“Right.”
“Let me know if you figure out anything else, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He gave me a mock salute as I headed back toward the diner.
Jessa rose. “Was that who I thought it was?” she asked, her little hands in fists at her sides.
I didn’t care if she took a swing at me. I gave her the biggest and longest hug that I could manage.
“Violet No-Middle-Name Jordan, what is wrong with you?” she whispered in my ear.
But slowly, she hugged back.
When I released her, I wiped my eyes and went to sit back down in my chair.
“Going to tell me what that was about?”
I took in a quaking deep breathe. “In case I don’t tell you enough, I love you.”
“You too, Violet.”
And as confused as she was, I knew she meant it. She would miss me if I were gone; she would fight for me if I were missing. Just as I would always fight for her.
Chapter Seven
THE NEXT MORNING, I could feel Myers walk up behind me as I flipped through my day planner. I’d heard that there were these new fangled devices called smart phones that had built in organizers. but I hadn’t even lived here long enough to have a Dallas phone number, let alone sign a two year contract to get the upgrade. My flip phone would just have to do for a while longer.
Myers had his borders up and strong, but I still knew it was him. I was growing accustomed to his cinnamon musk.
“Glad you could make it. I wasn’t sure about your schedule.”
Myers winced and ran his fingers through his hair to get it out of his eyes. “I’ve been a little preoccupied lately, been thinking about cutting down on my hours.”
“Nonsense. If I can keep three jobs and save the world, you can pimp horror movies. Come on. I already bought your ticket.”
“And if I weren’t able to make it?”
“I knew you were coming.”
As we walked into the front gates of the Fort Worth Zoo, I wondered the same thing that Myers had. How did I know that he was coming? Even though I had chosen a zoo the farthest away from us, it never crossed my mind that he wasn’t going to be able to make it, like I’d already seen him walk up to me in that green jacket and baggy blue jeans.
The moment I smelled the monkeys, all thoughts of my being psychic jumped ship and I’d wished I’d had the foresight to remember a scarf.
“What’s wrong?” Myers asked as he caught up with me after the turn stiles.
“Haven’t been here since my shift. I forgot about the smell.”
We walked through the primate exhibit and into the gorilla habitat. The large silverback watched us as we circled the air-conditioned enclosure.
Myers leaned in closer to me. “Is it me or is he . . .”
“He’s an animal,” I said softly mindful of the small children around us and excitable mothers. “He’s reacting to our animals.”
“I’ve got up a border a mile thick,” Myers said.
“Doesn’t matter. He knows.”
We kept watching him as the five-hundred-pound primate watched us until we excited.
“Was that part of the lesson for today?” he asked as he shoved his hands into his pockets.
“You think there was a plan? I just jumped at the chance at a sunny day.”
We walked farther through the zoo, seeing zebras and giraffes and elephants.
“Are you noticing that they move away when we walk up?” he narrated.
“Very good. Wonder if they can tell how hungry I am?”
Myers reached for the map in his pocket. I snatched it from his hand. “Just sniff it out.”
“What?”
“Smell our way to chicken fingers, my little padawan.”
Myers laughed but he closed his eyes and stuck his nose up into the air. I watched him focus. Felt him drop his shields and focus. On chicken fingers.
I contained my laughter as I followed him through the thickets of the savanna and the wild parakeets of wherever parakeets are actually from. We landed at the Grandy’s in the middle of the park for lunch.
“So what’s the next lesson, Obi-Wan?”
I snorted at the joke as I dunked my chicken finger into BBQ sauce. “I want to see the lion and maybe have a pretzel. What about you?”
Myers looked down at the map. “I think they have a Komodo dragon here. Do you think there are any shifter Komodo dragons?”
I shrugged. “Don’t see why not.”
“How come?” he asked.
I sat, a half-chewed chicken tender in my mouth as his wide eyes waited.
He asked the question that I have never thought to ask. “How come we can change into certain animals and not others?”
I shook my head and put the rest of the tender down. “I don’t know.”
A slow smile spread across Myers’s lips. “So make something up, creative genius,” he said in a low playful voice.
“Well,” I started as I closed my eyes to see the picture. It’s how my storytelling usually went, I just narrated what I saw in my head. “The Powers pulled us from the earth just as they pulled the animals and the trees and the made the birds of the air. When they saw that they had made two creatures from the same spirit, they let the wanderer choose what shape to take to be their true selves.”
“Does that mean that there are cats out there with the power to be human?”
His question was so innocent, but the lightening of a memory burned across the back of my eyelids and the taste of ash filled my mouth. The beast that had come across from the mirror when Spencer escaped. The knowledge, the familiarity I’d seen in the cat’s eyes as it lay dying. It was just a bigger version of me. The same spirit who’d chosen the cat form.
“Violet?”
“I’m fine,” I said reflexively as I opened my eyes and found him staring back at me, concern across that young brow. I let out a slow breath across the table and shoved the rest of my chicken tender into my mouth to get rid of the ashy taste. “I’m fine,” I said with my mouth full.
