by Amanda Jones
Dana’s fingers went to her holster before she realized what she was doing. It was Sarah’s gaze on her hand that made her stop drawing her weapon.
“I’m not going to let you go out there. I can tell you like him. He must be some kind of man, but I wouldn’t be doing my job very well if you went out into those woods thinking you’re doing him a favor. Getting yourself all clawed up isn’t worth it. You may have supernatural vision, and better-than-average reflexes, but you don’t have their speed.”
“You’re fired,” Dana mumbled. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Sarah’s notes in front of her.
Group of 67. 70% female composition between ages of 18 and 30. New males are often fought over by unattached women.
“Great. I needed a vacation,” Sarah said cheerfully. She drained the remnants of her beer and set the bottle on the table. “Is there any more of that? Think he’d mind?”
Dana picked her bottle up and finished it. “Get me one, too. No, get the case. It’ll take that many.”
Dana had never considered herself to be the jealous type, but if any of those unattached women got too close to Patrick, she would seriously consider growing some claws of her own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Patrick leaned against a sturdy pine tree and drew in a tentative breath through his human-sized lungs.
The crisp air did wonders to clear his spinning head, but did nothing to abate his exhaustion.
He’d never in his life been so tired—not even after he’d relocated across five time zones and got detained by airport customs for six hours over some bullshit.
He rubbed his eyes.
What had happened? He remembered shifting, studying his cat’s large paws through new eyes, and then there were only scraps—bits and pieces of memory about what had happened overnight.
There was a lot of running…
He’d taken down some animal… A deer?
He dragged his naked forearm across his mouth and licked his lips.
God. No wonder cat breath always smells so foul.
A clammy hand wrapped around his bicep.
Patrick’s cat forced him to scent the air, and his inner beast recoiled instantly.
Attack or run.
His feet weren’t cooperating with the idea of a swift retreat. He didn’t have the energy.
With a hiss, he turned to face the intruder.
“Whoa, whoa!”
The white-haired gentleman put his hands up in a peacemaking gesture and took a step back. His naked paunch jiggled as he moved, and his florid complexion deepened to a plum color. “’S’all right. Ain’t gonna hurt ya.”
Still baring teeth, Patrick scented the air again.
Not a predator, per se, but another cat.
No wonder I didn’t hear him.
Patrick knew better than to assume the encroacher was safe, especially given how swimmingly his first interaction with the local Were-cats had gone.
The man cleared his throat and nodded at the ground.
Patrick looked at the ground and saw nothing of interest. He looked back to the man.
There was some kind of mental tug—an urging for him to lower himself, make himself smaller for the other man. It seemed this man didn’t like having to look up into Patrick’s eyes.
Tough. He’d better find a stump to stand on.
The man sighed. “Shit. Been tryin’ to track you all night, boy, but you was movin’ too fast.”
“Find me for what?”
“I’m Billy. I try to keep the peace in these parts.”
Patrick looked down at the man’s extended hand. No rings. Just wrinkles.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” Billy said. He adjusted the grimy string he wore tied around his neck and pulled his wedding band around to front. “Would always lose it when I shifted. Old lady made me tie it on.”
Patrick got a sneaking suspicion those weren’t the only times Billy “lost” his wring. He knew his type all to well, and tried to make his bar unwelcoming to it.
“Accent says you ain’t from around here.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s probably good. Last thing we need is for the gals to go all hot and bothered over fresh meat.” He let out a phlegmy chuckle.
Patrick didn’t roll his eyes, but he understood his inner cat well enough already to know the cat was doing it for him.
Cat didn’t like this guy. Patrick would be a fucking idiot if he didn’t exercise caution. He didn’t know this world, but he trusted his instincts.
“I hope you’re hooked up already, because I don’t want to be dealing with no feuds again. My grandgirl still got bite marks on her neck from the last one.”
“Feuds?” Great. “I don’t plan on sticking around. I’m going home after I’m sure I’m…done for the month.”
“Well, that’ll be tomorrow, then. So, tell me. What do you remember? First time’s usually a bit hazy. I’m guessin’ it was your first time. Scent’s new.” Billy leaned against a nearby tree and crossed his arms over his chest, completely unabashed in his inglorious nakedness.
Patrick would have traded a case of his finest Irish whiskey for even a scrap of a terrycloth towel right about then. He ground the heels of his palms against his burning eyes and let out a breath. “Not much. Just running and…eating something.”
“Memory lapse is normal. After a few shifts, you get better control of your animal. Just takes some time for them parts of the brain to fuse together or something. Shit, I dunno. I ain’t no scientist, and ain’t nobody studyin’ this stuff.”
Patrick rolled the kinks from his neck, and cringed as something inside popped. “Maybe someone should.”
“Not riskin’ goin’ public over it. Listen, we normally meet up night after the full moon to debrief. I know you ain’t sticking around, but it’d be a good way for you to know everyone, at least by face, and point out the punks who did it to you. We’ll take care of whoever it was if it was one of ours.”
