Tempted by the Jaguar #1: Transformation (Riverford Shifters)
Read Tempted by the Jaguar #1: Transformation (Riverford Shifters) Online
Authors: Cristina Rayne
TEMPTED BY THE JAGUAR #1: TRANSFORMATION
A Riverford Shifters
Serial
CRISTINA RAYNE
The characters and events
portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living
or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2014 Cristina
Rayne
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without express written permission of the author.
Kylie Moore pulled her backpack from the backseat of her car and was in
the process of straightening when she heard it, the soft scrape of a shoe
slipping slightly on some loose gravel somewhere in the parking lot behind her.
Freezing instinctually, she started to turn just as the back of her head was roughly
pushed forward, and her temple slammed against the top of the doorframe. For
one endless moment, it felt as though her entire skull had shattered as the
inky blackness of the night exploded in a flash of white-hot pain across her
vision.
Her backpack and keys fell from fingers gone slack from shock, and
Kylie staggered back a step, blinded by pain and her mind a swirl of confusion.
A sense of vertigo hit her as her world tilted sideways, only to feel the side
of her body hit the pavement hard a second later.
A cry was torn from her lips as the sudden jolt caused what felt like a
dozen knives to stab into her head. Then hands grabbed her arms and yanked them
away from where she had been cradling her head, and her watery vision darkened almost
completely in a sudden wash of pain as someone began dragging her along the
asphalt away from her car, her body as limp and unresponsive as a ragdoll’s.
Dazed thoughts of being carjacked melted into panicked, disjointed
thoughts that, no, something much worse was happening, and Kylie tried to
struggle. However, her consciousness was fading fast, and she just couldn’t
seem to make her body do
anything
.
Then her head banged into the edge of something hard…and the next thing
Kylie knew, she found herself folded up into a very uncomfortable semblance of
a fetal position, her hands stuck up behind her neck. She tried to flex her
fingers, but both hands felt dead, as though she had been lying on them for
quite some time.
It was pitch black, the air smelling heavily of motor oil and something
rotten and sickly as though she was lying next to either a garbage can or a
pile of vomit. The floor beneath her body vibrated, and a slight roaring filled
her ears. Both the back of her head and one of her temples was throbbing
something fierce, and she couldn’t help the small moan that fell from her lips.
What the hell was going on? Her head pounding, confusion, her mouth
dry—it was as if she had just woken up in the weirdest place ever with the
worst hangover in existence. Only, she didn’t drink.
Kylie tried to move both her arms and legs, trying to remember what she
had been doing. She’d had a study group for genetics class today. She was sure
she had left the university library; she could remember getting into her car
and driving off towards the freeway with the intention of going back to her
apartment. Then…then…
Something rough and sturdy painfully dug into her bare ankles and upper
thighs simultaneously as she tried to straighten her legs, and her wrists met
that same barrier as she tried to bring her arms down from her head. It was
only then that the fogginess of her mind suddenly evaporated into terror. She
was freaking
tied up
!
Now in a panic, Kylie yanked her wrists hard against what she now knew
to be coils of rope and nearly choked as the sharp movement caused an unnoticed
cord of rope to tighten around her neck. Rather than just tied together, a length
of rope had also been connected to the bindings around her wrists and then
wrapped around her neck, insuring that any pulling on her part would only lead
to strangling herself.
She frantically thrashed her body around in an effort to free her legs,
but the thick rope cut painfully into her skin and only seemed to tighten.
Whoever had tied her up had done their job extremely well.
In some remote part of her mind not yet touched by hysteria, Kylie
desperately hoped that this was just some cruel, horribly misguided prank
someone was playing on her while the more practical part of her brain was
screaming that she was in shit so deep she was already drowning. Someone
had
to have hit her over the head. Her temple throbbed too sharply to attribute it
to even a migraine.
A memory surfaced, one she wished she didn’t know. For the past year,
half a dozen women had gone missing from various places within the city, even a
freshman from her own university. No bodies, no clues from security footage or
witnesses,
nothing
was ever found of them again, as though they had all
literally vanished from the face of the earth. The last one had vanished a couple
of months ago.
No—not a couple of months,
today
if I don’t figure out how to
get the hell out of here!
Kylie managed to roll her body to the left, but immediately hit a
barrier. After a bit of a struggle, she succeeded in rolling herself in the
other direction only to immediately roll onto what felt like a shovel. She
froze even though the metal edge was digging uncomfortably into her shoulders,
on the verge of a full-on panic attack. The vibrating floor and the smells now
made horrifying sense. She was in the freaking trunk of a car!
She began to struggle and strain against her bindings with a frenzied
effort, nearly biting through her tongue in an attempt to keep the anguished
wails of terror at bay. It was obvious she had been knocked out at some point,
and even though her mouth had not been covered, there was no way she was about
to possibly alert her abductor that she was now awake.
They were probably driving on a freeway or highway, so there was little
to no chance that anyone would be able to hear her screaming above the normal
rumble of travel and passing cars. She had no idea how long she had even been
unconscious. Her only chance would be to either free herself before the monster,
or monsters, opened the trunk, or if failing that, screaming her lungs out when
the car stopped.
Her wrists burned as she strained, but her abductor had left almost no
wiggle room. The ropes might as well have been zip ties for all the progress
she had made. By now her hands were so dead she couldn’t even wiggle her fingers,
and her legs were screaming with pain.
It was no use.
