Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Lucy
Brian left at six. He’d named tortoises D through G (Doris, Eddie, Freddy, and Gerald), added more dandelion greens twice, and declared Atlas his personal nemesis before heading out.
I’d spent the last hour pretending to reorganize the med cabinet while actually watching Atlas attempt his fourteenth escape of the day.
He’d made it halfway up the side of the tub the last time. I admired the commitment.
Warrick had gone to bring the SUV around.
He’d parked across the lot when we arrived, and the afternoon had turned gray and raw, and he didn’t want me walking through a dark parking lot.
I’d told him I was perfectly capable of walking fifty yards.
He’d given me the same look Felony gave me when I told her to get off the kitchen counter—a brief, polite acknowledgment that I’d made a sound, followed by absolutely no change in behavior.
I killed the lobby lights and opened the front door.
Two men were standing on the step.
The one on the left was mid-forties, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and a North Face jacket zipped to his chin. He looked like someone’s accountant. The one on the right was younger, maybe thirty, enormous, with a flat nose and a buzzcut.
“Lucy Lewis?” Glasses asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“Mr. Coleman would like to speak with you.” His voice was polite. Reasonable, even. “He’s asked us to bring you to him.”
Yeah. That was not happening.
“I’m a little busy.”
“It wasn’t a request, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Andrew used to say it in exactly that tone; warm on the surface, a warning underneath. Come on, sweetheart. Don’t make this difficult.
“I said no.” My voice came out even, which surprised me. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You can tell Andrew—”
The second one moved. Buzzcut was fast. His hand closed around my upper arm, and he yanked me forward off the step.
I twisted. Dug my fingernails into the back of his hand hard enough to feel skin peel up under them.
He swore. His grip slipped for half a second, and I wrenched my arm free and stumbled backward into the doorframe.
“Don’t touch me.”
He looked at his hand where I’d scratched him. Then he looked at me. And his expression changed. His eyes tracked down my body, slow and deliberate, and the corner of his mouth pulled up.
“Oh, I do like them when they get feisty, Marcus. Makes it all so much more fun.”
“Listen, lady, Coleman said willing or not.” Glasses—Marcus—adjusted his cuffs, looking bored as he said it. “Didn’t say anything about the in-between.”
Buzzcut stepped forward, blocking the doorway with his body, and the way he was looking at me had nothing to do with Andrew or any message or any conversation.
I knew that look. Every woman knows that look.
My hand found the cold doorframe behind me.
“Last chance, sweetheart,” Marcus said. “Walk, or he carries you. Either way, he’ll get what he wants.”
I wasn’t sure if “he” meant Andrew or Buzzcut. It didn’t matter. There was no way I was going to go with these two willingly.
“Hard pass. On all of it.”
Buzzcut laughed. A short, satisfied sound. “I was hoping it would go this way.”
“Put your hands on her, and I’ll kill you.”
Both men turned.
Warrick was behind them. He stood in the parking lot light with his arms at his sides and his hands open.
Absolutely nothing about him looked like a man making an idle threat.
His eyes were locked on the one who’d grabbed me, and whatever was on his face, I’d never seen it before.
On anyone. I could only describe it as pure, undiluted rage.
“This doesn’t involve you,” Marcus said.
“Oh, I think it does.”
“Walk away. We’re having a conversation with the lady.”
Warrick didn’t walk away.
He lunged forward as Marcus reached inside his jacket.
Warrick hit him before his hand came back out—one punch, short and brutal, and Marcus folded.
His knees buckled, his glasses flew off his face and skittered across the concrete, and he went down hard on his side.
Warrick caught his jacket on the way down, pulled the gun free, and threw it across the lot in one clean motion.
It spun under the dumpster twenty feet away.
Buzzcut came at him from the right. Fast, aiming for Warrick’s kidney. Warrick turned into it, took the hit on his side, and drove his elbow into Buzzcut’s jaw. Then his ribs, then his face. Buzzcut stumbled back two steps, spat blood onto the concrete, and pulled a knife.
He slashed. Darting forward, blade-first. Warrick’s body turned sideways to let the blade pass.
Not fast enough, though, and I saw a slash of red appear across his stomach.
Warrick didn’t seem to react to the cut.
He caught the man’s wrist and twisted. I heard something pop.
Buzzcut screamed, and the knife clattered on the asphalt.
Warrick drove him backward into the shelter wall.
The impact shuddered the nearby window. He pinned him there with one forearm across his throat.
Buzzcut’s feet were barely touching the ground, Warrick’s face inches from his, and though I couldn’t see his expression from where I stood, I could see Buzzcut’s.
He’d gone white. All the interest, the hunger, the calculation was gone. Whatever he was looking at had erased everything else.
I didn’t see Marcus get up. Just felt his arm go around my waist. He lifted me off my feet and dragged me toward a white car idling at the curb.
I kicked. Drove my heel backward into his shin, his knee, anything I could connect with, and heard myself snarl something that wasn’t even a word.
Every self-defense reflex I’d learned was firing at once, but his arm was a bar across my stomach, and I was a hundred and thirty pounds against two-fifty, and the physics wasn’t on my side.
Then Warrick was there.
He crossed the distance between the wall and the car in a span of time that shouldn’t have been possible for a human being. His eyes were a deep amber, a color I’d never seen on a person before, and they were locked on the man holding me.
Warrick stalked toward us, and with each step, something was happening to him.
His spine straightened. His shoulders rolled back and widened.
I blinked, because he was bigger—taller, broader, the muscles in his arms and chest visibly straining against the cotton of his T-shirt.
