3. Jalen
JALEN
Malachi’s seller runs his business out of a law office above the bank, and the meeting is nothing but numbers read out loud. I make it through most of it and stand up while the lawyer is mid-sentence.
“I’m going to walk,” I tell Malachi at the door, “before this room finishes me off.”
He gives me the same eye he’s been giving me since breakfast. “No funny business.”
“Scout’s honor,” I say. I was never a scout.
Millbrook keeps its downtown swept. The bakery window wears a red circle stamped over a wolf silhouette, and no one on the sidewalk meets my eyes. My ear cuffs went on in the car, and my pinned ears have been aching since the town line.
Stillwater Solutions takes up the tallest building on the square. I push through the doors like a man with an appointment.
The lobby smells like lemon polish. One guard sits by the badge gates minding his phone.
Cameras hang in the corners where amateurs put them.
The directory behind the front desk lists PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT on the top floor, badge access only, and next to it sits a name I’ve already underlined in my notebook: D. HALE.
I’m halfway through memorizing the directory when I turn and put my shoulder straight into a woman carrying takeout.
The bag pops loose. My hand gets under it on reflex.
She’s curvy, buttoned into office clothes, with deep brown skin and her hair slicked back into a bun. The wind has pulled a few curls loose at her temples. Her eyes are still wide when I straighten up with her lunch riding easy on my fingers.
“Sorry about that,” I tell her. “I need to watch where I’m going.”
“Thanks,” she says, and takes the bag back with both hands.
Her fingers brush mine on the handoff. Heat climbs the back of my neck, and my dragon leans toward her with everything he has.
Up close, her eyes are dark brown and beautiful, with the kind of tired underneath that a nap won’t fix. She’s lovely, and someone is running her ragged. I want her name.
I breathe her in and get almost nothing: a flat, scrubbed blank where a person should be, with one warm note buried too deep to place. The blank is familiar. It reminds me of the solution, the one that fools shifter noses, and my wrecked nose won’t swear to anything today.
I like women. Women like me back, most towns. Nothing about that has ever followed me home. This one gives me a one-word thank-you and walks off with something of mine I can’t name.
I watch the elevator close on her. My dragon reads it as theft.
Then I sneeze into my elbow, and a thread of smoke slips under my collar. My nose has been lying since sunrise, and I don’t trust a single thing it tells me today. Including whatever that was.
I give the lobby one slow lap for the cameras’ benefit. The service corridor past the mailroom ends in a door with a push-bar and no badge reader. The loading dock takes deliveries until dark. And nothing about this building expects anyone to arrive from the sky.
Tonight, after dark, I’m coming back to read Stillwater’s mail.
My phone buzzes while I’m counting night staff from the pharmacy roof across the square.
“The notary can’t get in until morning,” Malachi says. “We’re staying over. I took rooms at a bed and breakfast off the square. I’m texting you the address.”
“Fancy,” I say.
Papers shuffle on his end of the line. “What are you up to?”
“Sightseeing,” I say, from a rooftop, in the dark, watching a corporate loading dock.
“Uh-huh.” He leaves a long pause where my conscience should be. “Stay off their front page.”
He hangs up. His text with the address comes through while I’m still grinning at the phone.
Then I double over with a sneeze, and smoke curls off my ears into the night.
I drop below the parapet and wave it apart with both hands.
Down on the square, a couple strolls past without looking up, and I start breathing again.
A dragon sneezing smoke over an anti-shifter town is a headline I can’t afford. What the hell am I coming down with?
The sun drops, and Stillwater goes dark floor by floor. The loading dock light buzzes on. I’m mapping my route down to it when the front doors open and the woman from the lobby steps out under the streetlight.
Her bun has loosened since this afternoon. She trades her heels for flats out of her bag, right there on the steps, and sets off up the block with somewhere to be.
Every plan I made for tonight goes quiet. Stillwater sits behind her holding every answer I came for, and I choose her without a fight.
I could tell myself I’m following the blank spot in her scent, the one that smells like Stillwater’s product, and it would even be good journalism. That’s not what this is. I want to know where she’s going, and I want it the same hungry way I want a story no one else has.
The rooftops sit close together in this part of town. I take them quiet, gravel to tar to gravel, and keep her in sight below me. She talks to herself as she walks. I like her already.
She turns in under a buzzing neon sign, and I come down a drainpipe into the alley behind the bar. I round the corner to the entrance and give her a head start before I follow.
I am, by any definition I’d print, stalking this woman. I file the complaint against myself and go in anyway.
Inside is wood, low light, and an after-work crowd that doesn’t know me.
She peels off toward the restroom, and I take the back booth with a view of the whole room.
