“I know what you mean,” he muttered, and reached for her hand. Her palm hurt, and she realized that she had been digging her claws into the skin. Blue carefully unfolded her fingers and made a hissing sound. Her palm was a mess. Her claws were sharp.
“It’ll heal,” she told him.
“This is a bad habit, Iris.”
“You’re the bad habit.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Iris looked away from him, back at the women. She thought of Songbird, and the other girls who had lain so quietly drugged on their silk pillows—flesh for sale, for just the right price.
“You said you saw this before.” Iris glanced at Blue, and then again at the corpses. “Who was buried? Women?”
“Some women, but a lot of kids and young men. Victims of Santoso’s trade in human organs. Killed specifically for their hearts and kidneys and whatever else draws a high price on any particular day.”
Iris briefly closed her eyes. “I’m betting the people here were slaves. Sex slaves. Santoso kept me chained up with a group of them in the beginning. To show me how it could be if I didn’t cooperate. I doubt many of them survive long in that place.”
Blue said nothing, but she could feel him staring. He looked furious, and his scent—when it finally rolled over her—was just as violent. Iris could not stand it and walked away, stopping when he did not follow. She watched him bend over the desiccated remains, eyes closed, whispering something so soft it was more of a breath, and she caught only one word: promise.
And then he rejoined her, moving at a run that sent her staggering backward. His face was terrible, dark, and he caught her in his arms, hauling her close, squeezing the life out of her in a massive hug that made tears spring to her eyes. She returned his embrace, letting herself cry, trying not to shake as a sob tore through her chest. Blue kissed her face, her mouth, running his hands down the back of her head.
“He will never hurt you again,” Blue whispered brokenly. “I promise you, Iris.”
Iris believed his intentions, but not his promise, and she would have told him that, had she not suddenly heard the low drone of a car engine drifting on the wind.
“Blue.” Iris tapped her ear, pointing to the south. He hesitated for only a moment, head cocked as though listening.
“Shift,” he said, and she did, falling on all fours and throwing herself into the leopard. He ran and she followed, racing down the riverbed, red rock rising high, cut into ribbons and waves of vegetation and sky. The heat was terrible; she could feel Blue’s strength ebbing, his breath whistling in his lungs. He favored his right leg.
The car engine got louder; Blue muttered something under his breath and the sound cut out. Which made it impossible for Iris to track the car, though Blue did not seem to share her problem. He led her on an unerring path, taking her from the riverbed on a narrow path that curved up and around a steep hill filled with loose rock.
At the top of the hill, Iris gazed down at the valley spread before them. At the bottom, like an obsidian chip, she found a black jeep parked in the dirt. Men stood beside the vehicle. One of them was tall and pale, with dark hair and dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt and gloves. Beside him stood a much shorter blond man whose hands were pressed against his chest. Thin cords bound a slender gun holster against his jean-clad thigh.
Blue joined her, squinting down into the valley. His breath caught, and a wolfish smile spread across his face. “Goddamn. Those are my friends, Iris. Come on. We’re safe.”
No, she thought. We’re not.
But Iris followed him anyway, trying to battle her sense of dread. Being a leopard was no cure for nervousness; a woman still lived inside the fur, and the idea of meeting these strangers was displeasing, to say the least. Blue’s friends were not necessarily her friends.
Even if those friends are shape-shifters?
Nice, fantastic, wonderful—but it was no guarantee of character, no promise of trustworthiness.
Paranoia won out. Iris veered silently into the vegetation, tracking Blue on a parallel, more protected path. She did not tell him, but he looked back once—saw she was gone—and nodded silently.
Good. He understood. Even if he did not look happy about it.
The men saw him coming; the blond let out a whoop that was friendly enough to be some small comfort, but it was the other man who made Iris’s hackles rise. He did not move from his place against the jeep, just leaned, arms loose against his sides. He stared at Blue.
The blond man ran up the hill, grabbing Blue’s arm for one of those loose, swinging handshakes that was pure boy: friendly and relaxed and probably the equivalent of a locker-room slap on the ass.
