Tempted by the Jaguar #3: Ramification (Riverford Shifters) (6 page)

“Keep an eye out,” Hunter added. “There may be more of those bastards
waiting to ambush us outside.”

“Let me go!” Kylie demanded, pushing hard against his steel-like arms.
“I need to get to Paul!”

She had been expecting him to resist, so she was thrown a bit off
balance when he immediately loosened his arms around her. Without a word, she moved
from his embrace and crawled over to where Paul was currently lying on his
back, his hands pressing a wad of his own sport coat against his wound. His
face was ashen, and an alarming amount of blood was starting to pool beneath
him.

“Oh my God, Paul!” Kylie cried. “A scratch my ass—let me see!”

“I honestly—didn’t think it was that deep,” he whispered, his eyes
fluttering as though he was struggling to stay conscious.

“Don’t pass out on me, dammit!” Kylie barked as she moved his hands
away from the wound.

A gush of blood flowed from at least three vertical slashes starting
from just below his ribs and curving to his side. She hastily pressed his
already blood-soaked coat hard onto the wound, making him grunt with pain. He
was in very real danger of bleeding out.

“Help me! He needs an ambulance
now
!” Kylie shouted, turning
pleading eyes on Hunter.

At that moment, she didn’t care that this man had hurt her or about his
motives for showing up at the house. The only thing that mattered was getting
Paul help before he bled out right in front of her eyes. She would never forgive
herself if he ended up dying because he had tried to stand between her and a
lion assassin.

Kylie almost let out a sob of relief when Hunter immediately nodded.

“Leave that lion bitch to Lana,” Hunter said to Maxim. “I need your
help carrying him out to the truck. It would be faster if I just drive him
myself rather than wait for the medics to show up.”

“To your clan’s clinic?” Maxim asked as he rose from his crouch. “They
won’t be pleased that you’re taking a human there.”

“I know. That’s why I’m not asking first. He’s lost too much blood. On
top of the shock, he doesn’t have time for the usual bullshit.”

Lana returned, fully clothed, with the aforementioned zip ties as well
as a roll of duct tape and a stack of clothes for Maxim.

“We’ll stay behind and watch her as well,” Karren said.

The older woman was currently sitting on the floor examining the inside
of a now-conscious Mitch’s mouth.

He still had a couple of trails of drying blood leading from his mouth
and down his chin and a swollen lower lip. Kylie instantly felt guilty. In all
the excitement and her worry for Paul, she had forgotten completely about the
other two.

“Are you okay, Mitch?” Kylie asked anxiously, remembering hearing a
crack at some point.

“Jus a fat rip an a itten tongue,” Mitch slurred with a dismissive
wave.

“Don’t you worry about us Kylie,” Karen said firmly. “We’ll take care
of things here. You just focus on your dad.”

Kylie sat at her father’s bedside, holding one limp and clammy hand
between both of hers and listening to the steady beep of his heart monitor. They
had just brought him into this private room from surgery twenty minutes ago,
the lioness’s claws having gone deep enough to nick the corner of his liver.

She had sat alone in the waiting room throughout the surgery, her worry
and self-beratement interrupted only by the occasional update from the nurse
and a call from Karen. She had been escorted there by Hunter, and after she
refused to talk to him until after the surgery was over, he agreed to leave her
to her lone vigil.

Although most of her attention was focused on Paul’s sleeping face,
Kylie could feel the presence of the silent figure leaning against the wall
beside the door as keenly as if his body was pressed firmly against her back.

“I’m an asshole,” Hunter abruptly said, breaking the tense silence.

Kylie stilled. Of all the things she thought he would say,
that
hadn’t even entered her realm of possibilities.

“Yes, because only an asshole would save my father’s life,” she replied
stiffly without turning around.

“You know what I mean.”

If anything, she became even more rigid. When Kylie had given him her
ultimatum hours earlier, she had never imagined their inevitable conversation
would begin like this. He was supposed to demand answers. He was supposed to be
cold. Her heart clenched. He wasn’t supposed to apologize, dammit!

When she remained silent, Hunter said, “I—we just want to talk. Okay?”

His tone was neutral, giving no hints to what he was thinking. It made
Kylie more nervous than she wanted to admit.

“We?” she asked with an edge to her voice.

“Don’t worry. Only Maxim and I know about your true heritage. He’s
waiting outside the door right now.”

Kylie finally turned around and fixed Hunter with a hard stare, trying
to ignore the way her heart skipped a beat now that she was allowing herself to
look at his face properly. One look and her heart was already betraying her.
This was bad.

“You didn’t even tell Mr. Gaither?”

