by Beth Dranoff
I sniffed and shook my head. Tried to swallow it back; instead the tears flowed harder. There may have been a sob or two. Nice one, Dana. Way to be the weepy, needy female. I may have been in distress, but I was hardly a damsel in need of rescuing.
Although some honesty from me for Sam was long overdue.
“That does it,” Sam said, smiling a teasing kindness. “No more power ballads for you.”
I sniffled harder. What was wrong with me? Turned away to cross the room for my shoulder bag; dug around inside until I found a few not-yet-disintegrated tissues to use.
“Dana?” Sam’s voice was gentle, but he wasn’t dropping it. “Talk to me.”
“Fine.” I crossed the room to drop into the yellow velveteen armchair not recently occupied by my father.
“Fine,” Sam said, settling into the side of the couch closest to where I was.
“Well,” I said. Trying to stall. “There’s scary-ass Alina. She freaks me out.”
Sam nodded, waving his hand for me to continue.
“There’s that thing where my father, who is supposed to love me, made a deal with said scary-ass demon to save himself while tossing me under the metaphorical oncoming bus.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Was he always like that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember him like this. But then he’s been supposedly dead for years. Maybe he always was a self-serving prick and I didn’t realize it.”
“A father who tattoos an inter-dimensional portal map on his baby’s back without telling the mother, his wife, while pretending he took the kid to the doctor?” Sam shook his head. “That’s what I’d call a fine upstanding citizen. Strong moral and empathetic fiber there.”
“Fine,” I said. “So he might not have been the best father in the world even when he was officially alive.”
“Is that all of it? Or is there more?”
I didn’t answer, choosing instead to slump backwards into the cushiony upholstery enveloping me in its foam-separated-by-fabric hug.
“Dana?” Sam was willing to wait, but not without a gentle verbal nudge to get me going.
I nodded, stifling yet another sob that threatened to punch through before I could get the words out.
“You,” I finally managed.
“What about me?”
“I miss you,” I said. Whoa, look at that—I could breathe again too.
“I’m right here.”
“Come on,” I said, voice stronger. “You know what I mean.”
“Look,” Sam said. “We’ve been over this. I get that you feel you need an exit strategy, and that emotionally unavailable is your thing. So those other guys? Perfect choices. But I’m more than that, and you know it. I haven’t left you behind for some job, I’m not sleeping with someone who wants you dead, and I’m definitely not trading you in to be demon bait.” Mirthless laugh, short and sharp. “No, you need me and here I am, like a schmuck, even though I shouldn’t be.”
“Because Anshell told you to do it.” I sniffled.
“Anshell didn’t tell me shit,” said Sam. “I came because I wanted to make sure you were safe and had backup, just in case.”
“In case you got lucky?”
“Dana, I’m lucky I met you,” Sam said. “And if you’re being honest, you feel the same way. Sex is sex. Yes, it’s good with us—but I’m not here just to get laid. Although I’m happy to oblige...” Sam waggled his eyebrows and flashed me that drop-your-panties-and-get-over-here-now grin.
“Ha,” I replied. “Funny.”
“Life is fast,” Sam said. “You’ve got to grab it by the balls and ride it until you can’t hold on anymore and your fingers are tired and all you want to do is give up. But you can’t.” He reached out, gently lifting my left hand and sandwiching it between his. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in a few hours, never mind some vague future. Things happen, and fast, and I don’t know about you but I don’t want any regrets.”
“I don’t regret you,” I said. Soft, as though someone else might hear and take Sam away from me again. Never mind the part where it had been me doing it to myself.
“Good.” Sam turned my hand over and brushed his lips against my palm. I felt it all the way to my toes. And elsewhere. Tightening, inside; a shiver raising goose bumps in a room that really wasn’t so cold.
A blink and I had Sam’s hand turned around, wrist exposed, the skin-on-skin contact pulling my shift from me where we touched. No longer a hand, my paw stroked the back of his with claws retracted, all rough pads and kitten-soft hair. I bent over and kissed the surface of his palm before catching the still-human skin between my two front teeth. I sucked, leaving a tiny bruised line of purple for later.
