Accidentally Catty

by Dakota Cassidy

  He softened a little. “I apologize for frightening you.”

  The shake of her head was brisk. “Don’t apologize. It’s clearly not your fault, but I never, ever want that to happen to you again. If it was brutal to watch, it had to be much more brutal to experience.”

  “I don’t remember a thing.”

  “Then there’s something to be grateful for, and if you’d seen what I saw, you’d have done the same thing I did if it meant there was a chance of preventing it from happening again.”

  “I probably would have, but I’m a big, strong man who can take care of himself.”

  “Who was as weak as a newborn when I left the house and resting, something I know you need after the experience of my shift.”

  “Okay, I get it. Just don’t go around doing foolish things that put you and the baby at risk again, got that, Dr. Woods?”

  His possessive nature almost made her preen, but then she remembered how she’d promised herself she’d use caution. “Got it.”

  “So what happened up there?” he asked, hitching his sharp jaw upward.

  Her frustration became evident in her sigh. “We’re not much farther along than we were with the information Darnell brought us. Except for two things.”

  He slung an arm around her shoulder, clearly passed his anger and right back to happy-go-lucky Shaw. He directed her to the edge of the hospital parking lot. “And they are?”

  “We think Nissa is your mother, and both of you are in danger.” She couldn’t tell him about the dying thing because she was still praying that was just Daniel Green’s jumbled thoughts.

  He nodded like he’d known that. Patting a picnic-table bench where patient’s families could sit, he encouraged her to slide in by him. He surprised her when he said, “I know I’m in some kind of danger, but as far as I know, my mother’s dead.”

  Her stomach did two things. It took a dive and danced with excitement. “You do? You remember?” She was almost afraid to say the words, but if she was going to stop hiding from this so Shaw could have the help he needed, and he’d never be subjected to that horrific shift again, Katie knew she had to hear what he’d remembered.

  “Hold on. I don’t remember everything. I remember up until the point I got here to the U.S. and met Daniel Green. Then it’s all blank.”

  “So you are from England?” That so blew. Yet she fought asking the inevitable question. Like, how would his middle-school girlfriend feel about the fact that he’d knocked up someone old enough to be his mother? Would she refuse to sit at the cafeteria lunch table with him and deny him a carton of milk? Jealousy warred with reason in a mess of nervous anticipation.

  “Originally from London, but now I live in a town called Diss.”

  “Diss . . .”

  He chuckled “Diss. It’s on a beautiful lake.”

  Where a beautiful cottage with ivy climbing up the side of it gave way to a vista of blue and green. And in that quaint cottage lived his beautiful wife and two children. Maybe he even had a dog.

  Katie gulped. She’d known this was coming. Known. Now she was going to take it like the champ she was. But first thing was first. “Why were you here to begin with if you come from England?”

  Dragging a finger across her cheek, he took her hands in his. “First my stats. My name is Shaw Sedgwick Eaton. I’m six-footthree, two hundred and twenty pounds, before I left the motherland anyway. Oh, and I’m pushing seventy years old. Your cougar status was just downgraded, fair lady. No more gummy bear jokes for you, young’un,” he teased with a grin. “I’m older than you by almost thirty years. No”—he held up a hand with a smile—“don’t thank me for dashing your high-school-boy fantasies.”

  “Seventy . . .” she murmured. He was older than she was? Oh, sweet mysteries of life. And yay.Yay.Yay.Yay. “How can you be seventy? You don’t look a day over twenty.”

  “For the same reason my mother, the woman in the picture we found in Daniel Green’s office, didn’t look a day over thirty, and she’s somewhere in her hundreds. At least, I think that was her picture. I don’t know. My father never leaked much information about her. So I’m not exactly sure how old she is, and I’ll get to why in a moment. We age very slowly because we’re shapeshifters, Katie.” His smile was ironic. “I’ve often thought eternal life was given to us as compensation for watching everyone around us die. So what applies to Wanda and the rest, also applies to us.”

