Illicit

by Cathy Clamp

  Rachel nodded and drank, realizing that talking with Asylin had made her feel a little better. She knew the things she shared with the people in this town weren’t anything her mama, papa, or brothers would ever truly understand.

  “Hey, is Dani here? We should probably decide what we’re going to do once the travel ban is lifted.”

  Asylin motioned with her head toward the door as she put away the juice pitcher. “Up in her room, pouting about that very thing. It might make her feel better to see you.”

  It might help me too. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  She was on her way up the stairs when Larissa came around the bend in the hallway and started down the steps. She gave Rachel a smug smile and said sarcastically, “Poor little owl, so wounded and helpless. Come to Bosnia. We show you what means to be tough.”

  Excuse me? “You can’t be talking to me, because if you were, you’d find out damn fast just how tough an American is. Go ahead. Say ‘blood feud’ again. First blood will be your nose, hitting the floor from the top of these stairs.”

  * * *

  The past and the present were colliding in Dalvin’s brain. He wanted to keep being pissed at Rachel, but … she was right. Every word she’d said was right. He did know her family: her mother, her Aunt Krystal. They wouldn’t be able to handle her being Sazi. He himself had never even known a three-day shifter. Everyone in his family was alphic.

  “Thanks a lot, asshole,” came a furious male voice from behind him. “I just barely got Rachel thinking she was okay.” Scott’s face was set in tight lines, his nostrils flared.

  Feeling contrite, Dalvin kicked the wide concrete steps leading up to the apartment building and shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his pants. “I deserve that. But what would you do if you’d watched someone’s family suffering for a decade?”

  The question took some of the anger out of the other man’s face. Scott sat down on the stoop and looked at his hands.

  “Well, I’d probably start by asking why, instead of just assuming she was a callous bitch, y’know? She’s not. Rachel is the sweetest woman I know.”

  “I know. I know. And I was trying to get to where I could ask her. It took me the whole first day to convince myself I knew her. But hearing her say ‘Mom’ so casually, and with obvious affection in her scent … that … it just got to me.” His anger had faded into a dull lump of lead in his gut. He hated that he’d made her cry.

  “So how do you know her? I wasn’t kidding that I’ve known her since we were in grade school. We’ve been best friends most of my life. But you obviously know her real family, so I guess that trumps me.”

  “My family lived down the road from hers in Detroit. We went to school together. I was her best friend too. Well, more than friends, really. She was very special to me.”

  The rest of the anger left Scott’s face and he started looking sad. “Let’s go upstairs before we go any farther. You need some background and so do I.”

  People exiting the building gave Dalvin hateful looks. One older woman opened her mouth, and Scott put up a hand to stop her.

  “Don’t, Jenny. Please. Let’s all just try to get past this.”

  The woman closed her mouth, but the five-year-old with her didn’t hesitate to punch Dalvin on the arm. “You made Rachel cry. You better tell her you’re sorry.”

  He nodded and rubbed the spot, though the kid hadn’t hit him hard. “I will. I am sorry.”

  By the time they made it to Scott’s apartment, Dalvin had collected a good number of dirty looks and more than a few mumbled curses from other residents of the building. It seemed a little strange to him. If Rachel was right that she was a slave and pariah, why was everyone protecting her?

  Scott pulled two beers from the fridge in his small apartment and offered one to Dalvin.

  “Sit. It’s not the fanciest couch in town, but it’s comfortable. It folds out. That’s where you’ll be sleeping.” Dalvin saw that his bags were piled in the corner of the gold shag carpet. Where in the world had they found harvest gold shag carpet if the town had been here for only a decade?

  “If you want a drawer, I’ll clean one out,” Scott continued, sinking into an ancient threadbare brown recliner, “and there’s a little room in the closet if you need it. So, you knew her for the first twelve years and I’ve known her for the last ten. Give me three words that you’d use to describe Rachel the kid.”

  Three words? Dalvin sat down on the couch. It was sort of comfy—not too springy and with thick cushions under the plaid ’70s green-and-brown upholstery. He thought for a second while he took a pull on the beer. He shouldn’t drink on the job. He knew that. But hopefully the hierarchy would make an exception, considering they’d probably all heard the fight.

