by Nara Malone
Seth bowed to Jake’s taking charge of the situation without batting an eye. He was gone, covering the ground in long strides, breaking into a run as soon as he was out of Allie’s line of sight.
“Kitten?” Eddie asked again, inching closer. “Where you been, baby girl?” He squatted on the ground a yard from her. The guy had balls. Jake gave him that. Allie could be on him in one leap. He knew what he was about too, making himself smaller by crouching. Less threatening.
Allie tipped her head, her tail was dropping, her ears cocked forward, twitching.
The door to the shop slammed. Jake noticed the curtains above stirring again.
“Not much time left before cops show,” Jake warned. “And you need to get right up against the van, so that our busybody in the window can’t see your girl when she comes to you.”
“What if she remembers how pissed she is at me and decides to rip my throat out? What if this is all a trick and you just want to watch that big cat eat me?”
“She can be on you and snap your neck before you realize she’s going to jump. If she was going to eat you, she’d be done and puking you back up by now,” Jake said. “She knows you. You haven’t pissed yourself and you’re acting like women who turn themselves into cats is an everyday thing.”
Seth rejoined them and passed the jacket to Jake who only got close enough to Allie’s father for him to just reach the jacket and take it. He held Jake’s gaze. “You just think hard about the little ladies we left behind. If I don’t stay healthy, they don’t stay healthy.”
The threatening tone agitated Allie. She was back up on all fours, tail whipping, hissing warnings. Jake could see Maya’s hair, gold and gleaming in the beam of a flashlight Ben aimed into the interior.
“Save the threats for later. See if you can sweet talk her out of that van.”
Jake stepped back and let the little rat resume his wooing. “Come to Eddie, baby girl. Look, I have your blankie.” He held out Jake’s jacket. Again she mewed, her tongue swiped the air, tasting scent. Satisfied, she inched forward her two front paws, now on the ground. She looked back over her shoulder, uncertain about leaving her charges.
“It’s okay, kitty girl. Eddie can fix this. Don’t I always fix everything?” He spread the jacket on the ground. She stretched her neck full length, just far enough to sniff the jacket. “That’s my girl. There’s your pretty red blankie. Aren’t you sleepy? Come lie down for me now.”
She moved onto the jacket, turning in a circle, sniffing. Eddie reached out, his hand trembling. She could bite that hand off completely with one snap of powerful jaws. Jake and Seth exchanged a glance.
Allie sniffed Eddie’s fingers, then butted his chest with her head. He scratched behind her left ear and she lay down, purring as he stroked her head. She yawned. Eddie cringed but held his ground, staring down into a mouth big enough to crush his head. She lowered her head to her paws and vanished, reappearing a few seconds later as a sleeping Allie.
Eddie pulled the corners of the jacket around her, trying to cover her nakedness. Seth stepped up, threw his own shirt over her and lifted Allie in his arms. Eddie grabbed his arm. Ben ducked behind into the van and emerged with Maya.
The appearance of another naked girl set Eddie off. “What were you scum having, some kind of orgy with my baby girl?”
Seth was ignoring Eddie, his head tipped to a sound Jake heard too, the distant whoop of a squad car. He turned toward the shop.
“My place,” Ben called, heading into the shop with Maya. Seth turned to follow.
“Not so fast, cowboy. She’s going home with me. Just as soon as I deal with whichever one of you bastards caused this.”
Eddie dipped his hand back into his gun pocket. Jake had no choice but to knock him flat. Seth took off and Jake grabbed Marcus from the van, slinging him easily over his shoulder.
“This is the guy who caused it,” Jake said as Eddie scrambled to his feet. “You want to deal with him?”
Eddie looked from Marcus to Jake. “He’s like her?”
Jake nodded.
“Are you like them?”
“Dude, you don’t want to know what I turn into.”
Eddie’s driver, a short, round guy, obviously on the slow side when it came to protecting the boss, huffed across the yard waving a gun. Eddie told him to go back to the car. The whoop of sirens was close enough to hurt.
