“Aside from the entertainment value?” Gretel smiled. “I have my orders. I am authorized to book all of Mr. Leonard’s appointments. Since you were unable to schedule a time with him, we thought it might be more convenient to set the time with me.”
The blonde reached into an inner pocket of her blazer and pulled out a slim PDA. She turned it on and slid out a stylus, tapping the screen a few times before raising expectant eyes to Cassidy. “How does this evening look for you? Around nine?”
Twenty-one
The universe hated her. Cassidy knew it.
Her apartment was empty of werewolves when she walked in the door, her answering machine held four new messages from friends whom she’d stood up in the last couple of days while chasing down lunatics, and her phone started ringing again the moment she threw the locks behind her. Picking up the cordless unit, she glanced down at the caller ID and saw her grandmother’s number in the little window of doom. Groaning, she girded her mental loins and pressed the talk button.
“Hello?”
“So you’re not lying dead in a ditch somewhere being devoured by insects. I was beginning to wonder.”
Oh, for gods’sake. “No, Nana, I’m fine. How are—”
Adele didn’t give her time to finish. “Especially given what’s just happened.”
Cassidy frowned. “What do you mean? What’s happened?”
“Governor Thurgood’s daughter has been in a car accident.”
Cassidy was aware her grandmother knew the governor, but she didn’t know why this was big news. She searched for an appropriate comment. “I hope she’s not seriously injured.”
“Unfortunately, she was. It seems her car was struck by a drunk driver on her way home from a party in Connecticut. She was taken to a local hospital and admitted to the ER before anyone could be notified.”
She started to murmur something else polite when the implications of Adele’s news struck her. “The governor of New York is Other. He’s Racine.”
“A wererat,” Adele confirmed with a sniff. “As is his daughter.”
“But no one is supposed to know that.”
“No, but if the doctors in Connecticut performed a thorough exam on Alexandra, now somebody does.”
“Are we too late? I mean, haven’t they already run tests? Don’t they already know whatever they’re going to find out?”
“No one is sure,” her grandmother admitted. “The Council only found out about this a few minutes ago. Her father was in Beijing meeting with members of their Olympic committee in hopes of improving the chances of one of the state’s major cities in the next bid for the games, so it will be a day at least before he can get there himself. Rafael De Santos is sending two representatives to Connecticut right now. One is posing as the girl’s fiancé, the other as a member of her father’s staff. Naturally, they will be very concerned about her injuries and the tests and treatments that have been administered. We hope their questions will give us a good sense of what the doctors know.”
“Does the Council need my help?” Cassidy asked warily, thinking of the last things the Council had asked her to do.
“I thought Rafael might already have contacted you.”
Was it her imagination, or did her grandmother sound as if she were fishing for something?
“No, this is the first I’ve heard about it. I haven’t spoken to Mr. De Santos since the meeting the other night.”
Cassidy imagined her grandmother’s spine stiffening.
“When he asked you to work with that Irish dog.”
“Irish dog? Nana, the man has a name, you know.”
“I’m not concerned with his name, Cassidy. I’m concerned with yours. With the good name of this entire family. What could you be thinking to get involved with such a . . . creature?”
“Nana, the head of the Council asked me to cooperate with Mr. Quinn on a serious matter. I could hardly refuse. You know. You were there.”
The temperature of Adele’s voice dropped from its usual chill to something akin to permafrost. “I don’t see how a Council-ordered collaboration requires the beast to be seen entering your apartment at eleven at night and not leaving until seven the following evening.”
Oh, shit.
“Did you have someone spy on me?” she demanded.
“Honestly, Cassidy, don’t be insulting. Why would I need to have someone spy on my own granddaughter?”
“Then what makes you say Sullivan Quinn spent the night at my apartment?”
“It’s all over the community, Cassidy, thanks to your cousin. Everyone knows. And I don’t think I need to tell you how unhappy that makes me.”
Not so much. Cassidy could hear her grandmother’s disapproval loud and clear.
“I hesitate to tell you how to live your life,” Adele continued, and Cassidy had to work to suppress a snort. “You are, after all, a grown woman. However, I must say, this . . . fling of yours shows a remarkable lack of good judgment. In the first place, the two of you are co-workers—”
“We’re digging up some information together, Nana. It’s not as if he’s my department chair at the university.”
“It doesn’t matter. I raised you to know better than to get involved with a common animal like that,” Adele continued. “The man is a werewolf. He’s not our kind, Cassidy.”
“Not our kind?” Even to herself, her voice sounded incredulous. “Nana, we’re Foxwomen. Almost no one is our kind. You make it sound like Quinn is from another planet. He’s Lupine. So what? He’s a shifter; I’m a shifter. What other kind are you talking about?”
“You know very well what I mean,” the older woman snapped. “A werewolf is a very different thing from a Foxwoman. How can you compare their crude, childish attempts at shifting to what we do? A kit could do better than one of their elders.”
Okay, now Cassidy was sure she had a migraine. “Nana, we shift from human to fox. They shift from human to wolf. It’s really not that big a difference.”
