On the Prowl

by Christine Warren

  Corinne downed a swig of coffee and grimaced. “I have a feeling I’m not going to like this.”

  “You don’t have to like it. I’m just letting you know how this works.”

  “True.” Corinne nodded. “Go on.”

  “The arrangement of marriages means that those first two stages I mentioned in human relationships are unnecessary for us. Couples don’t date. They usually meet at or shortly before the marriage contracts are signed, not before. They get to know each other during the engagement, which becomes official the same night the male presents his mate with an engagement ring, usually just before the reception to announce the union.”

  “Oh, so that’s what last night was for you,” Corinne said, her eyes widening. “Wow, then that means that you two barely know each other, right? How weird must that be.”

  Saskia shifted uncomfortably. “Nicolas and I are a little different,” she admitted. “Our families decided early on that an alliance between us made sense, so I’ve known Nicolas since I was a little girl. I always knew we’d be mates one day.”

  “But no pressure, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed wryly. “The pressure starts now. Like I said, the relationship begins with the engagement, which happened last night, but it’s not considered official until the couple, er, consummates things.”

  Corinne stared at her for a second before understanding drew her eyes impossibly wide. Saskia felt her cheeks go crimson.

  “Whoa, you mean, even if you’re engaged and wearing a ring and telling five hundred guests about your intention to get married and all that, you’re still not official until you two have sex?” The reporter’s voice strained with incredulity, which wasn’t that strange a reaction. Saskia had heard it before.

  “Yes, that’s correct. The betrothal isn’t considered binding beforehand. We have to demonstrate a clear intention to procreate together; otherwise there would be no point in the relationship.”

  “No point? As in, you can’t just be together because you want to be? Because you love each other and you want to spend your lives together?”

  Saskia heard the indignation and pointed out the flaw in the human logic. “How would we have become so emotionally attached if we hadn’t met before we agreed to marry each other?”

  “Well, you— I— You— I mean…”

  “Exactly. Remember what I just told you—the whole point of a Tiguri mating is to produce children. Which is also why we won’t be able to marry unless I get pregnant. Until there’s proof that we’re fertile together, there’s always the chance we’d have to dissolve the agreement and each take another mate. And until I give birth to a healthy baby, we still have that option. We become true mates when I conceive, but it’s like a trial run. If I miscarry or produce a stillborn child, the trial period ends and we go our separate ways.”

  Corinne remained silent for several minutes, long enough for Saskia to drain her cup with a series of nervous sips.

  “Okay, wow,” the human woman finally managed, sinking back into her seat as if the effort to wrap her mind around Tiguri mating customs had drained her of energy. “I want to say that that’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard, but I can’t.”

  Saskia looked up in surprise. “You can’t?”

  “Well, I can,” Corinne corrected herself, “but it would be stupid of me. I mean, it’s horrifying to me, but I’m a total outsider. I’m human. I might be married to a man who’s a bit more than that, but I’d be a hypocrite to try and judge another species based on what I’ve learned about them in two brief conversations and a total of about thirty-seven minutes in your company. In a totally Machiavellian kind of way, it’s almost brilliant. It’s ruthlessly logical. If what your people need most is more little people and, like all the other shifters I’ve met so far, you can’t make more by biting humans the way the movies want us to believe”—she nodded at Saskia’s snort of ridicule—“then what you’ve described makes a sick sort of sense.”

  Saskia took a moment of silence for herself. “Thank you,” she said after she cleared her throat. “You’re the first person I’ve ever explained to who was even willing to admit that much. Most others are so disgusted by the idea, they can’t get away from me fast enough.”

  “Why the hell is that? Did you design the system? The fact that you’re part of it isn’t your fault, unless Tiguri have some weird ability to choose their species and parents pre-conception that no one’s ever told me about. That would be like someone trying to blame me for the Spanish Inquisition because I’m human and some sick member of my species thought up the idea to persecute heretics back in the Dark Ages. Not my fault, and I’m not about to take responsibility. Neither should you.”

  It felt almost as if a burden Saskia had been carrying had just been set aside. Impulsively she reached across the table and laid her hand over the back of Corinne’s.

  “Thank you,” Saskia repeated, and squeezed warmly. “I knew there was something I liked about you the minute I met you. I would dearly love to be able to consider you a friend.”

  Corinne grinned and squeezed back. “Oh, sweetie, with a fiancé who acted like yours did last night, I’m honor bound as a woman to be your friend. We have to stick together against the idiocy of the testosterone-poisoned half of the world. Now let’s get back to what your knucklehead did last night. Did he really walk out in the middle of the night without telling you a thing about where he was going?”

  Saskia nodded. “When I asked what was going on, he told me he didn’t have time for me.”

  The human woman’s expression turned furious. “Oh, no, he didn’t,” she hissed, her eyes narrowing into angry slits. “You need to tell me everything. Word for word. Right now.”

  So, Saskia did. Her explanation did little to calm her new friend, though. Corinne’s feelings for Nicolas’s shabby treatment were stamped all over her face, the anger sending their waitress scampering to deliver their refills with speed never before seen south of midtown. When Saskia got to the part where her fiancé had literally rolled off her naked body at the point of no return, Corinne almost choked on her coffee.

