Well, this is awkward. I shut my mouth, pressing my lips together, and stared at Rita. Her hopeful expression, her flushed cheeks, her bright eyes—this, right here, is why I don’t do love. Love is pain and disappointment. It’s a blip of joy with a massive hangover of misery. I choose not to feel any of those things, not anymore.
I inhaled slowly, tapping the tips of my fingers in a restrained, steady rhythm on the arm’s cutting. “Rita . . . I think we should call it a night. I’ve got a big job in the morning.” A clean break was best. The last thing I wanted to do was give her mixed signals and prolong her agony.
“We could get food, order delivery . . . ?” The hopeful glint in her eyes had faded a little, but she wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Or I can cook?”
“Listen, Rita—”
“Is it because I’m a woman? You’re not attracted to me?” She was pressing her fingertips into the tabletop so hard that her nails were bleaching of color. “But Jeff at the Goose said he’d seen you leave with both men and women, and I thought, you know, we always have such a nice time on these Friday night dates, and—”
I stiffened. “These aren’t dates, Rita.” My voice was cold, hard, and Rita flinched at my words. “You make an appointment, you come here, and you pay me for a service.” She wasn’t the first client to read too much into our relationship—the misperception of friendship, or more in Rita’s case, was bound to happen when clients shared so much of their personal lives with me—but Rita’s profession of love had still taken me by surprise. I was irritated with myself; I was usually better at reading people. Mostly for the sole purpose of avoiding situations like this.
Tears welled in Rita’s eyes, spilling over the brim of her eyelids and leaving behind a gray trail of mascara. “But the cards—you said . . .” Her chin trembled, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh God, I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.”
I scooted my armchair back enough that I could stand. “I’m sorry for that,” I said, forcing the words out. I pushed myself up using the armrests and, standing, gathered up the cards. “I’ll walk you out.” I cleared my throat. “No charge for tonight’s reading.”
Rita nodded, though she didn’t look at me. It was a relief. She slid her chair back and stood.
The tarot studio was in the back of my tattoo parlor, Ninth Life Ink. Back in my mom’s day, the place was a retail shop called the Goddess’s Blessing selling all things mystical and witchy. But that was years ago, before a war between Nejerets claimed her life, leaving all of her worldly possessions to an eighteen-year-old—me. The Ninth Life had been open for a little over three years now, offering ink to those desiring it and fortunes to those looking for something a little bit more ethereal.
I moved through a heavy beaded curtain of quartz, amethyst, and moonstone that had been around since my mom’s time and made my way into the main part of the shop, crystals clanking and Rita sniffling in the background. Rita’s kitten heels clacked quietly on the hardwood floor as she followed me across the tattoo shop to the glass front door. I unlocked the deadbolt and opened it for her. She left, head hanging and feet dragging.
“Again, Rita,” I said, watching her linger under the covered stoop on the sidewalk outside, “I’m really sorry for the misunderstanding, and I wish you the best. Something good is coming your way.” It’s just not me, I thought blandly.
Her head moved in the barest of nods, and she shuffled away.
I shut and locked the door, then wandered around the reception desk to close up shop for the night. I paused to pull out my phone and open my music app, scrolling through playlists until I found one that suited my mood—vintage alternative rock. Some Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and Third Eye Blind was exactly what the doctor ordered. I set the playlist to shuffle and, once the music started blaring over the shop’s speakers, closed my eyes and tilted my head back, soaking in the manly angst.
Feeling recharged, I set to work closing out the register. I was just printing out the credit card report for the day when the shop door opened, jingling the little copper bell hanging over the door.
Had I forgotten to lock up after letting Rita out? I was usually pretty good about it when I had after-hours clients, but I’d forgotten a time or two. Except I distinctly remembered turning the deadbolt.
