Winter Born Read online

  Around humans, that impulse was controllable. The chances of a human male being her mate were almost impossible. So the animal inside her might be curious and enticed, but it would stand down to her human rationale.

  Around a Were-Panther, that animal need wouldn’t listen to reason. It would pounce for a taste of the male.

  She would have no control!

  A shadow fell over her.

  Pandora squeaked and jumped back as she looked up to see one of the men she’d seen downstairs. This close to him, she couldn’t mistake his Panthiras attributes.

  His scent was undeniable.

  He was lean and powerful in human form. Deadly. His handsomeness would guarantee him any female who caught his interest . . . even her own feminine senses reacted to him, but not so much that she couldn’t fight him.

  Even more frightening than his innate feral masculinity, his scent was Katagaria—the animal branch of their species—while she was Arcadian, the human branch.

  Letting go of her room card, she crouched to attack and was amazed that the animal inside her wasn’t leaping out to mate with him.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “I’ve got good news and bad news for you.”

  “And that is?”

  He held his hand up so that she could see the geometric mark on his palm. At least that explained why she could resist the urge to copulate with him. “I’m mated so you’re completely safe from me.”

  Pandora still wasn’t ready to trust him, but at least as a mated panther, he wouldn’t be able to have sex with her. Once a Were-Panther male was mated, he was impotent around any female other than his “wife.” “I take it that’s the good news?”

  He nodded.

  “And the bad?”

  “I’m here with three brothers who aren’t.”

  She started to bolt.

  “No, no,” he said, reaching out to take her hand. He pulled back before he did. “Don’t be afraid of me. I really mean you no harm, okay? I have ten daughters myself and I understand your fear.”

  She still wasn’t ready to trust that he wouldn’t take her to his brothers for their enjoyment. That was what the ones seeking her would do and she had no intention of becoming a community toy for every unmated male in their pack. “What do you want?”

  “Believe it or not, I’m going to help you.”

  She chose not to believe that. At least not yet. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because of my daughters,” he said sincerely. “You’re just a baby and I don’t trust Leo or Mike not to hurt you. They wouldn’t do it on purpose, but they’re young too and not real good at holding back. No doubt they’d both pounce on you at once and who knows what they might inadvertently do.”

  And that was exactly what she was afraid of. “That’s only two brothers. What of the third?”

  “Dante’s different. Honestly, you’d be lucky to find someone like him for your first. He’s a selfish bastard who doesn’t like to share much of anything with anyone and he’d make sure no one else touched you while you were with him.”

  But his brother was still an animal and she had no interest in taking a Katagari lover.

  “Is that supposed to comfort me?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but don’t worry. Dante’s a lot older than they are and, lucky for you, he doesn’t want a mate. He plans to stay far away from you so I can keep him off you by simply telling him where you are.”

  Pandora calmed a degree. He was telling her the truth, she could sense it. One of the good things about being part animal was that she knew whenever someone was lying to her.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Thank you for your offer to help. I don’t want a Katagari to touch me.”

  His nostrils flared at that.

  She stiffened. “You said it yourself. You get carried away and you hurt us. My older sister was killed by a pack of Katagaria males who snapped her neck while attempting to mate with her when she was my age. I’m barely twenty-four. I don’t want to die. Not like that.”

  That seemed to calm him down. He bent over and retrieved her card from the floor. “Get me something with your scent on it so I can spread it around and keep Leo and Mike away from you.”

  Pandora nodded, then opened the door to her room. She went to her suitcase and pulled out the T-shirt she slept in.

  “Do you know Acheron Parthenopaeus?” she asked as she handed it to him.

  “Yes, why?”

  “I was told to find him. My surviving sister said that he could help me get home again.”

  The panther frowned at her. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you go home on your own?”

  She sighed as frustration filled her. How she wished it were that simple. If she were an older pantheress, she could easily find her own way home, but her kind didn’t get all their psychic abilities until after their first mating.

  Even then her powers would have to be trained and honed so that she could wield them. That was something that could take decades, if not centuries, to master.

  “I was kidnapped from the future by a group of Katagaria panthers and brought to this time period against my will. Unfortunately, my powers are just starting and I have no control over them or any way home on my own until I master them. The last thing I want is to overshoot my time period or end up with the dinosaurs.”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “I still don’t understand why they took you. Why go to the future for a mate when there are plenty of packs here?”

  She clenched her fists at that. “It’s some stupid pact my pack made with theirs. Since we seem to have an abundance of females, my pack agreed to sacrifice a number of females every generation from certain families so that the Katagaria panthers would leave the rest of the pack alone. Every time one of the winter born females in the chosen families starts to season, the same pack comes to our home and brings us to their time period to mate with them. They don’t want Katagaria females since they won’t stay and raise their young. They keep us instead and use us as slaves. My one surviving sister helped me to escape after they brought me here before they could induct me into their pack. She sent me to Atlanta to find Acheron. She said he could return me to my time period.”

  “How does she know Acheron?”

