by Chant, Zoe
Pete headed up the stairs, taking them two or three at a time. Even if he missed Carter, there was still Merlin and Ransom to contend with. And if you weren’t looking forward to something, the best thing to do was get it over with as fast as possible.
He stepped onto the first landing, and came face-to-face with a velociraptor. It stood as tall as he did, lean and predatory, its fangs glistening white against its black hide.
Pete jerked backward. Only his quick reflexes in grabbing the rail saved him from taking a very bad tumble down the stairs.
“Goddammit, Merlin!” he yelled.
The velociraptor grew to the size of a pony, forcing Pete to step back again, then shrank to the size of a St. Bernard. It let out a frustrated hiss that reminded Pete of Mom’s tea kettle, then suddenly became a blond man in blue jeans. His T-shirt had a drawing of cavemen hunting a woolly mammoth, with the slogan, The REAL paleo diet.
“Sorry,” Merlin said, not sounding particularly sorry. “No one ever uses the stairs, so I figured it was a good place to practice. I forgot that Carter was here.”
“What the hell does Carter have to do with it?”
“You were taking the stairs to avoid him, weren’t you?”
The cave bear in Pete’s mind snarled. Pete held it in tight check as he glared at Merlin, but he knew the beast was looking out of his eyes. Most men would’ve stepped back. Even most Marines would’ve stepped back.
Merlin just smiled that bright, annoying smile of his. “Carter’s checking all our laptops for viruses and stuff. Did you forget yours at home? He’ll be pissed.”
That was when Pete realized that he’d left the laptop in the back seat of his car. Swearing under his breath, he started back down the stairs.
Yeah. It was obviously going to be one of those days.
Pete took the elevator up. Sure enough, Carter was in the lobby, sitting on the sofa in front of a coffee table with a set of laptops on it. He was dressed to the nines, as usual. Pete was willing to bet that his shoes alone cost more than Pete’s car.
Carter glanced up at Pete. “Thanks for gracing us with your presence, Valdez. I hope you haven’t been surfing any porn sites. They’re full of viruses.”
“You would know.” Pete shoved his laptop case at Carter, making sure their fingers didn’t touch.
“Purely academic knowledge,” Carter retorted. “I’d never pay for that stuff.”
“You get porn for free?” Merlin inquired innocently. “Where?”
Ransom glanced up from his seat in the corner. The grim lines of his angular face brightened slightly as he remarked, “If you can make a billion off tech, you can figure out how to hack into porn sites.”
Carter shot an annoyed look at him. “You’re done, Pierce. No viruses, no hijacking. No search history. You ever actually use this thing?”
“I don’t need it,” Ransom said.
A brief silence fell as everyone looked at him. It was true as far as Pete knew—Ransom’s power seemed to give him the ability to know things, from being aware of events happening far away to learning secrets about people—but it was rare for him to talk about it and Pete had the impression that he didn’t like using his power.
“I have search history,” Merlin volunteered.
“I’m aware, Merrick,” Carter said, rolling his eyes. “I can teach you how to wipe it—”
“Oh, I know how,” Merlin assured him. “I just thought it would be more fun for you if I left it up. In case you wanted to check out any of the cool links I found.”
“Not particularly,” Carter replied. “And you’re—”
“Let me show you this amazing link I found on how to make a goldfish out of hot sugar!” Merlin broke in, leaning over Carter and typing on his laptop. “It comes out looking just like blown glass!”
“You’re done.” Carter shoved Merlin’s laptop into his hands as if he was fending off an over-eager golden retriever.
“But—” Merlin protested.
“DONE,” Carter said.
He spoke just as the door to Roland’s office opened. The Defenders boss ran his hand over his silvering hair and said, “Want a break, Carter? Or a drink?”
“I’ve just got Pete’s left,” Carter said.
“But—” Merlin began.
“Whatever it is, the answer is no,” Carter snapped. “I don’t even know why I bother coming here.”
Roland said, “Because we like having you around.”
