by Alyssa Day
Jack knelt on the floor next to me and apologized again, for about the seventeenth time. “I’m sorry. Tess, please say something. Anything. I need to know you’re okay, or I’m going to call an ambulance. Or Ruby. I didn’t know it would be so hard on you—”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you grabbed my hands,” I snapped, finally speaking to him. The threat of him calling an ambulance snapped me out of the fugue state I’d been plunged into by the unwanted vision of his death.
He blew out a huge sigh of relief. “Okay. You can talk. Are you in pain? Do you want to go to the hospital?”
“No, you idiot. I don’t want to go to the hospital. I don’t want to be the subject of any more gossip.” I threw off the afghan and stood up, still slightly woozy. “I’m going to get a glass of water, and you’re going to explain to me how you’re here in my living room when you already died. Clearly you’re not a vampire, and zombies don’t exist, so what the hell?”
He put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back down on the couch. “You stay here. I’ll get the water, and then I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just don’t pass out on me again.”
“I didn’t pass out. I just got a little shaky,” I informed his back as he headed for the kitchen.
“Right. I know. I’m just glad I was there to catch you and carry you in here.”
He carried me? Oh crap. Like a swooning southern belle. I wanted to crawl under the couch and hide there for a week or two. Lou, who’d jumped into my lap as soon as I sat back down, meowed in agreement. Or at least I thought it was agreement. Who the heck knew with cats? It might have been, “Oh boy, I need to get Tess another dead bird, because she’s losing it.”
I shook my head and tried to recapture an ounce or two of sanity. When Jack came back, I drank half the water in one gulp and then took a deep breath. “I’d say I’ll kill you if you ever tell anyone about this, but since you apparently already died, it’s probably an empty threat.”
“I won’t say a word.” He sat down on the couch with me, but wisely kept some space between us. I still wanted to punch him, manners and hospitality be damned.
“What happened?” We both said it at the same time, and then we both laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but it served to cut through the tension.
Jack looked at me and nodded, as if coming to some decision. “All right. I’ll start. What did you see?”
I shoved my hair, which had come loose from my ponytail at some point, out of my face. “A battle. Vampires. People with swords. A small woman with short dark hair screaming at you not to die.”
He flinched and then nodded. “Quinn. Yeah, that’s about it. The good guys had a tough time that night. We won, in the end, but the cost was high. And as you saw, I was pretty messed up. Knife wounds, gunshot wounds. I think one of the vampires broke my spine.”
My hand was shaking when I put my glass of water on the table next to the teacup. “How is that even possible? I mean, you’re right here. Is this a shapeshifter healing ability? The shifter community is pretty private about their—your—supernatural talents, but I’ve never heard even a hint that you can regenerate something as bad as a broken spine.”
“We can’t,” Jack said flatly. He stood up and rolled his neck, as if he could feel the pain from his memory. “A very powerful Atlantean priest, who happens to be a giant pain in the ass, healed the injuries and my bones. But I was still dead—at least in part. The human side of me had gone over, or tried to go, I guess. I’m not much for the metaphysical stuff. But the tiger half of my dual nature was still clinging to life, though just barely.”
I stared up at him. “You came back, though. How—”
“Well, the tiger in me wasn’t ready to die. I stayed in animal form for a long time. Eventually that part of me convinced the rest of me to live.”
He said it like it was so simple.
“Sure, no problem. I understand perfectly. You died, or half of you did, but the other half—the furry half—didn’t, and the doctors at the hospital just hung around trying to figure out whether to bring you Jell-O or Meow Mix,” I said, not even realizing I was shouting until I got to “Meow Mix.”
“I don’t think doctors actually carry Jell-O around,” Jack said cautiously, in a “back away from the crazy woman” tone. “That’s more of a nurse’s assistant or candy striper job, isn’t it?”
“Who even says candy striper anymore? There are no candy stripers. Why are we talking about candy stripers?” I jumped up off the couch, displacing Lou, who was vocally unhappy about it. “Where did you do this amazing recuperation? Why wasn’t the hospital on CNN, holding a press conference about their incredible doctors?”
