by Linda Welch
The room might seem yet bigger if not for the eleven naked men who lounge on the furniture. I heard that although shifters wear clothes in public, they like to relax and be themselves in their homes. However, I didn’t know relaxing means going buck naked, and being presented with the reality is something else. I don’t know where to look, but everywhere my gaze drifts it lands on a superb male body. Castle sniggers in the background.
Were my ego out of proportion to my size, I could conclude my delightful company makes two young men semi-erect but I’m sure it has more to do with the tension in the room.
“You may leave us, Christo, Malchali,” Val says quietly, sounding very much not amused.
Blood suffuses their faces and other parts wilt as Val stares at them. They shuffle to their feet and leave through a door in the rear wall.
Val says. “They are still cubs.”
He sits on the edge of an armchair with his legs apart and the biggest penis I have ever seen dangling between them. Not that I’ve seen many penises, but I have a good idea of the average length and girth, and Val is massive. His testicles are also huge. It makes sense, when you know his animal side. His skin is dark and he’s hugely muscled. There’s not a clean line on his body, he bulges everywhere. His face is broad, with huge brown eyes fringed with long dark lashes.
“Now we know why he wears a toga in public,” Castle says. “You’d never stuff that in a pair of pants.”
I’m too nervous to laugh.
Val has a low, gruff voice. “We were about to dine. Will you join us?”
I clasp my hands behind my back. “Thanks, but I’m good.” Asking me to eat with them is a good sign, they wouldn’t invite an enemy to dine, and my refusal is not impolite. So far, so good.
“Very well. How can we help you?”
“A shifter tried to kill me.”
Silence stretches. Has everyone except me stopped breathing?
Val leans in, one arm draped over a knee. “You are mistaken.”
“I don’t make mistakes where my life is concerned.” I struggle to keep my voice steady and not erupt in anger. “He put his teeth in my shoulder and neck. I got into a building and he followed me inside. Rampaged through apartments terrifying the occupants and causing I don’t know how much damage. I’m sure your contacts in the constabulary can verify the reports.”
Val regards me, then his narrowed eyes glance at a young brown-haired shifter and he jerks his chin at the passage. The shifter pushes up from his seat and hurries through the room.
They wait. The room buzzes with conversation exchanged in low voices. I should be able to understand them, but among themselves shifters talk in a language which is a mixture of words and sounds.
Castle prowls the room and starts up the staircase, but pauses on the steps as the shifter returns. The guy goes to Val, speaks low in his ear and retakes his chair.
“What she says is true,” Val announces to the room at large. “According to police statements from residents, an intruder shifted between human male and feline form. But,” he continues, switching his gaze to me, “I guarantee he is not one of mine.”
“A rogue?”
“There are no rogues in my territory.”
“Your territory doesn’t include the city.”
Val leans back. “True. But we would know were an outsider in the area.” He flashes big square teeth. “A shifter thing.”
“But you agree a shifter attacked me.”
“No. We agree what seems to be one of the dual-natured ran amok through a city building.”
I’m at a loss. If it wasn’t one of Val’s pack, where did the shifter come from? Why did it attack me? Val is positive the guy is not one of his, and is reluctant to admit he was indeed a shifter.
Voices outside, calling out what sounds like a challenge. The shifters who are sitting spring to their feet. Val takes two steps to the door before it crashes open. A streak of tawny fury bounds at me.
A huge black haunch knocks me aside and I land on my hip.
Val, in his bull form, towers over the cat. He lowers his great head, curved horns touching the floor, and snorts through his nostrils.
The cat bats at Val’s horns. It paces and cries, trying to go past him to reach me. Val tosses his head and the next snort flattens the cat’s facial fur.
The other shifters look poised to change. The air is thick with musk which overwhelms the cooking smells. The cat rolls its head and spits; Val lowers his horns again and his right forehoof gouges shavings from the wood floor.
The cat sinks to its belly, tail threshing back and forth, and snarls.
