I knew it didn’t work like that. Shapers didn’t need to be numerous to be powerful, and their power no longer rested solely on what they could do, but on their wealth and influence. And besides, the One Worlders wanted to rid the world of shifters as well, and that didn’t sit well with me. I liked the shifters I knew a darn sight better than I liked most humans.
“I thought you might tell me.”
You could have heard a pin drop in the shop. The counter between us was no protection at all. The suspicion was back in his eyes, and it was broad daylight. No chance of Alberto rescuing me now.
“I have no idea.”
“And yet you went straight to those boys as if they were a homing beacon. Normal people can’t do that. So prove to me that you’re normal and tell me how you did it.”
“I don’t believe in that One World shit. Some of my best friends are shifters.” He watched me, saying nothing, and my heart began to pound. I thought I’d left this garbage behind in Newport. Everyone suspicious of everybody else—couldn’t we just agree the world was big enough to share and leave it at that? “Do you think I’d be living here, in the middle of shaper territory, if I belonged to the One World cult?”
He folded his arms. “You’ve never heard of people infiltrating a society to work against it from within?”
Those enemies hidden in plain sight that he’d mentioned to Alberto in the pub last night. He’d seemed to give up his suspicions when Alberto had vouched for me, but he must have been thinking it over, and he couldn’t let go of how I’d led him straight to the lost boys.
“Sure I’ve heard of that.” Couldn’t he just leave me alone? “And if I was doing that, I would have pushed you down a dark hole in the bush last night, with pleasure.”
*Holy shit, will you watch your mouth?* Syl gasped in my head.
But Steele threw back his head and laughed, and the tension in the room dissipated as if it had never been. Well, fancy that—a shaper with a sense of humour. Colour me amazed.
Syl looked from him to me then back again, her tail twitching in agitation. One paw darted out and knocked his sunglasses off the counter.
He bent to pick them up, still smiling. “I don’t think your cat likes me.”
“My cat has excellent taste.”
He fiddled with the glasses a moment, then put them back on. “Are you sure I can’t persuade you to come to lunch with me?”
*He knows you’re hiding something,* Syl said, glaring at him through slitted eyes.
“Positive.”
He left, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the door jangled shut behind him.
“Of course he knows.” My shoulders slumped and I leaned heavily on the counter. “But he can’t prove anything. Dammit!”
I pounded the counter in frustration. Syl leap into the air, then sat down and tried to pretend I hadn’t startled her.
“Why did he have to come here?”
Syl rubbed her head against my cheek. Absently I stroked her, trying to think what to do. Maybe he’d finish his business here, and go; then I wouldn’t have to do anything. But if he kept sniffing around …
*Should we leave?* Syl’s green eyes were serious. She watched me, unblinking.
“I don’t want to leave. I like it here. We have friends—Alberto has been wonderful, and Holly’s baby is due soon.”
I didn’t want to slip out of here in the night and never see these people again. But I couldn’t afford this kind of attention, either—especially not from a shaper.
Not when our safety depended on anonymity. Not when Anders could still be looking for us.
A horrible thought struck me. “Do you think he’s working with Anders?”
Lord, why hadn’t I thought of that before? Steele had seemed suspicious of me right from the start. Following me around, telling me I wasn’t a sheep. And Anders was on the council, too. But it hadn’t sounded like they got on, when Steele had mentioned him in the pub last night.
And if he’d come to take me away, what was stopping him? He’d said he had business with Alberto. Suddenly it seemed imperative to find out exactly what that business was.
Syl’s ears flattened against her head. *We should leave. We can’t take the risk.*
Though my heart was pounding, I found myself arguing. “But we don’t know for sure.”
I thought of Holly, and of the nursery, all fitted out in readiness for its new occupant. I’d been looking forward to meeting that new little person. And Holly would need help, with Joe busy trying to make up for her lost wages. It would be a shame to run out on her for nothing.
