Out of Her Mind by V. M. Black

Author:V. M. Black [Black, V. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Swift River Media Group
Published: 2014-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

At that, Chay snapped an order, and the spook shop emptied out in under a minute, only Ophelia and Tara remaining.

“If you’d checked your messages, you would have heard,” the woman was saying, looking severe. She was probably a decade older than Chay, but she used a tone as if she were his mother. “There have been panther sightings and maulings and people going missing in the wilderness up and down the coasts, and two man-eaters have already been killed. Both black. Both jaguars.”

“The connection to Tara?” Chay demanded, releasing Tara to go to his workstation.

Ophelia shrugged, following him to sit at another section of the desk. She began tapping at the keyboard, and a moment later, a series of screens jumped up in front of Chay.

“No one knows,” Ophelia said as Tara trailed over to stand behind Chay’s chair. “No one even knows who they were before they shifted. They were too far gone to change back when they were shot, so there’s no way to match them with missing persons reports from across the state—if even that would be enough.”

Tara remembered how the pressure of all the people around her at college would so often become too much to bear in the last few months. When that happened, she’d drive to a nearby state park or national forest with overnight camping and lose herself in the wilderness for the weekend until she found her balance again.

Now she recognized the feeling of being trapped as having come from the panther inside her, fighting to get out and take control. If she’d followed her impulses, she would have been out in the woods when she’d first shifted instead of in a lecture hall. If that had happened, she would have become one of those man-eaters, and no one would ever have known what had happened to her.

“What about missing campers?” she asked, pursuing that thought. “I know they’re killing people, but maybe some of the missing are actually shifters. So if someone went in and didn’t come out again.…”

The woman went pale. “I’d assumed that all the missing campers were victims.”

Tara shook her head. “The day I changed, all I wanted was to get off campus, to drive out to the mountains. The other shifters might have had the same feeling, and then they might have gotten stuck as panthers.”

The woman nodded sharply and brought up a list of names in a few keystrokes. “These are the missing people,” she said as Tara crossed to stand behind her. Ophelia put asterisks next to several names. “And these are the ones who have not been positively identified from their remains.”

Tara looked at the marked names. A couple of them looked strangely familiar. One especially nagged at the corner of her memory.

“John Johnson. John Johnson. I know that name,” she said. “Can you find a picture of him?”

The woman tapped at her keyboard, and a photo popped up. The features didn’t help her figure out who he was, not exactly, but there was something around his eyes that increased her sense of familiarity.

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