her heart
gave itself to him, willingly and happily.

“What’s in it for you?”

He twisted his body to face her. Haley saw the tip of his
cock. A drop of cum on its tip gleamed in the silver moonlight flowing through
the window.

Haley slowly stroked around his cock with one finger. It
jerked at her touch. She caught the drop of cum on her fingertip and licked her
finger. She looked at his face. His golden-green eyes gleamed at her. The hot
lust shining in his eyes nearly made her come without even a touch from him.

“What’s in it for me?” She sat back against the pillows and
told him. “In my own interests, I want to get laid. I want you to learn to
control this because I absolutely have no desire to be in the midst of things
again only to discover you changing. Bestiality is so not my thing.”

Dylan placed one hand on her stomach and weighed one breast
in his other hand. His thumb stroked her puckered nipple.

Her words came in gasps between breaths. “Kinky is okay. I
can do kinky for a change of pace. I like an occasional light bondage, both as
Dom and as sub. I even enjoy participating with my college roommate’s ménage
partners once in a while.”

“Your college roommate’s part of a ménage? F-M-F?”

“Mmhhh,” she sighed as his hand dipped from her stomach to
massage the silk pajama crotch. “No, M-F-M. Very stable threesome for several
years now. Huge bed for them and their occasional guests. Takes up most of the
bedroom.”

Dylan felt the silk dampening under his fingers. He slid his
hand back up her soft stomach, then untied the pajama bottoms ribbon to run his
hand between the material and her soft skin.

She spread her knees farther apart as he parted the slick
folds covered by her pussy hair.

He took his hand away from her breast long enough push the
silk and lace top up above her breasts. He held one in his hand to play with
the nipple while he placed his mouth on the other to feast on the full bounty.

“Now as for me…”

What the hell was it with women who chattered during sex?
Damn it, if she didn’t willingly put her hands on his shaft in half a minute,
he was going to come from just the feel of the sheets, her wet juices on his
fingers and the taste of her breast in his mouth. Everything suddenly had more
texture as if his nerve endings had been enhanced to feel each molecule
separately.

Scents grew sharper. He separated out the chemicals in the
soaps she used to wash the sheets and herself. Then he concentrated on the
natural scents—the grass outside, the smell of her skin, the flowing musk between
her legs.

Colors disappeared but shapes came into crisp focus. The
room no longer was the dim cave of seduction. He watched the interplay of light
and shadows dance across her glowing skin. Between the lamp and the moonlight,
the room was lit as bright as daylight.

Dylan knew if he lifted his head from his succulent feast of
Hildy’s breast, he would be able to see the mouse he smelled and heard rustling
in the grass outside the window. He heard the male owl’s hunting scream, then
the whoosh, flap of wings. That mouse didn’t even have time to squeak its death
call.

“But as for me,” Hildy’s voice broke into Dylan’s study of
all the different tastes, textures, smells and shapes created by his
Brunhilde’s lush body. “I prefer a single male at a time. And while I
occasionally like my human males to act like animals, I do
not
want
animal animals as lovers. As much as I love your tongue on my breast, it’s
starting to scratch. I think you’re changing again. And if those damn claws
come out again while you’re playing with my pussy, I will break your cock in
two.”

Dylan jerked his fingers away from Hildy’s pussy. “Damn it
all to hell!”

He looked at his hand, four fingers and a thumb—no claws,
just fingernails. He breathed a sigh of relief that the changing hadn’t
occurred yet.

Tentatively, he ran his tongue across his teeth. His teeth
hadn’t turned into points. He rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth

“Are you sure I was changing? My tongue feels smooth.”

“You were shifting into the jaguarondi.” She narrowed her
eyes at him.

Well, damn, he knew better than to doubt a woman’s word, but
still.

“My tongue feels normal to me.”

She jerked down her pajama top and crossed her arms under
the lovely breasts he’d been holding and suckling. “How exactly do you know how
normal
feels? You spent half an hour in the jaguarondi shape and didn’t
even realize you’d shifted until I made you face facts.”

Dylan flinched at the reality Haley once again forced at
him. Part of him felt like he was five years old, mad at one of his snotty girl
cousins.

“Want to feel it?” Dylan stuck his tongue out at her.

Haley leaned forward, her fingers extended. Dylan resigned
himself to no more playtime for the night. He just hoped his First Amazon
Battalion soldier didn’t jerk his tongue out in her anger. She swiped her own
tongue across his, then sat back before he had a chance to grab her.

His cock pulsed angrily. He froze, afraid if he even moved
across the soft sheets he’d come all over the bed.

“Dylan?”

“Just wait,” he said between gritted teeth. Silently, sweat
popping in beads on his forehead, he fought the battle for dominance with his
cock.

The scent of her body on sheets, the aroma of her wet pussy
next to his head, the still slick feel of her juices on his fingers made it all
that much worse to gain control over his cock. Damn it all to hell and back.
His being—his self-worth—encompassed more than overactive hormones and a nearly
out-of-control dick.

His cock finally eased off enough that he didn’t think he
was going to come at the moment. He made no promises to himself that the next
time he’d win the battle or even want to. He hated not being in control of his
body.

