“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not. Your face was the final thing I saw on the outside.” He brushed a finger over those freckles of hers. “They must’ve faded or moved as you grew up.”
“No, they didn’t,” she snapped, and—for the first time—sounded exactly like the girl he’d known. “They’ve multiplied, spread. Damn things.”
“You own them now,” he said, amused as always by her antipathy toward those tiny spots of pigment. “They’re yours.”
“Since the creams don’t make them disappear and I don’t want to have laser surgery, I guess they are.”
He almost relaxed, caught in the echoes of a past long gone. Oh, the power Talin had over him.
She could make him crawl
. The realization of his continued weakness for a woman who found the violent heart of him repulsive, turned his next words razor sharp. “Give me your key.”
She took a wary step back. “It’s stalled. I can—”
“Give me the fucking key or find another fool to help you.”
“You didn’t used to be like this.” Big, haunted eyes, soft lips pressed together as if to withhold emotion. “Clay?”
He held out his hand. After a taut second, she put the flat computronic key on his palm. Most cars were keyed to the owner’s print, but for that very reason, rental places gave out a preprogrammed key instead of spending half an hour coding in each new customer. It saved time, but it also let thieves steal the vehicles. Idiots. “Get in.”
He stalked around the Jeep without another word and took the driver’s seat. By the time she stopped sulking and jumped in, he had the vehicle running. He gave her only enough time to belt up before reversing, turning, and heading back the way she’d come.
The bar was on the outskirts of Napa, close to the massive forests that edged the area, forests that were a part of Dark-River’s territory. He headed toward the cool privacy of those trees, doing his best to ignore the spicy feminine scent of the woman who sat so close. Intriguing as that scent was, there was still something off about it, and it confused the leopard. But right then, he wasn’t in any mood to analyze his reaction. He was running on pure adrenaline.
“Where are we going?” she asked ten minutes later as he drove them off-road and into the shadows of the huge firs that dominated the area. “Clay?”
He growled low in this throat, too damn pissed with her to care about being polite.
Talin felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise in primitive warning. Clay had always been less than civilized. Even trapped in the claustrophobic confines of the apartment complex where they had met, his animal fury contained beneath a veneer of quiet intensity, he had walked like a predator on the hunt. No one had ever dared bully Clay, not boys twice his age, not the aggressive gang-bangers who lived to terrorize, not even the ex-cons.
But that was then—his current behavior was something else. “Stop trying to scare me.”
He actually snapped his teeth at her, making her jump in her seat. “I don’t have to try. You’re scared shitless anyway. I can smell your fear and it’s a fucking insult.”
She’d forgotten that aspect of his changeling abilities. For more than twenty years, she had lived among humans and nonpredatory changelings, deliberately increasing the space between her and Clay. But what had it gotten her? Here she was, right back at the start … having lost everything that ever mattered. “You said that the first time we met.”
He had been this big, tall, dangerous boy and she’d been more than terrified of him. All her short life, people had hurt her, and he had seemed like exactly the kind of person who would. So she had kept her distance. But that day when she’d seen him fall and break his leg in the backyard of their complex—a junkyard, not a park—she hadn’t been able to leave him to suffer alone.
So frightened that her teeth had threatened to chatter, she had walked out into the living room and to the phone. Orrin had been on the couch, passed out. Somehow, she’d managed to make a forbidden call outside—to the paramedics. Then, unlocking the door, she had run down to sit with Clay until help came. He hadn’t been happy. Nine years to her precocious and fully verbal three, he’d been a creature of pure danger.
“You snarled at me to get lost and said you liked to crunch little girl bones.” It was a trick of hers, this memory. She could remember everything from the moment of birth and sometimes before. It was how she’d learned to talk before others, to read before she could talk. “You said I smelled like soft, juicy, delicious prey.”
“You still do.”
The comment made her bristle in spite of her wariness. “Clay, stop it. You’re being adolescent.” He was also succeeding in ramping up her fear—did he even realize how intimidating he was? Big, incredibly strong, and so damn angry it almost felt like a blow when he turned his eyes on her.