“Only Maxim. I—the way I behaved—it was obvious that my judgment was too
questionable to leave something so potentially dangerous in my hands alone,” he
admitted.

Kylie blinked at him in surprise, not expecting such honesty right out
of the gate. First an apology and now this. What exactly was he playing at?

“And what do you think now?” she asked before she could stop herself.

Idiot! You’ve been down this road before, and look where it’s gotten
you. You already know what you have to do. You absolutely can’t lose your focus
now thinking about all the maybes!

“That’s what Maxim’s here to answer, if you’ll let him,” Hunter finally
replied after studying her for a long, tense moment.

His answer gave her pause. It was true that this whole mess started
because she hadn’t been honest with him, even when Hunter had proven that he
was more than trustworthy and their relationship had grown from wary friendship
to something much more intimate. Yet, the fear of what her Polyshifter heritage
represented to the shifter clans was ingrained in her so deeply that she
wondered if it was even possible to ever lose it completely.

Maybe he was right. Maybe the best thing to have here was someone who
would consider her words a little more objectively. That way, if she pled her
case just so, then maybe Paul and she still had a chance of continuing on with
their original plan of fleeing to London once he was healed.

It seemed that Hunter wouldn’t be so quick to judge her on the clans’
past prejudices about her people this time, and she was disturbed to find that
the thought soothed the wounded part of her that still cared for him.

Despite her rising discomfort, Kylie did her best to erase the wariness
from her expression. She could do this.

“Okay.”

Some of the tension in Hunter’s shoulders eased, making her wonder what
he would have done if she’d said no and glad she would never have to find out.

Hunter reached over and lightly rapped on the door three times. The
door immediately opened, and Maxim slowly, cautiously, stepped in, his body
language like a cat entering potentially hostile territory. His nostrils flared
as his eyes darted quickly from her to Hunter before he flashed her a tentative
smile.

“So you’re a ‘human’ this time.”

Kylie stiffened briefly before she nodded towards the tiger shifter in
acknowledgment. She had dipped a finger briefly in Paul’s mouth on the way
over, figuring that it was better to smell like a human rather than a cougar.
If she had stepped foot inside the clinic smelling like a cougar then there
would have been no hiding that she was a Polyshifter. At least if she smelled human,
she could explain it away as a Returner thing, a reversion brought on by all
the stress. It had been an extreme amount of stress that had caused her
awakening, after all.

She waved a surprisingly steady hand towards the two empty chairs next
to hers. “You should sit. It’s been a long day, and I have a feeling it’s about
to get even longer.”

“I’m sorry to make you do this now,” Maxim began. “Hunter wanted to
wait until tomorrow when you’ve had some time to rest or at the very least,
your father had woken up from the anesthesia, but things have gone too much to
shit today that time is a luxury we no longer have. We just need to be
sure
—for
everyone’s sake.”

Kylie’s eyes inadvertently flickered over to Hunter, but his expression
was still as unreadable as before.

She nodded, and then took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She had a
fleeting thought of her father, wondering if he had felt this anxious when he
had first revealed himself to Paul.

“I’ve lived in fear my entire life of being discovered. You see, my
birth parents are both Polyshifters, from two different clans, in fact.”

“Two different clans…” Hunter repeated, his tone startled. “I thought
the Polyshifter clans had all been either destroyed, scattered, or—”

“—enslaved?” Kylie finished for him, unable to keep the bitterness and
anger from her voice.

Hunter and Maxim exchanged a heavy look before Hunter fixed his eyes
back on her. “That night in the forest when we first crossed paths—for a
moment, I smelled two humans.” He looked at her expectantly.

Kylie frowned. “What are you trying to ask me?”

“You were
human
,” Hunter emphasized. “I had never heard that a
Polyshifter could become fully human.”

“Not many of us can,” Kylie admitted, “but that’s not why you smelled
two humans that night.”

Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“You smelled two humans because before that sicko abducted me, I was one
hundred percent a Deadend. I wasn’t lying when I told you this earlier this
morning.”

Silence. Then both men began talking at once, and Kylie held up a hand
sharply. “Wait! Let me finish. Why do you think I’ve managed to avoid notice
for
twenty years
? I was a Deadend living
with a human
. How many
times does a shifter even look twice at a human crossing their path? However,
that wasn’t even the best part of my protection. After all, what better way to
protect a Polyshifter child, even a Deadend one, if no one knows that the child
exists in the first place?”

Maxim abruptly leaned forward. “Is Paul Moore really human?”

“He is,” she confirmed, willing them both to see the truth in her eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking, but Paul really is just my adoptive father. Paul
and his wife, Laura, met my parents while they were all in medical school.”

