To Tempt A Tiger (15 page)

Rose dipped her head to one side. “This is a very strange new reality.” She watched her daughter playing with the giant tiger, who was extremely gentle, and knew she’d never look at the world in quite the same way again.

Zoe plucked and poked at Alexis, showing no signs of fear or disturbance that a human had just turned into a tiger before her eyes. Rose supposed to a child, those kinds of things were entirely possible. It was only after growing up that most people lost their belief in the mythical.

“I’m glad we’re doing this now,” she said to Vlad. “While she’s so young.”

“Me, too.” He released a breath. “It would have been easier when the urge to shift first came on, but at least she didn’t suffer too long.”

She heard the guilt in his voice. Part of her wanted to comfort him, assure him it was okay. Another part wanted him to feel that guilt, to suffer for leaving them and feel just a little of what she’d been going through for the last year. That part of her made her feel petty, but the other voice, the one that wanted to comfort, made her feel like a gullible idiot. So she kept her mouth shut, because she didn’t want to be an idiot or a petty bitch.

After a few more minutes of Zoe poking at Alexis’ various tiger parts, including gently pulling her thick tail, Alexis nudged her to the couch and backed up. The shift to human form went a little quicker than the change to tiger, but because she was watching for it, Rose realized the change still happened slower than Vlad’s had. Zoe paid close attention, as if studying the process.

When Alexis was human again, she said, “So, Zoe, what do you think? Do you want to try changing? Or do you want to watch me shift some more? You don’t have to try until you’re ready.”

“Wanna be a tiger.” Her face bunched up in a frown. “But don’t think I can.”

“Why not?” Alexis kneeled on the floor in front of her again. She hadn’t bothered to dress, but Zoe didn’t seem to notice.

“Tried last night after saw Vlad. Didn’t work.”

Rose felt her mouth drop open and had to snap it shut. That was news to her.

“What did you do to try?” Alexis asked, calm and reasonable.

“Closed my eyes and imagined being tiger. Nothing happened.”

“Did you picture the tiger?”

Zoe nodded.

“Did you feel the tiger paws like they were your own?”

Zoe’s frown deepened, then she shook her head. “No. Just saw the tiger.”

“Well, there you go. You have to feel your tiger for her to get out. Easy peasy. Do you want to try now? So I can help?”

Zoe paused, then looked at Rose and Vlad. “I gotta take my clothes off?”

“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to,” Alexis said.

“Changing while you’re dressed will tear your clothes,” Vlad said. “But we can buy you more. Would you feel better if I left?”

Zoe’s mouth pursed as she considered. Then she said, “Yes.”

Vlad smiled. “You got it.” He squeezed Rose’s hand and said, “I’ll go make some phone calls, start setting things up so we can make our trip safely.”

Rose still wasn’t sure about facing the ruling body of the tiger shifters yet, but since both Vlad and Alexis thought it would keep Zoe safe, she accepted the trip as necessary. She just wished she knew more about what they were getting into.

After he’d left the cabin, Zoe said, “What trip?”

“I have to talk to Granny and Grandpa first, but I think we’re going to be on vacation a little longer. Is that okay? We’re going to go to West Virginia.”

“What we do there? Is there snow?”

“I don’t know about the snow. We’ll see. We’re going to meet some people. People like Alexis and Vlad.”

“More tigers? Wow.”

“Are you good with that?”

She nodded. “Wanna be tiger first. So I can play with other tigers.”

“Fair enough.”

Zoe stood and pulled off her sweater, then pushed her leggings down and reached for Rose’s hand to keep her balance as she stepped out. She shuffled out of her underwear next, then giggled and shivered.

“You too cold like that, baby?”

“Nope.” She spun in a circle and plopped back onto the couch, facing Alexis.

Alexis said, “Do you remember how my paws felt? The way the fur covered them and the hard bottoms?”

Zoe nodded.

“Think about that now, only with your hands and feet. Imagine your hands feeling like a tigers, how it feels to have fur and paws instead of hands. Go ahead and close your eyes. Good.” In a quiet, calm cadence, Alexis talked Zoe through the way a tiger body felt.

As Rose watched, her daughter’s little hands twitched. Her brow crinkled and the twitching stopped.

“Good, Zoe, you almost had it,” Alexis said. “Did it hurt?”