  Pandora ached at the thought that she would benefit from her sister’s misery. “Before she was mated to one of their males and had her own children, she was trying to escape their pack. One night, she overheard some of the Katagaria talking about a Dark-Hunter named Acheron, and after they went to sleep, she searched for him online. By the time she found out enough information to locate him, she was pregnant and couldn’t leave her children behind, so she gave her information to me once they brought me over.”

  “Hell of a sister you have there.”

  “Yes,” Pandora agreed. “She’s the best sister in the world and I would give anything if I could help her too.”

  The panther stepped back with a sigh, then started for the door.

  She took his arm to keep him from leaving as another thought occurred to her. “Could you help me get home?”

  He shook his head. “My powers aren’t quite that strong. If I wanted to take anyone other than myself across time, I would have to wait for the full moon. The only one in my pack who could do it without waiting is Dante and if you get near him—”

  “I’ll attack him for sex.”

  He nodded.

  Damn.

  At least all wasn’t lost though. “But you do know Acheron, right? Will he help me?”

  “I don’t know. He’s strange sometimes and no one ever knows how he’s going to react or what he’s going to do or say. But you can always ask. The best thing is for you to stay here in your room where Mike and Leo hopefully can’t find you—like I said, they’re young and aren’t as experienced at tracking prey. I’ll spread your scent around to keep them off you. Once I’ve got them occupied, I’ll bring Ash to you. Okay?”

  It was more than okay. It was
great. She’d never thought to find a Katagari male who could be so kind.

  “Thank you.” As he moved away, Pandora stopped him again. “Really, thank you.”

  He offered her a kind, fatherly smile and patted her hand. “Animals protect their own. I’m doing this to help my brothers as much as I’m doing it to help you. If they were to hurt you, they’d never forgive themselves, and I’d have to listen to them lament for eternity.”

  Releasing her, he moved to the door and left the room.

  Pandora took a deep breath, and for the first time since she’d been stolen from her people, she began to relax a little.

  Now all she had to do was stay put until he returned.

  But that wasn’t as easy as it would normally be. The female in her that was just entering womanhood was all too aware of the fact that there were three unmated panthers at the hotel.

  That alien and new part of her wanted with a vengeance the mating ritual that would induct her into adulthood.

  It craved it.

  For an Arcadian, the ritual was simple. Had she stayed at home, she would have chosen an elder panther from her pack to gently introduce her to the animal side of herself. Once he unlocked her full powers by copulating with her, he would have taught her how to shift from human to panther and how to protect herself and use her newborn powers.

  The Katagaria were completely different. She’d heard the horror stories directly from her sister Sefia. They took their nearas—virgin females who were cresting—and allowed every unmated male of the pack to have sex with her to see if she was the mate to one of them.

  They would use her without mercy until all their males were fully sated.

  Her sister Sefia had been one of the lucky ones. On the night they had deflowered her, Sefia had been mated to a Katagari panther who had then decided to keep her more as a pet than a mate.

  Katagaria females left their mates once they were out of heat, and only returned whenever they were in season. If a male tried to mate with a Katagari female when she wasn’t in heat, she would attack and possibly kill him.

  Once their season passed, the Katagaria females left their males and stayed with their sisters to travel about until their next fertile cycle. If the female became pregnant, she’d birth her young among her sisters, and as soon as the cubs were weaned, she would take them to the father to raise.

  Arcadian pantheresses were much more coveted since they were ruled by human hearts that wouldn’t allow them to abandon their children until adulthood. Unlike their Katagaria cousins, the Arcadians stayed with their young and their mates. The male panthers didn’t have to wait for an Arcadian female to go into heat. She would be receptive to her mate at any time.

  The worst part was that a panther male couldn’t rape a panther female when she was in heat. All he had to do was come near her and she would willingly accept him. It was nature and a pantheress had no control over her body at such times. It wouldn’t listen to any reason or rationale.

  She would beg him to fill her.

  The shame of that would come later, after the mating was done. Then, the Arcadian pantheress would feel embarrassed that she had acted like an animal and not a human.

  Pandora moaned low in her throat as her desire sparked again and coiled through her. Her breasts were heavy, her body hot and alive with need.

  Go . . .

  The command was overwhelming, but she refused to heed it. She was a human, not an animal.

  The Katagari male would return with Acheron and she would be among her own kind again.

  Then everything would be normal.

  Dante couldn’t get the fire out of his blood. The animal in him was awake and craving.

  Needing.

  One whiff should not have affected him this much, and yet as he drifted through the dense crowd of people pretending to be aliens and paranormal entities, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to find her scent again.

  It was all he could do to stay in human form and not revert to his true animal body.

  The hunter wasn’t listening to him.

  Damn it!

  He caught a glimpse of Acheron Parthenopaeus across the vendor booths. Oblivious to the humans who paused to gawk at his seven feet of height, the Atlantean Dark-Hunter was reading a Dark Horse Grendel comic book.

  Seeking the distraction of talking with a friend, Dante headed toward him.

