My Furry Valentine

by Karen Ranney

  "What do you want to have happen, Torrance?" He glanced at me, smiling slightly.

  Once you got on the truth train, it was hard to jump off.

  "Nothing," I said. "He was acting like an idiot, but it's not like Craig was a member of the Celtic Clan anymore."

  "There is that," he said. "Besides, I have taken a liking to your Mark.”

  I should have spoken up right then. I should've said something in a loud, firm voice. He's not my Mark. That’s what I should have said.

  Instead I asked, “What are you going to do about Craig?”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Find out what he wants. Why did he risk his family by coming back to San Antonio?”

  I knew that Craig didn’t give a flying flip about his father, whom he’d challenged and overcome years ago. But his mother and his younger brothers? He’d always seemed to care about them.

  If a banished Were did what he’d done, he could expect ramifications. Namely, that he would be re-banished and his family would be punished, if not banished with him. Either Craig didn’t give a flying fig about his family or his need for revenge overwhelmed any other rational thought.

  When I said that, my father nodded.

  "He could have come back for you, Torrance. Love will make a man do odd things.”

  Do tell. No, maybe on second thought, don’t.

  "Our relationship was over years ago," I said. “The icing on the cake was when he tried to kill me. If he came back for me, it wasn't in a romantic way."

  “You should’ve told me about Kerrville at the time,” he said.

  Maybe. Or maybe I just kind of liked being autonomous, responsible for myself. Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely true, given that Mark had moved in, but I chose to think of that as a relationship issue, not a protection issue.

  I stood, grabbed my purse, and left the Council chambers.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  What do you mean by this?

  I wasn't all that eager to drive home in the dark, strong, capable Boyd Furry that I was and all that. I was not, however, going to admit that to a living soul. Yet I nearly embarrassed myself and started crying when I saw Mark standing there by his car, waiting for me.

  Holy Batwoman, was I grateful to see him.

  "Have you come to escort me home?" I asked as I reached him.

  “I have,” he said.

  His scratches were fading. I reached up and touched one gently.

  “What did your co-workers think about your new macho image?”

  "I told them I went paint balling.”

  I couldn't help but smile. That was actually a great excuse. Who cared if he got a few thousand scratches from the bushes? He sounded macho and adventurous. Plus, it beat the hell out of telling them he was fighting a wolf. Humans would freak out at that comment.

  Honesty could sometimes be selective.

  "I'm glad you're here," I said, determined to continue with the truth.

  "I'll follow you.”

  And he did, his headlights a reminder that I wasn't alone. Plus it was a another reminder, that I had a confrontation brewing if I wanted it. Had he really moved in? What explanation had he given Danielle? What was I going to do about him?

  Seriously, what was our relationship?

  Once home, I greeted the Brood, doled out pets and praise – I'd fed them before I left for the Council meeting — and took off my shoes.

  I made tea, with Mark sitting at the table drinking a beer.

  “Have you moved in, then?”

  He nodded. “There's not much to move," he said.

  “So what does Danielle have to say?”

  "I haven't told her," he said.

  “Won’t she expect you home?”

  “Not since I made other arrangements for Cassie.”

  I nodded, but kept my thoughts to myself. And my questions.

  I made us both some quesadillas with ice cream as dessert. I normally didn't eat this late, but I was genuinely hungry. Plus food served as a way to communicate without saying anything difficult or intimate or painful. We talked about Mexican restaurants, cooking, and favorite flavors of ice cream. We found that we had a great deal in common other than being the only two Weres in creation who were also Pranic.

  Mark told me about some of his co-workers. Sue, who was into genealogy and couldn't meet a stranger without inquiring where their family came from. Robert, who was well on his way to becoming a germaphobe. He carried around a bottle of hand cleaner and used it if someone got too close, never mind wanting to shake hands.

  “I don’t think it’s working,” Mark said. "I've never known anybody who's had more colds than Robert. I think he'd be better off allowing his immunity to build up.”

  I told him about some of the vet techs at work, most of whom I really liked. That was another thing about leaving the clinic. I missed most of the people with whom I worked.

  After we finished eating and I straightened up the kitchen, I debated going into the TV room, having a nightcap on the porch, or simply going to bed. I was tired and it was late enough, but there was that uncertainty I had to face.

  Where was Mark going to sleep?

  “I think I’ll turn in,” he said, standing.

  I nodded.

  “Goodnight, Torrance.”

  I’m not sure it was relief I felt or simply an end to the tension.

  I said goodnight and watched as he walked up the back stairs.

  A few minutes later, after the Brood had gone out for the night, I entered my suite. I kept the door open just like I had the night before.

  Sitting on the edge the bed, I recited the hearing spell. It kept me from lying awake listening to the sounds of Graystone around me. Without the spell I could hear a bird landing on one of the chimneys or the rush of the wind around the bell towers.

  "What are you saying?"

  I halted in the middle of the spell and glanced over at the open doorway. Mark was standing there, between the sitting room and the bedroom, leaning against the door jamb. He was still fully dressed, arms folded in front of him.

