20
I GOT OUT of the Jeep, which was second in the line of cars behind the already filled garage. When we were all home, and the bodyguards had their own cars, it was a lot of cars. The guards tried to keep the cars down, and changing, so no one watching could figure out how many, and who was guarding us at any given time, but it was still a lot of vehicles.
I had a sense of movement to the side of the house and made eye contact with Bram for a second; his skin was dark and almost truly black, but in leopard form he was spotted. Since others with paler skin were black leopards, I’d asked, and learned that your animal’s coloring had nothing to do with your genetics as a person, but everything to do with the genetics of the line of beasts you descend from, so if you come from a line of leopards that run high to spotted yellow leopards, that’s what you’ll be, no matter how pale or dark your human form may be. I didn’t nod at that brief glimpse of him, as he melted back out of sight; there was just the “seeing” of each other. If someone was watching us, it was unlikely that my acknowledging him any more than what I’d just done would give him away. Bram was ex-military and had been a combat vet before a wereleopard attack had ended his military career for “health” reasons. He and his usual guard partner, Ares, a werehyena and ex-military sniper, had broken all of us of nodding, waving, or acknowledging the guards on duty in any way. They’d pissed and moaned about it, until we all learned better. I wouldn’t have waved, but once I would have given the smallest nod.
I tried the door handle before trying the key, because not everyone locked the door. It opened and I stepped into my house. The living room was dim, curtains still pulled, but laughter, talking, and bright morning light spilled through the open archway that led to the kitchen. It was a happy murmur of voices, not that fake murmur you get at a party sometimes where people are struggling to have a good time, trying to find things to talk about; no, this was a group of people who knew and liked each other and had things to share. I put my equipment bags down by the door. The smell of baking bread and bacon filled the air.
Micah stood in our bedroom door across the living room. He was on the phone. He waved, smiling, his green- gold leopard eyes shining in the dimness, catching what light there was and magnifying it. He was my height, built so delicate that almost any clothes hid that there was muscle underneath, and only the athletic set of shoulder to slender waist and hips hinted how much he worked out. He was wearing a T-shirt that fit us both; we even had a few pairs of jeans that we could share. I’d never dated anyone as tiny as I was; I sort of liked it.
I started to go to him, for a kiss, but what he said into the phone stopped me. He was going to need to concentrate on the call. “Stephen, you are not your father. You will not abuse like he did.” Micah pushed his dark brown curls back over his shoulder, frowning. Stephen was a werewolf, so he should have been making this comfort call to his Ulfric, wolf king, but Micah had become de facto leader for almost the entire furry community, because he actually led, and wasn’t pretending to be anything but who and what he was; the Ulfric, Richard Zeeman, was still trying to have a Clark Kent life and hide that he was also Superman, um, wolf, so he was at school teaching college students about biology. At least he wasn’t at the junior high anymore, where being outed as a werewolf would have certainly cost him his job. The college would have a harder time with it.
Stephen and his twin brother had been horribly abused by their father, so he was terrified that his fiancee wanted to have a baby. Stephen was convinced that he would abuse a child, as his own father had done. Therapy can get you only so far with exorcising your childhood nightmares; after that it’s willpower, and you, and people you can trust to hold your hand along the way. “I have faith in you, Stephen,” Micah said. “If you don’t want to have a child, that’s your choice…” He listened for a minute, and then said, “Vanessa is set on children, I know that. I’m sorry she’s given you the ultimatum, Stephen, but that’s her choice, too.” You think being leopard king and queen, Nimir-Raj and Nimir-Ra, would give you power to rule, and it does, but you also end up being part parent, part therapist, part carrot, part stick, part cheerleader, and part disciplinarian. I did my best, but Micah was really good at it.
I blew him a kiss; he pantomimed one back and went into the bedroom and closed the door. He’d be talking Stephen down for a while. I was honestly beginning to believe that Stephen wasn’t going to work through his issues in time to save his relationship with Vanessa, and that was sad, because they loved each other to pieces, but anyone who ever said love conquers all was a fucking liar. Love is a good place to start, but it’s a start, not an end.
