The trees beckoned me. They looked so peaceful and even though I knew they weren’t, I couldn’t resist.
I dived off the building into the river. Cool water foamed around me with a million bubbles. I surfaced and swam, gliding through the cool depths as if I were flying. The river ended too soon, and I emerged onto the opposite bank, dripping wet but no longer bloody. I climbed up and made my way through the underbrush. The forest sang to me in a dozen different voices and teased me with a myriad of smells. I inhaled the spicy scent of forest herbs, the musk of a raccoon, and the slightly bitter scent of opossum. My ears twitched, catching the sounds of mice scurrying in the underbrush, the distant hooting of an owl, and the chirping of cicadas, fiddling away in the soothing darkness.
As I walked, the grasses rubbed against my legs, tickling my fur. Above me a dense vine covered with tiny white flowers shivered in the night breeze. The tiny flowers detached, glowing with pale green, and floated past me, like fairy lights. Fascinated, I crouched in the grass and watched one of the glowing blossoms settle on a leaf. So pretty.
I walked the woods, thinking of nothing at all. If I could’ve shifted into a hyena, I would’ve. I just wanted to cool down, smell things, watch animals move about, and pretend that I was part of this world, rather than the place across the river. My choices were simpler here. Lay in the grass or on a fallen log. Watch the mice or try to catch one. Listen to the owl hooting or listen to the frogs singing. Simple and easy.
Finally I climbed a large tree, curled up in its branches, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
Sleeping in a tree seemed like a great idea in theory. In practice, I woke up just before sunrise, all achy, my fur damp with morning dew, and reeking of decomposing blood. Apparently not all of it had washed off in the river. The magic had fallen, with tech once again holding on to the planet’s reins, and the magical forest of yesterday was a soggy, muddy, and unpleasant place. Faced with the lovely choice of remaining in my beastkin shape or trotting across the city butt-naked, I decided that fur was preferable. I cleared the river and stuck to the rooftops.
I had conspired to break the law with my ex-boyfriend, who I professed to hate, broken said law, destroyed the victim’s attack dog/magic creature in a fit of murderous frenzy, and then run away across the city, wandered around some woods, and fallen asleep in a tree in my beastkin shape.
When I went off the rails, I didn’t do it halfway. No, I flipped a few times, caught a lot of air, and then exploded in a fiery crash.
I made it to my building, walked up the stairs to my apartment, and stared at my door. My keys were in my backpack, which I had dropped before we fought the monster in the warehouse. The bars on my windows were welded to a metal frame built into the brick wall. I could probably bend them, if I strained hard enough and wrapped something around my hands, since the bars had silver in them, but I’d take out some of the wall with them. How the hell was I going to get inside without busting the door?
Footsteps came from below. A moment and Mrs. Haffey walked up the stairs, carrying something wrapped in a kitchen towel.
Awesome.
Mrs. Haffey saw my furry butt and stopped. For a long second we stared at each other, she in a pink bathrobe and I, six feet tall, furry, bloody, and smelling like a wet dog who had rolled in a swamp.
Don’t scream. Please don’t scream.
Mrs. Haffey cleared her throat. “Andrea? Is that you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Good morning.”
“Good morning. Here, I made you a carrot cake last night.” She held the toweled object out to me.
I took it and sniffed, wrinkling my black nose. “Thank you. Smells wonderful.”
“I just wanted to thank you for Darin. We’ve been together for so long. I just don’t know what I would do without him.” She stepped toward me and hugged me.
Oh my God, what do I do?
I hugged her back, as gently as I could, with one arm.
“You take care now,” Mrs. Haffey said, smiled, and went downstairs.
She’d hugged my furry, smelly, bloodstained self. She had no idea, but I would run back into that basement and fight off a hundred of those bugs just because she hadn’t screamed when she’d seen me.
I needed to get inside and change into my human shape, pronto. Before any neighbors decided to call the cops because there was a monster breaking into that “nice Texas girl’s” apartment.
I gripped the handle of my door. It turned in my hand, but my brain didn’t process it right away and I slammed my shoulder into it. The door flew open with a thunderous thump and I rolled into the apartment, springing into a crouch.
My apartment smelled of Raphael. If he was still here, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard me.
I kicked the door shut, snarled a little to let him know I meant business, and set out to search. A quick glance told me that my living room was Raphael-free. My bedroom was also empty, and so was my closet. I made a full circle, came to the kitchen, and stopped. My nylon mesh backpack sat in the middle of my kitchen table, with my dress and shoes still in it. My tablecloth was missing in action and long, jagged scratches covered the table’s surface. The scratches looked suspiciously like letters.
