Sure enough, he raised a doubtful eyebrow. “You didn’t think to mention this before? When we were discussing the search areas?”
“Slipped my mind.” At least it was too dark for him to see me blush.
The rain had finally eased and, though it made me nervous to have his hostile presence at my back, I forged ahead, taking the lead so I wouldn’t have to see that sceptical look any more. He moved quietly in the dark, with none of the slipping on stones and cracking of twigs that I was doing. A natural predator. But then, his attention wasn’t split between his own mind and an owl’s.
Even with the rain, the view from above was spectacular. She could make out every individual leaf on every tree. Every edge was crisp and sharp, and her ears caught even the faintest rustle among the grey shades of the night forest. Air currents teased at her feathers as she soared aloft.
I didn’t bother calling out; I knew we were too far away yet for the boys to hear me. I let my owl guide me, and when I plunged off the faint trail Steele followed without question. Or even a biting remark.
We moved fast, and after about twenty minutes Steele said, “Did you hear that?”
“Cody?” I called. “Jamie? Are you there?”
A wild yell answered. “Over here! Over here!”
We veered in the direction of the voice, climbing a sudden steep rise. My boots slipped on wet rock as we scrambled up the slope, and then there was a thrashing in the bushes and a small wet boy appeared. I released my owl and she flew silently away.
“Lexi! You found us!”
I felt his hands. They were icy cold. I was about to strip off my jacket and wrap it around his shivering form when Steele stepped forward, nudging me out of the way.
He smiled at Cody reassuringly. “Hi. I’m Jake. I’m going to warm you up. Don’t be scared, okay? It doesn’t hurt.”
“Okay.” Cody didn’t sound convinced, but he didn’t move when Steele took his cold hands in his.
Warm orange light welled around their joined hands, then crept up Cody’s arms, flickering like tiny flames. Cody watched their progress, his eyes huge.
“Whoa. That is so cool. Are you a fireshaper?”
“Yep.”
As if anyone else would be wandering around out here wearing only a sodden T-shirt. That T-shirt clung to the hard planes of his chest, and I looked away hastily. The fire whispered over Cody’s body, spreading across his torso and up his neck.
“Are you all right?” I asked him. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” he said, though he didn’t take his eyes off the tiny flames. They were kind of impressive, even I had to admit that. I’d never seen fireshaping used for anything constructive before. “But there’s something wrong with Jamie’s leg. He fell out of the tree, and I think it might be broken.”
We followed him back to where Jamie sat propped at the base of the gum. His leg was most definitely broken. I flinched at the ugly shard of bone peeking out of his torn flesh. Poor little guy looked bad. He was shivering, too, and Steele laid his hands on him and performed the same shaping, so that both boys were outlined in an orange glow.
“Find a straight stick we can use as a splint.” He tossed the command my way without even looking at me, all his attention on Jamie. “You’ll be fine, mate. But we need to keep that leg as still as we can.”
I nearly asked him what the magic word was, but I bit my lip and hunted around for a strong enough stick instead. He already seemed to have it in for me; there was no sense irritating him further. People who irritated shapers tended to have limited life spans.
“What were you two doing out here?” I asked Cody.
Steele pulled his T-shirt over his head in one fluid movement and began tearing it into strips. Now that was a nice view. Water dripped from the tree overhead onto his muscular shoulders and ran down his broad chest—
Then he bent to bind the stick I gave him to Jamie’s leg, and I saw his back. It was crisscrossed with the stripes of old scars. I stared, aghast. His whole back was one big mess of scar tissue. Wow. I’d have liked to meet the person capable of doing something like that to a shaper. Or, on second thought, maybe I wouldn’t.
“Your mum thought you were going to Jamie’s house after school.” Determinedly I focused on Cody. Steele had probably deserved it anyway. Shaper bastard.
