by Zoe Chant
"Yeah, I'll bet," Maddox muttered.
"You seemed to make quite the impression on him. I wouldn't exactly say he's scared of you, but it was not a topic he wanted to discuss. However, I decided it was worth digging into your past a bit more, and I found a number of fascinating things."
Verity felt Maddox's arm give a convulsive jerk against her. His voice was steady, though, keeping its low, threatening register. "Everybody's got some stuff in their past."
"Oh, but few people have a past like you, Mr. Murphy. I assume you've come clean with your ladyfriend, haven't you?"
"Maddox?" Verity said. "What's he talking about?"
"Oh, you haven't." Ducker sounded so smugly satisfied that she yearned to reach out and slap him.
"What he's talking about is that I used to do the kind of work Hawkins does for him," Maddox said, the words tumbling out hastily. "Protection work, that kind of thing."
"Oh, that," Verity said. "I knew that. I guessed it, anyway." But she was apprehensive nonetheless. Ducker sounded awfully confident. She couldn't imagine anything he could possibly say changing her mind about Maddox, but—what dirt had he dug up, anyway?
Remember that he's a lying snake, she reminded herself. He's not necessarily going to say anything that's true.
"Oh, it's a lot more than that," Ducker was saying smoothly. Papers shuffled again. "I suppose you can't look at this, Ms. Breslin—such a shame—but your boyfriend has all kinds of interesting job skills. Shakedown rackets. Interrogations. Driver and bagman for mafia bosses. And he has the felony record to prove it."
Remember that you guessed most of this already. Remember that he's going to make sure that anything true sounds as bad as possible.
"Maddox, how much of this is true?" she asked.
Maddox's voice was heavy. "All of it."
He started to step away from her, but she grabbed his arm. "Don't go anywhere," she said fiercely, and told Ducker, "I already know what kind of man Maddox is. Whoever he was in the past, he's the man who's running for sheriff of this town, and he's going to be a far, far better sheriff than Hawkins ever was. He'll protect this town from men like Hawkins, and men like you."
"Yes, well, if you change your mind—" There was a creak on the porch of Ducker moving toward them, and she felt Maddox surge forward, followed by the sounds of a slight scuffle. "If you don't mind," Ducker snapped indignantly, "I just want to give the lady something."
"She doesn't want anything from you."
"I'll answer for myself, thanks," Verity said. "What does he have?"
"It's one of those little keychain computer things."
"A flash drive? What's on it?" she asked, addressing the question to Ducker.
"The results of my investigations into your boyfriend." Ducker descended the porch steps with quick taps of his shoes. "I'm just going to leave it on your porch railing here. You can listen to it if you want, or not, at your discretion."
Verity stood with her hand lightly touching Maddox's back as he kept his bulk in front of her. Ducker's footsteps receded, and a car door slammed.
"He's gone?" she asked quietly as the car's tires crunched on the street.
"He's gone," Maddox confirmed.
Verity went to the edge of the porch and ran her fingers along the railing until they encountered a small, hard object. Then she dropped it under her foot and crunched it very hard, several times, with the heel of her shoe.
"Verity—" Maddox began.
"It's not that I don't care about it," she said, turning toward him. "It's that I don't want to hear it from him. I want to hear it from you."
With that, she went to the door, aware of a whisper of air as Maddox moved out of the way. She brushed her fingertips across the charred wood around the frame. The door no longer closed properly, and she had to push hard to open it as it stuck in the warped frame. She was going to need some significant repairs to the front of the building, but that was something to deal with later.
"I'm going to make tea," she said over her shoulder. "And then we'll talk."
***
They took the tea out to the garden. By now the sun was high and the day was getting warm. Not too warm, though; summer's heat had finally broken, and she looked forward to the cooler days of winter.
"I'm not sure what you want to know," Maddox said.
"I want to hear what would have been on that flash drive, but without Ducker's spin. I trust you, Maddox, and I believe you haven't lied to me, but there's a lot you haven't told me, too." She stopped, waiting for his response, but his silence was tacit agreement. "I want the rest now. I'm not going to base a relationship on half-truths. Tell me about yourself."