Sam’s eyes fluttered. The rumble in his throat was a purr, but not one like Fluffy the Domesticated Indoor Cat might dole out for a behind-the-ears scratch. I’d never seen a lion wild on the Savannah, but I imagined that this was more the sound it might make. Rolling around on its back in the sun, rubbing dirt and grit into the itchy places it couldn’t reach with a paw.
I let him go only to move closer, slinking out of my safe zone and into his. On all fours now. Human again, covered in pink skin and downy fuzz. I kneeled in front of him, shifting any residual fur back to flesh, and leaned forward to undo his belt, then his pants.
Sam opened his eyes then, reaching out his arms to grasp mine. My decision but he was there to help if I needed it.
“Come here,” he said.
I ran my palms up the sides of his legs, along his hips, dipping my fingers in beneath the waistband of his jeans to find that soft spot. Then along his chest, across, my breasts dangling within reach of his mouth. Sam released my arms only to find the gap between top and bottom, under my shirt, sliding it up my back to my shoulders before pulling me down until our mouths found each other.
“You don’t need this, do you?” Sam was already pushing the fabric up and over my head, not waiting for my response. What would I have said? Thought chasing behind sensation, trying to catch up but never quite making it. He got as far as my neck; I reached back and pulled the fabric off the rest of the way.
“Hey,” I said, straddling him now. Kissing beside his mouth, beneath, to his cheeks and his eyelids then back to his lips once more.
“Hey yourself,” Sam replied, mouth brushing against mine, gentle, before pressing in again. And then, lower, his tongue lapping against my nipple, all things harder now, as I gripped his shoulders and arched back, pulling him forward with me.
He laughed, my breast still in his mouth, and oh! everything clenching heat inside. I felt something change, under the surface, and then his tongue was cat scratch sandpaper rough, and I forgot how to breathe, and I was falling and flying before tumbling back to earth again and into Sam’s waiting arms.
I realized his shoulders were bleeding, pin-pricked droplets in the shape of my claws. The cost of my distraction.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said as I started to pull back, and out. Sam held me, hands around my waist, pressed against me where our bodies would have been joined if not for all that clothing in the way. We needed to do something about that. Fur rolling over his shoulders to drop down along his arms to shape claws of his own before he retracted everything again. It took seconds but I couldn’t stop looking, the human skin left behind was pristine and pure again. Or at least as much as it had been before, but this time without the blood.
I rolled to one side, away from Sam; not too far. The only way I could extricate myself from him and my clothing.
“You’re still wearing too much,” I said, peeling my remaining layers off. “See? It’s easy.” I held up my underwear in one hand and twirled the leg opening around one finger. Not exactly the white flag of peace. But it got me a grin as Sam’s eyes tracked the spin of purple and black togethe
r, on his feet and out of his pants.
Supe speed had its advantages.
Sam was in front of me and my breath caught as he looked down. Cupping my jaw with one hand, the other light on my back but pulling me in as the sparse tangles of his chest hair tickled my breasts. His hardness, lower, leaving no question of intent.
This was different. Sam kissed the top of my head, tender, then down along the side of my face to my neck. Claws out, raising goose bumps even in the heat; retracting back to soft tips and blunt nails tracing a line to my tailbone and then down some more. I wrapped one leg around Sam’s waist and pulled him towards me.
But still he waited. There was ready and then there was something else. His fingers going deeper, spreading and lifting, heat made hotter by his touch. Too close to the full moon; fur suddenly poking up from straining pores, smooth but not from skin, my yowl of need catching in my throat and turning into something that was other.
And then his fur flowed over him, claws retracted just in time. Pull it back again. A whisper in my ear, or was it in my head? Still I heard, I listened, and I touched that thing inside that was human. Pink skin and human flesh flowing from me to Sam, from Sam to me. Being and altering to shape something different. I’d felt this energy between Sam and me, touch against touch, but I had no idea that alternating forms while in contact with someone else could feel so damned good.
