There were fifty yards between me and the beast. It felt like I was running for an eternity, stuck in some sort of hell, watching the man I loved die in slow motion.
The beast snorted in vicious glee.
I’ll get there, honey. Hang on another half a second.
The giant jaws opened wide, teeth ready to rend.
I smashed into the beast from the side, thrust my claws under it, and sank them into the creature’s gut. Blood drenched me. Slippery innards slid against my fingers. I grabbed them and yanked.
The beast spun, trying to bite me. I sank my claws into the wound and hung on. The orange lightning bit into me, fire and ice wrapped in pain. The moonlight dimmed.
Raphael loomed on the other side of the beast and clawed it. He was alive. I almost cried from the relief.
The magic stung us again.
Oh my God. It hurt.
The magic wouldn’t kill us. It just hurt.
Hurt.
Raphael and I stared at each other over the beast’s spine through the haze of pain and laughed. Our eerie hyena cackles echoed through the ruin.
It wanted to play the hurting game against two boudas. It had no chance.
We mauled the beast.
It raked us with its hind legs and shocked us with its magic, and we clawed it and clawed it, hanging on and laughing through the pain. I tasted blood in my mouth and clawed even harder, digging into the beast’s stomach, wrenching innards and bone out. We carved and gouged, blacking out and coming to, throwing blood and wet entrails.
The beast shuddered.
We ripped into it. It was the creature or us, do or die.
The beast stumbled, careened to the side, and crashed down.
I looked up, breathing hard. Across from me Raphael stood, covered in gore. His muscular furry chest heaved. Between us the beast lay, the bones of its rib cage bare. We had nearly stripped its carcass. It should’ve died ages ago, but the magic must’ve kept it alive.
I sank to the floor. My body was red with blood, some of it the beast’s, some my own. Long scratches marked my side and right leg from the hip down—gouges from the beast’s claws. The cuts burned. If I were human, I’d have needed hundreds of stitches.
We won. Somehow we had won and both of us had survived. It was some sort of miracle. I was bone tired. The floor looked so nice. Maybe if I just lay down here for a minute and closed my eyes…
“Andrea.”
Raphael’s eyes glowed with ruby fire. His face, a meld of human and hyena, didn’t mirror emotions well but his eyes stared at me with a chilling determination.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m taking you home.”
My mind chewed on his words, trying to break them into chunks. Take me home? Take me home…Home. With him.
My fatigue evaporated in an instant. “No.”
“Yes. You’re coming home with me. We’ll take a bath and eat and make love, and everything will be fine.”
I got my ass off the floor. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m done doing things your way. Your way means we don’t talk for months. You’re coming home with me.”
“You hurt me, on purpose, but everything is cool now, because you didn’t sleep with Rebecca and we can go home.”
“Yes!”
“It doesn’t work this way. I’m not going home with you. You and I are done.”
“You’re mine,” he snarled.
What the hell. Maybe the fight had knocked some screw loose in his brain.
“You’ll always be mine.” He stepped on the carcass and started toward me. I looked into his eyes and saw bouda insanity glaring back. The fighting had tipped the balance between rational thought and crazy passion. Raphael’s emergency brake was malfunctioning and he and I were on a collision course. “You know it and I know it. We love each other.”
“We’re bad for each other.”
“You’re not leaving me again!” he growled.
The adrenaline still coursing through me surged up. He was challenging me! I marched toward him, put my muzzle as close to his as I could, and said slowly, clearly pronouncing every word, “I am leaving you. You don’t get to play with me. I’m not your pet and you don’t get to hurt me because you think I should be punished.”
Baiting him was stupid. I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. The crazy cocktail of biochemicals and magic that got me through this fight drove me on. I knew I should stop, but it was as if there were two of me—the rational Andrea and the emotion-crazy beastkin—and right now the rational Andrea was being dragged off by a raging river of hormones, while the beastkin Andrea waved good-bye from a cliff nearby.
I bit off words. “You broke my heart and now I’m walking away from you. Watch me.”
He’d hurt me. He would pay.
