Claws and Effect

by Amanda Arista

  “Take your shoes off,” I pointed to my shoes on the ground by the door.

  It was the break in the day where Sensei didn’t have clients, or if he did, he’d scheduled them for other times while the two cats played. The two of us were free to be as rough as we needed to be.

  Myers did as he was told. I was beginning to think that this kid had a never-ending supply of obscure rock band T-shirts, but Chaz seemed to have an ever-expanding collection of college logo apparel that I had dug into today, so who was I to be the fashion police.

  “Why the martial arts?”

  “Stretch.” I pointed to the wall with the illustration of stretches to be done.

  As he motioned his way through the toe touches, I narrated why we were here. “Remember when I said that life with me was dangerous?”

  “Yeah,” he grunted as he reached down to touch his toes.

  “Well, we’ve had a rash of violet crimes against humans as well as wanderers, and I can’t be sure that they are not my fault.”

  Myers stopped stretching and turned his wide doe eyes to me.

  “See, I messed up the order of things a while back. Did Iris tell you that?”

  “No.” He tossed his hair out of his face with a quick flinch. “Iris didn’t talk to much last weekend. It was more ordering me around.”

  I chuckled, remembering how’d she’d been with me that first weekend. “Well, things got hairy. I created a power vacuum among the Wanderers, and now I think the rest of them are fighting a turf war.”

  Myers gulped. “Are you serious?”

  I frowned. “I joke a lot, but not about this.”

  He licked his lips and his eyes darted around me like I had the answer written above my head in a cartoon bubble. “So I just walked into a war?”

  “Happens to a lot of men before they become heroes.”

  Something flashed across his eyes, something warm and mischievous, and he smiled. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “We’ll they were brilliant,” I winked and gestured for us to go into the back room.

  “I think it was on TV.”

  I stopped just after passing through the protective charms of the workout room. “TV?”

  “Or a movie maybe,” Myers chuckled. “I might watch a little too much at my job right now. I’m stuck on cheesy horror movies now and this TV show, Everville. It only showed on this one station like for three seasons.”

  I gulped. The script came back to me. “Season 2, episode 10.”

  “You know it?”

  I laughed. “I wrote it.”

  Myers’s energy spiked out around him. “What?”

  “I’m one of the many writers for Everville.”

  I turned around to see Myers look pale. “Something wrong?”

  “I think I might be your biggest fan.”

  I laughed again, but he was serious. I read it in the wide O of his mouth. My smile faded as I looked up at him. “Wow. Never met a fan before.”

  “Are you joking? There are a million of us. Don’t you use the internet?”

  Sensei cleared his throat from across the room. “Flattery will not teach you to protect yourself.”

  “With the right girl, it might,” I smarted back.

  I felt Sensei’s energy before the wind attacked. I was quick enough to drop down but Myers wasn’t. The column hit him square in the chest, lifting him off his feet and into the padded wall four feet behind him.

  I winced for him as he didn’t exactly land on his feet.

  “The Pack will not wait,” Sensei said as he stretched his fingers out before him, gathering his energy too him again.

  It felt like little feathers running down my skin toward him. I liked this part of my day. This was when I felt like I could actually do something right with all this panther stuff. Forget being a Prima. Forget being a girlfriend. Bouncing off walls and beating senseis at their own game was what Violet now did best, except write cheesy sci-fi shows apparently.

  “Stop smiling and defend yourself.”

  I stalled his next attack with some conversation so that I could get my footing and do what I could only describe as priming the engines. “I thought we were teaching the newbie. Small steps.”

  “He will just have to learn by example.”

  “THOUGHT I TOLD you to take all the mirrors out of this place.”

  Sensei offered his hand as he pulled me out of the mess of the broke glass. That was the last time I was going to miss a kick to the chest.

  “Figured that fairy friend of yours can probably take care of the bad luck.”

  “Probably.” I brushed off the glass and watched as a few cuts healed quickly across my forearm.

  “How do you move that fast?” Myers pushed himself off the wall on the safer side of the room where he had been cowering for the past fifteen minutes as Sensei went after me with some sort of bone to pick.

  “It’s all about sensing where your opponent is gathering their energy.”

  “How can I do that with a border up?”

  “You fight with your border down. Isn’t that obvious?”

  Myers frowned as he crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”

  I sighed. I sucked at this. So far, all I’d done so far was teach him how to run. “You lower your borders when you fight. Lets the other guys know what they are dealing with.”

  Myers scratched behind his ear. “And when they are dealing with a young panther who doesn’t know his tale from a toaster?”

  I chuckled. “Just being a panther will make them think twice. Now come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  MYERS DIDN’T HAVE anything. To be more specific, he was less accurate than I was three sheets to the wind in a pair of high heels.

  “Just try a simple punch,” I said holding the black padded guard between us.

  Myers prepared, perched on his toes, put his guard up like I’d told him and threw a simple jab.

  I made it as obvious as possible that I was going to do a leg sweep, but he didn’t budge as I moved to kick his long legs out from underneath him.

