Authors: Marissa Farrar
Wanting to offer her some modesty, he grabbed an empty black trash bag that had been stuffed behind the dumpster.
“Sorry,” he said as he handed it to her. “Not exactly Dolce and
Gabbana.”
She took it from him with a shy, but grateful smile. “Thanks.” Her gaze flicked up and down his naked body, her cheeks turning pink, before she averted her eyes to stare at the ground.
Blake was grateful for his shifter body heat. If he didn’t burn hotter than a regular human, he’d be freezing right now. He glanced up at the block of apartments directly at his back. A metal fire staircase ran down the back of the brick building. Someone, probably breaking every fire safety rule in the city, had run a washing line from their window and over to the edge of the fire escape.
“Wait here one minute,” he told the woman.
Painfully aware of his nudity, he ran up the couple of flights and grabbed the clothes off the line. Thankfully, for the woman, a sweater dress had been hung out to dry. The luck didn’t continue on his side, as the only male clothing appeared to come from an adolescent. He wasn’t in a position to be fussy, and pulled on the t-shirt that was far too small for him and a pair of equally small pants.
He jumped back down the fire escape and handed her the dress. “A step up on the plastic bag.”
She laughed. “Yes, it is.” She quickly pulled the item over her head, covering her body. “Thanks again,” she said, and gestured at the clothing. “Not just for this, but for helping me back there.”
“I had to do something.”
She tried to get up and winced in pain, her hand clasping her lower back. Blake darted forward and offered his hand, helping her to her feet.
She squinted at him. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”
“Possibly. You might have seen my face on the news.”
Something in her eyes lightened. “I remember! You were involved in all that stuff that went on in the government building downtown.”
He didn’t confirm or deny her observation. “I helped you, now I need you to help me. I’m looking for someone, my cousin Chogan Pallaton.”
“Chogan? Looks a bit like you? Long dark hair?”
Blake nodded. “That’s the guy.”
“Yeah, I know him. He called the shifter meeting last night, but we were attacked. I wasn’t really behind his ideas, but then those people burst in and started shooting. And then when I saw this stupid protest, I was just so mad, I couldn’t stop myself. It was like my spirit guide forced me to shift. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
“Did Chogan say he would be in touch? That he would call another meeting?”
She shook her head. “No. He took our numbers, but didn’t say when or if he’d call another meeting.”
Blake frowned. “Was there anything else? It’s really important that I find him.”
She thought for a moment. “Actually, yes, there was. A woman showed up, a human woman. He seemed surprised to see her.”
A human woman? Instantly, Blake’s thoughts went to Autumn, but it couldn’t have been her. They were together all night. A pang of guilt jarred through him as he remembered how he’d left her in the car in the middle of all that madness. He hoped she was safe. He wanted to send his wolf to investigate, but he needed to concentrate on what the lion-shifter was telling him.
“What did she look like?” he asked.
She screwed up her face as she cast her memory back. “A bit like Chogan.” Then she lifted her gaze to his face. “Actually, more like you.”
Tala
!
How had his sister gotten involved in all of this?
WHEN IT BECAME clear that Autumn and Blake weren’t going to show up, Mia and Peter made their excuses to leave. The flat had grown too small, and the time they spent waiting, only for the others not to show, had made everyone awkward. Toby kept letting out over-exaggerated sighs of frustration. Peter was pacing. Dana tried to fill the time by offering too many cups of coffee and trying to force sandwiches on them all.
Mia hit the button to dial Autumn’s number once again. The number was new, her old phone having been lost or broken some time during the last week.
Come on girl.
Pick up, pick up, pick up,
she willed. Considering the things she’d learned over the course of that afternoon, she was starting to get worried. The call had rung out every time she’d tried over the past hour or so, when it became clear they weren’t going to turn up.
“Hello?”
Autumn’s voice on the other end of the line made Mia jump. She realized she’d not been expecting her friend to answer.
“Hey, it’s me. We’re wondering where you guys are.” She heard her friend sniff and her heart sank. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s gone.”
“What? Who’s gone?”
“Blake. We got stuck in the middle of a protest and there was a huge fight and Blake got involved. He was helping someone who got hurt, but he left me there.”
She experienced a surge of anger. “He left you in the middle of a protest?”
Peter was staring at her, his eyebrows raised to ask her what was happening. She waved a hand briefly to give her a minute to speak to Autumn. Her friend sounded upset, her voice tight as if she were trying to hide how she felt.
“It wasn’t his fault. If he hadn’t gotten involved, someone might have been killed.”
“Yes,
you
might have been! He should have stayed to look after you.”
