Cipher

by Moira Rogers

  “No, I didn’t mean—” He made an amused noise. “Is your head tangled up? And your instincts? That girl has never made it easy for you to think.”

  “My brain’s working fine, Alec.” It was even mostly true.

  “Uh-huh. It’s the rest of you working just fine that I’m worried about.”

  Andrew couldn’t resist an arrogant grin. “That’s working all right too.”

  Six months in New York had perfected Alec’s exasperated peevishness. “God help us all. Don’t be an idiot.”

  “No more than usual, you have my word on that.”

  “Good.” Alec’s finger rushed toward the screen, diverting at the last moment to crash into the keyboard, judging by the sound. He looked back up at Andrew, cursed, then pounded another key before bellowing, “Carmen, how the fuck do I turn this thing off?”

  The call dropped, and Andrew muffled a snort as he closed the laptop. Things may have changed a hell of a lot over the last year, but some things never would. It was comforting, in a way.

  Not that he had time to sit around and ponder it. He had to get on the phone with McNeely and clean up his mess, and then he had to figure out what to tell Kat about her cousin’s impending fatherhood—and what it could mean if she chose to pursue her investigation.

  Dixie John’s was the sort of restaurant tourists would have driven miles out of their way to visit, if they’d had any way of knowing the place was there. Once in a while, a tourist wandered in and enjoyed a meal, utterly oblivious to the fact that they were surrounded by witches and priestesses or psychics and shapeshifters.

  Not that everyone who visited the place was a supernatural, but the humans who tended to return were the sort who didn’t mind the rumors that Dixie John dabbled in voodoo. If patrons saw the regulars acting oddly, they shrugged it off and went on about their business.

  They probably didn’t imagine that the pretty redhead taking orders turned into a coyote sometimes, or that the bartender wasn’t just skilled at anticipating their orders—he really could read their minds.

  Kat loved Dixie John’s. During the worst months after Andrew had been attacked, John had given her sanctuary within the walls of his restaurant. At Mahalia’s, she always felt compelled to paste on a smile and pretend she felt healthy and happy, or the staff would tell their boss—and their boss’s husband. Derek had enough to worry about without reports that she was moping about, even if she was.

  John never tattled. Kat had written her thesis in a cozy corner booth, sustained by coffee, music and some of the best damn cooking in the state. John had even given Sera a job, one where she made decent enough money to feel independent as she struggled to find her place. There was something soothing about the big man’s steady presence, an odd mixture of determination and utter belief in fate.

  It had done wonders for Sera, that was for sure. Kat pushed through the front door and found her roommate bent over a table, making faces at a toddler whose shrieks of laughter hit Kat a moment before the wave of youthful glee.

  The few minutes it took to settle her psychic barriers firmly in place gave Sera time to cross the room. Even in jeans and a T-shirt, Sera attracted the gazes of most of the men she passed. Her curvy, pin-up girl looks made Kat feel like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, an insecurity not soothed when Sera nodded to the back booth. “Anna’s waiting for you. I’ve got to get a couple orders in before I take my break.”

  Time alone with Anna. Fabulous. Kat managed a smile. “Okay.”

  Sera sighed, clearly exasperated by the lukewarm response. “Be nice, Kat. Be nice, and I’ll bring you coffee, okay?”

  “I’m nice.” But the admonition reminded her of a blurry moment in a motel in Alabama. Andrew, holding her foot and whispering that he’d never be nice about Miguel.

  As she started toward the booth, Kat forced herself to admit that it was hard to be nice about Anna. Blonde, petite, practically a damn bounty hunter—Anna was everything Kat wasn’t. Including a shapeshifter, one who’d been able to handle Andrew’s strength in the first months after his transformation. With a shapeshifter’s instincts, she’d understood him, probably in ways Kat never would.

  Every time she looked at Anna, all Kat could see were the ways she hadn’t been enough.

  Even now. Anna was halfway through one of John’s omelets, and she waved at Kat as she lifted her coffee cup. “This place is insane. Did you know John mixes his own andouille?”