This time we were fully human, hands clasped, and a surge of need and want and now was between us and inside us and around and behind and there and oh! there again. I nudged Sam forward until his calves were touching the edge of the couch; another push and he was sitting on the edge. Just long enough to find that he’d replenished his wallet-condom-of-hope supply and slide it on while fingers were still fingers without claws. And then I was straddling him, sliding until Sam was within and my legs were wrapped around his hips. Looking into each other’s eyes.
Something feral prowled behind that gold-and-green-flecked gaze. I inhaled his scent of baked apple and cinnamon tea, the power of otherness twitching just beneath the surface.
“Pull it back again,” Sam said, voice rough like the tongue tasting between my lips. And then he did it, and I did it. Tightening my core as his energy burst inside me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I don’t get it,” said Sam, pulling on his underwear. “How many of them are there in that skin, and how do they keep from killing each other?”
“As far as I can tell,” I said, bending over to fasten my bra before readjusting and layering my tank on over it, “it’s just the three of them. My father, Ezra and Alina.”
“And it always looks like that guy you used to work for?”
“Ezra?” My pants were around here somewhere, right? “So far, yeah. Although sometimes the edges go fuzzy, like one time in the attic, and I can see my father sort of superimposed on Ezra.”
“What about this place?” Sam found his t-shirt and pulled it over his head as I located my shorts. They’d gotten wedged between the arm and the side cushion of the sofa. “With Alina here, it might not be safe to come back.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Shit. Looked around to see what I was leaving behind and what I could take with me.
“Maybe we should grab those maps,” I said. “Just in case.”
“What if this is one of the portal gateways?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I was wondering that too. Especially since my father has it keyed into my blood somehow.”
“His too,” Sam pointed out. “This wasn’t the first time you’ve seen him here, right?”
“Right. So if we accept the hypothesis that he’s stuck in an alternate dimension, and add in the bit where he keeps popping up here specifically, then logically this place must be more permeable somehow.” I paused, re-ran what I’d just said in my head. “Does that make any sense?”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Although it doesn’t explain how anyone wearing that skin can get to you in your truck.”
“One doesn’t-make-sense riddle at a time.” A smile to soften the snark. “Could there be more than one skin?”
“Have you seen more than one?”
“No,” I replied. Pressed my lips together; an unconscious habit when trying to figure something out. Yeah, I’m a lousy poker player. And I couldn’t believe what I was thinking now—hello, princess, you really think the world revolves around you? But my father had been a brilliant scientist. “What if I’m the key? We already know that Alina’s goal is to skin me for whatever I’ve got on my back. And that thumbprint tattoo looks familiar—what if it matches my actual thumbprint somehow? We also know my blood is an amplifier and that my father did a little something extra to it, even if we don’t have proof yet that Ezra was involved. So logically there has to be a connection.”
“We don’t actually know for sure what else Daddy Dearest did to your blood,” Sam pointed out. “When did he write that cryptic letter you found? Before or after this mysterious lab ‘accident’ that we keep hearing about without any details?”
I grimaced. Sam wasn’t wrong. We were basing theories on a man with his own agenda, who may or may not have been telling the truth.
“At least we’re sure that now I can shift into a big cat.”
“Which,” as Sam pointed out with an I-know-what-you-were-doing-fifteen-minutes-ago-because-it-was-with-me grin, “does have its advantages.”
“True.” I suddenly wanted to taste that grin; licked my lips and realized I still could. “Either way, everyone seems to think I can help open and close portal gateways. Remember that last time on the beach?”
Sam nodded.
“Plus those maps do stuff when I touch them. Or someone says Danyankeleh, my father’s nickname for me.” Even now, in this room, I could hear them rustling when I said the word.
“Speaking of—we should take what we can and get out of here, before someone else comes back for a visit.”
