Moonshifted es-2

by Cassie Alexander

  “You know her?”

  “Too well.”

  He released Veronica slowly, ready for her to pounce at him. Sike blocked her way.

  “I’m from her. Shhh, now. I’m from her.” Sike rubbed her hands over Veronica’s head like she was petting a cat, and the newly born vampire responded like one, bending toward her. “They’re all mad for a few nights,” Sike said, by way of explanation. “It’s quite the change, or so I’ve been told.” She ran her hand through Veronica’s short hair, kneading the other woman’s neck. Sike brought Veronica’s head to her chest, cooing at her as one might at a newborn child, and slipped the coat and collar on in one fluid motion, buckling the collar tight. “Smells like wolf in here,” she said, and glared at Lucas.

  “Not me,” he said, rocking up to a stand. “It’s why I rushed in.” Lucas stepped and moved around Sike and Veronica, never showing them his back. Then he glanced into my kitchen. “And that would explain it.”

  I stood and followed. There was a man on my kitchen floor, shadowed by my counter. A white guy wearing a blue tracksuit with a hood. Gnawed. Dead. “Did you know him?” Lucas asked me.

  “I’ve never seen him before in my life. Why is he here?” I hissed, trying not to sound hysterical.

  “I don’t know who he is, but I know what she fed on,” Sike said, bringing Veronica up to a stand. She left bloodstained indentions on my carpet in the shape of her high heels, like tiny hoofprints. “We’re going. Where’s the gimp?”

  I almost ran my hands through my hair, which would’ve carried blood and worse with them. “He’s in the closet. But you can’t take him if he doesn’t want to go.”

  Lucas turned toward me with a raised eyebrow.

  “I don’t keep him in there. He was hiding there from her,” I explained, realizing as I did so that it only made me sound more insane. “Gideon—” I called out, and he slid open my hall closet door.

  He was wearing my bathrobe, the webcam looking out from where he’d cut a hole into the shoulder. And his fingers were still metal twigs, reclaimed from my toaster oven.

  “What. Is. That,” Lucas asked.

  “Long story.” I said. “Gideon—do you want to go with her?”

  “What did you do to him?” Sike asked, looking him up and down.

  I ignored her. “Gideon, it’s up to you. Honest.” I knew I wanted him to want to go with her, but I wouldn’t send anyone with her who didn’t want to go. Gideon turned to look at Sike. Then he nodded.

  “All right then. Would all the circus freaks in the room please follow me?” Sike held Veronica up and began pulling the woman toward my door.

  “Aren’t you going to do anything about him?” I said, pointing toward my kitchen floor. My voice rose with each syllable. I was having to fight hard to keep it down.

  “Not my problem. Ask your new boyfriend for help.”

  “Wait—what about what—” I looked from her to Lucas, not sure how much I should confide. “What about what I texted you about?”

  Sike also glanced back in Lucas’s direction. “I’ll call you later.” Then she escorted Veronica out the door. Gideon followed her, my bathrobe fluttering in the night.

  * * *

  I stood there, looking at a corpse in my kitchen and a bloodstain on my floor, with a man—no, werewolf—I hardly knew.

  “Are you sure you don’t know him?” Lucas asked. He leaned down and tossed the corpse for his wallet and keys, like someone familiar with the chore. He pulled the man’s hoodie down so I could get a closer look.

  I knelt down. “Still no idea who he is.”

  “I bet you have a strong stomach—but you might want to look away,” Lucas warned. I didn’t. He reached up, put his hand into the corpse’s mouth, and yanked down on the jaw. I heard it pop as it dislocated, and then a wet snapping sound as tendons and muscles inside tore free. Once the jaw hung loose, he ran a finger along the teeth.

  “What are you doing?”

  “He has fillings. I don’t. Weres don’t get cavities—the moon heals all when you transform, even teeth. So he was made less than a moon ago.”

  “He’s a were?”

  “Was.” Lucas touched the blood and then put it up to his nose. “I can’t scent his pack, though. Which is strange.”