  Holy cats. Her breath shuddered. “We have eternal life?” She’d given the notion a great deal of thought before she closed her eyes at night, but his confirmation still took her breath away.

  “We do, though we’re not quite as infallible as Nina and Wanda. We have our kryptonite much like Marty does. If someone were to take out a vital organ in just the right way, we’d most likely die without medical attention even with the power to self-heal.”

  Katie grimaced. Right now, she just couldn’t wrap her brain around living for an eternity. “Okay, so why did you come to Piney Creek? I don’t understand the connection to you and Daniel Green.”

  “Daniel is my grandfather. One I didn’t know about until my father, a human, died just recently. It’s probably why I was so distressed that he’d been hurt. Though I admit, I feel that on only a humane level at this point. I don’t know him at all.”

  Her disbelief was evident. “So you’re half cougar, half human like me. But wait, your father was still alive?”

  Shaw chuckled with a nod. “Old damn coot. He was ninety-five and active up until the day he was mindlessly slaughtered.” Now his expression went from fond to hard.

  Katie gasped, her hands squeezing his in a gesture of sympathy. “He was murdered? Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. Please tell me it has nothing to do with whatever’s going on right now.” But apprehension stole over her. Of course it did, dummy. Darnell had said someone was taking out werecougars. Which totally didn’t explain why, if Shaw’s father was a human, he’d been murdered.

  “I think it has everything to do with what’s going on. My father was a research scientist—genetics, to be specific, as is Daniel Green, my grandfather.”

  Katie groaned, her eyes scanning his. “Are we going to some weird, sort of Fringe/X-Files place?”

  “Like we aren’t already there anyway?”

  Duh. “Right. So I’m betting experiments and Bill Nye gone awry are in my not too distant future?”

  Shaw’s dark head shook in irony. “I know you’re going to love this, but I don’t know. I only suspect. Here’s what I do know. My father, Alistair, owned an old converted apartment building. He rented the flats to a group who did nonprofit work for the homeless when he moved to his retirement home. When he was killed, they, purely by coincidence, made mention of some boxes in the basement that needed moving. I wasn’t aware of them, nor was I aware my father spent many long hours in that basement well after he’d retired. Tinkering was what the one counselor said. I went to collect those boxes so they could use the space for group therapy meetings. I didn’t think much about the contents for a few months because I was too busy mourning my father.”

  “So you two had a good relationship?”

  Shaw smiled, his grin genuine and warm. “We did. We played chess every Tuesday over brandy and biscuits at his assisted-living facility where he was a champion shuffleboard player and quite the ladies’ man. I often caught him wooing some woman or another with what he called his superior courting skills. He was quite the player for ninety-five.”

  Katie giggled. “Huh. Charming, you say? Clearly, a time-honored tradition in the Eaton family.”

  “He was also sharp as a tack right up until the day he died.”

  “You miss him.”

  “I definitely do. He was a good man who raised me almost totally alone.”

  Sorrow struck her in her heart, making her place a hand on his arm. “Where was your mother?”

  “Dad always told me she died when I was an infant, and that’s what I believed until I read some of his not
es—notes that are much like Daniel Green’s, and files, too. Daniel is my grandfather on my mother’s side, but my father, when he referred to her, called her Lettie. I have to wonder if maybe that wasn’t a nickname, not her real name? He always had a wistfully sad look on his face when he talked about her, but that wasn’t often. She was just this big pot of secrets I was afraid to stir.”

  “So your mother was a shifter and so is Daniel Green?”

  “That’s my assumption. If Daniel Green is my mother’s father, and that picture we found that night was a picture of her from the 1800s, what else could explain my grandfather still alive and kicking?”

  “So what do these notes and files have to do with Daniel and your dad?”

  “They worked together. On some project I’m still exceptionally unclear about.”

  Her spine stiffened. “I hear the theme to The X-Files playing . . .”

  “Catchy tune, yes?”