  “Ash,” he said as he drew near. “You seem remarkably relaxed.” Which was true. In all the centuries he’d known the man, Dante had never seen him so at ease.

  Acheron looked up from his comic and inclined his head in greeting. “What can I say? This is one of the few places I can take Simi where she doesn’t stand out. Hell, she actually looks normal here.”

  Dante laughed at that. Ash’s pixielike demon seldom blended in anywhere. “Where is she?”

  “Shopping like a demon.”

  Dante shook his head at the bad pun; knowing Simi, he figured it was probably quite true. “I tried to call your cell phone when we got in to see if you made it.”

  Ash immediately tensed as he put his comic down and pulled out another issue. “I turned it off on the day I got here.”

  “Really?” Dante asked, stunned by Ash’s confession. It wasn’t like him to be out of touch with his Dark-Hunter charges. “What if one of the Dark-Hunters needed you?”

  Ash shrugged. “If they can’t survive alone for four days once a year, they deserve to die.”

  Dante frowned. “That’s harsh, for you.”

  He looked at him dryly. “Harsh? Tell you what, you take my phone and skim through the three thousand phone calls I get every day and night and see how harsh I am. I truly hate modern technology and phones in particular. I haven’t had a full four hours of sleep in over fifty years. ‘Ash, I broke a toenail, help me. Ash, my head hurts, what should I do?’”

  Ash curled his lip in repugnance. “You know, I’ve never understood it. They make a deal with the devil herself and then expect me to bail them out of every minor scrape. Then when I show up to help them, they cop an attitude and tell me to blow. So if I’m selfish for wanting four days a year to be left alone, then I’m just a selfish bastard. Sue me.”

  Wow, someone was cranky.

  Dante took a step away from the Atlantean. “Well then, I’ll make sure I don’t bug you.”

  Ash pulled out another plastic-covered comic from the long white box on the table. “You’re not bothering me, Dante. Really. I’m just trying to zen myself out of a bad mood. I made the mistake of turning on my phone ten minutes ago and I had four hundred and eighty-two messages waiting on voice mail. I had it on all of three seconds before it started ringing again. All I want is a little break and no damn phone for a few days.” He let out an aggravated breath. “Besides, I’m the one who told you to come.”

  “Yeah, thanks. This is . . .”—he hesitated as a centaur pranced by on what appeared to be modified ski boots that looked eerily like hooves—“interesting.”

  Ash smiled. “Yeah, just wait until you see the Ms. Klingon Beauty Pageant. It’s something else.”

  Dante laughed. “I’ll bet. So what good bands should I check out for my club?”

  Ash grabbed three Dark Horse Tales of the Vampires comics and added them to his growing pile. “Last Dance is really good. They’re playing tonight, and Ghoultown too. But the one band you have to see is the Cruxshadows. They’re right up your alley and rule the Darkwave scene. The lead singer Rogue’ll be over in the Hyatt later signing autographs at their booth. If you want, I can introduce you.”

  “That’d be great.” The only reason Dante had come to Atlanta was because Acheron had assured him Dragon*Con was one of the best places to see several alternative bands so that he could hire them for gigs at his club in Minnesota.

  Simi came running up to them with two male “Klingons” trailing behind her. “Akri? Can I go to the Klingon homeworld?”

  Ash smiled at his demon. “Sure, just don’t eat any of them.
”

  The demon pouted. “But why not?”

  “Because, Simi, they’re not really Klingons. They’re people pretending to be Klingons.”

  “Well, pooh, fine then. No eats. But I’m going to go now. Bye bye.” She dashed off with the two young men.

  Ash handed the comics to the vendor, then pulled out his wallet.

  “Shouldn’t you go do a head count on the homeworld population?” Dante asked.

  “Nah. She’ll do what I said . . .” Ash paused as if something occurred to him. “Then again, I didn’t tell her not to eat a Bajoran or Romulan. Damn.” He paid for the comics. “You’re right, I better go count.”

  Ash took a step away, then stopped. “By the way, you might want to head upstairs right now and check out your room.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Make sure it meets with your needs.”

  Dante frowned. “I’ve already been there.”

  “Go there again.”

  The animal in Dante picked up a weird scent from Acheron, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  But as the Atlantean headed off, he felt an inexplicable pull to do what Acheron had suggested.

  Dante headed out of the vendors’ area, toward the escalator. He’d barely reached it when he smelled the pantheress again. He turned sharply to the left, expecting to see her.

  She wasn’t there.

  Still, he was hard for her. Ready. The animal inside was growling for a taste of her body.

  He headed up the escalator to escape the scent.

  It seemed to grow stronger.

  His head low, he scanned the crowd intently, but none of his people was there.

  Closing his eyes, he sniffed the air. Her fragrance was subtle now. And it was . . .

  He whirled around.

  There was no woman there, only Romeo, and he reeked of the pantheress. Dante couldn’t stop himself from sniffing Romeo, who immediately shoved him away.

  “Man, you skeeve me when you do that. And don’t do it in public. Someone might get the wrong idea about us.”