“Your girl shifted to save him and the other girl you just saw. That’s all the explanation I have time to make. She’s found her own kind. You want to keep her from that?”
Eddie studied Marcus. The squad cars turned down the street.
“I have to get them all out of here. I’ll be in touch as soon as they are safe. You don’t want her to wind up in the place she saved him from.”
Eddie shook his head no.
Jake signaled Atka in the driver’s seat to go and pushed the side door shut. The van disappeared save for the sound of the engine receding as it drove off.
Eddie blinked, rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “Go,” he said. “I have experience holding off cops.”
“What about Allie’s friends?”
“Do they know about her?”
“Don’t think so.”
“I’ll make sure they don’t run into any problems.”
“I’ll get word to you later, Eddie. I’ll find you.”
“Just go.”
Jake was inside and headed up the stairs when the sirens stopped behind his shop. He tossed Marcus over his shoulder and hoped his skill with a mirror portal was sufficient enough to get him and Marcus through without scrambling their DNA.
* * * * *
Marcus moved in and out of consciousness the way a car moves in and out of patches of fog. There were clear spells, when he was aware of Allie beside him. Moments when he’d been able to get his mind connected to hers. He’d been ripped back to consciousness by her pain after she’d shifted and the volume and blaze of telepathy threatened to drive her insane. He’d silenced the others, warned Jake, and then gone back into the fog.
He recalled Allie’s response to her father, something other than the animosity he’d expected. Then later he was in a soft bed with her body spooned to his. Safe. They were safe and nothing more mattered.
As he fought his way through the fog to clarity now, he was keenly aware of her absence. Not in his bed. Not in the house. He decided to hold off telepathy until he knew where she was and in which form.
The house was quiet, save for the murmurs of adults gathered downstairs, more than should be present in Ben’s house, Marcus realized as he surveyed the guestroom he’d been frequenting more than usual these past weeks.
He recognized the bright spots of energy, seven babies swaddled tight in blankets and sleeping on the triple king-sized bed in the master bedroom. He moved soundlessly past the door. Marisa stirred but didn’t wake.
In the kitchen he found them chatting over pancakes at the long table with benches where the pack gathered for meals. Ben and Carlos, plates empty. Ean was halfway through a triple stack slathered with syrup and butter. Adam was urging Marie to dig into her untouched breakfast. Seth poured coffee and pushed a mug next to the glass of juice Maya contemplated. Marcus recognized the hung-over, headachy daze she was in as exactly the way he felt.
Allie, Jake and the rest of the Alpha pack were missing.
Seth hauled a chair from beside the wood stove and set it at the head of the table for Marcus. “Jake took Allie to visit her father,” he said, filling another blue mug with scalding coffee and sliding it in front of Marcus.
The news snapped Marcus out of his daze. “Why would you let that happen?” he growled.
“I sent two of my guys with them, Magus,” Ben said.
“If he meant her harm, Magus,” Seth countered, “he wouldn’t have helped save her and you last night.”
“He helped? Maybe it’s a trick. Nothing Allie shared about him suggests he’s anything but dangerous. A criminal.”<
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“Who raised a daughter he was aware was not fully human, and protected her in ways that few humans would have been capable of. Not perfect, but what she needed given her situation,” Seth said. “She’s with Jake. She’ll be fine.”
“And what do you think her situation was?” he asked, but was thinking about the girls upstairs, that Seth here meant one more person knew Adam and Ean had taken a second mate. Pantherian law forbade any male having more than one. Would forbid Marcus claiming Allie. It made him uneasy that he had to keep breaking the laws. It made him uneasy that the number of males who knew about the law-breaking was growing. Secrets didn’t stay secrets when this many people knew them.
“A situation that is too similar to Marie’s to be mere coincidence,” Adam said, cutting into his thoughts and bringing him back into the conversation. “Jake said Eddie admitted Allie wasn’t his child. Allie said her mother abandoned her to Eddie’s care. So we have a second Pantherian female abandoned as an infant into the care of humans.”
