Headstrong Prince

by Michelle M. Pillow

  The statue seemed to stare into the distance as if ignoring him. A prickling sensation came over his senses. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating on the intrinsic warning. It had been a long time since he’d felt such apprehension. He wasn’t the only shifter on the streets this night. The excitement caused his hands to shake. Was he about to make contact with the dragons? He didn’t let on that he felt another shifter approach as he continued talking to the metal woman.

  “Yes, that would be bad. I have to believe my parents will not let that happen. I need to go home. I can’t stay here. I miss the smells of the shadowed marshes. I have been craving roasted baudron. It is only found in the northern hunting grounds on Draig territory, but my brother and I have gained permission to hunt there many times.”

  The sensation grew. Shifters were close. He didn’t pay attention to his words as he used his sensitive hearing to search through the crowds for his native language.

  “But the portal is on Draig territory,” Ivar reasoned. “What if the dragon elders use my disappearance as the excuse they need to close off all travel? I know my father. He will not let it stand. It will not look good that Finn came back without me. My parents will start a war to get me back.” He took a deep breath, feeling the stress in his stomach that never went away. When he didn’t hear anything to prove a shifter was near, he glanced around without trying to be obvious. He felt as if he was being observed. “If the portal is sealed, how will I find a way back home? Alien visitors? They don’t come to Earth often, and when they do they stay hidden. First contact hasn’t been officially established, and may not be for some time.”

  A man stumbled by, reeking of liquor and mumbling, “Damn woman broke my heart. If she had married me, I wouldn’t be the broken man I am today. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. I should find her and tell her that it’s not my fault.”

  “No offense,” Ivar whispered, “but this planet doesn’t have much to offer the universe yet. I guess it will be at least another hundred to two-hundred years until aliens make themselves known.”

  A small clicking noise caught his attention, and he turned to see a woman pointing a camera at him. It hid her face from view. She stood on the other side of the walkway. Dark brown hair with hints of red fell over her shoulders. She wore a white skirt that flared around her legs, leaving the calves bare. A memory tried to surface. She looked familiar.

  Was that the presence he’d been feeling? Was this who put his senses on alert? She did capture his notice.

  Her blue shirt hugged her figure, revealing each feminine curve. Tension rolled over him when she didn’t turn away. His eyes narrowed as he focused on her, trying to figure out what she was doing to him.

  It was the woman in white. The one from the first day he arrived. He’d found her again. But why now? And why did she bring with her a feeling of warning?

  No, there were others here too. Shifters. Why did they come now? On the night he found her again.

  Ivar had looked for her after that first evening, each time he was downtown in Oxford to check the portals. He’d never thought to look for her in New Orleans.

  Like last time, seeing her made the beast want to come out and play. Her finger twitched, and the click happened again. It was as if she purposefully made every primal instinct he had surge forth.

  She lowered the camera from her face and slowly stepped back. Her eyes met and held his.

  “It is her,” Ivar whispered to the statue. “The one I told you about. The one the gods sent to show me what I could not have.”

  He was too afraid to move scared she’d vanish. But there was another fear, the creeping one in the back of his mind, the knowledge that he was not the only shifter roaming the streets. Movement caught his attention, followed by the flash of glowing eyes.

  Dragon.

  No, not just a single dragon. There were two of them, possibly more. He saw them glaring at him from within the nearby shadows. There was nothing friendly about their expressions. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t expected them to give him a warm welcome. They had to suspect he wanted them to go home. Still, he was a prince, and they should not have been threatening him. Ivar wanted to do this peacefully.

  Ivar stood, a growl stuck in his throat. His body threatened with a shift. The woman’s eyes widened, and she stumbled. She must have seen the dragons, too.

  She took off running as if chased by rabid yorkins, or in this case angry dragons. Ivar jumped to his feet and glanced around, trying to see who threatened her. The dragons had disappeared into the shadows. Were they chasing her? Not seeing an attacker, Ivar ran after the woman, intent on protecting her.

  7

  Beth rushed through the crowd only stopping when she was through Dutch Alley. Part of her expected there to be panic in the streets. How could no one have seen what she had? A demon loose in New Orleans? Or a vampire? What else would have eyes with a supernatural glow?

  Well, actually, the people of New Orleans would probably welcome a vampire.

  Beth stopped running and pressed close to a building. She searched the crowd, not seeing anyone coming for her. Rumors flooded the city of paranormal and supernatural creatures, but she’d always taken that as local lore to sell ghost tour tickets to the tourists. Never in a million years would she have guessed it was real.

  And she’d captured proof.

  Beth lifted her camera to study the viewing screen on the back. She enlarged the last photo of the man as much as she could. It was hard to tell on the smaller screen, but she would have sworn his eyes glowed. Not the captured reflection of streetlights like in the first photograph from Oxford could have been, but a genuinely bioluminescent glow from within. A strange shadow marred the sides of his eyes. The orange color contrast made little sense, but the camera screen only let her zoom in so much.

  Had she really captured a vampire?

