by Sharon Shinn
Not wanting him to come over and start making conversation, I shift in my chair to look away, and find myself staring straight at Ryan.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he says, and bends over to kiss me on the cheek.
Instantly, my skin is aflame with reaction to his presence and worry that Joe will have seen the gesture. I laugh, hoping the sound seems casual instead of rattled.
“Ryan! What are you doing here—or, no, let me guess. You and Celeste cooked this up between you.”
He grins and settles into the chair next to me. Joe’s place. “Nothing so specific. She said she knew you had a date tonight and she was going to try to track you down. I said I’d be here or at Arabesque. Looks like we both picked Black Market.”
“Because you’re twins.”
“Something like that.” The waitress materializes at his shoulder and asks if he’d like a glass, which she conveniently already has on her tray. He glances at me and I shrug, so he accepts the offer and pours himself a beer.
“Won’t your date think you’re rude to go off and talk to another woman?” I ask.
“Not on a date. Here with clients,” he says. “And they left five minutes ago. It’s just me.”
“How’s your hand?”
He holds it up for me to inspect in the low light. He’s dispensed with the bandages, so the wound is plain to see—mostly healed, but still an angry red surrounded by slightly puckered skin. “I think I’ll live. Now, whether Terry Foucault will live, that’s another story.”
“Haven’t you learned your lesson about going out and stalking people on their own property?” I demand. “Isn’t there some kind of my-home-is-my-castle law that allows people to shoot intruders? We were intruding.”
He sips his beer, watching me over the rim of the glass. There’s something about the look on his face that gives me a momentary chill, and I try to identify the expression. Menace? Calculation? Conviction? I have the wayward thought that, if I was running down a dark alley, I’d rather meet up with a Foucault brother than with Ryan. I shake it away.
“We were driving down a public road, which we had a right to do,” Ryan finally says. “If we’d climbed the fence, then maybe they’d have a right to shoot us. If that gun’s even legal.”
“Well, hey. Unregistered firearms. Tell the sheriff.”
“I don’t talk to the law.”
“Phone in an anonymous tip.”
“We can take care of ourselves and our problems,” he says. There’s an ever so slight emphasis on we.
“Shape-shifter vigilante,” I scoff, too annoyed to be cautious. But no one can hear me over the music. We can barely hear each other.
He smiles faintly. “If necessary.”
Just then one song ends and another begins—a Jessie J piece, I think, though I don’t recognize it. Danceable, though, which means there’s no chance Celeste will release Joe for the duration. I try to muffle a sigh.
Ryan sets down his beer and slips to his feet. “Come on,” he says, holding out his hand. “Just a dance.”
My glance strays toward the family reunion table, where the restless stockbroker type is still watching me. I get the sense that if I don’t accept Ryan’s invitation, this guy will come over and offer to buy me a drink. Maybe my shirt is too tight.
“Fine,” I say ungraciously and scramble to my feet. “But just one song.”
It is, of course, impossible for me to adhere to the one-song rule. Ryan’s a great dancer, lithe and sexy, and he always focuses his attention wholly on his partner. A bit like a lion stalking its prey across an African veldt, maybe; I always get the feeling it’s too late to get away. I shake my head to flick away the thought and shake my hips to the upbeat music.
There are maybe five other couples on the dance floor, as well as a group of twentysomething girls from the family group, forming their own private dance hall and raucously egging each other on. Still, it’s not hard to get a look at everyone else who’s out there swaying to the music. Joe and Celeste look like they’re having a great time, strutting and pointing and snapping their fingers as the beat dictates. She’s tossing her hair and giving him sultry looks over her shoulder, but she’s playacting; that’s the way she always dances, even when it’s with me. Joe sees me watching them and gives me a big smile. If he doesn’t like that I’m partnered with Ryan, he doesn’t show it.
I see someone from the family group cross the floor to request a song from the DJ—even looks like there’s a five-dollar tip involved—so I’m not surprised when the next chord progression elicits exclamations from the whole party and most of them surge to their feet. It takes a moment for me to recognize “Stand by Me,” which maybe was the theme song at someone’s wedding. At any rate, they’re all planning to dance to it.
I turn back toward the table, but Ryan catches my wrist. “C’mon. You love this song.”
I used to. It was playing on the radio the first time Ryan and I made love, and I can’t ever hear it without remembering that. When we first broke up, I stopped listening to both oldies stations and country music for fear it would come on the radio in one of its cover versions.
“Ryan—” I say.
“C’mon,” he repeats, tugging me closer.
I could break free, but I don’t want to have a wrestling match here in Black Market and I don’t want Joe to see me struggling in Ryan’s hold. It seems easier to acquiesce, to let him pull me against his chest, put his arms around me, and rest his cheek against my hair. Unexpectedly, I am engulfed in such deep and complex emotions that I think I’d lose my balance if I wasn’t already leaning against him. I’m sad—so sad—I miss him so much, I miss this, the shape of his body against mine, the sense of excitement, desire, and belonging I feel whenever his arms are wrapped around me. The song speaks of faith and trust, the singer offering himself up as a bulwark against despair, and for a moment I can’t remember that Ryan cannot be counted on for any of those things. For a moment I remember only how much I loved him and that I can’t have him anymore, and the sense of loss is devastating.
