“No.”
“Andrea, I’m sick of being stuck here by myself. Please, please, please, can I come with you? I’ll be good.”
He’d been cooped up in the office for the last few weeks, at first because he was injured, then because he wasn’t and we wanted to keep him that way.
“I’m going to look for a murderer. If you come with me, you’ll get hurt when we run into trouble on the way. And then I will have to have a very unpleasant conversation with Aunt B, which will go like this: ‘You won’t join Clan Bouda, you broke up with my son, and you let that sweet precious boy get hurt.’”
Ascanio picked up my desk with one hand and held it four feet off the ground.
“It’s not your muscle I’m concerned about. It’s your brains. Or lack thereof.”
He set the table down. “Please, Andrea.”
He was going stir-crazy and doing broom drills. I could relate. I’d been there.
“Can you drive?” If I put my seat all the way back, I’d fit into the Jeep, but driving with my size-twelve feet and three-inch claws would be a challenge.
“Do the People navigate vampires? Of course I can drive.”
“Alright.”
He jumped three feet in the air.
“Now, while you’re with me, you will be acting as a representative of our firm. That means you will be respectful and polite. If some jerk calls you an asshole, you’ll call him sir. Even if you have to throw him on the ground and break his legs, you will still call him sir while doing it. You follow my lead and you follow my orders. That means not taking the initiative and starting fights without my express command. Do you get me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Excellent. Go get your knife.”
He ran into the supply room and came out with a tactical bowie knife in a sheath on his belt. The bowie, a “Mercenary Guild” model, boasted a sixteen-inch black blade and weighed almost two pounds. You could chop small trees down with it. It would be sufficient.
“Let’s go.”
He hesitated. “Carrie and Deb are in our parking lot. I saw them from the window.”
I went to the back and carefully glanced out of the window. Two boudas waited for us by my Jeep. The one on the left, Carrie, a tall Italian-looking woman in her mid-forties with dark shoulder-length hair, leaned against the vehicle, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Olive-skinned, Carrie had a kind of raw-boned hardness about her that said you’d have to rip her arms off before she’d stop coming after you. Deb, her buddy, was about ten years younger, looked softer, rounder in the face, and stood two inches shorter. Her red hair, cut in a fluffy carefree bob, flared about her tan face. Her brown eyes brimmed with humor. She cracked up easily and usually went for the gut in a fight.
Aunt B used them for light enforcement jobs. That old bitch was at it again. Aunt B and I never saw eye to eye. She’d helped me once during the flare, when the magic made me lose control over my body, but that was the only moment of kindness I had ever seen from her.
“What are you two doing here?” I murmured to myself.
“Maybe they have some pamphlets that will save our souls and make sure we’re right with the Lord,” Ascanio said.
“Did those nice church ladies come by again?”
He nodded. “I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God’s eyes. And then they decided they were late to be somewhere else.”
A little bit of knowledge was a very dangerous thing.
In the parking lot, Deb crossed her arms and kicked a tiny rock. It flew out of our view like it had been shot from a cannon. Deb watched it go, winced, and hid behind the Jeep. Carrie shook her head.
Any shapeshifter in the Pack’s territory had three days to present themselves to the Pack, at which point they would either obtain a visitor’s permit, allowing them to carry out their business; they would petition to join the Pack; or they would be asked to leave. While I was in the Order, Aunt B made no move to bring me into the fold. I thought she didn’t want to cause a problem with the knights. I discovered I was wrong—she left me alone because Raphael had a thing for me and then we became an item. The moment we had a falling out, she came after me like a shark.
Aunt B wanted me to play ball, join Clan Bouda, and be one of her girls. I’d been in a bouda clan once. No thanks.
“We could go out the front door,” Ascanio said.
They thought they could intimidate me. Well, they should have brought a lot more people, because I was done doing things by the book. “Hell, no. We’re going out the back. Whatever happens, you stay out of it or I will never take you with me anywhere.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I marched out through the back door.
The boudas took me in, fur and all. Their eyes widened.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going like that?” Carrie asked.
Wrong thing to say. Wrong, wrong thing to say. “Wherever the hell I please.”
“I don’t get it.” Carrie shook her head. “Are you trying to provoke Aunt B? What, your life’s too nice and you need some misery?”
I grinned at them.
“Sure,” Carrie said. “You can tell us what the meeting between you and Raphael was about.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because Aunt B wants to know,” Deb said.
They must’ve tried to listen in, but before Kate got this office, the same Jim who put me on this case had remodeled it. I didn’t know what he put into the walls, but the place was shapeshifter soundproof.
“Aunt B’s tailing her own son now?” I asked.
“That’s none of your business,” Carrie said. “Look, we can go with Plan A, where we all have a nice chat and go our separate ways, or we can do Plan B, where we have a more vigorous chat and tune you up a bit until you feel like sharing. Either way, Aunt B will get what she wants.”
“How about Plan C?” I asked.
“What plan would that be?” Deb asked.
“The one where you go fuck yourselves.” A snarl crept into my voice. “You come here to my territory and you think you can push me around? Well, come on. Push. See what it will get you.”
Deb blinked.
“Fuck you, you stupid bitch,” Carrie growled. “You want a lesson, I’ll give you one.”
Carrie’s body flowed, snapping into a new shape: half-person, half-animal, wrapped in sparse, sandy fur. Thick ropes of muscle corded her massive neck, supporting her round head with giant jaws and a forest of sharp fangs soaked in drool. The muscle continued to knot between her shoulder blades, forming a hump. Colossal biceps powered her arms, the network of veins bulging through her hide. Her feet and hands bore three-inch claws that would shred flesh like a knife cut through a ripe fruit. She looked like the stuff nightmares were made of. If you didn’t know any better.
I took a couple of steps forward, so I’d have plenty of room to maneuver. My furry me was proportionate: my limbs were properly formed, my jaws fit together into a neat muzzle, and although my hands and feet were oversized and armed with claws, my fingers weren’t misshapen. Maintaining this form came effortlessly to me. But Carrie was a regular shapeshifter and her warrior form was on the shaky side. Her jumbo biceps bulged from her too-long arms, limiting her movement, while her short legs barely had enough meat to support her top-heavy frame. She hunched over, because her spine fit into her pelvis at an angle, and no effective kicks would be coming my way. She didn’t specialize in combat, which meant she’d fight just like any other civilian shapeshifter: claws, teeth, nothing fancy. Good enough to tear most normal humans into pieces.
Next to her Deb raised her arms. No warrior form, but she was good at boxing.
