by Zoe Chant
"Oof! Watch out! Don't kneecap me!" She swept him up in her arms. "How was your day? Did you and Grandma Luisa have a nice time?"
"We went to the park! I petted a dog that was very soft and I asked the lady before I petted him and she said I could. She said his name was Tiger. I'm going to name my dog Tiger when I have a dog. When can I have a dog?"
"When we live in a place that allows pets," Gaby said in a tone which suggested this was a question she'd answered a number of times already.
She stepped forward into the apartment, with a giggling Sandy dangling from her neck. Derek followed her and closed the door quietly behind them.
The apartment smelled of potpourri and warm, pleasant cooking smells. It was small but tidy. The furniture crowded the living room somewhat, but had been arranged so there was room to move about between couch and armchair, coffee table and TV stand. The walls held an assortment of collectible plates with cute big-eyed children and animals on them, framed paintings of flowers, and a large gilt crucifix on the wall opposite the TV, above a bookcase crowded with paperbacks.
Derek had felt out of place in the coffee shop, but in this warm, homey room, he felt a thousand times more so. This was exactly the kind of place that men like him didn't belong, not with the air of darkness and danger that surrounded him. He shouldn't have come—
"Gabriella?" An older woman appeared from the nooklike kitchen, coming out from behind a freestanding cabinet that held the family's dishes. She was limping slightly and drying her hands on a dish towel, which she threw over her shoulder before flinging her arms around Gaby, child and all. "What a terrible day for you, my heart! And you didn't answer my texts!"
"Mama, I texted you from the car to let you know I was bringing someone for dinner."
"Yes, but you didn't answer the next three texts asking who. Oh!" Gabriella's mother switched her attention to Derek, like lightning. Startled, he found his right hand engulfed in both of her small, strong ones. "Is it this fine young man? When I said you should find a nice man, I didn't know you would take my advice so quickly!"
"Mama! This is the man I told you about who is keeping me safe. He is my bodyguard. Derek," Gaby sighed, "this is my mother, Luisa Diaz, and my son Sandy."
Some parents resemble their children closely. This wasn't the case with Luisa and Gaby—Gaby was curvy and medium height with a cascade of thick black hair; Luisa was short and round all over, her face made even rounder by its frame of brown curls.
But he could still see echoes of Luisa in her mother, especially around Luisa's generous mouth, in her eyes, in the set of her stubborn chin. He thought he could see where Gaby had gotten her courage and determination from.
He tried to let go of his feelings of discomfort. If Luisa felt that he was a man who shouldn't be around her daughter, he had no doubt that she would have told him so. Instead, she was beaming up at him.
"Ma'am, it's a pleasure to meet you," he said, closing his left hand around the short fingers clasping his right. "Your daughter's safety is my only priority."
Luisa turned to Gaby with a wide smile. "I like him! You can keep him," she declared.
"Gosh, thanks, Mama." Gaby rolled her eyes and smiled at Derek, but despite the mock exasperation, she looked genuinely relieved. And he felt as if he'd passed a test.
"I'm going to want to hear the entire story, every bit of it, but not in front of small pitchers with big ears." Luisa tweaked Sandy's ear, making him squirm. "But first, we should eat."
"Can I help with anything?" Derek asked. In retrospect he should probably have thought to stop somewhere and pick up something to bring along for the meal. He hadn't even thought about it. He was completely unused to deal with family occasions.
"No, no. You're a guest." Luisa hustled him to the couch. "Gaby, set the table while I check the casserole. Alejo," she added to the little boy, "come here and help me check if the oven timer has failed to ring again."
Derek helped Gaby drag out the table, which turned out to be folded in a corner, since there wasn't room in the small apartment to set it up without pushing the furniture out of the way. Gaby shook a flowered tablecloth over it and got down dishes from the cabinet. As she passed them to Derek to lay on the table, he noticed that they were nice dishes, with little roses on them; they made him think of a set his grandmother used to have.
"Are these antiques?" he asked.
"Only in the sense that my mother is an antique."
"I heard that!" came a call from the kitchen.
