by Nina Berry
I flushed again at the reminder of how he’d found us nearly naked in the car. “Fine,” I said curtly. “Then we feel the same way about each other.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “But if you’re too scared to go back to the Tribunal and do more, I understand.”
“Scared?” He spat the word out in surprise.
“I can give you a hundred dollars right now if you’d rather just run away on your own,” I said. He’d responded exactly the way I’d hoped. “And good luck to you.”
He spun away, took two steps, then paced back to me, clearly furious and not knowing what to do with it. He smiled tightly. “You are an ingenious bitch.”
I smiled back up at him. “Sweet-talker.”
He opened his mouth to retort when, in a blur of motion, Amaris appeared out of nowhere, nearly cannoning into us, her face flushed. “I saw a Tribunal member. I recognized him, coming through the lobby. He’ll be here any second.”
“An objurer here, now?” I turned on Lazar, fury blazing through me. “What the hell have you done?”
“I didn’t know,” Lazar said, his face draining of all color. “I swear I looked for anyone following me.”
“He hasn’t spotted us yet,” Amaris said between quick breaths. “He’s got a GPS or something. He’s looking at it and following it toward us, any second now. . . .”
“They must have planted a device on me without my knowing it,” Lazar said. “I promise you, I had no idea.”
I had only a split second to decide what to do. Despite everything, I believed him.
“This way!” I grabbed Lazar by the arm, pulling him away from the open area in front of the bowling alley, toward an area crowded with slots and cubicles featuring individual monitors. “Amaris, get to the car! Like we planned. We’ll lose this guy, then find you. Don’t let him see you.”
“Got it!” She angled away from us, back toward the reception area, but taking the long way around the edge of the room.
“You must have a tracking device on you—take this off.” I yanked on the shoulder of his jacket. “Now!”
“Okay, okay!” He started to shed the jacket. “I understand that you’re eager to get boys’ clothes off, but this is ridiculous.”
I rounded on him furiously, and then stopped, arrested by a thought. He was about to toss the jacket away, but I grabbed it, hustling him deeper into the casino. “Wait. Are you a good actor? Could you convince him you just came here to gamble?”
He immediately saw where I was going. “Because he probably already reported to the others that I’m AWOL.”
“If he hasn’t seen you with me yet, then maybe you can convince him you’re just a simple sinner. . . .”
“Not a traitor.” He nodded. “Worth a try.” He shouldered back into his jacket. “I’ll find a spot here.” He indicated our area, which had several large-screen TVs and a few men seated at desks in front of smaller screens, pressing buttons. A sign overhead said SPORTS BOOK. “You hide.”
“I’ll be watching.” I caught him by the sleeve as he began to move toward a cubicle. “If this works, you’ll go back there and be our inside man?”
“You knew all along I would.” He flashed his perfect teeth in a perfect smile and strode over to a desk with a large monitor. His fake confident walk was as good as mine.
I slunk over to the right, down a different row of cubicles, and slithered down at one. Its monitor featured a shot of a jockey in salmon-pink silks on top of a shiny black mare. Large boards covered in names and numbers loomed overhead, showing me the odds. Horse races, at this hour? Then I saw they were broadcasting from Australia.
I put my hand on the mouse and pretended to watch, hoping nobody would notice the sixteen-year-old girl supposedly betting on the horses. The wizened old man in a shapeless hat next to me didn’t even look up from his screen as I slumped in my seat for cover. So far so good.
Two rows behind me sat Lazar. I tuned my hearing in his direction, willing myself not to look behind me. Fortunately, my ears were sensitive enough to catch a heavy tread of footsteps moving toward him.
A nasal male voice said, “I thought you were too good to be true.”
“Oh!” Lazar faked surprise fairly well. But he was an objurer and knew how to manipulate his voice. “Michael. I . . . This isn’t what it looks like.”
Michael snorted. “I can’t wait to tell your father you said that. Come on.”
