CHAPTER 5
The best thing about Big Papaw’s Cookout was their brine. Big Papaw guarded its secret like it was weaponized plague, but there is very little you could keep from a shapeshifter’s taste buds. That brine had root beer, paprika, garlic, pepper, and salt in it, and after the pork ribs had soaked in it for at least a day, Papaw threw them on the grill with some hickory wood chips. I could smell it a mile off, two if the wind was stronger, and it made me drool.
The restaurant was located in an old abandoned gas station, with smoke grills in the back, outside. I parked the Jeep in the parking lot—my beastkin feet were smaller than Ascanio’s huge warrior-form paws, so I had to drive—and Ascanio and I went inside.
Colleen, Big Papaw’s oldest daughter, manned the counters. She gave me the evil eye and kept one hand under the counter, which I decided not to hold against her. When two furry, blood-soaked creatures walk into your place, anybody would get alarmed.
I dug in my pants and pulled out two twenties. “Hey, Colleen. We need as many ribs as this will buy.”
Colleen raised her eyebrows. “Do I know you?”
“It’s me, Andrea. You can quit stroking the shotgun now. We’re not a threat to anything except your barbeque.”
Colleen blinked. “Andy? I didn’t know you’re a shapeshifter.”
Neither did anybody else. “Surprise, surprise.”
“We ish harrrmlesh,” Ascanio assured her, smiled, and winked, flashing huge teeth.
Colleen winced, swept my money off the counter, went to the back, and came back carrying a metal pan with three huge slabs of ribs piled on it.
Ascanio grabbed the pan.
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll eat in the parking lot and bring you the pan once we’re done. Don’t want to alarm your regulars.”
“Much appreciated.”
We headed into the parking lot and sat on the low brick wall surrounding it, with the pan of ribs between us. Ascanio stared at the meat. That’s right. I was the alpha and even the devil child had learned that in the Pack one doesn’t eat until his alpha gives him permission.
I ripped one slab in half and gave him one chunk of it. He took it and tore into the meat, crunching bones. I bit into my ribs, my hyena teeth crushing the soft bone. The sweet taste exploded in my mouth. Mmm. Food. Yummy food. So hungry.
We went through two slabs before either one of us decided to slow down enough to talk.
“Can I assssk a bad quessshtion?” Ascanio asked.
I thought of reminding him that he’d promised to be good, but after everything he’d been through today, he had earned some leeway. “Shoot.”
“How come you’re beasssshtin?”
He would have to ask that question, wouldn’t he? I sucked on a bone, buying time. Telling the kid I was too chicken to talk about it wasn’t an option. “Let’s take the Atlanta Pack. Seven clans, each grouped by the beast. Within the clans you have structure. At the top of it are the alphas, then the betas, then other people in charge of different things appointed by the alphas. The alphas themselves make up the Council, which is led by the Beast Lord and the Consort. For the individual shapeshifter, there are all sorts of safeguards in place. If you have a problem with someone or someone is abusing you, you can take it up the chain of command all the way to Curran and you will be treated fairly. You may not like the decision, but it will be just.”
Ascanio nodded.
“Kids like you don’t realize it, but this sort of structure is pretty new. Curran has only been in power for about fifteen years. Before that, each clan was on its own, and some, like Clan Wolf or Clan Rat, were broken up into individual little packs. Each pack was only as good as its alpha. If the alpha was an abusive asshole, you couldn’t do much about it.”
I handed him another chunk of ribs. “My mother was a first generation shapeshifter. She grew up on a small ranch in southern Oklahoma with her mom and dad. One day a loup bouda got into their farm. He slaughtered the horses, killed my grandfather, and attacked my mom and my grandmother. My mother was fourteen years old and she had never seen a hyena before, let alone a shapeshifter. My grandmother killed the loup, but then went loup herself. My mother hid in the storm shelter underground. By the time the sheriffs made it out to the farm, my grandmother had dug a hole almost six feet deep, trying to get my mother out to kill her. They put silver bullets through her brain real fast.