"I'm sorry, Mama!" Gaby said, winking at Derek. "No, Mama and Papa bought these when they were married." She knelt to open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, and got out several rolled cloth napkins.
"I promised on my wedding day to Alejandro—God rest his soul—that I would always set a nice table," Luisa declared from the kitchen. "And I always shall. Gaby, put the flowers from the top of the bookcase on the table. The vase with the sunflowers. It will make a nice centerpiece."
Gaby handed the napkins to Derek and went to get the vase off the bookcase. "Before she got sick, my mother was the office manager at a rental car franchise," she told Derek softly, wearing a trace of a smile as she set the vase in the center of the tablecloth. "Now she's got no one to manage except her daughter and grandson."
"She's not badly sick, I hope?" Derek asked, just as quietly, glancing into the kitchen where Sandy was standing on a stepstool and helping Luisa rinse a serving spoon in the sink.
"She's much better now than she was," Gaby murmured back. "She's always had problems with arthritis in her hips, but it got so bad she couldn't even sit up, let alone work. She had to have both hips replaced, and she's just recovering from the second surgery."
His poor, brave mate. No wonder she was so serious and responsible. She had been carrying the weight of her family's worries on her shoulders, all alone. Derek brushed a hand down her elbow, eliciting a brief, pleased shiver. You don't have to carry it alone anymore, he wanted to say with that gesture of support.
"I see you are telling all our family secrets," Luisa said, coming out of the kitchen with a casserole dish in both hands. Sandy trailed her, clutching an iron trivet. "Now put that there, sweet one, beside the flowers." Sandy stretched to set the trivet very carefully with both hands, and Luisa put the casserole dish on it.
"Mama, you aren't supposed to be carrying heavy things," Gaby fretted.
"It's not so heavy compared to this one." Luisa tousled Sandy's curls. "I pick him up a dozen times a day."
"Yes, you're not supposed to be doing that either. Derek, what would you like to drink? We have, uh, apple juice and milk, I'm afraid."
Her slightly abashed expression made him smile. "Milk is fine. It's good for healthy bones. Right, Sandy?" he asked the little boy who had climbed into the chair next to him, staring at him with open curiosity. "Or, did your grandmother call you Alejo?"
"Alejandro," the little boy said. "I'm named after Abuelo Alejo who is dead. Who are you named after?"
"No one. I'm just named Derek."
"That's a crane," the boy said promptly.
"... what?"
"He means 'derrick,'" Gaby said, setting a glass of milk in front of each of them. "Except it's not exactly like a crane, kiddo. What's the difference?"
Sandy screwed his face up. "A crane is tall and—no—"
"A crane is a bird," Luisa said with a mischievous smile, reaching over to unroll Sandy's napkin for him.
"Oh, Mama, don't confuse him! There's a new building going up on the next street over," Gaby told Derek, "and we're learning about all the construction equipment. Sandy is fascinated by big machines right now."
"I remember going through a big-trucks phase too," Derek said to Sandy, but absently, because something had caught his attention. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his bear, which had been quiescent inside him, had begun to stir. Something was bothering it.
"I prefer the trucks; it is better than Gaby's horse phase," Luisa said.
"Mama!"
"What? At least Alejo doesn't ask me constantly if he can have a real bulldozer, not like you asking for a pony six times a day. Where would we have put it, in the kitchen?"
"I was perfectly aware we couldn't have a pony in an apartment in the city even at Sandy's age, Mama—oh, Derek, where are you going?" she asked as he rose from the table, reaching a hand after him. "I'm sorry, this is just our family's usual sort of dinnertime conversation. Don't let us scare you off!"
"I'm the one who should apologize. Excuse me," Derek said, as politely as he could with his bear increasingly tense in his chest. "Is there an opening window in the kitchen?"
Luisa started to rise, but Gaby hopped up. "Mama, you shouldn't be getting up and down. I'll show you, Derek. There's actually a very small balcony, really more like a fire escape except without the escape part. You aren't feeling unwell, are you?" she asked anxiously, hovering close by his side.
"No, I'm fine. It's not that."