  Dren had said as much about the women who’d been chasing me. Lucas wiped the man’s blood on his thigh. “This would have been his first moon, if he’d lived to see it.” Lucas rocked up to his feet and offered me a gore-covered hand. “This violence is fresh. If you’d left dinner any sooner, or not come out at all—” He didn’t have to finish his thought.

  I looked around my kitchen. It was thrashed—not just the aftermath of a fight but completely tossed, high shelves emptied of their contents, a spout of flour from a torn bag still trickling white powder onto my floor. Lucas followed my gaze.

  “He wasn’t just out to get you. Clearly, you weren’t hiding in your cabinets.” He turned toward me. “What were you hiding in here?”

  “Nothing,” I said. It was even the truth.

  There was a plaintive meow from my bedroom, and I ran back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Minnie?”

  There was another sad meow, from behind my dresser. I walked over to it and crouched down. It’d been shoved away from the wall as whoever had tossed my room had looked behind it. Minnie was back there, wedged in, hiding and unhappy.

  “Oh, Minnie—” If anything had happened to her, that’d be it. I’d be through.

  Lucas followed behind me and whistled from my doorway at the mess. All the drawers were out of my dresser, my underwear and bras strewn across the floor. I assumed the were had done that—and it’d been Veronica who’d taken my closet door off its hinges when she’d woken up. I scruffed Minnie and pulled her out of hiding, holding her to my chest.

  Lucas pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “You should pack. I’m calling you a cleaner.”

  “A cleaner’s not going to cut this,” I said, squeezing Minnie tight.

  “My pack’s cleaner. He understands. I’ll be out there, measuring your carpet.” Lucas tilted his head toward my living room and left the door.

  I should have asked some questions, like Where are we going? or For how long? But I stumbled around my bedroom in a state of shock. The mattress of my bed was pushed sideways and knifed open, stuffing poking out, looking like subcutaneous fat pushing out of skin.

  The dark wood box Anna’s knife had been in was shattered into large splinters on my floor. The knife was still in my locker at work. That was the only thing I could imagine the were had been looking for. A vampire-thing. So much for Lucas’s assertions that weres and vampires were completely distinct.

  I almost tripped over Asher’s silver bracelet. I picked it up, put it on, and went for my closet door—I had an overnight bag inside.

  Minnie’s cat carrier was at the top of my closet. I put her into it, grabbed enough clothing off my floor for overnight and walked out into my living room. Lucas was walking around my living room in a very precise way, sending multiple texts. I stood in the hallway, watching him pace.

  “Minnie can come, right?”

  “I’m not sure if Marguerite will approve.”

  And this would be when I found out he had a jealous werewolf girlfriend. “Who’s that?”

  “My cat.” He glanced over at my disbelieving face. “What, you think werewolves can’t have pets? Plenty of people have dogs and cats that live together.” His phone chirped, and he looked at it before nodding to me. “My cleaner will be here soon. Leave the door open for him. Of course you can bring her. Let’s go.”

  All the locks on the door were busted in. I had no choice but to leave it open. Me and Minnie followed Lucas out the front door, and we all got into his truck.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, once I had Minnie’s carrier settled on my lap.

  “My place. Just for a while. My cleaner’s fast.” I was thinking about this, and maybe h
e took my silence for fear, as he continued. “You couldn’t stay there. Not with all the blood.”

  “Yeah. I’d totally lose my deposit.”

  He snorted. We took a turn, and Minnie growled.

  “I feel awful putting her through this.” God only knew how long she’d been hiding behind my dresser.

  “Doesn’t it occur to you to be mad? Your vampire friend just got you into a lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah, only somehow all the things attacking me are weres.”

  “True.” His hands wrung the steering wheel. It occurred to me that a vampire couldn’t get into my place without permission, but a were could. Lucas went on. “He didn’t smell like Viktor. Which doesn’t mean Viktor’s off the hook.”

  “No, it just means I don’t really know who’s attacking me,” I said. He was silent after that.

