Rick took his mug to the bed and sat, patting the mattress. Over coffee-scent, I smelled tea steeping. He’d poured hot water in the pot, over the leaves in the strainer. I smelled a strong black I particularly loved, an organic Darjeeling first flush that I would have all the time if I could, but at a hundred twenty bucks a pound, it was too dear for regular drinking. This pound was a gift from Rick, unexpected and generous and thoughtful.
In the kitchen, I removed the leaves and joined him in bed with my own mug, tea sweetened and topped with a dollop of Cool Whip, and carrying a box of Krispy Kremes that had been Hot ’n Now last night, and were still fresh enough to melt in my mouth. I curled into the crook of his arm, not easy when there was no height disparity, but not impossible for the truly determined. It was cozy and warm and well established, as if we cuddled this way every day instead of only when we could grab the time.
On some level I felt guilty for sleeping with Rick, for being so homey and comfortable with him outside of marriage. My housemother in the Christian children’s home where I grew up would have chided me for it. A lot. It was that guilt that pricked me now as I lay against him, watching the flickering screen. And that guilt that I shoved away, deep inside, to worry about later. A lot later.
Overhead, the rain’s metallic pattering grew into a drumming roar. Rick turned the TV up another two notches and I snuggled close to him, skin to skin, watching the events unfurl across the globe as America woke to a world quite different from the one they’d left behind in dreams. There was an unconscious tension thrumming through Rick as he watched, and his hand strayed often to his scars.
We had missed the interview with the black were-leopard, but tuned in for an in-depth and politically astute dialogue between Donald Cooper and Raymond Micheika, a rare African were-lion who said he was the leader of the International Association of Weres, and of the Party of African Weres. Rick spelled out the acronym—PAW—and said he thought it was amusing, while I thought it was disingenuous and too cute for the raw power of the man. Raymond Micheika was an alpha predator, bigger than Beast and twice as vicious.
I can be big
, she reminded me smugly.
The I/we of Beast can be alpha male sabertooth. Kill any male big-cat in personal challenge
.
“Some cat species run, live, and hunt in packs,” I murmured, to Rick as much as to Beast. “Take on one, I bet you take on them all.”
Rick said, “Yeah. I’d hate to meet him in a dark alley, especially with his cronies around. ‘We need a bigger gun,’” he paraphrased the old
Jaws
movie, his voice tight in contrast to the light words. I turned and watched his face. “If there’s cats, then there’s gotta be other things,” he said, sipping his coffee, his fingers still tracing his scars. “Maybe whatever gorilla-type creature Big Foot is. Maybe that fish thing they see in the Great Lakes.
Werewolves
,” Rick said. “The B-grade movie variety.” He knew I was watching him, but he kept his gaze on the TV, avoiding my eyes, not letting me in. He took a slow breath and said the words that had been playing around inside his head. “Sabertooth cats.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “Like the one that got me. You killed it. And it changed back to human.”
“Part human,” I said, watching his face, my breath tight, “part vamp, part sabertooth.”
“If they only change partway back when they die, why haven’t we found any half-human skeletons?” His fingers caressed his scars, his eyes glued to the TV, tension buzzing through him, almost singing from him.
“He wasn’t a were,” I said slowly, knowing we were straying perilously close to the word
skinwalker.
“He was something else.” His hand slid from his scars, his tension softening. That was what I liked most about Rick, other than his sex-on-a-stick smile, his tats, and his ability to let me do my job without being overly protective. He was smart. He didn’t overanalyze things. He just ... accepted what was.
“Yeah.”
The thing I liked least about him, however, was job related—the fact that we couldn’t share much of our lives. So far, though we’d been sleeping together for weeks, he hadn’t talked about the attack that nearly killed him. He’d been undercover at the time, and the story he had been told was that I had followed him in human form, chased off the cat that had mauled him, and later killed it. But his memories had to include two cats, not one. Someday we’d have to address that. Someday we had to address a lot of things, if our relationship was to continue.
I sipped my tea, waiting, giving him a chance to draw whatever conclusions he might be heading toward. He opened his mouth, stopped, closed it. It was like missing a step in a dance. As if something had gone astray, been omitted, and I had no idea what.
