Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  Peri sighed. "This house doesn't have a phone. There's only one in the compound, and you need my dad's permission to use it. He'll probably listen in, too. I'll see if I can wrangle you some alone time on it, but it might take awhile."

  He was staring at her. "Are you serious?"

  "About what part?"

  "About any of it. They all live out here with just one phone? And your dad doesn't let anyone use it without a watchdog? Does he open their mail too?"

  "Yes," Peri said. "Welcome to life in a cult, Easton."

  He was still staring. Peri hopped to her feet.

  "The best time to use the phone is probably when everyone's at supper, which will be in a few hours. You want to look around in the meantime?"

  "Uh. Okay."

  He drank two large glasses of water and then followed her out the kitchen door to find out what life in a cult was like.

  At first glance, it looked like rural utopia. The air was warm and mellow. He heard children squealing as they played somewhere nearby, and a horse whinnied in the pasture. There was a cat lying on an overturned washtub behind the kitchen, and several dogs turned up out of nowhere, looking for handouts. Most of them shied away from actual petting; Noah guessed they didn't see strangers much. A couple of them were friendly enough to accept some scratching between the ears.

  "So, am I likely to have any problem with—" Noah waved a hand at his face and upper chest. Peri looked politely baffled. Noah gave up on being subtle. "I'm trying to ask if they have a problem with black people here."

  "Oh. That. No, not really, at least not from what I remember. They're not white separatists or anything. They're just insular and weird."

  She led the way through a field of long grass toward the horse pasture. The friendlier dogs trailed behind them.

  "How many people live out here?" Noah asked.

  "A couple dozen. It varies a lot, because people come and go. There are about five or six households right now, I think."

  "Kids too, huh?" He'd finally caught sight of the children he could hear playing. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, all of them around the age of eight or ten. They shrieked with laughter as one of them spun on a tire swing, grabbing at the others while the swing carried her through lazy figure eights.

  "Sure. They're home-schooled out here. At least we were when I was a kid."

  "Peri—" He stopped. She turned to face him. "Do they know what happened? That someone is following us who tried to kill us?"

  Did we just lead a killer to these children?

  "They know," Peri said. "I'm almost sure we weren't followed—"

  "Almost?"

  "Well, how could I be totally sure? But, Noah. Look."

  She pointed past the kids on their tire swing. At first Noah wasn't sure what she was pointing at. Then he glimpsed a man standing in the shadow of the barn, holding a rifle. Just standing there, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the woods.

  "Is that a guard?"

  "Security is pretty good here, and they've beefed it up a little bit because of us. Don't go in the woods without an escort, by the way. There are a lot of traps all around the compound. My dad's not quite old enough for 'Nam, but he had a couple of buddies who were former demolitions guys, so just ... stay out of the woods. If that scar-faced jerk comes looking for us, he's going to find a lot of surprises."

  "You grew up here," Noah said, eyeing her.

  "Until I was twelve." She watched the kids for a moment, lost in her thoughts. Under her breath, she softly hummed what sounded like a few bars from a children's song before she said, "Back when I was a kid, this place seemed impossibly remote to me. The absolute back of beyond. Now I realize that you can drive to town in twenty minutes. I guess it makes a big difference having a car and a driver's license, so you can leave whenever you want."

  Shit. He was being an idiot, probably a side effect of his injuries; he was always foggy-headed for a day or so after he'd been hurt, with his body drawing on all available resources to heal. He had a car. "Peri, where's my car? No, never mind." He'd seen it from the upstairs window. He could find it on his own, if he could just get his bearings.

  Peri jolted out of her musing, looking startled. "Where are you going?"

  "I'll drive to the nearest town and find a phone there."

  "You're really serious about this," she said, almost to herself.

  "Dead serious. I have responsibilities, Peri. I can't hide here while people are in danger."

  "Noah, people are trying to kill us. Maybe that happens to you all the time, but it doesn't happen to me."