“We were.” Cody looked down, as if he knew he’d done the wrong thing. “But on the way home Jamie was telling me how he’d found these baby possums in a tree out here, so we came out to have a look. But then Jamie fell out of the tree and hurt himself. I didn’t know the way back without him, so I couldn’t go for help, and I didn’t have any phone signal, so I thought it was better to stay together and hope somebody found us.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “You wouldn’t have done Jamie any good if you’d got lost trying to get help.”
Steele hoisted Jamie carefully into his arms. “We’ll take him to my house. It’s the closest.”
He strode into the dripping darkness beneath the trees without waiting to see if we followed him. How did he know the way? He didn’t have a host of animal ears and eyes to guide him. But he seemed to be headed in the right direction.
“Here.” I offered the flashlight to Cody. “You can carry this.”
He took it, and together we followed that powerful, scarred back in silence all the way through the bush until we emerged onto a manicured lawn. Ahead of us, Steele’s enormous house sprawled among dark gardens, the lights of its windows promising food and warmth.
There were going to be some happy people in town when we appeared. And I would be happiest of all, at not having to spend another minute in Jake Steele’s company.
4
Steele’s house was every bit as imposing on the inside as it had appeared from the outside. We entered from the rear, and Cody’s eyes widened.
“Cool! You have a pool inside?”
We followed Steele past the glittering water, through an enormous kitchen and into the main area of the house. Steele laid Jamie down gently on a couch, then cast me an impatient glance.
“You’re dripping all over the floor.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll get you a dry shirt.”
“You’re the one who needs a new shirt. I’m perfectly dry under this jacket.” I resisted the urge to wring out my wet hair all over his carpet and pulled out my phone: four bars of coverage. “I’ll just ring Alberto while you’re finding some clothes.”
I didn’t like the guy, but I wasn’t blind. He was seriously ripped, and my eyes kept straying to places they shouldn’t. It was a relief when he disappeared down the hall. I gave the good news to Alberto, who said he’d send Steele’s limo out for us, and the ambulance to take Jamie to the community hospital. They’d been on standby while we searched. The poor kid’s face was very pale. He was warm, thanks to Steele, but obviously hurting.
“The ambulance will be here soon,” I told him. “They’ll give you something to help with the pain.”
Sure enough, they turned up just as Steele came back in, wearing a dark blue shirt over clean jeans. Once we’d seen Jamie off to hospital, Cody and I joined Steele in the back of the limo for the short ride into town.
Rosie was waiting on the steps of the pub. She rushed over as soon as Cody got out of the car.
“That’s one boy who’s going to be in a lot of trouble,” Steele murmured.
“You think so? You don’t know much about mothers.”
Rosie swept him into her arms and sobbed into his wet hair. I grinned. Maybe tomorrow there’d be consequences, but tonight she was so relieved to have him back that she was all but crushing the life out of him. He took it pretty well. Maybe he was happy to see her, too, after a scare like that.
“Well, I’ll see you later,” I said to Rosie. Across the road, a familiar black cat sat in my kitchen window, gazing down on the street.
“Don’t go,” she said, releasing her death grip on Cody long enough to smile at me.
“Come inside and let me buy you a drink. Both of you. Everyone’s inside celebrating.”
I indicated my muddy jeans. “I’m a bit of a mess.”
“So go home and change. It’s not exactly a long way, is it?”
She waited expectantly until I agreed. I crossed the street—great, now the shaper even knew where I lived—and took the stairs two at a time. Might as well hurry up and get this over with. At least he couldn’t threaten me with his fire while there were other people around.
*I see you found them,* Syl said as I came in. *Where’s Jamie?*
“He’s gone to hospital. Broken leg.”
I filled her in as I changed out of my wet clothes. I would have preferred a bath and an early night, but Rosie was waiting.
Unfortunately, so was Jake Steele.
“He has scars all over his back,” I told Syl.
*Who, Jamie?*
“No. Jake Steele.”
She blinked. *That was quick work. You’ve known the man a couple of hours, and you’ve already had his clothes off?*
“Ha ha. He took his shirt off to splint Jamie’s leg.”