Not that it mattered; there wasn’t a lock in the world that could’ve kept out the man who’d just walked into my shop. He was on the taller side, and athletic, his broad shoulders only emphasized by his long, black leather jacket. His dark brown hair was styled in an undercut, the sides buzzed and the longer top portion combed back loosely. His face belonged to an angel . . . or a fallen angel . . . or a statue of a fallen angel, with all those bold lines, chiseled angles, and that insanely strong jawline covered in a couple days’ worth of stubble. A large, brushed silver belt buckle emblazoned with a black Eye of Horus drew my gaze to his trim hips. He was proclaiming his Nejeret clan affiliation pretty boldly with that buckle—Clan Heru all the way. Nobody who knows what they’re looking for—and what he is—could miss it.
The intruder stopped a few feet in from the door, his pale blue eyes locked on me. “Hey, Kitty Kat.” The corner of his mouth quirked, curving his lips into a confident smirk. “Been a while.”
I didn’t think. I reacted.
Hands on the counter, I leapt over the top, sliding on my hip until my boots landed on the floor on the other side. I crouched, bending my knees, then sprang at him. I landed one solid smack against his cheek, the force of the hit jarring my whole arm, and then it was a game of striking and blocking, then striking and blocking again. Neither of us held back, and it felt amazing. It had been ages since I’d lost myself in a fight. Too long. Not long enough.
He could’ve ended it at any time. His brand of “magic” would’ve allowed him to wrap me up in unbreakable, otherworldly bonds. But the light in his eyes, the vibrancy turning his pale blue irises into burning, gaseous flames, told me he didn’t want this to end. Not yet.
He kneed me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me, then grabbed hold of my ponytail and jerked my head back so he could see my face. “And here I thought you’d be out of practice.” His tongue darted out to catch the blood seeping from his broken lip.
“Never,” I said through gritted teeth, right before my hand shot out. I gripped his groin through his jeans, fingers viselike.
He grunted, releasing my hair and doubling over. My hand slid off his jeans as he moved, the friction burning the tips of my fingers. Off-balance, I stumbled to one knee.
I pulled myself up with a hand on the edge of the counter. Breathing hard, I straightened my ponytail. “Why are you here, Nik?”
Nik was someone I’d considered an ally a long time ago. Maybe I’d even considered him a friend, but that was before he’d disappeared without a word several years back and nobody had heard from him since. He’d risked his own life to save mine, and then he’d vanished.
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him. “Why now?”
Slowly, Nik straightened, wiping the blood from his mouth with the pad of his thumb and giving it a quick, dismissive glance. He’d be healed soon enough—relative immortality was a bonus to being a Nejeret, thanks to our regenerative abilities. It keeps us healthy and young-looking, permanently in the prime of life. In Nik’s case, he appeared to be in his mid-twenties. I wasn’t so lucky; I would be forever eighteen.
Nik returned my stare, breathing just as hard. “It’s Dom—he’s missing.”
My heart stumbled a few beats at the thought that my half-brother was in some kind of trouble, but I held my head high and redoubled my glaring efforts. “Dom’s a big boy,” I said. “He can take care of himself.” More than—Dominic l’Aragne wasn’t just my half-brother; he was also the one who’d trained me. He was one of the most careful and disciplined people I’d ever met, not to mention one of the deadliest. He was also, hands-down, the person I trusted most in the world. If something had happened to him . . .<
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A seed of dread settled in my stomach. I could feel the roots growing, the branches spreading, the trunk thickening. I balled my hands into fists, appreciating the sting from my nails digging into my palms. Dom was too strong—too smart and skilled—for anything to have happened to him.
“He’s been missing for three weeks,” Nik said.
That tree of dread spread out, its sickening branches extending into every part of me. But I couldn’t accept the possibility that someone could get the better of Dom. The thought disgusted me, and I refused to even consider it. “You were gone for three years,” I deflected.
Nik shrugged, the motion lazy. “Still would be, but when my mom told me about Dom, well . . .”
My eyes narrowed. “You talked to your mom?” I scoffed and shook my head. “So she found you. Nice of her to tell me you’re alive.”
Nik’s pierced brow arched higher. “The way she tells it, she’s been trying to get ahold of you. Maybe if you answered your damn phone every once in a while.”
