She laughed. “Be nicer to Evan, Marcus,” she quipped and disconnected.
Analise leaned against the seat. Her first time on Highway 17 scared the hell out of her, mostly because Martine was driving. Her cousin often said she loved fast women and faster cars. That day Martine dragged her from El Jefe’s Taco shop to Natural Bridges Beach. They’d sat on the warm sand, secretly drinking tequila while making plans for their future. It was also the day Martine promised to always look after her little sis-cousin and protect her from the world—a promise she couldn’t keep because some psychopathic asshole got away with murder.
No fingerprints or DNA traces, Martine’s body left as evidence of someone’s sadistic psychosis. The police detective called it a cold case after a six-months. He handed Mark a manila folder and suggested a PI would be the best bet. When Mark told her, she’d sold the condo, took a steep loss, and fled to the Ahaggar Mountains for two months.
By the time she returned to California, Analise had locked her feelings in her mental safe room for the second time in her life. The only connection to her past was the Tamahaq braid, which she kept hidden among her curls. Just as she kept everything about her secreted away.
Hurt and rage abruptly twisted into a visceral knot. A long-forgotten burn began to build in the pit of her stomach. Analise hadn’t felt the heat in two years. As the urge to shift pushed at her belly, a soft growl rose to her throat. She recognized the sound. It was her cheetah. She had fully shifted only once – the day she learned her cousin was dead. The shift had been painful, exhilarating, and terrifying. Once freed, the cat reveled in it her freedom and resisted her human side. Analise had won the struggle to resume human form but the cat was never far from the surface, demanding to be set free to seek vengeance.
The temptation to shift and seek freedom in the redwood forest surrounding her, was acute, For some reason, the cheetah chose this moment to impatiently claw at her awareness. Her skin stretched and bones popped with each push, the cheetah’s soft purrs demanding. Images of the experience flowed across Analise’s mind. The cat’s pleas were tempting. Will’s faint cough broke through the seductive web of the cheetah’s insistence. A reminder she was in a car, traveling to Santa Cruz and her driver was human. She really didn’t need the shitstorm that would erupt, especially if she harmed Will.
By the time he pulled up in front of the lab, she was once again in control and had the enraged cat purring like a happy kitten on the promise that they would go for a long run when the time came.
“Here you are, Ms. Drake.”
She grabbed her tote and climbed out when Will opened the door. “I’ll be two hours.”
“No worries. Text me whenever you’re ready to leave.”
She watched him drive off before heading up the steps and into AnthroGen’s main lab. Once inside, Analise passed through three stages of security checks, all based on a bizarre biometrics system she never understood.
“It’s because you’re the humanist brain in the fam,” Martine once joked. “Hung up on words, dates, and people. You hate numbers.”
She didn’t hate numbers, just didn’t like concepts devoid of life and character. She’d take myths and literature any day. Analise made her way down along a hallway until she reached a fourth security checkpoint. “Hey Andy, any excitement today?”
The security guard shook his head. “Although watching water boil is interesting.”
“Heed my warning and stay away from Leslie. Vampire in human skin. Serious mind control. Think of the children,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Where’s Richard? Lab or office?”
“Office.”
“Thanks.” She turned left and walked down a corridor until she reached a bright red door. Richard Houston, a renowned geneticist, painted every office door he claimed a vibrant red. He said it was a reflection of the inner chaos of the universe and its effects on human existence. Fortunately, the man’s brilliance as a computational geneticist led many of AnthroGen’s employees to embrace his quirk, as well as his annual diatribe on universal chaos and dark matter theory during the company-wide meeting.
Analise knocked once before she opened the door. A soft glow of incandescent pinkish light greeted her while Van Morrison’s “Madame George” poured from four mini speakers.
She sighed. “What did you fuck up this time?”
“I can’t possibly talk about it, Lise,” Richard groaned. “I’m a complete failure at marriage.”