After a long silence, Maddox said, "I started working for the mob as a kid. My ma was dead, my old man was in prison, and I had an 'in' with the outfits because my dad used to do some work for them. At first it was just simple stuff, fetching and carrying, being a lookout, and when I got a little older, driving people around. But you know what I—" He stopped and gave a little laugh. "No, actually, you don't know what I look like, do you? I'm a big guy."
Despite herself, Verity had to smile. She reached out and squeezed the first part of him in reach, the thick mass of his forearm. "I do know that much about you, Maddox."
Maddox huffed a small laugh. "Yeah. I guess you do. So I started getting tapped for protection work pretty quickly. By that I mean not just bodyguarding but ... er ..."
"Protection rackets?"
"Yes," he said softly. "I'm forty-three years old, Verity, and I've spent nearly all of my life doing that kind of work. For a long time, my job was to make problems go away for my employers. Any kind of problems. And I did it however it needed to be done. Eventually things went the way these things do. I got arrested and sent to prison for armed robbery. Did ten years in the federal pen. That's where I got a lot of the ink."
"Ink?"
"Oh," he said, sounding surprised. "I have tattoos. I'm sorry, I forgot you can't see them."
He took her hand and put it on his chest. "There's a bull here." His hand moved slowly along with hers. "And a dragon here. And here—a rose."
She traced the hard curve of his pecs with her fingertips and adjusted her mental image to include the sweep and curl of ink. "How long ago was that?" she asked gently.
"The tattoos? Or—"
"Any of it."
"I got my first tat when I was just a kid. The prison thing, though—I got out about seven, seven and a half years ago."
He hesitated, perhaps expecting condemnation, perhaps just looking for a cue to continue. "What did you do then?" she asked.
"I went looking for work. Honest work this time. I was going to get out of the business. But ..." With her hand on his arm, she felt him shrug. "When you have a felony record and look like me, nobody's going to hire you, especially when all your job skills come down to basically scaring people for money. Eventually I lucked into a job with a guy named Darius Keegan."
"What's he like?"
"A lot like Ducker," Maddox said. "Well, he used to be. Then. He's changed a lot. But the things I did for him ... they're the same kind of things Hawkins does for Ducker. You wanted to know why Hawkins is leaving us alone now? It's because we had a chat, as one gangster's strongman to another. Ducker is blackmailing him, so he's even got an excuse. I never had that. I just did it for the money. Because it was my job."
Self-loathing curled around the words. Verity opened her mouth to say that it was all right—and then stopped herself, because it wasn't all right, no matter how much she wanted to make it all right for him.
"Nothing can undo the things you did," she said. "But I can tell how hard you're working to change. Running for sheriff isn't just about getting rid of Hawkins for you, is it? It's about wanting to be a better person. Someone who works to keep people safe, not someone who makes them less safe."
"Yeah. It's about that. Some of it. Some of it's about wanting to change for you, too—to be a man who's worthy of yo
u." He said it like it was no big deal, oblivious to the way it made her heart swell and warm in her chest. "I hate the things I did. I'd go back and change it if I could, but it's like you said, nobody can do that. So yeah, I want to fix this town. I want to fix me. I want ..." He stopped, and then said in a different voice, a hard and decisive voice, "I want to stop lying to you, Verity. It's not right."
She tightened her grip on his arm. "You haven't ever lied to me. I know you've skirted around the edge of the truth, but nothing you just told me is anything I hadn't guessed for myself. Maybe I didn't know the extent of it, but nothing you've told me has come as a huge shock."
"No," Maddox said, sounding frustrated. "You're wrong. I have been lying to you, mostly just by not telling the truth, but sometimes directly to your face. I hate it. You're right, a relationship can't be built on half-truths and lies. And whatever was on that little computer thingie—most of it's probably about the mob thing, but there might be something else. I don't know if he told Ducker, but there's something Hawkins knows about me that you don't."
