“Do you fix cars, too?”
“No, but I clean.” Suraj grinned back at me. “I did detail work. Vacuumed cars and cleaned them very well with another guy he hired. Gave me a start.”
The next turn took us down a long farm road, past a few churches and quaint little homes. I had never counted so many churches in one area before in my life. I counted five beyond the city limits alone before we pulled up to a private community proclaimed Hawthorn Grove by the bronze sign hanging off the brick wall. I studied the bear, wildcat, and eagle silhouettes in the twelve-foot-tall iron fence while Nadir typed in a security code on the panel. The iron gate swung inward, permitting the Mercedes entrance.
A curving paved road led past a community center and homes that were larger than expected, each of them set a considerable distance away from the last. We pulled into the drive of a two-story brick home with a shitload of cars packed into the driveway and alongside the curb by the mailbox. All the colorful pastel balloons meant this had to be the place.
Suddenly, I found myself giddy.
This baby shower was a first for me. None of my high school friends kept in touch aside from Harper, who’d sworn off children for the rest of her life. I wasn’t close enough to most of my family of child-bearing age, and the ones who did talk to me just wanted shit from me, whether it was money, concert tickets, or for me to buy them things.
Nadir promised these people would treat me like a normal person.
Trusting him, I spilled out of the car with my giftbox in my arms, phone shoved clumsily in one pocket. Once the guys also had their gifts, we approached the porch.
“They’re here!” a woman bellowed from inside. The door flew open and a woman of Indian descent appeared in its frame, her vibrant smile and round-cheeked face surrounded by the sleekest, prettiest curls I’d ever seen. I envied them, as mine were coarser and required buckets of coconut oil to have as much luster. My hair consumed it by the gallon.
“Hi!” I practically shouted into her face like an idiot who had no social skills. I winced mentally, collected myself, and moderated my tone. “Good afternoon.”
“We’re so glad you could come. I’m Jada.” She didn’t gush. I appreciated that. She hugged Suraj tight then aimed another smile at me. “Nadir told me you’ve never been to a baby shower before. That true?”
“It is. I’ve never been cool enough to go to a baby or bridal shower,” I confessed.
“Perfect. Then there’s no time like the present to throw you to the lions.”
Chapter Six
Nadir
“Speaking of lions, I’m going to head down the road to Russ’s place,” Suraj spoke up from the rear of our group. “Esteban threw down a challenge I couldn’t decline, and a fine bottle of aged tequila is waiting with my name on it.”
“What?” I spun to face him, betrayed. “You were supposed to come inside with me.”
Suraj chuckled. “I never agreed to that. But here is my gift for the mother-to-be.” He passed a gift-wrapped box into Jada’s arms and leaned forward into the home to wave toward the living room where a large number of women congregated. “Congratulations, Leigh!”
“Thank you, Suraj! Don’t let them get you too drunk, sweetie.”
“I won’t,” he called back before he abandoned me. The traitor ambled away down the road and eventually vanished around the bend.
Inside, all of my favorite women had assembled around the living room with cups of punch. Juni, my favorite tech operative packed into five feet of kick-ass rabbit shifter, immediately pushed one into my hands.
Leigh sat on the couch beside Sasha, gorgeous as ever and doing that lovely glowing thing that people swore pregnant women all did. Usually they were sweaty and uncomfortable, but Leigh actually possessed a radiance I hadn’t noticed last time I visited their home. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a long braid, and she wore a frilly maternity dress that emphasized her enormous pregnant stomach. She was only three or four months along, but she looked ready to give birth at any moment.
I envied Ian. I envied him so much it hurt, even if I knew he deserved this most of all.
“Welcome to our home, Penny. Please, have a seat. I’d get up to greet you, but…”
“No, no, that’s fine!” Penny held out both hands. “It’s enough that you invited me.”
I did the introductions, proud of my friends for behaving precisely as I knew they would. They treated Penny like a person, not a star who sold 2.8 million copies of her last record in its first week.
I knew that number because I was proud as fuck of her. I knew all her stats, even memorized where her singles landed on the charts—
“You’re that Nandi?!” Penny shrieked, practically startling me into an early grave. My heart jumped into my throat before I realized my songbird was losing her shit over my lioness shifter friend. “I just read your latest book a week ago! I mean, finished it the night you released it, but it was so good. I love that series.”
Nandi was the sweetest, most humble woman I knew.
I also read her books. No shame about it.
The chatter immediately redirected into discussions about Nandi’s recent work and Penny’s taste in reading.
“I just…I never thought I would meet you.” Penny held both of her cheeks in her hand, appearing starstruck.
“Now you know exactly how your fans feel when they meet you somewhere,” I teased her. “I hope you have a couple books in the car for her, Nandi.”
“Honestly, I’m a little starstruck, too, but Nadir made us swear to behave like normal people,” said Julia, our coyote shifter friend. Jules was another community resident, living deeper into the woodlands with her mixed shifter family. Her dog shifter husband and Taylor were tight since Lyle had been employed by him for years now, managing one of the other autobody locations out in Huntsville a half hour down the interstate.