There was a rustle of clothes as Lazar got to his feet. “You don’t have to tell him, do you? Does anyone else know that you found me?”
“No, but don’t expect me to lie to the Bishop for you. It’s not like you ever did anything nice for me.” Michael began to walk away.
Lazar took a step. “Maybe I could.”
Michael’s footsteps halted. “What does that mean?”
“I could give you some of my winnings.”
“You won some money?” Michael’s voice arced upwards, interested.
“I made a bundle on tonight’s big game.”
My heart sank. It was midweek in mid-January. There were no big games except the football playoffs on the weekend. Lazar’s sheltered upbringing was showing.
“Big game?” Michael paced back toward Lazar. “Which big game?”
“You know—this last horse race game. I bet on the long odds.”
I nearly thunked my head down onto the desk of my cubicle. Lazar should have shut up while he was ahead. Even I knew the correct term was long shot, and horse races weren’t called “games.”
“You bet on the long odds?” Michael’s voice was soft, and I knew he hadn’t been fooled. I turned, keeping my head low, and peered under the desks behind me. Lazar’s brown boots stood about ten feet away, blocked by two desks. A pair of white running shoes walked right up to him. “Did you win the exacta?”
“Exactly.” Lazar was vamping now, trying to be clever with puns.
The old man in the cubicle next to me turned his head curiously as I hunkered down on all fours and scuttled under the desk behind me, where no one was sitting. Fortunately, my observer shrugged and turned back to his monitor. I lost sight of him as I neared the back of Lazar’s cubicle. Over its wall I could see the top of Lazar’s blond head, and the graying hair of another, shorter man facing him. Michael.
“Which horses did you pick?” Michael was asking. His head tilted as he looked up at the big board on the wall above us.
“Horses?” The plural confounded Lazar a little. I should have known better than to expect a guy raised by religious fanatics to lie well about gambling.
“You can just give me the numbers,” Michael said. “I’m curious. Exactas can bring in big money. . . .”
He was playing with Lazar now. I ducked under the cubicle between me and them and lunged forward, tackling Michael at the knees. He dropped to the floor with a squawk.
“He knows!” I said to Lazar in a kind of subdued yell. “Knock him out!”
Lazar, startled by my move, took one long second to realize what was going on. Michael, clad in Tribunal gray and white, tried to reach into his jacket for what had to be a gun.
I knocked his hand away and pounded on his solar plexus to wind him, the way Morfael had shown us in class. But my fist slammed into something much harder than skin and bone and bounced back up with no impact.
“He’s wearing a vest!” I hissed.
Michael backhanded me in the face, knocking me into the legs of the desk.
Lazar had his gun out, switching grips to hold it by the barrel, and lifted his arm to hit Michael with the butt.
Michael had no such scruples. In one swift move, he pulled his own pistol from under his jacket, pointed it at me, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 13
A sound like a tree limb snapping, and something smashed into my chest like a sledgehammer. I gasped, but my lungs took in nothing.
I caught a glimpse of Lazar’s eyes wide with horror; then he grabbed for Mich
ael’s gun.
Makes sense, I thought with an odd sort of detachment. Michael’s wearing a bulletproof vest, which makes it tough to shoot him back. And you can’t just go around shooting people in the middle of a casino.
Or maybe you can.
I wasn’t sitting up anymore; I was lying on my side on the floor. I didn’t remember sliding downward. I put my hand to my chest and felt something sticky, but didn’t have the strength to pull my hand away to see what it was. I tried inhaling again, and a tiny thread of air squeaked into my lungs.
Not enough. Not enough.
Something like the ocean was roaring in my ears, and the struggling forms of Lazar and Michael were growing fuzzy at the edges.
“Dez!” Through the din came Lazar’s voice, sharp as a razor. Somewhere out there I could still see his brown leather jacket, wrestling with a man in a gray jacket, whoever that was. It didn’t really matter. My eyelids were made of lead, and my heart had been replaced with a stone.