I climbed on a chair and looked at it from above.
MINE.
Oh, that’s great. Fantastic. So mature. Perhaps he would pull my pigtails next or stick a tack on my seat.
I shoved the table. Who did he think he was, breaking into my apartment and vandalizing my furniture? I had never done that to him. I had never ruined any of his things.
I went to shower and scrubbed myself clean.
I mean, what the hell was I even supposed to do with this MINE thing? One moment he was shoving another woman under my nose, the next he’d decided we were back on and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting with the program. An old song surfaced in my memories. Love is all you need. Maybe, but in real life love was rarely all you got. Raphael and I also had pride, and guilt, and anger, jealousy and hurt feelings, and all of it was mixed into this giant Gordian knot. Untangling it seemed impossible.
Smelly, ugly, stupid bouda moron. I should’ve emptied a jar of fleas in his car. It would’ve been good for a laugh. It wouldn’t solve anything, but it would make me feel better.
I put on my clothes, sat down at the kitchen table, tried my carrot cake—it was delicious—and looked at MINE some more. This was so unlike Raphael. The echoes of his roar floated up from my memory. Raphael was subtle. He seduced and enticed, and he was really good at it. So good that I had fallen for him even though I had sworn that hell would freeze over before I let a bouda touch me. This was very much unlike him. Was he really that desperate to get me back?
I wished I had been born in a different time. Somewhere in the past, before the magic, before the shapeshifters, when I could have just been a cop and done my job. When Raphael would have been a regular guy and I would have been a regular girl, and none of the complicated shapeshifter things would have gotten in the way. Or better yet, I wished the magic had never come. But that would mean that I wouldn’t have experienced the magic forest. I would be slower, blinder, deafer. Weaker. No, the magic was here to stay and so was the other me. I had suppressed her for so long, and now she had taken the wheel and was giggling maniacally as she drove me off the cliff.
When I got to the office, Ascanio opened the door with an expression of profound alarm on his face. “Take me with you. Please. I’ll do anything.”
I stepped inside the office and saw the source of his panic. It sat behind Kate’s desk. It had blond hair two shades lighter than mine, wore a blue T-shirt and a black skirt with layered ruffles, and looked to an outside observer like a cute teenage girl. And she was—at fourteen years old, Julie was cute and very much conscious of her position as Curran and Kate’s adopted child. Most of the time she was a perfect Pack princess, polite and poised—except when Derek, Kate’s sidekick, or Ascanio were in the room. Derek got frosty replies studded with spikes and if Ascanio was present, she turned into a foul-mouthed sarcastic devil.
It was hard to be a teenage girl. I had been one and I didn’t care to repeat the experience.
“Take me with you,” Ascanio begged.
“He can’t go. He failed the test on the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’” Julie said, her voice iced over. “Kate told him to sit here and study it.”
Ascanio turned to her and said a single derision-soaked word. “Snitch.”
“Crybaby,” Julie said.
“Harpy,” Ascanio said.
Julie gave him a look of concentrated scorn. “Pussy.”
Ascanio glared at her.
Julie crossed her arms.
“Where did Kate go?” I asked.
“To the Mercenary Guild,” Julie said.
Probably still trying to settle the dispute over who was going to be running the Guild. They had a bit of a power vacuum and Kate, as one of the veteran mercs, had seniority.
“Did you pick up that check from the mechanic?” I asked. “For that woman’s vehicle?”
“It’s on your desk.” Ascanio turned to Julie and mouthed, “Bitch.”
Just couldn’t let it alone, could he?
“Is it me or does it smell in here?” Julie waved her hand in front of her nose.
Oh no, she didn’t. Accusing a shapeshifter of reeking was the ultimate insult.
“You’re so dirty, Ascanio.” Julie grimaced. “Be careful, you might get fleas if you keep going this way.”
Ascanio bared his teeth at her. “Be careful you don’t get lice. They’ll shave you bald.”
Julie rolled her eyes. “It’s not necessary to shave your head if you have lice. You simply use a solution containing an extract of pyrethrin or any other of the wide variety of antilice herbal compounds and then comb the lice out. Your ignorance is staggering. I sometimes wonder how you survived to sixteen years of age. I’m curious, did you live most of them in Bubble Wrap?”
That kid sounded more and more like Kate every day.
“I had no idea you knew so much about lice,” Ascanio bit back. “Speaking from experience?”