River Road

by Johnson, Suzanne

  She finished my makeup and stepped back to survey her handiwork, smiling. “That should earn you a wolf whistle or two.”

  I laughed, a tinge of hysteria in my voice. Wolf whistle. She had no idea.

  * * *

  Jake Warin was two years older than Alex, four or five inches shorter, and the polar opposite in personality. He was laid-back where Alex was intense, better at improvising when the rulebook didn’t work, and had a better grip on his temper—at least before the loup-garou attack. And dimples.

  They were the first thing I saw when I answered the back door just before seven. The last three years evaporated for a few seconds, and he was a normal human guy with no idea the prete world existed, and I was just a girl he was attracted to. Except I’d never been “just a girl,” and now he knew it.

  He didn’t say a word, but smiled, stepped into the kitchen, and pulled me into a hug. He smelled like sunshine and aftershave through a silk shirt the color of copper pennies, but I noticed a tired, worried edge to his eyes. It disappeared when he smiled again. “I missed you, cupcake. It took a long road for us to get here.”

  “I’m glad we did.” I led him into the double front parlors. “What’s the plan tonight?”

  “I made reservations at Commander’s. That okay?” He grinned, knowing what my answer would be. I loved Commander’s.

  Ask a baker’s dozen people their favorite New Orleans restaurant and you’ll get a baker’s dozen answers. Jacques-Imo’s had moved into my number-two spot, but give me any excuse for a splurge and I head straight for Commander’s.

  “What time does Zachary Richard start his first set?”

  “Just doing one and it starts at ten. We don’t have to be there early.” He laughed. “I know the owner.”

  We made small talk on the short drive to Washington Avenue, traded stories about Ken and Alex and the extended Warin family over turtle soup and sugarcane-grilled pork and bread pudding soufflé, heavy on the whiskey sauce. An intricate tapestry of soft jazz wove through the tables, blending with the rise and fall of conversations, clinking silverware, and laughter.

  “What do you think about the enforcer work so far?” I said, waiting for the coffee to arrive.

  He leaned back and took a deep breath. “I think I’m gonna like it. I wish I’d finished the training right after the change, but I had to get my head around it first. I started it, then quit and came back here. It hasn’t been easy.”

  I nodded. I’d grown up knowing I was different, that the world wasn’t like most people thought. Having that truth thrust on you, suddenly and violently? “I think it says a lot about how strong you are that you’ve been able to make something positive out of it.”

  He reached across the table and laid his hand over mine. “I’m sorry I stayed mad at you so long.” He paused, looking at the table then back up at me. “I have to ask. You and Alex. Are you…?”

  “Friends,” I said, firmly pushing The Kiss out of my mind. He’d bitten my lip, for one thing, and for another, he’d only kissed me to mess with my head. “He’s going out with Leyla Friday night. So don’t be thrown if I show up as his ‘date’”—I crooked my fingers into quotation marks—“at his mom’s birthday dinner Saturday. It’s just because he’s a chicken and doesn’t want to admit he’s been lying to her all this time.”

  Jake grinned. “You’re gonna meet Norma and pretend to be Alex’s girlfriend?”

  I shrugged. “We’ve been dating since Katrina, didn’t you know?”

  “I hadn’t planned to go, but now I have to. You and Norma.” He shook his head, laughing. He didn’t seem jealous, and I hoped that was a sign the cousins were outgrowing their fierce rivalry.

  We fought over the check, but Jake insisted on paying so I let him. I was still out for the big seafood fest all the mers had enjoyed in Buras. The Elders were waiting on a detailed expense breakdown and a report on why they should pay for it.

  We stood out front while the valet went for Jake’s truck, and I closed my eyes, feeling content. The night air was crisp and cool, and being here with Jake felt right. It was nice to step away from mermen and dead wizards and the River Styx for one night.

  “You ready for some music?” Jake stood behind me and slipped an arm around my shoulders. “I have it on good authority he’s going to play a couple of your favorites.”

