by Nalini Singh
Jim was still here. I could smell him. I edged into the closet and raised my head. Jim stood above the door, legs propped up on the top shelves of the closet, his back pressed against the wall. The stupid lingerie hung from his fingers.
I wished I could fall through the floor.
Jim shook the lingerie at me and raised his dark eyebrows.
My mother turned around. “Why are you blushing?”
I had to get her out of my bedroom. “I really have to go and look for Eyang Ida,” I said. “I’m going to get dressed now.”
My mother looked at me.
“May I have some privacy?”
“Fine.” She shook her head and went out of the room. I heard her walk down the stairs, locked the bedroom door, sagged against it, and let out my breath.
Jim stalked out of the closet, moving completely soundlessly across the carpet and leaned against the door next to me.
“How much did that thing cost?” he whispered.
“Never mind,” I whispered back at him. “You did that on purpose.”
“Did what?”
“Dropped things. Are you a jaguar or an elephant?”
“I’m a stray cat, apparently. And your mother wants to neuter me.”
“She wouldn’t want to neuter you if you stayed quiet.” Neutering was the last thing he had to worry about. If she found him, she’d be overjoyed and run out of the house so we could get busy making grandchildren.
He grabbed me and picked me up. His eyes sparked with an amused light.
“What are you doing?” I whispered. “I’m mad at—”
His mouth closed on mine. His lips brushed me, teasing, coaxing, and I melted, opening my mouth. He brushed a single sensual lick across my tongue and I shivered. His scent swirled around me, amber and musk, and tangy sweet citrus, carrying me away to a secret place, where there was only Jim, my hot, crazy Jim, with his strong arms locked around me. His kiss grew intense, passionate, then possessive. Every stroke of his tongue said, “I want you.” I wrapped my legs about his hips and let him kiss me. Our tongues mingled, as we shared the same breath. He had no idea how beautiful he made me feel when he kissed me like this.
“Dali! What’s taking so long?”
I broke away from him.
He shook his head, his arms wrapped around me. “No.”
“I have to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
I wiggled and felt him. He was hard and ready for action.
“Jim, let me go. We can’t make out now.”
He nodded. “Yes, we can.”
“My mother is downstairs.”
He didn’t seem impressed.
“It’s that red thing, isn’t it?” I whispered.
“No, actually it was your little tank top and panties as you jumped out of bed this morning. Or specifically what was in them.”
“Dali?” my mother called.
I slumped onto him. “She isn’t going to let it go.”
“Which car are you taking?” he asked.
“Pooki.”
He set me down on the carpet. “I’ll catch up with you.”
Before I could say anything, Jim opened the window and jumped out of it. I sighed, yelled, “Coming, Mom!” and went to get dressed.
POOKI was my Plymouth Prowler. When you’re barely one hundred pounds and other shapeshifters make fun of you behind your back because you’re the only tiger who eats grass in the entire state, you have to do something to prove that you’re not a wimp. My thing was cars. I raced them. Unfortunately being half-blind meant I crashed a lot, but being a shapeshifter meant I walked away from most of it, so the risk balanced itself out. Jim kept forbidding me to race, as the alpha of Clan Cat. I kept disobeying him. Some things just had to be done. When I raced, I felt powerful and strong. I felt awesome. I couldn’t give that up no matter how many times I had mangled my cars.
Normally Pooki occupied a treasured spot in my garage, but a friend asked me to take care of his Corvette. He didn’t live in the best neighborhood and he was paranoid about his baby being stolen while he was out of town. So right now the Corvette chilled in the garage next to Rambo, my ’93 Mustang, and Pooki had to suffer the indignity of being parked in the driveway. I looked around. No sign of Jim. Hmm.
I unlocked Pooki, got in, and began to chant under my breath. The magic was in full swing and it took fifteen minutes to get the water engine running. Pooki had two engines, a gasoline one and the enchanted water one. Internal combustion engines refused to combust during magic, which made no scientific sense, because gasoline fumes still burned in open air. But trying to measure magic by Newtonian laws of physics and Gibbs’s thermodynamics was pointless. It didn’t just disobey those laws. Magic had no idea they existed.
