“Stay away from me,” she warned him fiercely. Though, she was very aware that she had nothing with which to back up her threat.
Catahassa stayed back by the door and put his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
“It’s just me,” he said, “I promise. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Why should I believe you?” she asked stepping back further from him until she nearly collided with the cabinets at the back of the break room. Cat did not move towards her but kept his hands up and stayed near the door.
“There were two creatures at your apartment last night,” he said, “one black, one yellow.”
“Yes,” Diana said uncertainly.
“The black one attacked you,” he said, “the yellow stopped it.”
“It looked that way,” she answered.
“It looked that way because that’s what happened,” Cat said.
“How do you know?” Diana asked.
“Because I was there.”
Cat closed his eyes and Diana watched in awe as the tall, athletic man before her disappeared and transformed into a small, yellow mountain lion.
She nearly screamed again until she looked into the creature’s eyes. These were the same eyes that she had seen locked in battle with the black panther. This was the creature who had saved her.
She took one step towards it. As she did, the mountain lion sat back on its haunches and closed its eyes.
She took one step closer as the cougar disappeared and Cat stood fully formed in its place. He opened his eyes and looked at her.
She realized, for the first time that his eyes were the exact same shade of black as her animal saviors’ had been.
“It was you,” she said, “you saved me. But how did you…?”
Once again, Cat pulled out his talisman. The yellow charm that was nearly identical to the white cougar pressed against Diana’s chest.
“They’re connected,” he said holding the charm out to her.
Diana came close enough to touch the charm. She reached out towards it and, this time, he did not pull it away from her.
As her fingers brushed against the talisman, the necklace next to her chest, glowed warm against her skin.
It was not the harsh burning that she had felt the night before. It was not a sharp kind of warming. It was a calm, comfortable feeling that spread through her entire body.
When she took her fingers from the little charm, she noticed that her journey towards the necklace had taken her within inches of Cat. They were so close now that she could feel his breath on her cheeks.
She let go of the talisman and looked up at him. He was staring down at her with an odd expression. Diana could not help staring in his eyes, the eyes that had saved her. They seemed to pull her in. Exactly as they had done when she had first seen them staring out at her from the cover of a magazine.
She stood up on her toes and brought their lips closer. She closed her eyes.
His lips met hers. It was slow at first, gentle, hesitant. Then, as Diana opened her mouth to welcome him, he wrapped his arms fully around her.
Vaguely, she felt the warm glow spread from the talisman against her chest and through her entire body as his hands moved from her back, to her hair, then along her hips. Finally, they wrapped around her waist.
Just as they did, there was a knock on the door.
“Cat,” Charlie’s voice called out from the other side of the door, “Amanda says we’ve got company. If we’re going, we have to go now.”
Cat moved away from Diana and hurriedly unlocked the door to the breakroom. He opened the door and, at that moment, Diana felt the warm glow from her talisman disappear to be replaced by the harsh, burning sensation she had felt the night before.
Cat turned to her and grabbed her hand.
“We need to go,” he said.
He pulled her from the break room and down a hallway next to it that she hadn’t noticed before. Charlie followed behind them.
“So, Amanda’s in on this too?” Diana asked.
“Of course,” Cat said, “she’s my sister.”
Diana stopped dead in the hallway before they reached the exit door. Cat turned back towards her and said, “Diana, please. We don’t have time to get into it now. I promise I’ll tell you everything once we start on the road.”
Diana looked into Cat’s eyes once more and nodded. She allowed herself to be lead through the door to a back alley.
There, a bright red Mercedes waited for them. Amanda stepped out of the driver’s seat.
“You don’t have much time,” she said handing the keys off to Cat, “They’re close.”
“Thanks,” he said to her. He moved past Amanda and into the driver’s seat. Amanda stepped away and then turned to Diana. She gave Diana one last full glare before she turned back to Cat and said, “I hope you’re right about this.”
“I hope so too,” Cat answered from the car.
Amanda looked Diana up and down one last time before she moved back to the exit door and into the building.
“Come on,” Charlie said to Diana, now taking the hand that Cat had dropped and leading her towards the passenger side door.
Charlie stopped before he could open the door. His body suddenly became rigid and tense.
Diana had to look over his shoulder to see what had caused him such distress.
When she saw what was on the other side, she screamed.
The second black cougar she had seen that day stared at her, haunches pressed downward licking its lips.
This cougar was several times larger than Charlie had been as a panther and there was a ferocity in its gaze that Charlie simply did not possess.
Diana felt herself being shoved into the Mercedes. The car door slammed behind her.
“Go!” Charlie shouted to them, “I’ll hold it off.”
“Catch up with us at the Westward Crossing,” Cat called back before gunning the car and taking off down the dark alley way and out towards the busy street ahead.
Diana looked back in the rearview mirror. Charlie had disappeared and now she saw two black cougars locked jaw to jaw. She gasped when she saw the large, fierce looking cougar swipe its large paw and knock Charlie to the ground.