And yet—visions of a burning building came to me. The reek of smoke invaded my nostrils. We still didn’t know if all our former neighbours had managed to escape the firestorm Anders had unleashed on them because of me. If I stayed, would I be putting Holly in danger?
“We don’t know enough to make a decision. We need to find out why he’s really here first.”
Syl’s tail lashed in agitation. *How do you propose doing that? You going to ask him if he’s hunting a werecat and a girl with a peculiar gift?*
“I could head out to his place tonight and snoop around, see what I can find out.”
*And by snoop around, you mean use your gifts to spy on him? That sounds like an excellent plan, when he’s already suspicious of you, and for all we know may have a way of detecting your powers in action.*
“Right.” She had a point there. Maybe not the best idea to flaunt my abilities right under his nose. “I guess I could talk to Alberto, see if he’ll tell me what Steele is doing here.”
*Tonight?*
Alberto usually didn’t rise until around six o’clock in the evening. If he didn’t come over to the shop tonight, I’d head over to the pub to meet him as soon as I’d closed up.
“Yes. Tonight.”
6
But Alberto wasn’t at the pub that night. The barman said he was dining with Jake Steele. Figured. Even when he wasn’t there, Steele was a pain in my arse. I’d have to try to catch Alberto early on Saturday evening, before things got too hectic at the pub.
If I survived the baby shower, at least. I arrived at Norma and Ray’s house at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, having shut the shop a little early, wearing my one and only skirt. I figured if Norma had got her hair done, I needed to make a bit more effort than my usual jeans and T-shirt.
They lived in a small brick bungalow on a large block of land that backed onto the bush, perfect for escaping on full moon nights. Holly met me at the door, perfectly at home in her mother-in-law’s house.
“You look nice,” she said. “Did you bring a baby photo of yourself?”
Crap. The invitation had mentioned it, but I’d shoved that into a drawer and forgotten all about it.
“No. Sorry! I don’t have any.”
“Didn’t you ask your mum?”
It was only then, staring at this person that I saw every day, this person I considered a friend, that I realised how cautious I’d become. Holly didn’t know the first thing about me, despite all the pizzas we’d shared.
“My mother and I … don’t talk anymore.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.”
“It’s fine.” It really wasn’t, but this was hardly the time for such a conversation. “Is everyone else here?”
“Nearly. Come and let me introduce you.”
I already knew most of the women: some of Holly’s now-former workmates, a couple of girls she’d grown up with who still lived locally. I met Norma’s next-door neighbour, a rather round lady who was already eyeing the cupcakes, and then Tegan burst in, in her usual scene-stealing style.
“Sorry I’m late! You should have started without me.” She took a glass of champagne and plonked her ample backside into the chair next to me. “I hate baby showers,” she muttered. “No one enjoys them except the expectant mum. Still, I suppose she needs something to perk her up before her life is totally destroyed, eh?”
She
handed over her own baby photo and Holly laughed.
“Tegan, what’s the point of putting this up on the wall? It’s supposed to be a competition, to see if everyone can guess which baby photo goes with which guest.” She waved the offending photo, and everyone laughed. It showed a tiger cub.
Tegan shrugged. “It was the only one I had.”
Typical Tegan. I sipped my own champagne and smiled. There was a good mix of shifters and humans here. Holly and Norma were wolves, of course. Tegan was a tiger, and a couple of the others were bears. It was pretty common to see shifters and non-shifters socialising in the shaper-controlled cities. Some of the humans who moved into shaper territory were groupies, hoping to find some accommodating shifter to turn them. Even Alberto had his suitors; despite the drawbacks, there were still plenty of people wishing to become vampires.
Others were drawn by the generally better living conditions in shaper territory. The laws might be draconian, and justice swift—but, unless you were a criminal, that generally didn’t affect you. Room to breathe was a lot more appealing to many people than being crammed in cheek-by-jowl in the overcrowded human-controlled cities. There was a reason the One Worlders were eyeing the amount of land under shaper control and agitating for a forcible redistribution.