The engine purred. I waited for an extra second, hoping Jim would jump into the car out of nowhere, but nothing happened. His scent was still on me. I sighed, backed out of the driveway, and drove down the street.
It was too much to hope for a whole day together. The Pack was keeping him busy.
I pulled up to the stop sign. The passenger door opened and Jim slid into the seat next to me. I clicked the locks closed. Ha-ha! He was trapped.
“I’m going to try to find Eyang Ida. She’s a nice old lady, who disappeared from her house and some sort of bad magic is involved.”
He nodded. “Can I come along?”
“Yes. Put your seat belt on.”
“I should drive,” he said.
I laughed.
“Dali,” he said, dropping into his “I’m a Serious Alpha Man” tone. “I’ve seen you drive.”
“Nobody drives Pooki but me. You know this. Seat belt.”
Jim clicked the seat belt in place and braced himself.
I stepped on the gas. We took the next turn at thirty miles per hour. Pooki didn’t quite careen, but he thought about it. Jim swore.
I laughed a little bit. “The magic is up. The fastest it will go is forty-five.”
Jim braced himself with his legs. If he were in his jaguar form, his fur would be standing up and all of his claws would be out, sunk into the upholstery.
We passed a crumbling wreck of an office building, jutting to the sky, its insides looted long ago by enterprising neighbors. Magic hated the by-products of technology, including pavement, computers, and tall buildings. Anything taller than three or four stories, unless it was built by hand and protected with spells, crumbled into dust. Atlanta’s entire downtown lay in ruins, and buildings still crashed without warning here and there. Most Atlantans didn’t care. Repeated exposure to fear-inducing stimuli creates familiarity, which in turn greatly reduces anxiety. We had acclimated to the chaos and technology. Falling buildings and monsters no longer terrified us. I wasn’t that afraid of monsters in the first place. I was one.
“When are you going to tell your mother about us?” Jim asked.
Never.
“You do realize that she met me, right?”
I made a hurrumph noise. That was all I could manage.
“I’m too old to be hiding in closets,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have to hide in a closet if you didn’t keep knocking things over.”
“What’s the deal?” he asked me.
Girls like me didn’t get guys like Jim. And if they did, they couldn’t keep them. Jim was everything an alpha of a Clan should be: powerful, ferocious, and ruthless. Clan Cat wasn’t the easiest clan to deal with. We all liked our independence and we chafed at authority, but we listened to Jim. He’d earned it. He ruled like an alpha, he fought like an alpha, and he was built like an alpha, too, broad shoulders, strong arms, great chest, a six-pack. You looked at him and thought, “Wow.” You looked at me . . . I was everything an alpha of a Clan wasn’t: physically weak, with an aversion to blood, and bad eyesight that even Lyc-V couldn’t fix, because it was tied to my magic. If I had transformed into some deadly combat beast, I might have gotten a pass. But my ferocious tiger image was only fur-deep
. I would fight if my life was threatened, but to be an alpha, you had to live for combat.
Not that Jim was some sort of murder junkie. He went physical only as a last resort and when he fought, he went about it with a methodical precision, brutal and lightning fast. I loved that about him. He was so competent, it was scary sometimes, and I admired that he was so good at something he had to do. But I had also seen him in combat long enough to recognize the excitement in his eyes when he struck and the quiet moment of satisfaction when his opponent fell dead to the ground. Jim didn’t look for a fight, but when one found him, he enjoyed winning.
The shapeshifters were all about physicality and appearances. It was so unfair, I used to cry about it when I was a teenager. To top it all off, I did magic. Not only the tiger purifying magic, but actual, spell-based magic. I wrote curses in calligraphy. They didn’t always work. The shapeshifters mistrusted magic. They were magic and they had very little need for it. It just added to my overall uncoolness.