Crouched in the loose vegetation, Iris saw Blue grin. “Miss me, Dean?”
“Like a good fart,” said the man. “Roland was whining like a baby about how you were up to your ‘nads in trouble, so I volunteered to be the shit-digger who gets you out. I just didn’t realize how much work it would take.”
“I’m touched,” Blue said, and glanced over his friend’s shoulder at the second man. “What’s wrong with Artur?”
Dean’s smile faded. “Nothing.”
What a terrible liar, Iris thought, inching closer. She watched him rub his chest like it pained him, and then the blond man glanced around the small rocky area, his gaze lingering for a moment on her hiding place.
“Dean,” Blue said, frowning.
“Let it go,” he replied, all his boyish charm disappearing into something tired and hard. “Please, Blue.”
No, Iris thought. Don’t let it go. Something is wrong. That man—Artur—is wrong.
But Blue said nothing and followed Dean down the hill. Iris followed, slinking through the brush, the knot in her throat growing thick and hard as the man called Artur pushed away from the jeep. He moved like a dancer, without wasted movement, elegant and deadly.
Killer, Iris thought when she looked at him. She thought Dean appeared uneasy as well. His fingers lingered near the gun strapped to his thigh.
“Artur,” Blue said, holding out his hand as they got close. “How—”
No warning, no time. Artur rushed him, slamming Blue into the ground with enough force that he bounced off the rock. Iris snarled—already moving at that first touch, tearing out of hiding with enough power to rip the man in half.
She never reached him. Dean stepped in front of her, held out his hands, light pulsing just beneath his white T-shirt—
—and she suddenly stood on the hill again, almost twenty feet away.
What? she began to think, but Blue was still on the ground, and that man—that Artur—had his hands far too close to Blue’s throat, and Blue was doing nothing to fight him off, was just staring up into his eyes with an expression of heartbreaking confusion. She heard him say Artur’s name again and again, and then, louder, in a rough voice, “Why?”
A pure and terrible agony passed over Artur’s pale face, a breathless heartbreak that made Iris wonder how the man was still standing, let alone beating the crap out of his so-called friend.
“Artur,” Dean said quietly.
“Because you killed her,” Artur whispered. He had a thick Russian accent. “My friend, you killed my wife.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You killed my wife. You killed my—Elena.
“No,” Blue croaked. Impossible. Elena could not be gone, not after saving his life. Not because of him, his mind—his motherfucking mind with his shields torn down and his power wild, power that could not be trusted, not for anyone, not even for—Iris, oh, Iris—
“Artur,” Dean said sharply. “Dude, enough.”
“No,” Artur murmured, and Blue could already feel the bullet in his brain, wondered if it was wrong to welcome it, wondered why he was not already dead.
Dean fell down on his knees beside him. “Fuck you, Artur. Blue, don’t listen to him. He’s exaggerating. Elena isn’t dead.”
Crazy. He was going crazy. Blue stared at De
an, too shaken to talk, and his friend nodded grimly. “That’s right, man. She did die—that’s no lie—but the doctors were able to resuscitate her.”
“Two minutes,” Artur whispered, still with that awful shaking voice that was murder, death, darkness all rolled into one. “Two minutes gone. And now—she is still dying, Blue. You damaged her heart in a terrible way. The doctors give her less than a month. Not even that much. Days, maybe. And she cannot … she cannot heal herself.”
“Artur,” Blue began, but the Russian shut his eyes—too bright now, bloodshot—and sat back, large hands dangling over his knees. Blue pushed himself up, following. Not standing, though. Not ever again. His body felt like a giant fork had been pushed into his gut to stir, cut, pry his innards into nothing but liquid.
Memories filled him, not just of Elena, but of others: pets, strangers on buses and streets, his teacher, his neighbor, his mother….
Deaths, injuries. You’re a killer. You have always been a killer. It doesn’t matter if it’s accidental; you have taken lives with nothing but a thought—and not even that much.