AFTER THAT, THERE was laughter and pointing and reading exhibit facts because frankly, you never know when you’re going to need to know who has the strongest bite in the jungle or when you’re going to need to know that you do not have the strongest bite in the room. We finally wove our way back to the cat house. The big tigers were lying lazily in their habitat.
“And now for a little trick,” I announced.
I stopped in one of the windows and concentrated. The male looked like he needed a little prompting.
With a deep breath, I relaxed my shields, careful not to let go of them entirely and was met with Myers at my back. Cinnamon was quickly becoming a very relaxing fragrance.
But he was not my target. The target was the tiger. I reached out and nudged at him with my animal. The target flicked his ear.
“Come on,” I prodded once more.
Frankly, it was a trick that I thought Iris has used to control me in animal form the first few times. I figure with the full moon fast approaching and with Iris sticking to her guns about just being the back-up Shala on this one, I might want to put all this theory into practice before I had an actual panther on my hands without the glass between.
I used the energy like a lion tamers pole that could prod and poke and caress as needed. And the tiger came right over and rubbed his muscled body against the window.
“How’d you do that?” Myers asked, bending down to get closer to the glass.
“He’s a boy cat. I’m a girl cat. You saw how the gorilla acted. Actual animals can react to ours. Mostly, I use it to keep the squirrels out of my pecan tree. “
The tiger began to pace before us as I pushed out my energy to flick his tail and caress his ears. I could feel the fur against my skin, the rough hairs on his tail.
I felt a spike of energy behind me and turned toward Myers.
He was leaning against the stone wall, his face pale and his lips apart, panting. Myers l
ooked up at me but his eyes were changed. Yellow globes replaced his wide green eyes. I could see the press of ivory down on his rosy lips.
It was my power; his cat was surfacing to meet it. And for a moment, my panther wanted to play. I felt her move toward him, wanting to slink against his youth-filled body.
Fear iced my veins at both our reactions. I quickly took his chin in my hand, bathing him in my panther, forcing his cat to back down. I felt it, felt it fight against me, but it wasn’t strong enough. I drowned it in my magnolia scent until Myers went weak and fell to his knees. I put my borders back up as quickly as I could, forgetting about the tiger on the other side of the window.
Head hung low, Myers slowly recovered. He pushed himself up off the ground.
“What did you do?” he asked breathless, leaning forward on his knees.
“Put your cat back in its cage. You need to be more careful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. First timer’s mistake.”
His eyes avoided mine.
“Myers, tell me what you’re thinking. I’m not psychic, well not that kind of psychic.”
He just shook his head.
“Myers?”
As his eyes trailed slowly upward to meet mine, they were wide and forest green and everything about him was so open. He was six feet four and looked so fragile. I felt like I’d broken him.
When he finally did speak, his voice was soft and cracked. “How am I supposed to help you if I can’t even keep my beast at bay?”
“It’s fine, Myers.”
“Stop saying that!” Myers paced along the window, his energy hot and angry. “It’s not fine, Violet. This has ruined my life.”
Something was brewing and it felt like a fight. I had the urge to take my shoes off, but instead just waited. If he needed to get something off his chest, if he needed someone to understand him, wasn’t I that perfect person?
“Four months. I’ve been surviving for four months. This isn’t living. I want to eat everything. I want to smell everything.”
In the blink of an eye, he was before me, on top of me. His slender frame pressed me against plaster rocks of the tiger enclosure. He buried his nose into my neck and took in a deep breath.
I flinched and waited until he was done, forcing my hands to my sides. His panther brushed against my skin, against mine, and I felt his untamed center. My panther leaped against my breast bone. She was ready to play and it had been so very long since . . .
“No,” I barked.
I pushed him off me and Myers stumbled back. I put up a border a mile thick to protect both of us from what our panther’s might do to each other.
“You are just tired,” I said. “Today was supposed to be a day to learn how to just be with your cat.”
“Failed that one,” he grumbled.
“No, you didn’t. I just need to be more careful. I think there’s a reason that there are not two panthers in any other city.”
Myers stared down my shoes. His anger was still there, just below the surface, and he wasn’t trying to even hide it. Ah, the angst of the young.
I sighed and put my hand out on his arm. “I was trying to give you a day where you didn’t get your ass kicked, but you’re making that a little . . .”
The wind changed and I caught a familiar scent of something foul. I turned my head and sniffed, letting go of enough power to use my super senses.
“What?” Myers’s energy changed from hot to cold as he watched me sniff the air.
“Something’s here. Something familiar.”
And I was off, not at panther speed. I kept my pace to something that looked close enough to normal to not attract any more attention than the couple fighting in the tigers cage could have.
The stench grew stronger and stronger until I found myself back at the African savanna exhibit again by the front of the zoo.
I leaned over the railing and the smell assaulted my nose, and I was sure that I knew this smell.
“What?” Myers asked as he looked down into the cage.
I quickly sought out the info tag for what was hidden in this enclosure.
Warthogs, the sign announced. It was the smell. The smell from the morgue. The dark, filth-ridden smell that was embedded into that poor girl’s skin even after she’d been cleaned by disinfectant.
