Second Nature

by Jae

  "If she did, she didn't do it by e-mail," Leigh said. "Allison pointed out things like run-on sentences, missing hyphens, or violations of point of view in her e-mails, but she mostly didn't comment on the content of the story."

  "Mostly?" There was no room for doubts with that kind of investigation.

  "Once or twice, the beta reader suggested that Ms. Price should take the story in another direction. She tried to get her to change a few things that were too close to the truth, but it seems this human is pretty stubborn." It sounded like a compliment. Stubbornness was a common trait in cat-shifters, and up to a certain point, it wasn't seen as a bad thing. "She seems to know exactly where she wants to go with the story."

  Yeah, Griffin thought moodily. Right into her grave. "Then I need you to get us access to Ms. Price's computer," she said.

  "I'm way ahead of you. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy. Ms. Price did all the right things to make her computer secure. I had to —"

  "I get it," Griffin said. "You were a good little cat and now want your back scratched. I'll do it later, when I don't have the council and my tas breathing down my neck. So what did you find?"

  "Great Hunter! If your mother is anything like you, no wonder the dads didn't want anything to do with her beyond that one night." Leigh snarled.

  Anger and fierce protectiveness rushed Griffin. She rolled around and got up onto her knees. The plastic of her cell phone crunched as she tightened her fingers around it. Slowly, her Saru training smoothed the rough edges of her anger, and she loosened her grip before she could destroy the fragile internal parts of the cell phone. "Who says they didn't?" she asked, her voice dangerously soft. "It was my mother who didn't want the pride to run her life."

  A moment of silence lingered between them.

  Let it go, Griffin told herself. Nothing good will come of dwelling on the past. At least Leigh was frank and straightforward, unlike Kylin, who was trying to draw her back into the family with clever cat manipulations. "What did you find on Marjorie Price's computer?" she asked. "And please leave out the detailed step-by-step report of every keystroke you did. I just want the results."

  Leigh cleared her throat, not once but twice, taking so long that Griffin was tempted to ask her if she was planning on coughing up a hair ball. "I hacked her e-mail account," Leigh finally said. "And I went through all the files on her hard drive and looked at the Web sites she visits."

  "And?" Griffin asked.

  "Well, either she's doing research for a very interesting story, or she's a poker-playing, cat-loving sex addict. If she weren't human, I'd ask for an introduction." Leigh chuckled, their earlier fight apparently forgotten.

  Forgetting wasn't so easy for Griffin. She was in no mood for joking around. "Leigh..."

  "What?" Leigh asked. "She spends a lot of time in online poker rooms, and she has bookmarked a lot of sites about zoology, veterinary medicine, big cats, and casino resorts in Michigan. And there's this Web archive with fan fiction. Some of it is pretty hot, and you won't even guess what kind of stories she —"

  "Leigh," Griffin interrupted. That wasn't the information she wanted. "Found anything to do with her new story?"

  "Well, the manuscript or what she has written so far is on her computer, but we already have that. She hasn't written more than a few paragraphs in the last few days," Leigh answered.

  Right. Griffin remembered the "unfaithful muse" Marjorie Price had mentioned in her e-mail. At least it would give her some time for her investigation. "Anything else of interest? Don't most writers do some kind of outline that tells them what to write next? Or at least take notes while they do research?"

  "Well, if Ms. Price does, she's one of the old-fashioned writers who does it longhand." Derisive disbelief colored Leigh's words. Clearly, Leigh as a computer expert thought this method of data capture was just one step above chiseling words into stone tablets. "There's nothing on her computer that gives us any clue as to where her inside knowledge about us Wrasa is coming from," Leigh said. "If anyone is providing her with information, he or she is not doing it via the Internet. Ms. Price doesn't use chats or instant messaging, just e-mail."

  No chat, no IM. I'll have one of our people on the police force check out her phone records. Griffin scratched her chin. "And there's nothing interesting in any of the e-mails?"