“You okay now?” Haley asked.

“Absolutely just fine and dandy,” he snarled. How the hell
did she think he felt? He had no control of this changing shit and his cock
kept wanting to take full charge.

“I’m so glad you’re feeling better.” Her sweet, sugary,
sarcastic voice flayed guilt across him for snapping at her concern. “I had
nothing to do with this crap about you turning into a jaguarondi. Don’t get
snitty with me, you pickle head.”

“Now I’m a pickle head?”

“Substitute dick for pickle, pickle head.”

Dylan didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. “My older
brother and cousins used to call me Pickle.”

Haley laughed, then asked, “Are you serious?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” He tried to glare at her. One
look at her fighting back giggles and he found himself grinning too. “Yeah,
yeah. Laugh. Dylan became Dill, which ended up being Pickle. They quit when I
finally got old enough, big enough and mean enough to beat the crap out of
them.”

Their shared laughter eased some of Dylan’s tension.

“Families suck.”

“Yes,” Dylan nodded, “and what would we do without them?”

“Good question. Okay, as long as we’re talking about
siblings and confessions, I have a confession.”

“You beat up your sister to steal her ruffles and laces?”

“I sure wanted to when we were kids. But no, this is
different. My sister works in a biomedical lab in Houston. I took blood samples
of you when you were in your jaguarondi shape and in your human shape. I sent
the samples to her to see what the hell is happening to you. It has to be
something triggering the DNA to change. Maybe she and her colleagues can figure
out what and help you to stop it.”

“Why DNA?”

“This has to be happening to you on a sub-molecular level
because the change is too perfect. You know, like the scientist in the graphic
novels who turns green and bulks way up when he gets mad or scared.”

“You’re saying I’m an incredible hunk?”

She grinned at him and swatted him. “Behave. You do have
your moments, but we’ll get into that later. You said you knew who did this to
you?”

“Yeah, I think so. It’s not like I was born in a litter and
have been doing this my whole life.”

Her chuckle at his feeble joke helped him calm down further.
He plucked at the loose silk pajama bottom, once again sliding his fingers up
and down a fold. He wanted to rub her silken skin but for the moment settled
for the material.

“Do you know what happened to you? And who did it?”

“Specifically who? No. The area where it happened? Possibly.
Why? And how? Not a clue.” Dylan concentrated on the silk between his thumb and
forefinger, wishing he was touching her wet folds instead. “It has to do with
my former job in Special Forces. I’d tell you what I did, but…”

“Yeah, yeah, then you’d have to kill me. My security
clearance is pretty high. I’ll have you know I came into Reserves as a First
Sergeant.”

“No, kidding? You outrank me. I was invalided out as a
Master Sergeant. Should I salute you?”

“Your pickle has been doing so all evening.”

Dylan shifted on his stomach, trying to find a soft place
for his hard shaft. “I have no control over it. Not only are you a toothsome
wench, but one of the side effects of the damn blackouts…”

“Not blackouts,” she corrected him. “Changing back to human
form after being a jaguarondi. My personal opinion is you have trouble
adjusting to the differences in your senses from human to jaguarondi. As a
result, you try not to remember the experience and consider the experiences as
blackouts. I’ll point out that you did remember what happened in the kitchen,
even though you were a jaguarondi at the time.”

“You know,” Dylan thought back through what he considered
blackouts. His internal clock ticked rhythmically. His internal clock always
reminded him how much time had passed. Knowing the time helped him remember who
he was. With those thoughts in mind, he forced himself through his memories and
beyond the confusion and pain during what he thought of as his blackouts. He
pushed himself to once again experience the blackouts’ strange sights, sounds,
scents. He compared his vague remembrances to what had happened in Haley’s
kitchen. He realized his vision, hearing and smell sharpened just before Haley
made him aware he was changing when they were enjoying foreplay a few minutes
ago. Damn it, when was he going to get some sex again? Probably not until Hildy
had her say. “You might be right. And maybe I’m adjusting since I can remember
what happened in the kitchen and moving to the bedroom?”

“You remember all of that?”

“Yes. I remember walking with you and rubbing against you.”

The gleam in Haley’s eye gave him pause.

“What?”

“Did you grow up with cats?”

Why did he suddenly feel like the mouse being toyed with by
the cat? “Yes. They were all over the ranch. Why?”

“Do you know why cats rub against things? And stroke things
with their tails?”

“I’m not a moron. To mark the things with the cat’s scent.
For the cat to mark whatever it wants as belonging to it.”

“And since you were in a jaguarondi body, rubbing all over
me, stroking me with your tail. Well,” Haley paused for a heartbeat, “it gives
a whole different meaning to the old term of pussy-whipped.”

Dylan groaned at her awful joke. He never had understood why
a woman’s thatch was often called a “pussy”. Eating a muffin made so much more
sense. Having a muff warm his cock—that had some logic. But pussy?

Not that it mattered to him. At this point, he really didn’t
care what it was called. He wanted his cock pounding hard and deep inside his
Brunhilde’s pussy again, its warm slickness taking away the ache hammering at
him. He shifted again on the bed, well aware he was close to losing control.

