by Lauren Esker
"Here," came his hoarse reply.
Peri stumbled through the mess and saw him standing naked in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning on the doorframe and staring blankly at her. His dark skin glistened in the sunlight streaming through the gap in the wall. She thought at first it was sweat, then realized he was dripping on the floor. His bare belly and leg were covered with blood.
"Noah. Oh no. Sit down, please—" With Wendy tucked into her other arm, she helped him sit on the floor before looking up at the shell-shocked compound residents staring at the hole in the wall, at her, and at the bodies on the floor. "Does anyone here have medical training? We have injured people. Where is my dad? Where's Hank?"
This last part finally penetrated. "He's out checking the perimeter—" one of the men began.
"Well, get him! You, with the hat, do it now!" She unconsciously straightened her back, throwing a bark of command into her voice, and somewhat to her surprise, the man she'd indicated meekly ran off to find her father.
In her work as a freelance journalist, she'd seen people in the aftermath of accidents and other disasters before. They were shocked and scared and just wanted someone else to be in charge, someone else to take on the burden of telling them how to fix things.
Peri dredged up her memories of various books she'd read about disaster preparedness. One thing she remembered reading was that, in an emergency, specific instructions were better than vague ones. Assigning a role to each member of the group helped keep people from falling apart.
"Eve is in the bedroom—the Albertsons' little girl. You." She pointed to a heavyset woman carrying a rifle. "Go make sure she's okay. You, you." She pointed to two more armed people. By now a crowd was congregating in the doorway to openly rubberneck at the ruin of Ramona's living room. "Set up a, uh, what do you call it, a perimeter at the back wall in case Sc—the bear comes back. You, cover up the bodies." Her hand was still resting on Noah's shoulder. His skin felt hot to the touch. Wendy gave a soggy little hiccup, preparatory to a new round of wailing.
"Where's Ramona?" Peri asked. "Has anyone seen her? Someone find her, please—"
"Wendy!" Ramona's desperate cry answered her, and Peri caught sight of her stepmother pushing through the crowd. "Wendy, oh God, where's my daughter—"
"She's here, she's here. She's okay." Peri passed the child off to her mother. Ramona buried her face in Wendy's thin blonde hair, murmuring soothing nothings.
Though he felt feverishly hot under Peri's hand, Noah was starting to shiver. She found a hand-knit afghan in the mess and draped it around his shoulders, crouching next to him with her prosthetic leg thrust out to the side. "How badly are you hurt?" she asked quietly.
"I think I'm winged, mostly," he answered in a whisper. "Bullet burn. Hurts like hell but I'm gonna be okay." A new round of shivering wracked him, and he tried to smile at her worried look. "It's just my body dealing with it," he explained through chattering teeth. "Once the emergency's over, we can crash pretty hard if we're hurt. I'll be okay in a few minutes when the bleeding stops." He turned his head to the side, a quick flick of his eyes into the living room. "Get the clothes."
"Sorry?"
"The clothes. Scar Face's clothes. And mine too. Before anyone else sees them."
Her heart sank. "You want us to lie to everyone."
"We can't tell them the truth. Go. Quick, before they do too much looking around."
Peri took a breath, pushed her feelings down, and straightened up. He was right; the room was filling up with people, but most of them were distracted by Eddie and Liam's bodies or the ragged hole in the wall. In the mess, no one was likely to notice the disappearance of a few extra, tattered items of clothing. She collected everything and went back to the kitchen find that two of the compound residents had discovered Noah sitting wrapped in the afghan.
"Why are you naked, son?" a gruff older man—the patriarch of the Albertson family—was asking.
"L-long story." Noah's voice was weak, his teeth chattering. "Peri ... I need to do something about ..." He gestured shakily, indicating the blood all over his front.
"Yes. Of course." She helped him up. He leaned on her and they limped into the living room. Peri, clutching the bundle of clothing to her chest, had to avert her eyes from the bodies, one of them covered with a blanket and the other with a flowered curtain. Liam ... she'd known him for her entire life. And now he was gone.