  “Is that the sausage?” Kat slid into the opposite side of the booth and dropped her bag onto the seat next to her. “He’s a great cook.” See, she could be nice. She was the damn queen of polite, meaningless chitchat about breakfast foods.

  “Yeah, the sausage stuff.” Anna eyed her and shook her head. “Did you tell Andrew you didn’t want me anywhere near you or your roommate?”

  Kat froze, one hand suspended over the table in the act for reaching for a glass of water. “I—what?”

  “Come on, Kat. I’m not a rocket scientist or an empath, but I know when people wish they didn’t have to be looking at me.”

  There it was, blunt and so unrepentant that it took a few moments for Kat to realize that the emotion churning through her was relief. The truth had been festering, an ugly emotion that shamed her so deeply she’d never given it voice. She was Kat—nice, sweet Kat, and she wasn’t allowed to be petty and jealous.

  Kat dropped her hand to rest on the table. “It’s hard sometimes,” she admitted, and the truth felt like dropping a heavy bag full of schoolbooks at the end of a long walk home. Light and freeing, even if her words carried the ghost of pain. “He ditched me and picked you. Not your fault, but it didn’t make it easier. Especially since you’re not that easy to hate.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people manage it,” Anna told her. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

  According to Andrew, she’d been wrong about everything. “What’s that?”

  “He never ditched you.”

  “Yeah, he tried that line too. He disappeared from my life and never talked to me. That’s my definition of ditched.” Kat gripped the edge of the table and met Anna’s gaze squarely. “If this is some shapeshifter thing I’m not getting, I wish you’d tell me. Because no one else will.”

  The blonde laid down her fork. “It’s not human emotion, for starters. It’s not that sentimental. It’s visceral. Andrew damn near ripped out his own heart to protect you, but not because he had some macho, noble idea that it was better for you. In our world, if you don’t know how to take care of someone, you have to walk. Make room for someone else, someone who can.”

  Well that was…typically egocentric shapeshifter bullshit. “Because obviously that’s your choice to make, right? I mean, what say could we have in it?”

  Anna snorted. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question, because you should know the answer by now.”

  This time, she said it out loud. “Well, it’s bullshit. You can’t trade the rest of us around like baseball cards. And if it’s such a universal truth, why the hell has Alec been giving Andrew such a shit time over it?”

  “He’s an alpha shifter,” Anna reminded her. “We’re hypocritical assholes.”

  Apparently. Kat laid both hands on the table. “So let me get this straight. If Andrew sticks around and I get hurt, it’s his fault. If he sticks around and hurts me, it’s his fault. If he leaves and I’m sad…it’s his fault. If he leaves and someone else hurts me…” She trailed off and tried to come up with a polite way to ask a question that didn’t feel polite at all. “Could you all be any more self-centered or condescending?”

  “Nope.”

  Yelling about it was less fun when Anna agreed with her. Slightly perturbed, Kat sat back. “I don’t know how shapeshifters survive, if almost all of you are like this. How do you stand each other long enough to have babies?”

  “You think we’re all like this?” Anna tossed her head back with a laugh. “Sweetie, if that were true, we’d definitely all have kill
ed each other by now. I’m only talking alpha shifters, and it just so happens that New Orleans is lousy with us. Lucky you.”

  As many times as she’d noticed that all of the shifters in her life—save Sera—seemed obnoxiously dominant, she’d never stopped to consider why, or if that was unusual. “Why is New Orleans different? I mean, I know Alec’s made it into the safe place, but if shit is so bad everywhere else, wouldn’t the submissives want to live here?”

  “You think all the subs run away from home like Nicky Peyton?” Anna shook her head as she drew one leg up to rest on the vinyl seat. “Hell no. Even if they want to, they stay put. Right where their more dominant relatives or spouses want them to be. Usually,” she added with a nod toward Sera.

  Kat glanced around to where Sera was leaning over the bar. She said something Kat couldn’t hear, and the man on the other side burst out laughing.