“You act like you’re uncomfortable on your stomach. Why
don’t you lie on your back?”

“There’s a side effect to regaining consciousness from the
blackout.” At her glare, Dylan corrected himself. “A side effect to shifting
back to human.”

“Besides ending up naked?”

“Yeah. Besides being naked, I end up horny. Very, very
horny.”

“Must be the animal part of you.” Haley shrugged her pretty
shoulders with the expertise of a first-class stripper. One of the spaghetti
straps holding up the pajama top slid down her upper arm. “Go ahead and lie on
your back. You’ll be more comfortable.”

Her calm practicality amazed him.

“Um, it’s a bit of a tent pole.”

“Oooooh, yum, yum,” her blue eyes widened with mock
innocence and sparkling humor. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it before.”

“Do you think you might be so turned on by its size you
might force yourself on me to have your wicked way?” Dylan rolled onto his
back, then scooted up so the bedstead braced his shoulders.

Hildy eyed him, then licked her lips and frowned at him. “We
have got to get this changing stuff under control. I really want to have my
wicked way with you. But not at the moment. Tell me what you think happened.
The how and why will have to wait until we find the specific whos and beat the
shit out of them.”

Dylan didn’t want to think about his time in captivity, much
less talk about it. But he also didn’t want to spend the rest of his life
changing into a wildcat at inopportune moments.

“It has to start with my Special Forces job that involved
infiltrating the cartels across the border that smuggle people and drugs. For
all the good it does to stem the tide. And the wall across the southern border
is worthless. Amazing the damn ground underneath it doesn’t collapse
considering the way it’s riddled with tunnels.”

“Yeah, big old waste of taxpayer money. More people, and
infrared equipment works better. We spend a lot of our time in Wildlife
Management rescuing people who’ve been abandoned in the brush and tracking down
caches of drugs. So what happened with your spy job in the smuggling cartel?”

He grasped her silk pajama leg again and rubbed it. If he
touched her naked skin, he might go completely animalistic. “One group I’d been
working with got busted by a rival cartel. All of us, including the people who
were trying to get across, ended up in one of the competitors’ prison camps.”

“Not fun.”

“It gets worse. One night, a bunch of us were taken to a
hospital straight from hell. You remember those psych tests we got subjected to
when we signed up for our compulsory terms?”

Haley’s full lips thinned. She nodded, her face set in hard,
grim planes.

“Those were a cakewalk compared to what we were put through.
In addition, they did a bunch of things for physical endurance. I also have
memory gaps during which I think they did medical things to us because I woke
up with anesthetic hangovers.”

“You keep saying ‘us’.” Haley’s fingers grasped his shoulder
and kneaded it.

“Definitely more people were being experimented on. I caught
glimpses of other people, plus I heard them. I want to find that Hell Hospital
again. The place needs to be razed. They’re not only experimenting on adults,
they’re using children.” Dylan closed his eyes and swallowed hard. Once he
found the hospital again, he’d alert his former squad members and they’d pull
the strings to close it down.

“It’s in Mexico?”

Dylan shook his head and looked into Brunhilde’s eyes. The
winter blue sky eyes looked back at him with compassion and encouragement to
continue. “I caught a glimpse of the area at night a couple of times. I have
this strong urge to go to the Davis Mountains here in Texas. Maybe it was the
star pattern I saw. I know I saw we were in mountains, but it didn’t feel like
Colorado or Mexico. I just have this insistent thought that it’s in the Davis
Mountains and I have to go there. I think it’s The Halcyon Institute.”

Haley’s eyes widened. “That can’t be right. The Halcyon
Institute is a very respected research and development hospital for helping
people with massive injuries and body trauma.”

“I know the reputation,” Dylan snapped. “They get
appropriated a lot of government funding for their help with war injuries. I’ve
been there to visit injured buddies. I was drugged a lot of the time I was held
there, but I think the star pattern and mountain range are the same. I want to
be positive before I start blowing any whistles. Besides, I have this extremely
strong urge that I have to be in the Davis Mountains and soon.”

“But how did you get out?”

Dylan knew by the skeptical look on her face she didn’t
believe him about The Halcyon Institute. Hell, he still didn’t believe it
either. But he was going to make sure. For now, it was enough that she wasn’t
calling the cops on him. Maybe if he finished his story, it might make more
sense to both of them.

“Someone took us back to a prison camp in Mexico. At least,
I woke up from a drug-induced stupor there. A coalition force of Special Forces
broke into the cartel prison and pulled us out. The SF people said it was too
easy, no more than token resistance, as though whoever was in charge wanted us
out of there. Everyone was suspicious as hell, but we were damn glad to be
out.”

“Then you came back and were invalided out because of your
so-called blackouts?”

“Hard to stay SF when I kept waking up with no idea how I
got places.”

“I’m sure the naked raised a few eyebrows too.” Haley
grinned at him.

One thing he loved already about Haley was that she was
wacky enough to find something funny in everything. Her joy in life eased the
shadows threatening him.

“The stand-up cock didn’t help much either. I was actually
worried I’d get busted out for being a pervert.”