“Grievous bodily harm or divorce? I need to know whether or not to post bail money for Tess,” she said, closing the door behind her.
Richard lay sprawled across a chocolate brown futon, his forearm draped across his forehead. Abjection and regret dripped from his posture, and she immediately identified the cause. “Please don’t tell me you forgot. Again.”
He groaned louder.
“Richard Allendale Huston! Mark sent you a text five days ago. I sent a text and left a voicemail two days ago. Twenty-two years of marriage, two children, and you forget?”
“I know, I know,” he whined. “But we were so close with the computations. It slipped my mind.”
Analise snorted. “What did Tess say?”
“She’s not speaking to me at the moment.”
“I’m surrounded by widgets this week.” Analise grabbed her cell phone from her tote and swiped.
“This is Mark, and you and I have already spoken today, Empress. One al pastor.”
Her eyes cutting Richard a frustrated look, she said, “We have a situation. Of course, it’s Richard. Yeah, he dicked it despite all our efforts. Brilliant, I’ll tell him.”
Analise disconnected and glared at Richard. “Whatever Mark wants you to do for the next six months, you’ll do it. No questions asked, no refusals.”
She plopped on the ergonomic stool behind Richard’s desk, which the man swore kept his ass firm. “Did you get my message?”
“Yeah,” he said, rising from his prone position. His facial expression lit up like a kid offered an entire bag of candy. “As your lab director, I should twist your arm to accept. There are four researchers I’d steal from UCSF in a heartbeat and the money would help. Also, I can use some new equipment.”
“You sound like Robert. Nathanson’s offer is generous. Twenty-five million upfront, four million per year to support the labs, and a line of credit if needed. For his generosity, he wants equal partnership in two years if we take his money.”
Richard lifted an eyebrow. “And?”
“A predator is a predator.” Analise sighed. “I’m not certain I want to swim with a great white.”
“Pun noted, though I hear he’s more of a velociraptor.” Richard’s forehead scrunched up. “Remember the asshole postdoc I fired, Dylan Matherson? I heard he went to work for one of Nathanson’s companies. Probably where your great white got some of his info. Why didn’t you say no last night?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Peter wasn’t what I expected, though I have cause to avoid him.”
Analise rose from the stool and strolled over to one of two bookcases in the room. She picked up an object. “He’s sexy smart, but every time he touched me it was physically uncomfortable. Like bad static electricity.”
She returned the object to the shelf and faced her lab director. “I read his proposal before sending it to Neal. Peter’s terms would excite any startup.”
Richard studied her face. “What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “I can’t figure out why he wants us when there are more established companies and better fledglings out there. If I were the paranoid type, I’d swear he’s playing some complicated game.”
Richard rose from the futon and stretched. Analise wasn’t surprised when people mistook him for one of his graduate students. He looked nothing like the fifty-eight-year-old professor of genetics he was. His faded jeans sat low on his hips, and the fitted Banana Slug T-shirt accentuated his muscular chest. Black and Asian, Richard was a seri
ous HEA-come-true: sexy, good looking, super-smart, and head over heels for Tess Washington-Huston. As Analise stared at him, she realized only a grounded Black woman could deal with the man.
“You are paranoid,” he said. “Come on, I want to show you something to help your decision.”
Analise followed him out the door and down the hall. He laid his open palm against the wall and a door slid open. They walked into a room. It was the first time in two years she’d set foot inside the lab. After Martine’s death, she rarely went beyond Richard’s office.
“Impressive.”
“Window dressing,” Richard crooned. “Wait until I show you the actual prize.”
He walked to another door biometrically, which was keyed to his iris. Analise entered the room behind him and whistled. “How much and was my signature on the actual credit card slip?”
His expression innocent, Richard shrugged. “It’s why we always ask Mark, and your corporate titanium card was put to good use.”
