Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  There was that blush, rising in her cheeks.

  Not that Tomás wasn’t blushing, as well. Bron was surprised to see a dull, crimson stain crawling across his high, sculpted cheekbones, darkening his already bronze skin.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “I’ll see what they’ve got.”

  They didn’t speak again until they had reached the truck stop, where Tomás was careful to pull into a deserted corner of the lot. “Stay here,” he cautioned—unnecessarily, as far as Bron was concerned. She couldn’t very well leave the SUV in her blanket toga, and that last shift had taken up too much energy to try it again anytime soon. She was starving and parched—she had used up all of her reserves in the consecutive shifts earlier.

  Apparently, Tomás’s partial shift didn’t take as much energy. Either that, or he was better at hiding the effects of shifting than she was.

  In any case, Bron wanted to learn how to do that kind of partial shift. She wasn’t entirely certain how she might use it, but she was sure it could be very useful. It was more immediately obvious how a shifter whose animal form had claws or teeth might be able to benefit from shifting only those parts of their bodies—as Tomás’s ability to slice open the goon with the knives had illustrated.

  I wonder if I could shift my arms into wings and fly without shifting the rest of me?

  Probably not, since her animal form changeover required a larger displacement of mass than his did. Shifter ravens were bigger than the non-shifter variety, but still nowhere near as large as a human, or even whatever kind of big cat Tomás might be.

  She caught sight of him walking across the parking lot, back toward the car from this door. Bron couldn’t take her eyes off him. Even if she hadn’t known he was a shifter, something in his walk would have marked him out as feline to her.

  She might have sensed it because of her own avian nature, but she didn’t think this was a predator-prey thing.

  Not in the typical animal kingdom sense.

  His broad, muscular shoulders stretched the black fabric of his T-shirt across his back. Bron’s gaze traced the line of his T-shirt down to his narrow waist, where he had tucked it into his blue jeans. His low-slung, rolling walk reminded her of a jungle cat stalking its prey. Even the way he ran the fingers of one hand through his dark hair made her think of a cat grooming itself.

  No, this was perhaps primal and animalistic, but the feeling he evoked deep in her belly was very much a mammal heat.

  Oh, yes. I definitely want him, she admitted to herself.

  When he got closer to the SUV, he glanced up and caught her gaze with his. For an instant, the intensity of that connection froze her in place.

  Tomás felt it, too, if his own pause as he stared at her were anything to go by. He shook it off after a second, however, and pulled open the back door, leaning into speak to Bronwyn.

  “This was the best I could find.” He handed a plastic bag through to her with a shrug. “Also food and drinks.”

  “Thanks,” Bron said, inhaling the scent of burgers appreciatively.

  “These too. In case you want to—” Tomás made an odd swiping motion across his face, and Bron opened the top of the sack to peer in curiously.

  Baby wipes.

  Oh, right.

  It hadn’t even occurred to her that there might be blood transfer from her attack on the kidnapper’s eyes. Usually, most of that burned away in a shift—though, admittedly, all of her experience to date had to do with small animals she hunted in her raven form. Not humans.

  Her stomach roiled at the thought, and Bron consoled herself with the knowledge that she hadn’t actually eaten anything.

  “Thanks,” she muttered, this time less graciously—but she opened the package and used a wipe to scrub at her face.

  Tomás nodded and held up a roll of black electrical tape. “I’m going to make a few useful changes to our license plate.”

  “Like what?”

  “Change a 3 to an 8, that kind of thing. It won’t pass any kind of close examination if we get stopped, but it will do until we can trade in this car for something else.”

  He ducked out of sight, and Bron busied herself pulling on the T-shirt and sweatpants Tomás had found in the truck stop. She glanced down at her chest and pulled the shirt out to better read it upside down. “Truckers go longer,” her shirt proclaimed to the world.

  At least the sweatpants were a plain, inoffensive gray. At the very bottom of the sack, Tomás had included a pair of slippers—the kind with a leather sole and a knitted, sock-style upper. Not quite shoes, but they would do for now.

