Chapter 31
JESS
I couldn't stop shivering, not even when we were home in front of the warm fire that Cade built. What a fool I’d been. I never should have gone hunting.
My loss of control had been almost as terrifying as the surge of memory that had caused it. But worst of all had been the look of horror on my husband’s face when he’d seen me hovering in the air above his head. He had tried hard to hide his feelings, but darkling vision and perception were far better than those of a human. Or a wolf. I could read his naked emotions and they’d been everything I’d always feared.
Ever since we’d gotten home, Cade had tried to get me to talk about it, share what I was thinking and feeling. Give him an explanation. Free him from what I could see in his ravaged countenance was a burden of dread.
What kind of thing had he married? What the fuck had his old friend Tom stuck him with?
I tried to find the words, but I felt really numb. Not until he threatened to call Jake, the physician, for help, did I manage to shake off my lethargy. "No, please. I don't need a doctor. I'll be fine."
"Prove it. Talk to me. What set you off like that? Why did you think the bird I shot wasn’t dead? This has something to do with your attacker, doesn’t it? That Jonathan guy?”
I nodded.
“What the fuck did he do to you?" His voice was heavy.
“It’s more what I did to him. I killed him, Cade.”
I expected him to shudder, but he didn’t. He held my gaze steadily and his hand tightened on mine. His blue eyes opened wider for a moment. Then he smiled. “You took him out? So…not just beautiful but badass too? Good. I love it. I need a strong mate at my side.”
He was giving me his acceptance and it helped. My story came pouring out.
“From the time my darkling first emerged, my mother warned me to suppress her. It’s dangerous to have such a form. There are actual darklings in Scotland. Shifters and darklings are ancient enemies there.”
“So the legends about darklings are true? They’re real?”
I nodded. “I’ve never met a purebred darkling. My mother and I are believed to be members of some diluted genetic line where, generations ago, a darkling and a shifter mated.”
“So your mother is one, too.”
“No. She’s a multiform shifter like me, but her other form is a bird. A hawk. All the Mallochs are multiform shifters, but the forms they can take vary. Mine—the darkling shift—is the rarest. Well, mine and the sea dragon—that is rare, too.”
“But there are non-shifter darklings? Do they really live a thousand years?”
“Some do. That’s why they aren’t too interested in humans or ordinary shifters. We’re like mayflies to them—we hatch and mate and die. We’re insignificant. Anyway, it’s hard to keep my darkling self contained. The pack in Scotland used to control me with the Choker.”
“Wait—the Highland Choker? Your collar?”
“Not the one I have now. My cousin Cam gave that to me. In Martin’s pack, they used to make me wear one, sometimes as a punishment and sometimes just because they could.”
He growled in anger.
“I hated it. I tried to shift anyway, but you can’t shift and the more you try, the more it hurts. I didn’t realize it, but I was training myself not to shift. The more I tortured myself in the attempt to shift, the more my brain connected shifting with pain and suffering.”
“Fuck! How did your mother allow this?”
“Martin had total control of my mother. They kept most of us in those collars. The women, especially. He made a slave out of my mother.”
“Jesus.”
“Jonathan hated it when I was in my wolf form because I was much more powerful than he was. His wolf was a runt. He got his power from weapons—he was obsessed with guns. And with hunting.”
I drew a deep breath to steady myself. The rest of the story was hard to tell. "He liked to trap small animals—mice, baby rabbits, birds, chipmunks—and torment them. When he went hunting, he shot to injure, not kill. He was an excellent marksman, and he knew how to hit areas that weren't vital. The poor thing would fall and the dog would retrieve it, but it would still be alive. Jonathan would stand there, smiling, and watch it exhaust itself trying to escape. Then he would…God, I can't even describe the things he’d do."
Cade groaned. "No wonder you feel the way you do about hunting."
I closed my eyes, wishing I could roll up like a hedgehog. But I had to go on. If I stopped, I’d never finish. "As we got older, Jonathan added sex to his list of ways to bully me. He was such a strange and hostile kid that no girls would go out with him. We weren't related, he pointed out to me, so why not?"
"Shit."
"I refused, but that meant nothing to him. He didn’t care about my feelings. He pursued me, grabbing me when I least expected it, kissing and fondling me while I fought him off. When I resisted or threatened to tell his father, he captured some small animal, killed it slowly, and brought me the body."
Cade made an inarticulate sound. His hands were clenched and he was breathing much faster than usual.
"I had a puppy. A Labrador retriever named Dusty. She looked a little like Barney. Jonathan knew how much I loved him.”
“Oh God.”
My heart was pounding so hard now, I could scarcely speak. "If I didn't fuck him, he was going to torture Dusty. He described how he’d do it. Every gory detail. I knew he meant it. I also knew that even if I gave him what he wanted, he’d kill my dog anyway. He was getting crazier all the time.”
Cade reached over and took my tense hands in his. His fingers tightened on mine. Where our hands met, sparks flickered. “It’s a damn good thing Jonathan is already dead. Or I’d be out the door right now on my way to the Highlands to track the fucker down.”
“He’s dead. Very dead.”
“How did you escape this hell?”
"I told my mother. I don't know why I had never told her before. I’d been raised to be self-reliant and she had basically checked out on motherhood ever since my father’s death.”
I paused. My head was aching.
“She didn’t believe you?” he guessed.
“No, she did believe me. In fact, it was as if she suddenly woke up. Once she got her head together, she was great. She planned everything. When my mother gets angry, she can work wonders. We drugged them all with some narcotic she’d procured. We snuck out of camp. We fled to London.”
“London is not that far from Scotland.”