  “Happy. Talented. Determined.” He motioned with the bottle to Scott. “You next, for adult Rachel?”

  “Traumatized. Angry. Determined.” Scott stared at the label on the bottle. “I would like to have known her happy. With the world open to her and a loving family. That would have been cool.” He paused, then continued. “I didn’t get to see much of her talent, except in school choir. We both just tried to keep our heads down. Singing, especially her kind of singing, attracts attention.”

  “I guess the trauma was from the snakes?” Dalvin had met a few other kids who had been rescued from the clutches of Nasil and the others. They were pretty messed up. “I tried to find her. We all did. But there were no clues. None.”

  Scott waved that off. “Yeah, I get that. Even the top people in the Council didn’t know what was happening. Rachel was just one of many. Claire was too, if you didn’t know. That’s how they know each other—from the cave. But that was only part of the trauma.”

  Dalvin hadn’t known about Claire. “Claire seems so … well-adjusted.”

  Scott lifted one foot onto the seat, revealing an elegant, patterned sock under his gray slacks. Everything about him was well put together. Far better than Dalvin’s mismatched wardrobe.

  “Yeah. That probably comes from a good foster family. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Williamses didn’t do their best. They did. They rock. But there were so many of us, and we were all messed up. It was like the lockdown ward in a psych hospital some days. You do the best you can to deal with the crisis du jour.”

  So part of the trauma came from being here, in this town. “Rachel said the Omega position in town was like being both a slave and a pariah, and that you’ve done your time too. Was that how you saw it?” Scott hesitated, so he continued. “Because I saw this whole outpouring when she started crying, and I feel like I’m the pariah now.”

  “Well, yeah.” Scott acknowledged the comment with another swig of beer. “But both things are true. I can understand how it looks weird to someone outside our little slice of hell, though. See, there’s Luna Lake, B.G and Luna Lake, A.G—that’s before Lenny Gabriel and after.

  “Lenny Gabriel, our late police chief, was a sadistic, manipulative bastard. He liked to inflict pain and humiliation on Rachel and me, and probably our predecessors, just because he could. I guess it made him feel powerful to beat up the little guy. Maybe it got him off. I don’t know. But he and Van Monk, along with all the upstanding citizens you just saw rallying around her, were also our abusers. Both of us have spent the last seven years being the town’s whipping boy and girl. We’ve been pushed, slapped, shoved, beaten, humiliated, and worked until our fingers bled. And half of the time, we weren’t sure we’d survive shifting on the moon.”

  Wow. How could he possibly respond to that? “What do you mean, survive shifting? Once you’re a shifter, you shift. Right?”

  Scott was taking a drink and choked, tumbling forward as beer shot out of his nose. Once he could breathe again, he stared in astonishment. “You’re joking, right?”

  When Dalvin shook his head, Scott blinked. Several times. “Wow. I would have thought they’d trained Wolven agents on all aspects of shifting. No, bro. That’s not how it works. Jus
t because an Omega shifts okay one month is no guarantee they’ll survive the next. We’re barely—and I do mean barely—shifters. Every single month is a crapshoot.

  “The Omega before me died while shifting. Every single month it hurts like it did the very first time because you don’t have enough magic to get rid of the pain. An alpha has to help us shift, or we might have one wing and one arm, or maybe our feathers won’t come in.

  We’re no longer human, but not quite Sazi. It sucks rocks. The one thing Monk was decent at was making sure we shifted. We could always count on him to do that. He wouldn’t really watch us afterward. We might wander off and wake up somewhere weird, but somehow that was okay, probably because we were mind-controlled.”

  Holy crap. Apparently, he needed to spend some time with Amber and get a better sense of what omegas went through before he made an ass out of himself again. “Sorry.” What else could he say?

  “Not your fault. But don’t pick on Rachel. Okay? Her life has sort of sucked since you knew her.” They sipped beer in silence for a few minutes; the emotions swirling around in the room were strong enough that they both sneezed more than once.

