Defender Cave Bear (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  While Tirzah was eyeing Merlin, visibly trying to figure out whether he was pulling her leg, Pete thought fast. He’d brought Caro here to protect her, and weird as his team were, he still couldn’t think of anyone he trusted more to do that. And if he was gone, their enemy would follow him and leave his daughter alone.

  “Tirzah’s plan is good,” Pete said. “I can protect her, she can do her thing, and you can guard Caro while I’m gone.”

  “I’ll protect her with my life,” Roland said.

  “This may be burned out for now.” Ransom tapped his temple. “But this is still good.” He touched his chest, leaving Pete wondering whether he meant his fighting spirit or a concealed weapon.

  “I’ll stick to her like Harry Potter chasing after a Golden Snitch!” Merlin assured him.

  “You can be in charge of entertaining her while she’s stuck here,” Pete said.

  “Where’s Carter?” Tirzah asked. “He could stay here, so he’s not a danger to us, and I could coordinate with him over email.”

  “No idea, sorry,” Merlin said with a shrug. “He took off. He does that.”

  Roland said, “If he turns up, I’ll have him email you immediately.”

  “I’ll talk to Caro now,” Pete said. “Remember, guys, she doesn’t know anything about any of the weird shit. And she’s a very bright girl. No subtle talking over her head—she’ll get it. And absolutely no shifting, Merlin!”

  “Why are you singling me out?” Merlin protested.

  Exasperated, Pete snapped, “Because Ransom hates his shift form and Roland doesn’t want to burn down the office!”

  It was only after the words left his mouth that he realized that Ransom had never said a word about hating his hellhound. Pete just knew it, now that he’d been inside Ransom’s mind.

  The muscles around Ransom’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

  Pete wished he could apologize, but that would just call more attention to it. Meanwhile, Tirzah looked like her wish was to sink into the floor. “Tirzah, want to come with me?”

  “Sure!”

  They fled more than left the office. Once they were outside, Tirzah said, “Thanks for the rescue. But I don’t have to sit in on your talk with Caro unless you actually want me to.”

  “I’d like you to,” Pete said. “But you don’t have to. I don’t want to pull you out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

  She smiled that irresistible smile of hers. “I don’t mind. I like her.”

  And that was when Pete realized that he was the one going out of the frying pan and into the fire. Being pitched into the dark chaos of Ransom’s mind was nothing compared to having to tell his daughter he was leaving her behind. Again.

  CHAPTER 22

  T irzah could tell that Pete was shaken from whatever it had been like to calm Ransom, worried about Caro, and not looking forward to the talk they were about to have with her. She couldn’t give him the Shoulder of Strength, so she put her hand on his arm. On him, a simple touch seemed to work like magic: she could actually feel him relax.

  “Caro’s going to hate this, isn’t she?” Tirzah asked.

  “Yeah. But it’s for her own protection.”

  She glanced up at his set face. There was something about him that reminded her of the bear: powerful, fierce, protective, and stubborn as hell. Crashing through obstacles, moving forward with such momentum that he couldn’t turn aside or stop. Who’d be willing to step in front of a charging cave bear?

  Me, Tirzah thought glumly. Oh, he’s going to hate this…

  But she’d never been able to stop herself from saying what she believed was the truth.

  “Pete? Have you thought of telling her what’s actually going on?”

  “You mean that I’m leaving to draw the danger away from her?” He shook his head. “I can’t. She’d be scared. She’d worry about me. Maybe she’d even feel guilty.”

  “Yeah, she might. But she’d also understand why you’re doing it, and she wouldn’t feel abandoned.”

  He shook his head dismissively. “I’ll explain that I don’t have any choice.”

  “You do have a choice, though,” she said. Pete gave her a look like she was suddenly speaking a language he didn’t understand, but she went on. “And also, everything else. Being kidnapped. Being a shifter. Why you didn’t want to hug her. Have you even considered telling her?”

  Now he was looking at her like she was a bug-eyed alien. “No, of course not.”

  “Well, why don’t you take a moment and consider it?”