Gaby let them out onto a tiny balcony—she hadn't been joking; it was just wide enough to accommodate a cheap plastic chair (with a cushion on the seat and a book lying on it) and a large pot with a healthy-looking tomato plant in it. More plants, giving off pleasant herbal smells, were lined up on the railing.
"Did you hear something?" Gaby murmured.
"I'm not sure." He was glad his mate was here, close enough to touch, since his bear was getting increasingly agitated. Having her hip pressed against him and the smell of her skin (still lightly spiced with sex, even though she'd showered at the hotel) was distracting. But having her back in the living room would have been even more distracting, where she was out of sight.
Something subconscious had set off his bear's finally honed danger sense. He wished he could figure out what was bothering it. He trusted those instincts. The problem was, in the complicated modern world, his bear's idea of what constituted danger wasn't always accurate. Right now it could be anything from a distant car alarm to a smell that had triggered some buried memory of another time he'd been attacked. It was so much easier in the mountains, where his bear's instincts were adapted to the world around it, a world without cars or high-rise buildings.
If the Ghost is here, he's not being obvious about it. I don't hear him, or smell him ...
"Derek, how worried should I be?" Gaby's eyes were wide, staring up at his.
Trusting him. Trusting him to protect her.
He wanted to tell her not to worry, but he was worried. Something was upsetting his bear. And it wasn't anything obvious, which made him even more worried.
"Well, if we're not in danger, we should go back inside," Gaby whispered. "We're being awfully rude, hiding out here with dinner cooling on the table. My mom might get the wrong idea."
"That would be terrible," he murmured, sliding a hand down to cup her round bottom, even while his sharp shifter senses tried to sieve through all the many smells and sounds of the city, trying to find the one thing that had tripped his bear's danger instinct.
The anxiety pinching Gaby's face was chased away by a smile, as he'd hoped. "You're terrible," she said, swatting at his hand with no real force.
He caught her fingers, caging them with his own, and grinned at her. God, being around her was like nothing he'd ever experienced. She made him feel light. Playful.
"I'll show you how terrible I can be. Later."
Gaby wrinkled her nose, looking amused. "You really need to work on your sweet talk, buddy."
He opened his mouth to respond, when he finally caught a whiff of something that struck a wrong note in the sounds and smells of an ordinary, peaceful city evening.
Smoke.
He hadn't noticed it before, with the cooking smells to cover it up. But now that the wind had changed, there was no mistaking it.
Gaby instantly sensed the tension in him. "What is it?"
Before he could answer, the building's fire alarm went off.
"Oh no," Gaby gasped, and darted into the kitchen. "Mother!"
"I hear it," Derek heard her mother say calmly. "Come on, Alejo. Dinner will have to wait."
Derek leaned over the railing. He couldn't see any smoke, but he could smell it more strongly now.
Ghost. It has to be. It could be a coincidence—but he was betting it wasn't. He'd thought Ghost would wait until nightfall to strike. But what better opportunity could there be? Ghost had seen the cops leave; he'd seen Derek go into the building with Gaby. And regardless of whether he's after me or her, now he's got both.
And dinnertime would be the perfect opportunity, because no one would be going anywhere. They'd be busy and caught off guard. All the Ghost had to do was get everyone out of the building and then pick off his targets.
The question was, where would he be? Waiting out front, where the crowd was going to congregate, or in back of the building?
Front. Probably. It depended on how wary he expected them to be.
Derek turned away, steeling himself, and checked the load in his gun.
Inside, he found Luisa helping Sandy put his shoes on, while Gaby was grabbing items and shoving them into a backpack. "Sandy's birth certificate and vaccination records—Papa's photo album—what else do we need? We should have some clothes—" She yanked open a drawer and started stuffing items into the backpack.
Derek took her by the shoulders. "Gaby. It's not worth your life. We have to get you and your family out."
"Yes," she gasped. "Yes, of course." She stilled, looking up at him. "Derek, is it—Ghost?"