In shapeshifter society, an alpha couple acted as a unit. They upheld the laws together, they made decisions together and when they were challenged, they answered challenges together. In a challenge, I wouldn’t be an asset to Jim. I would be a vulnerability. So all of this magical fairy-tale thing that was happening, his scent in my car, his big body in my bed, and our stolen secret dates, was temporary. Soon Jim would wake up and smell the reality. He would leave me and that would rip my heart out. When that happened, and it was a when not an if, I wanted to nurse my wounds in peace. I didn’t want pity from my mother, my family, or the Pack. I got pitied enough as it was.
I didn’t even want to think about it. I just wanted to enjoy the magic while it lasted.
“Dali!”
I realized we were heading straight for a pothole, swerved, and hit the bulging asphalt, where a tree root had burrowed under the pavement. Pooki went airborne. My stomach tried to fall out of me. The Plymouth landed on the asphalt.
“Whee!” I grinned at Jim.
He put his hand over his face.
“It’s not that bad!”
“Dali, are you ashamed of introducing me to your mother?”
“No!”
“Is it because we are planning on having sex before the wedding?”
“No. My mother is from Indonesia, but she’s been in the United States for a long time.” Not to mention that she would be so overjoyed that I was having sex in the first place, she would probably call all of our relatives and tell them about it. They’d throw a party to celebrate.
“Then why do I have to hide?”
Think of something quick . . . “You know, this introducing thing goes both ways. You haven’t introduced me to your family either.”
He nodded. “Okay. We’re having a barbeque this Sunday. You’re welcome to come.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. A barbeque with Jim’s family? With his mother, his sisters, and his cousins . . . Oh no.
Jim reached over, put his fingers under my chin, and pushed my jaw up to close my mouth. “The way you’re driving, you’ll bite your tongue off.”
I was smart. With all of that brain power I had to manage some sort of smart way to escape. “I can’t just show up unannounced.”
“I already told them that I would ask you, so they know you might be coming.”
“Oh so you just assumed I would show up?”
“No, but I thought there might be a possibility that you wouldn’t turn me down.”
He just refused to be ruffled and he was so logical about it. It was hard to argue with logic.
I made another turn. We’d swung into an older neighborhood. Magic destroyed tall buildings, breaking them down into dust, but it also fed tree growth. The people-friendly trees, red maples, yellow poplars, red and white oaks, which usually grew in carefully managed spaces to shade the front lawns, had shot upward, spreading their thick limbs over the road and their massive roots under it, bulging the asphalt in waves. The street looked like a beach with the tide coming in.
“Dali, I need to know if we’re on for this barbeque.”
“Driving on this road is just awful. They should do something about this.”
“Dali,” Jim growled.
“Yes, I will come to the barbeque, fine!”
He shook his head.
“Thank you for inviting me,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
I pulled up before a small yellow house and turned off the engine. “This is it.”
The house sat in front of us, a typical one-story ranch-style home, its walls bright with cheerful chicken yellow paint. A neat front yard, recently mowed, stretched to the front door, shadowed by an old redbud tree. A dozen bird feeders and wind chimes, some plain, some with shiny colored-glass ornaments, hung from tree branches. It looked so neat and bright, just the way you would imagine a grandmother’s house should be.
I really hoped nothing bad had happened to Eyang Ida.
“Roll down your window,” I asked.
He did. The air drifted in, baked in the relentless heat of Atlanta’s summer. I closed my eyes and concentrated. In my mind, the cheery front wall of the house fell forward. Inside foul magic waited, rotten and terrible. It dripped from the furniture, slid down the walls in thick, dark drops, and coated floorboards with its slime. Every house has a heart, the echoes of its owner’s presence, and simple magic that turns a building into a home. The heart of this house was rotten to the core. Something had fed upon it and now it was dying.
Fear raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. This was bad. This was so bad.
The ugly magic noticed me. Hundreds of mouths appeared all over the slime, dark slits armed with sharp, black teeth. The slime stretched toward me, trying to take a bite. It felt familiar. This was Indonesian black magic. Things were out of balance here, way out of balance.