  “Not a good time to crack wise, funny man. Stay focused. So what do you know from those files? Obviously you found Daniel somehow, which was what brought you here in the first place.”

  “My father left me a red-hot trail right to Daniel—almost as though he wanted me to find him. Though he never once mentioned him in all my life, he had his number here in the States and his location very clearly printed out in emails they’d exchanged. Nothing important in those emails but pleasantries, but they’d kept in contact all these years. What I don’t understand is why Daniel never made any attempts to see me.”

  Her heart clenched again. Without Teeny in her life, Katie didn’t know what she’d do. To have missed out on a grandfather had to suck. She caressed his hand with her fingers. “I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry you missed out on Daniel.”

  “Here’s the other crazy thing. I got on a plane and came here because of something urgent that eludes me until I want to ram my fist through a brick wall in frustration. All I can think of is Daniel had the cure for my problem.”

  There were more of those? God in heaven. She shivered. They needed another problem like they needed an IRS audit. “Problem?”

  “My shifting. What happened out in the woods this afternoon happened twice before to me back in England.”

  Katie’s eyes widened. “Wait, hold on.You’ve always known you were a shifter?”

  His smile was fleeting. “Yes. I’ve always known, and I’ve always shifted with the ease of Marty and Wanda. My father took great measures to keep my paranormal abilities a secret from humans, and he did a terrific job of it. I was raised quite normally despite them, lived an average life much the way the paranormal posse does. But I knew there was always a time and a place, and I can—or could—shift at will.”

  “Until recently.”

  “My last two shifts left me naked by the lake near my home, not knowing what happened to me or how I got there. I think feeling like I’d been run over by a cement truck when I woke up tonight was what brought everything back.”

  “God . . .” His somber words that he’d experienced this before frightened the hell out of her. “So did you ever ask your father why you were a cougar and he wasn’t? How he met your mother? What led them to marry?”

  “More times than I can count, and he had plenty of stories. When I was a child, he often told me I was a cougar because I was special. As I grew older and pressed him for answers, he explained that my mother was a shifter and he’d met her through his work as a scientist. She was one of the last werecougars on Earth besides me, and he’d loved her deeply, but she was killed. Now, knowing what we do about Daniel, it makes me wonder exactly what kind of scientific work was involved when they met.”

  Katie was incredulous. If what he said was true, Shaw and now she herself were pushing extinct. “How old was she when she died?”

  His brow wrinkled. “One hundred and seventy-five or so, I think. Which leads me to believe the picture we saw at the animal park was hers.”

  “And that’s it? Did you ever try to find anything else out about how you came to be? How she came to be? What she looked like?”

  “Over the years, I’ve done more research than I care to admit behind Dad’s back. We were very close, and I never wanted him to think I didn’t believe him, but there was always doubt about my origins. Yet what Darnell says is true. There isn’t much about us to be found. I know nothing about these elders Darnell told us about except for maybe Daniel, who I guess qualifies. I always thought my father’s suspicious nature was what kept me from finding anyone else like me, but it seems that’s not exactly true. As to what she looks like, Dad didn’t have much in the way of photographs of her, either, something I asked about often and his reply was always the same. She didn’t like having her picture taken.”

  Frustration settled back in. Knowing more about him only made their situation more complicated. Each time they took two steps forward, they took ten more back. She was almost afraid to ask, but he had said his father was murdered. Surely there was a basis for that theory. Her words were soft, her sorrow for what he’d lost seeping into her careful words. “Am I prying if I ask what happened to your father, Shaw? What the circumstances were surrounding his death?”

  Shaw’s gaze was direct, filled with blue fire and anger. “He was clawed to death.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Holy fucking shit, Three Names,” Nina crowed from the darkness. “That sucks, my British friend. Condolences.” She gave Shaw a slap on the back. “Man, you and Baby Bump Barbie just can’t get a break.”

  “Oh, Shaw,” Wanda said, right behind Nina. “I’m so sorry.”