“This is me walking away.” I turned and took a couple of steps. “Are you watching?”
He lunged at me, and we went down, rolling in the dirt, arm over leg. My back hit the floor and Raphael pinned me in a classic schoolyard bully mount, sitting on my stomach. One of the worst positions you can be trapped in. Great.
“Not walking away now,” he said.
I bent my knees, planted my heels in the ground, and bridged under him. He pitched forward, his right hand coming down on the ground. Got you. I dropped my hips, caught his right arm, pulling it snug against my chest, stepped my right foot over his, capturing him, and bridged sharply to the right. Raphael pitched over and I rolled up on top of him. He clamped my shoulders with his hands.
“I’m getting up and walking out of here. You’ll have to fight me to stop me. Your call.”
Raphael opened his arms. He was letting me go. I had known he would.
I jumped to my feet and walked away. A part of me was screaming, What are you doing, stupid? Run back. I kept walking, holding on to the memory of Raphael telling me, “I know exactly how much it hurt.” This thing between us was too complicated and it hurt too fucking much. I had nothing left in me now and I couldn’t deal with it.
Behind me Raphael roared, shaking the ruin. I kept walking. The sound of his frustration chased me until I finally broke into a run. My body hurt. Fever heated my face from the inside—the Lyc-V was trying to mend my battered body. If only mending other things were that easy.
I ran faster, scurried up the wall, through the opening, and out into the moonlit night. I leaped onto the nearest roof and ran and ran, the air burning in my lungs, droplets of the beast’s blood falling off my body, leaving a grisly trail.
I kept going until the fatigue built into an ache in my limbs. I was on a roof…somewhere. The buildings around me no longer looked familiar. I slowed, then stopped. Behind me the city stretched, steeping in magic. In front, a river flowed, like a silvery serpent glinting in the moonlight. Tall trees stood guard on the distant bank. Tiny points of light, green and turquoise, drifted gently between their branches. I had run all the way across the city to Sibley Forest, one of the new post-Shift woods, supercharged by magic and filled with hungry things that viewed humans as tasty, fun-to-catch snacks.
The trees beckoned me. They looked so peaceful and even though I knew they weren’t, I couldn’t resist.
I dived off the building into the river. Cool water foamed around me with a million bubbles. I surfaced and swam, gliding through the cool depths as if I were flying. The river ended too soon, and I emerged onto the opposite bank, dripping wet but no longer bloody. I climbed up and made my way through the underbrush. The forest sang to me in a dozen different voices and teased me with a myriad of smells. I inhaled the spicy scent of forest herbs, the musk of a raccoon, and the slightly bitter scent of opossum. My ears twitched, catching the sounds of mice scurrying in the underbrush, the distant hooting of an owl, and the chirping of cicadas, fiddling away in the soothing darkness.
As I walked, the grasses rubbed against my legs, tickling my fur. Above me a dense vine covered with tiny white flowers shivered in the night breeze. T
he tiny flowers detached, glowing with pale green, and floated past me, like fairy lights. Fascinated, I crouched in the grass and watched one of the glowing blossoms settle on a leaf. So pretty.
I walked the woods, thinking of nothing at all. If I could’ve shifted into a hyena, I would’ve. I just wanted to cool down, smell things, watch animals move about, and pretend that I was part of this world, rather than the place across the river. My choices were simpler here. Lay in the grass or on a fallen log. Watch the mice or try to catch one. Listen to the owl hooting or listen to the frogs singing. Simple and easy.
Finally I climbed a large tree, curled up in its branches, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
Sleeping in a tree seemed like a great idea in theory. In practice, I woke up just before sunrise, all achy, my fur damp with morning dew, and reeking of decomposing blood. Apparently not all of it had washed off in the river. The magic had fallen, with tech once again holding on to the planet’s reins, and the magical forest of yesterday was a soggy, muddy, and unpleasant place. Faced with the lovely choice of remaining in my beastkin shape or trotting across the city butt-naked, I decided that fur was preferable. I cleared the river and stuck to the rooftops.