“I’m not talking about end results, Cassidy Emilia. I’m talking about methods and about finesse. We shift because the magic of the transformation flows in our blood. We choose our time, our place. We are women, or we are foxes. We do not become stuck in some monstrous half-form. We do not feel a compulsion from the moon. They are like grotesque shadows of us. They are not magic; they do not use magic. They are used by it. They have no will to battle the force of the moon on their change. How can you compare them to us?”
“How can’t I?” Cassidy’s voice was quiet after Adele’s vitriolic diatribe. “Yeah, they’re different, but that doesn’t make them monsters, Nana.”
“It makes them unlike us, Cassidy. Our family has preserved our heritage through more generations than we can remember. The women of our family are Fox-women, and we pass on that heritage by taking human mates. What do you think will happen to your daughters if they have an animal for a father?”
Unbidden, an image of little girls with whiskey-dark eyes and smiles that could charm the bark off a tree sprang to her mind and promptly melted Cassidy’s heart. Quinn’s daughters.
She yanked herself right out of that fantasy. What on earth was she thinking? She’d slept with the man once. Okay, half a dozen times, but it was only one night. And a day. She had no reason to believe he had any intention of sticking around long enough to make Valentine’s Day plans with her, let alone babies.
But the idea of his babies made her stomach flip and her ovaries sing the Ode to Joy.
“Nana, I won’t deny I’m interested in Sullivan Quinn, but I don’t have a relationship with him. Calm down. Don’t you think it’s more important to focus on Alexandra Thurgood? I imagine her accident has sped up the time line the Council has to take action on the Unveiling.”
“Don’t try to use that as a distraction. The Council is taking care of it. I already explained that. What you should be concentrating on is thinking about whether you’re willing to sacrifice the dignity of your family to mate with an ani
mal.”
The next sound Cassidy heard was the dial tone droning in her ear. That and her heart thumping along in her chest at about three times the speed and thirty times the volume of normal.
Mate?
Why had her grandmother had to go and do that? Why did she have to bring up the m-word?
She replaced the phone in its cradle and sank down onto her sofa with a pitiful groan. Her stomach was twisting and clenching behind her navel, and the instinctive tightening in her throat didn’t do a lot to help her calm down. Once the word “mate” had come up, calm stopped being an option.
This wasn’t supposed to be about mating. This was just supposed to be two single adults, who happened to get each other really hot, having a mutually satisfying and indeterminately temporary relationship. It was supposed to be fun and sexy and casual, not scary and life-changing and permanent.
Cassidy might not know the details of how Lupines formed mate bonds, but she could guess that it was all speed and intensity, just like them. It had to involve dominance and submission and the male staking a claim on the female in that brutally basic way they had. It would be emotionally and physically messy, and it would definitely not come with an escape clause. After all, werewolves were ruled by their instincts, and she had no reason to think their love lives would prove an exception to that.
God, she almost wished she had asked the Lupines she knew some really personal questions through the years, just so she would have something more than speculation to go on. Her own instincts, though, told her she couldn’t be far off the mark.
The whole idea stood in stark contrast to the mating traditions of Foxwomen. For her people, the process closely resembled that of humans. A Foxwoman met a human man she liked, they dated, got to know each other, and if he didn’t freak out and run when she told him what she was, they’d mate and make babies. Some of whom would be Foxwomen and some of whom would be normal human males. It was all very calm and civilized—honestly, would Adele Berry have stood for anything else?—and built on a foundation of mutual respect and affection for one’s mate.
Cassidy had figured she could handle that. One of these days. She wasn’t ready for a mate anytime soon, but if nothing else, she could appreciate her responsibility to preserve a dwindling race. Still, in her mind the day she would mate had been lifetimes away, something that would happen when she had gotten her life in order, settled down and met a nice, nonthreatening human man she wouldn’t mind seeing across her breakfast table for a few decades. She never planned for it to be anything other than a matter of companionship and children. She wanted calm and civilized, because the alternative was intense and frightening and involved things like lust and passion and need. And love.
The word sent her stomach flipping again.
Cassidy wasn’t sure she wanted to fall in love. The idea terrified her. She’d loved her parents, and they’d been taken away from her. Her father had loved her mother so much that he’d uprooted his entire life for her. He’d given up a perfectly normal, human existence to become the mate of a woman who wasn’t even the same species. He’d had to learn how to live with the burden of hiding the truth about his wife from strangers. He’d even had to learn how to raise a daughter who kept losing her clothes in the forest because she’d gone out to play and had shifted and come back home in her fox form, forgetting all about the clothes she’d been wearing when she left. He’d done it gladly, and neither he nor his wife nor their daughter had ever thought it should be any different. His love for Cassidy’s mother had been so strong that he’d given up his own career to help with hers, learning how to negotiate regarding things he couldn’t possibly understand with people who could tear him into pieces without breaking a sweat. Finally, they had.
And Sarah Poe had loved her husband so much that she had died trying to protect him.
In Cassidy’s mind, love equaled loss.
When she thought about it, Cassidy admitted the emotion made her feel slightly panicked. She wasn’t sure she was even capable of being that selfless. What would she have done if she’d been her mother? If she’d been given a choice between dying with love and living without it?