Analise’s gaze swept a computational researcher’s version of a died-and-gone-to-heaven lab. Richard pointed to the four short rows of specially configured Apple servers and explained there were eight more servers concealed in a room behind the more visible servers. The only other furniture in the room were several desks sitting flush against the northwest wall, a half-dozen stools, and a long table bisecting the room. Mei Li Kwan and Randall Everett, full-time AnthroGen employees, sat at the table. Their attention focused on computer screens.
Besides Richard, Mei Li and Randall were the only ones deeply involved in AnthroGen’s shifter research, largely because they carried the recessive shifter DNA. Analise and Richard chose to keep the information classified, especially after photographs of two shifters mid-shift went viral. Within weeks of those photographs, Congress had acted swiftly to redirect funds from toxic cleanup sites to a ‘mutant capture and research program’ or MCRP. Invasion of privacy was common in the US as people’s medical records became part of MCRP’s database.
When MCRP killed a shifter, it got its first DNA sample. The small population of US shifters went into hiding, leaving people with the recessive gene trait easy targets. Two years into its existence, MCRP displaced ICE as the government’s domestic arm of repression, misogyny, and racism since people of color and women were more likely to have the recessive trait.
“Hey boss,” Randall sang, glancing at her before his gaze returned to his computer screen.
“Hey girl, we still on for tonight?” Mei Li asked. When Analise nodded, the postdoc grinned. “Did Richard tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Mei Li side-eyed Richard before she grabbed a stuffed rhino and flung it at him. He caught it and tossed it on a nearby chair.
“What party girl is excited about is we’re pretty sure we’ve isolated the anomaly,” Richard began. “Sean is still running the comps, but I don’t think they’ll change. He’s ran the sequence more than a hundred times and it still comes up the same.”
“I hear an unspoken ‘but’ coming.”
Richard shoveled light brown fingers through his thick black hair. “It’s hard getting any shifter DNA, let alone one with active strands, and by the way thank you. The sample filled in a lot of holes. I wish we had more. Everything sits on the one sample.”
“Geekspeak, Richard. Use nerd language.”
He sneered at her and paced the room. “What we’ve discovered is the haploid in the sample is like a masking code, for lack of a better way to describe it to your humanist brain.”
“Your one dig for the month.”
“I’ll take it.” Richard grinned and sauntered over to where she stood. “At first, we couldn’t see anything beyond the common African sequence. Once we modified our schematics and devised a more intricate sequencing model, fun things showed up. You’re paying Sean some serious overtime.”
Analise shrugged. “Mark’s problem since all of you go to him about everything. Besides, you know I’m not into numbers.”
Randall’s laughter dwarfed Mei Li’s giggle. The male postdoc gave Analise a raised fist. “Power to the humanist. Just the tropes, Doc. Just the tropes.”
Richard glared at him. “Really? Think it’s time to cancel your TV Land subscription? Anyway, Dr. Drake,” he drawled. “We found a sequence we suspect is the shifting code in the sample. The problem is there are two other sequences we’ve never seen and have no idea what they do.”
He strolled over to the door. “Impressed by my brilliance? Good, let’s go to El Jefe’s. Lunch is on you. Duckies, what do you want?”
Analise laughed while Mei Li and Randall gave him their orders before she and Richard left the room.
***
“I so earned this burrito,” Analise mumbled before taking a bite. She sighed contentedly before glaring at her lunch partner when he laughed at her obvious enjoyment. She chewed, swallowed, and took a quick sip of the slightly sweet hibiscus drink. “It isn’t polite to make fun of the person paying for your lunch.”
She and Richard sat at one of the metal tables on Cowell College’s patio. Sunlight glistened on sailboats gracefully skimming the blue water of Monterey Bay. White foam rolled up against rocky shoals before retreating to join the gentle waves pushing to shore. Life on the idyllic campus mimicked the sea’s ebb and flow.
Several students walked across the patio headed to classes or the residences. Others loitered near the open spaces to gaze at deer grazing in the great meadow below the college. A solitary red-tailed hawk circled overhead, its silent stalking of the tufts of grass at the edge of the patio disrupted by infectious giggles.