She was getting nervous now. If his deep dark secret wasn't that he used to work for the mob, what else could there be? "Whatever this is," she began cautiously, "are you sure you want to tell me?"
"Yes. 'Cause if Hawkins knows, then Ducker might know, and if Ducker knows, you'll find out sooner or later anyway. Hell, the whole town might know soon. I wouldn't put it past that assh—er—that jerk to put up a billboard telling everybody about it." He jumped up suddenly. Verity, startled, got to her feet as well. She could hear him pacing in front of her. "I just didn't think this through ... like always. Planning's never been something I'm good at. But I do know this, Verity." He stopped pacing and took her by the shoulders, firmly but gently. "I never want to lie to you again. From here on out, there's only gonna be truth between us. Okay?"
"Okay," she agreed, but she couldn't help feeling even more anxious now. The question beat like a drum inside her head: What else could it possibly BE?
"Everything I just told you is the absolute truth. But I left out a few things. The biggest thing I left out is what Darius Keegan really is. He's a dragon."
He paused like he expected her to know what that meant. "Is that some kind of mob term?" she asked cautiously. "I don't know the slang from your world, Maddox. You're going to just have to tell me in plain English."
"I'm trying," he said. "I don't mean dragon as slang for something else. I mean, he's a dragon. Big and scaly, has wings and claws, flies around and hoards gold and jewels."
What on Earth, she thought. She wasn't sure whether to be angry at him, or worried about him. They'd been having a very serious conversation about his past and then ... this. "Maddox, if this is a joke, I'm afraid I'm not getting it. It's been a very long night."
"It's not a joke. It's the honest truth. Darius and his entire family are dragons. My family used to work for them—well, for Darius, specifically. He's over two hundred years old. My family quit working for him and moved to Jersey a long time ago, but it was those family connections that helped me get work with him after I got out of prison."
Did he actually believe this, or was he using it as some kind of bizarre metaphor? "You know dragons aren't real, right?"
"That's what everyone thinks. They're as real as you and me. They're as real as ..." He stopped, and sucked in a sudden breath, dropping his hands from her shoulders. "As real as people who turn into animals."
"Oh," she said with a tiny laugh. "That real, are they?"
"That's right." There were little rustling sounds in front of her, and then the zip of a zipper, and she realized suddenly that he was taking his clothes off.
"Maddox! What are you doing?"
"It's a good thing you have a nice high fence around this garden. I don't have to go anywhere else to show you this. Or ... no, I forgot, you can't see it, so you're going to have to feel it."
He took her hand and guided it to his bare shoulder.
By now she was completely and utterly baffled. Was it possible he was having some kind of psychotic break? Could that just happen to a person? "I wish you'd stop babbling about dragons and just tell me what I'm supposed to be feeling!"
"This," Maddox said.
There was a sound, but she had no idea what it was. It was organic, that was for sure, but she'd never heard anything like it before: a sort of quiet crinkling, or ripping, or maybe gurgling, like soft things were moving past each other, pushing against each other.
His shoulder heaved under her hand. Heaved, and flexed, and—expanded? It was very sudden; the lurch of his shoulder pushed her back a step, and when she tightened her fingers to keep from being knocked over, there was a whole lot more shoulder to hold onto.
And it was furry.
Now utterly baffled, she explored with her fingers. If she didn't know any better, she'd think she had her hand on the shoulder of some sort of animal. It just went up and up. It was almost like touching a fur coat, except it was clearly alive, because she could feel it moving under her hand with the slight movements everyone makes as they keep themselves balanced. She could feel the ripple of muscles, the hardness of bone.
And she might have thought it was some sort of stupid sleight-of-hand trick—that he'd slipped something else under her hand and fled—except that didn't seem like him, and also, she could hear him breathing.
Or ... she could hear something breathing.
It was big and deep, a slow gusty bellows, in and out. And now that she thought about it, she could feel each gusty breath tickle her hair from ... above?