  He didn’t take a moment, but immediately replied, “She can’t know any of that. For her own safety.”

  “Is it really keeping her safe, though? Remember her saying she was fleeing her home, and asking how knowing why would make her less safe? You didn’t answer her. Do you have an answer?”

  “She’s too young, and it’s too dangerous. And that’s that.” He sounded annoyed, which was fair; she was annoyed at him too. She thought for a living, and he was literally refusing to even think about a very important matter.

  Tirzah opened her mouth to point out that being kept in ignorance might be more dangerous than knowing what was up, then closed it. That might well be true in the long run, but for now Caro was in a top security building, guarded by three ex-military bodyguard shapeshifters with magical powers. At this exact moment, it was literally impossible for her to get into any trouble.

  Besides, she was skating perilously close to criticizing someone else’s parenting, which she knew was obnoxious. Especially since she wasn’t a parent herself.

  Instead, she said, “Is she going to sleep here? Where, on the sofa in the lobby?”

  Pete looked relieved at the change of topic. “No, we have a place for clients who need protection and don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s a bedroom and bathroom. Roland fixed it up. He said anyone who used it would be scared and desperate and need a place that felt safe and cozy. So he put a deadbolt on the inside and a patchwork quilt on the bed and pajamas in all sizes in the closet.”

  “That sounds nice,” Tirzah said, though she bet Caro wouldn’t still enjoy it once she realized her father was leaving her there.

  They reached the client room. The door was shut. Pete knocked. “Caro? It’s me.”

  “Just a second!” Caro yelled through the door. She heard thumps and scuffles and a door slamming. Then the deadbolt slid back and she opened the door.

  Tirzah spun her chair around on the hardwood floor, admiring the room. It really did feel cozy, with a big four-poster bed, blue walls, a big window (made of bulletproof glass, no doubt) with a great view of the city, and framed paintings of cozy scenes: a red barn in a snowy landscape, a white sailboat in a clear blue sea, a meadow of wildflowers with a brook running through it.

  A tall bookcase held a very wide selection of books for every taste, from classics to fantasy to murder mysteries to popular nonfiction. The bottom two shelves held books for children, from picture books to young adult novels. There was a small table with a few chairs, a larger armchair, a TV, a closet, and a dresser. Caro had placed her jewelry box atop the dresser, and had Merlin’s laptop on the bed.

  “Hope you didn’t break Merlin’s bank,” Tirzah said. “Get anything nice?”

  Caro nodded, grinning, and turned the laptop to show Tirzah a billowing white nightgown trimmed with lace and tiny pink roses.

  “Very pretty,” Tirzah said.

  Pete barely glanced at it. “Listen, Caro. Tirzah and I have to go away for a couple days. You need to stay here. It’s completely—”

  “You’re DITCHING me?” Caro interrupted.

  Tirzah winced. This conversation was obviously going to go exactly how she’d guessed.

  Pete’s voice also rose. “It’s for your own safety! My team will be guarding you the entire—”

  “You’re ditching me AGAIN?!” Caro yelled.

  “I’m not ditching you! I’m keeping you safe!”

  “Why don’t
you keep me safe yourself?! Why are you foisting me off on your co-workers?!”

  Pete lowered his voice. “I have a job to do, and so does Tirzah. You know you can’t come along on my jobs.”

  Caro glared at him so hard Tirzah half-expected to see sparks fly out of her eyes. “Of course I know that! So tell me what the job is, if it’s real and not just an excuse to DITCH me!”

  Tirzah tried to catch Pete’s eye. But he wasn’t looking in her direction. Arms folded, he said, “I can’t tell you that.”

  “You mean you won’t! This isn’t the military—it’s not top secret! And it’s not about Tirzah’s privacy, because I know she’d tell me! You just don’t want me around!”

  With that, Caro jumped up from the bed. Snatching her jewelry case from the dresser, she ran with it into the bathroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

  “Lina! Get back in here!” Pete yelled.

  “My name’s not Lina!” Caro shouted from behind the door.