She'd meant to take Noah into the bathroom, but suddenly her room seemed like a better option. She just wanted to get away from all of this for a little while.
They made their slow way up the stairs together. As soon as they reached the top, Noah's weight lifted off Peri's shoulder. She looked up, startled. The hunched, miserable body language fell away, though he was still shivering slightly. He touched his finger to his lips and went to the window at the head of the stairs, looking out searchingly before leading the way into her room.
Peri closed the door and whispered fiercely, "You were faking?"
"Not entirely. Not at first. But yeah. It keeps people from asking awkward questions."
"So I'm up here taking care of you when I could be down there helping the people who actually need it. I can't even deal with you sometimes, you know that?" She dumped the armload of clothes on the bed and turned her back on him.
Noah took her hand and gave it a gentle tug. She resisted at first before reluctantly sitting on the bed with him.
"Peri, this is what being a shifter is like. Finding ways to explain away the impossible. Trying to duck questions if you can't do that. It's a life of endless secrecy. It will mean lying to people you care about."
"Like telling them there's not a guy running around attacking people who can turn into a bear the size of a buffalo? You want us to lie about that too?"
"What are we supposed to do, tell the truth?"
"Yes!" Peri had the dawning realization that they might be having their first real fight as a couple.
"Peri, I can't tell my biggest secret—my people's biggest secret—to an entire community of people who are mostly, let's say, not on the reliable end of the trustworthiness spectrum."
"So you'd rather leave them completely unprepared against a threat like that. Civilians. Kids."
"What about my people?" Noah countered. "Last year the SCB busted up a lab doing secret experiments on shifters. If word gets out about us, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Having normal lives would be impossible. We'd be hunted as a threat, hounded by the media, herded onto reservations, heaven only knows. Secrecy is what keeps us safe."
"What about me?" She could feel her eyes swimming with sudden, unwanted tears; angrily she dashed them away. "Am I a threat?"
"No—Peri—God, no." He put his arms around her. She held back for a moment before allowing herself to be dragged in to collapse against his chest, and only then her shivering began.
"Shhh ... Peri ..." Noah stroked her hair as she shook until she thought she might fly apart. She couldn't stop seeing Eddie jerk and collapse like a puppet with its strings cut, couldn't stop remembering how blood had splattered across Scar Face's skin when she'd shot him. She'd never actually seen a person killed before. She'd never done anything worse to anyone than hit them with her baton or kick them in the shins.
"How dare you get me into this," she sobbed furiously into his chest, even though some part of her still knew it wasn't his fault; if anything, she'd gotten him into it. But her life was starting to feel like a runaway roller coaster, speeding ever faster toward an unknown destination, while giant magical bears took swipes at her and a trail of bodies began to pile up in her wake.
"Zach," she sniffled. She hadn't even liked him, but right now she couldn't stand the thought that she'd never see him again. "What—what's going to happen to his body? The family—will the family be notified?"
"Shhh," Noah soothed, running a hand up and down her back. "The SCB is taking care of it."
"Which—which probably means telling them he died in a h
ouse fire on vacation or something," she mumbled into his chest. "Is there anything about your life that isn't a lie?"
"You," Noah said softly. Every time he spoke, his chest vibrated against her cheek. "The way I feel about you. I think I'm falling in love with you, Peri, and that's God's honest truth."
She'd almost stopped shaking; now a shudder wracked her from a new and no less distressing surge of emotion. For most of her life, she'd been alone in the world, in reality if not on paper. She'd known from childhood that her parents couldn't be relied on. She had never been good at making close friends. She'd gone through life depending on no one but herself, and she had liked it that way.
Or at least she'd thought she had.
"You're getting blood all over me," she said in a small voice, and even managed a weak, shaky laugh.
"Oh. Damn. Sorry." He started to push her away. She held on for a moment longer before tipping her head back to kiss him. What she meant to be a light brush of her lips against his turned into a long, deep kiss, lightly flavored with the salt of her tears.