  His first thought was to say something flippant about her job. He actually had thought it did happen to her on a regular basis. But then he saw the tears glimmering in her eyes.

  She was holding it together very well, but she was a civilian who'd nearly died. People had shot at her and tried to burn her alive. Hell, it was a testament to her inner strength that she wasn't more of a mess than she was. She could probably use a good therapist. But just as much, she needed somewhere she felt safe, and if a compound full of cultists made her feel safe, it wasn't fair of him to try to pry her out of it.

  And protecting her was still one of his responsibilities. He hadn't forgotten that.

  "You don't have to come with me. You can stay here."

  "No!" she said sharply, and more softly, "No. Please don't leave me here without a way to get out."

  He didn't really want to leave her alone either. "Okay. Why don't you come to town with me and help me find a phone? Sound good?"

  "All right, I guess." Her eyes searched his face. "But we won't go all the way to Seattle once you get me in that car, right? You'll bring me back here if I ask you to?"

  "Peri," he said gently. "I would never do that. If you agree to go back to Seattle with me, that's one thing, but I'm not going to lie and trick you."

  She gazed at him for a silent moment, and then lunged forward and kissed him.

  Noah staggered when she flung her arms around his neck, but an instant later her lips closed on his, and then he forgot about everything except the heat of her mouth and the lithe pressure of her body against his.

  Some people talked about shifters having a mating urge. Noah had never experienced it—at least not more than anybody did; in his opinion, humans had a mating urge too—but her kiss seemed to wake something primal and powerful at the core of him. He drank her mouth, leaning into her until he was breathless and dazed, and he still wanted more.

  It was Peri who broke the kiss at last, drawing back with her eyes lit up with a half-drunken delight. "Believe it or not," she said, "I've wanted to do that for a long time."

  "A day and a half?" he couldn't help saying.

  Her cheeks pinked in a way that was unbelievably adorable. "A lot longer than that," she admitted.

  And now he was grinning, despite the urgency and worry. He'd spent almost every one of their encounters trying not to think about how kissable her lips looked. "Yeah," he said. "Me too. All those crime scenes where we kept running into each other ..."

  Peri broke into a grin, ear to ear. He'd never seen her smile like that before. Now he didn't want her to stop.

  He put an arm around her, resting a hand just above the swell of her hips, and drew her against him for another long, lip-nibbling kiss. They were both breathless when they finally broke apart.

  "It just figures, doesn't it?" Noah said.

  "What does?" Peri asked. She looked dazed.

  "That you'd finally kiss me in a place where your survivalist dad could see us and come after me with a shotgun."

  "Oh, stop it." Peri made a move as if to play-punch him, and then stopped. "Hmmm." He could see her thinking it over.

  "It's a possibility, isn't it?"

  "I don't know if a shotgun is Dad's style."

  "But you're admitting it's a possibility."

  "Maybe we should get rolling for town."

  Before they did, Noah had to snag her for anoth
er kiss. Hey, if he was going to have an angry dad come after him, he might as well make sure it was worth it.

  ***

  Peri stopped by the house first to ask Ramona if she needed anything from town, and then walked down to the parking area with Noah. A young, gun-toting guard waved to Peri from the fence around the parking lot; she waved back and hurried over to let him know where they were going.

  ... which gave Noah some alone time with his car to mourn its current state. The paint along one side was blistered and fire-damaged, and the passenger seat was stained with blood again. He scrubbed off the blood with handfuls of paper towels from the roll he kept in the trunk, but the interior would need new upholstering, and there was no fixing the paint short of a whole new paint job. Not to mention the missing driver's-side window.

  His poor baby.

  He found his phone and gun tucked under the front passenger seat. Noah left the gun in place, with a glance at the guard. Peri noticed his look and sauntered back over just as he was holding his phone over his head, trying to make something other than the "Emergency Calls Only" message show up.

  "I told you, no service."

  "And yet you grew up here. How did you survive?"

