“I need a drink.”
I walked into the kitchen. Conlan was still on the pillow. Still in half-form. Julie’s mangled body flashed before me, half-human, half-animal, trapped in a hospital bed, sedated to the point of comatose, because the moment Doolittle took her off the sedatives, she would explode into a loup.
Anxiety stabbed me, cold and sharp, in the pit of my stomach.
I opened the bottle of sangria with a jerk, poured a glass, and drank it down.
Curran came through the door. He moved in complete silence. If my peripheral vision were worse, I would’ve never known he was there. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. I leaned into him, feeling the warmth of his body. I’d missed this so much. I’d missed him.
He breathed in the scent of my hair. “What’s up?” he asked, his voice quiet.
“What if he can’t shift back?”
“He’ll shift back. It was an exciting day for him. His hormones are high. He’ll burn it off in his sleep.” He kissed my hair.
“What if he doesn’t? My blood is really potent, and the concentration of Lyc-V in his bloodstream is off the charts. What if he goes loup?”
Curran turned me toward our son, hugging me to him. His voice was calm and soothing. “He won’t. Look at him. He’s proportionate. Look at his jaws. They fit together, they are well formed. The length of his legs and arms is perfect. He did it instinctually. He didn’t struggle; he just did it. With loups, there is a stench. He smells clean.”
He rubbed my shoulders.
“He bit Andrea. He’s known her since he was born.”
“He was scared. That’s good.”
It sank in. “Loups don’t get scared.”
“No, they don’t. They blindly attack. The adults can be cunning, but when children go loup, they turn feral.” He kissed me again. “You should’ve seen him in the woods. He splashed through the creek. He climbed everywhere, sniffed everything, like someone took his leash off. He’s our kid. He’s got this.”
We stood together, wrapped up in each other, watching our son sleep.
“Andrea called me a helicopter parent.”
“Andrea needs to shut the hell up sometimes.”
“I don’t have anyone to measure myself against,” I told him. “I didn’t know my mother, and Voron wasn’t exactly a model father.”
“Baby B is a beautiful baby,” Curran said. “But she’s a bouda. She smells like a werehyena, she acts like a werehyena, and other werehyenas know exactly what she is.”
“What’s your point?”
“There are no surprises there. He”—Curran pointed at Conlan over his shoulder—“is full of surprises. It will be fun.”
“I don’t want him to end up with my childhood.” Where did that even come from?
A hint of a growl slipped into Curran’s voice. “He has me and you. He won’t end up like us, and we are not going to end up like our parents. History isn’t going to repeat itself. I won’t let it.”
History had a way of rolling over the best-laid plans like a runaway bulldozer.
“Does he know I’m his mother when he’s in his animal shape?”
“Yes. I knew my parents were my parents.”
“But does he know?”
“He recognized I was his father.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I told him to stop and he did.”
“Maybe he just thought you were a bigger lion.”
“Trust me, he knows us. Our scent, the sound of our voices. He knows we’re his parents.”
He knew who I was, he knew who Curran was. Okay. I could do this. I’d done harder things before.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
“Yes?”
“Good evening,” a familiar voice said. Robert served as Jim’s chief of security. Today was a gift that kept on giving. I put him on speaker.
“What can I do for you?”
“I understand you’re involved with the Serenbe situation?”
Word traveled fast. “Yes.”
“Any chance for a briefing?”
“Why?” Curran asked.
“Karen Iversen’s parents owned a house on that street.”
I had no idea who Karen Iversen was.
“Clan Jackal,” Curran said for my benefit. “Parents are human. She’s first generation.”
A shapeshifter had attacked Karen Iversen, and she’d survived it and become a shapeshifter. Happened often enough.
“The GBI refuses to let her or us on the scene,” Robert said.
It made sense. Karen was a shapeshifter, but her parents were human, which meant the Pack had no jurisdiction. GBI likely didn’t want to start a panic before they had at least some idea of what they were dealing with.
“They won’t tell us if they are alive or dead.”
“They’re dead,” I told him.
“I surmised that. They’re blocking us from viewing the bodies. I need to know what we’re dealing with before I file the necessary court documents to force them to release the remains.”
I leaned deeper into Curran, letting the warmth of his body anchor me. “Robert, they can’t give you their remains.”
“If it’s the matter of a quarantine, we are immune to most diseases.”
“They can’t give you their remains because someone forced two hundred people out of their homes and then boiled them.”
Curran’s hold on me tightened.
“I’m sorry, it sounded like you said ‘boiled’?”
I explained the puddle.
Robert didn’t say anything. The kitchen was quiet.
“Can we meet tomorrow?” he asked finally.
“Yes. Cutting Edge at nine?”
“I’ll be there,” Robert said.
I hung up.
“Sorry,” Curran said.
“What for?”
“For being gone.”
“Did you catch the magic leopard monster?”
“I did,” he said.
“Then it’s all good.”
“I’ll make it up to you. What do you need?” he asked.
I glanced at Conlan. “Think he’ll be out for the next couple of hours?”
“At least.”
“In that case.” I put my arms around him and kissed him. It wasn’t a tender kiss. I hadn’t seen him for three days. The world had turned grim while he was gone, and I wanted him to know just how much I had missed him. His lips seared mine, the familiar taste of him washing over me, harsh and male. Every nerve in my body stood at attention and I shivered.
Then my feet were off the floor, and we were moving up the stairs at an alarming speed.
“Don’t want to wait until after dinner?” I murmured into his ear and licked the corner of his jaw, tasting the rough edge of his stubble.
“Fuck dinner.”
I laughed, and he closed the bedroom door behind us.
CHAPTER
5
“NATNED! NATNED!”
Curran took his gaze off the road to glance in the rearview mirror for a second. “You okay there, buddy?”
“Natned!”
“No,” I told Conlan.
My morning started with Curran kissing me, which was very welcome. At which point we discovered that our son had shifted back into a human in the middle of the night, because he climbed onto our bed in all of his nude glory, slapped his belly, and yelled, “Natned!” Then he grabbed himself, in case we missed his point. After Curran stopped laughing, I handed our child over to him and escaped into the bathroom.
Conlan had been yelling “Natned” since I packed him into his car seat twenty minutes ago. He’d clearly decided that clothes were overrated. At least he’d stayed human.
Usually we had a line of people willing to watch him, but he could decide to go furry at any second, and if he did, both of us wanted to be there, so he was coming with us to meet with Robert.
Outside the Jeep, Atlanta crawled by. Magic drenched the city. I always felt it, a kind of invisible sea, shallower here, deeper there, but ever since I claimed my little chunk of the planet, the invisible currents had gained definition. If I concentrated, I could sense them ebbing and flowing. It freaked me out even after all this time, so I tried not to think about it too hard.
“Natned!” Conlan yelled to be heard over the sound of the engine.
“He needs a deer leg bone to gnaw on,” Curran said. “They were my favorite.”
“Can it be a cooked leg bone?”
“He is a shapeshifter,” Curran said. “You know we don’t have to worry about bacteria and diseases.”
“What about intestinal parasites?”