  He had fought a very strong wolf less than forty eight hours ago, was involved in a quest, one of moral consequence. He was concerned about his daughter, and trying to juggle the needs of his clan against his own wants and wishes. I knew all this about him and even more, but that's not why I wanted to comfort him. It was something deeper than that. Not male-female stuff, but creature to creature stuff. I wanted to take away his pain, hold him, and be strong enough to allow him to feel vulnerable, if only for a few moments.

  Okay, maybe it was male-female stuff.

  "Have I interrupted your prayers?”

  I shook my head and held out my hand to him.

  "No," I said as he walked toward me. “I’m saying a spell Marcie gave me.”

  At that moment I realized that I hadn't told him about my super hearing. I did now, adding that the spell helped.

  “And you’ve only had this problem after the second transfusion?” he asked. “Any other side effects?”

  “No,” I said, feeling a warmth when he grabbed my hand and sat on the edge of the bed with me. I decided to jump in with the question. “Marcie says that vampires have the ability to mesmerize and that you’ve always known that. Have you mesmerized me, Mark?”

  He smiled. "If I had, Torrance, it would've made things a lot easier between us.”

  Maybe he was right about that. But I’d certainly capitulated easily enough when he told me he was going to move in. It hadn’t even been a question. He had merely declared it and I had said okay.

  "I can hear your thoughts," he said. “When we’re close enough.”

  I knew that. Had he been doing it lately?

  “No,” he said. "I figured we should do this the old-fashioned way.”

  Xena, the Warrior Princess or Wonder Woman would've asked him what he meant. I was too scared.

  He smiled, but didn't send me a thought.

  Finally,
disgusted by my own cowardice, I asked, “What do you mean by this?”

  "This love affair," he said bringing my hand to his lips. He kissed my knuckles, then released my hand, standing. “Isn't that what it is?”

  Was it? Frankly, I was so confused around him and about him that I didn't know which way was up. It was scary and exciting and delightful and scary and exhilarating.

  He bent and kissed me softly on the lips. It was a gentle, sweet kiss that seduced and lingered and lured.

  I was about to tell him that he didn't have to go back to the George Gervin room. He shook his head as if he'd heard that thought and walked away, leaving me staring after him.

  Well, damn.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I am the big bad wolf

  So much for pining for my beloved. I fell asleep almost immediately and woke at one, wide awake. I wasn't given to insomnia, so it took me a minute to realize why I’d awakened. I did a quick inventory. Was everyone okay?

  I never thought that I was a light sleeper until the Brood came into my life. Now if Cherry Pip had a cough or Dalton moaned in his sleep, I heard it. This was different. All three of them were snoring on the floor around the bed. I sat up as silently as I could so as not to alert them I was awake. Being awake meant we started the morning routine, and it was way too early for that.

  Had Mark made a sound and I’d heard it?

  Last night I hadn’t finished reciting the hearing spell and something had awakened me. I heard a curious little pinging sound downstairs and knew what it was immediately — the new alarm at the front gate. A car had entered the grounds of Graystone and was slowing in front of the steps.

  Nobody I knew would come to visit me without a phone call, family included.

  “It’s a damn fortress. What the hell do they need with that many rooms?”

  “Shut the hell up.”

  Evidently, there was more than one person in the car. The question was, what were they doing here in the middle of the night?

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, waking Pepper who looked up at me with sleepy eyes.

  "Sorry, sweetie," I said. “I need to check something out.”

  I sleep in a nightshirt and I have a collection of them with clever sayings. The one I was wearing now had tiny little kittens all over it. My sister had given it to me for Christmas one year, before the Brood had come into my life and I always apologized to them when I wore it.

  I threw on a robe, grabbed my slippers and tugged them on. I didn't turn on my light, because I didn't want them — whoever was parked in front of Graystone – to know that I was awake. Instead I walked through the sitting room, the three dogs following me in grand hopes of having an early breakfast, and crossed the hall.

  The George Gervin room, like other guest suites, had an attached sitting room, bedroom, and bath. I wasn't as familiar with the layout of this room as I was my own, but being a Furry gave me some advantages in the dark. Things appeared on the gray side rather than black. Unfortunately, my enhanced vision didn't stop me from running into a small table. The lamp almost tumbled to the floor, but I caught it only to look up and see a shadow standing in the doorway.

  I nearly lost it right then and there, but I bit back my startled yelp as the Brood ran up to Mark, greeting him like a long lost stranger instead of someone they'd seen only a few hours earlier.

  “What's wrong, Torrance?”

  One thing about Mark, he grasped a situation quickly.

  I told him what I'd heard.

  "There's not a turnaround once you enter the gate," I said. “A couple of people have gotten lost and realized it, but they've just taken the drive and gone right back out.”

  “But you don’t think these people are lost.”

  "Nope. Because right now they're sitting in front of the steps talking about how they’re going to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I can hear stuff,” I said, “but I can’t read minds. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll get dressed,” he said, turning and going back into the bedroom. That's when I realized he was in pajama bottoms and nothing else.