When the waitress comes by, I order a glass of red I have no intention of drinking.
It’s set dressing, so the room reads me as a man waiting on someone.
While she’s gone, I run my own interrogation. Why did I leave the job for her? What exactly am I doing in this booth? Every answer I’ve got is a non-answer. I’d shred a source who talked to me like this.
The restroom door swings, and she comes out, and her scent arrives ahead of her.
It hits me whole: burnt caramel, sugar that’s been through fire. The scrubbed blank from the lobby is gone, and what’s underneath prices out everything I have ever smelled, held, or hidden.
Mate. She’s my mate.
My dragon surges, and the table jumps under my hands hard enough to rattle the glass. I pin the urge down and swallow the smoke that wants up my throat. The couple by the jukebox glances over at the noise. I nod at them and keep both hands flat on the wood.
And my dick stands up so hard that leaving this booth stops being an option. I groan into the wine I’m only pretending to drink and set it back down. My dragon wouldn’t tolerate a real sip, and tonight I agree with him.
She never glances my way. She crosses to the bar, and a woman with braids piled high waves her onto a stool. Her friend flags the bartender, and the two of them fall into easy talk.
I sit in my booth and re-run the math I’ve lived on. The notebooks, the recordings, the receipts on this whole valley. Every piece of the hoard I’ve spent my life stacking reprices while I watch her read a menu. She’s across one barroom, and it’s too far.
I came to this town to steal Stillwater’s biggest secret. She’s sitting at the bar with her hair coming loose.
So I watch her instead of my plan. Her laugh starts small, behind her hand, and by the time the food comes it’s full and loud and worth the trip. I can hear the two of them across the room. Her friend spits out a name, Whitney, and my mate laughs so hard she has to put her drink down.
I wanted the name of whoever’s running her ragged, and the universe provides.
“Zuri,” her friend says, pushing the plate toward her. “Eat.”
Zuri.
While Zuri eats, her friend leans in over the food with a pitch she has clearly made before. She’s applied for a business loan, a spa, her own place, and she wants Zuri in it with her as a partner. She’s got the hand gestures and everything.
Zuri shakes her head over her plate. “I don’t know. I can barely handle my shifts as it is.”
I’ve already started a file on her in my head, and that goes in it. A woman that sharp, talking about herself like that.
The heat surges up my back, and right behind it my nose starts the warning tingle I’ve been cursing all day. A sneeze is coming, and mine come with smoke. I can’t sneeze smoke in a room this human.
I pinch my nose shut and run the room: the bartender is pouring, the couple by the jukebox is deep in their own night, and no one is looking at me yet.
I’m on my feet with the booth scraping loud behind me, and half the bar turns toward the sound. I keep my back to the room and drop cash by the untouched wine. I clamp my hand over my mouth on the walk out.
In the alley, the sneeze finally wins. Smoke rolls off my ears and drifts up the brick, and I stand there watering at the eyes, wondering what the hell a dragon even catches.
Then I check the alley mouth, and my wings come out.
My wings put me on the roof across the street, and there I wait, folded flat, one more shape against the night sky.
I came to Millbrook for answers. I’m not leaving without her.
She comes out later with her friend, and they split at the corner, and my mate turns up the dark end of the street on foot.
She’s walking home alone at this hour, and I have opinions about it.
Unhinged is a word for what I’m doing. I keep doing it anyway, roof to roof, while she walks below with her flats slapping the sidewalk.
She crosses into a small neighborhood where the trees close over the street. I drop from the last roof and land without a sound, and I follow from far enough back that even her shadow keeps its privacy.
How did I stand right in front of her this afternoon and not know?
The answer is bottled in the building she works in.
Stillwater makes something that erases scent, and my mate spent her day wearing it.
What I can’t figure is the why. What is that company hiding that needs its own people smelling like nothing?
Her building is small, two floors over a basement, four units. I post up behind an oak across the street and track her through the front door. A light comes on behind a first-floor window. She kicks off her flats, crosses the room, and pulls the curtains shut on me.
I close my eyes and breathe her in from across the street. Burnt caramel, faint now, threading through the trees.
My dragon wants across that street tonight. Being one soul means the wanting is mine, and so is the no.
My mate works inside the company I came to tear open. Either she’s part of what they’re hiding, or she’s an innocent woman trying to make it in this economy. I’ll find out tomorrow.
I catalog the block on my way out of it: the oak, the dead streetlight two doors down, the blue house with the loud dog, the numbers on her building. Cold crawls in where the heat was, and I have to make myself keep walking toward the square.
“See you tomorrow, Zuri,” I tell the dark, and go find the bed and breakfast Malachi texted me.