  "A few e-mails from her mother, who seems worried about her lack of social life; the rest is all somehow connected to her writing — fan mail, feedback from test readers, and exchanges with other authors." She heard Leigh click through a few documents at the other end of the line. "At least now I know where the 'J' in her pseudonym is coming from. She signs all her e-mails to her mother with 'Jorie.' It's a lot cuter than Marjorie; that's for sure."

  "And the 'W'?" Griffin asked.

  "No idea. Maybe another nickname."

  "Hmm. Nothing else?" All that snooping and getting Leigh involved and it had all been in vain?

  "I sent you the text of one of the e-mails she sent her agent," Leigh said.

  She has an agent? Either being a romance writer paid better than she'd been aware of, or J.W. Price was a more successful writer than she had realized. "What did the e-mail say?" she asked. She would read it later, but after a long day her eyes would protest the fine print of the e-mail.

  "She said that the new book will be completely different from all her other books and that she's aware she's taking a big risk, but after a revelation, she just had to write this book," Leigh said. "Sounds as if she knew how dangerous writing this book would be. And her agent knew it too. He wrote back that under these circumstances, he couldn't represent her anymore."

  "Check out that agent and his e-mail exchanges with Ms. Price," Griffin said.

  "I already did that," Leigh answered.

  She's good at her job; I have to give her that.

  "But it seems they usually talked on the phone, so it's another dead end," Leigh added.

  Griffin threw her large body onto the bed. No good leads and a writer who says she knows the book will be a big risk. Up until now, she had assumed that Jorie Price had gotten a few facts right by mere chance. But now she wasn't so sure. It sounded as if Jorie knew exactly what she was doing. She was determined to write this book — and Griffin was determined to stop her.

  CHAPTER 5

  THIS WOULD BE A lot more comfortable in my cat form, Griffin grumbled. She was lying in wait in the small forest next to Jorie Price's house. Branches dug into her side, and the ground had never felt so hard when she had settled down to wait for prey while she was in her animal form.

  She didn't have a choice, though. A ligerlike creature ambling up to Jorie's house in the middle of the day wouldn't escape notice in the small town, and Griffin didn't want to waste any time changing back once Jorie was finally gone.

  The front door opened.

  Griffin ducked behind a shrub of wild blackberries. Eyesight wasn't necessary anyway. She breathed in the scent that the wind brought to her. A mental picture of a stroll through the forest in springtime flashed through her mind. The unique scent let her know that it was Jorie Price who was leaving the house.

  Jorie got into a battered-looking car and drove off, probably running some errands before meeting Griffin for coffee. This was Griffin's chance to take a closer look at the house. She wasn't proud of invading another person's territory in this way, but she accepted it as necessary. Searching Jorie's computer hadn't amounted to anything, so they needed to do this the old-fashioned way.

  Her thigh muscles, which had been ready to pounce for the last hour, stretched powerfully, propelling her toward the house much faster than most humans could have gotten there. She pressed her big body against the side of the house and listened.

  Nothing.

  Everything was quiet inside the house and in the neighborhood.

  Looking left and right to make sure no one was watching, she took her lock pick kit from her pocket. Slowly, she inserted a pick into the keyhole while applying press
ure with the tension wrench.

  A moment went by. Two. Then she felt and heard a slight click as the first pin fell into position. Yeah! This is a cat's job. Griffin had always enjoyed the challenge of picking locks and liked that she needed all her considerable patience and her sense of touch to get the door open.

  She listened attentively, but instead of the second click, she heard the crunching of gravel.

  "Hello?" It was the voice of a human male. He was shouting through the hedge that separated Jorie's house from that of her neighbor. His steps were coming closer. "Anybody here? Are you searching for Ms. Price?"

  The urge to spin around and lunge at the human like a startled tiger defending its kill threatened to overcome Griffin. Then she shoved her tools back into her pocket and sprinted around the corner before the human could appear on her side of the hedge and really see her. Well, obviously he has already seen you, or he wouldn't know that you aren't Jorie. She realized that he was probably the next-door neighbor. He must have caught glimpses of her through the window of his own house. Her body had covered what she had been doing, but he had still come to see what she wanted. That damn small-town curiosity.