  “Wait just a second,” the human snapped, setting her mug down with an ominous thunk. “Let me see if I got this straight. Are you telling me that not only did the man leave you in the middle of the night after a phone call where you heard him ask if one of your party guests was dead, but he did it before you even managed to have the sex every single member of your family and community expects you to have as a matter of fricking civic duty?”

  Saskia squirmed. When she heard it laid out like that, she felt almost as if she should be defending her fiancé, no matter what a louse he’d acted like. “I doubt he thought of it quite like that—”

  Corinne cut her off with an impatient gesture. “I doubt he thought at all. Clearly, he didn’t think about how you would feel to be abandoned on what amounts to your wedding night without so much as a word of explanation. And it doesn’t sound to me like he even thought about the fact that common courtesy might require him to … oh, I don’t know … make sure you knew he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere this morning!”

  The woman cut herself off, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep, slow breath. Saskia watched in fascination.

  “Sorry about that,” Corinne said after a controlled exhalation. “I didn’t actually intend to channel the spirit of my mother just then, especially not since she’s alive and well and perfectly capable of saying the same thing herself. Which she would, if she heard about this, I can promise you.”

  “Um, thanks.”

  “No problem.” Corinne fortified herself with a gulp of coffee before continuing. “All right, so setting aside the fact that your man is the hands-down winner of this week’s award for Idiot Male–Epic Screwup Category, I suppose that for once, my inside sources on the Council of Others will be used for a higher purpose. It almost makes me feel noble. Usually, I’m just there for the gossip.”

  “What are your
inside sources? Your mate?”

  “God, no. Thankfully, the Fae don’t sit on the Council, so we get to avoid all that messy political crap. Luc doesn’t really have the patience for it, anyway. He’s a fighter, not a lover. No, two of my best friends are married to Council members. They always know what’s going on, even when their husbands aren’t supposed to tell them about it.”

  Saskia marveled at that. She couldn’t imagine a relationship like that, where the male confided everything in his mate, but it sounded like something she wanted. If she was going to try to build a new kind of mating with Nicolas, that was the sort of ideal that would be worth working toward.

  “Missy and Reggie,” Corinne continued. “Missy is the kindergarten teacher I told you about. Too sweet for her own good, but basically irresistible. You two ought to get along like a house on fire. I think you’ve got a lot in common. Missy’s husband is head of the local werewolf pack.”

  “Melissa and Graham Winters?” The names clicked into place, opening up Saskia’s mental database of people she needed to know. “They’re your friends?”

  “Yup. Well, Missy is. I think Graham looks at me more as an annoying but amusing accessory in his wife’s wardrobe. He’s okay, though. He worships Missy, and that’s the important part.”

  “And Reggie?”

  “Regina, actually. She’s the best source. Graham is on the Council, but Reggie’s husband was the head of it for, like, two decades or more. Which is nothing to a vampire, I suppose, but it did give him pretty uncanny instincts for what’s going on under the surface there.”

  Regina. Married to a vampire. A vampire who had led the Council for an unusually long period of time. The facts lined up like symbols on a slot machine.

  “Regina and Dmitri Vidâme.”

  “Hey, you’re good.” The human looked impressed. “I have trouble remembering the names of all my cousins. How do you do that with people you’ve never even met?”

  Saskia shrugged. “It’s my job.”

  “Huh. I must have missed that section of the want ads.”

  That earned a smile. “Or you didn’t get the Tiguri edition of the newspaper. I mentioned we kinda dig on tradition, right? Part of that includes some pretty intensive protocol training, at least for women in the prominent families. Girls are raised to become … political hostesses, I guess. Remembering names and faces is like a 101 course.”

  “I’d ask you to teach me your tricks, but then people might start expecting me to remember them, and really that’s just more trouble than it’s worth.” She pushed aside her empty mug. “So anyway, back to the subject at hand. The Council. According to Reggie, the Council called an emergency meeting last night because someone—currently unidentified—attacked Rafe last night after he left your party. Tried to kill him, from what I hear.”

  Shock pressed Saskia back in her seat. “Rafe? Rafael De Santos? But I spoke with him last night just before he left. Why would someone want to kill him?”

  Corinne lifted an eyebrow. “I’ve wanted to do it a time or two. I’m just not the sort to get the Council into a lather. Rafe’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he can be an arrogant prick sometimes. And the head of the Council is never the most popular guy in town. Council decisions are always offending one group or another. I don’t think anyone was surprised that someone would want to kill Rafe, just that they managed to get close enough to him to try.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “Not from what Reggie told me. She said the only thing he hurt was his pride. The guy jumped him from behind, took him totally off guard.”

  “The guy? So they know who did it?”

  Corinne shook her head. “A figure of speech. I mean, who else would attack Rafe but a man? The only woman who might be big enough to take him would have to be half giant, right? I mean, the dude looks like a useless, elegant cover model, but I’ve seen him get pissed. It’s not pretty. And not something any of the women I know would want to go up against. Including the shifters.”

