Rick stretched his way into the bathroom, the flickering light dappling his skin, his tattoos looking dark and menacing—the golden eyes of the crouching mountain lion and the bobcat on one shoulder visible in the gloom, the globes of red on their claws too bright. Seeing them, I shivered again. I didn’t believe in fate or karma, but the presence of my two cats painted on his body had always seemed like a sign, a portent, that we should, and one day would, be together. And now we were. When one of us wasn’t working.
The bobcat had been the first animal I’d shifted into when I was a child. The mountain lion was my adult beast, and my Beast, the other soul sharing my head. That she was inside with me wasn’t skinwalker magic, but something darker. She was there by accident, but even an accident didn’t make the black magic any cleaner, purer, or more acceptable.
Beast is amused by my guilt, any guilt, even the guilt I feel about stealing her soul. My Beast goes by many names: cougar, puma, panther, catamount, screamer, devil-cat, silver lion, mountain lion, and even the North American black panther, but they all refer to one beast—the Puma concolor, which once was the widest ranging mammal on the North American continent, and is still one of the largest modern-day land predators in the continental U.S. other than humans, bears, a few large wolves, and the vamps.
Rick moved toward the coffeepot like steel to a magnet and found a mug in the dark. My heart did a little pitter-patter and a blood flush touched my skin, evidence of Beast’s appreciation of my boyfriend. Since Rick and I had, um, gotten together, my own emotional roller coaster had smoothed out, and her rut had faded. I hadn’t had any more peculiar crying jags, and Beast had begun to purr more often. When Beast is happy, everybody—or everyone in my body—is happy. I heard coffee pouring into the mug and the softer sounds of swallowing. Rick sighed in pleasure, a sound I was learning had many different meanings—food, music, and sex each had its own sigh. Coffee, however, was in a category by itself, being as much relief as bliss.
I looked back at the TV, back on CNN, and saw a still shot of a sitting leopard. I gestured with the remote, keeping my voice light, slightly wry. “Big news. Guy claims he’s a black were-leopard. I just saw him change shape on BBC footage.”
Rick went still, staring at the screen, studying the jungle cat that was sitting with its front paws close, ears pricked forward, preening and purring, making nice with the camera. “Pretty cat,” Rick murmured finally, his voice oddly casual. The “pretty cat” comment made me smile and made Beast huff with something like possessive jealousy, which was amusing on all kinds of levels.
Rick’s fingertips brushed the cat-claw scars on his chest, an unconscious gesture. “It’s got green eyes and a round pupil, like a human. Not cat eyes.”
Shock chased the contentment away. The sabertooth lion that had almost killed him had had round pupils. Rick was remembering. “Big-cats have a round pupil,” I said, my voice sounding calm despite my speeding heart rate. “Housecats and some smaller wildcats have a slit pupil.”
Rick grunted, eyes fixed on the screen, his tone mild in counterpoint, as if saying, Well, how ’bout that. “Turn it up.”
I did as he requested, and flipped to the BBC channel where the were-cat news was on again, and Donald Cooper was saying, “—quite keen on the hunt, he is, when in cat form. Vegetarians and animal protection organizations the world over will likely put out quite a stink at his diet, which is fresh meat on the hoof, and, according to him, tastes better if he brings down his prey with his were-teeth and claws.”
Beast agreed with the statement, sending me images of a big-cat bringing down bigger prey. It was graphic and bloody and beastly. Beast huffed with amusement and retreated back into the darker parts of my mind.
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.