Chapter Ten #2
The shots were close and loud in the enclosed space, the sound hammering off the tile and the adobe walls.
The first round caught Grainger in the chest, mid-stride.
The second caught him as he staggered, hitting lower.
The crane's legs buckled. He crashed in a tangle of half-shifted limbs and white feathers.
Grainger lay on the floor of his living room and made a sound that was part bird and part human and entirely the sound of a dying animal.
His form flickered, crane to human, human to crane, the shift destabilizing the way it did when the body underneath could no longer maintain either shape.
Blood spread across the white tile in a pattern that looked like wings.
Nero stepped over him and went down the hallway.
The door to the room where Amani was being held was closed but not locked.
Nero opened it with his gun up and the adrenaline making everything sharp-edged and slightly too bright, and he found the kid sitting on the edge of a bed in a dark room, fully dressed, staring at the door with amber eyes that were enormous and terrified and absolutely, ferociously awake.
He'd heard everything. The window, the shouts, the shots.
He'd been sitting in the dark listening to someone come for him and not knowing if that someone was rescue or something worse, and his hands were fisted in the sheets.
His bandaged feet were on the floor. Every line of his body said he was ready to run, even though running would have destroyed what was left of those feet.
Nero lowered the gun. He was standing in a doorway, naked, holding a weapon, breathing hard, and the kid in front of him was the most beautiful, the most wrecked person he had ever walked into a room to save.
A thin band of silver circled Amani's throat.
The skin above and below it was raw and angry, visible even in the dim light from the hallway.
Nero had seen silver restraints before, in case files and training photos.
He'd never seen one on a person. The collar sat close against Amani's neck like a scar that someone had put there on purpose.
Nero cataloged it with the bandaged feet, and the too-loose clothes and the room with no lock on the door because there didn't need to be one.
"Amani," he said. "My name is Nero. I'm with shifter enforcement. Your mother sent me. I'm taking you home."
Amani stared at him. His mouth opened and closed.
His gaze moved over Nero's face, his body, the gun, the badge that wasn't there because Nero was naked since he'd shifted through a window because that was the kind of cop he was, and under any other circumstances the absurdity of the situation might have been funny.
"You're naked," Amani said. His voice was a rasp. Barely there. But the words were precise. The observation was accurate, somewhere in the wreckage of what this kid had been through, the sharp-tongued bartender who measured his own shorts was still alive.
"Yeah. I'm a ferret. It's a whole thing. Can you walk?"
Amani looked down at his feet. The bandages were dark with old blood and the gauze was fraying and he was twenty years old and sitting in the dark in someone else's clothes in a house in the desert and he had been waiting for four days for someone to say exactly what Nero had just said and now that someone had said it he couldn't move.
"My feet. I tried to run. Two nights ago. The desert—"
"Oh god." Nero didn't know the details. He didn't need to, not at that moment.
He lowered the gun because the gun was making the kid flinch and there was nothing left in the house that needed shooting.
It only took Nero a couple of steps across the dark room to reach Amani as he sat on the floor with his knees drawn up.
They were close enough to touch. Amani was broader, heavier through the shoulders, built the way lions were built, for power and presence, and Nero was lean and angular.
"You're not what I expected," Amani said. His eyes were filling.
"I get that a lot."
Amani collapsed. Not dramatically. He didn't collapse or faint or crumble.
He just stopped, the way a candle stops being able to burn when the wax runs out.
He started to fall to the side. Nero caught him.
Caught him easily, because ferrets were stronger than they looked and because Nero had been catching people his whole career, catching them out of lies, catching them in the act, catching them when they fell, and that was not different from any of those except that it was entirely different from all of them.
He lifted Amani. The kid weighed less than he should have, four days of fear burning through everything his body had in reserve. He pressed his face against Nero's bare shoulder. His fingers locked into Nero's arm. He held on.
"I've got you," Nero said. He said it the way you say things that are true and important and insufficient. "It's over. I've got you."
He carried Amani down the hallway, past the living room where Kessler was kneeling beside Grainger's body.
The hawk was on the radio calling in. They went past the broken window, the glass on the tile that was beginning to mingle with the blood that was still spreading in its wing-shaped pattern.
Past all of it, out the front door, and into the desert night where the air was cold and clean.
The stars were so thick they looked like something spilled.
Harold had pulled the SUV up to the house and stood with a blanket. He wrapped it around Amani without being asked. Nero adjusted his grip so the blanket covered the kid's feet, which were bleeding fresh through the gauze.
"Harold. Bolt cutters. The kit."
Harold took one look at the collar and dashed off.
He came back with the small bolt cutters from the tactical kit, standard issue for shifter extractions, because silver restraints were rare but not unheard of.
Enforcement had learned the hard way to be prepared.
Nero set Amani down on the tailgate and tilted his chin up gently.
The skin beneath the collar was raw and weeping, the worst of the damage hidden where the metal sat closest against his throat.
"This is going to hurt for a second," Nero said. "Then it's done."
