The hot shower was bliss. I washed my hair twice, scrubbed my face with the bath poof, and cleaned the rest of my body head to toe. I scraped mud and who-knows-what from under my nails and tried not to pay attention to it as it all went down the drain. I also had to scrape under my toenails.
When I was done, I found Slate fully dressed in the living room. I wore my robe, and for once, I felt less dressed than her.
“How was the hunt for you?” she asked, looking at me intently as I sat on the couch.
“Good. Great, really. I felt fantastic.” The moment I said it, I knew with every inch of me it was true. I’d hunted, killed, and eaten another living being, and all was right with the world. I shuddered as my human brain caught up.
Slate smiled, reading my expression. “It’s tempting, isn’t it? You didn’t want to come back.”
“No.”
She stood and stretched. It lifted the top of her track suit, and I caught the faded side of her tattoo.
“Five years,” she said.
I was confused. As she sat back down, her face had an oddly serene quality to it. She closed her eyes.
“I was five years in the wild. I had a pack. I had a mate. We had pups.”
Her eyes opened, and they were amber once again. Two blinks, and they were brown. Her glow was replaced with her usual dark expression.
“The winter is cruel.”
I wanted to ask what she meant, but I also didn’t want to pry, so I changed the subject. “So, about this guy we’re after. I was thinking I’d ask around the club I saw in my memory. It’s a good place to start.”
Slate nodded and walked to the door. She looked back before disappearing around the corner, and I saw another strange expression.
She looked relieved.
21
The wind rustled the pine trees outside my shift manager’s office, and I really wished I could jump through the plate glass window and escape.
“You understand I’ll have to place a reprimand in your permanent file, Dreama.”
I nodded. At least she had enough sense to realize I was under a lot of stress that day. Bleeding from my fingertips had probably helped.
“I’ll have to do random monitors on your calls for a few weeks. Standard procedure. How are your hands?”
I looked down. Despite the stress of being reprimanded, I was cool. What was standard procedure when someone tore out their supervisor’s throat?
“Fine, thank you,” I said. “Probably just a nasty paper cut. I’ve always been a bit of a bleeder.”
It was a complete lie, but she bought it.
“Okay, Dreama. Go on out to the floor and I’ll check in with you later today so we can work a call together, okay?”
Working a call together was code for monitoring the behavior of the operator when they did something stupid, like suggesting a customer go fuck themselves to donkey porn. I guess I couldn’t blame her.
I made it back to my desk past the sea of prying eyes that peeked over cubicles and tried to be nonchalant about it. If I was close to making any more friends at work, Mister “Women Don’t Know Anything” took care of that. Or maybe it was the blood. Whatever.
I put on my headset, signed in, and waited. My first call of the day came in not long after. Cable support waited for no one.
“It’s a great day at Woodspring Communications. This is Dreama, how may I help you?”
“Yes, I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”
The voice sounded not only familiar, but I could swear I was getting an echo from my other ear…the one without the headset.
Oh, shit. Not today. Any day but today.
“I need to know how to let a girl I like know my feelings for her. Do flowers work?”
He was directly behind me. I took off my headset and turned. “Hello, Charlie.”
“Dream a little dream of me,” he warbled completely off-key. He held a ridiculously huge bouquet of the gaudiest flowers I’d ever seen.
“Charlie, this is where I work.”
“Yep, took me a while to figure out which office, but once I did, it was smooth sailing.”
I started toward my shift manager’s office, but he blocked the only way out of my cubicle.
“Can you wait here for just a minute?” I asked. “I have to ask before I leave the floor.”
Judging by his disgusting puppy-dog eyes, he didn’t seem interested in letting me leave. My stress rose, and with it, I started feeling hot. I directed the heat into my hands as I lightly nudged him away. At least, I thought I touched him lightly. He staggered back like I’d punched him and looked confused.
“Just a minute, Charlie. Then we’ll talk.”
He recovered quickly, perhaps because he realized all the lookie-loos in the office were trained on him.
I rushed to my shift manager’s office, keeping Charlie in sight the whole time. I knocked, then barged in and shut the door behind me.
“Dreama, is something wrong?”
“Yes. He’s here.”
“Who?”
“Do you remember that complaint I filed a few months back? The guy who got a little too friendly over the phone?”
She backed her chair to the corner and dug through her filing cabinet. After some rifling through a manila folder with my name on it, she said, “Oh yes. Charles Filmore? Creepy, but nothing stalker yet?”