“I’m a big girl, Mia. I can take care of myself.”
Mia pressed her lips together to prevent herself from ranting. Blake’s colleague and best friend stood beside her, and besides, she didn’t know the whole story. Perhaps Autumn had been well away from any kind of danger. Given what she now knew, she wondered if Autumn would ever truly be out of danger.
“Where are you now?” she asked, clamping down on her anger.
“I’m at Blake’s place.”
“Where does he live? Do you need me to come and meet you?”
“No.” She could hear Autumn shaking her head against the phone. “I’ll be fine. I’m sure he’ll show up here soon.”
Mia didn’t like the idea of her being alone with trouble going on in the city. Plus, there was a good chance she was being followed by the same people who had abducted and tortured Toby. She wanted to tell her friend to call the police, to tell them she was in trouble, but she couldn’t even tell her that much on the phone. Peter had warned her that their phones might be bugged, people listening in on their conversations.
“Okay, honey,” she relented. “But you call me if you need me, okay?”
“Will do.”
Mia hung up.
Peter was still looking at her expectantly.
She sighed. “They’re not coming. They got caught up in some trouble in town.”
“Damn.” Peter bit his lower lip with his straight white teeth. Something in Mia’s chest tightened. “Can we go to them? Blake really needs to know what Toby’s discovered, but I daren’t talk about it over the phone. God only knows who is listening in.”
“He’s not there. It sounds like Blake is tied up with something else. Autumn doesn’t know when he’ll be back.” She didn’t want to say too much with Toby and his parents listening in.
“Okay, but I’m not going to drive you to your apartment if Autumn isn’t there. I can take you back to your parents?” Mia wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Well, I’m not going to leave you alone in this city, knowing what we do now. We can go back to your place, together, or you’re welcome to come back to mine.”
She felt a surge of pleasure at the thought of getting to see where he lived. Considering the expensive car parked at the sidewalk outside, she had a feeling she would be equally impressed by his home, though she wanted to tell herself she wasn’t the sort of person who cared about such materialistic things.
She gave a shrug, trying to appear nonchalant, when she was excited about the possibility of being alone with him for any length of time. “Your place sounds fine.”
They turned their attention back to Toby.
Peter reached down to the boy’s desk and scribbled something on a piece of scrap paper. “These are my cell and home phone numbers. If anything changes—if you feel threatened—call me right away and say you need to talk about the dog or something.”
Toby smirked. “The dog?”
“Anything like that. Just don’t mention the real reason you need to see me.”
“Okay.”
“And stay off the
DoD intranet. You’re going to get caught eventually.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, accompanied by a roll of his eyes.
The adults left the room, leaving Toby still sitting at his computer. Peter led the way, heading down the narrow hallway and past the living room and kitchen. They paused beside the front door.
Dana chewed her lower lip. “Do we need to be worried?”
Peter shook his head. “Not as long as Toby stays off the government intranet and keeps quiet about what he is. I know others are calling for shifters to stand up and reveal what they are, but as long as Toby keeps his head down, he should be fine.”
“We won’t even let him leave the apartment,” said his father.
The parents exchanged a glance, one that read, ‘Well, we can try.’
Mia and Peter headed back to ground level and climbed into Peter’s waiting car, which, thankfully, hadn’t been towed. Mia hugged herself with happiness at being in the presence of this incredible man. She caught herself staring at the flecks of white at the temples of his dark hair, his strong profile with its straight nose and full mouth. She’d never imagined someone as successful as him would pay any attention to someone like her. He was a man, not a boy.
She enjoyed being alone with him again, encased together within the metal shell of the vehicle. The faint hint of his aftershave, something musky and masculine, fed her senses. She thought of the confrontation they’d had in the government building after he’d gotten them out of the small room where they’d been held. He’d been in the form of a mountain lion then, but when he’d shifted back, he’d risen to standing completely naked. Her mind danced deliciously on the memory of his long, lean back, his curved, hard buttocks.
Suddenly, she found herself even more aware of his presence beside her, the heat from his skin pressing against her like something tangible. She forced her mind away from the memory of his nakedness, her cheeks already burning. She stared out of the passenger window until the color died down, and then her curious mind spoke up. “Can I ask you something?”
He glanced at her quickly before refocusing on the road. “Sure.”
“Do you know what type of animal Toby shifts into? I mean, you’re both shifters, right? Can you sense that sort of thing about each other?”
“It depends on the person and the spirit attached to them.” He paused for a minute, his smooth brow creasing. “The animal spirits we shift into all exist on different levels, so we don’t always see the other spirit, though sometimes we can catch traces of them, like an aura the spirit leaves behind. Does that make sense?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, not really. This is all still completely mind-blowing for me.”