“Why? I might as well get some fun out of this visit. Tormenting you will do.”
She wondered if she’d made a mistake. The Clay she had known, he’d been wild, but he’d been on the side of the angels. She wasn’t so sure about this man. He looked like pure predator, without honor or soul. But her too soft heart told her to keep pushing, that there was more to him than this incandescent rage. “You belong to the DarkRiver pack.”
No answer.
“Was that your father’s pack?” Isla had been human. It was from his father that Clay had gained his shape-shifting abilities.
“All I know about my father is that he was a cat. Isla never told me anything else.”
“I thought, maybe—”
“What? That she’d changed her mind, become sane on her deathbed?” His laugh was bitter. “She was probably mated to a cat and he died. I’m guessing she was fragile to begin with. Losing her mate broke her completely.”
“But I thought you didn’t know if they’d been married.”
“Mated, not married. Hell of a difference.” He turned down a pitch-black path, the fading evening light blocked out by the canopy. “I knew shit-all about my own race back then. Unless doctors intervene—and even then it’s a crapshoot—leopard changelings aren’t fertile except when mated or in a long-term stable relationship. No accidental pregnancies, no quickie marriages.”
“Oh.” She bit her lower lip. “DarkRiver taught you about being a leopard?”
He threw her a sidelong glance and it was nothing friendly. “Why the sudden need for conversation? Just spit out what you want. Sooner you do, sooner you can disappear back into the hole where you’ve been living for twenty damn years.”
“You know what? I’m no longer sure I came to the right man,” she snapped back, reckless in the face of his aggressiveness.
The air inside the car filled with a sense of incipient threat. “Why? Because I’m not as easy to handle as you remember? Your pet leopard.”
She burst out laughing, her stomach hurting with the force of it. “Clay, if anyone followed anyone, it was me tagging along after you. I didn’t dare order you around.”
“Load of shit,” he muttered, but she thought she heard a softening in his tone. “You fucking made me attend tea parties.”
She remembered his threat before the first one:
Tell anyone and I’ll eat you and use your bones as toothpicks
.
She should’ve been scared, but Clay hadn’t had the “badness” in him. And even after a bare three years on the planet,
she’d known too much about the badness, could pick out which grown-ups had it. Clay hadn’t. So, wide-eyed, she’d sat with him and they had had their tea party. “You were my best friend then,” she said in a quiet plea. “Can’t you be my friend now?”
“No.” The flatness of his response shook her. “We’re here.”
She looked out of the windscreen to find them in a small clearing. “Where?”
“You wanted privacy. This is private.” Extinguishing the lights and engine, he stepped out.
Having no choice, she followed suit, stopping in the middle of the clearing as he went to lean against a tree trunk on the other side, facing her. His eyes had gone night-glow, shocking a gasp out of her. Dangerous, he was definitely dangerous. But he was beautiful, too—in the same way as his wild brethren.
Lethal. Untouchable.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“It’s in DarkRiver territory. It’s safe.”
She folded her arms around herself. Though the early spring air was chilly, that wasn’t what made her search for comfort. It was the cold distance Clay had put between them, telling her what he thought of her without words.
It hurt.
And she knew she’d brought it on herself. But she couldn’t pretend. What she’d seen Clay do had traumatized her eight-year-old mind into silence for close to a year. “You were brutal,” she found herself saying instead of asking for what she wanted, the reason she’d fought the vicious truths of the past and tracked him down. She needed him to understand, to forgive her betrayal.
“You were my one point of safety, the one person I trusted to never lose himself in anger and hurt me,” she persisted in the face of his silence. “Yet you ended up being more violent than anyone else. How could I help but wonder if the violence wouldn’t be directed at me one day, huh, Clay?”
His growl raised every hair on her body.
Run!
her mind
screamed.
Talin didn’t run. She was through with running. But her heart was a drumbeat in her throat.
“You always knew what I was,” Clay said, tone full of a bone-deep fury. “You chose not to think about it, chose to pretend I was what you wanted me to be.”