By the time the song ends, I feel like I’ve shrunk into a fragile collection of sticklike bones and dried-leaf skin; squeeze me too tight and I’ll crumple into dust. As the last notes sound, all the couples on the dance floor stand motionless, still embraced. It’s as if we’ve all been frozen by the cessation of music. I suppose it’s only three seconds before the next song starts, but it feels like an eternity before Bruno Mars comes wailing out from the speakers. The people around us shake themselves back to life.
Ryan lifts his head, pulling back a little, though he doesn’t release me. Wordless, I glance up at him, not even attempting to arrange my expression into something less exposed. Maybe he can’t read my face in the dark, but I can tell he’s smiling.
“That was nice,” he whispers, and drops a kiss on my mouth.
My whole body trembles as someone takes hold of Ryan and gives him a hard shake. “Hey! No making out on the dance floor!” It’s Celeste, of course, and she pries Ryan’s fingers off my arm. “My turn. I want to dance, and Joe says he’s done for the night.” Now that I’m liberated from Ryan’s embrace, she pushes me back in the direction of the table. “But I bet he’d dance with you if you wanted.”
I stumble for a step or two, then have to twist out of the way of three young girls who are gyrating together more wildly than the music would suggest. By the time I’m back at the table, I feel a little less dizzy, but my brain is still in something of a whirl.
Joe’s lounging at his ease, sipping from a water glass instead of his beer. From his expression, I can’t tell if he didn’t witness Ryan’s kiss or he just didn’t think it was any big deal. “Not exactly the way I expected the evening to wind up,” he says over the music.
“That’s what happens when Celeste is in the mix.” My voice sounds normal enough to me.
He holds his arm out to show me the watch on his wrist. Past eleven. “I’ve got a drive to make tomorrow, and I have to get back tomorrow night before basketball,” he says. “Probably time to leave.”
I am so ready for this night to be over. “Just what I was thinking. Let’s go.”
“What about Celeste?”
“Ryan’ll take her home or back to her car. She’ll be fine.”
But I wave to her anyway as we head toward the door and she waves back, clearly unconcerned. A few minutes later, Joe’s truck has pulled up next to my Jeep where we left it outside Paddy-Mac’s.
“Here’s the bad part,” he says. “Me dropping you off at your car and worrying about your long drive home.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll text you when I get in.”
“You do that. Or, you know, you can always sleep at my place. On any piece of furniture you choose.”
“I know. Don’t worry.”
He hesitates a moment, and I think he’s trying to figure out how to express something unpleasant. I tense up. But all he says is, “You know I’m busy the next couple of days.”
“Yeah. And—I don’t know about me. Maybe Sunday or Monday or Tuesday—the change will happen. I can’t tell.”
“So it might be a few days before I see you again.”
“Yeah.”
“So that’ll give you a little time, I guess.”
“Time for what?”
“To think about Ryan.”
There’s dead silence.
“I don’t want to think about Ryan,” I manage at last.
He gives me a small smile. Lighting in the truck, under the streetlights, is just about as poor as it was in Black Market, but I can see the unhappiness on his face. “Well, I think you do sometimes whether you want to or not. And he’s sure thinking about you.”
“Ryan’s not the right guy for me. I’m positive of that.”
“Sometimes we want stuff even if it’s wrong for us.”
“Joe—” I put my hand on his arm. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t draw me closer, either. “I confess, when Ryan’s around, I still get muddled a little. But—”
“You’re not over him.”
“Maybe not, but I want to be over him. I want to move on with my life. I want him in my past, not my present. I want—I want you in my life.”
He’s been gazing out the front windshield, but now he looks at me again. “And I can’t tell you how much I want you in mine,” he says. “But I don’t want to fall in love with someone who isn’t ready to fall right back. I’ve done that. And that’s about the worst place anyone can be.”
It’s the first time the word love has come up for air during our conversations, but it’s been swimming around just under the surface for a couple of weeks now. I feel a small, hopeful smile come to my face, and I squeeze his arm tighter. “Well, I don’t want you to be in that dark terrible place,” I say softly. “I want to fall when you do.”
Unexpectedly, he leans forward and gives me a brief, hard kiss. It’s a ghostbuster of a kiss; it chases away the lingering wraith of Ryan’s memory. “Don’t wait too long,” he says. “I’ve already started falling.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I don’t change for another seven days.
It’s weird. I feel like I’m in a state of suspension, as if I’m waiting to hear the results of a medical test or a bar exam—as if I can’t move forward with my life until I get some resolution on a current problem. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to keep my human incarnation, and even hopeful that my modified injections have bought me more time in my natural state, but I’m unsettled, too. The only thing I want more than a normal existence is a little consistency in my abnormal one.
Joe calls every day, even comes out Monday and Tuesday evening, because I don’t want to be caught in town when the change comes over me. He seems to be in a good mood, but there’s a little distance between us. We cook meals, we watch movies, we talk easily, we make out a little—but there’s a suspension in the relationship, too. Waiting for something.