I fumbled for my phone and scrolled through my calls list. I hit the number and tapped my foot as it rang. Please don’t be right. Please just be crazy.
Myers stood before me impatiently, reading the sign and trying to see what I saw in the empty enclosure.
Tucker finally answered. “Miss . . . Violet? Is something wrong?”
I tugged on Myers’s jacket to make sure that he was listening. He needed to know what kind of trouble I was in.
“The smell from the morgue. It’s Warthog.”
There was a long icy pause on the line.
“Are you sure?” Tucker’s voice spoke volumes to me. There was history in the answer that I had just given him, case files locked up in his past as a keeper of secrets for the Pride.
“I’m at the zoo now. It’s is a very, very unique scent.”
“What made you go to the zoo?”
“Does it matter? Back to the dead girl. What do you know about Warthogs?”
Tucker exhaled loudly on the phone. I motioned to Myers that we needed to start heading toward the exit.
“There were some problems with them about seven years ago, before I got here. Gun running, mostly.”
“I’m needing a different kind of trouble than legal, honey.”
“Nash will know. He memorized the Pride archives one summer. “
Holy cow. There were archives? I was lucky to make a journal entry once a year. “Good. I want a full report the next time I . . .”
I should have felt it coming. I should have known. On a beautiful day in the middle of the biggest clue to solving an innocent’s murder, I should have known that something bad would happen.
A whip of wind knocked my knees out from under me. Fell down forward and my cell phone shattered into a million pieces. Crap.
The smell of ozone consumed me as I pushed myself back up to my feet. My palms were scraped and the moment I saw my blood, I growled, my borders evaporated around me.
As I turned to find Little Boy Blew and planned just how badly I was going to beat his ass, I found Myers on his knees between two men the size of walls. Double Crap.
Ice-blue eyes looked at me haughtily from behind two more men that made Vin Diesel look like a cardboard cut out. No joke. At least seven feet tall and four feet wide, the four men that Carlisle brought with him could have worked for Habitat for Humanity as the habitat.
Five against two was hardly fair. And I told him that.
“I’m not going for fair, Violet Jordan. You will submit to me as the rest of them have.”
I laughed. It was a low rumbling laugh that I’d never heard come from me. “I’m sorry, Carlisle, but I won’t. It’s just not in me.”
“Then I will beat it into you.”
“Here in the middle of a public place? Brilliant plan.”
“Didn’t your little fairy teach you about glamours?”
As coolly as possible, I looked around. Passersby weren’t even glancing at us. Mothers ignored the scene from Fight Club as they walked their strollers past us.
It could be why we didn’t feel them coming up on us. This was bigger than Jessa covering up a black eye, this was a spell big enough to cover up a brawl.
Just then, I felt something on the wind. A change. It gently brushed against the back of my neck. Tucker Briggs. Though a little creepy that he had followed me to the zoo, I was really liking the backup all the same. “You are so screwed.”
“Right.” The man pulled a vile of green liquid out of his pocket. “Remember this.”
We are so screwed, I thought as I looked at the icky green vile. Same stuff that Spencer poisoned me with last year. The “you shift, yo
u never shift again” stuff.
“Got it on good advice this stuff kills your breed.”
“Kill is a little harsh,” I said trying to imagine my way out of this situation. I could see only two and both of them left Myers here, alone.
A howl echoed through the park and my skin chilled and tightened.
Tucker strode into the little gathering. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?”
I winked at him. In a split second, I went for the ugly guy on the left and Tucker went for the ugly guy on the right. It was like dancing. I didn’t need to say anything to him; we just fought.
And completely got our asses handed to us. These guys were like rhinos. Not actual rhinos of course but just blocks of muscle and rock. Earth elementals maybe? Everything I threw at them just landed solidly and didn’t faze them at all.
I ended up with my elbows locked together behind me by Rock. Tucker ended up on his knees held to the ground by the man I would dub Roll for my mental narration.
Myers’s wide eyes were white with fear as Carlisle smiled smugly on the periphery.
“Didn’t know that dogs and cats played that well together.”
I didn’t respond. I was tired of playing and my arms were growing sore being pulled behind my back. I gathered energy, taking in deep breaths and filling my cat with all the nip she needed. And in that, I could only smell fire and ash as it lapped around me.
“Keep her tight,” the small man ordered.
The man on my arms tightened his grip as he felt my borders shift, growing wider around me. The anger had provoked it and if they harmed my boys, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stop it this time.
“I think it’s great that you’re taking in our traitors,” the man said as he pulled the black hair from his eyes.
“Another man’s trash,” I shrugged.
Myers was beginning to grow restless, his energy failed out like the arms of a drowning swimmer. He couldn’t control his beast if it became too frantic. I could feel the cat stir within his chest as my borders expanded.
I could feel Tucker’s too. His dog didn’t cower. He was calm. Patient. Kneeling there just watching what was going to happen next. I supposed he had seen this before, see what horrors Haverty and his men could do.
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