“So my mom was fourteen, all alone, a shapeshifter, and not knowing a thing about being one. The sheriffs made some calls and found out that there was a small bouda pack in Eastern Texas. The alpha was female and oh so nice on the phone. She even offered to meet them halfway to take the poor girl off their hands. So they drove out and handed my mother and the twenty thousand dollars left over from my grandparents’ life insurance over to Clarissa. Bypassed the whole Child Services mess and delivered her right to her own people. They thought it would be better for everyone that way.”
I dropped my bones into the pan. “Clarissa was a sadistic bitch. She wasn’t loup but she was damn close. She loved torture. Got off on it. Her own life turned out to be shit, so she made everyone else’s miserable. She and her two daughters, Crystal and Candy, ran the pack of two dozen boudas. My mom was small like me. The first day she arrived, Crystal beat the shit out of her and then urinated on her face. It went downhill from there.”
Ascanio stared at me, the ribs forgotten in his hands.
“The best we can figure out, my father was an exotic pet. The pack heard rumors of a drug dealer compound where a lot of large predators were being kept for show. Eventually law enforcement got around to raiding it, and three days later my father walked out of the brush. Lyc-V steals pieces of its host DNA and most of the time the transfer is from animal to human. For my father to exist, the virus had to have infected a human, and then passed from the human back to my father. This almost never happens because people don’t run around the wilderness biting animals.”
Even when shapeshifters encountered their natural counterparts while in beast form, most wildlife gave us a wide berth. A hundred-pound wolf looked at a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound werewolf and pretty quickly decided to run for the hills.
“Nobody could ever figure out how my father managed to get himself infected. He didn’t have enough brain power to explain what happened to him. Clarissa thought that my father was the funniest thing ever. They put a spiked collar on him and would lead him on a leash while he was in his human form. He couldn’t really talk, except for a handful of words like ‘no’ and ‘hungry.’ He was mentally deficient. Clarissa thought it would be oh so hilarious to have him rape my mother. He didn’t know what he was doing. He just knew that there was a female provided for him, so he mated. My mother was barely sixteen. I was born nine months later and they started beating me when I was still a toddler. For my mother, her chief tormentor was Crystal. For me, it was Candy, Clarissa’s younger daughter.”
“Didn’t your mom trrrry to prrrotect you?”
“She tried, but they would gang up on her. She used to bait them when they would start on me, because they would switch over to her instead. They told her that if she left, humans would kill her and me. She had no money and nowhere to go. On my eleventh birthday Candy and her flunkies set me on fire. My mother realized that sooner or later they would kill me. As soon as I healed enough to move, my mother grabbed me and ran. We ran clear across the country. They never came after us.”
A memory flashed before me, my mother and I huddling in the bathroom in some hotel room, wrapped in a blanket, both of us shivering because some stray noise outside reminded us of Clarissa’s voice.
“I didn’t mean to upsshet you.”
“I know. Finish your food.”
He looked at the ribs. “Not hungrrry anymorre.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Don’t let it go to waste.”
He bit into the rib. “Did you ever go back?”
I smiled at him. “What do you think?”
He blinked.
“Funny thing about that pack,” I said. “A few years ago someone went over there and wiped them out. Must’ve been some sort of marksman, because most of them had been shot from a distance. Very clean shots, with silver bullets.” I leaned over and touched a spot at the base of his skull about half an inch below his earlobe. “Apricot. Also known as medulla oblongata. It’s an area of the brain that controls involuntary functions: breathing, heart rate, digestion. It is the only place in the shapeshifter body that guarantees instant death when hit by a silver bullet. Very small target.” I held my fingers a little over an inch apart. “Tiny. Takes a lot of practice.”
Ascanio’s eyes were huge on his bouda face.
