Authors: Ken Goddard
"Jesus Christ, Paxton!" Dwight Stoner screamed as he dropped the crate and grabbed his ears. The other three agents appeared equally disoriented and deafened by the incredibly loud and reverberating blast.
It took the stunned agents several seconds to regain their senses and return their attention to the wading pool.
To their amazement, two extremely thick-bodied snakes, each approximately sixteen inches long, with broad scales arranged in alternating reddish brown and tan rings, lay immobile on the six-foot-diameter bed of ice.
"Are they dead?" Concern clouded Thomas Woeshack's boyish features.
"Who the hell cares? Get those damned things into that terrarium, now!" Larry Paxton ordered, still squinting from the effects of the unexpected, close-proximity shotgun blast as he first gingerly rubbed his throbbing shoulder, then racked another round into the smoking shotgun's chamber.
Using the snake hook, Mike Takahara quickly transferred each of the snakes from the bed of ice into an open terrarium nestled into an identical bed of ice in the adjoining plastic wading pool. As soon as he completed the transfer, Stoner quickly snapped one of the specially designed feeding lids in place, held the terrarium — staring nervously at the two still-immobile snakes now mere inches from his face — while Takahara hurriedly wrapped duct tape around both ends of it to make sure the top stayed on. Then he carefully placed the terrarium at one end of the bottom shelf of a long three-tiered plywood-and-stud-beam rack of shelves that the agents had constructed along the back wall of the warehouse.
All four agents then breathed an enormous sigh of relief.
"Which ones are these?" Thomas Woeshack asked as he brought his nose close to the glass.
"Common Death Adders," Mike Takahara replied.
"Far as I'm concerned, there ain't a goddamned thing common about a snake with death for a middle name," Larry Paxton commented as he snapped the shotgun's safety back on and set the weapon aside.
"Hey!" the team's Eskimo agent/pilot exclaimed excitedly. "I think they're starting to move!"
"Well, thank God for that," Larry Paxton muttered sarcastically as he looked down at his watch, then back up at his fellow agents. "It's now nine o'clock. A mere thirteen hours since we started this job, and we've already unloaded a whole two crates. The way I calculate it" — the team leader added, glaring over at the two duct-tape-wrapped terrariums at the far end of the long shelf, "at this rate, it shouldn't take more than oh, say, two months, tops, to unload the rest of the damned things."
"You really think this system will work for those tarantulas, too?" Thomas Woeshack asked skeptically.
"I think we need bigger wading pools, and a lot more ice," Dwight Stoner commented darkly.
Larry Paxton favored his subordinates with a withering glare.
"It may be necessary to modify our system to deal with the situation at hand," the Bravo Team leader acknowledged. "If we need to, we will. That's why they call us Special Agents."
"Speaking of Special Agents, I wonder what Henry's doing right now?" Mike Takahara asked his exhausted colleagues.
"I don't know." Larry Paxton snorted as he rubbed at his aching shoulder again. "But whatever it is, I hope the hell he's in some serious pain."
"And scared out of his mind?" Dwight Stoner offered.
"Oh yeah." Paxton nodded his head agreeably. "That too. Definitely."
Henry Lightstone gasped in both fear and pain when the sharp claws dug into his leg.
"Quit . . . complaining," the sensuous young woman responded in a breathless voice. Her entire body gleamed with perspiration and her gold-flecked green eyes smoldered with a seemingly endless supply of passion and desire. "My nails aren't . . . that long."
Every muscle in Henry Lightstone's own glistening body tensed as he fought to fend off a combination of physical and emotional sensations that seemed — from his highly stimulated point of view during those few uninhibited hours — determined to overwhelm him absolutely.
"Not you — her!"
"What?"
Karla raised her upper body to peer over her shoulder, and then arched her back and moaned as his hands roamed over her slick swollen breasts gleaming in the glow of the night light.
"When did . . . she get here? Supposed to be . . . locked up!" She briefly tried to control herself, but then abandoned that in favor of fully enjoying her fully aroused if slightly distracted partner.