“Where is she now?” Maxim asked. “Should we have called her?”

“She died of a brain aneurism a while back,” Kylie replied softly.

“Oh, sorry,” Maxim said, shifting uncomfortably.

“So your real parents decided to hide you with a human couple?” Hunter
asked. When she nodded, he shook his head, looking perplexed. “Why didn’t they
just go back to live within one of the Polyshifter communities? If those clans
managed to keep themselves hidden even in the Age of the Cyber Snoops, then I
would think there would be no place safer for you. Hell, why did they even
leave in the first place?”

Kylie sighed. “It makes sense if you know some of the Polyshifters’
history as well as my parents’ history. Understandably, both my father and
mother’s clans lived within isolated, self-sustaining—villages for lack of a
better word. It’s only within the past thirty, forty years that some of the
Polyshifter clans have allowed their kids to go out into the word in order to
attend college, not only to modernize, but to search for other Polyshifters in
the hopes of widening the gene pool.

“My parents met as college freshman, and my mother soon realized that
the ‘human’ she had befriended was a Polyshifter the first time she got a good
whiff of my father’s skin. You see, we Polyshifters have a unique scent that
gives us away to shifters when we’re masquerading as human, but it’s hard to
detect unless you know what to look for.”

“But if they were in a completely human form, then how could your
mother even pick up this scent?” Maxim asked. “Or does a Polyshifter retain the
heightened senses of a shifter even when they’re in a completely human state?”

“No, you’re right. The enhanced senses do disappear when we’re
completely human. My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t one of the Polyshifters
that could become fully human. Though it was more dangerous for my father,
because of this, once they’d graduated and married, to avoid scrutiny, they
made the choice to attend med school as cougars. They all even did their
residency at the same hospital. Then one night when everyone had been drinking
more heavily than usual, Paul let slip to my father that he used to play with a
wolf shifter kid back when he was in elementary school. Thinking that having a
human friend in the know might come in handy, my father took Paul into his
confidence about not only being a shifter, but a Polyshifter and why that was
significant.

“By the time my mother became pregnant with me, the lions had somehow
discovered my father’s clan in a remote part of Canada, killing all but the
youngest children.”

Hunter growled, his lips twisted in disgust. “The ones that could still
be molded.”

Anger surged potently throughout her body until she began to tremble
with it as it always did when she thought of the fate of her father’s clan. “They’ve
been hunting Polyshifters like my father, those who had been away from the
village when it was attacked, ever since. With the lions now breathing down
their necks, my parents went into hiding.”

She smiled thinly at Hunter. “Like you, my father knew that the only
place we had a chance to be safe was among my mother’s clan, and he pleaded
with my mother to take me and go. She flat-out refused. I think she’d had a
falling out with both her Elders and parents and had left without permission. Because
of that, she didn’t think they would accept my father, and she didn’t want to
leave him behind.

“When I was eight, my parents were forced to leave me with Paul and
Laura. Both Sniffers and one of the lions’ assassins were close on our heels,
and they were desperate to keep them from knowing that they’d had a child. They
promised to come back once they were certain they’d shaken their tail but then
soon after seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Paul and Laura adopted
me. We moved to Riverford, and we’ve been trying to find out what happened to
my parents ever since.”

“It’s no wonder you were so interested in what I could tell you about
the lion clans,” Hunter said.

“Yeah.” Kylie paused, and then added hesitantly, “That’s why Paul and I
didn’t make a run for it after I became a Returner. It had been over a year
since we’d discovered anything like a clue, and Paul thought well of
Riverford’s jaguar clan. He thought maybe you, like Karen and the cougar clan,
might be able to help us someday, and the thought of belonging to a community
for the first time…”

Kylie trailed off, suddenly unsure if she should have revealed that
kind of weakness at this point of the game.

Hunter’s eyes were suddenly golden pools of intensity. “Then—you were
planning to tell me eventually?”

“Despite how much trouble I caused you, you bent over backwards to help
me without batting an eye. I thought maybe, just maybe I had found someone
within the shifter community that I could someday trust with this horrible
secret, a friend around my age who could understand me at my core better than
my human friends because it was a core we shared. I never expected—” She looked
down at her hands and swallowed against the huge lump that had suddenly formed
in her throat. “I never expected last night,” she finished softly.

“And that’s my cue to leave,” Maxim cut in dryly. He stood and looked
at each of them with a hint of amusement. “I think the rest you two need to
sort out alone.”

Then before either one of them could say a word, he hurried out of the
room, leaving Kylie and Hunter to choke on an atmosphere that had suddenly
become unbelievably thick with tension.