by Ivy Sinclair
"Fine," Maggie said. She looked at her watch. "My hourly fee just went up by 25%."
Tony clinked her glass with his own. "I wouldn't have expected anything less."
CHAPTER NINE
Maggie didn’t know what was going on in her head. She shouldn't have agreed to go to Tony’s apartment, and yet there she was. Not surprisingly, he lived in a penthouse condo in one of the most exclusive buildings in downtown Copper City. It was the kind of place that Maggie could never have set foot in on her salary.
It was like watching the pretty people through the glass as she passed by the Violet Lune before that evening when she had finally been able to go inside. It was another stark reminder that she and Tony came from two different worlds.
Maggie’s father had been a factory worker at one of the energy plants on the outskirts of Copper City. Her mother was an elementary school teacher at one of the small charter schools. Her parents argued a lot about money when she was growing up. She had envied the other kids who got new clothes for school while she got secondhand thrift clothes. She had grown up with a keen awareness of being different and that she had always been one of the ‘have-nots.’
She stared out the window at the skyline. She couldn't help but admire how pretty it was. She thought of all the powerful men across the city. This was the type of view that would make them feel like they were on top of the world and in complete control of their destiny. That was the feeling that had Maggie craved her whole life.
She looked at the reflection of the man sitting on the couch behind her. She was confused about him because he seemed a bundle of contradictions, and Maggie didn’t like contradictions. She preferred things to be black and white. With Tony, there definitely seemed to be a lot of gray.
She was still furious with herself for allowing him to trick her into signing the confidentiality agreement without fully thinking through the ramifications. Tony was clever. Working with him meant she would have to constantly be on her toes.
At different points in time, she felt like they were on the same level, and at other times, she felt like he was carefully weighing options and calculating moves that she couldn’t see. It made her nervous, but until she understood what had happened the night of October 23rd, 1999, she was in it whether she liked the idea or not. She feared there was some type of gotcha coming that she needed to prepare for.
She thought back across the last couple of hours. After determining that they weren't going to speak any further of the cold case, Tony had encouraged her to open up about herself. Although she had initially been reluctant to do so, she found that Tony was an excellent listener. She blamed the whiskey for loosening her tongue.
He asked thoughtful and inquiring questions that made her feel like he was listening intensely to every single word she said. That was something that she sorely lacked on most dates. She shook that thought away. They hadn’t been on a date. It was a business transaction. Sure, there had been a little bit of personal talk combined with it, but that was it. Reluctant business colleagues, nothing more. If there was one thing that was absolutely certain, it was that Maggie did not get tangled up with her clients.
Tony Atwood was her client now. Their relationship had defined boundaries. So why was she wondering if he was thinking about picking her up and throwing her over his shoulder before taking her to his bedroom? She hadn’t missed the hungry looks he sent in her direction when he thought she wasn’t looking. Her lips burned with the memory of his at the benefit the night before. She mentally shook herself again and repeated her rule to herself. You do not get romantically involved with your clients.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Tony asked.
Maggie turned and smirked at him. "You're paying a hell of a lot more than that for my thoughts." It was as if she needed to remind him of the state of their relationship as well.
Tony set her off in a way that she just didn't understand. It wasn't as if she hadn’t been pursued by her fair share of attractive men. There was something about Tony that was different, though, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. He was successful, handsome, charming, and engaging. He was smart and came from an excellent background. He was well-versed in politics and the current worldview situation, and a lot of other things that she cared about. She had started to realize over dinner that they had some things in common. That made him dangerous to her in a very different way. She had to handle the whole situation with kids’ gloves, otherwise she feared that she might lose far worse than her job by getting involved with him.
"How about you stop beating around the bush? We’ve eaten. We had a few drinks. We’ve talked about everything, it seems, but your case. I think I’ve been more than patient.”
Tony patted the seat next to him on the couch. Instead, Maggie settled into the chair kitty-corner from him. He shook his head with an uneasy smile.
“Do you need another drink?” she asked politely.
Maggie had listened to enough confessions in her life that she knew it made sense to make the person comfortable. She didn’t want to detract from the flow of the story once he got started. She leaned back in her seat and enjoyed the warmth of the blazing fire that Tony had gotten going in the fireplace. It warmed her limbs even more than the liquor, and she could feel the flush across her body.
Seeming to accept her cue, Tony got up and refreshed the whiskey in both of their glasses. She noted that he had made himself a double. He handed her glass to her and sat back down on the couch. He looked uncertain.
“Where do you want me to start?" he asked.
"Usually, it makes sense to start at the beginning," she said. She had a pad of paper in her lap. She planned to take notes as she listened. Tony got up and moved to stare out the window. It was as if he couldn’t sit still.
"I haven't told this story to anyone. You would be the first. I guess that makes you my priest as well as my attorney."