  It was night, and he was mesmerizingly handsome. Broad shoulders and thick muscles molded beneath tight flesh. He wore snug denim jeans and a dark jacket. She felt a sexual ping in her stomach when she looked at him. Wait, vampires didn’t have a reflection, right? So could they have their pictures taken? Or was that just Hollywood nonsense?

  A memory nagged at the back of her mind. What had those kids said the night she took the first photo? Cat-man? It had been a passing amusement at the time, but maybe there was something to that conversation. Was the orange distortion really fur? She could have sworn one of the college boys said tiger. Had the photo from Mississippi somehow not been the perfect combination of special effect lighting and movement and instead was a supernatural cat-man? That wasn’t any more believable than a vampire.

  Beth turned the dial on the camera, flipping through the digital files. She stared at the first photo of the man as he talked to the statue. With each new photo, she watched as he turned toward her. His smile dropped, and his expression intensified as he peered into the camera.

  Beth stared at the evidence. Her hands shook as she moved to the next photo. Eyes began to glow, and his face changed. He’d stood, the movement of his body sure and fluid as he’d tried to come after her.

  What should she do? Should she tell someone? Who would believe her? Did she even believe herself? If she showed anyone the photo, they would assume it was a fake. That is what she would have thought if someone said they had evidence of a supernatural creature.

  She hadn’t planned her escape very well. To reach her car, she needed to cross Dutch Alley and go in the other direction. That meant chancing another encounter. He’d looked at her with those penetrating eyes. Surely he knew she’d seen his transformation.

  She debated on how to proceed. If she took the side streets, there might not be many people, but then she’d be a woman walking alone in the dark with a supernatural being on the loose. Her parking meter ran out in a half hour, but paying for parking wasn’t required after 7pm. Maybe she could duck into a bar and hide until the last call.

  What if there were more of them? How many su
pernatural creatures could be running wild in the French Quarter? Beth looked around, fighting the urge to run. Her thoughts were a scattered mess. No one had the mystique of Mr. Glowing Green Eyes, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more of them out there. Her heart beat harder than it should have.

  “Oh, dammit, this is stupid,” she whispered before holding on to her camera and sprinting down the sidewalk. Beth didn’t care how crazy she looked, running with no one chasing her. She couldn’t force herself to look around as she made a beeline straight to her car. Home would be safer than out in the open.

  She pulled her keys from where they hung attached to her camera strap and tapped the button to unlock the door. As she slid into the driver’s seat, she took several deep breaths. The sound was audible as she turned on the ignition.

  The headlights exposed a dark corner. She gasped, seeing an orange tiger sitting in the dark, staring at her. Cat-man was real. The beast didn’t move. The idea that she’d ran past it caused her breathing to speed up. She shook as she put the car into gear. The motor must have made a sound because the cat took off between two buildings.

  Beth slowly drove past the opening, trying to see the cat. Instead, she saw the silhouette of a large man. He stood as if staring at her from within the shadows. It looked as if he held a pair of jeans in his hand. Was he naked in that alley?

  “Cat-man,” she whispered, terrified that she might be hallucinating. Nothing made sense. She wanted desperately to go home to find a reasonable explanation, and at the same time, she knew there wasn’t one.

  Whoever he was, he silently summoned her closer. She had the urge to get out of the car and run to him. It took everything in her to step on the gas and speed away.

  8

  Beth couldn’t stop her hands from shaking as she tried forcing the key into the lock of her apartment door. It took longer than it should have and in the end the door opened without her key. She stood in the doorway, her breath held and eyes wide as she looked inside at a lamp she had not left on. She started to leave.

  “Beth, is that you?”

  Beth squeaked in fright at the sound but then she realized it was her neighbor, Yvonne Davies.

  “I tried calling you earlier. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in. I found my mail in the basket.” Yvonne had been raised in the South, but extensive traveling when she was younger had neutralized her Southern accent to what Beth thought of as Southern-light.

  Beth glanced at the wicker basket, seeing it was still filled with the woman’s catalogs and envelopes. She slid her photography portfolio on the small table close to the door and set her camera bag on the floor. In her panic to get inside, she barely remembered grabbing them. It must have been an automatic response.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you found that delectable man from your photo?” Yvonne insisted.

  He was there?

  “Yvonne,” Beth whispered, inching from the front door toward her living room. Fear choked her, and she could barely get the words out. “I need you to run. It’s not safe.”

  “It is very high fantasy compared to what you normally do,” Yvonne continued, clearly not hearing the warning.

  Beth peeked around the corner. Yvonne moved across the small apartment, looking from painting to painting, studying them as if they were hanging in a gallery when in fact they were propped up against a wall on Beth’s floor.

  Beth sighed in relief. Yvonne was only looking at her paintings.

  “Please tell me you’re at least dating this man,” Yvonne said, indicating the fact each painting had versions of the same subject. She wondered what Maura would have said about this peculiar hodgepodge of artistic styles.

  When Beth obsessively painted the handsome face she hadn’t known he was a cat-man. She also didn’t expect anyone else would see the collection.

  “When can I meet him?” Yvonne asked.