  She punched him lightly in the arm. "Why do you think I hate being out of touch? Nothing like a childhood in rural hell to leave you yearning for the bright city lights."

  "You left when you were twelve, you said? What happened?" Noah asked as they got into the car.

  She didn't answer, and he glanced at her, worried. "Peri? Did I say something wrong?"

  "No, not really. Nothing you had any way to know about." She smiled, but it looked forced. "The accident where I lost my leg happened out here. After that, my mom got custody of me."

  "Oh, shit. I'm sorry."

  "Don't stress. Like I said, you didn't know." She took a deep breath, and as he put the car in gear to back up, she went on, "If we're going to bring up awkward subjects, do you want to talk about the tiger thing?"

  Noah's foot slipped off the clutch. The car lurched backward and stalled.

  "You did that on purpose."

  Peri grinned.

  "So why don't you tell me what you know about the tiger thing," he hedged. As he put the car in gear again, he glanced over in the direction of the young man at the fence, but he was paying them no heed, chatting instead with a young woman in a long skirt who had wandered up to talk to him.

  "Oh no you don't, buddy. I know how that trick works."

  "I'm not just trying to duck the question. It would help me a lot if I knew what you saw."

  Peri chewed her lip. He could almost see the thought process going on as she tried to decide how honest to be with him and whether to hold something back. It was her life, after all. And his.

  "I saw a tiger turn into you," she said.

  He'd been expecting it, but still had to stifle a wince. That was less ambiguous than he'd been hoping.

  "I thought I was seeing things. But I'm not a person who hallucinates under stress. Trust me, if I were prone to that sort of thing, I'd know it. I'm confident about my own sanity, which means I actually did see you turn into a tiger, so what's up with that?"

  There was really no point in lying at this stage. He wasn't going to try to gaslight her about something she'd actually seen. "You saw what you thought you saw. I turn into a tiger sometimes. It's a thing."

  Peri bounced in her seat. "Seriously? Like, wow. How does it work? Did you get bitten by a radioactive tiger or something?"

  "I'm not Spider-Man. I was born this way."

  "If you were born like this, then there must be others, right?"

  "There are definitely others. And I'm not telling you about them, because that's their secret, not mine."

  "Others in the SCB? Is Agent Cho a shapeshifter? Is it contagious? Am I going to turn into anything?"

  "To answer your last questions, no and no. And I told you, I can't tell you the rest." He had to laugh. "You're taking this remarkably well. Most people aren't nearly this calm about finding out there are shapeshifting people in the world."

  "Noah, are you forgetting what I do for a living? This isn't the first time someone's told me a story like this. It's just the first time I've had the evidence of my own eyes to confirm it. I may be a skeptic, but I've also spent my whole life steeped in mysteries and conspiracies. If anything, finding out that at least some of it is real makes me feel less worried that I'm the one who's—stop!"

  Noah skidded to a halt with his bumper inches from a metal bar across the road.

  "There's a gate," Peri said, unnecessarily.

  "I can see that." His heart rate was slowly returning to normal. It wouldn't have been a dangerous accident at the slow speed he was traveling, but he would definitely have messed up his front bumper. The gate was painted dark red that had rusted to a color similar to the trunks of the trees lining the driveway, almost invisible in the shadows under the pines. "Why in the hell would someone put something like that in the middle of a road?"

  "Rural people don't like to be bothered. Hang on, I'll open it."

  She hopped out, retrieved the key from the base of a pine tree, and unlocked the gate. Noah drove through and waited for her to put it back and get back in.

  "For the record, I think that's a very stupid system."

  "Think of it as the rural version of a gated access community. I'm sure you have those where you come from."

  He'd actually grown up in one, with his parents near D.C., but he decided not to mention it. He didn't want to throw even more barriers between himself and Peri, especially after seeing the sort of background she'd come from.

  There were barriers enough already.

  "So basically you're not going to answer my questions?" Peri asked. "Turn left at the main road, by the way."