  For a moment, a fleeting moment, grant you, I gave some thought to following him and saying to hell with any danger lurking on the doorstep, almost literally.

  My libido, who had been quiet for the past couple of weeks, roused and came out of the back of her cave, eyes fixed on the sight of Mark. I had a feeling she wasn’t going to let me forget what he looked like.

  I rolled my eyes at myself.

  He came out of the room dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. I couldn't help but wonder if he was wearing underwear. I know, what was wrong with me? My thoughts had never gone there before. It was all Mark’s fault.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

  "Not on the hair of your chinny chin chin," I said. "You forget, I'm not the little woman who needs to be protected from the big, bad wolf. I am the big, bad wolf.”

  He grinned at me and for a fleeting moment, I wanted to put my hands on either side of his face and pull him down for a kiss. I loved that grin. I wished I could turn on the light to see if there was a twinkle in his eyes.

  Later, Torrance.

  I wish I could say that we crept down the stairs silently. Not quite. We might have been able to do that if it was just Mark and me, but we were followed by three dogs. They were excited that we were heading in the general direction of the kitchen in the middle of the night, which could only mean one thing: food.

  I swear I heard moans of disappointment when we turned toward the front door.

  Pepper opened his mouth to bark, but Mark stopped and looked down at the Brood, giving them a silent command to be quiet. Those few seconds probably saved our lives.

  I heard the sound first before I saw the explosion of flames through the fan light over the double doors. I jumped back, pulling Mark with me.

  Pepper yelped and the other two dogs followed suit, their communal whining unusual and totally understandable. A few inches of metal and wood stood between us and a raging fire.

  Most of Graystone was brick and stone, but there were other parts that were flammable. Lots of places like the formal parlors on the ground floor, my great-grandfather’s library, the Clan Hall filled with centuries of Boyd memories.

  They couldn’t be destroyed.

  Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to bring my phone, but Mark had. Even as he moved us all back into the main corridor of the house he was calling 911.

  There were two other exits, the back porch that I always used and the side door that was rarely opened. I wasn't afraid that we were going to get trapped inside. In fact, fear wasn't even my main emotion at the moment. Rage was building in me.

  Graystone was my heritage, a gift from my grandmother. My great-grandfather had designed and built it. It was where my father had grown up, where Sonia had held court, for lack of a better word.

  It was my home.

  How dare anybody try to destroy it.

  I had never thought of fire as loud, but the sound of it was assaulting my ears. I didn't say the spell. I wanted to hear every single lick and shudder of it, every hungry click and moan. I didn't want to forget this moment, this night, or the sound of a man's voice, telling his partners in crime to shut the hell up.

  I was going to find him.

  Mark hung up the phone and tucked it into his back pocket.

  “Shouldn’t we do something?”

  "The fire department will be here in a few minutes. We should go out the back because of the smoke.”

  "What if that's exactly what they want?" I asked.

  I realized I was being a little paranoid, but I could probably be excused, given everything that had happened lately.

  He didn’t answer me and I didn’t blame him. We really didn’t have any choice in the matter. The fire was spreading. I don’t know what they’d used as an accelerant, but it was clinging to the brick and racing up the windows. I heard the far off
sirens and hoped to God they got here before the fire made it inside.

  I heard a window shatter, the sound of it like a dagger to my spine.

  Too late. The Silver Parlor was probably going up in flames.

  "Come on, Torrance," he said, nearly pushing me down the corridor, toward the porch. The Brood was right with us, racing for safety.

  “What happens to my grandmother, the ottoman, if Graystone burns down?”

  Mark just stared at me as if I was losing my mind right in front of him. Normally, I'm very calm in a crisis, but I'd never had fire licking at the front of Graystone.

  “We need an axe," I said. "Treaty or no treaty, if one of the vampires comes after me I swear I’m going to behead him.”

  "Okay, Torrance," Mark said in a very calm, very reasonable voice. The kind of tone you used when someone was going nutso.

  I put my hands over my ears to block out the sound of the sirens a little. I don't know how many fire engines were pulling in front of Graystone, but it sounded like every single one from our small incorporated city, plus a few from San Antonio.

  Ten or twenty would be fine with me. As many as they needed to put out the fire.

  "We've got to go after them," I said. "We've got to find them.”

  "We don't have to do anything right now, Torrance.”

  He opened the porch door and urged me down the steps. I didn't want to leave Graystone. I thought that by doing so, it meant I was abandoning my home when it needed me the most. In my mind — and I was probably going through some kind of shock — Graystone had become a sentient creature. Something that needed me, required my loyalty, my devotion, and my constancy. I couldn't turn my back on it now.

  I allowed myself to be pulled into the middle of the backyard. The security lights, motion controlled, went on. It was a bit too much light and I blinked my eyes and turned away.

  The Brood settled behind Mark, as if they expected him to defend them. I wouldn't put it past him.

  "Will you stay here?" he asked. "I want to go see what's happening.”

  Someone had to stay with the Brood. They’d be too frightened alone in their dog run.