“Well, she could’ve left a message.” I held my glare for a second longer, but shame pushed my gaze down to the floor. I hadn’t spoken to his mother, Aset, in over a year. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to Dom or Lex or anyone else from our clan in at least that long, and not because they hadn’t tried. Though their efforts had certainly waned. They didn’t try nearly as hard to get ahold of me as they used to. But after the things I’d done . . . they were better off without me. “I’ve been busy,” I said, fully aware of the lame excuse.
Nik laughed under his breath, then turned, wandering to the nearest open doorway to get a look at the tattoo chair, stool, and desk within the semiprivate room. There were four such “offices” in the shop, each rented out by a different artist, aside from my own private room. This one belonged to a guy named Sampson.
“Yeah,” Nik said, walking all the way into the room. “Me too. I’ve been real busy.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Fine, whatever,” I said, leaning against the counter. “So what’s the deal? Why are you here, now? Why are you the one telling me about Dom?” So far as I knew, the two had never been close.
“Everybody else is too busy searching for him,” he said from within the office. “Which they should’ve come to you about earlier, except I’m pretty sure they don’t know about your little moonlighting gig.” He was quiet for a moment. “And I’m not talking about fortune-telling.”
My eyebrows rose, and I made my way to Sampson’s office. “But you do?”
“You find people, Kat. You find people nobody else can.”
I stood in the doorway, leaning my shoulder against the doorframe. “How perceptive of you,” I said dryly. “How long have you been spying on me?” I was both irritated and flattered at the prospect. But mostly irritated.
“What I can’t figure out,” Nik said, ignoring my question, “is how you do it.”
I wasn’t really sure how it worked, either—the magic, so to speak, was in the ink; that was about all I knew. So I gave Nik a dose of his own medicine and ignored his question. “Why hasn’t Heru gone after him? Or Mei?” Both were Nejerets with the innate ability to make spatial shifts, and it wasn’t beyond their power to focus on a person rather than a place and jump to their target’s side in the blink of an eye. Theoretically, either of them should have been able to find Dom by simply thinking about him, then shifting.
Nik glanced at me, elbows folded behind his head. The light from the streetlamps and traffic lights on Broadway shone through the slits of the blinds, making an eerie pattern across Nik’s face. “Don’t you think they’ve tried? Dom’s not the first Nejeret to go missing. The Senate sent him and a few others out on a mission to find the missing Nejerets—ones even Heru and Mei couldn’t find. Mari’s among the missing.” Mari, my old partner in crime, was as tough as they come. And as powerful.
I swallowed sudden nausea. “Doesn’t that mean—” I licked my lips and took a deep breath. “If Heru and Mei can’t find them, wouldn’t that suggest that they’re dead?”
“Most likely,” Nik said. “That’s what the Senate thinks, at least. But I’ve been around longer than most of them . . . long enough to know there are limits to our powers. There’s always a chance that something is blocking them. I figured it couldn’t hurt for you to try, especially since it’s Dom . . .”
I crossed my arms once more. “Yeah, okay,” I said, nodding. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter Two
“You fascinate me, Kitty Kat.” Nik gave the shop a quick scan. “When did you become so interesting?”
Those words were funny, coming from him. Real name Nekure, Nik is one of the ancients of our kind. He’s I-don’t-have-a-clue-how-many thousands of years old and easily the most interesting person I’ve ever met. His mother is Aset, the real-life woman the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was based on—twin sister to Heru, the real-life man behind the god Horus. Nik’s father was some now-dead Nejeret who abducted and raped his mom. I’ve never heard him given a name.
Nik was the first ever of our kind to be born of two Nejerets—the females of our species are infertile once their immortal traits manifest—and as such, he was born with an additional piece to his soul, a sheut, which made him not quite a god, but not just a Nejeret, either. At the time of his birth, he was something new, something more.
