He looked nonplussed, but didn’t protest. He climbed off the bed on the opposite side from me so that it remained between us, which I appreciated to some degree. After what he had just done and said, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted him near me. As I watched, the endearing brown of his eyes bled away. His pupils and irises changed shape, the color spreading out over the white of his eye. At the same time there were other changes going on. His teeth were becoming sharper, longer. His jaws elongated slightly, forming more of a muzzle than any person could have. As fur prickled up through his skin and muscle and bones slid and changed shape beneath his skin, I had to look away. I’d seen enough to convince me that it was either real or I was insane, but there were some things that just didn’t feel right to watch. The beautiful man I’d just been in bed with was obliterated in moments, replaced by a massive animal that could tear me apart accidentally.
With great reluctance, I looked at him again. The tiger sat on the other side of the bed, very carefully still. That was thoughtful of him, since any movement on his part would probably have had me peeing myself and running for the door at the same time.
I crossed my arms, hugging myself. “Can you change back?”
I had never been much of a cat person, so I wasn’t sure if I could read his body language accurately, but he looked reluctant. A few moments passed and then his massive head bobbed up and down once. I made myself watch the entire transformation this time. It was a little easier to watch than before, to see the human come swimming up through the tiger. It was also a much slower change the second time and when he was done he slumped forward on the floor, barely able to keep himself supported on his hands.
“Do you believe me?” he asked, his voice strained.
Logic or thought had nothing to do with what I did next. It was pure instinctive empathy. Sliding off of the bed on his side, I wrapped my arms around him to offer some support as he sagged beneath the weight of exhaustion.
“Changing like that is really hard for you?” I asked.
“It’s an energy thing. If I shift once and then hours later shift back it’s fine, but if I do it back to back...” He trailed off as I helped him back onto the bed.
“I guess that makes as much sense as anything. It’s not as if what you just did should be physically possible.” My eyes moved over his body, which was as beautiful and human as ever. I couldn’t say how much an adult male tiger weighed off of the top of my head, but I suspected it was quite a bit more than Luke did. That left me with only two possible options.
I was hallucinating all of this or else it was some phenomenon no one understood.
Magic seemed like a good way to describe it, but as an engineer I automatically recoiled at the thought. No, there was no such thing as magic. There was some conservation of energy going on here, something fueling the change and shifting mass around, but it wasn’t magic. A bizarre and convoluted explanation that involved quantum mechanics and the multiverse sounded appealing to my overwrought mind. Much better than magic.
Hallucination remained an option as well.
My hand stroked his cheek as I took note of how feverishly warm he felt against me. The room had felt warm to me moments before from the exertion of sex, but the current temperature spike had nothing to do with that. I could hear the air conditioner clicking on, humming as it worked to pump cool air into the room, and knew for certain that it wasn’t just me. It was him.
I helped him lay back against the pillows. Once he no longer had to fight to keep himself upright in some capacity he smiled in relief, relaxing.
“Talk to me?” I suggested softly.
“What do you want to hear?”
“Everything. You said something about shifters in my family, but there aren’t any. I’ve never seen anything like you before.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. It would have been generations back. The scent of it is faint on you, but unmistakable.” He reached out to me again and stroked his hand over my hair. I laid down beside him to put my head on the pillow next to his. “Most shifters can’t freely interbreed with humans, but some can. The rats and the mice are close enough to humanity somehow that they can do it. The children are sort of...somewhere in between. They can’t shift, but they can interbreed with any shifter.”
My brows drew together, lips pursed in a faint frown. “Are you saying I’m some kind of half-rat baby machine?”
Luke laughed. “That’s...not how I’d put it, no. I think your shifter ancestor was probably a mouse and you’re no more of a ’baby machine’ than any other fertile female. You just have more options for the potential fathers.”
“Is that why you were interested in me?” There was a hint of ice in my question.
He seemed to recognize how fragile the situation was, to his credit. He looked embarrassed as he pushed himself up carefully on one elbow. “I’m interested in you because I want you. That there’s the potential we could have kids together is a nice bonus.”
I wasn’t entirely sure that I believed him. “You could have kids with another weretiger, couldn’t you?”
“I could, if I met one I was compatible with. I haven’t met any other than my parents, though, and as far as I know we’re incredibly rare now. Neither of them had living relatives. I suppose I could go back to India and hunt around for a mate, but...Dawn, why? I already found someone I want right here. We could have everything together. The family we’ve both always wanted.”
I’d heard sad stories from my friends before. They met a man and had a one night stand and thought it meant something. He was so sweet, so romantic, surely it was the start of love? But it wasn’t and I’d always thought they were fools for getting swept up so quickly. Now I had Luke here talking about our future children when we hadn’t even spent the full night together yet. To call it overwhelming would be an understatement.
“I need to head back to my own room. I need to think about all of this, Luke.” I kissed his cheek and drew back with an apologetic look. “It’s a lot to process.”
There was frustration in his face, but he didn’t argue with me. He gave a short, small nod. “It is a lot to think about. I’m sorry. I had wanted to lead into it all slowly.”
