by Holley Trent
Although it seemed irrational, he felt he did indeed have something at stake in this battle: an opportunity that he may never encounter the likes of again. An opportunity that made his heart pound and his arms ache to be filled.
He loped to the door, but before Felipe could press his hands against the screen, a man—covered half in fur, half in skin—fell in a limp pile from the roof onto the ground in front of the porch.
Tamara landed gracefully on her feet next to the creature, and reached for his wrists as she ground her knee against his spine.
He bowed up, snarling, and showing off pointed canine teeth and a half-shifted face that struck Felipe with painful familiarity.
Felipe’s jaw slackened as recognition sank in. He’d seen that freak before—or at least one of his kind, but his gut said this was more than déjà vu. This was this creature’s favored form, and if this was the man he thought he recognized…
He threw his shoulder against the door and shouted, “Arpía, muéva!” as he pounded down the stairs.
Tamara looked up, eyes narrowed at Felipe, but before he could explain his concern, the creature shifted suddenly, forcing jagged spikes through the back of his now-shredded shirt. They pricked her hands, prompting her to release his wrists, and stabbed the insides of jean-clad legs.
Somewhere at the side of the house, Sarah shouted an emphatic, “Fuck!”
“No!” Felipe shouted, and gave Sarah a stay there gesture he was certain she wouldn’t heed. The creatures never worked solo, and if she walked out there, she’d be not much more than fresh bait. They wouldn’t care that she was a woman and that she didn’t pick the fight. They were all about impulse and self-preservation. Perfect traits for mercenaries.
“I told you to stay in the house,” Sarah snarled, ignoring his warning, as predicted, and striding toward her struggling peer.
“Save the attitude for some bitch,” he said in Spanish, and stepped forward to put his body in Sarah’s path. There was another one of those things nearby, and he needed her to move slowly, even if she didn’t know why.
He could tell when she’d successfully translated his barb, because for a moment, her eyes widened and jaw gaped. Just a moment, though. Next came her growl as a second creature dropped from a nearby tree and ran toward the woods. They hadn’t thought to look up.
The injured mercenary tossed Tamara clear of his back and took off after his friend. His gait was only mildly impaired by his bullet-riddled left leg. He was a creature used to manipulating his body, and was probably already shifting: expelling the foreign objects.
As strong as he was, and as fast as he ran, Felipe had him at the advantage. Fast Felipe, the man who’d stunned circus-goers time and time again for being there one moment, and seemingly vanished the next.
He had to make a quick decision. Take the weak one who’d been too distracted to see him, or try to stop the strong one?
Strong. And his choice wasn’t about machismo. It was about assessing probable outcomes and likelihood of success. He knew he could take either creature. He’d done it before, but he wanted to leave as little chance of risk for the others as possible. Sarah could bitch about it later. He looked forward to it, in fact, and grinned as his skin meshed with the surrounding air.
As he disappeared, already moving toward the woods, Sarah ran shouting, “I’m out of bullets—” and her eyes went wide, staring in his direction.
He knew why. He was there, and then he wasn’t.
“Felipe?”
He said nothing because he had no mouth.
He passed Tamara, whom now struggled to her feet, and willed his unbound feet to hit the ground harder—faster—setting his sights on the trees and praying he wouldn’t lose the faster mercenary to the woods. If he made it that far, he could shift into any number of beasts and Felipe wouldn’t be able to tell if he were dealing with man or animal.
He pushed harder, faster, until he overtook the injured mercenary, but he didn’t stop completely. He re-materialized long enough to whisk a leg in front of the gimp, and sent him crashing to the ground with a grunt.
Felipe kept moving, phasing as he went. He didn’t turn to see if Sarah had followed. He’d just have to trust she had.
