Cougar Bait Read online

  “Bitch,” he moaned when he saw Samantha watching him. “You . . . killed me! Blew my . . . dick off!”

  “No, you did that to yourself,” Samantha snapped. She realized she was still clutching the hematocrit centrifuge and let it drop from nerveless fingers. It clanged on the floor and came to rest on its side in the pool of Lounds’s blood.

  So much blood, she thought distractedly. The bullet must have nicked the femoral artery and he’s bleeding out. He’ll be dead soon—nobody can survive that kind of blood loss.

  Normally when she saw someone in pain or a life-threatening situation, she felt drawn to them, and her mind immediately went into trauma-surgeon mode. But looking at Lounds, bleeding his life away on the cold tile floor, she had absolutely no urge to save him.

  He was an evil man—he’d forced her body into a process it never would have gone through otherwise. Moreover, he had planned to harvest the byproducts of that process before raping and probably killing her once he had gotten as much as he could from her artificially stimulated body. Then he would no doubt have gone out to find another woman with a latent Shifter Gene and repeated the process.

  Let him die, whispered a cold little voice in her brain, and Samantha was inclined to agree with it.

  “You . . . bitch,” Lounds rasped out again. To Samantha’s alarm, she saw he was again fumbling with the gun. He might be on the way out but apparently he was determined to take her with him.

  Samantha turned and fled, leaving bloody footprints on the sterile white floor tiles of the lab. She looked frantically for the way out. She didn’t think about bringing food or water or trying to find clothes. She didn’t even think of trying to get to a phone to call for help—the fight or flight impulse controlling her was too strong to leave room for rational thought.

  All she could think was, Out! I have to get out of here now!

  Later she would realize that there was no way Lounds could have gotten to her. Even if he’d managed to get the gun, he wouldn’t have been able to come after her and shoot. But at that moment, when she saw an exit door with a silver push bar attached to it, she simply ran for it and jammed both hands against the bar as hard as she could.

  The door flew open and she was suddenly outside, suddenly free.

  Chapter 15

  The homing instinct that was leading him to Samantha pulled Keller southwest, right into the Everglades. He took the road as far as he could but finally had to stop when the track he was following turned first to dirt, and then to mud.

  Cursing himself for renting such an impractical vehicle, he pulled the silver Porsche over to the side of the muddy track he was following and got out. He was on foot from now on, and the feeling that Samantha was in danger was getting stronger all the time.

  It was getting dark by this time, and Lady Moon, still mostly full, was beginning her slow climb across the sky. Keller decided he would go faster in Shifted form—and he would definitely be more ready to take on the Hyena that had kidnapped her.

  He stripped and left his clothes in a neat pile on the front seat inside the impractical Porsche. The keys he left tucked inside the driver’s-side wheel well.

  Then he stood naked in the moonlight and took a deep breath. Looking up, he breathed, “Lady Moon, help me.”

  Then he closed his eyes and let the moon take him, pulling his body into another shape—the shape of his Cougar. The process was agonizingly painful, as always, but Keller bore it stoically, knowing it was necessary.

  As he let himself Shift, his bones and muscles changed and thickened. His torso elongated and he found himself down on the ground, on all fours. His ears moved up to the top of his head and his eyes could suddenly see much further in the deepening twilight. His canine teeth grew until they were six inch long fangs protruding from a snarling upper lip and his mass increased until his body was roughly the size of a large horse. Finally, a coat of tawny fur ran over his massive frame, covering him completely.

  He wasn’t turning into an ordinary cougar—he was becoming a beast of the Paleolithic era—a creature from the last ice age, when mammoths and mastodons roamed endless icy plains of tundra. His Cougar was an apex predator from a time of giants—a creature to be feared and respected.

  Keller lifted his head and roared, a deep, reverberating sound meant to strike fear in the heart of any who heard it.

  The female—have to find the female! Find her . . . save her. Mine, she’s mine!

  With that thought firmly in mind, the huge beast Keller had become lowered his head and bounded into the tangled, marshy woodland.

  * * *

  Samantha felt like she had been slogging along for hours, picking her way across the marshy land with only the light of the moon to show her way.

  When she’d first gotten out of Lounds’s secret lab, she’d been ecstatic.

  “I’m out,” she’d whispered to herself. “Oh my God—I did it. I made it. I got out!”

  And then reality had begun to set in. Yes, but out into what? Where the hell was she?

  When she calmed down enough to take stock of her surroundings, Samantha had realized she quite literally was not out of the woods yet, because the woods were all around her.

  In the back of her mind, she’d been thinking that Lounds was probably lying to her. The secret, hidden lab wasn’t really in the middle of the Everglades. It was probably on one of the Florida Keys. There were several smaller islands in the chain that would be an ideal spot for a research facility, in terms of privacy without sacrificing accessibility to civilization.

  But Lounds hadn’t been lying or exaggerating. Looking around in the light of the setting sun, Samantha was treated to the sight of flat, marshy swampland with tangles of cypress trees and palmetto bushes as far as the eye could see. Lounds’s jeep was parked around one side of the research facility, but the lab was the only building in sight.

  Her first thought was to get into his jeep and drive away. But of course the keys were with him inside the lab. And the lab was locked.

  “Damn it!” Samantha had tugged on the door in frustration. Once reason and logic had overridden panic, she was reasonably certain it would be safe to go back inside to get some supplies and call for help. Lounds couldn’t live for long with the amount of blood he’d been losing. The trauma surgeon in her was sure of that—he was probably already dead.

  But she’d let the door snick shut behind her when she came tearing out of the lab in a blind rush to get away from the Hyena Shifter, and she soon found there was no way back in.

  All the doors were locked, and as for windows—well, there were none. So all the resources inside the lab were out of reach—ditto the keys to Lounds’s jeep.

  Samantha soon realized she was stuck in the middle of the Everglades, stark naked, with no food, no water, and no way to call for help.

  What a mess.

  To make things worse, she was in serious pain. Her headache was coming back, but that was the least of her worries. Her nipples and pussy ached and stung from the industrial-strength suction Lounds had applied to them. Even worse, she was leaking—the pale golden liquid Lounds had called “nectar” was still flowing sluggishly from both nipples and the place between her thighs. Samantha was covered with the sweet, sticky stuff.

  In addition to becoming her own personal maple-syrup factory, she could feel other forces at work in her body. She felt like she was just about to get really sick with a high fever. Was it the breeding heat coming on her?

  If it was, she was going to die.

  Either that or become one of the Unformed—Samantha didn’t know which was scarier.

  Great going, girl, whispered a sarcastic little voice in her head. You just killed the one male in a hundred-mile radius that could help you through this process—the one Alpha that could breed you.

  The thought made a sick shiver of revulsion run through her. Though it might mean her own death, Samantha knew she didn’t regret leaving Lounds to bleed out. Even if she died in agony, it wou