Jessica awoke the second time blinking and cursing. For a moment, she wondered why her bed in her New York City walk up was so hard and uncomfortable, and then her memory rushed back to her. She remembered the crash, she remembered the way the wing had been ripped clean off the side of the plane, she remembered...
No... that wasn't a real memory. Was it?
She sat up and looked around, her panic only stalling out because her brain needed to figure out what was real and what was not. She was under some type of makeshift shelter, padded from the bare ground by a layer of switches laced together. It wasn't comfortable, but she guessed that it was better than bare ground.
Only a few feet away, there was a fire, and a makeshift grill fashioned from a piece of metal that she guessed was taken from the wreckage of the plane. An army-issue pot bubbled over it, and even as aching and exhausted as she was, she felt a pang of hunger go through her stomach.
She had just started to wonder where Marcus was when she saw him approach through the darkness, appearing out of the thick foliage as if it were as familiar to him as her home in New York City was familiar to her.
For a moment, she tried to convince herself that she had just imagined the panther, but when she saw a shimmering green glint in his eyes, she knew that she hadn't. There was a civilized part of her brain that might have tried to tell her that it was all a hallucination, but there was a part far more connected to an ancient, innate higher consciousness that told her in no uncertain terms that this man was a predator. Dangerous.
All Marcus did, however, was smile gently at her before squatting by the fire to give the meal a quick stir with a stick.
"If you're not too nauseated that you just throw this back up, you should try to eat," he said. "I'm afraid we're short on bowls, but I have a spoon. If you come here, you can have as much as you like."
He glanced at her, frowning when he saw that she hadn't moved from the shelter.
"Is something wrong?" he said with a frown. "I checked you over, you didn't look hurt..."
"The panther," she said, her voice surprisingly steady. "That was you."
If she hadn't been coming off a plane crash and a period of dark unconsciousness, she might have been more circumspect, more cautious about uttering a truth that could have gotten her killed. Instead, all Jessica had was bluntness, and Marcus's breath hissed between his teeth.
"You've been knocked around a lot today," he tried. "It makes sense that you might mistake a fever dream or some kind of hallucination for the truth, but surely you know how ridiculous that sounds..."
"It sounds ridiculous," she agreed. "But that doesn't change what I saw. I woke up, there was a panther who was lying down next to me, and the next thing I knew, that panther was transforming into you..."
"You had just fallen out of the plane hard," Marcus objected. "That's two hearty knocks in a row. You didn't know what you were looking at."
"You were nowhere to be seen until you emerged out of that panther," she said softly, gazing right into his eyes. "If it wasn’t you, how did you know I'd fallen out of the plane?"
He hesitated, and then closed his eyes. In that moment, he looked entirely human, and she could see that he was as exhausted as she was. For a moment, Jessica wanted to let him off the hook, however unwise that might have been. She wanted to take it back or at least to ignore it so that they could both get on with the business of surviving what had happened.
"All right, you win," he said with a sigh. "Welcome to the conspiracy, I guess."
She laughed a little, and somehow with that admission, she felt comfortable enough to crawl out of the lean-to and sit with him at the fire.
"What are you?" she asked, and Marcus shot her a half-wry, half-amused smile.
"You saw, didn't you? That's me."
"I saw you change from a panther into a man," she retorted. "What does it mean? Have you always been able to do that? When you are a panther are you still you...?"
"That's a lot of questions," Marcus said with a sigh. "Here, if you can eat at least half a bowl of this stuff, I'll answer what I can."
Her stomach rumbled, settling the matter for her, and she ate willingly. There was a strange gamey taste to the meat, but it was covered with something that she thought might be some kind of local wild garlic.
"It's good," she said with mild surprise, and he shrugged.
"It's not hard to find food out here, not if you know what you're looking for. It's the desert where you start to get desperate. I was stuck in the desert once, and hunting was... well, let's say I ate a lot of rat."
He laughed at the face she made, and then Jessica glanced down at the food that he had prepared.
"Did you... turn into a panther to hunt this for us?"
Marcus hesitated for a moment, and she could tell that he was not a man who was very to confessing private matters to other people. He reminded her of some of the military personnel she had known in the past, people who guarded their words and their pasts with a nearly zealous fervor. However, there seemed to be something compelling Marcus to speak, and she wondered what that was. What could drive a man like him.
"I did," he said. "There's... a bit of risk to it in some ways. The panther mind is a great tool. It lets me process all the things I'm smelling and feeling and hearing in the body, it lets me react far more quickly than I could as a man. However, there's a lot of instinct hardwired into it. The panther brain goes from scent, to hunt, to kill, to eat. There's not much space to stop and say no, let's bring this back to the fire, if that makes any sense. It's far easier for me to hunt as a panther, but harder to prevent myself from eating what I've killed where I killed it."
It made Jessica wonder about how safe she had truly been when she saw him shift from panther to man at the wreckage site, but she pushed the thought away. Right now, there were a dozen things threatening her safety, but for some reason, she didn't think that the man sitting next to her at a fire and feeding her was one of them.
"You talk about killing... it's not the panther killing things while you watch? Like from the back of your mind?"
Marcus looked startled for a moment, and then he smiled ruefully. He was silent for such a long time that she started to feel nervous.
"I'm sorry, did I say something that I shouldn’t have?"