“Dez, you must shift!” Lazar’s voice cut through the woolly fog. “I call upon you to shift now. Now!”
That voice could not be denied. It stirred the dark roiling essence at my core that had begun to still. Power, blazing with life, rolled through that portal in my soul, shredding the haze in my mind, pushing the stone from my chest. My hands were not hands, but huge, velvety, striped paws; my skin was now fur, my teeth fangs.
I rolled to my feet, my long tail knocking aside the desk. The monitor on it crashed to the floor. The bullet which had pierced my chest dropped to the floor, and I dug my claws into the patterned carpet, screening out the piercing clang of casino bells, the bright flashing lights, to zero in on the man in the gray jacket. He was thickset and strong. He expertly rolled on top of Lazar, one elbow pushing down on Lazar’s windpipe while pinning his legs to the floor with his knees. Lazar heaved up against him, to no avail.
Both guns lay useless nearby, a few feet apart. So Lazar at least had dealt with that part of the problem. I would deal with the rest.
Someone screamed, “Tiger!”
Yes, I thought, as a general murmur of panic swirled through the room. Yes.
And I roared.
The vibration from it made the floor thrum. Michael’s head turned with the suddenness of a marionette’s on a string. His eyes widened in fright. His terror pleased me, but it would not save him.
Around us, the sounds of hubbub turned to yells of horror and cries for help. Michael pushed himself away from Lazar, crabbing backwards on all fours and trying to grab for a gun. Lazar coughed, still alive.
“I objure you,” Michael intoned, but his voice was too high and filled with dread. “I forbid you entrance to this world, foul demon! Return! Return to—”
I pounced, leaping over Lazar. One heavy paw to Michael’s chest sent his arms and legs flying out from under him.
Flat on the carpet, he tried to grab my jaw, my ears, anything. I just swiped his hands away with my free paw, drawing red lines on his skin. He screamed, “Filth! Demon!”
I sank my teeth into his neck. His blood ran hot and liquid on my tongue. And it was good.
It got very quiet. I let Michael’s limp body go and licked my muzzle. Some part of me knew I would regret this, but right now I savored the blood of my enemy. This one, at least, would never trouble me again.
There was movement behind me, and I whirled, snarling, muscles tensed to spring. But it was Lazar, up on his hands and knees.
He froze. I could hear the quickened beat of his heart, the uneven pulse of blood through his veins, his terrified, shallow breathing.
“By God!” He swallowed hard. I could only imagine how I looked, crouched over a dead man, ears back, my striped muzzle awash with crimson. “That’s really you. Dez.” He said my name as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“It’s over there!” Someone was shouting. “Get it!”
“I’m not going anywhere near it,” a man’s voice declared in no uncertain terms.
An indignant voice: “You’re the security guard.”
“All I’ve got is a pistol. Did you see how huge that thing is? Get everyone out and I’ll call animal control. It must’ve escaped from one of those stupid shows on the Strip.”
Lazar started getting out of his jacket. “Here. It won’t cover you completely, but . . .”
There wasn’t time to shift. I shook my head at him. As always, it felt bizarre to make such a human gesture in my tiger form, but I had no other way to communicate. Lazar looked puzzled as I picked the manila envelope up gently with my mouth. Then I lashed out one paw and clawed his shoulder.
“Ow! Hey, what . . .” He jumped back from me in alarm. “What are you . . . ?”
His voice trailed off as I moved away from Michael’s body and pointed my nose at a side door marked EXIT.
“It really is you in there, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “You just look so . . . so much like a tiger.”
I curled my upper lip in a half snarl and loosed a low growl. I am a tiger.
“Don’t worry about the security cameras,” he said, forcing his voice back to something like normal. “We’ll be off the grid soon enough, and whoever watches this footage will be in therapy for years. No one will believe it or ever be able to connect it to us. You go first.”
I shook my head again and walked behind where he was sitting on the floor. He didn’t move as I got closer, but I could hear his breathing speed up again, his body tense, as I put my forehead against his back and shoved.