  After that, there was only silence. For the third time that day, Tirzah was in the uncomfortable position of being an onlooker to some intense emotional scene between other people. She was tempted to just leave, but if she moved, that would only make them remember she was there.

  Finally, Pete said to the closed door, “I’ll call you, all right? Okay, Caro? I love you, and I’m not doing this because I don’t want you around. There’s some serious stuff going on that has nothing to do with you.”

  There was no reply, but the silence had a distinctly sulky atmosphere.

  “Good-bye, mija,” Pete said.

  “Bye, Caro,” Tirzah said. “Um… If you like Harry Potter, you should try Percy Jackson. The second shelf has the complete series.”

  “I’ve already read it!” Caro snapped from within. “Twice!”

  Pete silently beckoned to Tirzah, and they left the room. He closed the door a little louder than necessary—not slamming it, but making sure she heard they were gone.

  Once outside, he sighed. “She’s usually much better-behaved than this.”

  Tirzah nearly had to bite her tongue not to say “I told you so.” Instead, she said peaceably, “I know, Pete. She’s stressed and upset and she just had to flee her own house with nothing but that jewelry box. If it’d been me at that age, I’d have been curled up sobbing in a corner. All things considered, I think she’s doing fine.”

  “I wish I could send her to Arizona to be with Mom,” he said. “I could get one of the guys to escort her. But I can’t risk someone trying something at an airport.”

  “Or on a plane,” Tirzah agreed. “Come on, let’s grab the kittens and get out of here.”

  Pete nodded. “You want some spare clothes or a toothbrush or anything like that? We keep them here for clients.”

  “Nah, I have everything I need at the cabin.”

  Pete went to get a gun, a cell phone, and other equipment from the office supply room, and Merlin went with Tirzah to corral Spike and Batcat into the suitcase, which he’d already helpfully punched holes in with a screwdriver. Tirzah was just crossing her fingers they could both go in without a fight, because the backpack couldn’t be comfortable for poor Spike.

  They found the winged kittens snoozing on a desk, bellies rounded with all the ham they’d gobbled down. They were at opposite ends of the desk, but Tirzah decided to take it as a positive sign that at least they weren’t at opposite ends of the room. She slid them into the suitcase with no trouble at all.

  “Sure you don’t want to leave them here?” Merlin asked hopefully. “They’d be safer.”

  “You mean, you want to kitten-sit,” Tirzah said.

  Merlin grinned, unabashed. “Of course I do.”

  “Pete’s dead-set on making sure Caro never finds out about shifters or magic or any of this,” Tirzah said. “These little guys are escape artists, and they meow. If they stay here, it’ll all come out. Anyway, if I trust Pete to protect me, I trust him to protect them.”

  “Can’t blame a guy from trying.” Bending over the suitcase, Merlin called, “See you later, little guys. Maybe I’ll have a little friend for you to play with by then!”

  She and Pete met up in the lobby, where Roland was waiting for them.

  “The cameras outside the building don’t show anything suspicious,” Roland said. “I think you’ll at least be able to get out of the parking lot without any trouble. Hopefully out of the city. After that...” He spread his hands. “I know you can handle yourself and protect Tirzah. And there is a real danger of any of us getting within range of a mind-controller. But all the same, call us if you need us.”

  “I will,” Pete said. But Tirzah had the distinct impression that he was just saying it to get his boss off his back. She’d yet to see him call for help under any circumstances.

  But that didn’t scare her any more than she was already scared. If Pete couldn’t protect her himself, nobody could.

  They got in his car and stashed the kitten case in the back seat, and Pete drove away. At first his attention was completely on the road, watching for ambushes or cars following them or gargoyles in the sky. But once they were on the freeway and heading out of the city, toward the forests and mountains and small towns that lay to its north, she saw him relax a little.

  “Caro’s a lot like you,” Tirzah said.

  “That girl is smarter than I’ll ever be. Her mother’s a high-powered lawyer now.”

  “Hey, don’t put yourself down,” Tirzah said. “You’re plenty smart. But she’s also got your stubbornness. And your temper.”