"All right," she said, pulling away reluctantly. "All right, we'll do it your way. But only if we make sure they understand the magnitude of the threat. They don't need to know Scar Face and the bear are the same, but they do need to know that both of them could come back to hurt them."
"Fair enough," Noah agreed. "I'm on board with that."
"You, uh ..." She wiped at her T-shirt, hopelessly smeared with dark swatches of blood. "Do you need stitches or anything?"
"No. It's just residual blood at this point. You know how fast I heal."
"Huh." He was right: no more fresh blood was oozing, and already it looked like the pale crease down his abs and across his thigh had been healing for hours or days.
"You know what I could use, though, are some clean clothes." He picked up his torn T-shirt ruefully. "That aren't rags. And I was so happy to get my own clothes back, too ..."
"I'll find some for you—and me, too. Oh!" She twisted around on the bed to dig through the pile of collected clothing. "Want to find out who our scar-faced guy is?"
"Assuming he's got ID on him."
There were rental car keys and a wallet in the pocket of Scar Face's shredded jeans. Noah opened the wallet carefully and shook out its only contents, a driver's license and a credit card. "Brand new wallet," he remarked, holding it up to the light. "Store bought, probably no more than a few days ago. It's not worn at all."
"Roy Smith," Peri read off the driver's license. "Seattle address. Yeah, that's likely. Smith? Really?"
"Don't handle them any more than you already have." Using a corner of the ragged T-shirt, Noah tucked the items back into the wallet. "Lab might be able to pull prints. Damn, I wish I'd thought of it before we smudged everything. I'm not used to doing field work."
"But he's not really Roy Smith."
"I think we can safely say that, yeah."
Peri started to run a hand through her hair, checked herself when she noticed blood on her fingers, and surreptitiously wiped her hand on the bedspread instead. "I better go find you something to wear. You'll be okay here for a little while?"
Noah nodded. "Be careful. If there's any sign, any sign at all of Scar Face or Smith or whatever his name is coming back, get to me pronto, okay?"
"I won't abandon anyone in danger. But," she added, "I will scream for help at the top of my lungs."
"I can deal with that."
She closed the bedroom door and went quickly down the stairs. The activity in the yard had died down, though a stale smell of smoke hung over everything. The living room was bustling with people. Liam and Eddie's bodies had been moved to the side, still covered with their inappropriately cheerful makeshift shrouds. To Peri's vast relief, little Eve was in her mother's arms on the couch. Ramona was nowhere to be found, but her father was crouched in the mess, looking at something.
"Where's Ramona?" Peri asked.
"She's a wreck. Aida Lewis drove her and Wendy to a neighbor's." Her father's answer came absently, and he straightened up with something in his hand. Giving her a level look, he flipped it open and held it out. "Recognize this?"
A cold pit formed in the bottom of her stomach. With everything else going on, she'd forgotten to recover Noah's badge.
"I can explain."
"Yeah?" He glanced at it again. His face was like stone. "Noah Easton, Special Crimes Bureau. That's pretty unambiguous. What does your new boyfriend do for a living, Peri?"
Every eye and ear in the room was now tuned to them. "Could we have this conversation somewhere private?" Peri asked desperately.
"I think this affects the whole community."
They were only a few feet apart, but Peri was acutely conscious of the vast gulf of culture and community between them. When she'd left, she'd stopped being a member of the people her father called his own, but only now, with every eye on her a hostile one, she began to understand what being an outsider really meant.
No one was going to give her the benefit of the doubt on this.
"Liam and Eddie were shot to death," her father went on, his voice steady and calm. "Most of us were out fighting the fire or investigating the vehicle that you told us about. And the only people in the house with guns when everybody else got here were you two."
Every word felt like another blow, punching the breath out of her. "You think we did it?"
"It wasn't the bear."
"Ask Eve." Peri pointed to the child, face pressed into her mother's shoulder. "She must have seen a man come into the bedroom, a man with a gun. Ask her. Eve, honey, you remember the bad man with the gun, don't you?"