I had conspired to break the law with my ex-boyfriend, who I professed to hate, broken said law, destroyed the victim’s attack dog/magic creature in a fit of murderous frenzy, and then run away across the city, wandered around some woods, and fallen asleep in a tree in my beastkin shape.
When I went off the rails, I didn’t do it halfway. No, I flipped a few times, caught a lot of air, and then exploded in a fiery crash.
I made it to my building, walked up the stairs to my apartment, and stared at my door. My keys were in my backpack, which I had dropped before we fought the monster in the warehouse. The bars on my windows were welded to a metal frame built into the brick wall. I could probably bend them, if I strained hard enough and wrapped something around my hands, since the bars had silver in them, but I’d take out some of the wall with them. How the hell was I going to get inside without busting the door?
Footsteps came from below. A moment and Mrs. Haffey walked up the stairs, carrying something wrapped in a kitchen towel.
Awesome.
Mrs. Haffey saw my furry butt and stopped. For a long second we stared at each other, she in a pink bathrobe and I, six feet tall, furry, bloody, and smelling like a wet dog who had rolled in a swamp.
Don’t scream. Please don’t scream.
Mrs. Haffey cleared her throat. “Andrea? Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Good morning.”
“Good morning. Here, I made you a carrot cake last night.” She held the toweled object out to me.
I took it and sniffed, wrinkling my black nose. “Thank you. Smells wonderful.”
“I just wanted to thank you for Darin. We’ve been together for so long. I just don’t know what I would do without him.” She stepped toward me and hugged me.
Oh my God, what do I do?
I hugged her back, as gently as I could, with one arm.
“You take care now,” Mrs. Haffey said, smiled, and went downstairs.
She’d hugged my furry, smelly, bloodstained self. She had no idea, but I would run back into that basement and fight off a hundred of those bugs just because she hadn’t screamed when she’d seen me.
I needed to get inside and change into my human shape, pronto. Before any neighbors decided to call the cops because there was a monster breaking into that “nice Texas girl’s” apartment.
I gripped the handle of my door. It turned in my hand, but my brain didn’t process it right away and I slammed my shoulder into it. The door flew open with a thunderous thump and I rolled into the apartment, springing into a crouch.
My apartment smelled of Raphael. If he was still here, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard me.
I kicked the door shut, snarled a little to let him know I meant business, and set out to search. A quick glance told me that my living room was Raphael-free. My bedroom was also empty, and so was my closet. I made a full circle, came to the kitchen, and stopped. My nylon mesh backpack sat in the middle of my kitchen table, with my dress and shoes still in it. My tablecloth was missing in action and long, jagged scratches covered the table’s surface. The scratches looked suspiciously like letters.
I climbed on a chair and looked at it from above.
MINE.
Oh, that’s great. Fantastic. So mature. Perhaps he would pull my pigtails next or stick a tack on my seat.
I shoved the table. Who did he think he was, breaking into my apartment and vandalizing my furniture? I had never done that to him. I had never ruined any of his things.
I went to shower and scrubbed myself clean.
I mean, what the hell was I even supposed to do with this MINE thing? One moment he was shoving another woman under my nose, the next he’d decided we were back on and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting with the program. An old song surfaced in my memories. Love is all you need. Maybe, but in real life love was rarely all you got. Raphael and I also had pride, and guilt, and anger, jealousy and hurt feelings, and all of it was mixed into this giant Gordian knot. Untangling it seemed impossible.
Smelly, ugly, stupid bouda moron. I should’ve emptied a jar of fleas in his car. It would’ve been good for a laugh. It wouldn’t solve anything, but it would make me feel better.
I put on my clothes, sat down at the kitchen table, tried my carrot cake—it was delicious—and looked at MINE some more. This was so unlike Raphael. The echoes of his roar floated up from my memory. Raphael was subtle. He seduced and enticed, and he was really good at it. So good that I had fallen for him even though I had sworn that hell would freeze over before I let a bouda touch me. This was very much unlike him. Was he really that desperate to get me back?
