Raven Cursed

trees, a long, lean man lazing in it. One leg was draped over the side, bare foot and calf dangling. A matching arm, equally naked, held a bottle of beer. The body between the two was hidden by hammock, and hammock and beer were banned in the park, hence the positioning of them behind the tent. I grinned, skipping the niceties. “You are dressed, aren’t you?”

He toasted me with the beer and wiggled his toes at me in a drunken wave, which didn’t answer my question. The dark skin of both limbs was smooth and unscarred, the flesh of a shape-changer, forever untouched by damage, remade with every shift. Given a few more hundred shifts, my own skin would be as perfect again, assuming I stayed out of mortal danger. For reasons I didn’t know, scars from a lethal wound were hard to heal. “Jane Yellowrock, Rogue Hunter,” he said. “My alpha.” I had made Kem my beta, forced him to bring Rick here, and care for him until he shifted into his big-cat. Kem wanted me to understand that he didn’t have to like it. “My alpha, who smells of catamount and Eurasian owl and dog.”

The last was a slur and I let a hint of my grin out. “Kemnebi, of the Party of African Weres, my beta, who smells of black leopard and sweat and very strongly of beer.”

He lifted his hand, the bottle disappearing behind the hammock edge. I heard a slurping sound and the bottle reappeared, now half empty. “Good beer. Samuel Adams makes the most acceptable beer I have yet discovered in America. I have been tasting all of them. Extensively.” He sipped again. “There are more in the cooler.”

“No thanks, I’m driving.” I dropped my jacket, plopped into a folding sling chair, which was far less comfortable than it looked, and lifted the cooler lid anyway. “I’ll take one of these, though.” I opened another Coke and sipped, wondering how much beer it took to keep a shape-shifter drunk. Our metabolisms are fast, and it had to be a lot of beer. With a toe, I lifted the lid of a large, blue recycle pail. It was three-quarters full of broken beer bottles. Yeah. A lot of beer. After a companionable moment of silence I said, “How long ago did the grindy get here?”

“Safia’s pet arrive two week ago.” The words held no inflection, but were carefully, drunkenly enunciated. Interesting.

“It was a long swim, I take it.”

The hammock moved with what may have been a shrug, noncommittal. “He was most unhappy with me at first. But he forgave me.” There was a heavy dose of bitter irony in the words. I wasn’t real sure about the symbiotic relationship between the two races, but it would seem difficult to maintain, when one was always in danger from the other. I didn’t know what to say to that, but Kem was drunkenly loquacious and carried on the conversation without my contribution. “They are like pets until we err. Affectionate . . .” The words trailed off, then picked back up again. “He killed my mate. And then he came beneath my hand for caress. He . . . licked my hand.” He spaced the last words widely, and they were full of venom. “I forced him to leave, yet I still smell him on the wind. He watches.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but that might have been offensive as well as disingenuous. I had a similar relationship with the vamps. I killed them when they got out of line, much like the grindy did the weres. Of course I didn’t lick Leo’s hand afterward. The thought’s accompanying mental picture made me grin, which I hid behind the Coke as I drank. My sense of humor was gonna get me killed one day. “How is he?” I asked from behind the can, changing the subject.

Kem raised his head at that one, his black eyes wide, showing above the hammock edge, trying to focus in my direction. His face was darker in the shadows beneath the trees, but his eyes were vibrant. “He is alive. He is unchanged. He is frightened about the full moon, which comes again soon. He is lonely. As lonely as I am.”

The he is lonely was directed at me for not coming to visit. Asheville is only sixty miles from Hartford. A nice ride. One I hadn’t made, even though I’d brought Kem and Rick here in the first place. I’d hoped the black were-leopard could ease Rick through his first shift, teach him something about being a were- cat. The International Association of Weres had agreed, and insisted Kem help the newbie. For a lot of really good reasons, Kem had been less than enthusiastic. “Still no shift?”

“He will not try again until the full moon. His pain is too great.”

