The Night Serpent

by Anna Leonard

  “You’ll arrange for them to do what?”

  He didn’t answer her, instead going back out to the foyer where the two uniforms were still standing, awkward without anything to do. He spoke to them softly, and she could see their entire demeanor change, going from useless to directed with the speed of a few words. He might have been an outsider, cops versus fed, but he was Authority.

  Stephens looked over at her, and she shrugged, a sort of “you think I get any say in this?” motion. He gave a twisted smile in response that, weirdly, reassured her immensely. He wouldn’t do anything that she didn’t agree to.

  “Lily, this is Officer Dunkirk—” that was the shorter one “—and this is—”

  “Karl Stephens. We’ve met.”

  Stephens smiled at her again. “Ma’am.”

  She nodded her head politely at them both. “You’re going to be my guard dogs, is that it?”

  “Ma’am. We’re good at barking. And completely yard trained.”

  Stephens clearly had the right attitude about all of this.

  “All right, I’ll keep them. But only if it stays low key. I don’t want any of my neighbors upset, or the condo board screaming about loitering strangers and ‘bad elements’ hanging around the building.”

  Stephens didn’t seem to mind being called a bad element, either. “If anyone asks, ma’am, we’ll tell them we’re part of the mayor’s initiative to get more patrols actually out on the street, meeting locals and getting our faces known.”

  “Great. You mean I’ll have to vote for him next election?”

  The laughter didn’t quite overcome the irritation she was feeling, though. When Jon turned to her as though to continue their discussion, she felt the urge again to hiss at him, warning him away. It was all…too fast. Too much. He came in here as though he had the right to reorder her life, tell her where to go and what to do. Arrange for cops to guard her, as though she were some sort of possession…

  A small part of her mind knew that her reaction was overblown, that he wasn’t thinking that—probably, that she was reacting to things that weren’t in the picture. And Aggie had arranged for the cops in the first place—Aggie had been the one to suggest her staying home, playing it safe. But she felt as though it was Jon who was steamrolling over her, refusing to accept her ability to make decisions, to control her own life.

  And yet she reacted positively when he went all alpha male on her. She admired his competence, his aggression. She found it appealing, sexy.

  And she…feared him for it at the same time.

  It didn’t make any sense. But it was real, and Lily had learned that while facing your fears was good, denying that they were real was the worst thing she could possibly do.

  She needed space to figure this out. Space she wasn’t going to get with Alpha Male Special Agent Jon T. Patrick trying to protect her.

  “I’ve already allowed enough changes, against a threat you aren’t even sure exists. No more.” She stared at him, daring him to override her. “I stay here. They can stay. You have to go.”

  It was cold, standing in the shadow of the old tree, but for once he did not mind it. The cold was nothing compared to the anticipation inside. So close. So very, very close…and so easy to find her, after all! To hear her voice…

  It was a small, narrow building, two stories, crowded on either side by identical structures. A one-car garage shared a driveway with the building next door. The symmetry of the structures pleased him.

  Lights were on in the lower level of the house, and people moved in front of the windows. One figure, slender and short, then another, taller and bulkier. A man. The Night Serpent scowled. Who was that man with her?

  A sound; the front door opening, shadows under the lights. The man was leaving. Good. And two more, behind him—were they guards? Attendants? There, they were leaving as well. The man drove away, the others walked down the street, the slow pace of trained fighters. Guards, but not belonging to the man? No matter. They were no longer in the house. They had left her to him.

  And yet, the thought that she was now left alone disturbed him. She too should have attendants about her, attendants and guards to protect her, protect that brightness within her. It was wrong, as wrong as everything else in this world. The way he had seen her before, that was right. That was correct. She should be striding free, not locked away in that narrow house. There was so much inside her, so much glinting gold, this world could not, would not reward, any more than it rewarded his own superiority.

  But he knew her value. He would reward her once he got what he needed from her. But first, the woman must tell him what he needed to know.

  He needed to talk to her again. Now that the man and the guards were out of the way.

  He stepped out of the shelter of the tree, and then stopped. One of the guards was back, a rucksack over his shoulder. He went up the stairs, and she let him in without hesitation.

  “Damn.” The Night Serpent glared, but the door remained closed. After a while, a light went on upstairs, while one remained on in the first level.

  They were in for the night.

  He hesitated, wanting to stay, watch over the house in hopes of a chance to speak with the woman alone. But the beasts needed feeding and watering; it would not be good for them to become angry before he could ask them to intercede for him. No, it would not do at all.

  Chapter 12

  Lily was fuming. She had thought it was all settled. She had been a good girl, allowed Stephens and Dunkirk to babysit her all weekend without complaint, alternating shifts sleeping on her sofa. She had taken her leave from the shelter. She had even rescheduled her hairstylist appointment, leaving her with a mass of unruly curls that she had resorted to stuffing under a baseball cap rather than fight with Jon about going out in public spaces. But this was…This was one step beyond too much.

  “I don’t need an escort,” she snarled.

  “Fine.” Cool, oh so cool, Agent Patrick was. Like nothing could scratch his surface.