“Don’t worry about Charlie,” Cat said as they turned a corner on the busy street and he slowed the car down. Clearly hoping to blend into traffic, “he knows when to retreat. He’s just trying to give us time to get away.”
“Who was that?” Diana asked. Cat looked over at her quizzically and she rephrased the question. “I mean, the other cougar, who was that?”
“We don’t know,” Cat answered, “definitely female. The largest ones always are. Probably a Navajo.”
“You mean other tribes can...do...what you do...too?” Diana said, unsure of the proper term for what she had seen.
“Shift?” he asked supplying the term for her, “yes.”
“But,” Diana said, “you said that the whole...salt woman...cougar...thing was a Zuni legend.”
He gave a derisive snort.
“You whites are not the only ones who like to appropriate other cultures,” he said, “shifting is an ancient knowledge given to the Zunis. It takes years of study and practice to be able to master it. Years ago, Zuni traitors gave our ancient secrets to the Navajo tribe so that they could use it against us.”
“Why would they do that?” Diana asked. She knew that the Navajo and the Zuni’s had a bit of a...difficult history. But as far as she knew, the tribes had never been in a full out war. And she never imagined that they would use Zuni culture as a weapon. Then again, she could never have imagined any of this.
“Why do humans do anything?” Cat asked as they turned a corner and set out on the road towards the open freeway, “you’ve studied Anthropology. You must have seen enough human wars and skirmishes throughout the centuries to understand.”
“Different cultures value different things,” Diana said. She had never believed in simple answers. Especiall
y to questions about human nature.
“On the surface,” Cat answered, “but, in the end it boils down to one thing. Humans fight each other for power.”
Diana tried to think of a rebuttal to that. Some war or conflict that had some other motive. That would prove Cat wrong.
Still, when you got right down to it, she had to admit that he had a point. In every major conflict she could remember either from history or her anthropology courses, power over something or someone had been at the very heart.
Rather than admit this however, she decided it was best to change the subject.
“Why do they want me?” She asked.
“Because you have the blood of the Salt Woman,” Cat said.
“The...what?” Diana asked. “You mean the Salt mother? The one from the salt lake?”
“Yes,” Cat answered.
“But that’s not…”
“Diana, I think we’ve gone way beyond impossible at this point, wouldn’t you say?” Cat asked.
Diana opened her mouth to give him some kind of response to this but she found that she couldn’t. She found that, after everything that had happened to her that day, she couldn’t combat anything with logic or reason or even science.
Still, she could not accept this. The idea that she was some kind of...goddess reincarnated or something...it was laughable. She didn’t have any remarkable traits. She had no skills in fighting, she had no religion or spirituality to speak of, and she hadn’t even been the best in her class in school.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing to distinguish her from any other person on the street.
“How do you know it’s me?” She asked, “I mean...how do you know that I’m this...reincarnation or whatever.”
“We don’t know for sure,” Cat said, “but the fact that you were attacked, and the fact that you felt the glow of the talisman make a very strong case.”
“So, this could all be a mistake?” Diana asked.
“It’s possible,” Cat said, “but I don’t think so.”
“What makes you so sure?” Diana asked.
Cat looked at her sideways again and a strange expression came over his face.
“I can’t really explain it,” he said, “all I can say is that, when I saw you...I knew. I knew it was you. It was like I was being pulled towards you. Like…”
“...like you knew me all ready?” Dian asked.
“Yes,” Cat said.
Diana thought about telling Cat that she had felt that same thing. She had experienced that same, inexplicable tug towards him the first time she saw his picture on the front of that magazine. However when she even thought about the possibility of revealing that to him, she felt herself blush. Even after the kiss that they had shared, it still felt too intimate. She decided she wouldn’t dare and instead kept silent.
“Anyway,” Cat said after a moment’s silence, “we’ll know for sure either way when we get to the reservation.”
“That’s one hundred and fifty miles away,” Diana said. She had not brought a change of clothes or a charger for her phone or anything except her wallet and the clothes on her back. She certainly had not planned on traveling so far in such a small amount of time.
Then again, she had not planned on being attacked in her apartment, then at work, then being told that she had the blood of a deity running through her veins.
“I’m sorry you won’t have time to get your things,” Cat said, “We’ll have clothes for you at the reservation.”
“So there are people waiting for us?” Diana asked.
Cat let out a small cynical laugh.
“Oh,” he said, “there have been people waiting for you for a long, long time.”
Diana looked at him. She remembered the gentle eyes he had given her when he told her his secret, the kiss he had placed on her neck when he wrapped the necklace around her, and finally, the kiss in the breakroom and she realized she had one more burning question she had to ask.
“Have you been waiting for me?”
Cat looked at her. He wore the same expression he had had when he first met her. It was awe and reverence. As though he had never seen anything quite like her.
Finally, he gave her a gentle smile and said, “You have no idea how long I have waited for you.”