Wrong place, wrong time. A break in his shields, high emotion, stress, and there … there … terrible things. Broken hearts.
Blue sat in the dirt, silent. Artur and Dean did the same. All three men stared at everything but one another.
Movement. Iris. No more hiding for her. She wended her way down the hill, silent, still a leopard with those lovely golden eyes looking at nothing but him. Muscle rippled beneath the round sleek spots on her shining fur, the desert heat making her shimmer, casting shadows and light in his vision—beautiful, wild, strange, and so much like home—such an odd thing, to call a woman home—that seeing her eased for one moment the terrible scream wrapped around his heart.
There, he thought, as she stepped free of the underbrush, wholly leopard, wholly inhuman. Right there. There’s your forever. If you don’t kill her.
“Iris,” he said, his voice hurt, bent, with the edge of that scream still lurking.
She hesitated, studying the other men. Artur barely looked at her; he appeared almost too exhausted to breathe. Dean only nodded briefly, which was just as well. Blue recalled a little of what he had done to Iris—teleportation, displacement. Cold words for magic. Blue wondered what Iris made of it, though she wore the mask of the leopard with deadly calm; not a twitch or flinch.
She pushed close. Blue smelled rock and wind and heat. He touched her paw and said, “Iris, meet my friends, Dean Campbell and Artur Loginov. We … work together.”
Work together. For now, perhaps, but Blue could not expect the energy and camaraderie they had all shared over the past seven years to hold strong. Not after this. He tried to imagine leaving, resigning from the agency, going his own way into the world without friends, without the family he had made since that first invitation into the solace of Dirk & Steele.
You would survive. That’s all you need to know.
As if mere survival were enough. Blue caressed Iris’s paw, and she leaned into him as the wind died into a hush, heat blistering his body, cooking him into the desert rock. The world shimmered, glowed—all around him, light—and he traced the radiance to Iris, watching as gold diffused her fur, shedding tendrils of the sun as her body shifted, receded.
She did not complete the transformation. She stopped in that twilight between human and leopard, clad in sleek spotted fur, her body humanoid, shapely, but fuller around the waist and shoulders. Her face was undeniably feminine, but alien, with sleek cheekbones that lifted so high they stood out at angles. Her mouth and nose were mostly human, though more delicate, edged in black and pink, and her ears—arranged against her skull like a human’s—ended in sharp tips.
Her eyes, though—her eyes were all woman. And they were only for him.
“I’m having a Thundercats moment,” Dean said. “Someone pinch me.”
Blue wondered if fur were the same as nudity. “Pinch yourself. This isn’t anything you haven’t seen before.”
“Yes,” Dean said. “But she’s a chick.”
“How observant,” Iris rasped, her voice guttural, low as a growl that rolled off her tongue like cream. Unbearably sexy, her vowels deeper than purrs. She glanced at Blue. “So they’ve seen this before, too?”
“We’re certified experts in the world of weird,” Dean said. “And sorry to say, darlin’, but you’re not even as strange as they come.”
“And that’s supposed to be a comfort?”
“Yes,” Dean replied. “Absolutely, yes.”
Iris narrowed her eyes. “So why are you here?”
Blue found the question unnecessary, but Dean surprised him by hesitating. “We’re here to help.”
Her nostrils flared. “You’re lying.”
Dean began to protest, but Artur held up his hand. He looked at Iris, and his eyes were black, hard, cold. “No, he is not lying. Dean is here to help. I have a different agenda.”
“To hurt Blue.”
“No,” Artur whispered. “I want something else. I want the man you are hunting.”
“Santoso?” Blue said, but even as he said the man’s name all the pieces fell together. Impossible, he thought, but he looked into Artur’s face and he knew it was the truth. He could not fathom it, could not understand why part of his mind remained unsurprised, quiet and calm, while the rest of him raged. He remembered the dead. The people cut open. Left to rot in pits and alleys.
Artur leaned forward, dark eyes burning. His lips thinned. “You know, yes? Santoso has access to human organs. I want one. For Elena. There is no time for legal channels. The doctors have told me as much.”