Not everyone got a clean death. Some were more up close and personal. Not everyone died either. There were four children—all boys—and three adolescents—two girls and a boy—in chains. The next generation, new victims of Clarissa’s tender love and care. They made it.
“What happened to yourrr dad?”
“He died about two years after we ran away. He was a hyena and they only live about twelve years or so in the wild. He probably lived twice that. If you’re done eating, we need to get a move on.”
He hopped off the wall.
We wiped our faces with the towel from the Jeep, returned the pan, and drove out.
“Whereee to now?” Ascanio asked.
“Garcia Construction.” I highly doubted that we would even be allowed to enter Anapa’s HQ in our current shapes.
Garcia Construction had an address on the east side of the city, in the tangle of newly renamed streets, and it took us a good hour and a half to find it. The building sat in the back of a lot behind a chain-link fence, but the gate stood wide open. We parked on the street and breezed right in. Gravel crunched under my paw-feet. I really hated gravel. It was sharp, it got stuck between your toes, and it didn’t exactly provide a stable surface.
Random dirt and refuse littered the gravel lot before the structure. The building itself was nothing special: built post-Shift, with magic in mind. Just a brick box, with barred dusty windows and a barred door, a standard house for a world where monsters spawned out of thin air and tried to break into your house to eat you. Another chain-link gate, on the right of the building and also wide open, led to the back lot.
The place smelled abandoned: squirrels, the musk of a tomcat on the prowl, dog excrement decomposing in the sun, tree rats. No human odors. Odd.
I ran my fingers along the wooden board nailed tight across the double door. Dirt.
“They arrrre closshed,” Ascanio observed.
“It looks that way. Either the Heron building was supposed to be their big comeback and they didn’t rehire anyone until they got a contract, or…”
“Orrr?”
“Or someone hired them specifically to reclaim the Heron Building and when the deal fell through, the client abandoned them. Come on, we’re going to dig in their garbage.”
“Oh boy!”
Smartass.
The Dumpster by the fence didn’t yield any new information. It wasn’t exactly empty either. The moment we lifted the lid, a very upset mama skunk aimed her butt at us, and we dropped the lid pronto. Stupid May, everybody was having babies.
I went to check the mailbox, while Ascanio trotted off to the back.
The metal box was empty. No mail. Hmm.
“I found shomeshing!” Ascanio called.
I made my way to the back. The narrow space between the building and the fence opened into an enormous back lot, filled with random metal junk. Tiny creatures, fuzzy and quick, with long chinchilla tails, skittered over the refuse. The gravel lay unevenly. It looked like something had been dragged out.
Ascanio greeted me in the back, holding up a flat tire, with a jagged chunk of metal embedded in it. He stuck the tire under my nose. The scent of automotive lubricant wafted up. Fresh. Car grease changed its scent in the open. This was a recent blowout.
Someone had driven into this lot probably during the last week, no more than ten days ago for sure. I held up the tire. It wasn’t just flat, it must’ve exploded. The vehicle to which that tire belonged couldn’t have gotten very far. I looked back at the drag marks. Someone had been towed out. That was the most likely explanation.
The dirt on the board blocking the door was months old. Magic had killed most of the cell phones—if you had a working one, you were likely in the military. So how did this person get themselves out of their blown tire predicament?
I jogged to the street, with Ascanio at my heels. Two hundred yards down the road, a tall sign announced Downs Motor Care. Aha.
I pointed at the sign. “This would be a clue.”
Ascanio chortled next to me. It sounded like something out of a nightmare.
We walked to Downs Motor Care, which consisted of a parking lot littered with car parts and filled with random clunkers of both the mechanical and the magical persuasion. A large metal garage sat in the back. Two of the garage’s four doors were open. In the first door, a man dug under the hood of a Dodge truck.
“Afternoon!” I called out.
The man spun about, saw us, and hit his head on the Dodge’s hood. He was young, in good shape, with a face that looked like something had chewed on the left side of it and spat him out.