  She glared at him. He ignored her, pulling the car out of the parking lot. It was his rental, an economy compact, and handled like crap. She missed her own car. She missed driving herself. She had been fuming about it all day, even as she was smilingly pleasant to the customers.

  “You are the most high-handed, overbearing, impossible, insane human being—”

  “I told you—you’re not going anywhere alone.”

  “I didn’t need a driver. I don’t need a guard. Bad enough you and Aggie have the boys wandering around my house….”

  “The boys, is it?” She thought she heard jealousy in his voice, but decided that she was probably imagining things. “Lily, we don’t have patrols assigned to your home on a whim.”

  “No, just a theory,” she muttered, and was almost immediately ashamed of herself. It was a theory she agreed with, even if she didn’t like the results.

  He ignored her, and went on. “That bastard is still on the loose. He knows where you live, your name, he probably knows where you work by now, if he didn’t before—you really want to give him a clear chance at you? Would you rather have a patrol car drive you everywhere?”

  “I want to go to the shelter.”

  It was a ninety-degree turn in the conversation, but it made perfect sense to Lily. She had been away for over a week now, thanks to Patrick and Aggie’s insistence, and she missed her cats. Ronnie had been updating her by e-mail on who was adopted, and what new cats had come in, but it wasn’t the same. They needed her there. More, she needed to be there.

  “Lily, you know why….”

  “Yes. I know why. And yes, I want to stay out of this guy’s sights more than you can believe. That’s the only reason you’ve won chauffeur’s rights. But I can’t…”

  She paused, and then decided to fight dirty.

  “You don’t understand. I was seven the first time it hit. This total, unrelenting, impossible-to-describe feeling.” Even now, talking about it, she felt cold, even with
the heat on in the car. “It wasn’t fear, or discomfort, or the usual sort of phobic terror. Just…every inch of my body felt uneasy. Something was wrong, and something was coming at me, and I had no way to deal with it because I didn’t even know what it was. I couldn’t explain it to my parents. But I knew what triggered it.”

  Patrick made a sound that she took to mean “go on.”

  “Cats. They would walk into a room and stop and…look at me. That old saying, ‘A cat may look at a king’? It doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not about a cat’s rights…it’s about their abilities. Their…. A cat looks at a king, and he doesn’t see a member of royalty. He sees a human, in all its vain ego and uselessness.”

  She paused, feeling her mouth dry up in a way it hadn’t for years. She swallowed anyway, and went on.

  “A cat looks at you that way, and they see all the way through you. At first I thought that they were…that they didn’t like me. But they kept coming to me after they looked at me like that. They would rub against me, and demand to be picked up and carried, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold them, touch them. After a while I couldn’t even be near them. I couldn’t bear to have them look at me. I used to cry the moment one of them came into the room. I wasn’t allergic, I was traumatized.”

  “And now you work with them…?” He clearly didn’t understand how that leap had happened, or why.

  “I guess there’s only so long you can let something like that rule your life. It took me a lot of therapy, a lot of talking myself up to it. I’m still not…entirely comfortable with cats outside the shelter, but when I’m here working with the kittens, or even the older cats, I can stand to have them look at me. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  She paused again.

  “I need that right now. I need a sense of being okay. All right?”

  There was a long silence from the driver’s side, and even without looking she knew that she had him. What else could he do but give in?

  “Okay. I’m going to regret this, but…okay.” He turned the car into a strip-mall parking lot to turn around. The shelter was on the other side of town. “An hour, and you stay inside, and away from any visitors, and I’m with you at all times. All right?”

  She smiled, just a little. “All right. Thank you.”

  The familiar facade of the shelter made a tightness she didn’t even know was in her chest ease slightly. She walked through the door, Patrick a disapproving shadow on her heels, intending to go directly to the main office to say hello and let them know that she was there. But the moment she entered the lobby, the tightness in her chest came back like a metal fist squeezing tight, and she would have fallen to her knees if he hadn’t been there to catch her.

  “I’m making a habit of this,” he said in her ear, the humor not masking his worry.

  “Something’s wrong. Something’s…” She started to hyperventilate, each breath coming faster and faster until she felt as though she could never catch up with the air leaving her lungs. Weight crushed her rib cage, and sweat poured down her neck and the sides of her face. It was never like this, not even at its worst. This was…gods, the anger she felt! The outrage, and the snarling fear…

  “Lily?” His voice was edging on panicked, and the fact of that gave her something to focus on. “Hey, anyone in there? I need some help!”

  There was the rush of feet on the linoleum tile, and familiar hands on her. She should have been comforted, but instead she wanted to throw up.

  Too much. Get them away from me. They’ll see. They’ll know. The guilt is all over me and I cannot bear it….

  There was a howling in her ears, like a thousand sirens going off in a thunderstorm.

  “Oh my God, what’s going on?”

  Lily came back to herself enough to realize, as some of the hands released her into a chair, that the howling came not from sirens but living throats. It was the full-bodied scream of an enraged cat. More than one, more than a dozen. It sounded as though every adult in the shelter was screaming at her.

  Mother, I am sorry!