And there were always a few who plain old hated shifters, hated shapers … hated anything that smacked of magic or “the devil”. Yet they still made their homes in shaper territory—sometimes out of a misguided wish to “minister” to the poor deluded humans who actually liked living there, but sometimes just because they were hypocritical enough to prefer the living conditions there, whatever they thought of the neighbours. Some were better at disguising their dislike than others. You’ve never seen two-faced until you’ve seen a One Worlder trying to live unnoticed in a shaper town.
I had the feeling that Holly’s friend Becky might be one of this type. She was a pretty blonde, with one of those round, butter-wouldn’t-melt kind of faces. But every now and then I caught a slight curl to her full lips when she thought no one could see, particularly when she was looking at Holly’s enormous belly, as if the very idea of another werewolf coming into the world revolted her.
I’d seen a few like her in Crosston. A big city like that attracted all sorts of people. As long as they didn’t do anything with their loathing, the shapers generally left them in peace.
But Becky just seemed a little too bubbly, as if she were compensating for something. She clapped her hands together now. “Let’s have some games!”
Norma obligingly organised a game that involved pegging baby clothes on a line one-handed. I got out early on, which suited me just fine. I was beginning to think Syl had been right about baby showers. I’d offered to bring her along, and she’d just laughed at me.
*One of the many benefits of living as a cat is you don’t have to put up with any of that bullshit,* she’d said, flouncing ahead of me down the stairs to the street. *I have other plans.*
Still, I liked Holly, and this was about her, not me, so I smiled and tried to look interested as tiny baby suits and little booties fell to the floor, owing to some very dodgy one-handed pegging. Those clothes were so small. It was hard to believe anyone could be so tiny.
As if summoned by thinking about her, Syl spoke in my head.
*Have you started snoring yet?*
*It’s not that bad,* I lied. *Where are you? What are you doing?*
Our link didn’t stretch too far. Since Syl wasn’t actually an animal, linking with her wasn’t the same as what I’d done in the bush the other night. I could feel animals from a long way away and enter their minds, even direct them to do things for me or see what they were seeing. With Syl, it was more like a radio communication. I could hear what she wanted me to hear, and she could hear whatever I chose to share, but the rest of her mind was just static, and the further apart we were, the worse the signal got until it dissolved into nothing. For me to hear Syl so clearly, she must be pretty close by. Since she hadn’t been interested in the baby shower, I couldn’t see any other reason for her to be so far from our apartment.
*Just exploring,* she said, with a nonchalance that didn’t fool me for a second.
*Exploring what? We’ve lived here for three months. What’s to explore?*
The clothes-hanging game ended with a round of applause, and one of the bear shifters was presented with her prize. The next game apparently involved a race to see who could drink the contents of a baby bottle the fastest, as a whole bunch of bottles were being filled and passed around. Tegan insisted on hers being filled with champagne.
*Just paying our friend a visit,* Syl said airily.
Distracted by the bottle of juice I’d been handed, I wasn’t thinking. *Alberto?*
That didn’t make sense, but our roster of friends was pretty small. Everyone knew Alberto spent the day sleeping in the extensive cellars he’d had built beneath the pub, though no one had actually seen them. Alberto discouraged visitors with a heavy iron door which he locked behind him once he’d retired for the morning. None of the staff even had access to the rooms beyond that door.
But if Syl was at the pub I wouldn’t have been able to hear her. My brain finally caught up with that fact.
*No, wait—you mean Steele? I thought we agreed it would be too dangerous to spy on him?*
Her mental voice sounded impatient. *No, we agreed that you couldn’t spy on him. We never said anything about me.*
Holly shouted “Ready, set, go!” and everyone raised their baby bottles to their lips. I got a mouthful of super-sweet juice and pulled a face. Maybe I should have gone for the champagne, like Tegan.