Amani nodded. His jaw was clenched.
Harold positioned the cutters and squeezed.
The silver band resisted, then gave with a sharp snap, and the collar fell away from Amani's neck in two pieces.
Nero caught them before they hit the ground, evidence, chain of custody, the cop part of his brain still running even now, and sealed them in an evidence bag from the kit.
He did the best to ignore the burning of his own flesh from contact with the metal.
Amani's hand went to his throat. He pressed his fingers against the raw skin where the collar had been and held them there, and his whole body shuddered once, hard, the way a body shudders when something that's been hurting for days suddenly stops.
Then his jaw cracked.
Not all the way. Not the full shift. But his canines lengthened past his lower lip and his fingers curled and the nails thickened into something that wasn't quite claws and wasn't quite human and a sound came out of his chest that Nero felt in his sternum, low and raw and involuntary, the lion surging up through five days of suppression like a breath held past the point of drowning.
His eyes went full amber, the pupils narrowing to slits, and for two seconds the kid on the tailgate was something older and wilder and very, very angry.
Then it collapsed. The claws retracted. The teeth shortened.
The sound cut off and Amani sagged forward, one hand braced on the tailgate, the other still pressed against his throat, breathing hard.
The partial shift had cost him something visible.
His face was gray under the brown and his arms were shaking and the effort of it, just that much, just teeth and claws and a sound, had burned through whatever reserve he had left.
But his eyes stayed amber for a long time after the rest of it faded.
The lion was awake. Battered, exhausted, five days of silver, cages, and compliance behind it, but awake.
Nero could see it looking out through Amani's face, assessing the night, the SUV, the men around it, deciding whether any of them were a threat.
The predator's scan. Ancient and automatic and completely beyond Amani's control.
"Okay?" Nero asked.
Amani nodded. He didn't take his hand away from his throat. His canines had settled back to human but he ran his tongue over them once, checking, making sure they were still there. The gesture was small and private and Nero looked away because watching it felt like reading someone's diary.
Harold's face, when he photographed and cataloged the damage the collar had left behind, went tight and professional in the way that meant he was filing it all away.
For the report. For the testimony. For the part of the job where they documented what was done to someone so that the documentation could do its own kind of justice.
Nero put Amani in the back seat of the SUV.
The kid wouldn't let go of his arm. His fingers were locked around Nero's wrist with a grip that was surprising in someone so depleted, and his eyes were closed and his breathing was jagged and he was holding on to Nero the way you hold on to the thing that pulled you out of deep water.
"I need to put clothes on," Nero said gently.
Amani's grip tightened.
"I'll be right back. Thirty seconds. I promise."
The fingers loosened. Slowly. One at a time. Amani opened his eyes and looked at Nero. The look said everything that his voice couldn't.
Nero came back in twenty seconds. Dressed, badge on, gun holstered, looking like a cop again instead of a naked man who'd crawled through a window. He got into the back seat next to Amani and the kid's hand found his arm again immediately, the grip settling in like it belonged there.
Amani was quiet for a long time. Then, so softly Nero almost missed it: "A ferret."
He couldn't tell if it was a statement or a question or the beginning of an opinion that the kid was too exhausted to finish.
It didn't matter. Amani's eyes closed and his grip on Nero's arm went slack and his breathing deepened into the rhythm of someone who had finally, after four days, found something safe enough to fall asleep against.
Harold got in the driver's seat and started the engine.
The SUV pulled away from the ranch, and Nero looked through the rear window at the house shrinking behind them, the lit windows, the broken glass, the beautiful Spanish arches that had hidden something ugly, and then the desert swallowed it and there was nothing but the road and the dark and the stars and the kid asleep against his shoulder.
Doing his best to not wake Amani, he called Lady Leo.
"I have him," Nero said. "He's alive. He's hurt but he's alive. We're bringing him home."
The sound she made was not a word. It was something older than words, the sound of a lioness hearing that her cub is safe, and it lasted one second before she pulled herself together and her voice came back controlled and sharp and every inch the woman who ran an empire.
"How badly is he hurt?"
"His feet are in bad shape. He was collared with silver, we got it off him. He'll need a doctor. The rest I'll let him tell you."
"The man who took him?"
"Dead."
A pause. "Good."
Nero didn't disagree.
They drove through the desert in silence.
Three and a half hours back to Vegas, the highway empty and the sky enormous and Amani sleeping in the back seat with his head against Nero's shoulder and his bandaged feet tucked under the blanket Harold had given him.
Somewhere around the halfway point, the orange glow of the city appeared on the horizon, distant, warm.
Nero looked at the glow and then looked at the kid and then looked at the road, and he understood that this was not over.
That getting the kid out of the desert was the easy part.
That what came next, the healing, the testimony, the long slow work of rebuilding a person who'd been taken apart, would be harder than anything that had happened to that point.
He'd do it anyway. He didn't know why yet. He just knew.
The orange glow grew brighter, and the desert fell away behind them, and Amani slept.