"You've hit on a very old question among my kind," Marcus responded. "That's the question, isn't it? There isn't a one among us who can talk while we are in our animal bodies. We can sort of communicate, show that we don't like things or that we do like things. We can understand others just fine... unless we can't. There are some among us who seem to be utterly bestial when in their animal forms, but is that just an excuse? No one can say for sure."
He shrugged.
"For me, I know that my instincts are very strong, and that there are some things that instinct demands. At the end of the day, though, I am the one in control, which is a damned good thing because I am the one who has to deal with the consequences."
There was a darkness to his words that made her wonder about those incidents where his instincts made demands. She knew better than to ask, however, and started a new line of questioning.
"And what about others? I guess it makes sense that you are not the only one of your kind."
Again, he hesitated. She could tell that he was trying to figure out how much he should tell her.
Of course, she thought. If there are any number of... his people, it would only make sense that they live in secrecy.
"There are others," he said finally. "It's hard to tell how many, but some of us live among you, pass as completely human, and many more live in our own secluded communities. I was heading to one of these communities before our plane took a nosedive. It's... a hard thing to talk about."
Jessica took a deep breath.
"I understand," she said. "I've heard enough."
"Have you?" he asked, regarding her with caution. She had a moment to wonder what in the world he expected her to do before she shrugged.
"As long as you’re not trying to hurt me or to impair my mission, I'll keep the rest of my questions to myself. Besides, I have more important things to worry about than wondering about whether there are people turning into were-panthers in the dark."
For a moment, she could see that Marcus didn't know what to do with that, and then he laughed. The sound was a low rumble that made her think of a purr, and something deep inside her shivered with pleasure.
"All right then," he said. He eyed her quietly for a few moments and then said softly, "Fierce Jessica."
It was the first time Marcus had called her by her name, and she felt a faint ghost of that electricity she had felt when they had touched earlier. She shook it off, because if she couldn’t afford an entanglement when everything was going well, she definitely couldn’t afford one now that they were stranded in the jungle.
They ate together in silence, and then she watched in fascination as he drained the last liquid from their meal into a small dish he fashioned from a broad leaf.
"Here, drink this. Plenty of nutrients to keep you strong."
She might have objected to being fed like a baby, but a part of her simply wanted to obey, to stop thinking about all the bizarre occurrences building up around her like a drift of snow. She whimpered a little when he cupped the back of her head with his warm hand and tilted it back a little, but she drank the strong broth that he trickled into her mouth. It was uncommonly good, and she closed her eyes with a slight tremble when he pulled away. Her entire body felt electrified, almost overwhelmed at having him so very close.
Animal magnetism, she thought with something close to fatigue and
hysteria, and she started to laugh.
"What is it?" Marcus asked her with a wary glance, and she knew she had to sound a bit like a madwoman.
"It's just... it's just..."
She tried to get the joke out, but the minor frustration at being unable to do so was the final straw. She had been running on autopilot ever since she had woken up after the plane crash, every surprise, every added stress simply sitting on top of the one that had come before. Now, it all came toppling down, and she pressed her hands over her face. Too much. It was all too much, and in a matter of moments, her laughs had turned to sobs. It felt as if the entire world as she knew it was tumbling down around her, and there was absolutely nothing that she could do about it.
She could sense Marcus's eyes on her for a moment, and then he wrapped his arms around her tightly. He was strong and powerful, and Jessica simply allowed herself to be held against him. She allowed herself to slip into the space of feeling protected and comforted by his presence.
"It's all right, you cry if you need to," he murmured. "It's all right, it's been... let's be fair, a shit day. But we'll get you where you need to go, it's all right. We’ll get you where you're going, I promise."
He went on saying things like that until her tears slacked off. It seemed like it took hours, but she knew logically that it was only a few minutes. When she sat up, she knuckled the last tears and grinned at him ruefully.
"You just spent the last few minutes telling me that everything is going to be okay without getting freaked out by the fact that I was crying or telling me to stop. I think that actually makes you more of a rare creature than the turning into a were-panther thing..."
Marcus laughed at her.
"God, I hope not," he said, "but if you're feeling better, we should bed down for the night. We've got some hiking to do, and I would rather do it on a full night's sleep."
"Oh, sounds like a good idea, I guess..."
She watched, feeling a little helpless, as Marcus banked the fire and then indicated that she could get into the lean-to as he draped it with nylon mosquito netting. It wasn't high season for the dangerous little insects, but she knew they would be around sooner or later. She watched, her eyelids already drooping as he set the netting and crawled in with her.
"It's going to get cold tonight," he said, nestling against her back as if they had done it for years. "If I had a blanket, I might spare you this, but as it turns out, I do not."
She giggled faintly.
"No worries. Besides, I don't think I have very much to worry about. After what we've just been through, I probably look like something that was dragged through the mud and then rolled in a haystack,” she yawned. “Not really feeling my most seductive or attractive right now."
"Well, I don't know about that," Marcus said mildly, and she could feel his face pressed briefly against the back of her neck. In a split second, their embrace had gone from comforting to sensual, awakening that need inside her again, that need to hang on to this man, to touch him and to pull him as close as he could get and never let go.
Then, the moment was over, and they both relaxed, a companionable silence falling over them.
"It really is going to be okay," he said, and she could hear the heaviness of his voice as he dropped off to sleep.
"Do you promise?"
He chuckled, sending slow and sleepy tingles up her back.
"I do promise," he said. "I promise you, it will all be all right."