  “I do love to hear that man sing, even though it’s in French and I can’t understand most of it.” I leaned against him and smiled. The real world would come barging back in soon enough. Tonight, I was content just to be.

  * * *

  The Gator was already packed when we arrived, but Jake shepherded me to the front, where a small table sat before the stage with two chairs, two glasses, a bottle of wine, and a RESERVED sign in the middle.

  Jake pulled out a chair for me and grinned. Here was a man who knew what a girl wanted.

  For ninety minutes, we sat side by side, Jake occasionally leaning over to whisper something about a song and, once, to plant a soft kiss on my jaw. When Zachary finished with an unplugged version of “Lumière Dans le Noir,” one of my favorites, I almost purred like Sebastian.

  I met Zachary without making too big an ass of myself, and finished my wine while Jake made sure the man got safely out of the bar without being hassled.

  Business at the Gator continued without missing a beat. The jukebox grooved out BeauSoleil, and the crowds settled in for the night. The last I’d spent any real time here, National Guardsmen and emergency workers assigned to New Orleans for post-hurricane security comprised most of the crowd. Now, college kids and tourists slammed down hurricanes and Abitas and a bouncer stood at the door.

  “Want to go upstairs for a while?” Jake held up the bottle of Riesling.

  I thought of Alex’s warnings about not being alone with Jake, and realized he was just trying to manage me by planting doubts in my mind. Big jerk. Same as making me think of his talented lips when I was with Jean Lafitte.

  “I’d love to.”

  Jake leaned over and said something to Leyla that sent her big doe eyes narrowing in my direction, and we headed for the back.

  He went into his small kitchen to get fresh glasses, and my gaze was drawn to the table. It was covered with guns, boxes of ammunition, and things I couldn’t identify but looked big and nasty and lethal.

  “What’s the arsenal for?” I frowned at the biggest piece of equipment. Rocket launcher? Flamethrower? Whatever, it looked like it could kill something big.

  He flicked his eyes over the collection. “Welcome to my new life, sunshine. Every monster needs its own flavor of weapon. I’m still trying to learn what all of them do, and which ones are needed for which pretes.”

  He picked up a box and held it open for me to see.

  “Bullets?”

  “Silver,” he said. “To kill werewolves and loup-garou.”

  Yikes. “You’re helping Alex with the investigation, not so much with prete calls. How much of this stuff do you really think you’ll use?”

  His voice was soft. “I’m going to be killing things, DJ. Alex is doing sentinel work, not me. Enforcers don’t just investigate.”

  He handed me a glass of wine and walked back into the living room, setting the bottle on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “That’s what I’m suited for now anyway. I like it, even though I think I shouldn’t. It bothers me that I want to kill things.” His grip on his wineglass tightened.

  “Sometimes you don’t have a choice.” That sounded lame, but I wasn’t sure how to handle the direction this conversation was taking.

  Alex had been trained as a killer, but he didn’t talk much about his enforcer runs. He liked his weapons, but seemed to have a clear vision of what was good and what was bad—and no qualms about killing what was bad. Sometimes Alex’s life outlook was too black-and-white for my taste, but Jake seemed to be wandering lost. Maybe Alex had been right to worry about him, and I had been arrogant to think he was okay.

  I fo
llowed Jake into the living room, sparsely furnished with an old bookshelf full of video and stereo equipment, a couple of chairs and lamps, a beat-up coffee table, and the same old worn brown sofa that had probably been here when he and Ken first bought the bar.

  I noticed an empty square on the wall that was a lighter shade of beige, where the shadowbox with his Marine Corps medals had hung. He’d taken it down. Just how much emotional trouble was he in?

  Even though I’d promised myself to stay out of his head tonight, I tried to get a read on Jake’s emotions. Nothing came through but a fuzzy were signature. Loup-garou didn’t broadcast well.

  I took a sip of wine, sat beside him on the sofa, and tried for an easy subject. “Tell me about your leg. Is it healed?”

