Rick’s Frenchy eyes followed the curve of my jaw like a tender hand. I shivered under the not-touch and felt something hard and cold start to melt deep inside. I had wounded him, but he had forgiven me, I realized, and the coldness melted even faster, running out of me.
“You’ll take me in?” he asked, his voice a purr of sound. “Like a lost kitten?”
“We’d make a good team,” I managed, my voice matching his, purr for purr.
“Yeah. We would. And George? You take him in too?”
All the happy-happy-joy-joy feelings froze solid. “That was low.”
His eyes hardened. “You saying you aren’t interested in the MOC’s sex-and-blood meal?”
“You bringing your Soul in?” I countered. “How about your crazy wolf and the grindy who’d kill us in a heartbeat if we tried to have sex?”
Something flashed between us, something icy and flaming, velvety and thorny, like fear and need, anger and joy, all commingled together. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to break that cold/hot wall between us, but before I could lift my hand, Rick turned to the front of the house, his paper clothing crinkling. The door was still hanging open to the night. “We have company,” he said, his voice displaying none of the emotion I smelled on the air. Vehicle lights sliced through the dark, a van and a car. Crime Scene techs were here, and they’d be ticked that we had entered.
“Good,” I said, on the knot of anger rising in my throat. “Things were getting sticky in here.”
“I like them hot and sweaty better,” Rick said. But he’d turned and was at the door, stripping off his paper and nitrile. Not quite sure what had happened, I followed, picking up a few things I thought we might need on the way. I left my crime scene clothing in a pile with his, remembering a time when I’d had to separate our clothes, which had been tossed onto the floor, so we could dress. I’d lost so much by my own stupidity. My life sucked.
I waited in the SUV for him and when he got in, Brute again rocking the SUV’s suspension, Rick slammed the door and looked at the stuff in my lap. “You took evidence from a crime scene?”
“Yeah. Arrest me.”
“While the idea of you shackled and bound is appealing, no.” I gave him a hesitant smile and he said, “What do you have?”
“Amulets. At least one witch was a moon witch.” I showed him a moonstone paperweight. “One an earth witch, if you go by the garden. And one was an air witch.” I held up the dried leaves I’d stolen from a bowl on a lamp stand. “There are bowls of dried leaves and twigs and pine needles everywhere, but nothing is scented, like for potpourri. And I can feel the magic on them.” I crunched the leaves slightly and smelled only oak and pine rising from them. “The bowls of windblown leaves are probably set equidistant on the points of a pentacle.”
“Not bad.” Rick started the engine, pulling slowly into the night along the narrow drive, the oak trees sheltering us from the moon until we pulled onto the secondary road. Rick tensed.
“Full-moon problems?” I asked, keeping my tone calm.
“Yeah. Mind if I play my music?” Without waiting for my reply, he hit PLAY on the SUV’s sound system and flute music skirled out. It was a spell, created by my once friend Big Evan to control Rick’s need to turn furry for the three days of the full moon. His tattoos, magic woven into his skin, prevented his turning, and he had nearly gone insane with the pain until Evan had found this treatment.
I looked out the window, knowing I had been cut off. Yet knowing that Rick was as aware of me as I was of him. Knowing that Bruiser and Soul and our past together stood between us, as real as if they fought, swords drawn and blades clashing.
Under my T-shirt was another theft, an old photo of an American Indian woman wearing a homespun dress, soft-looking boots, and a feather woven into her braided hair. Not Cherokee. Maybe Choctaw. She had been staring at me as if begging me to steal her photo. And for reasons I didn’t understand, I had.
CHAPTER 13
Make Ceremony with Me
Sitting on the edge of the bed in Esmee’s house, I took out the old black-and-white photo and studied it. The woman was young, midtwenties, standing with shoulders back, wearing a Western cowboy hat, a gun belt around her hips, Annie Oakley style. Her dress was short for the era, stopping midcalf, revealing the boots that looked like deer hide, embroidered with porcupine quills and beads. The picture frame was wood, carved with tiny grooves that looked exactly like bird footprints, down to the talons at the end of the toes, the wood stained with some greenish-bluish tint that had penetrated the pattern carved into the wood, making the bird feet stand out sharply. The term came to me from high school art history class: counter-relief, or intaglio. Weird to remember that. I had sucked at art.
Misha had been in that class. She had taken to art like a bird to the air, freed by all the media, all the things she could shape and change and bring to beauty. All the things she could control. Unlike the rest of her life, which was out of her control. Like me, Misha had gone to regular counseling. I had gone for the experts to keep tabs on me and try to poke holes in the curtain of memory loss. I wondered why Misha had gone. I had no idea. I also had no idea why I had taken the photo. It had nothing to do with beauty or art. It had everything to do with the woman in the print calling out to me.