  As Bron was pulling the sock-slippers on, Tomás swung into the front seat, where he pulled his own burger out from a bag and put the car in gear.

  “What’s your shifter animal?” Bron asked abruptly as she gave the second sock a tug.

  “Jaguar. Why?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been wondering.” Finally dressed again, Bron gathered up her food and the giant soft drink Tomás had gotten for her, and clambered into the front seat. “I had you pegged for a bobcat.”

  “A bobcat? I’m way more powerful than that.”

  Bron glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. That was certainly true.

  And sexier, too.

  Not that she’d say so aloud.

  “So,” she asked, “where are we going?”

  “Well, according to this vehicle’s navigation system—and some of the conversation I overheard during my short time with those guys back there—we are headed to New Orleans.” He reached out and pushed a few buttons on the dashboard screen. The recognizable, crescent shape of New Orleans appeared on the on-dash map. “Specifically, the Pirate’s Booty Riverboat Casino.”

  Bronwyn frowned as she stared at the map. Then she turned in the passenger seat, hiking one leg up under her so she could lean her back against the door and face Tomás as she spoke. It was all he could do to keep his eyes on the road when all he wanted to do was watch her.

  “Isn’t Pirate’s Booty the new shifter casino in New Orleans?” She tapped the top of one knee as she thought aloud. “So is this some kind of shifter rivalry? Do you know who owns the new casino?”

  “Werewolves, I think.”

  “But Jeff’s a werewolf.” She shook her head. “This isn’t making any sense.”

  “You said that your head of security went missing, too? Maybe that’s part of the pattern, as well.”

  Bronwyn barked out a short laugh. “You really think there’s a pattern to this?”

  Tomás nodded. “There always is. When you’re dealing with shifters, it might be a human pattern, or it might be an animal pattern—but once you can find the pattern, it all falls into place.”

  Tapping his own fingers on the steering wheel, Tomás considered all his options. Nodding toward the floorboard at Bronwyn’s feet, he said, “There’s a burner phone in one of those sacks down there. Pull it out and plug it in, would you?”

  Bronwyn fished the package out of the plastic bag, her small, deft hands efficiently removing the phone itself from the cardboard and plastic wrapping. “So what kind of people do you call when you’ve been kidnapped, murdered the kidnappers, and are still heading toward their original destination?”

  Tomás snorted. “I’m not the only big cat in my security company—I’m the one who owns it.”

  “Seriously, though. Is speeding toward the exact place those two goons wanted to take you really the best idea?”

  Tomás shrugged. “It’s certainly the one most likely to get answers for me. Also, I’m guessing it’s the best way to get your boss back. That’s still your goal, right?”

  “At the moment, yes. And no matter what else, I want to know why this is happening.” She held one slim finger poised over the phone’s screen. “What number should I dial?”

  After she had punched in the number for him and handed him the phone, Tomás considered what to say when Kyle answered. Last the Big Cat team had heard, their boss was headed out to do
a small job in Shreveport.

  It was a little embarrassing to have misread the situation enough to end up in this situation.

  Not embarrassing enough to avoid telling the guys about it, though.

  I might need backup.

  Though he had to admit, the tiny raven shifter next to him had made a surprisingly good partner so far. If anyone had asked him before now, Tomás would have dismissed bird shifters as unlikely security material.

  Bronwyn was beginning to change his mind.

  “Hey, Kyle,” he began when the cougar shifter answered. “You still planning on taking this weekend off?”

  “I was.” The other man’s voice tilted up into a question. “I guess that’s out now?”

  “I need you on the next flight to New Orleans, along with a high roller’s wardrobe for me and another for a woman, size …” he raised an eyebrow at Bronwyn.

  “Zero to two,” she supplied.

  He repeated her size, then rattled off more instructions. “Got it?”