“No.” She refused to back down. “You
were
different before.” Before he’d discovered what Orrin had done. Before he’d killed to keep her safe. “You were—”
“You’re making up fairy tales.” The harshest of rejoinders. “The only thing different about me was that I treated you like a kid. You’re not a kid anymore.”
And he wasn’t going to sheathe his claws, she thought. “I don’t care what you say. We’re still friends.”
“No, we’re not. Not when you’re quaking in your boots at the sight of me. My friends don’t look at me and see a monster.”
She couldn’t say anything to that. She did fear him, maybe more than she feared anyone else on this planet. Clay had almost destroyed her once, was the sole person who could do that even now. “I’m sorry.” Sorry that her weakness had made him a murderer, sorry that she wasn’t strong enough to get past what
she’d seen in that blood-soaked room. Sorry that she’d come here.
No
.
She wasn’t sorry about finding him. “I missed you.” Every single day without him, she had missed him. Now, he was a shadow in the darkness. All she could see clearly were those cat eyes of his. Then she sensed him move and realized he’d crossed his arms. Closing her out.
“This isn’t going to work,” she whispered, conscious of something very fragile breaking inside of her. “It’s my fault, I know.” If she had come to him at eighteen, he might have been angry at what she’d done, but he would have forgiven her, would have understood her need to grow strong enough to deal with him. But she had waited too long and now he wasn’t hers anymore. “I should go back.”
“Tell me what you want, then I’ll decide.” The roughness of his voice stroked over her in a disturbingly intimate caress.
She shivered. “Don’t give me orders.” It was out before she could censor herself. As a child, she had learned to keep her opinions to herself. It was far safer. But half an hour with Clay—a Clay who was almost all stranger—and she was already falling into the old patterns between them. He was the one person who’d gotten mad if she
had
kept her mouth shut, rather than the other way around. Maybe, she thought, a bright spark of hope igniting, maybe he hadn’t changed in that way. “I’m not a dog to be brought to heel.”
A small silence, followed by the sound of clothes shifting over skin. “Still got a smart mouth on you.”
The tightness in her chest eased. If Clay had told her to shut up … “Can I ask you some questions?”
“Auditioning me for your job? Sorry, Talin, I hold the power here.”
The emotional taunt hurt more than any physical blow. They had always been equals—friends. “I want to know you again.”
“All you need to know is that I’m even more deadly than I used to be.” He moved far enough out of the shadows that she could see the unwelcoming planes of his face. “I’m the one who should be asking the questions—tell me, where did you go after they took me away?”
His words opened another floodgate of memory. A groggy Clay being hauled to his feet by black-garbed Enforcement officers, his hands locked behind his back with extra-strength cuffs. He hadn’t resisted, had been unable to do so because of the drugs they had shot into him.
But his eyes had refused to close, had never left her own.
Green
.
That was the color that drenched her memories of that day. Not the rich red of blood but the hot flame of incandescent green. Clay’s eyes. She’d whimpered when they’d taken him away but his eyes had told her to be strong, that he’d return for her. And he had.
It was Talin who had dishonored their silent bargain, Talin who had been too broken to dare dance with a leopard. That failure haunted her every day of her life. “There was media attention after Orrin’s death,” she said, forcing herself past the sharp blade of loss. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I went back and researched it.”
“They wanted to put me down. Like an animal.”
“Yes.” She dropped her arms and fisted her hands, unable to bear the thought of a world without Clay. “But the Child Protection Agency intervened. They were forced to after someone leaked the truth about Orrin … and what he’d been doing to me.” Bile flooded her mouth but she fought it with strength nurtured by a sojourn through hell itself.
She couldn’t erase the past, her eidetic memory a nightmare, but she had taught herself to think past the darkness. “It became a minor political issue and the authorities charged you with a lesser offense, put you in juvie until you turned eighteen.”
“I was there. I know what happened to me,” he said, sardonic. “I asked about you.”
“I’m trying to tell you!” She squared her shoulders in the face of his dominating masculinity. “Stop pushing.”