Kylie fell limp and clenched her jaw against the sob of despair that
wanted to break loose. There was a very good chance that she was about to die
that day, and damned if she was going to give the bastard the satisfaction of
seeing her tears, the fear that was threatening to choke the breath from her.
She had to save her strength, keep her mind as clear as her throbbing headache
allowed, her eyes sharp. She took a long, shuddering breath, trying not to gag
on the smells that were coming from the trunk’s carpet, trying to calm the
pounding of her heart that sounded as loud as gunfire in her ears.
By the time the car started to slow down, Kylie felt as though she had
been trapped in that trunk for days. She had debated back and forth on whether
or not to pretend to still be unconscious or to try screaming the moment the
car stopped, and now that the moment of truth was almost here, Kylie’s panic
returned with a vengeance. What if she screamed and that was the thing that
doomed her? What if she kept her eyes closed, pretended to still be unconscious,
and she missed seeing the only chance to escape she would get?
The moment the car came to a complete stop, something in Kylie snapped,
and she was screaming for help before she even realized that she was going to
do it. Bellowing at the top of her lungs, she managed a dozen “help me’s”
before the trunk was wrenched open and three more after before a large, dark
figure abruptly filled her vision. An equally large, sweaty and calloused hand
roughly slapped over her mouth mid-scream.
Kylie instinctually tried to bite at the hand. However, it lifted
before she could really sink her teeth into anything, and a second later her
mouth exploded with pain as that same hand backhanded her with brutal force
before she could even think to scream again. She felt the soft tissue of her
bottom lip slice across the sharp edges of her teeth, and a trickle of hot
blood began to flow into her mouth.
She only had just enough time to suck in a shocked breath before she
was wrenched out of the trunk by her shoulders and promptly dumped face-first
onto the ground into a cluster of tall weeds, jarring her head and causing pain
like a knife stabbing into her skull to shoot through her temple. Kylie gritted
her teeth and immediately forced her body to roll onto its side.
“Somebody!
Help me
!” she screamed over and over as soon as her
face was free of the weeds even though the only things she could see were
darkness and the dark silhouette of dozens of trees.
It was hopeless. Now that she had seen the trees and knew that he had
brought her into the forest that surrounded Riverford, a forest that went on
for miles in all directions, it was pretty much game over for her. Yet, she
just couldn’t make herself stop crying out for help. She couldn’t give up on
the slim hope that someone else just might be nearby, just might be able to
hear her screams, because dammit! She couldn’t die now! She couldn’t die
without ever knowing what had happened to her parents! Hadn’t fate shit on Paul
and her enough!
So Kylie screamed and screamed and writhed within her bindings,
probably doing terrible damage to her legs and wrists as she strained to break
the ropes, but not even her anger and desperation was enough to free her. It
was only after she had screamed her voice to almost nonexistence that she
realized that her abductor was standing only a foot away from her head, just—standing
there with his head down, watching her futile struggles.
There was no moon that night, so even her dark-adjusted eyes couldn’t
make out more than the outline of his body. He was tall, looming over her still
and quiet like one of the phantom trees surrounding them. Was he smiling?
Smirking? Or worse, did he have no expression at all. The thought of her
possibly giving him exactly the show that he wanted made Kylie immediately stop
her thrashing.
For the space of what felt like an eternity, the only sound was the
rustle of the wind flowing through the multitudes of tree branches and her
ragged breathing. That he hadn’t said one word to her was more terrifying than
if he had been reciting a list of horrible things he was about to do to her.
Kylie told herself she wouldn’t scream, that she wouldn’t move until
she saw an opening. Tied up the way she was, he had only left her two possible
weapons. Now that one of them, her voice, had obviously failed to bring her
help, she had only one possible, one very
sharp
way out of this as her
cut lip and the taste of blood in her mouth could attest. He only had to get
close to her, or more specifically his
neck
, in just the right position.
One tiny hope; one try.
She had to wait; she had to stay sharp. Kylie could almost hear her
father whispering those words to her again, words that she had lived by, that
she had clung to as her anchor for the past twelve years.
However, when he sank down onto one knee and she saw the large pair of metal
scissors moving towards her stomach, Kylie couldn’t help flinching with a small
cry of alarm. Her abductor’s free hand shot out of the darkness to wrap around
her neck, squeezing with just enough pressure for her to feel the rope coiled
around her neck begin to bite into her delicate flesh but not enough to
strangle. A warning.
He was now close enough to her that she could see the whites of his
eyes, could see him staring directly at her with unblinking dark eyes that sent
a shiver up her spine. There was nothing human in that gaze, nothing even
remotely resembling an emotion. Just what kind of monster was she at the mercy
of?
Without moving his gaze from her face, he began to slowly cut away at
the hem of her blouse. Kylie lay frozen on her side, afraid to move, afraid to
even breathe as she felt the cold metal of the scissors brush against her skin
as they slowly moved up her abdomen.
It was in those dead eyes. She could see it as plainly as if he had
announced it. He would not be satisfied with just cutting all her clothes off.
He wouldn’t be satisfied because he had never intended to violate her body in
the way she had feared. No, this was a monster the likes of which she could
have never imagined.
Kylie could feel a scream welling up in her throat. In a second or two
it would break free and with it, very likely her sanity. Kylie opened her mouth,
and a sound emerged that she had never heard come from a human throat, a long,
drawn-out keening of pure despair that seemed to come directly from her soul.
…and something deep within her entire being shattered.