  He flexed his right knee and looked down at it. “Yeah, before I shifted the first time, the surgeons took out all the rods and pins and put it in a cast. I split the cast during the change and when I shifted back, it was healed. Just like I’d never been hurt except I’ll always have the scars.”

  Jake had been backed off a cliff in an attack on his Marine unit in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2003. The fall saved his life, but the damage to his leg had been permanent. Or so they thought.

  “Alex says you’re running again.”

  His smile had an edge to it. “Yeah, like it never happened. It makes me wonder what the hell we were even doing over there.”

  I frowned. “You mean in Afghanistan?”

  He stared somewhere past my shoulder. “The world we were fighting to protect? Doesn’t exist, never did.” He shook his head, jaw tight. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to go there tonight.”

  “But—”

  “Hush.” He leaned over and put his wineglass on the coffee table and moved closer to me, taking my glass and setting it beside his. “Been thinking about you a long time, and we’re not gonna talk about anything except what’s right in this room, right now. You and me.”

  A stupid smile plastered itself on my face before I could stop it. Not that I tried very hard. “Yeah? What are we going to talk about?” I’m so sophisticated it’s scary sometimes.

  He slid his right arm around my waist and angled in for a kiss. It was sweet and soft, and I ran my hand down his cheek.

  “We’ve kissed before,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t sober so it gets thrown out on a technicality.” I caught a flash of the killer dimples and started to laugh before he moved in for round two and put a little more heat into it, winding his fingers through my hair and tracing his other hand in slow circles on my back. I quit laughing.

  Jake groaned when Fats Domino began singing out of my purse on the coffee table. I was starting to dislike Mr. Domino. “Ignore it,” I said, grabbing Jake’s collar and returning his attention to the matter at hand, namely me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made out on a sofa, but it was all coming back to me.

  “I didn’t hear a thing.” He slid a hand under my sweater and began kissing his way toward my collarbone.

  He eased me to my back and shifted his body alongside mine, nuzzling my neck and breathing in deeply before tilting his head up to kiss my ear. I brushed my hand through his hair and tried to pull him to my lips, but he growled and continued moving along my neck, nipping at my earlobe. My head tipped in an effort to catch his mouth for another kiss, but strong, rough hands—too rough—clutched my hips and held fast, one muscular leg slipping between mine.

  Laughing, I slapped at his shoulder. “Do you always go this fast on a first date? I can’t move.”

  He stilled, his breath heavy and hot against my neck, and I realized something had changed. I was still at playful, but he’d moved into possession. He held me too tightly, his mouth had grown too still over the artery thudding against his lips. If he broke skin, I’d be furry by Thanksgiving. The thought sent my heart rate into hyperdrive, and I felt him inhale deeply, taking in my fear.

  Scent could send a wolf over the edge before he could think better of it.

  “Jake?”

  My voice sounded too uncertain. Calm it down, DJ.

  “Hey, Marine. Let me up.”

  He made an unintelligible sound, and I struggled against his grasp. He shifted more weight onto me.

  “DJ…” The low growl of my own name rumbled through me. It wasn’t a sign of consciousness, but a warning.

  I froze as the long, deep kiss he’d planted on my neck turned into a bite. My skin was between his teeth. I didn’t even want to breathe.

  I eased a hand to his shoulder and did the only thing I thought might bring him around. I shot a jolt of magical energy at him—just a mild electrical shock, not enough to hurt him and not even a heavy tap on the scant physical energy I possessed as a Green Congress wizard.

  He jerked his head away and looked at me with eyes that had turned a flat, reflective golden-yellow. His wolf.

  “Jake? Stop. Listen to me.”

  “Shit.” He pushed himself off me and stood up, looking down with eyes that were slowly darkening back to amber.

  I took a deep breath and blinked, trying to force my muscles from shaking with the drain of adrenaline. Calm, DJ. Don’t upset him. I sat up and forced a smile. “It’s okay. No big deal. We just moved too fast.”

  I stood and reached for his hand, but he jerked it away.