Analise’s eyes followed the hawk until it disappeared from view then turned her gaze in the laughter’s direction. A smile crinkled the corners of her mouth. A student hugged a ceramic whale sculpture at the foot of the patio while another took pictures.
After Martine’s death, Analise had commissioned the sculpture to honor what Martine called her place of peace. Laughter flooded the patio as the student planted a kiss at the corner of the whale’s gaping mouth. With a wave to her friend, the student strolled toward the dorms.
The rest of her burrito tasted like dust when she took a bite. Analise put it on her paper plate.
“You miss her terribly.”
She brushed at the wetness gathering in her eyes. “Sometimes it hurts so bad I can’t breathe, especially when I come here. I expect to see her running toward me, with her crooked smile and her arms wide open. It doesn’t help the anniversary of her death is two weeks away and we still don’t know who killed her.”
Analise lifted her gaze to Richard’s face. “Martine would be the first to call me silly for being weepy. Say I was missing what’s important around here. At times, the loss hurts so bad I want to beat the crap out of someone.”
Richard reached over and gripped her clenched fingers. “You, sweet Analise, are not violent despite Master Deng’s training. Marti used to say you wouldn’t even defend yourself when another kid hit you. She also said you wouldn’t cry when you were hurting, especially after your parents died. Don’t you think it’s time you release your tears?”
“I mourned Martine,” she snapped. “In fact, still grieving.”
“Not grieve, Lise, cry. A flood of tears on your cheeks, a snotty nose, and swollen red eyes. Not Hollywood’s version but a real honest-to-God, snot-slinging, ugly crying because your sister cousin, your best friend in the entire world, is dead.”
“What good would it do?” Analise pulled her fingers from his hand and stared at the bay. A weighted pause hung between them before she asked, “Should I take Nathanson’s offer?”
“What’s your counter?”
“Twenty percent, no partnership,” she replied. “I won’t give Peter a greater stake than you have. Mark has five. You know Isabella and Henry are my heirs, so I need to protect their share.”
“My children don’t need your money. What about your future children? Don’t you plan to have at least on
e to convert your internal blackness to red?”
“Red?” Analise laughed. “Nope, Nada, and no way.” Her face became pensive. “I can’t have children.”
He exhaled and she heard two years of exasperation. At times, she regretted telling him she was telepathic. If she told him she was a full-blooded shifter, all hell would break loose. She brushed her fingers across his knuckles. “Let it go, Richard.”
Her phone vibrated on the table. She glanced at the text message. “I intend to conspire with Jess to get Mark on vacation and away from me. The northern tip of Finland would be ideal.”
Richard stood at the same time she did and walked her up the steps to the entrance to the college. He waved at Will, who leaned against the car. For a brief second, Analise wondered about the drivers who chauffeured her. All of them, from Roger to Will, were more than they appeared. She should ask Mark where he found her guardian angels.
She took Richard’s hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for always being here for me. I’ll let you know what I decide about Nathanson’s offer.”
He pulled her into his arms and hugged her. “We may need the cash, Lise, but not at the cost of your immortal soul.”
“My immortal soul?”
Richard flushed and it showed on his light brown skin. Analise giggled. “Do go on.”
“Okay, I couldn’t think of anything else off the top of my head. Tess’s been reading one of her paranormal novels to me,” he explained. “I love my wife, the romance is hot, and I’ve learned you don’t say no to Black women, beginning with my mother.”
He squinted and scratched his chin. “Although, mom’s Black and Chinese-American, which means I’m doubly doomed.”
“You’re ridiculous, though I love that Tess has you wrapped,” Analise said. “FYI, no one sells their soul anymore. They give up their DNA. Although I admit, the immortals in some books are such temptation on a stick I’d be tempted.”
She leaned over and kissed Richard’s cheek. “I’ll call you and mama Tess when I get home.”
Chapter 5
Fate's Consort Page 5
