"But what if - "
"Pull up the trapdoor on the third level and activate the internal security trap. The panel's hidden by the trapdoor. That will keep the bogeyman from you."
Her eyes narrowed. "Fine. Good night." No response. "I hope a bear eats you."
A growl drifted upstairs.
Smiling, satisfied, she made her way to the third level. The panel was exactly where he'd said it would be. She opened it and had a look. Her eyes widened. This was serious security. Once activated, this entire section of the aerie would be surrounded by lasers. Anyone attempting to cross that barrier without the access code would get one warning. If they didn't retreat, they'd find themselves cut up into neat little cubes of flesh and blood.
Gruesome.
But it made her feel safe.
Fast and powerful in his leopard form, Clay wanted to run forever, but he stayed close to home. This was his range and he knew every shift of air, every animal resident, every scent. He'd be home before anyone ever reached Talin.
Right now, he was the real threat.
The leopard let out a short, sullen roar. The forest creatures froze. But he wasn't hunting tonight, too angry at Talin. She'd let him touch her at the bar, but he'd felt the tension in her body - as if she were bracing herself for violence. That wariness was a constant insult and it infuriated him. While that anger was on a leash right now, it threatened to break free and turn to a rage that might make him the very monster she accused him of being.
The danger was very real...because he wasn't like the others in his pack.
It wasn't his half-human blood. There were other half-bloods in DarkRiver. No, it was the fact that he'd grown up in surroundings incredibly wounding to a predator's soul. All those years of being trapped inside the stifling walls of apartment buildings had taken their toll. The animal wanted out, wanted control. But ironically, he could act human better than anyone in the pack, his leopard disguised by a veneer of silent calm.
It had made Isla cry to see the leopard in him and because he had loved his mother despite her flaws, he'd buried the leopard, crippling himself in the process. Changelings weren't human and they weren't animal. They were both. They needed to be both. To be one but not the other, it was a kind of amputation. Yet he had pretended to be fully human for most of his childhood.
However, in the past decade, his leopard half had made up for lost time. He could still pretend to be human, but blood hunger and animal wildness raced through his bloodstream every second of every day. Like the predator it was, the leopard didn't see anything wrong in the cold logic of survival of the fittest. It was willing and able to kill without compunction. And Clay didn't particularly want it to leave.
That was the real danger.
Lucas had never said it. Neither had Nate. But both men had to know that though it was Vaughn who was the more outwardly animal, it was Clay who was the most near to going rogue...to never becoming human again.
Shaking his head in an angry growl, he clambered up a tree with the lethal grace of his kind and stretched out on a high branch, from which he could glimpse the light in Talin's bedroom. If he turned rogue, he'd lose the right to touch her. To go rogue was to give in to the animal so unconditionally as to forget his humanity. But though a rogue's mind held nothing of the person it had once been, some spark of knowledge remained. When a rogue attacked, it inevitably went after those who had once been Pack.
Clay had been fighting his beast for years. At fourteen, when he'd violently repudiated the inhuman control that had been forced onto him by Isla's fragile mind, it had changed him. He had learned what he was, what he could do, learned the taste of blood and fear. Learned that part of him liked it. Exulted in it.
Being locked up for four years had only enraged the animal further. The day he'd walked out of the juvenile facility, he'd gone on a bloody hunt. He had taken down three deer and it was through blind luck that they had been true animals, not changelings. Back then, lost and unaware of the meaning of his heritage, he hadn't known how to distinguish between the two. More to the point, he'd been too blinded by eighteen years of stifled blood hunger to care.
Over time, he'd become better at controlling that hunger. The fact that he was a DarkRiver sentinel spoke to that control. But it was inside of him, a pulsing need. He knew that Tally was his greatest vulnerability, the trigger that could push him over the edge. What he felt for her - protectiveness, rage, affection - it was all tangled up in a caustic stew. Each time she flinched, he came one step closer to going rogue. But today she had leaned into him and that had had an even more unpredictable effect.
Extreme, blinding, violent sexual attraction.
He'd been drawn to her as a man is drawn to a woman from the instant she'd walked back into his life, but with her small act of trust, that attraction had ratcheted up into a craving that scratched at his gut, made his cock hard with the need to claim, to brand. But he knew Tally. She had been sexually betrayed by the very people supposed to protect her. For her, trust and sex were incompatible. If he pushed her in that direction, it might equal her last straw.
Then there were the other men. So many she couldn't remember their names.
He roared again, the sound vicious.
Why? Why had Tally sold herself so cheap?
Lost in the coils of sleep, Talin frowned, turned, then settled back down. A few minutes later, she did it again. And again.
Fear twisted the sleeping peacefulness of her face, shuddered over her body, locked around her throat. Gasping for air, she sat straight up. She didn't scream. She never screamed. Never had. Not even as a child.
For five long minutes, she sat there, adrenaline pumping, as she examined every corner of her well-lit room. Only when she was satisfied that no one had opened the trapdoor, that no one had entered while she'd been sleeping, did she get out of bed and pull on a cardigan over her sweatpants and tank top combo.
Walking into the bathroom off the room, she threw some water on her face, then tucked her hair behind her ears before walking back out. The bedside clock told her it was four a.m. The hour of nightmares. The time of night a terrified child's bedroom door had creaked open for so many years.
Shaking her head to clear the vile memories, she went to the security panel and turned off the lasers. She wanted a cup of hot chocolate. Maybe the Larkspurs hadn't been able to banish her demons, maybe she hadn't let them love her like they had wanted to, but they had helped her sometimes. Ma Larkspur had been a light sleeper - even with Talin's quiet creeping about, she'd noticed. Those nights they had spent sitting in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate were some of the best memories of Talin's life after Clay. Before, he had been the only good thing, the only wonderful thing, in her life.