“I was never in a hospital. I was in a secret, magically warded cave near the peak of Mount Fuji, in Japan,” he said, as if that were any kind of normal answer.
All at once, the fight went right out of me, and I sank back down on the couch and put the afghan over my head.
“Of course you were,” I mumbled. “Where else?”
Chapter Five
I woke up feeling hung over. After my spectacularly impressive (read: idiotic) meltdown, Jack had muttered something about it being late and beat a hasty retreat. I’d managed to lock the door behind him and then hadn’t even bothered to walk to my room, but had collapsed on the couch, pulled the afghan back over me, and gone to sleep.
A long, hot shower and three cups of pumpkin-spice coffee later, I was dressed in jeans and a soft, emerald-green sweater, and mostly functional. I ate some cereal with a banana sliced into it, fed Lou and gave her a farewell cuddle, and headed out to face my family. Eleanor was working this morning at the shop, so I hadn’t planned on being in until noon to spell her for lunch.
Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike lived in a meticulously maintained old farmhouse about five miles from me, and kept chickens, goats, and an ancient horse who had to have his teeth rasped periodically so he didn’t bite his own gums. When vampires and other supernatural creatures had “come out of the coffin,” so to speak, I’d briefly entertained the thought that Bonnie Jo was some kind of horse vampire, because of the teeth. Then again, I’d also believed that my chemistry teacher was a snake shifter, because he’d had a habit of hissing when he said any “S” words. The word sucrose still made me nervous. Luckily, it didn’t come up a lot in conversation.
All of us in Dead End had already known that there were other beings in the world, even before they came out to the rest of humanity. Our town had long been a haven for all kinds of weird people—human and other—so it hadn’t been much of a leap to figure out that the crazy old hermit lady who lived in a shack at the edge of the swamp and only came out at night was a vampire.
Uncle Mike had nearly blown a gasket, though, when word had come down from Congress that everybody had to display a copy of the 2006 Non-Human Species Protection Act taped to a window of their home and/or place of business. That law hadn’t lasted long, especially around here, where we had the charter, and federal regulations were considered to be more like guidelines. It wasn’t just Dead End, though. The entire country had rebelled at that one, and the vampires who’d set up their own special house of Congress had needed to rethink their strategy.
Eating people who disagreed with them hadn’t been working out, apparently.
I parked the car next to Uncle Mike’s sparklingly clean F-150, climbed out, and waited. “Three, two, one…”
Right on schedule, Uncle Mike ambled out of the barn, wearing his standard “I’m retired, and I’ll never wear a suit again” uniform of old blue jeans and an ancient flannel shirt, and started to criticize my car.
“Sure don’t know why you insist on driving a foreign car. Why anybody would want one of those tin cans when you could have a reliable American car is beyond me.” He scowled at my old but sturdy Toyota as if it might fall apart in the driveway any minute. After he’d heaped abuse on it for seven years, it would probably blow up all over his lawn one o
f these days, just for spite.
“Because I got it for cheap, it’s good on gas, and I can’t afford another car with the house payment,” I said, reciting the familiar litany. We’d been over this so often we could set it to music.
“How is the house? You need me to stop by? That back window off the laundry room still sticking?”
Uncle Mike was a retired engineer, and he could fix anything. I could probably call him and say, “Hey, this turnip-powered time machine is acting wonky,” and he’d stop by with his tool bag and fix it within a few hours, muttering about the superiority of American-made time machines the whole time. There was no way I could have maintained my house without him. I’d been able to buy the house using my mother’s life insurance money as a down payment, but there was no extra money for hiring handymen.
My mother, Kate, had died of cancer when I was only three, and my dad—Mike’s brother—had run off to bury himself in a bottle because of the loss of the love of his life, or so he’d said. We hadn’t heard from him since. Mom had left me a small life insurance policy that Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike had refused to touch. It was meant for my college tuition, they’d always told me when I wanted to bust into it, like the time I’d wanted to buy myself a car for my sixteenth birthday.