  In two big leaps, Griffin reached the back of the house, determined not to let the nosy neighbor see her face. She cursed herself for getting caught like some inexperienced cub who was doing this for the first time. Sure, the neighbor had been downwind, and she had been focused on picking the lock, but it was still humiliating. This assignment is not off to a good start. Jennings wouldn't like it. He was a perfectionist — and so was she.

  Pressing her back against the rough wall behind the house, she paused and listened to see if he was following her. She crouched down — and froze when the flap of a kitty door that someone had installed in a basement window opened.

  The acrylic glass swung back, and Griffin came eye to eye with a cat.

  Half in and half out of the kitty door, the cat stopped and hissed at Griffin.

  Griffin was tempted to hiss back and show the small feline who was top cat in the area. "Hush," she whispered. "I'm a fellow cat. Don't rat me out to the human."

  The three-colored cat smelled of coconut and Jorie Price, so it was definitely her cat, not just a feline neighbor sampling the food. The cat hissed again. Its eyes were wide with fear, and its nose wrinkled as it took in Griffin's scent. Finally, almost in slow motion, the cat backed away. The flap fell closed behind the disappearing cat.

  Great. A curious neighbor in front and a snobbish cat inside — alarm system Osgrove-style. I'm beginning to think that breaking in was not the best idea I ever had.Now I need to call Jennings and have him send someone over to make Jorie and the neighbor think it was just a salesman or a Jehovah's Witness going from door to door, not a burglar. Griffin drew her watch from her pocket. Only a half hour left until she had to meet Jorie at the local diner. There have to be easier ways to get inside the house, she decided and turned to sneak away.

  * * *

  Jesus Christ! Jorie ducked down in the driver's seat of her car and stared out the window. Do I really want to go over there and sit down to have coffee with her?

  In the small diner right next to her parked car, at the very first table where she could see the street, Griffin Westmore sat and calmly regarded the other patrons of the diner.

  Jorie didn't need the printed-out newspaper article on the seat next to her to identify the zoologist. The photo didn't do her justice anyway. Griffin Westmore was the only stranger in the diner, and the locals were staring at her. Not that Jorie could blame them. She was staring too.

  Griffin Westmore wasn't just tall; she was large. Not fat, exactly, but she didn't have the thin limbs and rangy body of some tall people either. The expensive-looking silk shirt she was wearing couldn't hide the strength that lurked beneath it.

  It wasn't just her size that made Jorie hesitate to go in. Most of her opponents at the poker table had been men, and some of them made Godzilla look like a harmless lizard in comparison. She also knew that sometimes, the biggest person wasn't the most dangerous.

  Still, that niggling sixth sense that had always told her when it was time to fold her cards just wouldn't shut up. Even Griffin's gleaming, coppery hair seemed to shout a silent warning at her, like a fire that set off the smoke alarm.

  The waitress came over to the table and extended her arm as far out as it would go to set a cup on the table, preferring to keep her distance from Griffin Westmore.

  She's afraid of Griffin. Not that Jorie could blame her. She looks like someone who could break a bobcat's neck rather than put a radio collar around it.

  The cup rattled on its saucer, and the liquid threatened to spill over.

  Jorie flinched when Griffin's hands shot out.

  But the long fingers were gentle as they took the cup from the waitress's shaking hands and set it safely onto the table. For someone so big, she moved with a flowing grace that Jorie hadn't expected. No hint of irritation was visible on Griffin's face. She just gave a gentle nod, took a sip from the cup, and smiled at the waitress.

  Why is she so calm? Jorie thought of herself as a levelheaded person, but she wouldn't have reacted so pleasantly at almost having a cup of hot coffee or tea dumped into her lap. Something about Griffin's body language seemed... off. She's holding back, putting her temper on a tight leash. Does she know I'm here, watching her? The thought rushed through Jorie's mind, but she dismissed it. She can't even know what I look like. Maybe she's just used to strangers being intimidated by her size and wants to show them that there's nothing to be afraid of.