  Sera had run away from home at seventeen. Walked off her high school campus one day and climbed into a car with Josh. They were across state lines before anyone realized she was gone. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t tried to talk her friends and family around. Not that Franklin would have been talked around, and Sera would have had to obey.

  So she’d run. And she’d regretted it.

  Shivering, Kat turned back to Anna and lowered her voice. “Josh made my skin crawl. He treated her like a princess, but it was never right. It was like…deathless love that you knew was going to end badly. It was Romeo and Juliet.” If Romeo had been in his midthirties and had a mullet.

  Something feral and angry sharpened Anna’s gaze for just a moment before vanishing. “Sometimes you think someone’s being treated like a princess, but what they’re really being treated like is a favorite pet or a doll. Property.”

  Harsh words for the possessive interest Kat had never been able to put into words. Maybe she’d been too innocent to understand then. Now she knew better. “Thanks for looking out for her. I didn’t want to drag her into another mess. Not when she’s getting back on her feet.”

  Anna picked up her cup again. “She’s a good kid.”

  “For what it’s worth, Anna, I never hated you. Maybe I wanted to, and maybe I hated myself for the urge, but I never hated you.”

  “Believe me when I say it’s understandable.” Anna finished her coffee and propped her elbows on the table. “Now, are you ready for the good news?”

  That depended on if their definition of good diverged as sharply as their definitions of ditched. “Lay it on me.”

  “He’s figured it out. That he’s the one who can get it done.”

  “Oh.” Maybe to Andrew, it was that easy. Walk away when he couldn’t handle it and come back when he could. It was instinct after all, and humans weren’t allowed to hold instinct against shapeshifters, no matter how much they’d hurt you. Derek had pulled that one on her for years, smothering her like she was a kid and blaming instinct every time she tried to push back.

  Before she could frame a more meaningful response, Sera appeared, squeezing into the booth next to her. “Y’all playing nice over here?”

  “Mostly.” Anna tilted her head and sighed. “It’s hard as hell trying to explain some of this crap without losing a lot in translation.”

  Sera flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder and pushed a cup of coffee toward Kat. “If you thought coming in here smelling like you spent the night under Andrew is going to distract me from the part where you got shot, you’re going to be massively disappointed.”

  Kat flinched, heat filling her cheeks. She’d forgotten—again—and her conversation with Anna seemed a hundred times more awkward now. “Shit, Sera.”

  “Don’t ‘shit’ me. You got shot.”

  Relating the story from the start took most of Sera’s break, and earned Kat a blistering lecture on communication and asking for help that only ended when the bartender flagged Sera down to pick up an order.

  When she was gone, Kat took a sip of her coffee and grimaced when it turned out to be lukewarm. “Do they teach that speech about protecting your people in shapeshifter school?”

  “Closest thing to shapeshifter school is Conclave training, and you don’t want to know what they teach you there.”

  Kat had more guesses than she wanted. “How to rip up men and torture psychics?”

  “For starters. And hey, maybe they’ve expanded the curriculum since I left.” Anna prodded at her cold omelet. “What’s this shit you’re mixed up in that’s got people trying to off you?”

  “I don’t even know.” The zip disk was a foot away, tucked safely in her bag, and it took effort not to reach out and touch it. “Someone who doesn’t want me knowing why my mother was so dangerous she ended up dead.”

  “Got any leads?” She shook her head without waiting for an answer. “Of course you do, or they wouldn’t be after you. Dumb question.”

  “Yeah.” Kat folded her arms and watched as Sera stopped at the table with the toddler again, bending down until the girl got a fist full of Sera’s ponytail. Kids loved her, and Sera loved them back with an outward pleasure that masked the echoes of pain that Kat caught in unguarded moments.

  Glancing back at Anna, Kat tilted her head toward her roommate. “She’s doing okay, right? Is she staying with you?”

  “Mmm, over the bar. I tried to get her to take the bedroom, but she insists on sleeping on the couch.”