Eve nodded without raising her head.
"So there was someone else here. Doesn't mean he wasn't working with you and your boyfriend." Hank Moreland's voice was flat, leaving no room for her to wedge an argument into.
She'd been hurt by her parents before. She'd even felt betrayed. But this was a level of betrayal that sucked all the warmth out of her and left her feeling chilled to the bone, as if she'd gone into a sort of shock.
"How could you think that?" She wanted her voice to be steady and strong, needed to sound strong and capable as she never had before, but instead the words came out in a quavering moan. "How? Dad, I'm your daughter. You can't possibly believe I ... I killed Eddie or Liam. Liam! We used to play together when we were kids."
Her father tossed the badge at her. It fell to the floor when she failed to catch it. Reluctantly, she leaned down and picked it up.
"I'll tell you what I know," her father said. "Eddie and Liam are dead. My baby girl was in danger and now my wife's a mess. We've got two people with burns and one with a broken wrist from fighting that fire, and the community center's going to need to be rebuilt before winter. And all of this happened when you and your fed boyfriend showed up. Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong." She forced it out through quivering lips. She wasn't going to cry. In Noah's arms, yes, but not in front of this man.
My baby girl was in danger ...
So was your other baby girl, and now she's standing in front of you, scared out of her mind and covered with blood, she thought bitterly. But you washed your hands of your old family when my mother took me to live in Idaho after my accident, didn't you? Now you've got a new wife and a new daughter, and the other one can go to hell as far as you're concerned.
She shored herself up with anger and tried to pretend there wasn't a soul-deep guilt underneath. Whether she'd meant to or not, she had led danger here, and now she'd nearly gotten her baby sister killed—the baby sister she hadn't even known she had—and probably blown up any chance of having a relationship with her stepmother.
Fair or not, Liam and Eddie's deaths could be laid at her feet. She and Noah hadn't pulled the trigger, but everyone here would still be alive and safe if not for them.
"We're going to make sure there are no more strangers lurking in the woods and the community's safe," her father said. "And then you and your boyfri
end are leaving, you got it? You're getting in that fancy car of his, and you're driving straight back to wherever you came from."
"Got it," she said tightly. "But unless you like the idea of both of us marching out of here naked, we need clean clothes. I'm going to get some from Ramona's bedroom—"
Her father shook his head. At a gesture, one of the guards who had been quietly standing in the gap in the back wall, rifle held alertly at his shoulder, stepped to block her path.
"Mary will bring clean things up to you," her father said. "You go back upstairs now."
Under the withering chill of a roomful of unfriendly glares, she gathered up their wallets, phones, and jackets, wrapping her fingers tightly around the weight of her useless baton. If only all problems could be resolved by hitting something. Wordlessly, with their possessions clutched in shaking hands, she climbed the stairs back to the room that no longer felt like hers.
Chapter Thirteen
They spent the afternoon in the upstairs bedroom, watching from the window as the community engaged in a sort of combined cleanup and siege preparation. A knock on the door turned out to be Mary Albertson, bearing a bundle of clothing which she thrust wordlessly into Peri's arms before turning to leave. Looking past her, Peri saw that there was an armed guard on the stairs. She didn't think he was there to guard them from Scar Face.
An hour or so later, a teenage girl brought them a plate of sandwiches and a couple of cold Cokes. These were passed inside without a word. The girl didn't respond to Peri's polite thanks.
Noah turned away from the window. "Think it's safe to eat those?"
"What, you think they're gonna drug us or something?" She wanted to laugh, but there was nothing funny about the situation. She looked down at the sandwiches. Tuna fish, looked like. "I guess there's nothing we can do about it. And I can't see the point when we're at their mercy anyway."
But she was starting to see Noah's point about keeping his shifter nature a secret. It was bad enough being locked up by people who thought they were normal humans. If the compound residents knew Noah was a shifter, what would they be doing right now? Probably not treating them both nicely and giving them food, that was for sure.