  Katie couldn’t comprehend it. Her hand went to his face to smooth away the lines of sadness. “Clawed to death?”

  Shaw’s nod was curt, his mouth a thin line of grim. “Yes. He was found in the woods behind his assisted-living facility.”

  “And how did the police explain something like that?” Katie asked.

  “Wild dogs, which aren’t uncommon in that area. However, he didn’t die of the wounds, though they didn’t help. The final coroners report claimed it was a heart attack. I never connected his death with anything having to do with me until now. Now I have to wonder if he died needlessly because of whatever was going on with my grandfather.”

  “Okay, lovebirds. No more gruesome tonight. Let’s sleep on this. It’s time to get back home. Katie’s pregnant and needs her rest, and you’re a shifter’s nightmare, waiting to happen,” Wanda scolded. “We don’t need you turning into some whacky version of mythology’s centaur out in public. We also don’t need to alert the police, who’d love nothing more than to slap us back in that jail cell slicker than snot. Let’s move.”

  Nina loomed over them, her face less tension-filled when she gave Katie “the look.” “And now that I only want to scar you versus kick your stupid ass, I think I can ride in a car with you without driving you off a cliff. So get in it, and let’s go home so we can figure out what the fuck this all means.”

  Katie popped up with a wince. “I said I was sorry. Wow, can you grudge.” Nina’s face darkened, but Katie was quick to pacify her. “It was a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing. I just got caught up. I apologize. Profusely. Which means a lot.”

  “I know what it fucking means. Next time you do that, you’re gonna be caught up in my fist,” Nina warned, holding that very fist under her nose.

  Katie threw her hands and latched onto Nina’s cheeks with a smile. “Got it. No more getting caught up.”

  “You know, Wanda?” Nina asked.

  “What’s that, oh, hot-tempered one?”

  “I like Katie. She fucking listens. Unlike some other werewolf whose name is Marty.”

  “Speaking of listening—”

  “Yeah,” Nina agreed with Wanda. “We heard everything.”

  “Eavesdropping, Nina?” Shaw admonished with a teasing smile.

  “I have super hearing, dude. Comes with the territory. And didn’t I fucking tell you there’s always a woman involved? Jesus Chris
t in a miniskirt. Never fails,” she scoffed.

  Katie shook her head. “But we don’t know that Nissa, a woman who, if she’s Shaw’s mother and supposed to be dead, is involved. If she’s dead, she can’t be involved. I think whatever Daniel relayed to you via his thoughts was just muddled.”

  Nina began to walk toward Teeny’s truck. “I dunno. I just know he said she had to be stopped. That she had to be saved from herself. That’s enough evidence for me to believe she’s lurking around here somewhere, and some big showdown’s gonna happen. Always drama,” she complained, holding the back door open for Katie.

  Wanda hopped in the front driver’s side and nodded her head, her lips thin in the rearview mirror. “I hate to say this. Nay, I despise saying it, but Nina might be right. Is there any way you can get your hands on those files, Shaw?”

  Shaw slid in the other side and pulled Katie close to him. “For what purpose? They didn’t have anything in them other than Daniel’s information and notes that were as indecipherable as Dr. Green’s were. Their emails to one another are how I found out Daniel is my grandfather.”

  Wanda slapped the flat of her hand against the steering wheel. “Darn. We just need one more dead end before I spork my eyes out.”

  They each fell silent on the ride back to Katie’s, losing themselves in their thoughts.

  One thing was for certain; Katie felt it deeply rooted in her gut. Something was going to blow.

  Where, what, and how remained unclear.

  But it was going to be big.

  And in the psychically gifted Nina’s words, probably involve a fucking woman.

  WHEN they arrived home, Katie pulled Shaw to her side as everyone left to go to their rooms. Right now, right this minute, she needed him. She didn’t want to sneak off to his room after everyone had settled in.

  Stooping to give Dozer a quick stroke on the back, she gave him a coy smile. “C’mon, King of the Jungle. Let’s come out of the closet and make a statement.”