His lips pulled back from his teeth, and the sound that came out of him was low and raw and belonged to nothing that walked on two legs.
Everything about him, the way he moved, the way the air seemed to reorganize itself around his body, registered on some part of my brain that predated language. The part that knew, long before words, when something in the tall grass was looking at you.
Marcus felt it too. He froze. His arm tightened, his body going rigid against my back.
Then everything I knew about the world went in the trash.
Warrick’s shirt split. The fabric tore apart across his back, separating like tissue paper.
Underneath it, his skin was moving. The muscles reshaping, thickening, stretching the skin past anything that should have been structurally possible.
His spine pushed upward, the vertebrae visibly reforming, each one larger than the last, and his shoulders cracked wider with a sound like a green branch snapping under a boot.
White fur spread across his body. Not hair.
Fur. Dense, actual, impossible fur. His hands hit the asphalt, and they were paws—paws the size of dinner plates, tipped with claws that scored the pavement like it was wet clay.
His face collapsed inward and rebuilt outward, broader, flatter, the nose bridge widening, the brow thickening, and then there was a mouth that could close around a man’s skull the way Felony closed around a treat.
Ten seconds. Maybe less. And then there was a four-hundred-pound white tiger standing where a man had been.
Marcus made a noise behind me. It was small and airless and full of a terror so complete it sounded like it had bypassed his throat and come out of his chest. He dropped me. I hit the asphalt on my hands and knees, palms scraping raw on the concrete, and rolled sideways.
The tiger covered the distance in one leap. Ten feet of parking lot, gone, like gravity had different rules for something his size. Marcus decided, in that moment, that running was the correct response.
It was not.
He made it two steps toward the car door when the tiger’s jaws closed on the back of his neck.
The sound was short. A crunch, then nothing. Marcus’s body dropped, and his head was at an angle that didn’t belong on a person who was still alive.
“Fuck.”
I turned. Buzzcut, his eyes wide, was staring at the body. Then his attention found the tiger. “Fuck.”
He scrabbled at his ankle with his one good hand, the other dangling uselessly, and came up with a gun.
He fired. The shot went wide, punching into the dumpster ten feet to the tiger’s left with a metallic clang that echoed across the lot.
The tiger didn’t react. He turned toward Buzzcut with a slow, deliberate rotation that was somehow worse than speed would have been. Four hundred pounds of muscle and teeth and absolute focus, turning the way a searchlight turns, inevitable and unhurried.
Buzzcut fired again. Missed. His hand was shaking so badly that the muzzle was tracing circles in the air. Three strides. The tiger slammed into Buzzcut chest-first, the momentum taking him clean off his feet and onto the asphalt. The gun spun away. His skull bounced off the concrete with a crack.
The tiger’s jaws closed around his throat. Buzzcut’s hands came up—one good, one broken—and he grabbed at the tiger’s face, his fingers scrabbling uselessly against the massive skull. His legs kicked. His boots scraped the asphalt, dragging furrows in the grit.
The tiger bit down.
Blood sprayed across the white fur. Buzzcut’s hands dropped. His legs stopped jigging. The tiger held on for another second, jaw locked, then released. I blinked, knowing that what was left of Buzzcut’s throat was not something I was going to be able to un-see.
The parking lot went quiet.
My palms were scraped raw, and my ears were ringing from the gunshots.
My hands were shaking, my legs were shaking, my jaw was doing something involuntary that I suspected was the early stages of shock.
I’d just watched the man I’d kissed this morning turn into a four-hundred-pound tiger and kill two people in front of me.
The tiger turned toward me.
He was massive. Blood on his muzzle, blood matting the white fur across his chest, his sides expanding and contracting with each breath. He looked at me and went completely, absolutely still.
Here’s the thing…
My brain didn’t do what it had done with Andrew.
It didn’t start the old program where every muscle locks and every thought narrows to a single point of don’t make it worse, don’t provoke, be smaller, be less, disappear.
I was terrified and shaking, and there was a tiger the size of a Smart car six feet away from me with a dead man’s blood on its teeth.
But I was still here. All of me. My legs hadn’t buckled.
My eyes hadn’t dropped. I was looking right at it.
That was new.
The question was whether Warrick was still in there.
Did Shifting erase him, or was this simply Warrick in a different shape?
If it wasn’t him, would the tiger know who I was, or would he just see his next meal?
My vet tech coursebooks had covered feline behavior in some detail.
They had not covered what to do when your sort-of-boyfriend turns into one.
“Er, hi.”
Brilliant, Luce, utterly brilliant.
The end of the tiger’s tail twitched.
I took that as a good sign. I stepped forward. “Nice party trick. You’ll have to show me how to do that sometime.”
A nervous giggle came out of me. Great. That was it. I had officially lost it. I was standing in a parking lot talking to a tiger and asking it for lessons, while two dead men cooled on the asphalt behind it. If Dani could see me right now, she’d have me committed.
The tiger’s ears flattened. He made a sound—low, rough, vibrating through the concrete and up through the soles of my shoes and into my bones.
I breathed. He breathed.
Then he turned and disappeared around the side of the building. Sounds came: cracking, wet restructuring of bone and muscle, a ragged breath. Then Warrick came back around the corner in what was left of his jeans, shirtless, a knife cut across his ribs, leaking red.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
Tires screeched on the road behind us. I turned. Two black vans tore around the corner, too fast, cutting across the curb and into the lot with their headlights off. They skidded to a stop thirty feet away, and both side doors slid open.
Men poured out. Four. Six. Ten. All armed.
Warrick grabbed my arm. “Run.”