“I didn’t threaten you.”
“You said you’d teach the triplets how to dig beneath fences!”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, they’re going to figure that out and learn it anyway. May as well learn from the best.”
Penny scrunched her nose. “Dig beneath fences?”
“Uh…” I couldn’t tell her that Julia’s children were half-dog and half-coyote kids who loved escaping the yard and roaming wild in the woods.
“Game time!” Jada announced, swooping in to the rescue. My short-lived relief dried up like a dusty well the moment I realized she had stepped into the role of party coordinator. Jada was imaginative at the best of times and terrifying at all others. She wasn’t a shapeshifter like her cousin, but she had the soul of a big cat.
I prepared myself for the worst, though I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. She held up two skeins of pink and blue yarn. “Everyone has to guess how big our Leigh is. Closest guess without going over gets bragging rights annnnnd a shot in their punch cup of this super-ultra-high-priced whiskey I stole from Taylor’s liquor cabinet.”
I missed by two inches, losing to Penny due to guessing too conservatively. I had feared a large number would hurt Leigh’s feelings. It turned out she was proud and happy with the enormity of her stomach.
Because she was expecting triplets, a discovery made during the next game when we were to guess the gender. It was a trick question, because she had three fetuses taking up real estate in her belly.
Fuck. The envy-meter took a homerun hit and sailed into oblivion. When Ian hit the jackpot, he really knew how to score.
Jada poured a second shot glass into Penny’s cup then another in Juni’s since they had come closest by guessing girl and boy twins.
“I’d share a sip with you,” Penny said, “but you didn’t tell me how fun all of your friends are and properly prepare me.”
“What?”
“Get used to that from him,” Juni said.
“Cookies, anyone?” Isisa called from the archway.
I groaned. This was the part I had dreaded. “Please tell me
none of them are vagina-shaped.”
“Then it would only be a tube, Nadir,” Sasha chirped. “The vagina is the part inside the body.”
“I know that,” I snapped.
The lioness lowered the tray to the coffee table. Every single cookie was a masterpiece in nightmare fuel.
They had been carefully iced to resemble placentas. I recognized the inside joke, but expected Penny to be equally horrified. Instead of balking, she reached down, plucked a cookie from the trap, and bit it in half.
“Thank you!”
Jada, Juni, Leigh, and the lioness trio took one look at my expression then howled with laughter. Even Penny joined in.
“These look disgusting, but they taste amazing. I love them!”
“Wait until you see the cake,” Leigh said.
“Can I see it now?”
I should have known better. Penny was a flawless fit with our group.
Of course. She was perfect in every way.
Suraj
“Fight, fight, fight, fight!” Despite their ages, Russ and Taylor behaved like schoolyard children whenever they were drunk, the pair egging us on while sloshing beer over their cups.
“Are they serious?” I asked Esteban.
“Always.” The werelion sighed. “When I was new, they made me fight Russ. This is what you have to look forward to in your middle age, Suraj. You drink with your boys on the deck, gloat about your children, and pick on someone younger than you. You down?”
I had about half a bottle of tequila in me and the rest waiting in a bottle on the deck table. Last time the group of us got together, we ventured into the hundreds of acres of property owned by Ian, stripped off our clothing, and hunted until we glutted ourselves with wild game.
I supposed this time they wanted to host Fight Club.
I answered by stripping off my shirt and rolling my shoulders.
“Don’t look so glum, buddy,” Ian called to me. “You’ll thank us for this later, once you’ve been crammed in a mobile women’s club for months. Take advantage of all this wilderness while you have the chance.”
Pants and boxers fell next to shouts and calls. Lyle whistled. I didn’t take him seriously. Not only was he straight as an arrow, but he was married to Doctor Bearheart and they had three rambunctious and hyperactive coydog offspring. All fifty pounds of her would kick all four hundred pounds of my ass if I looked at her husband wrong.
Esteban stripped and folded his clothing, too. Because we were men and not the actual beasts we were going to pretend to be for the upcoming brawl, we set our stuff aside in our deck chairs.
After all the time I’d spent cooped up in the city, shifting felt just shy of orgasmic. I shook free of the human body, letting my bones contort, the angles change, limbs lengthening in some ways and elongating in others. When I was younger, transforming subjected me to a whole-body itch from head to toe and a desire to claw off all of my flesh until it was over.
Now, it was like being born anew. I relished the rush of fur over brown skin and dropped down onto all fours. Claws burst from the tips of my finger and pressed into the dusty Texas soil.
As a human, my shifter heritage amplified my sense of smell, but in my animal form, it became unmatched. I longed to race into the wilds to begin the hunt, but I turned my head to find the keen, amber eyes of a male lion on me.
In our human bodies, Esteban and I were evenly matched, though I had about twenty food-loving pounds on him that I’d gained since entering America. We stood eye to eye while on all fours, matched in breadth and height, as well as power.
The gang had fallen surprisingly silent now, aside from the crunch of Lyle’s popcorn and Russ cracking open another beer. Ian lit a cigar—Leigh would kill him if she knew—and passed a second to Lyle.