"No idea . . . never saw her come down." Lightstone gasped, torn between passion and self-preservation, when every shred of his awareness converged on the woman's increasingly focused, heated, and frantic movements. "I wasn't paying . . . any attention."
"Good!" She began to kiss him passionately while rubbing her sweat- slickened breasts against his heaving chest.
Realizing that all sense of control had rapidly deserted him, Lightstone growled deep in his throat, and then flipped them both over so she lay on her back with her long silky legs tightly wrapped tightly around his waist and her arms around his neck.
You're insane, Lightstone
, he told himself.
Absolutely fucking insane.
He sensed, in the midst of absolute bliss, the force of the panther's head butting hard against his own and, without thinking, he shoved the huge cat aside, then proceeded to ignore both the subsequent roar and the sharp pain across his arm as he gave in to an ancient and ultimately irresistible urge . . .
Only later, as he lay on his back, trying very hard to control both his breathing and his emotions — Karla snuggled tightly against his right shoulder and sighing sleepily, and the panther snuggled in tight against his neck and other shoulder rumbling contentedly — did Henry Lightstone finally realize that a goodly amount of the glossy sheen on his chest, arms and shoulders was definitely not sweat.
"Hey," he whispered to the sensuous creature laying against his right shoulder, while trying to ignore the other one rumbling against his neck.
"Hummf?"
"I think I'm bleeding to death."
"Just some scratches. Don't be a wimp," Karla mumbled. "Betadine® in bathroom. Fix you up in the morn . . ." Her voice trailed off into an exhausted sigh that almost immediately gave way to the sound of soft, regular breathing.
"What do you mean . . . ?" he started to demand, but quickly shut up when the cat jerked awake, her bright yellow eyes suddenly appearing in the darkness and focusing on his for a brief moment before they closed again.
Moments later, the deep feline rumbling against his neck and left shoulder resumed.
Lightstone remained unmoving in the semidarkness for another ten minutes until the breathing of the enchanting but dangerous creatures on either side of him evened out into a deep-sleep rhythm.
Then, ever so carefully, he slid out from between them. When he did, the panther gracefully rolled over into his abandoned spot next to her sleeping mistress, and with equal grace the woman wrapped her body around the big cat's.
He remained motionless, silently watching the two of them until the deep rumbling slowly evened out again. Then he picked up his clothes and slowly worked his way to the bathroom door.
After carefully pulling the door closed behind him, Lightstone turned on the bathroom light, squinted, and then stared in disbelief at his right forearm, where blood oozed from four deep parallel slashes.
"Christ, no wonder it hurts," he muttered as he quickly confirmed that most of the blood covering his torso had apparently come from the wounds on his arm.
After muttering a few other things under his breath, Lightstone turned on the shower, walked over to the mirror, then winced as he examined the various wounds that corresponded to numerous tender areas on his shoulders, back, hips, and buttocks. Even though they paled in comparison to the deep gouges that crisscrossed his calves and his right hand, to say nothing of the four outright slashes into his right forearm, a few of the human-induced scratches were deep enough to have bled slightly.
You may have short nails, lady, but you sure as hell know how to use them.
The warm shower felt wonderful, but the rivulets of diluted blood swirling around Henry Lightstone's feet reminded him of the real reason for his visit.
He tried not to curse as he rubbed soap into the wounds, reminding himself that it would get a lot worse in a few minutes. He rinsed off, dried himself as best he could with the single large bath towel on the rack, used some folds of toilet tissue as a temporary compress, opened the medicine chest . . . and sighed.
The antiseptic spray caused him to blink a few times when he awkwardly applied the stinging mist to the scratches that crisscrossed his shoulders, back, hips, butt, calves, and hand. But he knew that cat bites and scratches could be highly infectious, and he could think of no reason why panther claws would be any different.
Which meant he needed something stronger.
Must be out of my goddamned mind
, he told himself as he reached for the small brown bottle on the top shelf of the medicine chest.
Without thinking about it anymore than absolutely necessary, he quickly removed the makeshift compress, firmly placed his right hand palm down against the bottom of the porcelain sink, poured the Merthiolate down the full length of the first deep slash in his forearm . . .