Carter frowned, staring at the Defenders boss as if searching for sarcasm, but found none, just Roland’s steady, straightforward gaze. He seemed at a loss for how to reply.
Pete, watching their silent regard, was reminded of how, in the middle of a desperate battle, he’d once seen Roland step calmly forward and raise his arms, and fire had blossomed along them. Pete only once seen the phoenix that Roland could become, but he’d never forgotten it; beneath that exterior of calm authority smoldered a fire that could light the world.
“Thanks,” Carter said, as if the word had been dragged from his lips against his will. “I’m about to go, though.”
Merlin flipped open his laptop and held it up. “No, wait, this is really amazing.”
“Get that thing out of my face,” Carter said.
Undaunted, Merlin went on, “You know I was raised in a circus—”
“Oh, God, not that again,” Carter said.
“—and my best friend, Natalie, was apprenticed to the lion tamer—”
Quietly, Roland retreated back into his office and shut the door.
“—who was the third cousin twice removed of the former empress of Moldavia, which doesn’t come into this story but I do think it’s interesting—”
“Maybe you do, but nobody else does,” Pete broke in.
“—but the important part is the feud between the lion tamer and the seal trainer, which started three years before Natalie and I were born—”
Ransom picked up his laptop case and headed for the elevator. Merlin glanced from Roland’s closed office door to Pete’s glare to the top of Carter’s head as it bent over Pete’s laptop, and apparently decided that the best audience for his ridiculous bullshit story was Ransom’s back. Merlin pursued him out the door, still talking.
“—over a little matter of a missing camel—”
The door slammed behind them both, cutting off Merlin’s voice and leaving Pete and Carter alone together. Pete could hardly believe that he was glad of that, but at least for the moment, he was. With any luck Carter would spend five silent minutes checking his laptop, and then Pete could—
“Whoa!” Carter said. “Valdez, your laptop’s been hijacked.”
Pete had no idea what that meant. “I have a virus?”
“No, I mean that some hacker took over your camera and is using it to spy on you. Every time you open it, they can see whatever the computer sees.”
Pete stared at the screen, which now seemed to glow with a sinister light. “Someone is looking at us now?”
“No.” Carter tapped his finger on the screen. Once he’d pointed it out, Pete could see the little black square Carter had stuck over the camera. “I put that on before I opened it, so the hacker hasn’t seen anything yet. I disabled audio too. But if you’ve used your computer in the last…” His fingers flew over the keys. “Two days, then…”
Pete shook his head. A slow-burning rage was heating him from within, stoked by the ferocious growling of his cave bear. Thank God, that hijacker hadn’t seen his home. He hadn’t seen Mom. He hadn’t seen Caro. But he’d tried to. “Where is he?”
Carter typed, typed, typed, while Pete’s fury grew until the room seemed hazed with red. When Carter finally spoke, Pete could barely hear him over the snarling in his head. “I’ve got an address for you. There’s no guarantee they’re still there, though…”
“Give it to me.”
Pete took the address, and his laptop too. He stormed out of the office, the case swinging from his hand. He’d break it
over the hacker’s head.
But the heavy rush hour traffic gave him enough time to cool down, just slightly. Just enough that when he saw that the address was in a large apartment building, he made sure to park well away and approach stealthily. People stood chatting at the front, and might well notice that he didn’t belong. But he was prepared for that. He pulled on a red jacket and walked up with a pair of empty pizza boxes, and nobody gave him a second glance.
Once Pete was on the fifth floor, where his target lurked, his rage returned, filling his veins like boiling water. He stashed his pizza boxes and jacket in a utility closet, then approached the hacker’s door. He picked the lock as quietly as he could, remembering Merlin, who had taught him to do it, saying, “Pretend it’s a raw egg at the bottom of a Jenga tower made of fifty more raw eggs.” At the time Pete had thought that was a typically ridiculous thing to say, but now it helped to guide his hands.