“He’s graduated to full-on stalker, Marie.”
She poked her head out of the office door. Charlie must have waved because Marie gave him a tense smile.
“I’ll call security,” she said.
I don’t know why I did what I did next, but I’ve regretted it ever since.
“No, wait, let me talk to him. Maybe I can get him to leave without calling in the big guns.”
Marie looked at me skeptically, one hand still on her desk phone. “You’re sure?”
“Just five minutes. If he’s not gone by then, you can call in the cavalry.”
Her hands went up. “Your stalker, your call.”
“Thank you so much, Marie. I’m sorry I’ve been so inconsistent lately.”
She shook her head and shooed me out. I walked over to Charlie and lowered my voice.
“Maybe we should talk in private.”
His eyebrows shot up. He smiled and followed me toward the front of the office, past the receptionist, and out into the parking lot. I made sure we were around the corner from prying eyes.
“Wanted to get me alone, eh?” he asked. “I knew there was more between us, Dreama.”
I didn’t pull any punches. He wouldn’t understand subtlety.
“What the fuck are you doing at my work? Did I not make it exceedingly clear to you on the phone that I had no interest in you whatsoever?”
He looked confused for a second before his confident grin returned. “I just figured you couldn’t flirt with me during an official call.”
I crossed my arms and glared. “I’m seeing someone, Charlie. A cop.”
He jerked like I’d actually punched him. The dopey smile went to a frown, then a scowl. “How could you? After all we had?”
I rolled my eyes at that. “Charlie, you’re delusional. I do tech support for your crappy cable box. I swear, the thing breaks down so much, I was beginning to wonder if you broke it on purpose just to talk to me.”
He closed the gap between us like he wanted to hug me. “It’s okay, Dreama. I forgive you. We can work through this.”
I cut him off with a shove, and he squeaked. He was close enough to the wall that I’d pinned him with the palm of my hand. I wasn’t pressing hard, but he acted like he couldn’t breathe.
“Drea…ma. You’re hurting…me. Let me…down.”
My head tilted in a very Slate-like gesture, and I looked down. Charlie was suspended six inches off the ground by my one hand.
I yelped and let him go. Looked like I had a long way to go keeping my anger in check. In my defense, this guy was the Stalkergizer Bunny.
/> Charlie recovered, picked up the flowers he’d dropped when I pinned him, and tried again.
“It’s okay, really. I like a little resistance. Makes the heart grow fonder.”
The phrase disintegrated what little control I had left. I pinned him to the wall again, much higher this time, using his crotch for leverage. I easily supported his weight with the heel of my palm, leaving four fingers free for shredding. Heat surged from my back and into my hands and face. He looked down in terror as my fingers split and grew long, black claws. I tapped my middle finger-claw on his zipper.
“Listen, psycho. No means no. Now get the fuck out of my life. If you tell anyone about this, I will hunt you down and make sure you’re still alive when I eat you, piece by piece. Perhaps starting with this!”
I punctuated it with a poke to his crotch. I heard fabric tearing. My voice had come out husky but not lisped. I’d somehow managed to change my mouth without letting my muzzle extend. I couldn’t imagine what he thought when he saw a row of long pointed teeth filling my dainty little mouth.
Charlie’s eyes were pale saucers. His mouth moved, but nothing came out. I pressed my claw in a little further.
“Are we clear?”
He nodded, and I let him down. He fell to the ground in a heap, grabbing his crotch. Seeing him in that pathetic state cleared my mind a bit, and I felt my hands and face return to normal.
“Thank you for choosing Woodspring Communications. Now get the fuck out.”
Even in my normal voice, I didn’t have to ask him twice.
22
My monitored calls went fine, and I left a mostly carefree person that afternoon. PJ caught up with me as I was leaving.
“Stalker boy finally made the break for the big-time, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
She gave me a hug that was probably meant as reassuring. I just felt suffocated.
“Do I see a restraining order in your future?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think he’ll be a problem anymore.”
She laughed. “Why’s that, you beat him up?”
I stopped walking. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing, ho. Geez. Wait…did you beat him up?”
“No! No, I just maybe slapped him around a little to make a point.”
“Look at you, a regular crusader for women’s lib. Congrats.”
When we got to the parking lot, I pulled her aside. “Were you with me the weekend this happened?” I patted my back.