  The buildings outside passed by like fence posts in the dark. After an uncomfortable silence, I spoke. “Won’t you miss your fights tonight?”

  “I’ve been there every night for the past two weeks. I think I can skip one.”

  * * *

  Minnie’s fear had subsided to a low growl by the time we got to Lucas’s home. It was a huge, sprawling two-story—the kind of place you assumed would have a pool behind it, and it did, I realized, as we went up the driveway and around. There was a smaller home in the back, and when we got out of the truck, I realized that’s where Lucas was leading us. I picked up the carrier and my overnight bag and followed him inside.

  “My uncle is—was—a contractor. The main house is his. Helen lives there now, with Fenris Jr. This one is mine.” He tossed his keys on the counter and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have to make some more calls. You can take the first bedroom down the hall. There’s a bathroom the next door past it, with a shower.”

  I set my stuff down in the spare room, then went into the bathroom and calculated the risks of showering in a strange house with a strange man in it versus being sticky with strange blood for the rest of the night. Disgust won over sanity, and I stripped out of everything, except for my silver bracelet, and hopped into the shower stall.

  The hot water made it easier to think, but it didn’t solve any of my problems. Everything I owned was torn, broken, covered in blood, or absorbed into a creepy cyborg. I still owed a vampire a new hand. Weres were attacking me, and I had a date with a vampire on New Year’s Eve night. My thoughts spiraled like the water down the drain. I lost track of time.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Did you drown?”

  “No.”

  The door opened up, and I prepared to be scared, tried to scrape together some adrenaline left over somewhere, deep down inside, but Lucas just set down extra towels on the counter and closed the door again. I turned off the shower and dried myself off—remembering that Gideon had worn my bathrobe out the door, one more thing I’d never see again—and carefully picked up all of my bloodstained clothes. I walked down the hall to the room where I’d relocated Minnie. The door to her cat carrier was open, but she still sat inside, like Lucas’s carpeting was lava.

  “I know. Boy, do I know.” I dried out my hair as best I could, and thoroughly dried off my body. Then I hunted through the clean things I’d brought—sweatpants and baggy shirt. Asher’s cuff didn’t go with these, and I didn’t want to be unkind. If Lucas was going to kill me, he would have done it in the shower to keep the carpet clean. I snorted at my morbid self and put the cuff inside Minnie’s cat carrier. Then I lassoed my silver belt around my waist one more time and untucked my shirt, so I could be a little protected but not openly rude. As armored as I was going to get, I went back outside.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Lucas stood in his kitchen, not much bigger than my own. “I made coffee. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Thanks.” I took the mug from him. Might as well drink coffee and stay up. It was at least one thing I was good at.

  “How’s Minnie?”

  “Unhappy.”

  “I believe that’s tonight’s theme. Cream? Sugar?”

  “Both,” I said, and he handed them over one at a time. Once I’d doctored my coffee to within an inch of its life, I walked out into his living room and sat down in a chair covered in cat fur. Of course.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. He sat across from me on a couch with his own coffee mug. He was wearing a white tank top now, which made it easy to see his tattoos. The one sleeve was blurry, covered in old work, but the newer sleeve was still fresh, ornate, gorgeous. “Are you shell-shocked?”

  “I’ve seen people die before. Not in my living room, but—” I shrugged, attempting to be cavalier.

  “Sure you don’t want to tell me what was he looking for?” Lucas said, with his head tilted forward. His tone was casual, kind. Downright friendly.

  “What does it matter, when he was a were?” I asked back.

  Lucas’s eyebrows rose at this. “You make a good point.”

  “How is it that there are weres you don’t know about? My vampire friend can’t make new vampires without permission from her people.” I didn’t tell him that Veronica had technically been illegal. “How does that work for weres?”

  “Viktor’s family still has connections. He could have brought them in from out of town—Helen told me that he’d be a problem, even before I moved out.” He gave his coffee a rueful smile. “I wished I’d listened to her.”

  “And what, killed him?”