First the bottom lock, then the top opened with the softest of clicks. Pete threw open the door and kicked it shut behind him. That spy would wish he’d never—
A pair of startled brown eyes met his. The hacker was a very pretty woman of about his age, with a tumble of curly brown hair, soft full lips, and a determined-looking jaw. Her slim hands were frozen on the keyboard of a laptop, and her bare feet rested on the foot supports of her wheelchair.
They stared at each other, both too surprised to speak.
And that was when he got a faceful of flying kitten.
Chapter 3
Tirzah was too startled by the unexpected entrance of Pete Valdez, Hot Cave Bear Bodyguard Who Never Opens His Laptop, to say a word. She did, however, hear herself emit a faint squeaking noise.
And that was apparently all it took to set off Batcat’s protective instincts. She dove from her perch atop the ceiling light like a very tiny, very fluffy missile, right into Hot Home Invader Bodyguard’s face.
He staggered backward and fetched up against her front door. Batcat resisted his attempt to pry her off, wrapping all four legs around his head and hissing like a tea kettle.
“Be careful with her! She’s just a kitten!” Tirzah sent her chair rocketing forward to remove Batcat herself.
Just as she reached his side, what sounded like every tenant on the fifth floor began shouting and pounding on her door.
“Tirzah! Are you all right?”
“Tirzah! Do you need help?”
“Tirzah! Should we call the cops?”
The door opened a crack before Pete Valdez’s weight thudded it shut. She grabbed the doorknob and hauled herself to her feet. Once she was up, Tirzah caught Batcat by the scruff of the neck and pulled.
Reluctantly, the kitten came loose. And then Tirzah realized that she was standing with only a door between her and a whole bunch of very concerned neighbors, holding a flapping, spitting, winged kitten.
She was so desperate for help, she looked up at Pete, who was the cause of the entire problem. Their eyes met. He had the most beautiful eyes, big and brown and soft. Gentle eyes in a hard man’s face.
He bent down, and the dog tags he wore on a chain around his neck clinked together as he murmured in her ear, “Turn on something loud. I’ll hide the kitten.”
There was a split second in which she wondered whether to trust him. He had broken into her apartment…
…but it was obvious why. More than that, it was justifiable. And though she’d thought she’d covered her traces, he’d somehow managed to not only figure out that his laptop had been hijacked, he’d tracked it back to her. If he was that good of a hacker, or had that good of a hacker on staff, she definitely wanted to hire him.
That was, if he’d be willing to take her business after she’d spied on him and her flying kitten had scratched up his face.
But that could all be dealt with later. Right now, she needed to hide Batcat. And though she knew looks could be deceiving, she found it impossible to believe that anyone with eyes like that could do anything with a kitten but cuddle it.
“Hide yourself too,” she murmured back. “I don’t want to have to explain how you got in here.”
A glimmer of humor sparked in his eyes as he whispered, “Me neither.”
Tirzah transferred Batcat to him (a procedure which involved him getting a number of scratches on his hands to match those on his face), and locked her door, shouting, “I’m fine!” to cover the sound of the click.
She quickly wheeled to her laptop, typed even more quickly, then returned to the door.
“Don’t rush in!” Tirzah called. “I’m right at the door.”
She put a hand on the wall for balance and glanced back to make sure that Pete Valdez and Batcat were both out of sight. Then she opened the door to one Jewish grandma waving a cellphone and another brandishing a cast iron frying pan, a beefy biker with a baseball bat, one of Amy’s dads coming to Tirzah’s aid and the other shooing Amy back into their apartment, a Filipina Navy vet with a prosthetic hand and a “No one messes with my neighbor” expression, and a teenage boy in a black hoodie with bubblegum-pink lettering reading No more throne, no more crown, fuck shit up and burn it down.
Tirzah smiled. There they were, her neighbor family, all rushing to her rescue.
Right on cue, the sounds of hushed arguing from the movie playing on the laptop suddenly rose into a blast of noise, then subsided.
“Sorry,” Tirzah said. “I’m fixing a laptop with a volume-control issue, and my headphones fell off.”