  “He’s just…” What could she say? “I don’t know who he is. I made him up.”

  If not for the pictures she’d seen on her camera, she would have thought the cat-man was a hallucination. The first image had mesmerized her, but these paintings were nothing she thought of showing other people. She looked at it as more of a way to practice her techniques.

  “Seriously, why haven’t I seen these before?” Yvonne used the tip of her finger to pull back a canvas to see what was behind it.

  Had Beth known her neighbor was coming home a day early, she would have hidden them in her room. “When the muse hits, it must be obeyed.”

  Yvonne pulled out a close up of the man’s face. “This one. This is my favorite. The lighting in his eyes is very unusual.”

  The color hues were unnatural for human skin tones. But, then, she’d painted his flesh with orange, white, and black while giving his skin a smooth texture. At the time, she’d mimicked the strange colors that appeared on the original photo. Only now did she realize it was a blending of man and tiger, no fur, no fangs, but the intensity she’d seen in his gaze. The painting had haunted her dreams, and so she’d hidden it, that way the man could not stare at her when she walked around her apartment. Now, knowing about the cat-man, the image somehow seemed dead on perfect.

  “How was Japan?” Beth asked, not wanting to be alone. She went to the window and peeked outside at the street below. Someone walked past but didn’t seem threatening. She watched as he made his way down the sidewalk.

  “We went to a bar where we were served drinks by two adorable macaque monkeys. They took our orders and delivered them,” Yvonne said. “Which reminds me, I brought you something. It’s by the door.”

  Beth found the yellow gift bag and reached inside. A red silk robe with delicately embroidered cherry blossoms slid against her hands as she lifted it. “Thank you, it’s beautiful.”

  “How did your meeting go at the gallery?” Yvonne asked. “When was that happening again?”

  “Today. Maura Masters said I had potential, but that the collection wasn’t edgy enough for her.”

  “You evidently didn’t show this one to her?” Yvonne lifted the portrait of the cat-man and held it before Beth. “Take this down to Ron’s studio and catch her before she leaves town.”

  “I don’t know.” Beth again crossed to the window and searched the street below. “I’m not sure I’m going to show it. As you said, it’s very science fiction and—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Yvonne scolded. “They’re all good, but this one is transcendent.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she answered, distracted.

  “Are you waiting on a date?” Yvonne sounded excited. She hurried to the window to look out. “Who is he?”

  “No one,” Beth dismissed. “I thought I saw a stray cat outside and was watching for it.”

  “I’m a dog person myself,” Yvonne said, as she went to gather her mail from the basket. “But I think you taking in a pet is a great idea. You shouldn’t be alone in here by yourself painting all the time.”

  “You make it sound like I’m some kind of crazy recluse who never leaves the house,” Beth chuckled.

  “More old maid than a recluse,” Yvonne teased. “You can’t date a paintbrush.”

  “But it can still break your heart,” Beth answered, looking at the cat-man’s face on canvas. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend. I need to focus on my career first. I can’t have any distractions right now.”

  “So you’ve said,” Yvonne mumbled with a disbelieving smirk.

  Yvonne said something more before leaving, but Beth wasn’t sure if she actually answered the woman or said goodbye. To know that her vision had come to life was surreal. It was the perfect convergence of an accidental photo, the playful conversation of college kids, and the unlikely odds of seeing the same man in two different cities.

  A knock sounded on the door, and Beth moved to answer it. “Yvonne? Did you forget something—?” Her words ended with a sharp gasp.

  Cat-man stood staring at her. His chest heaved as if he’d run up the stairs to her second st
ory apartment. How did he find her? And why? She stumbled away from the door.

  “You are safe.” The words were gruff, and the tone of his voice made her feel anything but.

  She reached around, blindly feeling for a weapon. She couldn’t look away. Though all the pertinent areas were covered, he was bare-chested and held his shirt in his hand. Her fingers met something, and she grabbed it, holding it up in warning.

  “I surveyed the alleyway. You were not followed. You are safe,” he said.

  He didn’t come inside, and she slowly lowered her hand. It was only then she realized she had been about to defend herself with a wicker basket. She dropped it, and he surged forward with lightning fast reflexes. Beth inhaled sharply and stumbled away from him, lifting her arms in defense. Instead of harming her, he caught the basket before it hit the floor and held it out for her to take.

  Trembling, she took the basket from him and set it beside her feet on the floor. His earnest eyes watched her expectantly, and he didn’t move. The cat-man stayed kneeling on the floor. Nothing about his demeanor was threatening unless she counted the fact that he was more magnetically gorgeous than any man had a right to be. Knowing the power he had, the ability to become a tiger, a tiger that she had seen staring at her in the alleyway, should have made her scream and run. Instead, she stood, breathing hard, unable to look away.

  “Who…?” she finally managed.

  “Who?” He repeated, slowly pushing to his feet. She really wished he had stayed down. When he stood, it became apparent just how tall and broad he was. “I do not know who was after you, but I assume you saw the dragons? I don’t think they followed you. Are they after you? Do you know something about where they are hiding?”