Why does he assume it happened here?
Patrick shifted his weight and studied the old man’s face.
Maybe he was being overly cynical. It’d been a rough night, and it probably would have been obvious to an idiot that Patrick had more than likely been attacked in the area.
Billy seemed guileless enough. His scent hadn’t changed during the whole conversation, and Patrick had little else to go on.
Mind open, he nodded.
“Good deal.” Billy pointed east toward a clearing Patrick had passed through earlier. “We meet out there about an hour before true dark. We usually don’t get forced to shift until a few hours after moonrise, but we like to play it safe.”
“Okay.”
Billy turned his back to walk away, but Patrick remembered something. “Billy?”
“Yep?”
“Am I…am I ever going to be able to be around people during the full moon?”
Billy looked at his feet and Patrick had his answer. “You’ll be able to control your actions, for the most part, but you’ll still shift. You won’t be able to be in a house, you know? You’re gonna need to run.”
“So, I’ll always have to come back here?”
Billy shrugged. “Probably be safer. Folks in the city would probably shoot at the first big furry thing that crossed their paths.”
Shit.
That was going to require some creative tinkering to his calendar. And what about his pub? He couldn’t exactly abandon it once per month to flee to the mountains, but what choice did he have? Get Dana to crack the whip on Uncle Simon while Patrick was out in the woods running with the beasts?
Dana.
Was she even still there? Had she stayed?
What had she seen? He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d taken up his suggestion and left. He hoped she didn’t, though. He needed to see a friendly face.
He padded through the leaves, appreciative of his new sense of direction, because without it, every tree in the woods might
have been identical to him.
Ten minutes later, he came to the end of the forest and looked up the incline to see—in addition to his SUV parked beside the cabin—Dana’s car plus an unfamiliar yellow pickup truck.
He climbed up the path, leapt onto the porch, and pulled on the door handle.
Locked.
He knocked. He had told her to lock it, and though inconvenienced, he was glad she’d done it.
Footsteps sounded within, and then the inner door swung in.
A woman, who was most certainly not his shrew, put her head in the gap.
She eyed him from head to toe, then back up to his head again.
He crossed his arms over his chest, and then realized that perhaps what he should have been covering was much lower.
Deal with it.
“You must be Dana’s employee,” he said, trying for casual, but probably sounding perturbed.
“I am.”
“This is my house. Might I enter it?”
She eased back, pulled the door in, and cast her gaze toward the ceiling.
“Thank you.”
He stepped into the living room, rubbed his muddy feet on the mat, and looked up to see Dana standing by the coffee table, her eyes wide and lips parted wordlessly.
Hello to you, too, lover.
He didn’t really expect a woman like her to run into his arms, but his ego took a bit of a hit all the same. She didn’t even look happy to see him.
“Okay, then,” he said under his breath, and tracked past both women toward the bathroom. He’d nearly had the door closed before a resistance from the other side stopped it from catching.
Dana slipped in through a small gap and put her back against the door to close it.
She didn’t say anything. Just eyed him.
He reached over the edge of the claw foot tub and turned both faucets before wrenching the shower on. “You’re obviously pissed. Would you care to tell me why, sweetheart?” He stepped into the hot stream of water and hissed as dirt and other things loosened from fresh scratches on his skin.
“Don’t sweetheart me.”
“Shit, are we back there again? I thought we were beyond that. I call you sweetheart, and you get over it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You want to explain to me what I did to deserve your ire?” He kept his gaze locked on hers while blindly patting the shower caddy in search of soap.
She stared at him for another long moment, and then walked to the commode. She put down the lid and sat. “Run into any trouble last night?”
“I can’t say, honestly. I don’t remember much. Another Were-cat tracked me this morning, though. Said there’s a meeting tonight.”
“So, you have no idea where all the gashes on your neck and shoulders came from.”
He looked down at his chest and the first thing he thought wasn’t Did I get in a fight last night? but instead, Shit, I hope those scars don’t screw up my tattoo. But of course, he didn’t understand why Dana would be annoyed either way. It was clear she only saw him as a case—a person of interest in a strictly business kind of way.
He grunted and lathered his chest.
“I don’t. Wish I did. Guy I ran into this morning said early on it’s common not to remember things, but you gain more control.”
“Meanwhile, you have no idea what they’re from. Whether you ran into some nice girl cat and had a bit of a tumble?”
A girl cat?
Dana’s schooled expression dissolved into one that seemed if not slightly jealous, then a lot concerned.
Oh, God, that’d be just my fuckin’ luck. Find the perfect woman and then blow any chances of winning her all to Hell the same night.
His stomach felt like a block of ice, and that ice quickly melted and threatened to come back up on him. He crouched and put his head between his knees, willing the spinning of his head to stop.
He would have remembered that, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have just…screwed some woman he didn’t know, furry or not.
The small hairs on his back prickled at Dana’s proximity. She was closer now, and he felt her hand’s touch on his spine before it was actually there.