“And not siblings,” Ean added. “We compared DNA to Marie from that hair sample you gave Maya.”
“There’s just no way one Pantherian mother, let alone two, would abandon a female child,” Ben put in.
Maya looked from him to Marcus and rolled her eyes.
“You don’t agree, Maya?”
“I think, especially if it was a girl, given that there has been so little progress preventing the wasting, she might see it as a last-ditch chance to save her baby. Maybe away from Pantheria it could survive. Obviously it worked at least twice.”
“And the fathers would overlook a missing child?”
“They might. Or she might birth alone and conceal the female baby, slip her out through a portal later.”
Ean interrupted. “Females don’t use the—” A lift of eyebrows and a glare from Maya silenced him. If she had figured out how to use one, others could have.
“I don’t go with that theory,” Adam said. “There are genetic differences consistent between the two females we discovered in the wild.”
“In the wild?” Marie asked, joining the discussion for the first time.
“It’s what we call the human world,” Adam explained, “far wilder and more dangerous to our kind than the sensible order of nature.”
“I don’t know if I agree with that assessment.”
“You don’t have to defend the humans,” Ean said. “It’s not like you’re one of them.”
“Hold on,” Marcus said. He hadn’t really wanted to get involved in this discussion right now. He wanted to find Allie and Jake. Carlos slid a plate of hotcakes in front of Marcus. Marcus picked up a fork to be polite, but the scent of rich maple syrup and melting butter aroused nausea rather than appetite. “Let’s stay on track here,” he said. “Why don’t you agree, Adam? What genetic differences?”
“Face blindness and to some degree a co-symptom, called topographic agnosia, a navigational disconnect. I knew Marie seemed to lack an inner compass, but she compensated for the face blindness well enough that I didn’t suspect until I saw her test score.”
“How bad?”
“She got thirty percent.”
Marcus wasn’t surprised. It matched his own score, but he didn’t say so.
“I want to propose two other possibilities,” Adam said.
“Go ahead.”
“Either there is another tribe of therianthropes, a subspecies we haven’t encountered, or there is someone conducting genetic experiments that have produced the two we’ve come across.”
“I’d say the first is more plausible than the second.”
“When you take into account the brain damage of the two females—”
“Brain damage!” Maya chimed in with Marie on that one.
“They have obvious perceptual disabilities,” Ean said gently.
Gentleness didn’t fly with Marie. She pushed back from the table and stood. “Disabilities?”
Marcus wasn’t fond of those labels either. “I’d say differences is a better word than disabilities. Wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t think either Ean or Adam agreed, but they’d stepped on some tails and had enough sense not to keep going.
“Right. Differences. That’s a better word. Thank you, Magus.”
As many times as he’d heard his son address him by his formal title, it still stung, that public display of the distance between them. No one else seemed to notice.
Adam steered the conversation back to safer territory. “Human genetic technology has not advanced to a level that would allow them to create shifters. It certainly hadn’t advanced enough at the time these two were conceived. I’ve checked every possible source and Jake has worn his fingers to nubs hacking research data.”
“Not all data is hackable,” Marie said.
“What data isn’t hackable?” Ben asked, flexing his fingers and cracking his knuckles.
“The kind written down on paper,” Maya said.
“We have a lot of theories,” Marcus concluded. “To choose the correct hypothesis we need more data. Ben, your team is the best at getting into and out of those places where unhackable data may be stored. Seth, we found two females in this area without even looking. I say we start looking. If there is another subspecies we’ll find them. If someone is manufacturing therianthropes, I doubt we miraculously stumbled on the only two.”
“Aren’t the hybrids you find therianthropes?” Marie asked. Around the table Pantherians froze. She’d done the equivalent of ask what was the difference between a Pantherian and a human without realizing. The comparison didn’t sit well with the True Children, the superior race.