Some of the ladies were taking the challenge seriously, sucking for all they were worth. I made a less enthusiastic attempt, distracted by my conversation with Syl. On the one hand, we needed to find out whatever we could about Steele and his reasons for being here, but on the other, one black cat was no match for a shaper. No matter how opinionated that cat was.
*Is he home?* I asked.
*Doesn’t seem to be.*
Well, that was a relief, at least.
*Big place,* she said. *The guy must be loaded.*
*Of course he’s loaded. He’s on the bloody Ruby Council.* The fireshapers ruled half the country, and the Ruby Council ruled the fireshapers. *He could probably buy and sell this whole town and everyone in it out of petty cash.*
*There’s someone in the kitchen,* she said a few moments later. *Looks like that caretaker woman who lives here. Can’t see anyone else. No car in the driveway. If I can find an open window I’ll go in and have a snoop around.*
*Be careful.*
*Stop fussing. Go put a nappy on a baby doll or something.*
Surreptitiously, I checked my watch. How much longer was I stuck here for?
I’d rather have been with Syl, that was for sure. Steele’s property on the headland was a few streets away from Norma and Ray’s place. Maybe I should head over there when the shower finished. Still, it was easier to explain away a trespassing cat than a human, and if Steele returned, or his housekeeper saw me, the explanations could get embarrassing. Maybe I could pretend I’d dropped something there the other night. An earring, perhaps?
Syl said nothing for a while. Holly brought out garbage bags with holes cut in them and solemnly instructed everyone to put them on and get into pairs. Tegan rolled her eyes as she struggled into hers. Just as well the bags were big.
“Who would like to volunteer to go first?” Holly asked.
Becky’s hand shot into the air. “What are you going to do to us?”
Holly laughed. “You know how feeding babies can get messy sometimes? We’re going to practise feeding each other baby food.”
“That doesn’t sound so hard,” Becky’s partner said, eyeing the garbage bag she wore doubtfully.
“I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job,” Holly said, handing each of them an open jar of baby food and a spoon.
They waited, spoons po
ised above their jars.
“You have to feed each other at the same time.” Holly grinned mischievously. “There’s just one catch.”
“There’s always a catch,” Tegan muttered darkly.
Holly produced two blindfolds from behind her back and everyone groaned. “You have to wear these while you’re doing it.”
*Hey, nice bedroom,* Syl said. Though she spoke into my mind, it was hard to hear her over the gales of laughter as Holly solemnly blindfolded each woman.
*Where are you? Whose bedroom?*
*His, I assume. Man, it’s the size of our whole apartment. You should see his bed!*
I really didn’t need to hear about Jake Steele’s bed. *Focus, Syl.*
*I am focusing. It’s enormous, and it’s on this kind of pedestal thing, like he’s the king of the world or something. Hey, I wonder if it vibrates?*
*I think you’re focusing on the wrong things, Sylvie. Forget the bed, are you inside?*
*No, I’m on his windowsill. One of his windowsills. He has a private balcony too. Do you think he takes his ladies there to admire the sunset before they retire to the vibrating bed of sexual transcendence?*
*Can we please stop talking about him and sexual anything? Are there any open windows?*
Syl sighed. *Sometimes I miss opposable thumbs.*
For a moment I considered telling her to shift and open the balcony door, but I knew she wouldn’t listen. She’d developed such a terror of being caught in human form that I worried she’d spend the rest of her life as a cat.
Distracted, I watched Becky smear baby food all over her partner’s face, and almost get a spoon in the eye in return. Everyone around me was laughing helplessly. Tegan leaned across.
“Are you all right? You don’t seem yourself.”
“I’m fine.” It was hard to be two places at once. I tried to focus on the two contestants in front of me. Holly had a stopwatch out. Apparently we would all be timed, and the team who managed to finish their “meals” fastest would be the winner. But most of me was listening for Syl, wishing I was on that windowsill with her—or, better yet, inside the house. The sooner she got in there, the faster she could leave.
Stolen Magic (Shadows of the Immortals Book 1) Page 6