  I watched him fall like a very skinny tree, but to save his ego, I refrained from hollering “Timber.”

  Myers stayed down this time. He stared up at the ceiling and just stayed down. His energy was low, defeated.

  “I’m sorry. This isn’t going well.”

  “You’re not the one flat on his back.”

  I flopped down on my fanny and lay down next to him. The ceiling wasn’t just a ceiling. Protection symbols had been punched into the tiles to protect us from above. I’d bet that there were symbols under the pads on the floor as well.

  “There. We’re even.”

  As I rested there, I could smell him. The sweat on his skin. The deep cinnamon on his magic that lapped against the right side of my body like a tropical tide. It was different. I’m not going to say I didn’t like it.

  “How did you do it?” he finally asked. “How’d you learn all this stuff?”

  “Apparently, I’m some freakish cross breed of imagination and predestination.”

  “You believe that?”

  I rolled my head to the side to look at him. “There’s a book. I’ve seen it.” I looked back at the ceiling and sighed. “But I will admit that the book is very, very vague with the details.”

  “I bet being a writer that killed you.”

  I laughed. “Just made for an interesting interpretation.”

  “So what else are you going to throw at me?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I think it was Iris’s intention that we do this twice a week for as long as we can make it. I think that if we keep running, the cat will get its exercise.”

  “And if something happens? If one of these bad guys attacks us when we are out?”

  I looked over at him. “Just snarl at them. We’ll work on that later.”

  Myers smiled. It was a wide goofy smile that I could get used to.

  “Maybe we should just work on borders.”


  In an instant, the warmth that had been pressing against my side was gone. I could still smell his salty skin but all traces of spice were gone from the air around us. “Wow. Good.”

  “Iris and I worked a lot this weekend.”

  And if he could learn control, then I had to learn my own. Carefully, slowly, I let my power flow around him. Calm and collected from the exhaustive exercise, I was able to keep the fiery power at bay. I sat up and stretched out my energy to poke and prod around him, but didn’t feel anything but a cool void before me.

  A cool void just like that dead girl in the morgue. My energy went all spiky around me, and I clamped down with every muscle not already exhausted to put it back where it came from.

  Myers sat up quickly. “What’s wrong? You’re face went all hard.”

  I forced away the frown that had appeared. “I’m sorry.”

  “Danger brewing in Dallas?”

  “Isn’t there always?”

  I looked up at his young face, his trusting eyes, and knew I couldn’t let what happened to that girl happen to anyone else. We needed to work harder, everyday if that is what it took.

  “Come on. You’ve got to get some defense down, even if I have to throw you against a few walls.”

  I noticed the necklace that had fallen out of this T-shirt. It was something silver and about the size of a nickel on a black leather chain. It had a rune engraved on it.

  “Neat pendant. Mean anything?”

  Myers licked his lips and quickly dropped the necklace back down his shirt. “Na, just something I thought looked cool.”

  “Job done.”

  I offered him a hand, and he took it.

  Then I proceeded to show him how to properly defend himself.

  “MY GOD, VIOLET,” Jessa exclaimed as she sat down across from me at Café Brazil the next day for lunch.

  I was already three cups in and halfway through a story board for the comic book. Actual work felt good. Thinking about other people’s problems felt more natural than dealing with my own.

  “What happened to your face?” she whispered, as if everyone in the place hadn’t already been looking at the girl with the black eye.

  “Myers has learned how to properly defend himself,” I said as I closed my notebook and picked up the mug of Mexican mocha.

  She was holding in the laughter. Somewhere in the twinkle of her brown eyes was an aha waiting to happen.

  “I think I’m going to call it the Dimple defense. He smiled at some point, and I think it distracted me because he just rabbit-punched me. Actually saw stars for a second.”

  We paused to give our food orders.

  “And then what?” Jessa asked.

  “You’d think he had punched his grandma. I’m fine.”

  She leaned in across the table. “I thought shifters healed fast.”

  “You should have seen it last night.”

  A smile rolled around on Jessa’s lips.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a cure for it. Well . . . not a cure, but I’ve been working on glamours, and I just know that this one will work.” Lavender flashed across her eyes, and I got the devilish whiff of roses.

  I didn’t quite like her conditions in that sentence. “You want to do magic on my eye?”

  “I want to use the mirror to glamour it so you can’t see it until it heals.”

  “And you know how to do this how?”

  Jessa shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands sitting in my apartment like a damsel in distress while you clean up the neighborhood. Please, Violet? I need to practice this stuff just like little Myers boy needs to defend himself.”

  I gave in so easily to her pleading brown eyes. “Fine.”

  She jumped up and grabbed my hand and pulled me into the bathroom. It was a one-stall bathroom, but the staff there knew us well enough to just shake their heads and move along.

  “Okay. Look into the mirror,” she instructed.

  When she couldn’t see over my shoulder, she huffed. “Okay, scrunch down and look into the mirror.”

  I looked into the mirror. My eyes looked even paler green next to the vivid purple of my eye. The long wavy hair didn’t exactly detract from the wild woman look.