And then sprayed the rest of it all over the bathroom wall when he slammed his left hand against the sink while trying — with only minimal success — to contain an anguished scream.
He was still trying to regain his senses when the door behind him burst open.
"What in the world are you ... oh my God!"
"Sorry, didn't mean to wake you," he mumbled thickly, blinking back the tears as he tried to will away the agonizing pain in his forearm that knifed all the way up into the center of his skull.
"I thought — Jesus, never mind what I thought," the woman muttered as she grabbed his arm, quickly examined the deep slashes, and then observed the empty Merthiolate bottle in the sink and the bright red spray pattern all over her bathroom wall.
"I swear I don't understand you males," she continued muttering as she squatted down and removed a brown plastic bottle and a large tube of ointment from the cabinet beneath the sink, along with a handful of large gauze pads and a roll of medical tape. "Every damned one of you seems to go into arrested development the moment you turn twelve.
"And by the way," she added absentmindedly as she removed the top from the larger bottle, "didn't I tell you to use the Betadine® solution?"
"What's that?" Henry Lightstone's glazed eyes slowly began to focus, a process that rapidly accelerated when he realized that she was stark naked, and that he was actually seeing her that way — in the light — for the first time.
"Tamed iodine," she explained. "Works just as well as Merthiolate, but doesn't make your eyeballs pop out of your head." Working quickly and professionally, she stoppered the sink, pushed his hand back down onto the bottom of the porcelain sink, then lathered and rinsed the bloody slashes in his forearm repeatedly.
"There, isn't that better?"
"Much." Lightstone nodded gratefully.
"I don't know what got into her," the sensuous young woman apologized as she gently blotted the wounds dry with a clean cloth, smoothed a thick layer of antibiotic ointment over them, and neatly bandaged his arm.
"If it's anything like what got into you, I don't want to know about it."
Karla blinked, started to say something . . . then thought better of it.
"You may be closer to the truth there than you think," she admitted, giving him the full benefit of her gold-flecked green eyes. But before Lightstone could say anything, she began examining his other wounds.
"Hey, what's that all about?" she demanded, pointing to his shoulder.
"As I recall, that's where you bit me." Lightstone tried very hard to ignore the sensual impact of the woman's close and naked presence, and failed miserably. "I guess some women reach for a cigarette afterward, and others just try to rip a guy's shoulder off."
"No, not those little things, I mean these, right here," she persisted, running her fingers lightly over the patch of ragged white scar tissue on his shoulder. "I sure as hell didn't do that . . . and these either," she added as she moved behind him to examine his back. "What caused all this?"
"Well, uh . . ."
"You know, several of these scars do look an awful lot like claw marks." She moved closer to examine the scar tissue and, in doing so, unconsciously pressed her breasts against his arm and back. "But I don't think a cat made them."
"Bear," Lightstone mumbled, thinking,
Jesus, I've got to get out of here!
"What?" She pulled him around by his shoulders and stared into his pain-dulled eyes.
Careful.
"Bare. Naked. We're both standing here bare-ass naked —"
His comment momentarily confused her until she looked down at herself. "Oh."
"That's right, 'oh.' And it would be a lot easier," Henry Lightstone went on halfheartedly, "if you'd go get dressed before —"
"Before what?" she deliberately lowered her voice to a sultry whisper and pressed her body firmly against his.
"This isn't what it looks like."
"It certainly looks like it to me."
"That's not what I meant."
I don't know what I meant, but that wasn't it,
Lightstone tried to tell himself.
And if it was, I don't want to know about it.
"I know." She ran her fingers lightly over the irregular pattern of scar tissue on his shoulder again, and let them trail slowly and gently down his chest. "Just shut up and let me take care of it."
Oh Christ.
She was still moving her warm hands over his lower torso, thirty seconds later, when the sudden sound of sharp claws digging into the outside surface of the bathroom door, immediately followed by a loud and demanding yowl, jarred them both.
"Ignore her," the woman ordered in that same sultry whisper.
"Yeah, but what if —"