“You know, I’ve been looking into that. I don’t remember a thing from that weekend. I must have spent the whole time plastered to Hell. The bartender at Thermal said he didn’t see either of us all night.”
“I think we might have been at a comedy club.”
PJ made a face. “What? What makes you think that? Did you remember something?”
I thought back to the whirlwind of images Slate had torn out of me. “Only a little. It’s foggy. I might be totally wrong.”
“I think I’d have remembered sitting through that kind of torture,” she said.
I rubbed my lower back. “Yeah, me too.”
“Okay, Dree, point taken. Are we trolling comedy clubs tonight?”
“Umm, maybe. I want to bring Alan.”
“Well, shit, that means I need a date too.”
“He won’t be a date. More of a bodyguard.”
“Have you told him how you got that tattoo?”
I realized I hadn’t discussed my ink at all with Alan. He probably just assumed I’d had it for years. Obviously, it didn’t bother him. Would it bother him if I told him it had been done against my will? Probably.
“Okay, maybe not Alan. What about your uncle Connor?”
The look PJ shot me was not friendly.
“What?” I asked, “He’s a pretty stocky guy, and he knows his side of town better than we do.”
“Yeah, Dree, but I don’t usually take him along on social outings. He’s like fifty.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, “No bodyguard. But the second we smell anything fishy, we need to leave. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow with the rest of my body tattooed.”
“What about that friend of yours? The antisocial one?”
I hadn’t even considered Slate. She could definitely hold her own in a fight.
“That’s perfect, PJ. I’ll call her.”
PJ nodded and started off toward her car. “Cool. Leave around ten?”
“Okay,” I said.
She opened her car door and leaned against the frame. “We are going to have some drinks, right? I can’t go through a night of bad stand-up sober.”
“Sure thing.”
With a nod, she took off, and I was left wondering how I could get in touch with Slate. We hadn’t exactly exchanged phone numbers. Was she watching me right now? I looked around in a sudden bout of paranoia, but I didn’t know what I expected to see. She could be invisible when she wanted to.
I climbed into my car and headed home. As it turned out, I didn’t have to search very hard for Slate. She was waiting at my door when I got home, covered in blood.
23
I let Slate in immediately, and she walked to my kitchen sink. She didn’t seem bothered by the dried blood on her knuckles or her swollen lip.
“What happened?” I asked.
She washed her hands and came back into the living room, hands on her hips. “I was busy today.”
“Obviously. Did you find something?”
“He has changed clubs since he attacked you.”
Wait. Changed clubs? That meant…
“You knew where I was that night? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know for sure until today. I was following him before you, but I wasn’t paying attention to where he picked you up.”
“Why not?”
She looked annoyed. “I was following his scent. The trail led where it led.”
“So you know where he is?”
“I believe so. His former employer was—less than enthusiastic to tell me where he went.”
She rubbed her knuckles, and I saw there were no wounds. Over the course of our conversation, her lip had recovered as well. It was barely bruised now.
“Do we all heal that fast?” I asked.
She nodded. “As does he.”
“Did you get his name?”
Slate grumbled, and it came out as a growl. “The Amazing Lupin.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s the strangest name for a comic I’ve ever heard.”
“He’s not a comic,” she said.
With a name like “The Amazing Lupin”, he certainly wasn’t a lounge singer. “What does he do, juggle?”
“He is a hypnotist.”
Bingo. Things suddenly made a little more sense. I’d always heard hypnotists couldn’t make you do anything you didn’t want, though. Looking back on the memories I had of that night, I had to blush and admit that I had wanted it plenty. At least the first part.
“PJ is coming with us tonight,” I said.
Slate’s hands returned to her hips, and she tilted her head at me. “I’d advise against that.”
“Why?”
“She is not one of us. If we have to change, she won’t understand. She will run, get in the way.”
It was a fair point. Still, I wanted someone there I felt halfway comfortable with. “If it gets to that point, we can ditch her.”
Slate was firm. “She should not come. We are hunting tonight.”
“Yeah, about that. I still don’t know if I can kill him.”
She growled again, and stalked into the kitchen.
“There’s a big difference between an animal and a person, Slate.”
“Not so much with us,” she said, “With him.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
I couldn’t explain it to her. She had obviously killed people
before. I had seen it in her memories. But it was one thing to kill for food, to kill something that didn’t talk, didn’t love.
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