Bonnie brings Alonzo out on Wednesday and I pronounce him fit to resume light exercise, though I don’t think he should be playing basketball yet. “He could dribble and shoot with his right hand, but what if someone knocks him to the floor? It could tear his wound right open.”
Alonzo, who makes it a point not to want anything enough to beg for it, is clearly disappointed, so I relent a little. “Well,” I say. “You can go to practice and do the passes and the shootarounds, you just can’t play in any of the games where you might get hurt. And I’ll tell your coach the same thing.”
“That’s cool,” he says, seeming satisfied.
Except for the fact that he’s been recently shot with an arrow, Alonzo’s in a good place right now. He enjoys the basketball team; he’s started taking a math class at the middle school, and he’s unexpectedly good at it; and he got the job with Q-Ville Drugs. Before I cleared him to start riding his bike again, Bonnie took him around in her car to make deliveries, just so he could get a feel for the route.
“That Rich Hogarth—the guy who owns the drugstore?—I think he thinks Alonzo has Asperger’s,” Bonnie says. “He said something the other day, like, ‘I have a son who’s on the spectrum, too. It gives me hope to see Alonzo doing so well.’”
“Huh. I wouldn’t say that’s Alonzo’s primary disability, but maybe it’s not a bad thing if people think it,” I reply. “It makes them more willing to make accommodations.”
“Well, he doesn’t need any accommodations in math. He’s blowing everybody away. It makes me so proud.”
But the most interesting thing that happens this week is that I acquire new tenants.
It’s Friday evening, and I’ve just spent a couple of hours cleaning the barns and rearranging cages. Two different sets of people dropped off puppies earlier in the week, so now I have seven tumbling around the enclosure—three that look like setter/Lab mixes, and four that might be half poodle and half God knows what. The poodles were brought by a longtime client who said her neighbor had threatened to drown them; the other three were left at the house in the middle of the night. Scottie woke me up with a warning growl, so I got to the door just in time to see a shadowy shape dash from the porch to a waiting car, leaving the box of squirming dogs behind. I wished I’d woken up in time to get the license plate, because the puppies looked like they were barely three weeks old, and the night was unexpectedly cold. If Scottie hadn’t sounded the alarm, they could have frozen to death by morning.
They’re young enough that I start to get anxious about what will happen when I change shape and no one else is around. I bottle-fed them that first morning, then coaxed them to eat real food by nightfall. Still, they won’t survive long without constant care. At the moment, Daniel isn’t on the premises, so I can’t even beg him to stick around until they’ve grown up enough for me to stop worrying.
But then this particular problem—of all the ones in my life at the moment—chooses to solve itself.
I’m just getting ready to leave the barn and head for the house when I hear car tires scrape across the gravel. Now that we’re almost through October, night falls so early. It’s almost full dark when I step outside and try to figure out who’s arrived.
The car is a big old clunker, white with a lot of rust. It’s not too hard to imagine that it’s just managed its very last burst of effort and will never be able to move again. A woman is climbing out of the driver’s side door, and I note the head of someone else, maybe younger, in the passenger’s seat. If there are any others in back, I can’t see them.
I stroll close enough to talk, stay back far enough to not seem threatening. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but the woman looks edgy to me, nervous, like she’s not sure she wants to be here. “Hi, I’m Karadel, can I help you?” I ask.
“I’m lookin
g for someone named Janet,” she answers. There’s a slight quaver in her voice. Could be fear, but I’m betting exhaustion. Like the car, she seems to have been pushed to the limit
“Janet’s been gone awhile. She sold the place to me. But I know all about her particular—clients,” I say delicately. A down-on-her-luck after-hours visitor is likelier than not to require specialized services, but just in case this woman isn’t a shape-shifter, I don’t want to be the one to say the word out loud.
She comes a little closer, moving into the circle of my perimeter lights. She’s a short, plump, tired-looking woman who might be in her mid-forties; she clearly hasn’t spent much time on her hair or clothing. Or maybe she’s just been driving for days.
“My dog’s sick,” she says abruptly. “Can you look at her?”
“Of course,” I answer. “Is she well enough to walk inside, or can you carry her? Or do I need to get a cart?”
“I’ll carry her,” she says.
A few moments later, we form a procession from the car, across the yard, and through the side door into the office. Scottie’s right behind me, followed by the nervous woman, who’s holding in her arms a Dalmatian that’s maybe halfway to adulthood. Bringing up the rear is a teenage girl. I didn’t get a good look at her except to notice her fine dark hair, her pale white skin, and her sulky expression. Neither of the newcomers speaks until we make it to my office.
The woman lays the dog on the examining table and leaves her hand resting on the animal’s thin shoulder. Just from the way she’s breathing, I’m betting that the Dalmatian has a respiratory problem; she lies on the table with the listlessness of a creature too miserable to care what happens to it next. But her dark eyes are intelligent and alert, and they meet mine with a preternatural self-awareness.
The woman might not be a shape-shifter, but her dog is.