He focused all his concentration his body’s movement, imagining he was wind being expelled from a turbine, and found another jolt of speed. Never before had he moved so quickly in that shapeless form, and suddenly he understood why Jacques kept him and Fabian on such short leashes. Was this how their father had been? Wild and dangerous? This freedom—this power—was exhilarating yet terrifying at the same time. If he kept at it, would he be like some plane that’d lost structural cohesion a mile over the Earth? Would he send all his bits scattering into the woods, never able to piece them together again? What would that mean for his soul? Would he just perish—fade away without his human trappings, or were they just an illusion, anyway?
Stop philosophizing. Save the energy.
He drew his physical form together, binding cells and blood and flesh and fabric just in time to cut in front of the fleeing mercenary and throw his hundred and seventy pounds onto the man’s charging form. They fell to the soggy ground with grunts, and before the hired gun could work out what had transpired, Felipe had has hand on the side of the mercenary’s head and pushed his nose and cheek into the leafy thatch.
“Stay still, puta,” Felipe said, pressing his other arm against the man’s throat. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Tamara jogged over, her pretty face pulled into a scowl and clothes stained red. With a muttered oath in her native tongue, she reared back and delivered a well-placed kick to the man’s side. Felipe had barely gotten out of the way before the blow connected.
The mercenary howled in pain, and but Tamara seemed unmoved. She ground the sole of her combat boot against the side of his head and reached into her back pocket. With a grunt, she extended a pair of handcuffs to Felipe.
He slapped them onto the man and yanked him to his feet.
“Still don’t like you,” she said, pulling the now-bruised man along beside her, and pointing a gun at him as they moved.
Felipe clapped dirt and leaves from his palms and chuckled. “Don’t care. Ingrata.”
“Didn’t ask for your help.” She loosened her grip on the mercenary long enough to flick up a particular finger at Felipe.
With that large distraction out of the way, he turned his further up the field, and felt the knot in his belly release when he confirmed his opportunity was still completely in tact. No worse for the wear, she seemed. In fact, she looked fresh as a daisy without so much as a hair out of place as she cuffed the injured man’s wrists. It wasn’t for lack of a struggle, either. The man seemed bloodier, probably courtesy of one of Sarah’s harness boots. The women seemed to gleefully use their footwear as deadly weapons.
“Seen these before,” he said, when he’d reached Sarah’s side.
Annoyance flitted across her face, and he knew there was a sharp retort on her tongue, but whatever it was she kept it at bay. Through clenched teeth, she grumbled, “I assume that’s why you got in my way earlier.”
“Yes.” In Spanish, he explained, “They can shift into whatever form they imagine with some effort, although each has their favored forms. Most have one particular form they fight in. They’re mercenaries. They hang around us weird people a lot. I’ve seen them before at the circus, dealing with Jacques. Fabian didn’t trust them. Did some prying about them. They call themselves Visa after the shapeshifting Hindu earth goddess Visahari, although I don’t know their original origins. Given their ability to become both larger and smaller, you should expect that those cuffs won’t hold them long. You need to lock them up someplace secure.”
“Okay…” They slowed as they approached the house. “Locked up. Got it.”
Tamara joined their little clump along with a couple of the Were-cats who’d been momentarily stunned by the Visas. They flanked the poachers and looked to the ladies for
instruction.
Felipe chuckled. Looked like they knew perfectly well who not to cross.
Sarah handed her wounded captive off to the Cats and fisted her hands, propping them on her hips as she turned toward Felipe. The glint in her eyes was the opposite from the sort of passion he usually incited in women.
Here we go. He crossed his arms over his chest and cocked an eyebrow up as she approached.
“Hey, Felipe?”
She used his name. That was probably better than being called asshole, which was what he expected. “Yes, shrew?”
“You were out of line.”
“I didn’t realize there was a line. I knew I could help, so I did. You’re welcome, by the way.”
She drew in a deep breath and let it escape through her clenched teeth. There was an eruption simmering beneath that calm façade, but he knew she was putting on a show of solidarity for the sake of the Visas. She’d never rage in front of them, because that would indicate in a way that the Shrews had been unprepared.