A half beat later, Rick indicated the TV with his mug and veered the subject onto a different course, his tone forced, but lighter, his voice the cop-tone he used when he was telling something he knew for fact. “That’s a slick bit of video. This wasn’t filmed fast and dumped on the airwaves. They spent time with it, which means the BBC’s known about weres for a while.”
I shifted slightly to see his face better. But he didn’t look my way. “And?” I asked, trying to read his body language, recognizing the slight trace of adrenaline leaching from his pores.
“There’s no way they could keep it totally under wraps. Word probably got out that it was going to hit the airwaves. And whatever weres we have in the U.S. will have been informed it was going to break and will make a statement. Fast.” He said it like a pronouncement rather than just guessing.
When Rick was undercover, he had been investigating the vamps, and though he’d been outed to them, any weres ...
Crap
. Any weres would never know he was a cop. He could fit in anywhere, which had made him so good undercover. And Rick had been mostly unavailable for the last couple of weeks, appearing for quick breakfast dates, late-night dinners, and for this trip into the mountains to move me to New Orleans. Suddenly I realized why Rick had been working undercover. It had something to do with weres.
My cold chills returned, lifting my skin in tight points as if my pelt rose. Beast rumbled inside, watching Rick, curious, focused, like a kitten watching a fluffy toy twisting on the end of a string, not sure if attack was warranted. I breathed in through my open mouth, Beast-like. The scent of his body was like the color of daffodils, yellow and tart. Rick
did
know something.
He took a donut and ate it in three bites, washing it down with coffee. “This announcement,” he said, sounding more certain than prophetic, “will be followed with one of several reactions.” He licked the sugar from a finger and held it up. “One. The press will go wild. That’s axiomatic, actually.” He held up another finger. “Two. More weres’ll come out of the closet. Three. The white supremacists and the xenophobic human extremists’ll join hands and vow to hunt down and exterminate the nonhumans.”
“And they call you a glass-is-half-full kinda guy.” I could hear the low timbre of concern in my voice.
“Hey, I’m an optimist, babe,” Rick said. But he still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV; he still hadn’t looked at me. He chuckled and took another donut, gesturing with it. “It’s gonna be a zoo. You know. Wild animals. Zoo.”
I made the requisite groan over the humor. “You know something, don’t you?”
He lifted a shoulder, noncommittal.
Apprehension started to churn in the pit of my stomach, heavy, bitter tasting, a dark, recirculating whirlpool of possibilities. Wondering what he knew. Wondering if—okay, hoping that—skinwalkers would come out with the weres. Hoping that I finally wouldn’t be alone. And worrying what Rick might do when—if—he learned he had been sleeping with one. “
Pretty cat
,” he’d said of the black were-leopard, as if he had liked it. But it was a heck of a lot easier to be blasé about a theory; it might be quite different in a relationship reality. And, last, wondering what he had been doing undercover with weres.
I hadn’t smelled anything on him, but his sisters had cats, and there were at least a dozen barn cats at his parents’ place. If he’d been with were-cats, I might not have noticed.
Back on the BBC, Donald was chatting with the big-cat, Kemnebi, once again in human form, about how he became a cat, the interview we had missed. The were-cat spoke English, the dialect one of those liquid African accents that flowed like water down stone. “We reproduce much as human do, mating and having baby. But we have litter, some small, some large, some with cat baby that have potential to change to human, some with human baby that have potential to change to cat. Some with both. Potential is there, ready to be awakened.”
“You don’t bite to make a were-cat?” the anchor asked, clearly surprised.
“No. To bite a human, even in self-defense, is against all of our laws,” he said, his black-skinned face compelling. “To bite a human, hoping to turn him into one of us, is a death sentence. We may not mate with human, for fear of passing the contagion. For this crime, there is no mercy.”
Rick started to speak and stopped. A broken instant later he said, “Jodi’s gonna love adding that to the woo-woo files.” Jodi is Rick’s boss, in charge of all paranormal investigations in the party city of the South. “Especially the part about a human-shaped mother giving birth to a litter of kittens and humans all at the same time.”