"It's ironic how often those two roles are correlated," she agreed. Maggie felt a bit excited by the idea that Tony was trusting her this way. Of course, she had signed a contract that said that she would take his secrets to her grave, but this felt like a momentous step nonetheless. She had started to see cracks in Tony’s carefully crafted image, and she felt as if she was starting to get glimpses of the true man underneath.
They were circling each other in an intimate verbal type of dance, and she was eager to find out how it would play out.
Tony swirled the liquid in his glass. Then he moved his fingertip around the edge as he stared into it. "The beginning. I guess you could say the beginning was sophomore year at St. Ignacious Prep. I had been enrolled at another prep school freshman year, and then my father decided that St. Ignacious would be better for my future political career." He caught Maggie's raised eyebrow. "Oh yes, the old man was totally in favor of me following in his footsteps. Too bad for him, I had no desire to ever be a politician. But when you're fifteen years old, you do what your father asks you to do whether you want to or not, especially since he was footing the bill. I figured I'd still have the rest of my life to figure out what I wanted to do. It turned out that transferring me to St. Ignatius was the best and worst decision of my father's life."
Maggie was fascinated. “The best decision because you met Eric and Kyle there?”
“Well, that was one of many reasons it was a good decision. But yes, I made close friendships that have obviously endured the test of time. I feel like that was because St. Ignacious required a certain humbleness of its students. It didn’t matter who your family was- everyone was treated the same. That worked well for some people and not so much for others. I spent a lot of time trying to deduce why people were like that. It was the first glimpse I had of what I would want to do when I grew up. I’d already been fascinated by human behavior and how it related to shifter behavior as well. I had a really fantastic biology teacher who encouraged me to test out different hypotheses and do research to see what stuck.”
Maggie found that she liked hearing abo
ut this part of Tony’s life. He was the type of guy who came across as having complete confidence in everything he did and no vulnerabilities. But this side of him was softer and more introspective.
“So what made it the worst decision?” she asked. It was her job to pry after all. She was used to asking rapid fire questions and getting answers that could turn things on its head. She wanted Tony to be completely honest with her, and her bullshit radar was on high alert.
“That was long and complicated. It’s the reason we’re here as well. But it all started before the night that you keep asking me about.”
“Okay, I guess That was why we’re three years before the incident starts according to the timeline.”
“You just have to understand that the world was different then. Humans didn’t really know about or understand shifters at that point in time. St. Ignacious was a bit like an oasis in the world. It was the one place where shifter families were comfortable sending their children. There were certain provisions that the school had initiated that ensured everyone’s protection, including the one that had to do with the very first time a shifter phased.”
Maggie leaned forward in her seat. “I’ve heard you talk about this first phase like it’s some kind of initiation into adulthood. It sounds pretty brutal, though.”
Tony’s eyes searched her face as if he thought she was pulling his leg. He had a considering look on his face. “It is. It’s one of the most brutal phases you ever experience as a shifter, and That was because the first phase is not by your own will and can’t be controlled. It is dictated by some magical algorithm out there that determines that you are ready to meet your animal side for the first time. Imagine going through your life up to that point and being the only one in your head. Then, one day out of the blue, there are two of you. It is a completely discombobulating sensation, and it’s not surprising that it drives some shifters insane.”
Maggie sensed that she was starting to get to the core of what Tony was trying to tell her. Granted, he was taking the long way around it, which didn’t surprise her.
“Okay, so this first phase is important to the story. I’m assuming this happened to you while you were at St. Ignacious?”
“Yes, as it did to Tony and to Kyle. All three of us experienced it around the same time as our fourth roommate as well.”
Maggie made a note of this; it was a new detail that she hadn’t heard before regarding the origins of the Urban Dwellers’ close-knit friendship. “I knew that the three of you met because you were roommates. I didn’t know there was a fourth.”
“That was information that we’ve always kept out of the media, and it was for a very good reason.”
“Enlighten me,” Maggie said.
“Robert Calhoun was from Springfield, Missouri. He moved on campus a couple of days after we did and always seemed to resent that Eric, Kyle, and I were closer. He was our roommate for the first year. We were all late bloomers, you could say. None of us had had our first phase before we got to St. Ignacious, and so there was a certain alert status around all of us. Anyone who hadn’t phased yet had more eyes on them over the course of their schooling than anybody else. We weren’t allowed to go outside the boundaries of the school grounds either, just in case the phase overtook us while we were out. Until you phased for the first time, it was like you were kept under lock and key. Eric, Kyle, and I had finally gone through our phase, and then a couple of days later, Robert did too. But, Robert wasn’t one of the lucky ones.”
Maggie was trying to process this information. This was a side of the whole process that she had not heard before. “So you’re saying he went nuts?”
“No, that the school could’ve dealt with. Those cases St. Ignacious sweeps under the carpet. The people in question are taken away to psychiatric hospitals that specialize in shifter care. There aren’t that many of them out there, and the shifter alphas keep their existence hush-hush. That was because once the craziness sets in, most of the time, the shifter can’t be rehabilitated, and they don’t make it back.”
“Don’t make it back from where? You mean they die?”