“Man,” Jamal said, peering at it from within the depths of his black and pink hoodie. “It really sounded like there was some kind of fight going on in here.”
“Only onscreen,” Tirzah said. “But I really appreciate you all looking out for me!”
Amy’s head popped out of her apartment. Tirzah waved at her. “I’m fine! I was just playing a movie too loud.”
“Daddy says that’s rude,” Amy said disapprovingly, and vanished.
The crowd began to sheepishly disperse. But Esther, frying pan now dangling at her side, fixed Tirzah with a gimlet eye. “That’s some movie. My walls shook.”
“Low-frequency sound can do that,” Tirzah replied.
“Hmph.” Esther was clearly unsatisfied, but didn’t know enough about the relevant technology to argue.
“Thanks again!” Tirzah said brightly, and closed the door.
She sank back into her chair, then spun it around. Where had Pete gone…? Her closet door opened, revealing him with a napping Batcat cradled to his chest. The sight of the tall, strong, muscular man gently holding an adorable fluffy kitten made Tirzah melt inside.
He’s your bodyguard, not your boyfriend, she reminded herself. And maybe not even that, depending on how ticked off he is over the laptop hijacking.
Then, to provide a plausible explanation for any warm fuzzy feelings that might have showed on her face, she said, “I’m glad that… you’re in my closet! That is, I was worried that you’d gone into my bedroom.”
Pete looked genuinely offended at the suggestion. “I would never go into a woman’s bedroom without her permission.”
“You came into my apartment without my permission,” Tirzah pointed out.
“Because you spied on me! Anyway, I didn’t know who you were.” He looked at her, then down at the snoozing Batcat draped over his right hand. “Who are you? Why did you hijack my laptop? Where did you get this kitten?”
“Wow, that’s a lot.” As a scowl started to darken his face, she hurriedly said, “I’ll tell you! I just meant, it’ll take a while. Also I have some questions for you, too. But the short answers are, I’m Tirzah Lowenstein, I hijacked your laptop because I wanted to hire you as my bodyguard so I needed to check you out first to make sure you’re on the up-and-up, and the kitten just appeared at my window.”
“It just appeared at your window,” he repeated, laying on the disbelief with a trowel.
Irritated, Tirzah said, “Is there some other explanation of where I got my flying kitten that you th
ink would be more plausible? A pet shop? The Humane Society?”
Pete rubbed his jaw. He had a little streak of stubble he’d missed shaving that morning, a sharp black line against his smooth brown skin. Tirzah couldn’t help wanting to touch it. Watching her closely, he said, “A lab, maybe?”
“Oh! Yeah, sure, that makes sense. I guess she must be genetically engineered.” She didn’t want to admit that she’d thought the kitten might be magical. Then again, she was talking to a man who supposedly could turn into a cave bear.
Who’d supposedly been altered in a lab to make him turn into a cave bear. Tirzah’s mind, always her best asset, assembled the bits of scattered data into a clear, if incomplete, picture. “Did you see something like her in the Apex lab?”
Pete’s head snapped up. “What do you know about Apex?”
He spoke in a quiet voice that she bet had terrified the criminals he’d caught when he’d been a cop. It might have scared her too, if he wasn’t still holding her kitten cupped in one of his big-knuckled hands. But she found it impossible to be afraid of a man who was so gentle with a baby animal.
“I downloaded one of their files,” she said. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“I got time.”
Tirzah swallowed. He’d spoken simply, a statement of fact, but something about the deep timbre of his voice made her think of other contexts he might say those words in. Such as lying naked in bed, his brown skin and black hair striking against her white sheets. “We can make love all night. I got time.” Or maybe just sitting in her living room, his strong arm warm around her shoulders. “Let’s just stay here a while. I got time.”
Like that would ever happen.
Pete lifted his free hand and touched one of the scratches Batcat had left in his face. Most of them were nothing more than pink lines, but a few had drawn blood. His fingers came away spotted with red.