Val morphs back to his human form, so fast he’s no more than a shimmer of hide and horn before the muscle-bound man stands over the cat. His face is dark with rage. “Delamore,” he bellows.
The cat writhes, and a man lies on the floor in his place. He quickly surges to his knees and hurls his hand at me. His voice is anguished. “She killed Layna before my eyes!”
He tries to leap upright but is buried in a mountain of naked male flesh as the other shifters, excluding Val, leap on him. Two of them pull him up so he kneels with arms forced behind his back. Throwing back his head, he yells as tears stream down his face. I distinguish the words Layna, and dead. What else he says is lost in unintelligible gabble.
“Get Layna,” Val says. A tall, slim shifter hurries to the rear of the cabin.
Delamore hangs his head and sobs. “Layna.”
His anguish is a spectral hand clenched around my heart. I believe him. He saw me kill the woman he loves. We share an uncanny bond formed by watching those we deeply care for die, helpless to prevent it. Pity and sympathy wash away anger and fear. I want to offer words of comfort but dare not go near him, and I doubt he’ll hear me anyway; grief and the savage need to avenge his love grips him.
“Do you know what’s going on, Rain?” Castle asks, followed by, “Don’t reply, you’ll look stupid talking to nothing.” As he has countless times before, he links his hands behind his back and paces. “Seems to me the puma thinks you killed Layna, whoever Layna is. But we know you didn’t and Val has sent for Layna.” He twirls to face me. “The question is, my little cupcake, why would he believe, honestly believe, he saw you kill Layna?”
A spell. The shifter is spelled.
Wiping her hands on a towel, a honey-haired young woman rushes into the room. Muscles roll beneath her smooth naked skin and I know I wouldn’t want to go up against this one in a fight. Although flour dappling her cheek and chin indicate she’s baking, the pack females are the hunters.
She drops the towel, bends at the waist and takes Delamore’s face between her palms, forcing him to look up at her. “Del, what is it?”
I hold my breath. The shifters are tense and static mixes with the musky scent. Silence pools around them.
“You are dead,” Delamore finally says in a small, lost voice.
“No, my dear. Can you not feel me?”
His hands hesitantly settle over Layna’s, his voice breaks on the word. “Layna?”
He slumps forward, his cheek on her belly and she wraps her arms around his head. “I’m whole. No one hurt me, Del.”
“But I saw,” he says huskily.
Val is back in his chair, hands clasped on the arms. “What did you see, Delamore?”
Layna moves her hands to Delamore’s shoulders so he can speak. “We were leaving Gettaholt. She came from the deepest, darkest shadow.” His gaze finds me and his voice turns guttural; his shoulders shake.
“But you went alone to the city,” Layna says. “I have been here all day.”
“She gutted Layna!” Delamore says as if he doesn’t hear her.
Her fingers dig into his flesh. “No, Del. I’m here, with you.”
“You did not sense the wraith’s approach?” Val asks.
Delamore shakes his head against Layna’s stomach.
“And you did not think it strange?” Val’s brows come together to form a single
hairy bar. “What then?”
“I chased her through the streets. She tried to escape to a roof and I went after her. She disappeared, but I knew she went into the building. I followed. I almost had her. I sensed her near, a wall away, but she used her wraith magic to elude me. I had to leave when the police came. I returned to Layna but her body had gone.”
Val asks, “When you saw the wraith kill Layna, were you alone in the vicinity? Did you hear a voice or voices?”
Delamore murmurs, “No,” before burying his face in Layna’s belly.
“Take him to your room,” Val tells Layna as he heaves up from the chair. “Do not leave him.”
Layna gives him a quizzical frown. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I mean, not for an instant, until the magic fades. Your presence proves to him what happened was an illusion. You must be with him, to show him what is, or he will go after the wraith again.”
“How long will it take?” I ask.