Tony’s face was grim. “If only that was what happened. No, shifters who go mad like that sometimes are not able to mentally handle the reality of the transition. They can’t live with what happened. They basically rip themselves to shreds. It’s a kind of suicide that is gruesome and horrible to watch. That was what happened to Robert. He started to phase in the middle of the night, and he snapped. Nobody knew it happened because there wasn’t any outward sign. We woke up to screaming. Such screaming. And then there was the blood. I had never seen anything like it. It’s something I don’t wish upon anyone. I still see it happening on occasion, but it’s less prevalent now that the shifters are out in the open, and it’s a lifestyle that is generally accepted.”
Maggie was aghast at this. “Why didn’t someone help him? Couldn’t you have stopped him from hurting himself?”
“It all happened so fast, and the first phase is completely unpredictable. I was just a kid. I had no skills or training on how to talk someone down off the ledge who was in the midst of going completely mad. The voice in his head, he couldn’t deal with it. And instead of trying, even though he knew what was happening to him, his mind kept telling him that it was easier to use his teeth and claws to essentially flay himself alive. By the time the medics got there, it was too late.”
Maggie was horrified. It sounded awful. It was as if Tony read her emotions on her face. “There’s a dark underbelly of the shifter world. You’ve come into contact with it before, Maggie. But this is why I keep trying to tell people that holding shifters to the letter of human law is preposterous. We don’t deal with the same kinds of issues that you do. If our adolescence was simply getting some pimples and waking up with an erection every morning, That’s something you can deal with. We literally have something else in our heads. It’s a relationship that has to be developed and that you have to learn how to control. Because otherwise, it will control you.”
Tony’s eyes glowed a bright amber for just a moment, and That was the first time that Maggie truly recognized that she wasn’t dealing with someone who was wholly human. She had known that, of course, but it was the first time that she was seeing it. It terrified her, but also drew her in. Tony had a dark side. Everyone had a dark side. It was just his dark side that had something to do with the animal inside of him. A being that operated on instinct and emotion alone. He was right. It was something that she had seen in her work.
“I don’t understand how you can be an expert witness and defend that kind of behavior when you know that it’s wrong. I understand that things are happening that affect these shifters’ ability to deal with them, but when they go out and hurt someone else, they have to be held accountable for that,” Maggie argued. She refused to be moved by Tony’s theory. At least, not yet.
“Do you know the worst thing that you can do to a shifter is lock them in a small 8 x 8 cinderblock cell for twenty-three of twenty-four hours a day?” Tony asked. “The leaders of the various shifter clans have gone out of their way to downplay the fact that violence in prison populations that contain shifters has escalated over the last eighteen years. It’s a problem that is becoming an epidemic. That is why I take a cold eye to any of the cases that comes across my desk, and why I will advocate for shifters that I believe can be contributing members of society if just given a chance for proper treatment and rehabilitation.”
“That sounds like an idealistic view of the world,” Maggie said sarcastically.
“Perhaps, but the world as it exists today still isn’t fair and equitable for all of us. That was part of what the Urban Dwellers is all about.”
Maggie felt as if they were getting derailed. They had gotten into a philosophical argument that she thought they probably were not going to be able to compromise on. She needed to get him back on task. There were a lot of other questions that she wanted ask him, though. She couldn’t help herself by askin
g the most obvious one.
“So did you all know back then that Kyle was the alpha?”
“That was a conversation for another day,” Tony said. It had only been recently announced that there was indeed an alpha in the Urban Dwellers organization. Of the three of them, Kyle was the least obvious choice, which of course had caused a media frenzy. He was attracting the same kind of attention as another alpha in another part of the country. For the time being, it appeared that Kyle Frost and Lukas Kasper were the ones who were going to dictate policy for the shifter world at large. It was something that she wanted to dig into, but she knew it wasn’t the right time. She had focus too.
“Okay. The first phase is difficult, and you lost your roommate. You watched it happen, and it was horrible. That had to have happened at least a couple of years before the night in question.” Maggie wasn’t unaccustomed to having to reel her witnesses back in.
“It happened in 1997. The reason that I’m telling you this is because that event with our roommate had a profound impact on me, and Kyle, and Eric. We had watched it happen right in front of us, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. We had the seeds of what would later become the Urban Dwellers organization all the way back then. We talked about what we would do differently if we were in charge. That was a pretty big deal when you consider that we were all from different clans. I’m a wolf shifter, Eric’s a panther shifter, and Kyle’s a bear shifter. It would be unprecedented for all of us to come together as one unit, but That was part of why we did it. What we wanted to build and create wouldn’t be the same as the old establishment. We were excited about the future.”
Maggie decided to let Tony get it all out. She had a sense that he wanted her to understand how important this was to them even all the way back then. She had heard some of this in various bits and pieces that had been in the media. It was always served up in a very polished way. Hearing the raw cut of it was different. She had admiration for Tony’s passion. She could see why people would follow him. He had a commanding presence.