Nightmare. This was a nightmare. “She needs a new heart, Artur.”
“And he can find one. The right one. He has the resources.”
“Those resources are people. Any donor Santoso finds will still be alive and taken unwillingly. You’d be paying for murder.”
“I would be paying to save Elena. I would kill anyone to do that.”
No remorse. No hint of anything close to regret. Blue felt as though he were staring into the face of a stranger, and he could not find words to respond, to argue. He looked at Dean, who stared back, his expression impossibly grim.
And you? For Iris? What would you do for her? What would you risk?
Memories flashed: moonlight and screams, guns and darts and running for his life, for Iris’s life, abandoning his brother and Serena because he could not make the choice to use his gift to kill.
But a bullet would have been fine, right? A bullet to the brain, a knife to the gut, a bomb or grenade or a pit full of spikes? What the hell is the difference? Dead is dead.
Just like Elena was almost dead. Dead and dying because his mind was not as obedient or predictable as a gun. A gun could be trusted.
Iris clutched his hand and squeezed; her palm was warm, soft, sleek with fur. She looked at Artur. “You can’t do this. It’s wrong.”
“Do not judge,” Artur replied. “You have no right.”
“You have no right,” she snapped. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with. That man—Santoso—kept me chained to a wall in the middle of a goddamn harem where the women were treated like meat—where I was meat—and the only reason I didn’t get gang-raped inside the first hour was because he wanted my body clean. Merchandise whole. And not because he wanted to be the first to fuck me. No. Because he wanted to kill me.”
Iris leaned forward, shaking. Blue watched her lovely eyes shadow with fury and fear and shame, and he found his own body quaking—with rage, a bone-deep, murderous anger. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to rip off Santoso’s head.
Iris’s claws crunched into stone and dirt. “Here, look at me. Look at me. You want a heart? You want to kill someone for your wife? You want to follow through with what Santoso was going to do? He was going to strip me for parts, you know. Trade organs. Bleed me down to God knows what, all so he could pretend to be a goddamn shape-shifter. And now he has my mother
and he’ll do the same to her. If he hasn’t already.”
Even Artur could not hold her gaze. “You seem to be under the impression that I am a man who will be moved by your story. You seem to think I care, yes?”
“Because you do,” Dean muttered. “God, Artur.”
“God? No.” Artur gave his friend a dark look. “Compassion is irrelevant. In this I will do what needs to be done, even if the consequences are distasteful.”
“And what will Elena think?” Blue leaned close, the hard knot around his heart unraveling into something wild, sick. “You know what kind of person she is. She’ll hate you for this, Artur. She won’t want—”
Artur slammed Blue into the rocks, landing on top of him with a grunt. He raised his gloved fists. Blue braced himself to be hit, but when those hands came down it was to punch the ground on either side of his head with bone-breaking ferocity.
Iris moved to intervene, but Dean grabbed her arm. She almost fought him—the look in her eye was terrible, fierce—but Artur stopped pounding the ground just as she pulled herself free. He swayed, gaze hollow, bleak.
“I do not hate you,” he whispered to Blue. “I know you did not mean to hurt her, but it was you who did this. It was you. And if she dies …”
Artur did not finish. He did not need to. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he touched his forehead with his fingers, grazing his skin like it hurt so bad he could barely stand to touch it.
“I cannot hear her,” he breathed. “She is so quiet, Blue. So quiet, no matter how loud I scream. I have not been separated from her for all this time, and now …” Artur climbed off him and lay down in the dirt, flat on his back, exhausted, almost broken. “Elena fell into a coma several days ago. Our psychic link is gone. I would not have left her, otherwise.”
Blue closed his eyes against the bright blue heat of the sky. His body baked; his heart felt as if it were on fire. God. The only way this could get worse was if—
Iris touched him. Her fingers clasped his wrist, and all his focus—all his fear—dropped into that one soft touch, that gentle, persistent connection.
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