“The lab hybrids aren’t shifters,” Adam explained. “They’re chimera, parts of them are human and parts of them are beast. Pantherians are two complete species and can shift between the two at will. Both the human and beast side of a Pantherian is superior to non-Pantherian humans and beasts.”
Marie was digesting that. To Marcus it looked as if she might be headed for a case of indigestion, but the others didn’t notice.
Ben pulled his chair closer to the table. “We need a strategic plan. Maps. Background checks on genetics research facilities, lists of traits to look for, a good strategy session to nail down just what we’re looking for and where to find it.”
Strategy was Ben’s strength. His independent, paramilitary special ops team would take over mission planning and setting objectives.
“So let’s start a shopping list of traits we have discovered,” Adam said, “what to look for in a wildling.” Ben retrieved a notepad and pen from the kitchen counter, straddled his chair and said, “Go.”
Adam ticked off the traits. “Shifting before puberty, genetic coloring outside the Pantherian norm, an immunity to the wasting, no inner compass, face blindness.” Marcus sipped his coffee, only half listening. The drug-induced fog was clearing. If Allie didn’t return soon, he was going after her.
* * * * *
The old neighborhood looked smaller and rattier than Allie remembered. But she’d had nothing to compare it to before now. Greyville with its freshly painted shops and flower boxes in the windows, with machines that made rounds to sweep and wash the streets and crackless sidewalks, had once been a place where she felt nervous. A ragged girl, she’d fretted she wasn’t clean enough to walk on their sidewalks, or sit with diners in a tiny café with starched curtains.
But grit and exhaust were no longer embedded in her skin, or her soul. Looking at this world with fresh eyes, she realized she’d never really belonged here either. An alien species in Greyville and Slumville. Last night she’d come to terms with the fact she wasn’t human. Most people she knew would say Eddie wasn’t human either, but Allie didn’t doubt, at least in the genetic sense, that he was. Which meant it was time to get some answers.
They parked behind the old club. At nine a.m. the streets were empty except for a garbage truck making haphazard rounds.
Atka was at the wheel. When Jake shu
t the side door, the van disappeared. “That’s excellent,” he said. I have to get Ben’s pack to whip one of these up for me.
Allie shivered. Disappearing vans. Referring to guys as the pack. What happened to the normal life she’d been working so hard to find? Marcus’ world made Eddie’s look ordinary. She recalled the sound of wolves howling by the river when she’d gone to take the garden pictures. She headed for the back of the club, asking Jake as they went, “So not all Pantherians are leopards?”
Jake started to say something and then snapped his mouth shut.
He shook his head, studied her a minute and then said, “There are eight tribes, or phyla, some with several subspecies among them.”
“But what? There’s something more, Jake, something you were going to say.”
“There are no leopards. Or not that we knew of until now.”
“What about Marcus?”
“That’s a long story, something his little granddaughter did. You can get the details from him later.”
“Sheesh, a granddaughter? He’s that old?”
Jake winced at the comment. She should have thought before she said that. Jake was probably close to Marcus’ age. But trying to smooth comments like that over usually made things worse and Jake seemed eager to leave the topic of age anyway.
“We’re here to find out about you, remember? We’ll fill in all the details about Marcus later.”
Allie nodded and led Jake to the back door. Head was at the door to greet them. Allie wondered if he ever slept. He’d been as much a fixture in her life as Eddie, always there, silent but ready to lay low the slightest threat. His bald head was so shiny she wondered if he polished it. The edges of tattoos, gleaming blue-black swirls, showed beneath the cuffs on his suit jacket and at the neckline of the t-shirt he wore under the jacket. “’Bout time you got your ass back where you belong,” Head grumbled. He held up a fist and Allie made one too, bumping his knuckles in greeting. “Your old man’s been sick, doesn’t look like he used to.”
“Is he asleep? Should I come back tonight?”
“No, he doesn’t sleep much anymore. He’s in his office.”