“I think it was better this way, really. All the cards are on the table now, right?”
“I guess.” He didn’t sound very convinced.
I got dressed, not bothering with the tattered remains of my underwear. Now I knew how he had sliced them open so easily, at least. I glanced over toward him while putting on my shoes. His eyes could change while the rest of him stayed human, making it reasonable to assume the same went for his claws.
Once I was dressed and as ready as I could be to return to my room, I went to the door without a word. What more could I say in the face of all of this?”
“Dawn.” His voice made me stop. I turned to look toward him. “I wanted to date. I wanted to see how compatible we are before I ever even spoke of this. Don’t think I’m expecting all or nothing right now.”
I was quiet for a moment, then gave a small nod. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Chapter 5
Sunday at the conference was a short day. The panels and discussions were all crowded into the morning, with the vast majority of people leaving by noon. A very few people stayed through Sunday night and flew back on Monday so that they had some extra time to enjoy Vegas, but the vast majority of us didn’t have that luxury.
I only barely caught sight of Luke all morning. Every time I saw a flash of him from a distance my heart would stop and I’d feel a gnawing ache inside of me. He had spoken about humans as something that he wasn’t, I had to remind myself. My ex-husband was a monster in the everyday normal sense of being an asshole, but Luke was a literal one. He could change into a massive apex predator and likely rip people’s heads off with as little effort as it took a housecat to decapitate a bird.
These were all the things I told myself over and over again as reasons to stay away from him, but they did noth
ing for my need. Not just the physical desire for him, but something that went deeper. He had always been someone whose company I enjoyed. He understood me in ways no man ever had. What were occasional claws and fur in comparison to that?
We shared a flight home, but he was sitting several rows ahead of me and on the opposite side of the aisle. I could see the back of his head through the entire flight, but he never turned around to look at me.
“How was Vegas?” a voice called out cheerfully when I stepped outside from the baggage claim. My best friend Sofia Leones had stopped her car at the curb, timing it just perfectly for when I made it through the airport. I suspected she had been circling until I texted her that I had landed, since no one’s timing could be that perfect.
Seeing her was like an instant return to reality and I grinned, hurrying over with my carry-on wheeling behind me. We stuffed my carry-on and laptop case in the back of her little VW Beetle and then I slid into the passenger seat beside her.
“What happened to your neck?” Sofia asked while I was buckling my seat-belt.
My hand automatically moved to cup the bite mark at the back of my neck. I’d kept my hair down to hide it, but it must have shifted out of position when I leaned to get the belt. My mind started working to find some possible explanation other than the truth.
Sofia had been through this with me before, though it had been during far more nefarious circumstances. Her eyes narrowed, lips pressed into an angry line. That I had to think about the answer instead of having an explanation ready made it all too clear to her that I was planning on lying.
“Did that shithead track you down out there?” she demanded.
“No! No. This isn’t from Chris.” That much was true, at least. I took a deep breath and let it out shakily as I lowered my hand into my lap. “Nobody abused me this time, Sofia. Do you remember when you went to my department Christmas party with me? My co-worker Luke?”
She had to stop looking at me so she could drive, but even in profile I could see her face remained stoically concerned. “You just got out of one nightmare relationship. You don’t need a new one.”
“It’s not like that,” I assured her quickly. “Really. Luke isn’t Chris. We hooked up and got a little carried away. It’s just an overly enthusiastic hickey.”
“Hickeys don’t have teeth marks and scabs.”
She had me there. I fell silent for a moment, thinking over that. Was he dangerous? Would he hurt me like Chris had? The physical abuse had never been as bad as the emotional abuse, which had been so difficult to explain to anyone. Chris would play these little mind games with me where he’d convince me I had asked to be hurt, that it was my idea all along. I found an article once that described it as “gaslighting“, in honor of a movie by the same name where a woman was convinced she was insane because someone else kept adjusting the gaslights in her house and then swearing nothing had changed. That was the perfect description of what he had done. Nothing was ever his fault in Chris’s worldview and I was just asking to be hurt because I hadn’t run away, even though he threatened to track me down if I ever tried to leave. There was no winning with him.
I shuddered at the memories, feeling tears prick behind my eyelids.
“Luke asked me what I wanted every step of the way, Sofia. I promise. He didn’t trick me or push me or get me drunk or any of that. He gave me what I wanted and I did want this.”
The blood had been more than I was expecting, but now I knew how it had happened. He must have been so out of control that he couldn’t keep his form in check any longer. Human teeth couldn’t slice through skin like that, but a tiger’s could. Just like his eyes, just like his claws. Even in my shock over seeing the blood, I’d enjoyed him biting me. Knowing it was a sign of how unrestrained I’d made him made me enjoy it even more in retrospect.
“You sure about that? Chris made you think you ‘asked for it’ too.”
“Very sure. I appreciate your concern, but I’ve been through therapy, I’ve filled up journals trying to figure things out, and I know the difference between when I really want something versus being manipulated.” Figuring out what I wanted was harder than I thought it would be, but Luke had helped me answer those questions for myself.