Chapter Three
Charlie did indeed meet them at the “Westward Crossing”, which turned out to be the Albuquerque city limit going west.
When Cat pulled the car over and Charlie slid into the back seat, he sported one black eye and his face had two long scars working down the right side.
“You should see the other guy,” he quipped wryly when Diana looked at him in shock.
“Did you see the other guy?” Cat asked turning back towards Charlie.
“Other girl you mean?” Charlie asked giving Diana another wink as she looked to him. “No I didn’t. She ran off as soon as you disappeared down the road.”
“Looks like she roughed you up pretty good beforehand,” Cat said, pulling once again out on to the open highway.
“I looked much worse right after, believe me,” Charlie said. “Amanda patched me up a bit and gave me a new shirt.”
He brought Diana’s attention to the green button down shirt that he now wore in place of his tight fitted blue one. Now that Diana looked at it closely, she could see that it was indeed, much larger on Charlie than the other had been.
“That’s mine,” Cat said. Diana was not surprised, “I’ll expect it back.”
“Relax,” Charlie said casually, putting both his feet up on the back seat, “it’s not like I’d want to keep one of your ugly ass shirts anyway.”
“Then at least get your ugly ass feet off my seat,” Cat quipped looking at Charlie lounging in the rearview mirror. Cat, though his words suggested irritation, wore an exasperated smile none the less.
“Dude,” Charlie said, “you know I can’t sleep if I’m not lying down.”
“Do you need to sleep?” Cat asked. “That black panther could be back with her friends at any moment.”
“Hey,” Charlie said, “I did just save your lives. Don’t you think I’m entitled to a nap?”
Cat rolled his eyes but the slight smile was still present.
“Fine,” he said. “Just take your shoes off.”
“Ok,” Charlie said sitting up and sliding his oxfords off his feet, “just remember, you asked for this.”
Diana did not know what he meant by that. It remained a mystery for about five minutes until a strange, ungodly smell filled her nostrils.
“What is that?” she asked.
Cat did not answer, merely rolled down a window.
“Sorry about that,” he said, “I always forget that his feet are even filthier than his shoes.”
“Should we wake him?” Diana asked. Even through her hand that still covered her nose, she could smell what had a definite rotten sewer odor wafting up from the back.
“No point,” Cat answered. “Once he starts snoring, Charlie can sleep through the coming apocalypse.”
As though on cue, Diana heard a loud snore rise up from the back seat. Cat smiled and shook his head.
“How long have you known him?” Diana asked.
“Well, that depends,” Cat said.
“On what?” Diana asked.
“Are you asking out of curiosity or are you wondering whether or not he’s trustworthy?”
“Can’t I be asking both questions at the same time?”
Cat was silent and seemed to consider that for a moment.
“If I recall correctly,” Diana pressed when she did not receive an answer, “you were the one who told me ‘don’t trust anyone’. And now, you’re asking me to trust an awful lot of people I’ve never met before.”
“Fair enough,” Cat said finally. “I’ve known Charlie most of my life. We grew up together.”
“On the reservation?” She asked.
“Yes,” he answered, “we lived next door to one another. We pla
yed together, went to school together, we even trained together. I trust him with my life.”
“Trained together?” Diana asked.
“You’ll see when we get there,” Cat responded.
Diana was too exhausted by that point to ask any more questions. Instead, she looked out the window and focused on the large canyons moving towards them in the distance.
“You know, I’ve always loved it out here,” Cat said, “the world seems...I don’t know...bigger somehow away from the cities.”
“Me too,” Diana said. “I remember taking trips to the four corner canyons with my parents when I was little. Everything was so big and bright. I could have stayed there for days and been completely happy.”
“I miss it,” Cat admitted.
“Why did you leave?” Diana asked. She had been to the Pueblo several times. And while the reservation itself was not most people’s idea of paradise, the land around it was so beautiful and rich, she knew if she had grown up in such a place, she would do everything she could to stay there.
“That’s a long story,” he said reluctantly, “the short version is, I got into a huge fight with my dad when I was eighteen. Went away to school and never went back.”
“But...you said you still had ties there,” Diana remembered, “you were allowed to do digs.”
“I’ve kept in touch with my Grandfather,” he said, “he’s still on the elected council. But I haven’t been back to the Pueblo in over twenty years.”
“Does it feel strange going back now?” Diana asked.
“I didn’t have time to think about it to be honest,” Cat answered. “You sort of came out of nowhere.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t intentional,” Diana answered wryly.
Cat looked over at her and smiled softly.
“You should get some rest,” he said gently, “it’ll be a while before we get there.”
Diana nodded, leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.
It seemed to Diana that only a few minutes had passed before she awoke to the sound of raised and slightly panicky voices.
“We can’t go that way!” Charlie was saying, “I’m telling you it’s a trap!”
“Well, we can’t come in from the east either,” Cat answered him, “Amanda said, they’re waiting for us there.”
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Southern Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) Page 24