“But it is city and Mum said Martin would never come to a city. He’d never go anywhere where he couldn't rule the roost, and the only place he could do that was in the outposts.”
“What happened to your dog? To Dusty? Did she escape with you, too?”
My mind went dark. Even now, after all these years, I couldn't bear to think about Dusty.
I nodded and hurried on to the next part: “My mum and I’d both had enough of shifters and wolf packs, so we lived as humans in a suburb of the city. I went to school, where I had a lot of catching up to do. We stayed out of the shifter networks. And I continued not shifting.”
“And at some point, Jonathan came after you?”
"Yes. It was several years afterwards. He’d graduated from torturing and killing animals to raping and assaulting girls. The women he preyed upon always looked like me—same build, same eyes, same dark hair. But I didn’t find that out until later.
“His own father had exiled him from the pack—that’s how much of a threat he’d become. Without the pack, his only social connection, he turned to criminal enterprises. He was arrested several times, but he broke jail and escaped.”
“It's hard to keep a shifter in prison.”
“He became a player in the trafficking nets that operate on some of the islands off the Scottish coast. It’s really horrible. Wealthy people put in orders for unique slaves. They love to capture shifters. What a novelty…can you imagine? They use the chokers on them, too, doing things like putting a wolf shifter in a pen with a pack of wild dogs, but in human form and wearing the choker. So when attacked, they can’t shift to defend themselves.”
“Fucking hell. I’ve heard rumors about stuff like that—I think it happens here, too. But I hoped the stories were false.”
“Nope. Sadly true. Anyway, I left Scotland. I went to college here in the States, majoring in fine arts. I thought I’d put the whole nightmare behind me. I didn’t know he was still stalking me, or that I had become his obsession. He wasn't obvious about it.
“After I graduated college, I went back to Scotland for a while when I was figuring out what to do with my life.” I shivered, wanting to hurry through this part as quickly as possible. “That was where he grabbed me. I was driving on a country road to Inverness to visit my mum. He overtook me and stopped me, pretending to be a traffic cop, and next thing I knew I was bound and gagged in the boot of his car.
“He took me to an isolated hideout. He was going to sell me to the slavers. What was left of me after he was finished. He had quite a program planned. He described it to me in exquisite detail.”
Cade had risen and was stalking about the room, his face an angry red and all his muscles clenched with rage. He growled a couple of times and I thought he was going to shift, but he stayed human.
"He started in on me. With a knife. But he’d forgotten something.”
“Your darkling?”
I nodded. “It had been years since he’d seen me shift at all. And he’d never seen my darkling. He didn’t know about her. If he had a Highland Choker, he didn’t use it. Big mistake.
“When threatened, my darkling isn’t exactly docile. She came out and attacked.”
A heavy silence hung over us. I could tell that Cade was reluctant to press me too hard. I was thankful for that.
“She—I—went for his throat. His wolf emerged, too. I guess that attack and defense instinct is strong. We fought. But he was no match for me. No wolf is.” Not even you, I was thinking. “You’ve seen her. You’re right—she’s like a superhero. Or maybe a super villain.”
I didn’t want to continue, but I needed to spit this out. “I killed him. I tore open the blood vessels in his throat and watched while he bled to death. Slowly. Then I ripped his body to pieces. Sometimes I can still taste his blood and feel the sticky grit of his fur in the back of my throat.”
Cade didn’t look away from me for even so much as a moment. His voice was firm and strong as he said, “Good. Fuck him. He got what he deserved.”
Relief flooded me. But I kept speaking. I had to. “It wasn’t over. I’d committed a crime against our kind. And I’d done it as a darkling at a time when shifter/darkling relations were uneasy, at best. I wanted to run away and hide, but I knew I’d be hunted down if I did. So I went to Mallochbirn to be judged.”
“What do you mean? Here we decide such matters in the pack. As the leader, I’m also the judge.”
“As a multiform shifter, I am subject to the judgment of the laird of Mallochbirn, who is the head of all the Scottish multiform shifters and many of the other shifters as well. That’s Ross Malloch, my second cousin. His twin, Cameron, is the head of something called the Council of Protectors. I’m not sure what they do, but they seem to be in charge of all sorts of things, including fighting criminals like the shifter trafficking outfits.”
“Wait. Isn’t that the man your mother wanted you to marry?”
I nodded. “That was later. I didn’t know my cousins when I first went to Mallochbirn, so I didn’t know what to expect. I just wanted it all to be over. If they condemned me, I was prepared for that. I couldn’t forget my darkling’s rage. It haunted me. It still does.”
“Anyway, there was a trial and I told my story. It was judged to be an act of self defense, so no punishment was forthcoming. But I was ordered to learn to control my darkling. Cam warned me that even in Scotland, darkling shifters—and he is one also—are regarded with great suspicion and fear. Should she kill again, I’d be screwed.”
“So you’re afraid of that? Of her? That’s why you don’t let her out?”
“Yes. She’s wild. Completely without conscience. She enjoyed what she did to Jonathan. That’s why I lock her away. Her ferocity and savagery scare me. I don't know what she might do next.”
“I get that,” he said slowly.
I wondered if he did. I don’t think he felt as much of a division between his human side and his wolf side as I did. Cade had never been forced to lock his wolf away, or been punished for releasing it.
“I want to meet this badass darkling who saved your life.”
“You have met her.”
“I’ve seen her. I want to spend some time with her.”
Surely he didn’t mean that? No, he couldn't. He was trying to make me feel better about myself. Which I really appreciated.
Funny. At the beginning, I’d thought him an arrogant ass. Now what I thought was that I didn't deserve him.