He jetted up and forward two steps, and then looked back at me, a light of understanding in his eyes. “Got it,” he said. Then he sprinted for the exit, at full speed, as if a tiger was after him.
And I was.
He shoved open the exit door just steps ahead of me. If anyone was watching, it would look like he was fleeing from me, not accompanying me. The door slammed behind us as we pounded into a blank cement hallway that smelled like urine and chlorine.
Thirty feet down the hall, a woman in a rumpled uniform pushing a wheeled laundry basket pointed at me, screeched like a dying bird, and fled, her clogs clomping.
Lazar laughed and nodded. “I know how she feels.”
I bounded past him, toward the laundry basket. He followed, taking long strides. “Oh, look.” He pointed through a nearby doorway just as I smelled hot detergent and heard the rumble of clothes in a dryer. The hotel’s laundry room was brightly lit and going at full steam at this late hour, getting towels and sheets ready the next day.
“Clothes for you,” he said, reading my mind. “But I bet there’s a camera in there, to keep employees from stealing. . . .” He startled and pulled away as I used the edge of the envelope in my mouth to scratch at his hand.
He hesitated, then gingerly reached out and took the envelope from me. “This is the strangest day of my life.”
But I was already in the room, scanning its upper corners. Sure enough, a cheap camera beamed its little red light on me. I sprang upward, using the wall like a tree trunk, and swiped it with one paw. The camera fell to the floor and shattered. No more little red light.
Lazar walked in. “That’s going to look very interesting when they run the footage later. But who knows why tigers do what they do?” He saw me sniffing at a pile of white towels and folded sheets. “No, here, try this.”
He held up a cheap terry-cloth robe, the kind hotels provided for their guests. Enough to cover you up when you got out of the shower, but not thick and soft enough to tempt you to steal it.
“And look.” He fished a pair of slightly stringy terry-cloth slippers out of a laundry basket. “Is this what they call fashionable out here in the world?”
He threw the slippers down, facing me, on the floor, and then held the robe out, as if waiting for a swimsuit model to step into it.
I made a kind of growling whoof sound, something between a snarl and a roar.
He took a step back, going a little pale. I did
n’t want to just shift to human right in front of him. I wasn’t ashamed of my body, but Lazar wasn’t exactly a trusted friend I felt comfortable with when I was naked. In fact, quite the opposite.
“Don’t you think it’s better if you shift?” He swallowed, trying to sound reasonable, but I could see the uneasiness in his eyes as he stared at the tiger in front of him. “And I promise I won’t look.” He closed his eyes, still holding the robe.
When I didn’t move, he peeked under his eyelids and lowered the robe, his face shadowed with remorse. “I know I’ve given you reason to distrust me,” he said. “I didn’t mean what I said, about you being like my father. You’re quite the opposite. At least in your human form.”
I thought about Amaris’s story of how her mother had died, and I chuffed at him, the loud, purring noise thrumming in my throat. He frowned, then nodded and stood back up, lifting the robe high so that I couldn’t see his face, and he couldn’t see me. I turned my back and shifted, reaching back toward the robe.
Lazar guided my arms into the sleeves. I glanced back, expecting to see a knowing sneer, but his eyes were squeezed shut. So he really was being a gentleman about this. His fingers brushed my bare shoulder for a moment, but he pulled away quickly and didn’t touch me again.
My face got very hot. Another reason I loved my tiger form. In it, I never wanted to blush and never could. Human form was more complicated. I pulled the edges of the terry-cloth together and used the thin belt to close the robe up good and tight as I turned around.
The bruises forming on Lazar’s face were standing out more harshly, his cheeks slightly flushed with red. “What I meant to say is that you and my father are both leaders. But that’s where the resemblance ends,” he said. “He only respects strength and cruelty and devotion to the cause, and if you can’t offer him one of those things, you’re no use to him.”
“Is that what happened with your mother?” I asked.