  And then it stopped.

  When Jon was able to focus again, he discovered that Lily had passed out in the chair.

  “Damn it!” But even as he crouched over her and tried to remember what the protocol was for someone who had passed out, her eyes opened.

  “Jesus.”

  He fell back onto his heels, staring. Her eyes—her lovely hazel eyes—had been completely swallowed up by pupil, until there was nothing left but inky blackness, looking back at him.

  “Come on, Lily. Stay with me. How do you feel?” he said, touching her shoulder.

  “I’m okay.” She shook her head gently, as though testing her equilibrium. “I’m okay.”

  He would have argued that point, but his cell phone rang. Never taking his gaze off her, he answered. “Patrick. What? Are you sure? Where? I’ll be right there.”

  He shut the phone with one hand, slipping it into his pocket while still keeping the other hand on Lily’s shoulder.

  “What is it?” Her voice was almost back to normal, but he didn’t trust it. Not after the little scene he had just witnessed. And not the way her eyes still looked, all spooked and strange.

  “Nothing. Just…you need to go…sit with the cats a little. They sounded as freaked as you looked.”

  “Jon. What?”

  He looked into her weirdly black eyes, and was swallowed up by them.

  “Jon?” Her voice dropped to a whisper, almost a purr. Soft. Seductive. “Tell me.”

  Sheer force of will brought him out of her eyes, allowing him to step back, literally and emotionally. What the hell?

  But she was right; she deserved the truth. Even if he was going to have to sit on her afterward.

  “That was Petrosian. Someone turned our unsub in, gave us a name. They want me down at the station, to go in after him.”

  “Let’s go!” She struggled to get out of the chair, and he pushed her back down, gently. “Not you. Go get some cat therapy or have a cup of coffee or something.”

  “Patrick!” Her tone was outraged, and he couldn’t help but smile. She was just adorable when she was pissed off, even more so than when she was trying to be a seductress. Seduction came naturally, in her every movement. He buried that thought, and tried to keep a stern face.

  “Lily, you just had a major panic attack and collapsed. You’re not going into a…” He looked at her, and lost track of his thoughts. Her eyes weren’t back to normal yet, despite how she sounded and was acting. It was starting to really freak him out, all the more so because she seemed totally unaware of it.

  “There might be cats there, Jon. Or…Whatever. You’re going to need me. You do need me, otherwise you wouldn’t have kept me around this long.”

  Damn it. Patrick wanted to send her home, if she wouldn’t stay here. But she was right, if not for the reasons she thought. He stood and reached to give her a hand. “You’ll stay in the car until the scene is cleared. And if you get dizzy, or anything—anything—gets weird, you tell me immediately. And the moment we’re done, you’re making an appointment with a doctor, because something is wrong. Deal?”

  She grinned, triumphant. “Deal.”

  Chapter 13

  He was restless, tired of waiting. Too many days of waiting, outside her home, outside her job. They never left her alone, and he did not want to approach her in front of others. She would hear him; they would not.

  Now. Now, now now! His impatience practically danced on his shoulder.

  Not yet.

  But she’s there. She’s here. Right here.

  And so is the man. And so are all those beasts. I will not go near that place; it stinks of Her. Now is not the right time. Not without proper preparation.

  But she’s never alone! Impatience wailed.

  The voice was right; he could feel himself quiver with the need to reach her, talk to her. The cat woman. Time was short. Too short. He needed to know, now.

  No more wa
iting. Everything was in place; all he needed was the woman.

  If he could not go to her, then she would have to come to him.

  They had gone directly from the shelter to the police station to meet with Petrosian, arguing all the while about what Lily called his overprotective machismo bullshit, and he called pragmatic protection of a material witness.

  Lily didn’t mince words. “I’m not a witness, material or otherwise. And you’re a bully.”

  Jon smiled. “You’re right.”

  “And you snore.”

  He nodded his head once. “Guilty as charged.”

  She glared at him, and he placed his hand low on her back, escorting her through the visitors’ parking lot toward the building. “Lily, be honest with me. How many times in the past week have you been dizzy? How often have your pupils dilated like that? You swear you haven’t hit your head or taken any sort of pharmaceutical, and I’m trusting you.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  “But I’m not going to let you do anything that might worsen whatever it is that’s causing this.”

  “Stress is causing this, Agent Patrick. I told you. It started after I saw the kittens. It will end as soon as you nail this bastard. So let’s go let you nail him.”

  It amused him; that they were already squabbling like a couple. But he had felt her muscles tense when he touched her, and he knew that no matter how light her tone might be, there was something she wasn’t telling him. Something more than could be explained by the circumstances. And something definitely happened back there in the shelter. Not only her spell, but the reaction of the cats. When they calmed down, she calmed down. Or was it the other way around?

  He’d get it out of her. Later. When he wasn’t on the clock. For now, he had to think of the case, and only the case. Everything, everyone else, had to wait. Starting now. He took his worry about her condition and their chemistry, and everything even remotely Lily-shaped except for the potential of a connection between her and the Serpent, and put it into a box and closed the lid firmly.