Very hesitantly, very nervously, she put up the hand that was not currently resting on the warm fur of ... whatever was in front of her.
She touched warm moistness and jerked her fingers back, at the same time as she heard a loud, very animal-like snort from above her and felt the warm furriness flinch and ripple.
"What," she said out loud, very faintly.
She reached up again, more slowly this time. She had petted cows and sheep—she lived in farm country, after all—so she now recognized the warm, damp feeling of some sort of large animal breathing on her. She touched its soft, moist nose.
"M—Maddox?"
The ... whatever-it-was gave a snort. Somehow it sounded like Maddox.
Disbelieving, she explored his face with her fingers. It felt like some kind of ... cow? There was a broad furry forehead, the fringe of eyelashes, a shaggy topknot almost like a horse's mane. She touched the smooth curve of what felt like enormous horns, each as big around as her fist at the base.
And then suddenly there was that same weird popping/crackling noise and she had her hand on a man's face.
Verity jumped back, stumbling into her chair. The lawn furniture knocked into each other, and someone's teacup went over and hit the stone edging of a flowerbed with a crunch and tinkle of porcelain.
"Oh, no. I'm so sorry." Maddox caught her gently, and then his voice moved as he knelt to pick it up. "Jeez. I didn't mean to."
"Maddox ..." She touched his bare shoulder. It was nothing but normal skin, the smooth well-muscled feeling of a male back. It was hard to believe she hadn't been ... what? Fantasizing, dreaming?
No. She'd felt what she'd felt, fur and muscle and bone and horn, and the warm breath of some kind of large animal.
"What was that?" she asked. Her voice came out small and plaintive. In a world where she couldn't rely on her eyes, relied instead on the touch of her fingers, she depended upon the certainty that the world around her would remain well-organized and reliable. Items would be where she left them. The floor would be there under her feet. Men did not just turn into large shaggy animals in front of her ... "What are you?"
"I'm a bull. Uh ... a really big, shaggy bull. Like a Highland kind of bull."
"I ... I don't understand," Verity said faintly.
Maddox caught her arm and guided her to a chair. "You okay? This cup is smashed up pretty bad, but I got all the glass—it's here on the table—"
"I don't care about the cup." She started to jerk her arm out of his grasp, but stopped, because she needed to know where he was—and what he was turning into. "Tell me about the cow."
"Bull," Maddox corrected. "A cow is female—"
"I know a cow is female! Maddox!" She grabbed his arm with her other hand, clinging to his solidity and trying not to remember the feeling of his body rearranging itself under her hands. "People can't just—turn into things! What else can you turn into?"
"Nothing else. Just my bull." He paused; it was almost like he was listening to something she couldn't hear. "Listen, I know it's hard to believe. We're called shifters. Most humans don't know about us."
"And you used to work for a dragon."
"Yeah," Maddox said.
Verity gave a strangled laugh. She pulled out of his grip and buried her face in her hands.
Maddox's touch hovered lightly against her upper arms, just the barest brushes of his fingertips. "Uh ... are you okay?"
"No!" she squawked out. She lowered her hands when she was entirely sure she wasn't going to burst into tears or hysterical laughter. "You turned into a ... a cow!"
"Bull," Maddox corrected patiently. "Yeah, you wanted to know how my clothes got all torn up. That's how."
"And why Hawkins was willing to leave us alone on your say-so."
"Well, it's not just that—we did have a talk—"
"Maddox."
"Yeah," he said, sounding slightly embarrassed. "I turned into a bull and kinda trampled him a little. Just a little."
Verity squawked out another strangled laugh and buried her face in her hands again.
"Verity ..."
She took a long, slow breath through her fingers, lowered her hands, and squared her shoulders. "Maddox, it has been a very long, very awful night. I'd like to be alone for a little while."
His hands left her shoulders, and she sensed a change in the warmth of the sunlight on her face: he'd stood up, blocking the sun. "Do you want me to ... go? I mean, to leave. Permanently."