  Jessa closed her eyes and reached for her power. The cool crisp air danced around the tiled bathroom and her rose scent filled my nostrils.

  With a look of concentration like I had never scene on her face before, she reached out to the mirror and it rippled under her finger tips.

  I jumped back.

  “Don’t move. You don’t want me to give you a third eye, do you?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Why?”

  “Cheap Halloween costume.”

  Jessa pinched my arm and started again. In my reflection, she brushed the bit of skin just under my undamaged eye and I could swear that I felt her cool fingers against my skin.

  She then touched the bruised eye of my reflection and where her finger touched, it looked flesh toned again. Using her finger like a paint brush, she buffed out the bruise under my eye.

  I felt weird, like when I’d let her put a cucumber mask on my face. It was cold and tingly, but only where she lightly brushed her fingers.

  Within the minute, the purple was gone and frankly, she buffed away some of the dark circles caused by restless sleep and not Myers’s fist.

  “This is amazing, Jessa.”

  She smiled and slipped away from the mirror to admire her handy work. She turned me around to look at her. “It’s amazing how much you can learn if you’re open to it. Lord knows my mother wanted to teach me all this stuff, but I was too stubborn.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the perfect visage. My little fairy princess was all grown up and accepting her fate. All the while making me look very well rested.

  As with all other moments in my life, my cell phone rang. Jessa unlocked the bathroom door, and I answered the call as we walked back to the table. Our food was waiting for us, along with the waiter’s number underneath Jessa’s fork. Nice to know that some things never change.

  It was Tucker. “Hello?”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “You are talking to me.”

  “No. Outside.”

  I immediately looked up and saw him standing just in the corner of the far window. Stalk much?

  I closed my phone. There was no way that Jessa was ready to meet them, but if he’d followed me this far, maybe it wasn’t a phone kind of conversation.

  “I have a little business to attend to,” I said as I left my purse and phone there.

  “We were just in the bathroom, Vi.”

  “Ha,” I smirked at her as I walked for the front door and around the side of the building toward Tucker.

  I’m not going to lie and say that I wasn’t hesitant about turning the corner, so I sent a little emissary of power out before me. It was just Tucker. Paranoid much?

  “What do you need, Tucker?”

  He looked good. Am I allowed to think that? He looked like a normal average human who just happened to be standing at the side of a building handing a girl a picture.

  “Her name was Yvette Parker. She was twenty-three, last scene at a bar in South Dallas with her friends.”

  I looked down at the casual snapshot. It was a Thelma-and-Louise shot with just a Thelma. Even though the shot was off kilter, you could still see how striking the young woman was. Her black eyes and wide smile.

  “The girl from the morgue?” I asked. A knot of emotion was welling up in my throat.

  “I’m pretty sure. Her friend confirmed that the earrings were a graduation present from her boyfriend.”

  I licked my lips and knew that I wasn’t going to eat the crepes I’d just ordered.

  “She was last seen talking to a man her friend didn’t recognize, only knew he was big and looked like an ape.”

  “An ape?”

  Tucker shrugged. He was too good at this ‘just the facts, ma�
��am’ routine. Years of practice, I guessed, at having to deal with the baser side of humans and wanderers alike.

  “What did they tell the family?”

  “They just made the I.D. this morning from her friend.”

  “Her family doesn’t know?” I gasped.

  “Her friends were the ones who reported her missing.”

  Jessa and I talked almost every day, even if it was just stupid stuff and that was before the end of the world. Of course, I’d know that something happened to her and it would be more than just that Key Holder and Guardian thing.

  “Should I send flowers?”

  “What?” Tucker asked.

  It wasn’t as if I’d asked him about the weather. “What do I do? Do I go to the funeral? Do I turn myself in as an accessory to the crime?”

  Tucker grabbed my shoulder. It was one of the first times that he had ever dared to touch me. “You’ve done a good thing here, Violet.”

  “I got this girl killed.” Water was filling my eyes and making the image of the girl in my hands blurry.

  “You don’t know that. All we know is that something magical killed her.”

  He squeezed my shoulder and then did another thing completely new. He let down his borders. He was warm and did smell a little like rawhide, but more like a fresh brewed cup of coffee and maybe something sweet.

  “If it wasn’t for your insistence, this would just be another Jane Doe. Now her family can mourn her and her friends can have closure, and we are one more step closer to nailing the guys that did it.”

  I chuckled and sniffed and blinked away the tears. That’s what I needed. I needed Tucker to be Tucker and his police dog self.

  “Thank you,” I said with a deep sigh. I handed the picture back to him.

  He tucked the picture back into the breast pocket of his new coat. “He wouldn’t have cared, you know.”

  “The he with a capital H?”

  Tucker nodded. “He would have just made sure that she stayed hidden.”

  I knew this. I knew that Tucker finding out who she was was going to be a blessing to her family in the long run. And though I couldn’t help her now, I could still prevent it from happening to another Yvette Parker. I thumbed back to the restaurant. “My crepes are getting cold.”