The mechanic yanked a large wrench from the nearby table. “What do you want?”
I held up twenty bucks. Six months ago I would’ve flashed my Order ID. He would have instantly been put at ease and I would have gotten my information. But in the past couple of months of working with Kate I had learned that the private sector paid for the answers to their questions. It chafed me, but I needed to find the killer.
“Looking for some information, sir,” I said.
Ascanio showed him the tire.
The mechanic studied us for a long moment. “Put the money on the ground. Pin it with a rock and don’t come any closer.”
I should probably rethink running around in beastkin shape, especially if I kept getting bloody. All my witnesses seemed to be disturbed by it.
I put the twenty under the rock. “Did you tow someone out of Garcia Construction in the last week or so?”
The mechanic rested the wrench against his chest. “Yeah.”
“Who was it?”
“Some woman.”
“Was she one of Garcia’s regulars?”
He shook his head. “Never seen her before.”
“What did she look like?”
He frowned. “About early forties, nice dress, good shoes. Well put together. Looked like a businesswoman to me.”
“Did she mention what her name was or what she was doing there?”
“No. I changed the tire, she paid me, that was it.”
“How did she pay?”
“Gave me a check.”
I blinked at him a couple of times, before I remembered that fluttering my eyelashes didn’t exactly go over well in my current shape. “You took a check from some woman you don’t know?”
“It was a check from her business. I called it into the bank; they said it was good.”
“What sort of business?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Store of some sort or the other. Art something.”
Interesting. “Any chance you can find that cancelled check?”
“I have work to do,” he said. “I’m busy.”
I showed him a card, bent down, and put it under the rock. “If you happen to run across the check, there is another fifty bucks in it for you. The address and phone number are on the card.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Like I said, I’m busy.”
I walked off.
“Now what?” Ascanio asked.
“Now we go to the office and bathe.”
I was sitting in the office, with my beastkin feet on the desk and a bottle of Georgia Peach Iced Tea, custom-made for me by Burt’s Liquor, where I’d made a strategic stop before arriving at the office. Outside the barred window, evening had dimmed the sky to a deep purple. Ascanio was in the back, trying to scrub himself clean in the office shower. He’d caught a nap on the way back to the office, so I expected him to emerge in his human shape and at least semi-conscious.
I sipped my drink. All in all, a productive day. A hell of a lot of excitement.
Footsteps. I twitched my furry round ear, listening. Light stride, sure steps…Kate.
The door swung open and Kate walked in. Her jeans and T-shirt were splattered with blood and she was carrying a severed vampire head. The T-shirt had a smiley face on it.
In my natural untanned state I was pale. If you put me into a pitch-black room, my face would probably light up like the moon. That’s why I cultivated a sun habit that resulted in a mild pigment formation in my skin. I liked to call this tan golden brown. My favorite cosmetics company, Sorcière, which had a slightly cannibalistic tendency to name all their foundation skin tones after food, liked to call my tan “cream.” Cream was only a couple of shades darker than the palest “milk.” If I really baked myself, I could get all the way to “vanilla blush,” which meant pale beige. Woo-hoo.
Kate would need “dusky honey” at the very least. I knew this because a few weeks ago I had to explain to her what concealer was and why she couldn’t use it by itself on the strange rash we got after clearing some odd rat-critters from an old warehouse. Putting concealer and foundation on Kate turned out to be a losing proposition, because after the first five minutes it bugged her and she kept rubbing her face until she looked like a clown who got painted up in the dark.
Her hair, put away into a long braid, was chocolate brown and her eyes were dark too, framed in dense black eyelashes, and oddly cut, large, but slightly elongated with curvy corners. The first time I saw her, I had stared, trying to figure out what the heck she was. There were shades of India there, or maybe Arabia, or possibly a touch of Asia. She could twist it any way she wanted, depending on makeup, which she rarely wore.
