Page 76
She got a hint of where I was headed. “Red loves me!”
“Red loves power more. What kind of boyfriend is he that he would try to rob you of your power? To use you this way? Sex is…” I struggled for words. “It’s an intimate thing. A loving thing, or at least it should be, God damn it. You should do it because you want to make the other person and yourself happy.”
She was blinking back tears. “If I gave him my power, it would make him happy and then I’d be happy!”
It’s good that Red was hiding somewhere far away, because if I could get my hands on him right this second, I’d wring his little neck.
“You’re a sensate. One in ten thousand. You and your mom always worry about money, right? Julie, with a little training, you could make three or four times as much as I do within a couple of years. People will bring you money in truckloads. They will pay for you to go to school, just so you could tell them what color of magic something is. But even if you had the most useless power in the world, even if all you could do was to make a fart sound with a flick of your fingers, I would still tell you the same thing. You shouldn’t give up what you are to make somebody else happy.”
“I decide what makes me happy!” She jumped off the bed and stomped off.
“If it feels wrong, it probably is.”
She slammed the door. Well, I had managed to handle that one with my usual tact, finesse, and sense of perfect timing. I got up and went to dress and find something to eat.
YOUNG SHAPESHIFTERS DIDN’T HAVE A LOT OF TIMEto find themselves. When puberty hit, they had two choices: go loup or go Code.
Going loup meant abandoning all control to blindly follow your body into hormone hell. Loups fed on human meat. They reveled in pain and sadistic perversion, sliding down from one elaborate torture to the next, until a gun, a sword, or claws cured all their ills, or until Lyc-V burned them out. Loups died young and didn’t leave pretty corpses.
Going Code meant controlling your every move. Free People of the Code wanted to stay human and went to extraordinary lengths to keep their beast on a short leash. Code meant strict mental conditioning, discipline, accountability, hierarchy, and obedience. All of the things that pretty much drove me crazy.
The individuals emerging from this Code crucible acquired similar traits. They knew their boundaries.
They avoided smoking, strong scents, liquor, and spices, as they dulled their senses. They rarely gave in to excess.
Except when it came to food. The shapeshifters ate like pigs. And I did my best to imitate them. I was ravenous and there was no telling when I would eat again.
I was alone in the kitchen—it was past breakfast except by the most lax standards. I had just taken my first bite when Derek walked in and sat across from me. He had an old-fashioned metal coffee can in his