I wished I had been born in a different time. Somewhere in the past, before the magic, before the shapeshifters, when I could have just been a cop and done my job. When Raphael would have been a regular guy and I would have been a regular girl, and none of the complicated shapeshifter things would have gotten in the way. Or better yet, I wished the magic had never come. But that would mean that I wouldn’t have experienced the magic forest. I would be slower, blinder, deafer. Weaker. No, the magic was here to stay and so was the other me. I had suppressed her for so long, and now she had taken the wheel and was giggling maniacally as she drove me off the cliff.
* * *
When I got to the office, Ascanio opened the door with an expression of profound alarm on his face. “Take me with you. Please. I’ll do anything.”
I stepped inside the office and saw the source of his panic. It sat behind Kate’s desk. It had blond hair two shades lighter than mine, wore a blue T-shirt and a black skirt with layered ruffles, and looked to an outside observer like a cute teenage girl. And she was—at fourteen years old, Julie was cute and very much conscious of her position as Curran and Kate’s adopted child. Most of the time she was a perfect Pack princess, polite and poised—except when Derek, Kate’s sidekick, or Ascanio were in the room. Derek got frosty replies studded with spikes and if Ascanio was present, she turned into a foul-mouthed sarcastic devil.
It was hard to be a teenage girl. I had been one and I didn’t care to repeat the experience.
“Take me with you,” Ascanio begged.
“He can’t go. He failed the test on the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’” Julie said, her voice iced over. “Kate told him to sit here and study it.”
Ascanio turned to her and said a single derision-soaked word. “Snitch.”
“Crybaby,” Julie said.
“Harpy,” Ascanio said.
Julie gave him a look of concentrated scorn. “Pussy.”
Ascanio glared at her.
Julie crossed her arms.
“Where did Kate go?” I asked.
“To the Mercenary Guild,” Julie said.
Probably still trying to settle the dispute over who was goi
ng to be running the Guild. They had a bit of a power vacuum and Kate, as one of the veteran mercs, had seniority.
“Did you pick up that check from the mechanic?” I asked. “For that woman’s vehicle?”
“It’s on your desk.” Ascanio turned to Julie and mouthed, “Bitch.”
Just couldn’t let it alone, could he?
“Is it me or does it smell in here?” Julie waved her hand in front of her nose.
Oh no, she didn’t. Accusing a shapeshifter of reeking was the ultimate insult.
“You’re so dirty, Ascanio.” Julie grimaced. “Be careful, you might get fleas if you keep going this way.”
Ascanio bared his teeth at her. “Be careful you don’t get lice. They’ll shave you bald.”
Julie rolled her eyes. “It’s not necessary to shave your head if you have lice. You simply use a solution containing an extract of pyrethrin or any other of the wide variety of antilice herbal compounds and then comb the lice out. Your ignorance is staggering. I sometimes wonder how you survived to sixteen years of age. I’m curious, did you live most of them in Bubble Wrap?”
That kid sounded more and more like Kate every day.
“I had no idea you knew so much about lice,” Ascanio bit back. “Speaking from experience?”
“Yes, I am. I lived on the street for a year. Remind me, where did you live?” Julie tapped her finger to her lips, pretending to think. “Ah yes, you lived in a religious commune, sheltered and coddled, where you spent your time trying to nail anything that moved—”
That’s enough of that. “Quiet!” I barked.
Two mouths clicked shut.
I looked at the check. It was a business check from “Gloria’s Art and Antiques.” Antiques. Why would an antique dealer visit a reclamation company unless she knew that they were bidding on a building that contained a vault full of antiques? Reclamation companies didn’t deal in antiques; they dealt in metal and stone. Not much else survived a fallen building.
“Here’s the address.” Ascanio handed me a piece of paper. “I looked it up.”
“Thank you. Very nice of you.” I looked at the address. White Street, Julie’s old neighborhood. Right on the edge of the Warren, a poor part of Atlanta where beggars, gangs of homeless kids, and small-time criminals of opportunity made their home. Most of them wouldn’t know what “antiques” meant, let alone buy them. This case was getting stranger and stranger.
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