I washed my hands in the hallway bathroom before I went into the kitchen. You didn’t go to breakfast with the possibility of blood under your fingernails. There wasn’t any blood on my hands, but… there had been in the past, and washing my hands when coming in from work had just become a ritual, like I was cleansing myself of more than just germs and potential crime scene schmutz.
Nathaniel was half bent over, taking something out of the oven. His auburn braid curled on the floor, because it was just that long, falling nearly to his ankles. He was wearing only a pair of jeans so worn they were almost white, and his dark purple chef’s apron across his muscular upper chest. I knew the apron made his lavender eyes look very close to true purple. He’d been my live-in sweetie for nearly three years. I knew what his eyes looked like in the new apron, or the old ones.
Nicky was at the stove in a T-shirt that strained over his massive, muscular upper body. He had jean shorts on that had been cut down from an old pair of jeans, so they accommodated the swell of his thighs. He was tall enough to carry the extra muscle at just about six feet. He had a kitchen towel tucked into the front of his shorts, because aprons were not his thing. That he’d put on a shirt to protect himself from the bacon he was frying up in a pan was all the concession I’d ever seen Nicky make to domesticity. He didn’t live with us, officially, but he was with us a lot. We always had bodyguards, and he was one of the best we had. He was also my werelion to call, and my lover, though not exactly my sweetie.
Nathaniel lifted weights because he was an exotic dancer, so only to a point. Nicky lifted because he was a bodyguard, and he liked lifting. His body showed how much. His blond hair was cut short in the back and halfway down the sides, a skater’s cut, but the bangs were actually a wedge shape, one part in a straight, yellow triangle of hair that trailed halfway down his face. It looked very anime, but it wasn’t just a fashion statement; it hid his empty eye socket from where he’d lost his eye long before he became a werelion, or my bodyguard.
Cynric-Sin-was the last one at the business side of the kitchen. His dark blue hair had grown long enough that he usually put it in a ponytail to cook. I got a glimpse of the blue-on-blue of his tiger eyes. Most people didn’t catch that his eyes weren’t human, because they didn’t think that tigers came with blue eyes, but the clan weretigers were different from all the other wereanimals, because they were born with tiger eyes and hair that wasn’t always human-normal, like Cynric’s deep, almost navy blue hair. He was wearing dark blue jeans; he’d grown four inches in the last year, so we’d had to buy him new pants, so he had no old jeans that still fit. That tended to happen when you were eighteen. He was taller than Nathaniel, and almost the same height as Nicky, though his shoulders didn’t have Nathaniel’s spread, and he looked damn near willowy beside Nicky, but then most of the men did. I realized that with all three of them turned away from me, Sin didn’t look like a little boy anymore. He’d filled out in the weight room and thanks to the new preternatural football league and track. He was Missouri’s quarterback, and we had coaches from some serious schools scouting him. A preternatural college league had started last year, and the amateur preternatural adult men’s league was one of the top money draws on pay TV, so the colleges had gotten on board, and we were probably only a few months away from a professional league.
Gina was setting the table. Her dark, nearly black hair was short and curled sort of artfully around her face. When my hair was that short, it wasn’t artful, just messier, but then some curls are better behaved than others. Gina was tall, nearly six feet; her dark gray eyes were looking more at her husband and baby than at the dishes, so the settings were a little crooked as she moved around the table, but I didn’t care; perfect place settings were overrated and the happiness on her face as she watched them was worth it.
Zeke was in half-man form, which meant he looked like most of the movie werewolves you’ve ever seen, except that his eyes were human. Usually when someone was stuck in animal form their eyes were the first things to go animal, and stick, but for some reason Zeke had done the opposite. His blue human eyes were trapped in the face of a movie monster. The baby in his lap looked up, laughing, and he had his father’s eyes, except it was a very human face, with short dark hair just beginning to get long enough to prove he was going to have his mother’s curls.
They were living with us because the baby hadn’t been getting enough sunlight underneath the Circus of the Damned. The baby had started getting agoraphobic when he was outside the underground, like some kind of post- apocalyptic survivor. They’d been here two months and it had made a world of difference in Chance. He was getting