I sighed and set the picture facedown on the bed, reaching for the phone. It hadn’t rung, and I held it, waiting. Leo wanted to chat and my bound Beast knew it. It was childish, but I let it chime twice before I punched SEND. “Hi, Leo.” Beast started to purr and rolled over on her side. I could feel the power of her breath rumbling through me.
“What have you done to my heir’s house?” he spat.
I could tell his three-inch fangs had dropped down and he was talking through and around them. “Good to speak with you too,” I said, not because it was true, but to yank his chain. “Hope you are well and chipper and all that. How’s business?” Leo was raised in a more proper time, and when he forgot or ignored the niceties it gave me an opening for insult and snark. He didn’t give me many.
“What. Have. You. Done. With my heir’s house?”
“Ahhh.” I relaxed onto the bed, understanding. I had modified the house I was using in New Orleans and I hadn’t exactly asked permission. Part of the modifications were to take over Leo’s secret lair and make it into a combo safe room and weapons room. “I take it you paid me a visit?”
“There is silver everywhere.”
“Guns too. And ammo. And things that go bang.”
“Silver in my lair,” he grated.
“Yeah. Sorry ’bout that,” I lied, and made sure he could hear that I wasn’t sorry at all.
Leo growled low in his throat; Beast rolled, pulling her paws beneath her, ready to pounce or flee. “My house, Leo,” I said, “for the duration of my stay in New Orleans, as per my contract. No one said I couldn’t redecorate.”
The silence was too long, that potent silence the really old vamps can do, because they don’t breathe or have a heartbeat. “We have much to discuss, my Enforcer.”
“Yeah. I guess we do. I’ll see you when I get back to New Orleans. Meantime, stay out of my house.” I hit END and smiled slightly. Bet that ticked off the MOC.
Beast yawned deep inside and rolled back over. I frowned at her. Beast? You didn’t go nuts at the sound of Leo’s voice. What gives?
Beast is not chaser of squirrels.
It took a moment to realize that she was responding to my go nuts phrasing.
Fast chase, small bite, crunch and gone, she thought. And Beast is still hungry.
But you didn’t get . . . I let the thought trail off. For the first time since Beast was accidently bound to Leo, she wasn’t all Pet me, mate me, rub my tummy with Leo. In fact, she’d been calm. She had gotten good at batting away the magics used against her.
Fierce joy shuddered through me like an earthquake. The urge to shift slammed through like an aftershock. I hadn’t shifted in so long, afraid of what Beast would do, afraid of losing myself to her binding to the Master of the City. I needed to shift. I needed the healing and the strength that shifting could offer, the renewal. I had denied my nature longer than at any time since I rediscovered my shifting ability when I was eighteen. And I had shoved that need so far down, so deep, that it exploded upward now, as if under pressure, desperate.
I stood, gathered my go-bag, and made my way out of the house, out into the last hours of the night. There were no stones here, not the kind I needed. And then I remembered the pink marble mounting block and made my way to it. It was well hidden beneath the overgrowth of shrubs and the low branches of the tree overhead, and when I climbed deep into the brush, I was hidden from the house. On my knees, I stripped, dropping my clothes in a heap, and strapped the go-bag around my neck with my gold nugget necklace and the mountain lion tooth I had wired to the gold chain. Naked, chill bumps rising on my skin, I bent to the stone and rubbed the nugget over the marble, depositing a small scrape of gold, a homing beacon if I got lost in this unfamiliar place.
I sat on the cold marble, the stone burning its frozen way into my skin, and grabbed the tooth like the talisman it was. I’d been afraid to shift for months. Now, suddenly, all I wanted was to shift and run and hunt and kill something. I blew out a breath and closed my eyes. And thought of the snake that rests at the center of every cell of every animal. The snake that is the RNA of creation. I sought the snake of form that was my Beast. The mountain lion. The Puma concolor.
I dropped front paws down to ground, back paws still on stone, and stretched hard, feeling new muscles and weight. Jane had lifted metal things and grunted like dog, sweated like horse; she had made me bigger big-cat. I looked over muscular shoulders at body and twitched long, thick tail. I was strong. I was big! Jane was good.
I looked at house and saw human-shaped form on back porch. Watching Beast. It was Bruiser. Bruiser had watched Jane shift into Beast. Bruiser knew all of Jane’s secrets now. I chuffed my displeasure and caught his scent on night air. Bruiser had changed. His scent was no longer Leo’s scent. Bruiser smelled of power and youth and many things that were good. But Bruiser was no longer bound to Leo as he had been. Bruiser was not blood-servant now. Bruiser was other. And full of power.