  “All my worst qualities,” he muttered.

  Tirzah gave an exasperated huff of breath. “Don’t be like that. My point is that you’re clashing now because you’re so much alike, neither of you will give an inch. But you’re so much alike, you’re bound to come back together in the end.”

  Pete glanced at her with his big brown eyes, and she saw she’d given him some hope. “Yeah. I guess so. And you’re right. If my dad had hustled me off and stuck me with his co-workers, I’d be plenty pissed. Then again, his co-workers were Marines, so I guess once I’d cooled down, I’d get them to teach me hand-to-hand combat or to disassemble a rifle blindfolded.”

  “Just wait till you see Caro’s new skills when you get back,” Tirzah teased. “She’ll probably be a black belt.”

  “I don’t think she’s interested in that stuff. But Merlin might teach her some gymnastics. I could get her riding lessons or gymnastics lessons, but I couldn’t afford both, and she picked riding. I don’t know where Merlin learned—he claims he got taught by trapeze artists in that bullshit made up circus of his—but he’s good.”

  “There you go.” Tirzah patted his thigh. “You’ll come back to a very happy girl who can fly through the air and has a complete set of the girliest clothes she’s ever dreamed of. Possibly including a pink leotard.”

  Pete nodded, smiling at last. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but thank God for Merlin. And if she actually wants to hear his circus stories, and I think she will if he makes up some pretty pretty performing ponies, his life will be complete.”

  Tirzah smiled. Then she remembered what she’d been meaning to ask Pete, before Caro had distracted her. “Hey! What was going on when you shook Roland’s hand? Does it still hurt?”

  The hard planes of Pete’s face were transformed by joy, like the sun rising over a mountain range. “No! Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Caro hugged me in the garage, and that didn’t hurt either.” He shook his head in wonder. “Didn’t hurt. Man, that’s an understatement. It was like when I first held her, when she was a baby.”

  “Oh, Pete.” Tirzah couldn’t give him a real hug, since he was driving, but she did her best. “I’m so glad.”

  “I wish I knew what changed. Just so I could stop worrying that it was a one-day fluke, and tomorrow it’ll be back to the way it was before.”

  But the moment he said, “what changed,” Tirzah’s mind was leaping ahead. “Pete
, what changed was the Shoulder of Strength! You never did that before, right?”

  “No, but I don’t see what that has to do with…” His eyes took on a distant, inward-turning look. “When I did it to you, your emotions had a kind of… physical feeling. Like, your fear felt like it was cutting me. Your anger burned. I think maybe I always had the Shoulder of Strength, sort of, but it wasn’t working right. I couldn’t turn it off, and I couldn’t do anything useful with it, and I couldn’t feel anything positive or even know what I was feeling. Whenever I touched anyone, it turned on automatically, found whatever negative stuff was inside them, and threw it back at me as pain.”

  “So Jerry was telling the truth!” She grabbed his arm, excited by her favorite thing: all the pieces of a puzzle falling into place. “Remember, he said you had two powers, and one wasn’t working right.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that. I just figured he was making it up to mess with me.”

  “But why not me?” Tirzah asked, more thinking aloud than to Pete. “It’s not like I don’t have any negative feelings.”

  Pete started to smile, then got that distant look again. He suddenly blinked, then a look of understanding came across his face, as if he’d heard some inward voice. His cave bear talking to him?

  “Earth to Pete,” Tirzah said. “Someone talking to you?”

  His face went deliberately blank. She gave an inward sigh. One more thing he wasn’t going to tell her. Rather than argue about it, she changed the subject. “So what was it like being inside Ransom’s head? You looked pretty shaken up after that.”

  “It was like walking into a giant store with thousands of TVs stacked up at every wall, turned up so loud they hurt your ears, with every single one playing something different. I always figured when he used his power, it was like typing into Google and seeing what comes up. But I think it’s more like having everything anyone’s ever searched for on Google dumped into your head and trying to sift through it for the answer to your question.”

  “As someone who does a lot of weird searches on Google, that does not sound fun.”