I opened my eyes. The house appeared so welcoming from the outside. Just you wait, you nasty thing. You have no idea who you’re trying to eat. I don’t know what you’re doing in this house, but I will purge you out. You don’t get to defile the home of someone I know.
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“Eyang Ida is a nice lady,” I told him, my voice tight with anger. “Something evil is squatting in her house and feeding on it. I’m going to get it out. This is going to get creepy fast. Do you want to stay in the car?”
Jim looked at me, his face completely flat.
“Jim?”
He leaned toward me and said in a quiet, scary voice, “I don’t stay in a car.”
Well of course. That would be ridiculous. Big Alpha Man does not stay in car. Big Alpha Man roar and beat manly chest. He’d locked his teeth. Jim was an incredibly smart man. That’s why I fell for him so hard. He was also incredibly stubborn.
I sighed. “Look, this is something I do. If you come with me, you have to do it on my terms. I’m going to do some magic and you will have to go along with it and not act like it’s stupid.”
“It’s your show.”
Say what you want about Jim, he always treated my magic with a healthy dose of respect. My calligraphy didn’t always work, but my Balinese magic was a different story. He had never seen that side of me before.
I popped the trunk open and got out of the car. Two chests sat in the trunk, the small one with my calligraphy supplies and the large one with all of my Balinese items. A box of donuts sat on top of the bigger chest. Jim’s eyes lit up. He reached for the box and I slapped his hand lightly. “No. Offering.”
I opened the large chest, pulled out a necklace of iron wood beads with a large black amulet hanging from it. A stylized lion, bright red with details painted in gold gleamed on the amulet. The lion had large round black eyes half covered by bright red lids, a wide nose with two round nostrils, two wide ears, and a huge open mouth filled with bright white teeth.
“Barong Bali,” I told Jim, as I put the necklace over his neck. “King of spirits and sworn enemy of Rangda, the Demon Que
en.”
Jim studied the amulet. “So how often do you do things like this?”
“About once every couple of weeks,” I said. “There is usually something untoward going on.”
“And it’s an insult to offer you money for it?”
“The legend says that a long, long time ago on the island of Bali, there lived an evil sorcerer. He was a terrible man who summoned demons, cast curses, and stole children and young pretty men and women to drain them of their blood so he could use it in his dark rituals. A man called Ketut had had enough and he asked Barong Bali for the strength to destroy the sorcerer. Barong Bali spoke to Ketut and told him that he would grant him powers to banish evil, but in return if any villagers came to Ketut for help against the dark magic, neither he nor his family could turn them away. Ketut agreed and Barong Bali made him into Barong Macan, the Tiger Barong. Ketut defeated the sorcerer and his descendants have guarded the balance between evil and good ever since.”
“Do you think it’s true?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m a tiger, I have the power to banish bad magic, and people come to me for help.”
“Are you afraid that if you started charging for the services, you would be tempted to prioritize?”
I glanced at him in surprise. Wow. Nailed it. “Yes. Right now rich and poor are equal to me. I get no compensation either way, except for the satisfaction of restoring the balance and doing my job well. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“There should be some reward for this,” he said.
“People leave gifts,” I told him. “Sometimes money, sometimes food. Mostly on my doorstep or with my mother. I never know who they are from but I appreciate it always.”
I opened the large chest and took out the statue of Barong Bali. It was about a foot tall, but size didn’t matter. “Please put him under the tree.”
Eyang Ida had loved the tree. It grew with her as she aged, and I could feel traces of her in the tree’s branches. The tree’s spirit loved her. It would help us.
Jim set the statue by the tree roots. I slipped my shoes and socks off and took my offering out of the chest. I had made it in the house before I left. Jim regarded the banana leaf twisted into a small basket, the elaborate palm leaf tray, and the arrangement of flowers and fruit, and raised his eyebrows. I added a donut to it, took it to the statue, knelt, and placed it at Barong Bali’s feet. Jim knelt next to me.