After I’d discovered that touching anyone might send me into death spasms, I’d kind of given up on higher education of the formal kind. I read a lot, though, and took online courses sometimes, mostly in art and history, which fascinated me. Once in a while, a truly wonderful piece would come through the pawnshop, and I liked having the knowledge to recognize and appreciate it. Jeremiah had donated a small but important painting by Frederic Remington to the Orlando Museum of Art in both of our names after he’d bought it as part of a lot at an estate sale and I’d recognized it for its true worth. I was still proud of that.
A lump formed in my throat, and I had to swallow hard. I still missed Jeremiah so much.
Uncle Mike was staring at me, probably reading too much in my face, as usual. I couldn’t hide my emotions. It made me a terrible poker player and worse at lying than I was at parking.
I kissed him on the cheek. “The window is fine. But the hall bathroom sink is clogging. Should I use some of that drain unclogger stuff?”
I smiled to myself as he went into a familiar rant about the perils of drain cleaner. I couldn’t lie, but I was a champion distracter. It had been my only defense during my half-wild high school years.
“Aunt Ruby home? I don’t see her car.”
“She went to town to get doughnuts. Figured you’d be needing some sugar, after yesterday.” He studied me with a sober expression in his light blue eyes. “Are you okay, Tess?”
It was surprising that it had taken him this long to ask. He was ferociously protective of me. They both were. They’d never been able to have kids of their own, so they’d focused all that frustrated parenting on me. I realized how very lucky I was. Once in a great while, however, I wished there were someone else to share the over-protection load.
“Yes. I’m fine. Last night was…bad. I don’t know how else to put it. It was just bad. Chantal—I didn’t know her well, but I knew her to say hi to, and I just saw her a few days ago, and—” I broke off helplessly, shaking my head. “I just don’t understand any of it. Who would shoot her? Why would they dump her at the shop? What does it have to do with Jeremiah, if anything?”
He led the way up the steps to the porch and sat down on the old swing, leaving room for me. I settled in next to him, smiling a little at the memory of the many heart-to-heart talks we’d had in this same swing over the tumultuous years of my childhood. I’d had an orphaned child’s anger and fear of abandonment, and Aunt Ruby had been too emotional for us to be able to connect when I was overwhelmed with so many feelings. She and I had bounced off each other, like atoms in some crazy sssscience experiment my not-a-snake-shifter chemistry teacher had droned on about. But Mike Callahan had a big, warm, heart and an engineer’s soul—logical and steady—and he’d always been the one to talk me back to an even keel after I’d made a side trip to Crazy Hormonal Town.
“When were you planning to tell me Jack Shepherd was back in town?” His voice was mild, but I could tell he wasn’t pleased. Once we’d learned that Jack was a tiger shifter, I was fascinated, but Uncle Mike had kept me far away from him. Not that we’d had much interaction, since Jack was six years older than me, but even at barbecues and town socials, Uncle Mike managed to make sure I was in the part of the gathering that didn’t overlap wherever Jack was.
I studied his tanned face. When had so much white sneaked into his hair? When I looked at him, I still saw the tall, strong man who’d given me piggyback rides across the field and who’d patiently answered the seven thousand questions that a curious little girl could ask in a day. He was still tall and still strong, but the lines in his face had deepened, and he looked like the man approaching seventy that he was.
“He just got here. Anyway, what do you have against him? He was never one of the town troublemakers.” He’d gone off and become a war hero overseas, and then he’d come home and joined the rebels.
Uncle Mike laughed. “I don’t have anything against Jack. He was a fine young man, if a little wild after he learned he was a shapeshifter. No, it was you I worried about. You were young and starry-eyed, and something as exotic as a shapeshifting tiger would have struck you as unimaginably romantic. Better that I kept you two apart.”