  Saskia conceded the point. “Then they don’t know the identity of his attacker.”

  “Not yet, but I think it’s pretty clear they have their suspicions.”

  Another good point, one that Saskia had been trying to avoid. “You mean they suspect my Nicolas.”

  Corinne shrugged, but her gaze remained glued on her friend’s face. “It seems like a pretty logical assumption, given the timing of the phone call you got last night and the mood you said he was in when he left. What I want to know is, why?”

  “Why would being accused of attempted murder make Nicolas angry?”

  “No, why would anyone think that a newly engaged Tiguri with every reason to look forward to a … ahem … satisfying night with his new mate would rather be out jumping someone else?”

  Saskia groaned. The answer to that question was even more complicated than the traditional Tiguri mating customs. How could she boil it down so the human would understand it without giving her a full-fledged lesson in the history of the Others?

  “Has anyone mentioned to you just why the Tiguri and our marriages have become such a hot topic of conversation recently?”

  “Not really. I guess I just assumed it was like when a new kid shows up at school one day. People just get curious.”

  Saskia had heard worse analogies, but …

  “Think of it less like a new kid just showed up at school and more like you just met your new neighbor and found out he was Genghis Khan.”

  Corinne blinked. “You plan to sack the city, massacre any resistance, enslave the survivors, and dine atop the bloody corpses?”

  “Not me personally, but I think that’s what the Council believes is my family’s ultimate goal. Mine and Nicolas’s.”

  “That’s one heck of an assumption,” Corinne mused. “Have you given them any reason to believe that’s what you guys are after?”

  “I don’t think they need a reason.” Briefly she outlined the history between the Tiguri and the larger Other population. “So, naturally, the Lupines tend to be the most suspicious, but most other shifters are a little wary of us. The vampires just work around us, and magic users generally could care less. Unless they’re trying to get their hands on little bits of us to use in their spells.”

  “Considering how powerful the Silverbacks are in the city, I’d say you’re not going to find yourself making coffee for the Welcome Wagon.” Corinne shook her head. “Are your families really sure moving here is worth it?”

  Saskia laughed, completely unamused. “Are you suggesting they might have asked me first?”

  “You know, I don’t understand you at all,” Corinne said, leaning back in her chair and eyeing Saskia curiously. “I like you, but I don’t understand you. You’re clearly intelligent, you’re well educated—I overheard you talking to that NYU professor last night about some Renaissance painter I’ve never even heard of. You’re beautiful and not even remotely airheaded.…”

  “But?”

  “But you don’t seem to have any problem letting your father or your fiancé tell you how to run your life. It just baffles me.”

  “There are days when it baffles me, too.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Seriously,” Saskia agreed. “In general, I have no problem with tradition. I like the sense of continuity and safety in knowing what’s expected of everyone around me. And no one has ever forced me to do anything I really didn’t want to do. My parents love me. Sure, they raised me with certain rules and expectations, but they never tried to take away my sense of self or denied me anything I really wanted.”

  “But your fiancé sure did.”

  It took Saskia a minute and a glance at the mischief in the other woman’s eyes to catch her meaning. When she did, she flushed predictably. “Well, yes, I suppose so, but I know where he sleeps now. He can’t avoid me forever.”

  Corinne laughed. “True.” She glanced at her watch. “Hopefully, he can stop avoiding you any minute now. Missy and Reggie t
old me that come hell or high water, the Council would be adjourning by ten. Even Others need to sleep eventually. With any luck, your man is already on his way home.”

  “Really? Just like that?” Saskia sat up and reached for her purse. “They won’t try to hold him, or anything, will they? Has he been officially accused of the attack?”

  “I seriously doubt it. If they had any proof he was involved, I doubt they’d have issued a polite summons to ask him to come to them. They would have shown up on your doorstep and dragged him away in chains.”

  “The summons wasn’t all that polite, remember?”

  Corinne stood and left cash on the table to pay for their coffee, waving away Saskia’s attempt to take care of it. “This is on me. Trust me, though, for the Council, that summons was as polite as it gets. Those folks don’t mess around.”

  Saskia feared she was right.

  Four

  Saskia hurried home from the café, tapping her foot impatiently until the cabbie turned up his radio to drown her out. Thankfully, the music also covered up the sounds of her growling every time they got stuck at a red light. By the time they pulled to a stop outside Nicolas’s building, she was so anxious to get upstairs that she threw enough money at the man to pay for a dozen trips just so she wouldn’t have to wait while he counted. She positively ran past the doorman, not even pausing to acknowledge his greeting as she pushed impatiently at the elevator button and all but danced in place while she waited for it to arrive.

  She darted into the car the minute the doors opened and got a look at the way the doorman frowned at her with the phone to his ear while she stabbed at the “doors close” button. Less than thirty seconds later, the doors opened again, disgorging her into the lobby of Nicolas’s private floor. The door to the apartment swung open even as she fumbled in her purse for the key she’d snagged from the hook in the kitchen.

  “Just where in hell have you been, woman?” Nicolas roared at her, the force of the demand literally backing her up a step.