At first glance you looked at Kate and thought “fighter,” maybe merc. Five inches taller than me, she was all muscle—well, and some boobs—but mostly muscle. She moved like a predator and when she got pissed off, she exhaled aggression, like hot breath on a winter evening. Still, men looked, until they saw her eyes. Kate’s eyes were crazy. It was that hidden-deep crazy that told you that you had no idea what the hell she would do next but whatever it was, the bad guys wouldn’t like it.
Kate looked at me for a long second. “Hey.”
I saluted her with my bottle. “Hey.”
Kate went into the kitchen, pulled a ceramic dish from under the sink, sat the vamp’s head into it, put it in the fridge, and washed her hands. She came back, slipped the sheath off her back with her sword still in it, hung it on my client chair, and plopped into it.
“What are you drinking?”
“Georgia Peach Iced Tea. Want some?” I offered it to her with my claws.
“Sure.” She took a sip, and coughed with a grimace. “What the hell is in this?”
Heh-heh. Lightweight. “Vodka, gin, rum, sweet and sour, and peach schnapps. Lots of peach schnapps.”
“Do you actually get a buzz from this?”
“Sort of.” Lyc-V made it very difficult to get drunk. “It lasts for about thirty seconds or so and then I need another gulp.”
Kate leaned back against her chair. “Where is the bane of my existence?”
“In the shower, freshening up.”
“Oh God, who did Ascanio screw now?”
“No, no, he’s covered in blood.”
“Oh good.” She sighed and stopped. “The kid is covered in blood and we’re relieved. There is something wrong with us.”
“Tell me about it.” I took another swig. “Not going to mention my beastkin appearance?”
“I like it,” she said. “The torn pants and gore-stained T-shirt is a nice touch.”
I wiggled my toes. “I was thinking of painting my claws a nice shade of pink.”
Kate glanced at my feet. “That would take a lot of nail polish. What about some golden hoops in your ears instead?”
I grinned. “It’s a definite possibility.”
“What happened?” Kate asked.
“I saw Raphael this morning. I’d called him last night, because Jim put me on some shapeshifter murders and I needed to interview him. I wanted a chance to apologize.”
Kate took my bottle and drank from it. “How did it go?”
“He replaced me.”
The bottle stopped in Kate’s hand, three inches above the table. “He what?”
“He found another girl. She is seven feet tall, with breasts the size of honeydew melons, legs that start at her neck, bleached blond hair down to her ass, and her waist is this big around.” I touched my index and thumb claws. “They are engaged to be engaged.”
“He brought her here?”
“She sat in that chair right there.” I pointed at the other client chair. “I’m thinking of burning it.”
Kate put the bottle down. “Did you punch him?”
“Nope.” I took a long swig. The alcohol burned my tongue. “After he told me that his new sweetheart’s best quality is that she isn’t me, it didn’t seem like it would make any difference.”
“Is she a shapeshifter?”
I shook my head. “A human. Not a fighter. Not that bright either. I know what you’ll say—it’s my own fault.”
“Well, you did check out of his life,” Kate said. “You checked out of my life for a while.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I took a deep breath. There was no action to displace the pain now. No escape. The ache settled in my chest and scraped at me with sharp little claws.
“Are you going to fight for him?” Kate asked.
I looked at her. “What?”
“Are you going to fight for him, or are you going to roll over on your back and take it?”
“Look who’s talking. How long did it take you and Curran to have a conversation after that whole dinner mess? Was it three weeks or more like a month?”
Kate arched her left eyebrow. “That’s different. That was a misunderstanding.”
“Aha.”
“He brought his new main squeeze here after you called him with a peace offering. That’s a slap in the face.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know.” I growled, deep in my throat.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Nothing is free,” Kate said. “If you want it, you have to fight for it.”
Coming from a woman who had fought off twenty-two shapeshifters to stay by Curran’s side, that was a statement based on experience.
