Did I want to get into how to break the demon mark on the mongrels? Couldn’t it wait one more day? I really wanted to do that with Chaz. Maybe being all Hardy Boys together would bridge this whatever was going on between us, or at least distract us from what wasn’t going on between us.
“Violet?”
“I’m here. Just mental-checklisting, you know.”
“I do. What did you do today?”
“Jessa bought a business.”
“What?” he laughed.
“I know. There is a fray in the Veil there and she bought the place to keep others from getting to it.”
“Smart girl.”
“You know, I think she’s growing up on us.”
I could picture his smile. “Can I take you out to dinner tomorrow night?”
My cheek flushed and I bit my lower lip. “Yes please.”
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
AROUND THE CRACK of noon, I walked outside of my town house in my pajamas with my coffee in hand and picked up the paper. The gore of the front page filtered through the milky white bag.
I pulled off the plastic and unfolded it with one hand. “Women found mauled in Oak Cliff.” Oak Cliff wasn’t the safest neighborhood in Dallas, if you believed the nightly news, but they weren’t known for their dog attacks. The photograph was a graphic scene of a body with white sheet, soaked in red. It made me grimace, and it takes a lot to make me grimace.
I went to sit on the front step and scanned through the rest of the headlines. Three more unidentified bodies were found around the city and there was a rash of dogs missing in Rowlett.
As I turned the page of the paper, I spied a visitor. There was a black dog sitting across the street. I tried to figure out which one it was, but I couldn’t remember. I knew that Tucker’s form was a large black lab, which meant that Tyler was probably one too. Right? Didn’t it work like that?
I motioned that the pup should come over here. Whistling and calling “Come here, boy,” just didn’t seem appropriate.
The mutt trickled over, his tall wide ears were that of a German shepard, but his body was more of a runner. A true mutt of a dog. He stopped right before me and sat to my right on the cool grass. Border collie, maybe? But jet black from nose to tail.
Carefully, I relaxed my borders and enveloped him. His identity echoed back to me as the breeze of his energy flowed within mine, his scent surrounded me and it was more hot dog breath than chewed bone like Tucker. But just like Tucker, the smell was not as strong and had something else mixed in there.
“Hello, Shadow.”
His wide brown eyes looked at the paper.
I folded up the paper and picked my coffee up from the step next to me. “I suppose saying that it’s a dog-eat-dog world would be inappropriate.”
The dog nodded.
Something cold ran down my spine. Of course he knew what I was saying. These boys had been doing this longer than I had. Of course they could remain aware in their animal form and they could probably shift in their clothes, something that I still had a hard time doing.
I looked him over. He was just an all black dog with shaggy black hair and exactly thirteen ribs because I could count every single one under his black fur. The men had been scrawny at the mall, so it would be safe to assume that their other forms would be too.
“I’ve got some oatmeal inside or I can make you a turkey sandwich or you can just have the turkey.” I rose from the step. “I hope you don’t think me rude, but I’m not ready for you guys to come back inside.”
Shadow hung his head. His ears flattened. I had to laugh. “I know you’re sorry. Just stay here.”
I went inside and tossed the paper with the gruesome scene on my table and set my coffee down on the counter.
I grabbed the container of turkey from the fridge and looked down at it. Would he be offended if I just gave it to him like that? Was that too much like a dog bowl? Should I put it on a plate?
Yes. If my gift to them was going to be that they are humans first, I should treat them the same in either form. I scolded myself for even thinking about doing it any other way.
I plated the meat with two pieces of bread and then went through my fridge and dumped whatever else I thought would go bad in the next two days on the plate and tossed it in the microwave. I never realized just how much Chaz cooks just for the two of us. Like he’s making up for all those years living off of burgers in bags.
I looked down at my steel-cut oatmeal and cracked an egg over the top before putting that in the microwave as well. Little tricks like that were just a new part of the lifestyle. Get as much protein as you can. The egg would cook down into the oatmeal and with a little brown sugar and cinnamon, it tasted wonderful and kept me full for almost three hours. That was a feat some days, not to be hungry all the time.
I wasn’t going to joke about eating for two, but the grocery bill had doubled in the past four months. And if I was feeling the strain of rising food costs, five men on one small salary must be feeling it just as acutely.
I took my oatmeal and the plate of warmed food out to the porch. Shadow was still sitting there patiently. I set the plate down on the first step, so it wasn’t on the ground, and sat next to him as I ate my breakfast.
I think he was trying to be delicate as he gobbled up the turkey, the dregs of the roast beef, and the pile of mash potatoes. He saved the chunk of cheese for last, like a desert.
He was done, and I’d only taken a bite, enthralled by watching him.
Shadow sat back down on the grass next to me and his energy had already changed.
“It’s hard to feed all of you, isn’t it?”
The dog dropped his head again.
It hurt. There isn’t any other way to describe it. It hurt to know that they were starving. It didn’t pay to be a good guy in this town anymore.
I looked down at my oatmeal and dumped half of it out on the plate for him. “I fixed too much.”
Shadow ate the small mountain of food as I tried to finish off what I had.