Sofia shot me a look out of the corner of her eye, then sighed and refocused on the traffic. “Okay then. I’m sorry for pushing so much, but I just worry. I remember who you were before you met Chris and I remember the Stepford Wife treatment he gave you. It was like my friend had died. We’re finally getting you back again and I fear losing you all over.”
Hearing it put like that filled me with an odd mix of guilt and abject love. I gave her a pained smile, then leaned over to rest my head against her shoulder, since I couldn’t really hug her while she drove. “I’m not going anywhere this time.”
She tilted her head so she could rest hers against mine briefly. I reflected on how incredibly lucky I was to have a best friend who had stood by me in my darkest moments, always offering a hand to pull me back into the light whenever I was ready. The truth was that I had been pretty terrible to her at times while trying to justify my fucked up marriage, but she had forgiven me and never given up on trying to help.
“So when do you want me to come over to help you with your sink?” I asked.
Sofia had bought her first home just a few months before. It had seemed like an amazing deal, especially for a decent neighborhood in San Francisco, but the reasons for the good deal had become quickly apparent. The roof leaked and there were plumbing problems, to start with. It also wasn’t well-insulated—if it was actually insulated at all—and on cool, windy nights it felt like the cold was radiating straight through the walls.
“Do you think you could do it tomorrow after work? I imagine you’re exhausted after your weekend.” There was a hint of a leer in the second sentence that made me laugh.
“Definitely. I’ll just swing by the apartment to get Mr. Beetlegles and he and Leggy can have a play date while we work.” I paused, smiling at the thought of my dog. He was some sort of Chihuahua mix with a breed or two that had left him with an underbite to make a bulldog proud and a tendency to fart uncontrollably if he got even a bite of human food. He was probably the ugliest little dog I had ever seen and it was love at first sight when I saw him shivering there in the animal shelter. “How is Mr. Beetlegles?”
“Good. I thought about bringing him with me when I came to pick you up, but I worried about how he’d handle waiting in the car. He and Legolas really enjoyed each other’s company while you were gone, but I’ll be happy to only have to pick up half the poop.”
“Thank you again for watching him,” I said.
“No problem. What kind of auntie would I be if I didn’t pamper your furbaby for you?”
Furbaby. Before the term had always seemed like a joke regarding just how attached some people would get to their pets, but it took on a new meaning in my mind as I considered what Luke had told me. If I was with him, if we had kids, they wouldn’t be human. I’d have furbabies in a strangely literal sense. The thought didn’t horrify or disgust me exactly. I was just left lost in thought as I pondered over what it would all mean.
I was fairly quiet the rest of the way home, but Sofia didn’t complain. Occasionally I’d lapse into thoughtful silences and I always had, so she was used to it.
We said our goodbyes when she dropped me off and I went in to deal with a very excited little dog. Five pounds of mutt bounced around me and off of my legs, too worked up to hold still long enough for me to pet him. He eventually tired himself out and collapsed into a little heap on the floor, though his eyes continued to watch me as though I might disappear at any moment.
I unpacked, put in a load of laundry, made myself a sandwich, and then sat down at the table. I stared at the phone for a moment before a bit of orange caught my eye and I raised my eyes to the wall. An art print of a woman with a blazing ocean sunset behind her stared back at me. I’d had it for a year and half, but hadn�
�t actually framed it and put it up on my wall until I moved into the apartment.
When I had first seen it, it was when I was at the Fillmore Street Jazz Festival. Alone, though Chris had promised to meet me there. Every time I called or texted him, he had some new excuse about why he was late, which made me assume he was sleeping around on me again. While I waited for him, I started wandering the exhibitor booths and looking at the art on display.
The original painting of the woman had caught my eye, then. With a canvas almost six feet tall, the figure on it had been nearly life-sized. She had dark skin and a piece of leather wrapped around her to hide her nudity. Closer inspection revealed the leather was the skin of a seal. Waves lapped at her feet as she stood there at the meeting place of the sea and the land. The sunset behind her cast most of her body in shadows, but the painting captured the moment as she began turning her face away so that one cheek was bathed in golden light. Her body looked ready to twist back toward the sea and flee the land entirely.
“Dawn?”
I had turned away from the painting to see Luke standing there, somewhat surprised to see me. I imagine my face mirrored his. The size of the city aside, the jazz festival itself was huge. Accidentally running into anyone I knew there was rare.
He came closer, his eyes narrowing as he read the description on the painting, then he had smiled with comprehension that mystified me. “The Selkie. Appropriate.”
I tore my eyes away from him to look at the painting again. “What’s a selkie?”
“A little like mermaids. They’re seals in the water, but they can take off their seal skin on land and appear as human beings,” he said.
My eyes moved to the painted figure’s face. The artist had managed to perfectly capture a look of pained longing in her eyes. “She doesn’t seem to be all that happy about being on land.”
“No, she wouldn’t be. I assume this is based on the legend where if a human man steals a selkie maiden’s seal skin, he can force her to marry him. In the story I’ve heard before, the selkie bride was kept by her husband for many years until she found her hidden skin and fled.”
Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle) Page 4