That got me. I’d seen Rick try to shift on his first full moon. It had been agonizing. Like watching a man try to turn himself inside out. “So where is he?”

“He likes to fish.”

I smiled at that one and stood. I rinsed the can and crushed it, tucking it in the sealed, bear-resistant recycle basket. “Tell him I said hi.” I turned and stopped. Dead. As still as a vamp.

“Tell him yourself,” Rick growled.

My breath caught. Kem chuckled. He’d seen Rick approach behind me, quiet as a cat. Rick was unshaven and shirtless, his jeans hanging low on his hips, chest hair sparse and straight and forming a line pointing into the top of the jeans. His black hair had grown, the ends curling at his nape and over his ears. His eyes were shadowed, black as night, steely, pinning me to the path. His torso and shoulders were a mass of scars from big- cats and werewolves, the scarring ripping through his tattoos, nearly obscuring the bobcat and the mountain lion. Except for the cats’ golden-amber eyes and the blood on their claws. There was something about that naked chest and the scars that begged to be touched. I curled my fingers under. Rick’s eyes dropped to them, then back up in a leisurely perusal that made me acutely aware of myself. My breath hitched slightly, and I tightened all over, warming from a lot more than the heat. Boyfriend? Oh my.

Rick LaFleur was a pretty-boy when wearing city clothes. Half-naked, in the wooded site, ungroomed and feral-looking, he was gorgeous. He smiled then, exposing white teeth, one bottom tooth slightly crooked, and I realized I’d said part of that aloud. Crap.

“I’ve missed you too,” he said, amused. He moved past me, and only then did I catch the smell of fresh fish. Even the breeze had been hiding the man. He carried a bait bucket, two rods, a tackle box, and a string of fish. They looked like smallmouth bass, about eleven to sixteen inches long. One still flapped. Rick stowed his gear away and carried a long curved knife and the fish to a board set up between two trees; there were traces of blood on the wood, and part of the dead-fish smell I had attributed to the grindy actually came from the fish-cleaning station.

Movements economical, almost graceful, Rick hung the fish chain from a nail and slid the hook from the gills of the top fish. It moved weakly when he sliced through below the gills and cut off its head. I wondered if Rick thought I’d run at the sight of the casual cruelty, but Beast sometimes ate her food still kicking. I figured she could outdo him in the gross-factor if I wanted. Of course, Rick didn’t know about Beast. Rick didn’t know a lot of things. I hadn’t found a way to tell him most of them. Others were complicated.

Okay. I was lying. I was a coward, that’s why Rick didn’t know a lot of things.

The knife moving with swift, sure strokes, he scaled the fish, the iridescent scales flying everywhere. I thought fishermen scaled fish before they beheaded them, but I wasn’t a fisherman trying to gross out an old girlfriend.

“Beer,” Kem said from behind me. Rick stopped, wiped his hands on a towel hanging in the tree, and walked to the cooler. He took out a beer, opened the top and handed it to Kem without meeting his eyes. It was the action of a submissive animal to an aggressive alpha. Beast hissed quietly inside, the hair of her pelt rising, stiff, the phantom reaction tight inside my skin.

Wordless, Rick returned to the fish. I narrowed my eyes, putting things together. I walked to the hammock, placing my feet without care, so that Kem would know I was coming, if he wasn’t too drunk to notice. I stood over the hammock, seeing his body, lithe and fit, wearing baggy shorts and a sheen of sweat. He smelled of bug spray and old beer. He was watching me with savage glee on his face. Expectant. Eager. “You want a fight, don’t you. Fine.”

Drawing on Beast-speed, faster than he could see, faster than he could react, I flipped the hammock. Rode him down to the ground. He landed on his stomach. Face in the dirt. My knee in his back, pressing him down. I grabbed his short hair and yanked back. Bowing his spine, arching his neck. Shoved the stake I had found under his chin. The hammock spun and settled. The sound of fish scales flying stopped. The beer bottle landed, spilling in a froth. Everything stopped.