  Probably as perplexed by the intimidating stranger and her unexpected friendliness as Jorie was, the waitress hurried away.

  Okay, Jorie thought. Do I go in, or do I run for the hills too?

  * * *

  Griffin felt gazes resting on her — and one gaze in particular. As a predator, Griffin was always aware of what was going on in her territory. For now, Osgrove was her territory and the diner her hunting grounds. All her senses came alive, and her skin prickled. For once, the predator was the one being watched. Jorie Price had been sitting in her old car in front of the diner, studying her, for the last ten minutes.

  Ten minutes in which Griffin had done everything to convince her captive audience that she was perfectly harmless. She had smiled at the waitress, had greeted the other patrons with what she hoped was a nonpredatory expression, and had said "please" and "thank you," trying hard to put the people around her at ease. It wasn't easy when you looked like a six-foot-two leader of a street gang. Griffin cursed the scar that the target of her last mission, a renegade bear-shifter, had left behind on her face. It would take a few more changes for it to heal completely and disappear. For now, there was nothing she could do about it, but she tugged her collar-length hair over her left ear that had been injured on another mission two years ago.

  She was careful not to look in Jorie's direction, instinctively knowing that it would scare her prey away. Instead, she focused on her herbal tea. Not that the brew deserved the attention. With every sip, Griffin had to fight against the urge to snarl at the tea or the person who had wasted a hot cup of water on it.

  Outside, a car door slammed, and Griffin suppressed a triumphant purr. She's coming in.

  A concert of bells clattered when the door swung open.

  Griffin recognized the scent of the writer before she stopped in front of her table. Once again, Jorie's scent made her think of a walk through the forest... or through a coconut grove.

  "Dr. Westmore?" Jorie asked.

  Griffin looked up with her most charming Cheshire-cat grin. "Yes. Ms. Price?"

  "Yes." Jorie's smile was polite, but Griffin felt the wariness behind it.

  Like a deer that has stopped grazing and lifts its head to catch a glimpse of a possible predator. One wrong move and she'll run away. I'll need to work harder to get her to lower her head and munch on the grass again. "Then call me Griffin, please," she said, still smiling. Unlike the Ka
sari, she didn't stand on ceremony, and she had noticed that humans opened up faster when they were on first-name basis.

  Jorie nodded politely but didn't return the offer.

  Either she's a really private woman, or she got into the habit of using her pseudonym and assumes that I'll just use that. That was what Griffin would have to do since she officially didn't know Jorie's first name yet. She vowed to be careful not to let slip any information about the writer that she shouldn't have yet.

  Even though her Wrasa instincts screamed at Griffin to avert her gaze, she forced herself to keep eye contact. Humans didn't find it threatening. They seemed to think it was the polite thing to do. At least it gave her a chance to study Jorie more closely and take in all the details she had missed on her late-night investigation in front of Jorie's house.

  The lithe body and the shining black hair, revealing small ears and a slender neck, reminded Griffin of a black panther. Almond-shaped eyes added to the feline image, but the sparkle of intelligence in those Asian eyes was all human — precise, analytical, and cautious.

  It wasn't tradition among her kind, but Griffin reached out a hand. She noticed the confident movements of Jorie's slender hand that took hers in a short, but tight grip. She might be a recluse, but she's not shy. Jorie's hand was soft and felt good against hers.

  Jorie let go first and gave her a nod. "Dr. Westmore," she said, ignoring Griffin's offer to call her by her first name. "Thank you for meeting me here."

  Meeting at the diner had been Jorie's suggestion. Apparently, she thought meeting in a public place with a lot of people around them was safer. Well, she doesn't know that if the Saru want her dead, there's no place on earth where she'll be safe. But they weren't at that point just yet, and Griffin hoped it wouldn't become necessary. Right now, she was still investigating.