“Felt weird.”

“It does the first time. Can you try again? Just focus on how your hands would feel if they were paws.”

For several long moments, nothing happened. Then Zoe’s hands twitched again, and a ripple of fur sprouted along the backs before disappearing.

“That’s it, Zoe,” Alexis said. “You’re doing great. Don’t worry and don’t fight it. Just keep thinking about how your paws feel. That’s it.”

Rose tried not to gasp, or even move, so she wouldn’t break her daughter’s concentration, but watching parts of her body start to change was more than disturbing. Panic bubbled up and was forced down. Then, almost suddenly, Zoe’s hands turned into paws. One instant they were child hands, the next cat paws with orange and white fur and extended claws.

Rose looked at the rest of Zoe. Her whole body was twitching now, fur rippling over her skin and not disappearing. She convulsed a few times, movements that made Rose reach for her. A look from Alexis made her stop halfway and sit back. But every maternal ounce of her wanted to take hold of her daughter to keep her safe from what was happening.

Zoe opened her mouth as she dropped onto all fours on the floor in front of Alexis. Rose expected a moan of pain or even a scream, but what came out was a sound her daughter had never made—a growling hiss. Just like a cat.

Rose forced herself to keep watching as her daughter’s beautiful face changed and shifted to a tiger cub’s face. Panic and fear rode her, until she had to sit on her hands to keep from interfering.

The minutes felt interminable. But everything seemed to finish in an instant. Though she’d watched the change, it felt like she’d blinked and a tiger cub stood in the middle of the living room.

An adorable cub, covered in the softest-looking fur Rose could imagine. “Can she understand me when she’s like this?” Rose asked Alexis.

“Sure. She’s still Zoe. She can think and understand just like she can in human form.”

Zoe growled and then collapsed on the rug, rolling on her back, her little cat tongue lolling out, and a sound like a purr rumbled loudly from her.

“How do you feel, baby?” Rose asked her.

The cub that was Zoe bounced to her feet and charged Rose, bumping up hard against her legs and rubbing her head against her knee before bouncing away again and spinning in a circle, chasing her tail. Faster than she’d ever seen her daughter move, Zoe charged around the living room, running so quickly she was a blur.

This time, Rose couldn’t hold back her gasp. “She moves so fast!”

Zoe paused to rub her face against Rose’s leg again before making another rapid circuit of the room.

“Shifters do. At top speeds, you wouldn’t even see us,” Alexis commented.

“I’ve seen Vlad do that, but…” A new kind of fear and panic gripped Rose. “What happens if she runs away from me and gets into danger? I can’t move fast enough to catch her. How can I protect her if she…I don’t know, jumps into traffic or something? She’s just a little girl. She doesn’t understand a lot of dangers yet.”

Alexis tilted her head to one side and frowned a little. “That is a bit tricky. Not something I’ve had experience with because I could always move as fast as my cubs. Vlad’s going to have to help you.”

“But we haven’t even decided…” She trailed off. Zoe could still understand her, even if she wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Rose didn’t want her hearing things they hadn’t actually explained to her yet.

Alexis moved to the couch, sitting next to Rose as they both watched Zoe getting used to her tiger shape. She stopped abruptly, too suddenly for her body, and ended up rolling head over tail into a wall.

Rose stood. “You okay, baby?”

Zoe popped to her feet, shook her entire body, then nodded and tore off toward the back of the house, skidding over the wooden floors. Rose started to follow, to keep an eye on her, but Zoe sped back into the living room before Rose even moved away from the couch.

When the cub plopped onto the rug in front of the fireplace and started licking her feet, Rose sat again.

“You’ll work it out,” Alexis said. “She’s a good girl and you’re a good mom. And you’ll have support. I’ll help where I can, if you want me to. Once she’s introduced to our people, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of volunteers stepping forward to help.”

“Why?”

“She’s a female tiger. All females are incredibly precious to our people.” Alexis smiled. “Plus, she’s absolutely adorable. She’ll be capturing hearts all over the compound when she arrives.”

Rose wasn’t sure whether to be comforted or worried by Alexis’ assurances. She didn’t know how to feel about her daughter being thrown into this strange world, and she wasn’t sure she
wanted
strangers fawning over her child just because she was female.