“Not long. Opposed by logic, the spell’s strength is already waning. As long as he sees and feels Layna, Delamore knows he was tricked. Left to himself, it would overpower him again before it runs its course.”
“Come, my love.” Layna pulls Delamore to his feet. He lets her lead him up the staircase.
When they are out of sight, Val growls, “I will find whoever did this and kill them.”
“Not if I find them first.”
“Fair enough. But we can help each other. Are you willing to share what you discover, if anything?”
“I am. You’ll do the same?”
His smile makes my stomach roil. Should Val find the culprit first, he will be a long time dying.
As well as physically weary, I’m worn out from expounding by the time Castle and I arrive at my apartment building. The hellion, the shifter, Castle’s murder? Who? Why? I can’t think straight anymore.
“The hellion was sent for us,” Castle muses.
“Obviously. You can’t call forth a hellion on a whim.”
“Hey, let me finish! But the shifter, maybe it was opportunity. They see a potentially dangerous shifter nearby and throw a spell at him.”
“Which means I’m being watched?” My shoulders slump. “Great.”
We stop outside my building. “I’d better go in. Hope River’s asleep, or how am I going to explain this?” I tug at the sweat shirt with both hands.
“You’ll come up with something.”
“Have to.” I push my hair off my forehead. “See you tomorrow?”
Castle reaches out to me; his hand falls. “I’ll be here.”
“Will you?”
“Always.”
Chapter Eleven
Warmth envelops me. Firm arms embrace me. Taut flesh cocoons me. Gentle, steady breathing lifts the muscles of River’s chest against my spine. I should disentangle but am too comfortable. I crack an eye; the dark-pomegranate-red of night still hangs over the rooftops. I go to sleep again.
I wake spooned to a hot body with a hard butt. I don’t remember switching positions during the night, we must have moved in our sleep. Shuffling back, I put a few inches between us. River loses flesh but doesn’t rouse.
Rubbing my thumbs in the corners of my eyes, I ease from the bed, kneel at a cube and select a gray button-up shirt, black jeans and the requisite underwear, and go in the bathroom for the morning routine of brushing teeth, so on and so forth. River is sitting up in bed when I come out dressed. He pinches his waist with thumb and forefinger as though gauging how much flesh he carries. Blue, white and red neon from the Maddox Market sign across the street flashes on his pale skin, spattering him with rainbow colors. His eyes dart to me, wary as a cornered animal.
I speak softly. “Good morning. How did you sleep?”
“Great. How long?”
“About eleven hours.” Did he wake and find me gone? I wait, but he says nothing so I guess he slept the night through.
He’s all taut lean muscle and sleek flesh. Dark eyes with a hint of purple glimmer behind tendrils of fine black hair. Remembering how he felt in my arms last night, I’m glad embarrassment doesn’t give me red cheeks. I know, because I checked in a mirror the first time it happened.
“I slept, even like this.”
I smile. “We should talk about the ways you can control your body.”
“We should,” he agrees, angling his head, brushing one hand down the other arm. “Rain, look, I just noticed it.”
The scar on his upper arm. I squat next to him and pass a finger over it. He twitches at the touch.
“Looks like you were cut.” Every wound I receive disappears when I drop flesh, yet a small jagged scar always decorates my shoulder, and three holes in each earlobe, as if I once wore earrings. The scar and tiny holes were with me when I woke Upside, along with my name and clothes.
Castle got his ear pierced last year and wore a black diamond stud. The first time he shed flesh, he spent ten minutes scrabbling on hands and knees trying to find the thing in a filthy basement, only to discover the hole in his ear had closed up.
“This looks old. You already had it when you woke Upside, and the tats.” My fingers smooth over his scar. He doesn’t flinch this time.
I pull down my shirt’s shoulder to reveal the small blemish. “I’ve always had this. I figure I got it before. I’ve been cut, bitten and burned since I came Downside, but the wounds disappear when I entirely shed flesh and there are no scars. But this one is always here.”
His brow creases “Entirely shed?”