She honestly didn’t know. And if she didn’t know, how could she consider taking a mate?
She grew very, very still.
Was she considering taking a mate?
Shoving down a surge of childhood fears, Cassidy searched for an answer to that question. Did she want Sullivan Quinn for her mate? Regardless of his species and his profession, did she want him, the man she knew him to be? The exasperating, sneaky, adorable, trustworthy, persistent, caring man she knew he was?
Oh, shit. Yeah. She kinda did.
Cassidy groaned and buried her face in her hands. Damn, but she had some lousy timing. Here she was, in the middle of an international political nightmare, and she picked this as the perfect time to consider mating with a man from another species who made his home on another continent and who probably wouldn’t be interested in her in another two weeks?
Good work, Cass. Now that’s what’s called picking a winner.
Twenty-two
A few hours later, Cassidy was still brooding as she stepped out of the shower and quickly dried her hair. She braided it into two simple plaits and padded into the bedroom to dress, all the while studiously avoiding the thoughts that had been plaguing her ever since her grandmother’s phone call. She had plenty of other things to worry about without obsessing over the word that would not be named.
What was the appropriate attire for a forced meeting with a vampire, anyway? Was she supposed to go the Anne Rice route and try to find something frilly and Victorian? Or maybe go all Gothic, with lots of black eyeliner and a pair of combat boots?
In the end, she pulled out her favorite pair of blue jeans, the ones that were worn white at the seams, along with a scooped-neck pullover in faded, sweatshirt gray. Leonard could live with the disappointment of not seeing her all gussied up. Besides, her daddy had always said costumes only made it harder to concentrate on what was important.
She left her apartment at eight-forty and ignored the elevator, jogging down to the lobby with the directions Gretel had given her in one hand. She used the other to flag down a cab and spent the next few minutes battling the desire to tell the driver to forget the address she’d given him, just drop her off someplace with bad lighting and Guinness on tap.
The idea tempted her mercilessly, but the cab jerked to a stop before she worked up the nerve to be quite that rude.
“This is it, lady.”
Cassidy paid the cabbie and slid out onto the deserted sidewalk, looking up at the old garment warehouse while the taxi peeled off behind her. The building hulked in the middle of the block, surrounded by the kind of narrow streets that marked one of the city’s older neighborhoods. The structure looked pretty old itself, all chipped brick and decaying concrete. Looked as if Leonard really knew how to live it up.
She made a face and stepped up to the door, a graffiti-covered, black steel thing with a speakeasy-style peephole in the door. Good God. Talk about your vampire melodrama. These guys couldn’t seem to get past the whole “Legend of the Wampyre” thing to save themselves.
Her knock brought several seconds of silence, followed by the faint rustling of footsteps and a slow creak as the door swung open. Grendl stood on the other side looking about as friendly as her namesake, if a little better dressed. She wore a severely tailored suit in dark blue with a silver watch fob dangling from the coat pocket. Judging from the plunge of the neckline, the suit looked to be all she was wearing.
The blonde gave Cassidy’s casual clothes an unhurried once-over, but her expression never changed. It didn’t have to; it had been disapproving from the start.
“I’m here to answer the royal summons,” Cassidy said. “D’you think the queen will grant me an audience if I promise to curtsy low enough?”
“King.”
The vampire’s servant stepped back from the threshold, maki
ng room for Cassidy to pass through, frowning. “What?”
“King.”
The door shut with an ominous thump, but Cassidy absolutely refused to twitch. She met the other woman’s icy gaze with a level one of her own.
Gretel smiled unpleasantly. “In your little metaphor there, Mr. Leonard would be the king, not the queen. As I’m sure you’re well aware.”
The woman so knew how to take the fun out of a snide insult. Cassidy followed her down a dimly lit and graffiti-decorated corridor to a steel-gated service elevator. “I’m aware of the fact that he isn’t a monarch at all, actually. But that’s where my knowledge of him ends. And my interest in him.”
“Oh, I would be surprised if you don’t find meeting with Mr. Leonard this evening to be very interesting, indeed.”
Any rolling of Cassidy’s eyes then was done with absolute discretion. Honest. “Right. He’s off to a great start with that. Because I just adore it when I’m threatened and harassed into having a few words with someone. I find that really puts me in a receptive frame of mind.”
Her guide stepped forward as the elevator ground to a halt, sliding open the gate without so much as a pause. “And me without my thumb screws. How positively tragic.”
Cassidy made a face at the woman’s back and fell silent as they moved through another corridor, this one looking much less likely to fall down around their heads. The hall ended at a reinforced steel door with yet another Capone-style viewing hole. She almost expected a Chicago accent to demand the password before letting them in. Instead, the cover over the viewing window slid open without so much as a knock from Gretel. There was a brief pause, then the snapping of locks, and the entrance made room for them to walk inside.
Oh, goodie.
After the melodrama that had greeted her so far, she had half expected to step through the doorway into a replica of Dracula’s castle, complete with cobwebs in the corners, smoky torches on the walls, and the howls of wolves echoing in the distance. Perhaps even three scantily clad, bloodthirsty women writhing around in the faint, silvery glow of the moonlight. She wouldn’t have been surprised.
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