When we were both done, I picked up the plate and set my cup and spoon on top and stood to go back inside.
I took a deep breath of the wonderfully cool weather.
“Since you seem to be on Violet duty, I’ve got to get a run in before Chaz comes home. Want to join me?”
Shadow sat down again and waited.
THE BOY COULD run. As I started on my usually spin through my neighborhood, Shadow kept up with me the whole time. Halfway through, we stopped at a local park. The kids hadn’t emerged from their winter hibernation, so the park was quiet.
I walked over to the water fountain and stepped on the pedal to get a drink. The water was freezing cold and felt good on my hot tongue.
I kept the pedal pressed down and point to the flowing water. “Drink?”
Shadow jumped up, his front paws on the metal bowl and took a couple of laps of the cool water.
When he was finished, he jumped down and waited.
For an instant, I thought I felt his power rise with joy, with happiness, as if a happy tail had brushed my calf.
But it was only an instant as we both felt the cool wind of something that wasn’t a cool wind. It tingled along my skin. Magic. Something big and echoey carried along the wind.
I grabbed my phone from my fanny pack and dialed Jessa.
I accosted her as soon as she answered. “You okay?”
Jessa laughed. “Yeah, why?”
“Nothing. Checking in. You got a watcher on you?”
“You mean mutt patrol? Yeah, a lab.”
“Good.” Tucker was probably watching her. It made the ridged chill down my spine lessen.
However, Shadow nudged my knee back in the direction of home. I walked quickly while still on the phone.
“What are your plans tonight?”
“Working on reweaving that Veil. You?”
“Date night.”
“Aw, how sweet.”
I r
aspberried into the phone and then wiped it on my shirt. “Keep inside.”
“Something wrong?”
“Isn’t something always wrong?”
“Anything you say, fearless leader.”
I snorted and hung up the phone. I really wished they both would stop calling me that.
Shadow danced around me and together we started on a quick pace back to the townhouse.
I left him at the door. “Get home. Tell the others what we felt and then stay inside. Do you understand?”
Shadow nodded and then ran off in the direction of their house, wherever that was.
Chapter Four
I SLID OPEN THE shower door and could smell him. Chaz was home. A smile crept across my face. I dried and dressed before heading down stairs, taking time to actually comb out the long dark curls and get them into some semblance of order.
“Chaz,” I called out as I scurried down the stairs.
“Living room,” he echoed back.
His olive drab duffle was sitting in the dining room. I’ve never been so happy to do laundry in my life.
The television was off which was unusual. Habit usually had him slouched down on the couch within ten minutes of getting home watching something about extreme mountain biking.
Instead, he was reading a paperback. He had his boots off and at the side of the chair. He licked his finger before he turned the page, not looking up at me. The reading lamp threw more golden in his hair than I remembered. It seemed like ages since I’d seen him and it was only two days. Maybe this was something like the L word.
“You look thoroughly engrossed,” I asked as I stood before him.
“It’s a pretty good book.”
“What is it?”
I had thousands of books upstairs in the office, an entire wall of everything from the classics to modern horror, which I felt was a little redundant in my current life. I didn’t recognize the glint of the dark purple cover.
“Something by this amazing author Velma Grayson.”
The blood drained from my face and my mouth went cotton dry. “Where did you find that?” It felt like the words had clawed themselves up my throat as I stood there fear-stricken.
Chaz looked up from the pages and smiled. “Bottom shelf.”
I dropped my head and covered my face with a hand. My cheeks burned with seven shades of embarrassment.
“Who knew that little Violet Jordan had such a vivid imagination?”
I peeked through my fingers and raised an eyebrow.
“I have to say,” he said as he stood up and tossed the book on the chair. “I particularly like the part where the handsome stranger appears in her bedroom. Gave me shivers.”
“Please don’t mock me.”
Chaz smiled and his hands slid around my waist. “I’m not mocking you. I’m simply appreciating your work.”
I stepped back and dropped my hands to my hips. “Didn’t peg you for a literary critic.”
Chaz laughed and looked down at the cover. The dark plum cover held a picture of a dark stranger in a long black trench coat and a woman swooning against a brick wall. The Forgotten One.
“When did you write these?” he asked returning to the chair under the light.
“After college. When I went to go work for Drew,” I narrated as I went to lounge on the couch, my legs stretched out along the length of the cushions. “He paid next to nothing and I had college loans.”
“So you wrote porn?”
“They’re not porn,” I snapped. “The romance genre netted 1.2 billion last year alone.”
“This has more sex in it that the Kama Sutra.”
“Fine, Erotica then.”
Chaz smiled a closed lip smile and raised an eyebrow. “Fine, you wrote magical erotica,” he said devilishly. He tossed the book on the side table between us. “Guess you really were hard wired for this shifter stuff”
I gaped at his audacity, playful as it was but I couldn’t be offended for long.I knew where this was coming from. It always went back to the underwear. “Well, not all of us can get through the world on our good looks.”
“Hey,” Chaz protested.
“Oh come on, like having a sacred destiny hasn’t been easier looking like an underwear model.”