I didn’t reply. We watched, switching channels between the networks and the cable stations as the sky lightened outside, despite the din of rain. We didn’t talk, though I wanted to ask questions, wanted to know what Rick was thinking. I had a feeling that a normal girl would have been pumping him for answers about his were-knowledge. But I had no idea what to ask or how to do it. Unlike most girls, I hadn’t spent my early years absorbing the social interactions between humans. Impossible to do while living inside the body of a mountain lion; nearly as hard to do while living in a children’s home, the amnesiac outsider with no English and no past. So I sat on the bed, my shoulder under Rick’s, snuggled close, with him, but alone.
Near six a.m., Rick changed to FOX, which was running an interview purported to be with one of the leaders of the U.S. werewolves, the Lupus Clan, based in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “What’d I tell you?” Rick said. We’d slid down in the bed, under the covers, mugs replenished and a box of cereal open between us as we ate it, dry. “
Werewolves
. B-grade movie version.” The purported wolfman was muscled but slender, strawberry blond, tough-looking, aggressive, angry, gesticulating in a hostile manner, his words being bleeped as he cursed at the reporter.
Rick said, “Bet it’d tick him off to hear this, but he’s mean as a pit bull.”
It struck me as funny and I chuckled, mostly in relief. Rick slanted me a grin and I snorted, feeling better, though not sure why. On TV, the pit bull/werewolf was still going at it.
“He stands about six feet tall,” Rick mused, “and probably one eighty. How big do you think he’d be as a wolf?” There was something odd about his tone, but then there was something odd about Rick today altogether, so I didn’t know how to categorize this new odd.
“If the law of conservation of mass and energy holds true,” I said, thinking about what happened when I shifted into any animal that genetically might equal my body mass, “then he’d be a wolf weighing in at one eighty.” Rick looked at me in surprise. “What?” I asked. “I took physics in high school.”
“So did I but I’d never remember the name of a law. I didn’t know you had a brain,” he said, teasing. I made a fist and mimed socking him. He took my fist and kissed my fingers, one at time, which had my toes curling. I gripped his hand, holding it tightly, as if it might disappear. As if
he
might disappear. “Besides,” Rick said, his lips moving against my knuckles, “it’s magic. Why would the physical laws hold true?”
“Why wouldn’t they? Those black motes that floated around him when he changed looked like sparks of some kind, which is energy.” I muted the TV and rolled over so I could look up at him, and so he’d have better access to my fingers and any other parts of me he might want to reach, wanting to touch him, wanting him to touch me. I slid my other hand up his arm, his skin warm against my palm. “When the man became a black were-leopard, the cat looked big enough to weigh one eighty.”
“So if a fat guy got turned into a were, he’d be a fat were?”
I laughed at the mental image of a pudgy black leopard, rolls of fat undulating as he walked. Beast showed fangs, not amused. “No. Remember, that Micheika guy said the caloric requirements of shifting were enormous.”
“So fat people could get bitten by a were and lose weight every time the moon was full.”
“You’re a funny guy. Funny, funny guy.” But the mundane dull chitchat and the texture of his skin had relaxed me. “They get killed for biting a human. Not a good way to promote weight loss.”
“There is that. And they go furry once a month. Hard to hold down a job with that.” Rick returned his attention to the TV and switched between news channels to stop on CNN again, where they were playing an early-morning telephone interview with a Texas senator named Jones about the “problem with the supernatural creatures in our midst,” as he put it. Jones, his speech pattern stolen from small-town Southern Baptist preachers, said, “In species that live for
cent-u-ries
instead of
decades
, of what use are
stat-utes of lim-i-ta-tion
? And, how long is a
life sentence
for
vampires
, who live decades longer than
real humans
? How will we deal with the
cost to the prison system
in terms of prison cells that will be occupied for
cent-u-ries
? In terms of
feeding
the
bloodsuckers
? Keeping them safe from the sun? In terms of the
confine
ment
require
ments to hold a
creature
that is so much stronger than
humans
. How do we control the foul things?”