Alexis broke into her thoughts with a question. “Did Vlad mention that he can’t sense Zoe?”

Rose blinked. “Yes. He said most tigers can sense each other, but Zoe is different. She can sense him, though.”

“Really? Huh. Nila is the same. We thought it was just because she was human that we couldn’t sense her. Zoe is most definitely a tiger shifter. The fact that we can’t sense her either is…interesting.”

“Vlad seemed to think so, too. Why?”

“It means there could be a lot more people like Zoe and Nila out there, and we wouldn’t necessarily ever know.” Alexis turned away from Zoe and very quietly said, “Our males don’t bother using birth control with human women because we don’t pick up the same diseases and we thought there was no possibility of a pregnancy. But now… Well, how many accidental pregnancies might have occurred from those couplings? How many children could have been born to shifter fathers without them even realizing?”

“Vlad thought I’d cheated on him when he found out I was pregnant,” she murmured as quietly as she could, hoping Zoe was too distracted by her new shape to pay attention.

“That’s probably not the first time that conversation has happened.”

“So…there could be others like Zoe, in pain and not understanding why?”

Alexis sighed. “Hell. I hate that idea.”

“Would some of them just…shift? Not fight it the way Zoe was?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. This is all hypothetical. It’s possible more humans than shifters have been born. Or it could still be Zoe and Nila are incredibly rare instances and there just aren’t any others like them.”

Rose watched her daughter roll around on the carpet, wiggling her back as if itching. “To be honest,” she murmured, “I hope they are rare because I hate the thought of other children, children you’d never be able to identify, going through what Zoe has been through for the last year.”

Alexis reached out and patted her hand where it rested on the couch. Both of them watched Zoe in silence after that. And Rose realized just how lucky they were Vlad had returned to them, even if his return heralded the start of a new and dangerous journey. The thought of how much worse things could have been for Zoe closed Rose’s throat. She didn’t want to even think about it. She might not completely trust Vlad, but she was extremely grateful he’d cared enough to come back.

Chapter Ten

The process of Zoe returning to human form went smoothly, though once she was human again, she wanted to go instantly back to her tiger form and go outside to play.

Rose put a stop to that thinking immediately. “You are only allowed to turn tiger when I say so, never in front of someone you don’t know, and never outside unless we’re well away from other people. Do you understand? This is a secret and you have to be careful to keep it.”

“But Vlad and Alexis know,” she whined.

“Because they’re tigers, too. They understand. Not everyone will. Okay? You have to mind Mommy in this.”

“Fine. When I go outside and play tiger?”

“We’ll find someplace, maybe go for a hike, and if I think it’s safe, you can change. But,” she said, interrupting Zoe’s bounce of excitement with a raised finger, “you have to listen to all the rules and when I say you change back, you change back. No arguing. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mommy,” she said, trying to hide her pout behind a “good girl” expression.

Rose wasn’t fooled for an instant.

Vlad returned just before lunch, his expression serious and contemplative.

“What’s wrong?” Rose asked.

“My brothers have been…talking to other tigers, those sympathetic with my father’s anti-hybrid stance.”

“What does that mean to Zoe?”

“It means we’ll have to be very careful with her, even at the elders’ compound, even with the deal I’m working out with Elizaveta.”

Alexis came out of the kitchen with Zoe trailing behind her carrying a plate with a peanut butter sandwich on it. “I’ll talk to Victor," Alexis said. "I’m sure Elizaveta is already organizing things with him, but I’ll make sure he sets stuff up even she doesn’t know about." To Rose, she added, “My husband is in charge of the compound’s security systems. He’s a tech fanatic, so he’s got bugs and cameras all over the place as it is. I’ll make sure he’s got Zoe under surveillance at all times so we make sure she’s safe.”

“I’m not leaving her side, so that won’t be a problem.”

The lunch dishes were barely cleaned up when Zoe started pestering them to let her go tiger again. After some discussion, they decided a hike in the woods, somewhere relatively private, would give Zoe a chance to test out her tiger form in the open.

Using Rose’s SUV, they drove to a higher elevations, leaving the car parked in a small lot at the base of a hiking trail she and Zoe had walked before. Zoe stayed out in front of the adults as they walked the narrow path. The snow was only a few inches deep, so the hike was pleasant.