He wasn’t wrong.
* * *
Anshell had the coffee ready when we got there.
“Let’s go over what we do know,” he said. So we did—the skins, the contracts, my father’s connection with D’Lee and Ezra’s Agency arm via Owain, even Alina turning up in the attic room that shouldn’t exist. Where was a dining room dry erase board when you needed it?
“There’s got to be a reason this is happening again,” I said. Frustrated. “It’s been quiet for months. Why now?”
“The temperatures? We’ve had a lot of days that cracked 30°C already this year.” I knew Sam was talking but I was suddenly distracted by a vision of him covered in sweat. Because why yes, indeed, there had been a lot of hot days this year and he was still talking and oh shit I’d missed it all re-imagining the taste of his inner thigh. Focus. Right, the heat. And how everything could be connected to that.
Except it didn’t feel right.
“It’s hot lately,” I said. “Climate change. Plus June. But it’s been hot before and none of this happened.”
“True,” said Anshell. “Could it be the time of year rather than the temperatures themselves?”
“I wish I knew.” I was thinking out loud. Bonus: it distracted me from thoughts of naked sweaty Sam. Eyes forward, Dana. Come on. You can do it. “It was super cold the last time. February freeze. So it’s not like we’ve got weather forecasts in common. Timing makes more sense.”
“Agreed,” said Sam.
“The last time Alina surfaced, her portal-swinging-door ritual thingy was timed to harness the power of the third night of the full moon. Where are we at with that?”
“That was last night,” said Anshell. “Remember? We had a meet scheduled?”
Oh. Right. That would explain my residual urge to drag Sam onto the kitchen table right now, with or without Anshell’s viewing pleasure. Then again, maybe t
hat was just me with Sam at this point.
Hang on—something else happened this time of year in Toronto. Like, for the entire month and culminating in a big party because June in Toronto was more than just heat—the weeks-long celebration of LGBTQ2 Pride. The Trans March was tonight, the women came out on Saturday and the full-on, hours-long Gay Pride parade was on Sunday. The moon would be starting to wane by then.
Still. There was nothing to suggest a portal crossing needed a party to function. Right?
“What if there is no causal connection between the when and the why? We know my father wants his marbles back, and that they’ve been shaken loose by spending so much time in an alternate dimension. He thinks having some of Gus’s genetic material will allow him to solve that problem for himself. But he also has a plan B, and that’s using me to get Alina to open a portal herself and bring him back. My father is a smart guy. He’s hedging his bets.”
“Neither of those things have a moon-dependent element,” Sam pointed out.
“Which could mean that everything with your father, the timing, has been a series of coincidences,” said Anshell.
“Exactly.” I was starting to think the same thing myself. “Boy, I really won the Daddy jackpot here, didn’t I?”
Sam squeezed my hand; I nodded, grateful for the support. His presence bore witness to a reality nobody would have otherwise believed.
“We still don’t know why Ezra arranged for me specifically to get the Gus contract though,” I pointed out. “And of all the people to send it with, he picked Owain? My ex?”
“Would he have known of your involvement with this man Owain?” Anshell rubbed his skull, as though smoothing imaginary loose hairs. An unconscious gesture.
“It wasn’t exactly a secret,” I said. “But the Agency didn’t love co-workers cohabiting like that, so we didn’t make a big deal of it either. It wasn’t anybody’s business.”
“Right. I forgot you two lived together.” Sam pulled his hand back, leaning away from me in his chair and crossing his arms.
“Yeah,” I said. “For about a year. Domicile, domesticity—and then desertion when he got a better offer.” I mirrored his body language with some defensive arm and torso positioning of my own. “It was years ago.” Sam gave me a look. Reminding me without words that my craving for some kind of closure with Owain had cost me Sam, albeit temporarily. I shrugged and tried to force a smile. Yep, that was me: Scary Smiling Dana Spice. But it was true. If I hadn’t realized it before, I knew it now. Owain was my past. Sam was my future.