“I don’t have to right to be angry with you.” Her voice was gentle. “You’re not mine, and even if you were, you can’t really tell an animal what to do.”
Not hers.
Carefully, he stood, reaching for the rims of the slippery tub and bracing himself beneath the water again. Not hers, she’d said. He was just a dirty cat that had managed to drag itself home after a roll in the mud and who-knew-what-else.
As the water pelted him, stinging his open wounds, he worried about what this meant for his future. Always having a woman distrust him because he couldn’t completely control that hungry, feral side. So what did that leave him? To only committing himself to another cat? Giving up on the most confounding, difficult, ball-busting, beautiful, intelligent, gutsy woman he’d ever met?
No. Not that.
He shifted his gaze to her and forced down a swallow before speaking. “I don’t think I did…that. I ate a deer or something. I scratched up some trees. I…” He scraped his hands through his twig-strewn hair and let his face scrunch while he struggled to recall the night. There was something dark in his memory. Large and furry, but not cat. It was…
“There was something else. I don’t remember it well. I think there was a tussle and I got hurt, but whatever it was got distracted or called away before it could do any real damage.”
Her face, which had been angry before, now went very serious. She knew something he didn’t. “I’m going with you tonight. To your meeting.”
“Hell no. Are you crazy? I don’t want you exposed to that.” He scoffed as he scoured the mud from his hair. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of dirt. He hoped he hadn’t picked up any bugs along with it.
He froze at the thought. Did were-animals get fleas? Suddenly, he itched, though it had to be all in his head.
She leaned in close and wrapped her fingers over the tub’s edge. “I am. Sarah and me. We may be small, but we can hold our own in a fight. Besides, we’ve got big guns and a lot of bullets.”
“I don’t think—”
“We’re not worried about the Cats, Patrick,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper and really forcing him to listen, not just hear. “There are other groups. We don’t know what they are, but they’re not as friendly and hospitable as the Cats. Sarah’s research says they’re dangerous. Strike first, leave no witnesses. Disorganized rogues. Until you have your shit together, you need eyes on your back. Mine’ll do.”
The water finally ran clear, so he turned the knobs to their off positions and accepted the towel she held out to him.
He stepped over the edge and sidled to the sink and plucked his toothbrush from the stand as she watched.
“We meet at dusk.” He painted a stripe of toothpaste onto the bristles. “In the woods. You might want to find better shoes.”
“You let me worry about my shoes. You worry about your memory issues.”
She left.
Thank God, he still had a chance.
CHAPTER NINE
Patrick led Sarah and Dana—whom each carried enough firepower under their blazers to blow up a barn—through the dim woods. He shone his flashlight ahead and used his Cat hearing to suss out unusual or unnatural sounds.
Every now and then he’d point off to something and they would all paused until he determined it was just ambient noise.
“I bet this isn’t what you thought you’d be doing when you decided to work for Dana, is it?” he called back to Sarah.
She laughed from the rear. “Sure as shit isn’t. This job keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“Just like you, honey,” Dana quipped.
“Hey, I know what I am.”
“You know I would never actually fire you, right? Contrary to what I said.”
“Can I have that in writing? I can never tell if y
ou’re pulling my leg.”
Dana sighed. “Look, if we leave here unscathed and still human—”
“You mean as human as we shrews currently are?”
“You know what I meant.”
They reached the break in the woods where the clearing began, and stopped. Patrick pulled in a breath through his nose and catalogued the scents on the wind.
Earthy. Warm-blooded. Familiar, but not.
Cats.
“Let’s go.” He led them toward a cluster of casually dressed people in the middle of the clearing.
The Were-cats sat on beach chairs they’d carted through the woods, or else blankets. Some sat right on the soggy ground. It could have been Woodstock, as far as any outsider could tell.
“I will not only make such a promise, but I’ll give you a raise, too,” Dana said, picking up the former conversation. “I’m getting a weird feeling that we’re about to get some extraordinary new clients.”
“Other than just me?” Patrick asked. He didn’t really want to be thought of as a client, though. At the moment, he would be stoked if she were thinking of him in a future scenario at all.
Dana didn’t respond.
___
Dana hoped that feeling in her gut was a false one, but her gut was almost never wrong—especially not since her mutations. That meant her life was about to get really interesting, and she didn’t know whether she should be happy or pissed.
Patrick wrapped an arm around her waist, possessively, she thought, and guided her toward a middle-aged, overweight man whom sat on a tree stump, watching their approach.
She looked up at Patrick, hoping to convey a question in her expression. What are you doing?
He just gave her waist a squeeze and fixed his gaze on the man ahead.
The old Cat stood and extended a hand.
She shook it.
“Billy Jones,” he said with a chuckle. “I guess I’m the group grandpa. We don’t really do titles here.”
“Dana Slade.” She had a title. He just didn’t need to know it.
He turned his attention to Sarah next.
“No wonder you’re not interested in the Cats,” Billy said to Patrick. “You’ve got your own li’l harem.”