“I’m thinking about it.” Thinking if I wanted to fight for Raphael. What he did to me was cruel. I hurt and I wanted revenge more than anything else. But at the same time, who was I to stand in the way of his new happiness? Whatever Rebecca was giving him, he clearly needed it, otherwise he wouldn’t have made plans for their engagement. “How did your day go?”
“I got some head. It was vamp, but still.”
I stared at her. Kate was the last person I would have expected to make that joke. Well, someone had loosened up since mating. “That good, huh.”
“Yup.”
“I have a glass monster corpse for you. It’s in the freezer.”
Kate grinned a deranged smile. “You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s a bribe for putting up with my psychotic break.”
A car engine roared outside.
“That’s my ride,” Kate said.
The door swung open, and Curran shouldered his way in. Muscular, built like he fought for his life every day—which wasn’t too far from the truth—Curran moved like a beast who knew he was at the top of the food chain. When he walked into a room, he owned it and you knew that if you disagreed, he would prove it to you. Judging by the blood spatter on his T-shirt, he had done it today already.
I rose. It’s polite to afford monarchy its due. If you don’t, they get royally pissy.
Curran’s thick blond eyebrows furrowed. We didn’t really get along that well, mainly because I complicated his life. A good portion of the older shapeshifters believed in killing beastkin, and my existence meant he would have to resolve this prejudice sooner or later. On top of that I was a shapeshifter and I wasn’t in the Pack. He managed to ignore this fact, probably because Kate and I were best friends. However, I had spent the whole day galloping around the city in my beastkin shape. Ignoring me was no longer an option.
Kate stepped next to him and kissed him. He turned to her, focusing on her completely, as if they were alone in the room. That’s what mating meant. It stabbed at me a little. There was a time I’d had that, too.
“Hold on, let me grab the vamp head.” Kate went into the back.
The Beast Lord looked at me. “I see you’ve decided who you want to be.”
“I’m working on it.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days, then.”
If I didn’t present myself in three days or make some sort of arrangement to do so, he would take it as an open challenge. To present myself, I would have to swallow my pride, put aside the memories of my tormented childhood, and go back to Aunt B, a bouda and the woman I had slapped. The woman who had sent two boudas to thrash me. I would have to bow my head and apologize and ask to be admitted into her clan.
I’d rather eat dirt.
“I hope so,” I said.
“The Pack isn’t so bad, Andrea,” he said quietly. “And loyalty goes both ways.”
“I know,” I said. “I just…I feel like I failed.” What the hell was I doing having a heart-to-heart with the Beast Lord? “I worked so hard at my previous life. Joining the Pack is the last nail in that coffin.”
“The only thing you failed at was pretending to be something you’re not. And you got away with it for a very long time.” Curran shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody in the Pack will judge you for what you are or whose daughter you are. You have my word on it.”
Ascanio emerged into the room and bowed his head. Normally either Kate or Derek gave Ascanio a ride. He couldn’t be trusted with his own vehicle. Today he had the privilege of Curran’s company. I didn’t envy him the car ride home.
Kate came out of the kitchen, carrying a plastic sack. She waved at me and the three of them went into the night, closing the door behind them. The car pulled away.
I was all alone.
I sat down and drained half a bottle of my Georgia Peach Tea in a single long swallow.
To rewrite my life, I had to own all of the choices I’d made and deal with their consequences. I could take off and start over somewhere else. It would be easier. So much easier than bending my knee to my new bitch alpha and seeing Raphael and his happy bride at every clan gathering.
I laughed at the thought. It sounded too bitter and I stopped and headed to the shower instead. The night was still young. It was barely past six-thirty. I could get cleaned and sift through my evidence some more.
From the moment I was born, I learned that I had two choices: to fight or die. I wasn’t the dying type. Atlanta would respect me. The Pack would value me. And Raphael…Well, Raphael would come to regret replacing me, because I would prove to him that I was a much better choice.