  He started pacing, and I didn’t need to read his emotions to see he was scared. “No, it’s not okay. I thought I could control … I can’t…” He slammed his fist into the wall, smashing through the plaster and sending out a cloud of white, chalky debris. The electrical wiring inside the broken lathing lay exposed.

  “Jake—stop!” I reached for him as he thrust his fist toward me, stopping about two inches from my nose. It took everything I had not to flinch, but instinctively I knew if I showed fear now, we’d never come back from it. He might never come back from it.

  “Watch,” he said. His knuckles were bloody and raw from impact with the wall, but as I took his hand the skin reknitted itself. Within thirty seconds, he was unmarked but for a fine coating of plaster dust and an earthquake crevice in his psyche. I’d never known a were could heal that fast. But as people kept telling me, loup-garou were not ordinary weres.

  “I’m a long way from human, DJ,” he said, then laughed. It sounded as bitter as chicory coffee the morning after. “I thought I had the damned wolf under control, but he’s still controlling me.”

  I held his fist in my hand and forced his fingers to uncurl. “I’ve never been purely human, Jake. We’ll just take it slow. I know you won’t hurt me.”

  But even as I said the words, I wasn’t sure I meant them. Moments ago, I hadn’t known it at all. I’d been scared.

  His voice grew hard and he still wouldn’t look at me. “I wouldn’t hurt you but he might.”

  With horror, I realized he hadn’t accepted his situation at all. He’d just become a better actor. Until he came to terms with what happened, he would never be able to control himself. “You are him. The wolf is not separate.”

  He pulled his hand away and clenched his fist again, holding it at his side. “I am not him. I won’t be him.”

  God, what could I say? He had to calm down before he shifted spontaneously, and as brave as I tried to sound, I wasn’t sure how either one of us would react if that happened.

  I practiced breathing and kept my voice low and level. “You have to accept what you are. You have to make peace with it.”

  He avoided my eyes as he walked past me to the kitchen counter and grabbed his keys. “I better take you home. It’s getting late.”

  “Don’t push me out, Jake. Let me help.”

  He looked at me finally, and the pain in his eyes made me want to cry. “I don’t know how to let you help me. I don’t know how to help myself, or even what would help.”

  He chuckled and shook his head, looking at the floor. “I think you pushed a whole set of buttons the folks at Quantico didn’t anticipate.”

  I smiled
a little at that. I knew one of the things his sponsor had done was bait him to lose his temper, to see how far they could push him before he lost control and shifted involuntarily. He must have achieved a good mastery of the wolf or the enforcers wouldn’t have let him come back to New Orleans. But anger wasn’t the only strong emotion, was it?

  “We’ll call it a night, but I’m not willing to give up on us.” I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. “Let’s slow it down and start over.”

  He nodded, but wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  The drive home was silent and tense. Finally, he asked, “Who called? It might be about the case.”

  If I’d answered my phone, could we have avoided that catastrophe? I pulled it out of my purse to check the call log. “Alex.”

  Jake grunted. “That figures. I’m not sure my cousin’s too happy to have me working with you guys.”

  “He’s just worried about you.” I unbuckled my seat belt and shifted around to face him. “Look, I know it’s different for him as a shifter than it is for you, but he can help you. Let him.”

  He didn’t answer, just kept his eyes on the road, so I punched the buttons to retrieve the phone message. It was brusque.

  “DJ, call me when you get home. A fisherman just found Melinda Hebert’s body on the riverbank in Plaquemines, near another breach.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Tish sounded half asleep when she answered the phone at six a.m. “DJ, do you know what time it is? What’s wrong?”

  I gave her the text-message version on the latest Styx rift and Melinda Hebert, then asked her to stop by. “I have an idea on how to permanently seal these rifts, but I want somebody to know what I’m doing.”

  In case it goes badly, I didn’t add.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Tish said quietly. “What are you planning?”

  “Stop by and I’ll tell you.”

  I didn’t want to explain over the phone. I could plead for her silence better in person.