He appeared to think again. “Think of our existence as a skyscraper. Our world, the one we live and breathe on, is the ground floor. Everything on this level is real to us. We can see and touch almost everything around us.”
She nodded cautiously, trying to follow where he was going with the analogy. “
Ooo … kay.”
“Then above us are all the spirit levels of existence. We don’t know they’re there unless something happens to take us to them, such as we die. Or, some people have abilities which allow them to communicate with the spirit world.”
“Like mediums?” she interrupted.
“Exactly. But each of the levels can’t see each other, just like we can’t see them, for the most part. The spirits that reside on the levels closest to ours are normally the spirits which have the closest link to their shifters.”
“So your spirit guide, the mountain lion I saw you turn into, is on a different level than Toby’s spirit?”
“Possibly. That might be why I’ve not seen it. Or it might just be that our two spirit guides are simply nowhere near each other.”
Silence settled upon them as Mia allowed what she’d just learned to sink in. Wasn’t what Peter was saying proof that an afterlife existed? If that were the case, and her twin brother who vanished on the way home from school when they were children hadn’t survived, then he still existed somehow, if only in spirit form.
No. She shook the thought from her head. Marcus was still out there somewhere, alive. She could feel it in her soul.
As they headed toward the center of the city, she noticed Peter’s eyes flicking continuously to the rearview mirror, as if he were more interested in what lay behind them than ahead.
The reason why dawned on her. “You’re checking if we’re being followed, aren’t you?” she said in alarm.
Peter glanced at her and nodded. “Just because our names didn’t appear in any of the files Toby hacked into, doesn’t mean someone isn’t watching us. Also, if the government is keeping an eye on Toby, then our appearance at his parents’ place will have just put us on their radar.”
“Was it wrong to go and visit him?”
Peter shook his head. “No, I’m glad we did. Knowledge is power, and we know more now than we did earlier today.” He smiled at her. “Plus, I got to spend more time with you.”
Mia had to stop herself from breaking into a stupid grin.
They headed deeper into the city. The streets were a mess. Shop windows had been smashed, glass littering the sidewalk like confetti. Groups of young men with hoods pulled up over their heads ran and jumped and whooped as if they were at some kind of illegal party. A fire had been lit in a trashcan and someone kicked it over to spill out onto the road, though whether they wanted to spread the fire or try to put it out was unclear.
Mia looked around at the passing streets in dismay. She caught sight of a number of abandoned homemade signs with writing too damaged to read in the brief moment she got as they passed. The black smear of either blood or oil on the road and sidewalk—a frighteningly large amount—terrified her.
“Oh, my God. This must be what Autumn was talking about when she said they’d gotten caught up in a protest. She’d said someone had been hurt.”
“Of course. I’d forgotten you mentioned a protest. What were they protesting against?”
A sheet hung from an apartment window, spreading down so it covered a large part of the wall. The letters were tall and looping and written in red. Mia hoped it was paint and not blood.
Werewolves are monsters
, it read.
She turned to him. “You.”
He gave her a grim smile. “Ah, shit.”
They passed through downtown and toward Near North Side, where Peter said he lived. Instead of getting quieter, there seemed to be more crowds around. People began to run along the street, toward something instead of away, as if they were eager to join in a party.
“What’s going on?” asked Mia, twisting in her seat to watch the streets go by.
“I’m not sure, but I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Her eyes widened as she caught sight of a middle-aged man with a gut bulging against his faded jeans toting a shotgun against his shoulder. She didn’t need to hear him speak to know he was spouting something along the lines of “The only good
werebeast is a dead werebeast.”
Where are the police?
Why weren’t they doing anything about men openly patrolling the streets with guns? The answer came to her—
because they’re on the same side
. She hated to think what would happen if any of these people realized the man she drove with was one of the things they hated and feared so badly.
The density of people increased, spilling from the sidewalk out onto the road.
“Something’s blocking the street up ahead,” said Peter, forced to slow the car to a crawl.
Mia’s questions about the police were answered. Trying to contain the riots to downtown, the Mounted Division of the Chicago Police Department had been brought in to try to regain control. The chestnut geldings stood in a solid line, blocking the main route out of the city. The mounted police wore white protective helmets with faceguards, and the horses wore similar guards across their eyes. The police sat straight and strong, their expressions unreadable beneath the gear.
People ran toward the mounted unit yelling, fists raised.
“What the hell is this city coming to?” Peter said. “They’re fighting their own, the fools.”
“Is this the same protest Autumn and Blake got caught up in?”