I pushed against the floor with one foot, setting the swing into gentle motion. “You won’t be able to keep us apart any longer. You know that Jeremiah left the pawnshop to both of us.”
“The damn fool. I wonder what he was up to with that. Well, don’t go touching Jack, at least. A man like that, he might have a very violent death in front of him, and you know how hard it is on you to see the bad ones.”
I took a deep breath. “Too late.”
“What? Tess, you know better. If—”
“Speak of the devil, er, tiger,” I said quickly, pointing. “Here he comes, with Aunt Ruby.”
Aunt Ruby parked her Chevy Malibu (her rebellion against Uncle Mike’s obsession with all things Ford) and came bustling across the lawn, not bothering with the little paver-stone walkway she insisted we all use, so I knew it was serious. Jack followed behind her with packages from the bakery. I tried not to notice how the sun glinted off the deep bronze of his hair, or how really, truly excellent he managed to make a simple pair of jeans and a white sweater look. I told myself that my mouth was just watering because of the doughnuts, but it’s hard to lie to yourself successfully, so I didn’t believe me.
“Tess! I’m so glad you’re finally here!”
I pointedly looked at my watch. Donald Duck’s hands told me it wasn’t even nine-thirty, so “finally” was stretching it. She ignored my not-so-subtle hint and pulled me up off the swing and into a tight hug. Aunt Ruby was pleasingly plump, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, and “If God wanted me to go gray, He wouldn’t have made Clairol” blonde. She was also four or five inches shorter than me, depending on the heel height of her orthopedic shoes, so I had to lean into her hug, which I was happy to do.
She smelled like honey-glazed doughnuts and home, and she squeezed me harder than usual before letting go. “I was so upset about Chantal, and so worried about you last night. It was all I could do to respect your wishes and let you sleep,” she said, pursing her lips and casting a glance back at Jack, who’d wisely taken the stone path instead of walking on the grass.
Jack winced. “Sorry, Tess. I ran into Ruby at the bakery and told her that you’d been kind enough to make me dinner last night.”
Uncle Mike shot an outraged look at me. “You had a man you don’t even know in your house at night? Alone?”
I sat back down, closed my eyes, and thumped the back of my head against the swing a few times. “I do know him, Uncle Mike. You know him. We all know him. He’s Jeremiah’s nephew. We grew up in the same town.”
Uncle Mike was unmoved by my logic. “We knew him then. We don’t know him now. From what I read, he’s been involved in a lot of the crazy violence going on in the US for years.”
“Standing right here,” Jack put in, his voice mild.
“We’re business partners now. You’re going to have to get used to it,” I told Uncle Mike. “And I’m not a little girl anymore. I can invite anybody I want over for dinner. Molly’s coming over tonight, and Owen is coming over Saturday. Do you have a problem with that too?”
“Still standing right here,” Jack said, a little louder this time. “And who’s Owen?”
I gave him a narrow-eyed look. “None of your business, that’s who Owen is.”
“He’s her dentist,” Aunt Ruby helpfully piped up. “And her boyfriend.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that an ethical breach? Not to mention weird. Do you talk about how many cavities you have, and whether you’re flossing enough when you’re on a date?”
I buried my face in my hands. “Doughnuts are so not worth this. I’m leaving.”
“Chocolate-covered Bavarian crème,” Aunt Ruby said in a sing-song voice.
“On the other hand… Gimme.” I hopped back up out of the swing and snatched one fragrant bag out of Jack’s hands.
“I don’t think your boyfriend would approve of all that sugar,” Jack said, a hint of laughter in his voice.
Some mornings, a girl just couldn’t catch a break.
Chapter Six
The three of us sat around the kitchen table, because nobody ever used the dining room except for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. Aunt Ruby busied herself making coffee, putting out little yellow plates, and casting worried glances at her husband.
“Now, don’t start, Mike. Let the poor boy eat his doughnut in peace,” she admonished, patting Jack on his shoulder as she walked by.
I rolled my eyes. The “poor boy” looked like he could bench press her Chevy.