"We have to assume so," he said quietly. "It's not likely he'll try anything in a crowd." At least, it was better for her to think so. He didn't need panicking civilians on his hands. "Stay with me. We're going to be heading for the car and getting all of you out of here."
"Yes. That makes sense." She slung the backpack onto her back. "Mama, get your walker, would you?"
"I don't need to deal with that thing in a crowded stairwell, Gabriella—"
"You can't walk a block without it. Just get it, Mama, please? It folds up, so we'll carry it down the stairs."
They made a strange procession trooping out into the hallway. Luisa held Sandy's hand, while Gaby carried the folded-flat walker in one arm and had her other arm around her mother, the backpack dangling from her shoulder. The hallway was half full of panicked building residents, but Derek could no longer smell smoke. If he was in Ghost's place, trying to flush out his quarry, he wouldn't set the entire building on fire. That'd be a good way to end up in danger himself. He'd break into an empty apartment and create enough smoke to set off the building-wide fire alarms, which was the only thing he'd really need.
Still, they couldn't count on it, certainly not enough to stay inside a building that might be on fire. Around him, he saw old people, families, little kids. People were clutching bundles of belongings, or empty-handed and crying.
If the Ghost had done this, Derek thought grimly, he was going down.
As he shepherded his charges toward the stairwell, Derek realized that there were two entrances and exits downstairs, but a strategic bottleneck inside the building. Nobody would be using the elevator during a fire. So everyone had to go down the stairs.
I hope what I said to Gaby is right and he really won't attack in a crowd, because otherwise, we're all in trouble.
He paused at the stairwell door, causing a pile-up behind him, as he tried to figure out the best way to do this. Gaby was going to be the target, but the old woman and child were too vulnerable to leave unprotected. Danger would most likely come from below, but he couldn't see what was happening to Gaby and her family if he put them behind him. At times like this, working with a partner would really come in handy ...
"What's the holdup?" someone shouted angrily from behind.
"I'm going to have you three go in front," Derek told Gaby. "I'll be right behind you. Trust me."
"I do," she said softly, and with her arm around her mother, she nudged open the stairwell door with he
r elbow.
The four of them joined the crowd of fleeing residents jostling their way down the stairs. Derek took advantage of his natural size and generally intimidating nature to stay so close to Gaby that he was almost stepping on her heels. He could hear sirens wailing now. Good. If we can just get out of the building, it ought to be easy to make our escape in the confusion, with emergency vehicles everywhere—
At the bottom of the stairs, the Ghost was waiting in the hall.
It was a good location. Derek had to admire his strategic sense, if nothing else. Every person on the upper floors had to come out the door into the hallway. The stairwell door swung open and closed as each little family-sized knot of refugees pushed out into the hallway. As they reached the ground floor and Gaby started to push it open, Derek glimpsed sudden movement in the hall, going against the tide of escaping building residents.
"Move!" he snapped, pushing Gaby and her family unceremoniously out of the way.
Ghost slammed into him.
It was definitely Ghost. There was no mistaking those ice-pale eyes, not to mention the massive size of him. He was actually bigger than Derek, but Derek had fury on his side. Through sheer bodily force he pushed Ghost out into the hallway, slamming him into the wall so Gaby, her family, and the rest of the refugees could get out of the stairwell.
"Give it up, Ruger," Ghost snarled.
"Shut up!" Derek headbutted him, and as the Ghost reeled, Derek briefly freed a hand to hook his keys out of his pocket and fling them in Gaby's direction. "Gaby! Get to my car. Get out of here. I'll hold him off."
"What about you?" she protested.
"Just go!"
All he could do was hope Ghost still worked alone and didn't have a partner waiting out front. However, he suspected that if Ghost was working with someone, he wouldn't have risked an attack in the crowded hallway; he'd just have had both exits covered and made his move outside.
There was no choice but to gamble Gaby's life on it.
Ghost snarled and his canines lengthened as he went for Derek's neck. Derek twisted to take the bite on his shoulder rather than the throat, turning his body to knee Ghost in the stomach. Ghost tried to twist away to go after Gaby, but Derek kicked his legs out from under him and the two of them went down to the floor in a tangle.