She flicked her tail angrily, changing moods like the wind. *You shouldn’t be hanging around with him. Or feeling sorry for his poor scarred back. The man’s a shaper.*
“I know, I know. Believe me, it wasn’t my choice.”
If it wasn’t for shapers, we wouldn’t be here in Berkley’s Bay, hiding from the world. If it wasn’t for shapers, a certain apartment block in Crosston would still be standing, its residents’ lives untouched by fire, and Syl herself wouldn’t be hiding in her cat form, too scared to face the world as a human again.
And if it wasn’t for shapers, I wouldn’t have been driven out of my home in the first place.
Shapers were bad news, full stop. No matter how good they looked with their shirts off.
“Do you want to come with me?”
She gave me a look of disdain. *Are you kidding me? I’m not spending any more time with that guy than I have to. I don’t want him outing me.*
“No one else in town has guessed you’re a shifter—not even the other shifters.”
*No one else in town is a fireshaper.* She turned her back on me and started grooming herself. Conversation over.
“I’ll see you later, then.” She was probably right to avoid him. I should have done the same.
I crossed the street, avoiding the puddles. The sky was clearing now; a few stars had poked their heads out from behind the clouds. I hesitated on the threshold of the pub, wishing I’d been faster to come up with an excuse for Rosie. I really didn’t want to spend any more time with Jake Steele. I’d caught him watching me a few times tonight, and the hostility in his eyes made me uneasy. I couldn’t think what I’d done to deserve it, but nothing good ever came of catching a shaper’s attention. They didn’t need a reason for the things they did. They were like a force of nature. Might as well stand in the path of a forest fire and tell it to stop burning.
Noise and light burst on me as I opened the inner door and stepped inside.
“Here’s my hero!” Rosie cried when she caught sight of me standing in the doorway. Heads turned, and several people cheered. I felt my cheeks heating, and hurried to join her at the bar. Having so many people staring at me at once made me uneasy, especially since one of them was Jake Steele. He was seated at a table with Joe’s parents, who were the alphas of the local werewolf pack. Joe’s mum Norma waved to me and I nodded, but I wasn’t going over there to say hello. I’d had quite enough of Mr Steele for one evening.
Rosie threw a grateful arm around me and dragged me back to the bar. Cody was propped on a stool with a nearly empty glass of lemonade in front of him. Joe and Holly sat beside him, and Joe enveloped me in a hug that would have done a bear proud.
Embarrassed by the attention, I looked everywhere but at them, and found my eye drawn to the sign prominently displayed above the bar. “No Shifting on the Premises, by Order of the Publican,” it read, in large black letters. Some comedian had gotten up on the bar one night and drawn a set of fangs in the corner, with a single drop of blood rolling off them. Alberto had never bothered to remove the graffiti. Perhaps he secretly approved of the threat.
I’d certainly never seen anyone shift in here, except for Joe tonight, and he’d been shifting from animal to human. I had the feeling Alberto’s objection was to going the other way, from human to animal. Bar fights got bad enough when everyone stayed human, without throwing fangs and claws into the mix.
Not that there were many bar fights in here. When the owner was a vampire, people tended to be on their best behaviour. Alberto was a local legend—I’d heard some crazy stories about him since arriving in Berkley’s Bay. One guy swore he’d seen the ground open up and swallow him one night, others said they’d heard raised voices from behind the locked door to the cellar, though no one but Alberto was ever seen to come and go through that door. This had led to a favourite theory among those who resented the vampire’s status in town: that he kept prisoners down there to use as blood donors. Even Joe, who was usually pretty level-headed, insisted that he’d seen Alberto in broad daylight once, walking in the wilderness beyond the town.
“Thank you for finding him,” Holly said, giving me a slightly less excitable but no less sincere hug of her own.
“What’ll you have?” Joe asked. “I’m going to buy you a drink.”
“You really don’t have to do that,” I began, but he cut me off with a wave of his big hand, so I let him order a rum and Coke. Just one drink, to make him happy.