  “Maybe. If that’s what it would have taken to avoid all this. Winter would have done it. Winter would have killed him the first day. He didn’t appreciate other contenders.” Lucas leaned back. “That’s why I worry I don’t have it in me.”

  “Viktor called me yesterday. He said you all were setting him up.” I watched him carefully for any reaction, but Lucas was only surprised.

  “He called you?”

  “Have you ever heard of House Grey?” I decided to press whatever small advantage I’d gained.

  Lucas looked baffled. “No. That’s a vampire naming convention, isn’t it? I can ask around.” His phone beeped, and he glanced at it. “Just as I thought. Jorgen is pissed.”

  “He can’t fight in your stead?”

  “Hardly. He’s only bitten.”

  Like the guy on my living room floor. “Can bitten people bite other people and change them?”

  “No. It doesn’t work like that. Only major weres can make more weres. There’s not many loopholes. Unless you want to skin me and wear my pelt, that is.” Lucas gave me a look. “What they were looking for at your place—did they find it?”

  “I’m sorry, Lucas.” I shrugged without answering him. Anna, I trusted, even if she was currently bathing in blood. Lucas, not so much.

  “What can I do to change your mind?” he went on.

  For all I knew his cleaner was right now tearing through my house again. I suddenly felt trapped in his small living room, wearing nothing but one silver-buckled belt for protection. Drinking a drink he’d made for me that could have been roofied or poisoned or—

  “No—don’t.” He put his hand out. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. You’re safe here. I swear.”

  I squinted at him. “Are were-promises like vampire-promises?”

  He gave me a roguish smile. “Depends on the were.” His phone rang this time. He looked at who was calling, and hung up. “Sorry. Jorgen again. I have to leave it on for when the cleaner calls. But I don’t want to hear it from Jorgen.”

  I imagined Jorgen back at that were-bar, discovering Lucas’s absence and frothing at the mouth. “I don’t get why you have to fight so much.”

  “To prove my ability to lead. Miss me on one night? Catch me on the next. It’s not a match, really, it’s a performance. Like I’m a magician and my wolf’s the rabbit. How many times can I pull it out of the hat?” Lucas turned his phone’s screen off. “It’s a miracle Winter lived to see his amazingly old age, with them doing this to him.”

  I
leaned forward, fascinated. “What’s it cost you to change?”

  “Pride? No, not really. I’m sure one of those vets you work with told you.” He looked at me, and I waited quietly for his answer. “Each time you change it eats minutes off your life. It’s like tapping into the bottom of the hourglass God gave you, draining out the grains of sand.”

  I hadn’t thought of it like that, when Gina first explained it. It made everything seem more horrific. “Is it worth it?”

  “On the nights when it’s not for show, when you’re outside as you were meant to be, yes. I can’t imagine how frightening it was for little Fenris at the hospital, without a pack, being out of place. But in the land where you belong, it’s perfect. You can feel it’s what you were meant to do, to be. Through the pads on all your paws.” He jerked his chin at me. “What’d it cost you to be a nurse?”

  “My sanity. Three years of school. A lot of student loans.”

  “Not literally. The parts when you’re in it, when you’re there.”

  “Heh.” I stared down at the end of my coffee. “Most nights there’s a lot of people being unhappy with you. They’ve heard news they don’t want to hear, and you can’t change that for them. You spend a lot of nights pushing dying people like boulders up very steep hills.”

  “What’s it like when it works, when you feel it?”

  I thought about it. “Those parts don’t happen as often as I might like.” The most recent one involved his uncle, on the pavement, but I didn’t think I would tell him that. Because sometimes you could do everything right, and it still didn’t turn out well. “When you see something that needs doing, and you know you’re the right one to do it, even if you’re scared—it’s good. There’s a lot of charting around those times, though. And sometimes being yelled at by drunks.”

  Lucas snorted. “My dad was a drunk.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I never was sure which came first, the alcohol, or the asshole. He did this to me.” Lucas stroked a finger along the dent on his nose. “Said if I changed into a wolf to heal it, he’d rip off my arm and beat me with it. I believed him.”