  Scott took a deep breath and gave a weak smile. “So, tell me about Rachel as a kid. Back when she was happy.”

  That he could do.

  CHAPTER 7

  Larissa’s eyes narrowed and her fingers dug into the bannister. She had just opened her mouth to respond when Rachel heard a heavy thump, like something hitting the floor hard, behind her, attracting the bear’s attention. Rachel looked over her shoulder and saw Iva, who had comforted her when she’d first arrived, at the foot of the stairs.

  “Larissa!” the woman said sharply. “No more. Win one battle before starting another. Come down here. Alpha would speak with you.”

  Eyes flashing angrily, Larissa started down the stairs. As she passed Rachel, she fake-stumbled and tried to push Rachel against the railing, but the owl shifter was prepared. The bear shifter hit her unyielding body and wound up nearly spinning around on the stairs. She had to grab at the rail for balance and ended up with her legs at awkward angles on two different stair treads.

  Rachel tipped her head, stepped over Larissa’s leg, and said, with sweet innocence in her voice, “Oops. You’ll have to be more careful. These stairs can be tricky.”

  Larissa’s low, rumbling growl should have bothered her, but frankly, a physical fight with someone she could whup would be almost welcome. Hair pulling and kicking? Really? She’d graduated from that when she was five. She’d love to see how the bear would take a punch straight to the face.

  Turning left at the top of the stairs, Rachel walked down the hall to Dani’s room and gave an obligatory knock before poking her head in.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” she said, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the music playing in the background. Rachel sighed without making a sound. She still didn’t know what Dani saw in bubble gum pop.

  Her foster sister’s smile lit up the room. Her teeth could have been feathers, given how white they were. “Rachel! C’mon in. Pull up a beanbag.”

  The beanbag chairs scattered around the room were a shade of pink that would have made Malibu Barbie’s eyes hurt. Another thing Rachel didn’t get about her friend. The bags were hard to sit on, hard to get out of, and not all that comfortable. She grabbed the rolling chair from the desk instead.

  “So little miss Larissa tried to roller-derby me off the staircase just now. Have you met her?”

  Danielle rolled her eyes. Her long, wavy hair was swept off to one side of her heart-shaped face and held with a barrette that was the same pink as the beanbags. Even on her best day when she’d had long hair, Rachel wouldn’t have been able to get her hair to do that. Dani always looked like a model ready for a shoot, just waiting for the photographer to call for her. She had no interest in being in front of a camera, though—Dani was focused on science. She planned to be a wildlife biologist, studying owls. Rachel laughed every time she thought about it.

  “Oh, yes,” Dani said. “Mom introduced the whole family. Suljo, the oldest son, is a hunk and seems sweet, but Zara and Larissa are prime-grade witches. They wanted my room instead of the guest rooms. Uh, no.” She let out a snort. “And I am so sick of the sinister whispering in French. Hello? You’re in America. Just speak English.”

  “French? Why would they be speaking French? And how do you know that’s what it is?”

  Dani leaned back on the bed and propped one dark calf up on the footboard. “First term, I had to have a foreign language and French sounded cool. I want to go to Europe someday to study, and French is spoken in a lot of places where English isn’t. I got an A-minus in the class and the professor suggested I take the advanced course. She says I’m a natural.” She shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. Hey, you should take it too! Then we can sound sinister like them.”

  Rachel leaned forward, resting her palms on her knees.“What were they talking about?”

  “Mostly about this fight Larissa’s supposed to have. She keeps telling Zara that she’s going to kick Anica’s butt. But I accidentally overheard her on the phone, telling someone that she’s going to throw the fight.”

  Whoa. That was interesting, but she couldn’t tell Dani why. “Who was she talking to?”

  Dani shrugged again. “Not a clue. Like I said, it’s always in low whispers and I wasn’t really listening.”

  “She’s going to be surprised at what comes next,” Rachel said with a chuckle.

  Dani raised her brows, her dark eyes questioning, and sat up straighter, stuffing a second pillow behind her back. “Details, girl.”