I sit back on my heels. “Lesson number one: You know we increase body mass when you and I touch, or are touched by a vampire, but we can do it to ourselves without external compulsion. As we are now, we don’t have the weight of full flesh, but we can manipulate our mass in different ways. I lose enough to become lighter if I want or have to move fast. If I need more mass for something strenuous, I pull it in. And completely shedding it is like … disappearing, except we don’t really.” I want to reassure him with a touch. It seems a natural thing to do, as if we are humans who touch casually, not wraiths who avoid contact because we don’t want to force flesh on each other.
I tell him we can disperse the components of our bodies and restore them to a condition of unity. But I can’t describe the physical process or explain why we can do it, and experience tells me everyone wants to know why, about everything. River looks totally at sea. I speak a language he doesn’t understand.
“We can go through solid objects.” I dip my chin and smile. “Though, there are disadvantages. A neat trick when you want to escape trouble, but you lose what you’re wearing and carrying and you’re blind. You can move, but you’re walking in the dark.”
He studies me intently. “Show me.”
My head jerks back. “I said we lose what we’re wearing!”
“Right.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively. “Prove it.”
I burst out laughing and he gives me a sidelong smirk.
I wasn’t going to do this yet but smart-ass needs a demonstration. I walk to the bathroom door and through it.
When I come from the bathroom wearing the oversized T-shirt I slept in, River is right outside standing over my small pile of clothes. His eyes are wide as I walk past to the bed and plop down on it.
“Guess you’re a believer now?”
He joins me and sits down heavily. “What are we, Rain? In Manhattan, we are ghosts as far as everyone is concerned. Were we dead there?”
I have asked myself the question too many times to count. “I do have a theory, but remember it’s a theory. We were alive Upside. We died, but for some reason didn’t pass on to where the dead go. We stayed there as phantoms. But Downside magic makes us real.”
“Why? How?”
I lift my shoulders. “How the magic works isn’t a science we can investigate.”
“Okay.” He jiggles one fisted hand as if shaking dice, indicating frustration with something he can do nothing about. “What about others lik
e us and vampires making us solid against our will?”
“Think about it. Wraiths and vampires are the only entities who… .” I make my eyes big and voice hollow, “… .returned from a true death.”
He doesn’t smile, so I guess a manic cackle will be wasted on him.
“Nothing else can affect us?”
“Not that I know of.”
We don’t recall anything before we are born Upside, yet something remains in the psyche. I knew I’d hate rare meat, like red wine, adore raw brown sugar in coffee. And I got a sick sensation in my stomach when Castle and I were Upside in Dallas and approached an alley. I couldn’t go down there. Where did it all come from, if not a former life?
River says, “Or were we created like this and the knowledge planted in our heads?”
“Why would anyone want to make something like us, what use are we Upside? Do you mean by a deity or by science?”
“I suppose neither option is logical.”
“Nothing about us is logical. I’d strike out science. Castle has been - ” Pretending Castle isn’t here will give me heartburn. “Castle was Downside forty years and he told me Pine, over in Maltemore, has been here ninety. I expect there are wraiths who are older. Not only is that an awful long science experiment, could the technology have existed a century ago?” I flip one hand. “Anyway, it’s too fantastical.”
He snorts out a small laugh and cocks his thumb at the window and street beyond. “And that isn’t?”
“You have a point.” I grin and scratch behind my ear. He still can’t believe half of what he sees out there.
“But we were visible to the vampires in Manhattan.” River leans back on one elbow. “We became real for the vampires but nobody else saw us. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I wonder if Upside humans don’t perceive us because in their reality we are impossible? They can’t, or refuse to, acknowledge what can’t exist.”
“But they see the vampires, though they don’t know what they are. Why them and not us?”
His questions begin to irritate me again; it feels as if every other word is why? I don’t have answers and hashing it over is pointless. “Living Downside is about accepting life as it is, not trying to find a reason for everything.”