His turn to take a deep breath, and unlike Sarah, it wasn’t because he was angry. It was because she smelled like mangoes and sweat and woman. He’d never been so turned on. Even with her scowling at him, she was a vision. Perfection in leather.
“Dana would have my neck if anything happened to you.”
“I know you were hired to do a job, but this seems backward.”
Some of the anger seeped from her expression, and now her visage was marked with curiosity. Intrigue. “What seems backward?”
“You minding me. I feel like it should be the other way around.”
And she laughed—a genuine, rumbling laugh of amusement that came with a headshake and her turning on her heels. She strode toward the porch and said, “I’m an ex-Marine, Felipe. I can take care of myself.”
With any other woman, he would have let it drop. He’d already established she was far from normal. He wouldn’t want her otherwise. “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to all the time.”
She paused in the doorway, her back to him, and rested her hand on the frame a moment. He expected she was working up a particularly nasty response, but in the end, she just shook her head and reached inside the doorway for something.
On the way back down, she carried a key ring and hardly acknowledged him as she descended the stairs. “They’ll be okay in the bread truck for a while,” she called out to Tamara and the Cats.
Tamara nodded, and handily caught the keys Sarah tossed at her. She unclasped the padlock and the Cats pushed the wounded Visa into the back of the vehicle.
“Why do you own one of these things?” Felipe gestured to the truck.
Sarah shrugged. “One of the Were-cats owns a car graveyard. This was brought in. He fixed it up and asked Patrick if he wanted it. Patrick was thinking about tricking it out and using it for advertising his pub.”
Tamara drew the gate down and reattached the lock. “Since we’re not savages, we should probably get the one you shot some medical attention,” she said to Sarah.
“Pretty sure one of those bullets in him is one of yours.”
Tamara beamed. “I’m getting better with the moving targets. Call Doc and see what she says. I’m going to check on the good guys.”
Sarah brushed his side brusquely on the way into the cabin. “I’ve got to call our doc. Do me a favor and stay out of trouble for five minutes.”
Five minutes seemed like a lot, but if she insisted…
He followed her in and leaned against the kitchen counter while she made her call, eyeing her the entire time.
She looked up at him once or twice, saying nothing, and apparently she was put on hold, because she put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “What’s with the glare?”
He crooked his thumb toward the front door. “This is normal for you? This…caos? This pelea?”
She produced a noise that was a combination of a snort and scoff, and raised her shoulders briefly. “I expect the unpredictable. We Shrews, we can take care of ourselves. Every now and then, a bad guy might get away, but we usually come out unscathed. Doesn’t matter what kind of supernatural bogeymen we’re up against, none of them particularly like guns. That’s why we all carry.”
“But—”
She held up her index finger, bidding him to wait. The person on the other line had obviously returned. “Hey, Doc. We had a bit of a scuffle. Two of the Cats are clawed up. Usually I’ve seen these sorts of injuries heal on their own, but I don’t know what kind of entity we’re dealing with, and whether the unknown factors will affect the wounds in any way. Tam got stabbed pretty good, too. She’s trying to walk it off as always, but the cuts don’t seem poisoned or anything. Just ragged.”
Felipe pulled back the nearby chair and sat. He rested his elbows on the tabletop and twined his fingers into a basket to rest his chin on. It was probably strange that he found this sort of chaos so fascinating, but for once he was useful for something other than being pretty and awe-inspiring. He’d been a key player in solving an actual problem. That felt damned good. Hell, he was still high on the endorphins from that tackle. Life outside the circus was a whole new ballgame. It was a different kind of danger—the kind that felt so much more rewarding if one survived it.
If Sarah thought she was going to dump him at some safe house while this strange feud raged on with her in the midst of it, she had another think coming.
CHAPTER SIX
He twined his fingers behind his head, and leaned back in the kitchen chair, grinning. Dios, Fabian would flip over this.
His grin ebbed. Fabian. At the thought of his younger twin, Felipe’s stomach dropped. Here he was, technically on the run from—hell, who? He was so out of the fucking loop. He’d left without a plan and had no access to information.