  Kyle had been on the computer in the meantime. “Yeah. Looks like tomorrow morning is the earliest I can get out of Houston.”

  “We’ll also need a rental car waiting somewhere between Shreveport and New Orleans.”

  “We’re past a town called Natchitoches,” Bronwyn offered.

  Tomás relayed the information. “And a hotel room in New Orleans. Preferably in an alias.”

  “You need ID to go with it?” Kyle asked.

  “Unless we can check in without it.”

  “Got a pic of the woman?”

  “Hang on.” Holding up the phone, he snapped a picture of Bronwyn. He glanced down at it. It would do, but she looked surprised.

  Like a startled bird, he thought wryly as he clicked to send it.

  “Got it,” Kyle said. “That it?”

  “Call me back on this number when you get it sorted out.”

  Ending the call, he handed the burner back to Bronwyn, only to find her staring at him with wide eyes. “You can arrange all that with one phone call?” she asked.

  “I sure hope so. It’ll make everything easier if we have that in place.”

  They rode along in silence for a long time, Tomás glancing in the rearview mirror more often than he otherwise might.

  We really need to ditch this SUV as soon as possible.

  The license-plate change wouldn’t survive any kind of scrutiny.

  “Hey,” he said, gesturing at the phone Bron still held. “We getting any kind of internet service on that? Good,” he said when she nodded. “See which swamps we cross on the way.”

  She blinked at the order, but didn’t ask any questions as she tapped and scrolled in search of the information he had requested. “Looks like we cut right across the top edge of the Atchafalaya, not long before we hit Baton Rouge, but only if we cut over to I-49,” she said.

  “What’s the biggest town or city between us and there?”

  She tapped a few more keys. “Alexandria.”

  “Hit redial for me.”

  When she handed the phone to him, he marveled at how calm she’d remained throughout all of this. He didn’t like to think of himself as having unreasonable prejudices, but he would never have expected a female bird shifter to handle his world with such aplomb.

  He hoped she’d continue to display that kind of calm, collected attitude—given everything that had happened so far, he suspected they’d need it.

  “Hey, Kyle,” he said when the other man answered. “Car and IDs in Alexandria, Louisiana, if you can manage it.”

  “Already done, boss.” Kyle sounded especially pleased with himself for anticipating Tomás’s needs. “You going to ditch the current vehicle in a swamp?”

  “It’s like you’re reading my mind.” Tomás grinned.

  “That’s why you pay me the big bucks.” Kyle’s response was breezy. “Need me to call in the rest of the team?”

  “I think the three of us can handle it.”

  I hope so, anyway.

  He was beginning to really want Bronwyn to be able to keep up with him professionally—and although he wasn’t willing to examine that desire too closely, he didn’t dismiss it, either.

  “Want to tell me anything about this woman?” his employee asked.

  “Call me when you have the details,” Tomás replied dryly.

  “Will do.”

  Tomás clicked off, then turned to Bronwyn with a gleam in his eye. “Ready to lose a car in a swamp?”

  Chapter 7

  Two hours later, they stood outside the SUV under an interstate overpass on a deserted road of a perfectly average small city. Tomás shook the keys in his hand, rattling them back and forth on their key ring as he waited.

  Bron leaned against the back bumper, half sitting. “So we’re not actually dumping the car into a swamp?”

  “Not literally,” Tomás replied with a laugh. “The effect is the same, though. It’ll disappear. Might even end up out in the swamp—but if it does, it’ll be with the people who live out there.” He glanced out of the corner of his eye as if gauging Bron’s response to his comments. “Seems silly to waste perfectly good car—and the potential for goodwill that could come with it.”

  Bron shook her head. “I never thought I would say this, but I can’t decide if I’m relieved or disappointed that I won’t be watching the back end of a car sink down into the depths of the Atchafalaya swamp.”

  Tomás grinned, and the smile brightened his otherwise saturnine face, taking Bron’s breath away in the process.