  "I can't, Peri. We're secret for a reason. Having grown up like this, you must understand. For us, it's like this only more so. We're afraid that if the world finds out about us, they'll kill us." With more reason than he'd ever realized, now that he knew about the Valeria. "I never meant for you to find out, but now that you know, we're all depending on you to keep our secret. All of shifterkind."

  Peri was silent for a minute. Then she said, "A lot of people tell me their secrets, but it's always with the knowledge that I'm—you know—a reporter. That I'm investigating a story. People trust reporters. They like talking to us. It's something movies never get right. But people don't normally trust me ... like—like this."

  She trailed off. They drove through patches of sun and shade on the gravel road.

  "I do trust you," Noah said.

  "I know, and I don't understand it. Just ... like that?"

  "I don't really have a choice right now," he felt compelled to point out. "But yes, just like that. You know our survival is riding on it. I don't think you'd make the wrong choice."

  "The story of the century and I can't tell anyone," she sighed.

  But her hand crept out and rested on his thigh. Noah laid his fingers over hers.

  They drove into a town even smaller than the one near the safehouse. This one wasn't even big enough to have a grocery store. Noah parked in front of an abandoned and boarded-up antique store to check his cell phone. Still no service. He sighed.

  "There's a pay phone at the gas station," Peri said. "At least there used to be."

  There still was, in a weatherproof enclosure near the gas pumps. Noah needed change, so they picked up the few items Ramona had requested (canned beans, baby food, and a carton of ice cream) from the sparsely stocked shelves of the gas station. He also picked up two hot dogs and two stale donuts—he was hungry again—and ate them while studying the pay phone and trying to remember how to use one to make a long-distance call. "I can't believe these things still exist."

  "I can't believe you're eating gas station hot dogs. They're probably made from actual dogs."

  "Excellent, I always wanted to devour the flesh of my ancestral enemy."

 
; "Your what?"

  "Cats—dogs—never mind." She still looked mildly horrified. "It's a joke," Noah said, and called Stiers' line.

  The automated switchboard picked up instead, so he transferred to the PR department. If Trish was still in the hospital, the only person staffing their department would be Mayhew, whose well-attested tendency to screw up any technology he came in contact with hopefully hadn't reduced the entire office to a smoking crater by now.

  "Department of Public Affairs." It was a woman's voice, scratchy but familiar.

  "Trish, are you supposed to be on duty?"

  "Boss! Where are you? Do you have any idea how many people you've worried to death? Are you okay?"

  "Long story." He offered the remaining half of his second hot dog to Peri, who waved it off, but she accepted his uneaten donut. "I'm fine. Reasonably fine, anyway."

  "Agent Cho's going to be glad to hear that. Actually, a lot of people have been going out of their skulls worrying about you. Luckily that's your problem now, not mine."

  Noah winced. He hadn't even thought about the potential political nightmare that his disappearance was going to cause the department. Nobody wanted to be responsible for misplacing the agency director's son. "Is the Chief in the office? I tried her line but got the switchboard."

  "Everyone's out in the field. People are scrambling. Look, let me transfer you to Cho. She's probably the best one to answer any specific questions. I don't know what I'm allowed to talk about, and all I really know anyway is just enough to tell people that everything is fine. Which I am starting to get the feeling it really, really isn't."

  "I'll tell you everything, but not now. It's good to hear your voice, Trish."

  "You too," she said. "Hang on, I'm putting you through to Cho."

  Static gave way to Cho's impatient voice saying, "—really not the best time, so this better be important."

  "Hi to you too."

  "You asshole!" Cho burst out, loud enough that Peri overheard and started grinning as she stuffed the last bite of the donut into her mouth. "And people accuse me of not communicating properly in the field! I hope aliens abducted you or you got caught and put in a traveling zoo, because those are the only excuses I'm willing to accept for you dropping off the face of the planet for most of a day. Stiers is going to turn you into a tiger-skin rug, to match the gecko-skin purse she's already tanned out of my hide."