All Nejerets are born with a ba, the part of our soul that enables us to live forever—so long as we don’t get ourselves killed. But not Nik. He was different, the first to be born with a sheut, the rare part of a soul that gives its bearer seemingly magical powers. Others came after him—even I had a sheut now, a gift from the new gods, who’ve since abandoned us—but Nik has had the most practice with his, not to mention he played host to one of the old gods in his body for several thousand years.
I have no idea all that he can do with his sheut, but I imagine it must be more than he’s ever let on. But then, he’s never been very open, always hiding behind a wall of sarcasm and smirks. Even when we were close, or close-ish, he’d wielded his attitude like a sword, keeping me at a distance. I was just a young, cursed Nejeret. He was the closest thing left on this earth to a god. I was hardly worth his time, as he’d made so abundantly clear over the years. So how the hell could I fascinate him?
I stared at the shop’s glass door a moment longer, then turned away—from the door and from Nik—and retreated behind the counter to finish the evening tasks. I left the music on as I closed out the register, counting the cash and checks and stashing it all in a zippered bank deposit bag. Somehow, I managed to do it all without looking at Nik despite him watching me from the other side of the counter.
“You grew up,” he said.
My heartbeat picked up for a few beats, and I paused in folding up the long credit card report. I couldn’t help a quick glance at him. He was just standing there, arms crossed over his chest and pale eyes scrutinizing. I continued folding the receipt tape. “You and I both know that’s not possible.” Thanks to a hasty decision made two decades ago, I was stuck in an eighteen-year-old’s body. It was my body, always had been and always would be. Teenage hormones and all.
Nik tutted me. “Literal and bitter . . . what trick will she do next?”
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. While I would never grow into a fully mature adult physically, I was fairly certain Nik’s growth was stunted in a much less tangible way. For as long as I’d known him, he’d had the emotional maturity of a frog—and that was probably being harsh. To the frog.
I placed the folded-up credit card receipt into the deposit bag, tucked it under my arm, and picked up my tarot deck and phone, turning off the music with a tap of my finger. “So . . .” I looked at Nik across the counter. “You delivered your message.”
“I did.”
I rounded the end of the counter and headed toward the beaded curtain. “Isn’t it time for you to disappear?” It was what he was best at.
“I was thinking I’d stick arou
nd for a bit,” he said. “Maybe help you with the Dom situation.”
I clenched my jaw. The last time we’d worked together, it hadn’t ended well. “I work alone,” I said as I passed through the curtain with a clacking of stone beads and turned to the right, angling toward the door to the stairway that led up to the second-floor apartment.
“Fine.” He was following me, practically walking on my heels. “Can I at least crash here tonight? The trip wasn’t exactly planned.”
I yanked the door to the stairs open. “It’s not too late to catch the last ferry. Go stay with your mom on Bainbridge.”
“Yeah . . . no.”
I stomped up the stairs. “There are hundreds of hotels in this city.”
“I’m afraid of bed bugs.”
I chuckled without meaning to and caught myself as soon as I noticed I was doing it.
“Kitty Kat . . .”
“Fine,” I snapped. “One night. You can sleep on the couch.” I twisted the knob of the door at the top of the stairs and pushed it open a few inches, then hesitated. “I, um, don’t usually bring people up here.” And by usually, I meant ever.
Nik leaned in, and when he spoke, his breath tickled the hairs at the back of my neck. “Lucky me.” His voice was low, vibrating with a deep thrum that resonated through me.
My breath caught, and I shivered. “Can you not do that?” I said, glancing at him over my shoulder.
“Do what?” he asked, eyes opened wide, innocent as a preacher’s daughter.
“Be yourself. Can you just not?”
A Cheshire grin spread across his face.
Rolling my eyes, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked into the barren living room, noticing things that hadn’t stood out to me in years. The only furniture in the room was a couch pushed up against one wall so I had room to move through my daily routine of mixed martial arts poses . . . which had been taught to me by Dom. Several cardboard boxes were piled up against the opposite wall. They’d been there unopened for so long that I no longer had any idea what they contained.
Kat Dubois Chronicles Page 2