Taylor stepped forward to the sidelines. “You guys know the rules. Well, Esteban does. Suraj, you aren’t a dick, and it’s kinda common sense, but we don’t go for the throat unless it’s for a pin. Nonlethal wounds are acceptable, but don’t rip anything off of each other that Jules or Sasha can’t sew back together. Got it?”
Identical big cat noises served as our confirmation.
“All right! This ought to be interesting. On three.” Taylor stepped back and gave us a wide berth before initiating the countdown to the match start.
I couldn’t believe I was doing this. Where I came from, no one fought unless it was for survival or training, and now I was entering the figurative ring with a pal for the amusement of our peers.
At the end of the count, we sprang at each other, claws out and teeth bared. We snarled and clawed and fought for dominance with the half-dead grass beneath us, gray and brittle, easily torn by huge paws.
Esteban hit hard. Usually when I fought, I scared off criminals or armed poachers by springing from the brush with the element of surprise before they knew I was there. The last time I’d gone up against another tiger, it had been my mother. The rarity of our kind hadn’t permitted me to meet many others over the years. And then, it had been for training instead of a drunken bout for fun.
His claws raked down my side, but I got him across the chest, not that our tough pelts couldn’t withstand a few tickles.
We tumbled and fell together again, leaping and snapping our teeth.
“Maybe we should have told them to keep the snarls down while our women throw their party,” Ian commented distractedly.
“Like that’ll happen,” Lyle replied. “Twenty bucks says Esteban’ll be the first one to roar. You know he can’t keep that shit down.”
The blood pounded in my veins, a battle rhythm urging me to annihilate my enemy, my humanity tempering it with a warning that Esteban was a friend and someone I cared about.
We rolled across the grass, kicking with our hind legs and scraping each other. We clawed and bit in a frenzied battle to pin the other to the ground first. Despite his size as an older male lion, Esteban had enough agility to outmaneuver my best moves. His mane may as well have been a million miles thick, guarding much of his upper body and preventing most of the chances I had to pin him by the throat.
The guys cheered. The scent of beer and brats was in the air, the barbecue tended by Russ. As I didn’t eat beef, a whole leg of lamb roasted nearby for me with a delicious charred coating perfuming the whole yard with the redolent aroma of the spice rub on its crispy exterior.
My rumbling belly encouraged me to end the battle as quickly as I could, but all of the motivation in the world wasn’t enough to get Esteban beneath me for any amount of time.
“Gotta work harder than that, Esteban! All that time sitting on your ass at work sites has you out of shape,” Taylor called to our contractor friend.
I would have snickered if we weren’t in each other’s faces, clawing, snarling, snapping—he roared, the depth of it and the bass taking me by surprise at close range. The sound reverberated in my ears and seemingly split the skies.
“Oh shit!” A chair tipped over and another man swore, difficult to discern one voice from another.
Heat flushed through me, renewed desperation pounding a visceral sensation through my throbbing skull, before I cut loose with a matching snarl and dove forward. We batted with claws, but my heavier weight collided with the lion and forced him down.
I had him, finally. How much time had passed, I didn’t know, but my receding bloodlust allowed me to recognize my opponent had yielded. I let Esteban up and transformed first. My whole body was slick with sweat and the occasional slash from his claws. I offered him a hand up from the ground.
“Goddamn, I ain’t never seen a fight like that before,” Lyle said, revealed to be the one who tipped over in his chair. A wet beer stain darkened his shirt and jeans.
“Damn good fight,” Ian remarked, nodding in approval.
“Sure was,” Esteban replied, grinning despite his heaving chest.
We kicked back with more alcohol before heading into the forest together to scare up more meat for the pit. Taylor and Ian both sw
ore I’d thank them later.
Once we headed out on tour, I wouldn’t be in touch with my beast form again until June.
Worth it, if it meant quality time with Nadir, and ample opportunities to see Penny smile.
Maybe I wasn’t as gay as I’d thought I was.
Chapter Seven
Suraj
As the date of Penny’s tour neared, Nadir told me to handle whatever affairs I had in Texas because we would be on the road for three months before returning to Houston. I laughed.
What affairs? Living near Dallas in the household of a vampire—at least, on the premises of a vampire’s grand estate—had not prepared me for actual life in Houston. Suburban Dallas did not compare to the bustle of downtown Houston, where I could become lost for hours as I wandered with only a map on my phone.
Everything differed from life in India, even my brief experiences with the cities of my native country. There, the persistent fog of toxic air lingered and offended my nose. It wasn’t so bad in Texas, though Nadir insisted that New York City smelled of urine at all hours of the day. I took his word for it.
The people and the architecture differed the most. When I asked Nadir how everything was maintained with such cleanliness, he assured me that I hadn’t wandered deep enough into Houston, and that America had its share of filth.
Again, I took his word for it. I envied him at times for being so well-traveled, but mostly, I clung to tenacious restraint forbidding myself to ask him to show me these places.
Between working with Penny and Nadir, I had determined life wasn’t fair. How could fate grant me so many wonderful opportunities and also punish me with the relationship I could never have?
Two issues were at play.
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