“How did you manage to find him?” Rosie asked. She had one arm around her son, and now she ruffled his hair. “The little devil was well and truly off the beaten track, he tells me.”
“Mum!” He pushed her hand away, but he was smiling.
They all looked at me expectantly.
“There was too much rain out there to pick up a trail,” Joe said.
“If you have some secret way of tracking down missing children, I want to know.” Holly rubbed her hugely pregnant stomach meaningfully. “It could come in handy one day soon.”
“Just got lucky.” I took a swig of rum and Coke, and felt the alcohol burn a warm trail all the way down my throat.
“Really?” Rosie looked doubtful. “The way Mr Steele told it, you left the track and went haring off like a bloodhound on a scent.”
Damn the man. I glanced across and found him looking back at me. I lowered my eyes to the bubbles in my drink.
“How did you know where to start looking?” Rosie was persistent. “It was nowhere near where the boys left their bags.”
“Just a hunch.”
“Well, thank goodness for hunches, then.” Rosie still didn’t look convinced, but she gave me a quick, fierce hug. “Thanks again. I’d better take him home. Too much excitement for a school night.”
Cody hugged his dad and Holly, then he and Rosie went over to say goodbye to his grandparents. Steele too, though he didn’t get any hugs. Fireshapers just weren’t the cuddly type. When they’d gone the fireshaper in question glanced my way again.
Holly nudged me. “He keeps looking at you. I think he fancies you.”
“Oh, shush. That’s the pregnancy hormones talking. You just want everyone to make babies.”
She laughed. “I do not. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. Sore back, swollen ankles, heartburn. I’m living on three hours’ sleep a night and I have a stomach the size of an elephant. And shifting just makes it worse. It’s torture.”
“Never mind. Not long to go now.” She was due in three more weeks. “Then Joe can help and you can get some more sleep.”
“I’m helping now,” Joe protested. “Who do you think rubs her feet, and her back, and brings her snacks when she can’t be bothered getting out of her chair?”
She whacked his arm. “Can’t be bothered? You try heaving twelve extra kilos around with you all day and see how easy it is to get up.”
> He grinned. “You don’t know how I suffer, Lexi. All that back rubbing is damaging my delicate hands.”
He held out his hands for my inspection. They were nearly the size of dinner plates. Joe was a big guy, solid as well as tall. It would be hard to imagine anything less delicate.
“You, suffer? Your wife spoils you rotten.”
“It’s all an act,” he said solemnly. “You should see how she treats me when we’re alone.”
Holly rolled her eyes at me. She barely came up to his shoulder. Even pregnant, she probably still only weighed half what her husband did.
“I imagine she’s terrifying,” I said dryly.
We chatted for a while, and Joe bought me another drink, though I’d only meant to stay for one. They were both good company, though a little more subdued than normal. Holly’s pretty face took on a grim look every time the Mayor’s braying laugh rose above the noise in the pub, though she kept up such a flow of chatter that no one who didn’t know her well would have realised there was anything wrong. It made me want to walk right over and punch him in his smug face. He’d kicked Holly out on the flimsiest pretext so he could give the job to his girlfriend’s niece. That might come back to bite him in the arse when the kid screwed it up, and none of us would be upset.
They were my kind of people, Joe and Holly, and I hated to see them so down. Friends had been few enough in my life that I treasured every one I had. Even Syl liked them, prepared to overlook the fact that they were wolves. We’d shared a pizza and a bottle of wine on many a Friday night since we’d moved in. No wine for Holly, of course. I’d been forced to drink her share.
The noise in the pub had reached a dull roar and my glass was nearly empty again when Holly nodded behind me, a gleam of mischief in her eye. I turned to find Steele at my elbow.
“Hi, I’m Jacob Steele,” he said, leaning across me to shake hands with Joe. A wave of heat came off his body as he brushed against me, and I moved back ever so slightly. “We didn’t meet properly before.”
“Joe Kincaid, and this is my wife, Holly. Thank you for your help in finding the boys.”
Stolen Magic (Shadows of the Immortals Book 1) Page 4