I got up and tugged his bag into laundry room off the kitchen and was just about to unzip it. Chaz came flying into the little space and ripped the bag from my hands.
“What the hell?” I cried out, grasping my fingers to my chest that had nearly been ripped off.
“I’ll get my laundry,” he said quickly, avoiding my eyes. He took the bag and stomped up stairs.
That was strange. Chaz hated laundry and was usually glad when I asked. And what had he been doing in my office, rolling around on the floor in order to find the book? And what else had he found in there? And what had he been looking for?
Chaz eventually came back downstairs from the bedroom. I was still in the kitchen, thinking of all the things that I hidden in my office: my trilogy of demon porn, my teenybopper scrapbook of Neil Patrick Harris and my violet box, filled with my most sacred memories.
“I do have some shop talk for you,” I said as I watched him get some ice tea.
“Can it wait ’til dinner?”
“Not exactly publicly acceptable.”
His eyebrows rose up as he leaned against the counter next to me and my eyes trailed down his lean body. His dark blue thermal had seen better days and grass stains were permanently embedded on his dark wash jeans.
I had to shake my head, locked my arms over my chest, and dig my fingers into my upper arms. Sacred Destiny, not sexy guardians. Ignore what you’d like to do with those pants.
“My Sensei said that your father helped him break Jovan’s mark.”
The kitchen was silent. Everything. But his heartbeat seemed to echo as it started beating faster next to me.
Slowly, I looked up at him again. He’d lowered the ice tea to his waist and was staring at me.
“Do you know anything about a journal or something that your dad kept?”
Chaz shook his head.
“Any random ancient texts that you’ve discovered at his house?”
He shook his head again. “Never really thought Dad would keep something like that in the house.”
“What’s wrong?”
He licked his lips and my heart sped up to meet his. “I didn’t know.”
I reached out to take his hand.
He wasn’t a hand-holder, so when he wove his fingers through mine, I knew that for the first time I was doing something right in this relationship.
“Sensei said he helped a few from the Pack break the mark and then stay hidden. Tucker wants to break the mark. I want to help him.”
Chaz looked down at our hands. “Why wouldn’t he tell me something like that?”
“Sensei said it was painful. Like ripping out a chunk of his soul. Maybe he just didn’t want you to know.”
Chaz stayed quiet.
“I thought we could head over to your place and look around? Play Hide and Seek.”
Chaz cracked a brief smile, but it faded quickly. “You trust these mongrel guys?”
I thought about how’d I’d spent my morning. “I think I do.”
“And this Myers kid?”
“He’s as strong as a wet noodle.”
“A wet noodle who has the potential of being as strong as you.”
I snorted.
“Raven thinks otherwise.”
“So you did reach out to white hat broadband.”
He smiled and pulled me to him, wrapping our hands behind me to settle in the small of my back. “According to Raven, she was sent by her Seer to find him to prevent him from harming others.”
“Is he Haverty?”
Chaz looked up at me. His telltale furrow was back, creasing his brow. “She couldn’t tell me for sure. The timeline is right. The location is right.”
“But they don’t know?”
�
�Can’t you tell?”
I huffed and pushed him away. “Why does everyone think that I’m some huge bigwig?”
“Because you’re Violet Jordan. The Daughter of Jourdaine.”
“When are you going to get over that?”
Chaz smiled. “Never. You’re one in a million.”
I sighed. He wasn’t wrong on that point. “No, I can’t tell anything else except that he’s a panther.”
“Maybe you need to go meet other panthers.”
I jutted out my lower lip.
“I’m not saying tonight,” he said as he put the tea into the sink and reached out to pull me to him. “Tonight, I get you. Sacred Destinies be damned.”
“Oh, please don’t say that.”
NOW THAT THE words were out in the air, I was looking into every shadow and jumping at every random noise, just sure that is was another attack.
“I felt something this afternoon. Something big.”
“We’ve been out before,” he shrugged. “Even if something does happen then we will take care of it together.”
He wrapped my arm around his as we walked into the restaurant. It was just a family-style place, nothing special. I had suggested something populated. Using a crowd as a shield had become part of the life recently, which meant that usually we had screaming children running around us at romantic dinners.
We were seating, and as usual, I got the seat with the kid on the other side kicking my booth.
“Its not exactly N9NE Steakhouse, I know, but . . .”
It finally clicked. “Is this an anniversary dinner?”
The corner of his mouth turned upward. “Maybe. Try again.”
I looked around at the red glittery décor and my face hit my palm. “Valentine’s Day? Chaz, I would have suggested something a little more . . .”
He laughed. “It’s okay. Almost past me by as well. I’m just glad that we’re together.”
I sighed and looked through my fingers. “I suppose that we do have that to celebrate.”
The kid kicked the seat again.
As soon as the waitress took our drink orders, both our cell phones rang. We fought it as long as we could, but we both sighed and reach for our respective phones.
“Hello,” I answered to the unknown number. Might as well, right? Not like any one can kill me through a phone, but that was a pretty good movie idea.
Claws and Effect Page 5