There was Jacques to run from, obviously, but what about the police? Were they still interested in him? How could he find out? Maybe Fabian would know something, but there was the matter of contacting him. None of the troupe members had personal phones. It was a wonder Fabian had found a way to call Dana. They could email, but he had no way of knowing if Fabian could access a computer. He had to be on heavy lockdown now that Felipe was gone. A hostage of his brother’s making, and Fabian phasing to invisible and phasing away was out of the question. By now, Jacques probably had every psychic in the troupe monitoring Fabian’s movements. If he gave serious thoughts to leaving, Jacques would probably have him drugged.
“Mierda.” He let the chair legs down and blew a long exhale through his lips.
Sarah crooked an eyebrow up at him and covered the phone’s mouthpiece.
He shook his head.
She shrugged.
He and Fabian had never expected they’d be separated so long. Whenever they moved from one city to the next with the circus, they’d always had a tentative plan; they’d pick a nearby town with a train station to hide out in for a couple of days, and meet at some pre-decided place. Like clockwork, they picked someplace in every city they visited.
But there was no way Fabian could know where Felipe was now, and if he moved again—to someplace “safe”—before the circus moved on, he may never catch up to him. Not even with the help of the fortunetellers.
There had to be a way to get a message to him.
Perhaps send a Shrew?
Sarah was now scribbling some notes onto the back of a fast food menu, and mumbling “Uh-huh” into the phone.
No, Sarah would be too memorable. She was too striking. Too singular. Besides, Felipe wanted to keep her close—to put a different kind of pressure on her and see how she’d handle it.
“Okay,” she said into the phone, raising her eyes to meet Felipe’s. “He said they’re called Visas and that they can shapeshift at will.” She held the phone back from her ear. “¿Y qué más?”
God, her accent was horrid. Her mother must have felt like a failure.
Sarah made a Get on with it gesture with her hand.
He shrugged. “Es to
do. Jacques would know.”
With a groan, she slumped in the chair across from him and rubbed the back of her neck. “That’s all he knows, Doc. I’ll keep an eye on Tam and see what I can find out about these guys. You do the same, and I’ll check in.” She stabbed the end button on her phone and gave him a scrutinizing stare. “Our departure will be somewhat delayed for obvious reasons.”
“No hurry.” He pushed back from the table and stood. With his gaze locked on hers, he eased around the table and stopped behind her chair.
She propped the back of her head atop the chair’s top rung and stared up at him.
Beautiful brown eyes with a depth of intelligence that aroused him far more than the lowest cut shirt or shortest skirt. She probably had a lot to say that he wanted to hear. Needed to hear. And he wondered if she knew just how stunning she was. She couldn’t possibly.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She lifted her head and rolled her shoulders. Something in her neck clicked.
Felipe cringed at the sound, then pressed his hands onto the tops of her shoulders. He squeezed gently.
Almost instantaneously, her body tensed beneath his touch. She sat more upright and tried to turn her head to look up at him.
“Relax,” he whispered, increasing the pressure, kneading her tight muscles like dough. She was so wound up, but after a while, her shoulders sank. The muscles uncoiled. She sighed.
“Just relax,” he repeated, extending his ministrations to her shoulders and down her back.
“I hate to admit it, but it feels good.”
“I do it all the time for Fabian. Trust me.”
She leaned her torso forward and pressed her face against the tabletop. “Trust me,” she said into the table. “I think that’s very similar to what the spider said to the fly.”
“No comprendo.”
“Cool.”
Oh, she was long overdue to relax. It’d be easy to take advantage of the situation, and that temptation was certainly there. Her body was so fit and her curves so enticing, he never wanted to stop touching.
He pressed his hands lower, and made small, tight circles down her back on either side of her spinal column with his thumbs. When he got to the base, where her spine met her waistband, he was nearly ready to burst and she didn’t even know the effect she was having on him. He dragged his fingers ever so lightly across her warm, brown skin from hip to hip, and forced a giggle from her obscured lips.