  “I suggested an Ascension challenge instead of a physical fight,” she said as casually as possible. She knew Dani would smell her pride anyway. “The Council people thought it was a pretty good idea.”

  Her friend let out a loud hoot. “You didn’t! Oh, you’re bad!”

  “The cat course, so she can tear up those perfect nails on pine bark.” Rachel was giggling.

  Dani started laughing. “The full treatment, robes and everything?”

  “Alek made two copies of the whole rule book. That hot councilman, Rabi, is going to give them to the two male alphas. But there’s a downside.”

  Another questioning look, and the scent of oily sweet curiosity filled the room. Dani rolled one finger in a circle, urging Rachel to continue.

  “I have to show Dalvin the course route so he can train the other girl, Anica.”

  “Ooo, I heard about that. What’s with you and him? How do you know him?” There was a knock on the door. “Yes? Who is it?” Dani called.

  From the other side of the door, Scott said, “Just a little owl looking for a place to roost his tired claws.”

  “C’mon in.”

  The door cracked open just wide enough for Scott to slide through. He looked even paler than usual in a white pullover sweater and gray pants. “Big powwow downstairs with lots of angry bears. I was a little nervous walking past them. Thought I should warn you that the Council is headed over here and Dalvin will be with them.”

  “Ah, crap,” Rachel said. “Guess I’d better hit the back stairs and scoot.”

  Dani sat up and threw open her arms. “Wait, what happened? All I heard was that you two had a fight.”

  Rachel opened her mouth, but Scott held up a hand, saying, “If I may? The über-short version: Dalvin and Rachel were hooked up back in Detroit before Rachel got grabbed by the snakes. He didn’t know she was still alive. She didn’t know he was Sazi or that he’d joined Wolven. Fast-forward to today and they each discover the other exists. Drama ensues, fighting commences, and here we are.”

  Rachel blew a raspberry. “We were not hooked up. We were twelve. But we were friends, and the rest really was the short-and-sweet version.”

  Scott tipped his head, causing his waist-length hair to fall over one eye. “Eh, I beg to differ. Boy says hooked up, girl says not. Salt to taste.”

  That made her fa
ll back against the padded chair back. “Wait. Dalvin said we were hooked up?”

  He nodded.

  Dani let out a low, hooting whistle. “Ooo. Drama ensues. What did you tell Claire when she and Alek fought? ‘When people fight like that, lust is in the air.’”

  “Is not!” Rachel exclaimed, but an odd feeling made her head swim, and her stomach felt like she’d swallowed a pound of lead.

  Scott lifted his head and tapped her on the shoulder. “Go, go. They’re nearly here.”

  Rachel jumped up and headed for the door, then turned around and gave each of her friends a swift hug. “Thanks, guys. I have to do some thinking. Cover for me.”

  Dani followed her down the back stairs. They had to stop short when two of Anica’s family walked by on the ground floor, speaking what Rachel presumed was Serbian. Dani tugged on her sleeve and whispered in her ear, “That’s her, Rach!”

  She shook her head, not understanding. Dani leaned in again. “On the phone with Larissa. The tall woman is the other person who was speaking French.”

  “How do you know?” Rachel asked quietly. The “tall woman” was Draga Petrovic. Why would the omega of the Bosnian sloth be speaking French to one of the Serbian alphas?

  “The way she says Anica … Ah-NEE-ka. She puts the emphasis on the middle and drops the last syllable until it’s almost an ‘o.’ The other people here don’t. French has really taught me about vowel sounds.”

  Rachel stared at the crowd in the living room, the whole lot of them stinking of angry bear musk. Too many voices, talking in too many languages.

  While she was trying to figure out what to do, the front door opened and Amber and Rabi came in. Rabi shouted, “People, people, please quiet down and listen!”

  Maybe she should stay and find out what was going on. If it had anything to do with Ascension, they might need her anyway. Looking more closely, she realized Dalvin was nowhere to be seen in the room. Maybe he’s guarding the perimeter. If he is, I’m safe.

  Feeling movement behind her, she glanced back. It was Scott.