  It sounded like a Sera thing to do. “As long as she’s safe. If there are shifters after us…” Anna bristled with power as dominant as Andrew’s. Sera was a quiet submissive who could be bent to a stronger shapeshifter’s will no matter how viciously she fought. “I don’t want to drag her into my crap.”

  Before Anna could answer, John dropped onto the booth beside her with a heavy sigh, a kitchen towel slung over one shoulder. “You around next weekend, Kitty Kat? Jimmy Aucoin’s gonna play here Friday night.”

  One week, and it seemed like a decade away. She already couldn’t begin to make sense of the events that had transpired—open an email on Monday, wake up in Andrew’s bed on Friday.

  By next week she could be married. Or dead. “I don’t know. Things are hectic right now, but if they settle down, I’ll be there.”

  “How about you, Lenoir?”

  “I don’t make plans, John. You know that.”

  He laughed. “Course not. Little rambling Anna.”

  “Plans aren’t the best idea in New Orleans,” Kat pointed out. “Making them is lots of fun until you realize someone or something is always going to come along and break them.”

  “Those days are over,” John insisted. “The place is finally calming down—and I, for one, am gonna enjoy it.”

  Yeah, that was a guilt-punch to the gut.

  “Don’t you have shit to do?” Anna asked him. “Chef-type things back in the kitchen? Make me another omelet.”

  He said something in response, something no doubt both creative and obscene. Kat heard the sounds, but the words drifted away into meaningless noise as Andrew stepped through the front door.

  For a moment, he stood in the late-morning sunlight, and Kat held her breath. The flutter was back, the one she’d had in her hapless innocence, when his mere presence had filled her with imagination with possibilities. Not just the flutter, she had tingles, the kind that came with high school crushes and the driving urge to make out in dark corners.

  She had no idea what they were or where they were going, but sometime in the last week he’d resurrected her ability to hope. To imagine something between them besides pain and loss. It was exhilarating.

  It was terrifying.

  It was kind of turning her on.

  Her heart beat too fast, and Anna would hear it. So would Andrew, and Sera, and probably any number of patrons who were shapeshifters she didn’t recognize. There was no subtlety in the world of supernatural senses, and no privacy.

  Half the people in the room knew she wanted to jump on Andrew, and the rest could probably make a pretty good guess. />
  He stopped beside the table and smiled down at her. “I got things squared away with Alec. How’s it going, Anna? John?”

  They murmured their hellos as Kat oh-so-carefully didn’t touch him. Considering what had happened last time, being within five feet of him seemed risky enough. Instead she gripped her bag as a reminder to keep her hands to herself. “Sera yelled at me until she felt better, so I’m ready to go when you are.”

  “I’m parked right outside.” And he seemed eager to go.

  John grinned and slid out of the booth. “Y’all take it easy.” He disappeared back toward the kitchen.

  Anna spared a glance for Kat as she refilled her coffee cup from the small carafe on the table. “Let me know if you need any backup, okay?”

  That the offer had been made to her, and not to Andrew, was a gesture Kat appreciated. “I will. Thanks, Anna.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Outside, the crisp January morning had her digging a scarf out of her bag. “Sera seems okay. I think Anna is really good for her.”

  “I think so too.” Andrew rested his hand on Kat’s shoulder, drawing her closer. “I didn’t clear the trip out to Alec’s house, after all. He gave me a lecture about independence and initiative, so I said fuck it.”

  “Go us. Breaking and entering.” Leaning into his side felt nice. Fuzzy, but nice. “It’s not like we’re going to trash the place or anything.”

  “Unauthorized entry,” he corrected. “I have a key and security codes.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “Would you feel better if we were likely to get arrested?”

  Kat stepped off the sidewalk. “I guess not. So how was Alec? I haven’t gotten any email from him in a couple days. Not even the profanity-laced ones when he breaks something.”

  “Up to his ears in Conclave crap.” He unlocked the doors and opened hers. “There’s some stuff going on right now.”

  “Uh-oh. Worse than usual?”

  “No, just—” He climbed in and slid the key into the ignition before falling still, his hands on the wheel. “Derek and Nick are going to have a baby.”