  He really is beautiful, Bron thought. It was too bad their shifter animals were natural enemies—though she’d heard of some odd pairings working out before, she couldn’t imagine how a natural predator and its prey could possibly get along long-term.

  With a start, she shook herself out of that line of thought. What had even led her there? Tomás had given no indication that he was interested in Bron in any way other than as a way to deal with a problem in the casino he had been hired to evaluate.

  That is not entirely true, a tiny voice in the back of Bron’s head whispered.

  Okay, okay, she admitted to herself. He sometimes looks at me as if he’d like to devour me—and I don’t think that’s only his inner jungle cat looking to consume my raven.

  Still, even if she did take him up on the implicit invitation in his eyes, Bron knew that there could never be anything permanent between them. Their lives were far too different. Though his might not involve constantly chasing down kidnapped employers, the phone calls she had overheard between him and his employee Kyle made it clear that he worked in a rarefied world—one full of people who could make cars disappear and fake identities appear with a single phone call.

  Like the car that was pulling up in front of them now. As it slowed to a halt, Tomás stepped toward it, and Bron pushed herself up off of the back bumper. A large, young man, perhaps in his late teens or early 20s, stepped out of the driver’s side of the nondescript, blue sedan. He wore a pair of denim overalls over a gray T-shirt, and some kind of green baseball cap with a fisherman’s logo on it.

  “You the ones done called for a new car?” he asked in a thick Louisiana Cajun accent.

  Tomás stepped forward to make the key exchange.

  Bron tilted her head to one side, and then to the other, trying to figure out what struck her as so strange about this guy.

  He was definitely a shifter—she could tell that from the usual sort of vibrating aura that surrounded every shifter she had ever met. And all of her raven senses kicked into high gear at the sight of him, telling her that he was a predator she needed to steer clear of. But there was something slower about him than, say, Tomás, something more ponderous.

  When Tomás in the new shifter had finished their low conversation, the cat shifter motioned Bron forward. As she drew even with the young Cajun man, he whipped his head around and grinned at her, baring his teeth in a way that suddenly seemed very familiar. “There’s suitcases with
clothes in the trunk, ma’am,” he said to Bron, then gave a half-salute and ambled over to the SUV.

  Pulling the sedan door closed and locking it behind her, Bron turned to face Tomás again. “He’s an alligator shifter, isn’t he?”

  Tomás tapped the original destination from the SUV’s map into the new one on this dash.

  At least this car was no less comfortable or up-to-date than the SUV had been. Things could be worse, Bron decided.

  “Louis?” Tomás’s tone was distracted. “Yeah. I’ve worked with him for years and years.”

  “Him? But he’s only a kid.”

  Tomás’s laugh filled the car. “Natural-born alligators don’t actually age,” he said. “They get bigger and bigger until they die of disease or are taken down by some other predator. Some of the shifters in Louis’s clan have a similar characteristic. Once they hit physical adulthood, they never age again. Louis is older than I am by about twenty years.”

  Bron settled back into her seat, considering how much the ravens’ isolationist attitudes had kept her from learning about other shifters.

  “So what’s he going to do with the SUV?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. I think it’s better if we never ask.” He gestured for the glove box. “Check out our new IDs,” he suggested. “Who are we?”

  Bron extracted a small manila envelope and dumped two sets of IDs into her hand. She flipped through them. Driver’s license, credit cards, health insurance cards. Even automobile insurance cards. She stared at them, amazed at how easy it had been for Tomás to supply them with the new identities they needed.

  What would it be like to have that kind of power, those types of resources?

  The part of her that had spent her entire life wanting to be a police officer or a member of the Shifter Shields spent a second wishing to be a true member of his team more than anything else.

  More even than ending up in his bed?

  Maybe, she admitted to herself.

  But only maybe.

  “We are Gordon and Lola Abernathy from Victoria, Texas, and apparently you’re some big-wig at a bank.” She let her voice turn sarcastic. “I suspect I’m a loving housewife.”