Animal Instincts (Entangled Ignite) (8 page)

Chapter Twelve

“What in the world are you doing here?” my best friend and business partner demanded when I entered Petopia halfway through the next morning.

Phoebe looked particularly cheery today, her frilly magenta top matching her newly streaked hair. Bangles from her wrists halfway to her elbows clanged. By comparison, I was decked out in straight-legged jeans, and the only ornament I wore—the sparkling sea glass pendant—was tucked out of sight beneath a navy T-shirt.

Leaving the counter, Phoebe threw her arms around me. “You shouldn’t be trying to work yet.”

I hugged her back and said, “I need to keep myself busy.”

Otherwise all I would do was think.
About Luc.
About Shade still being here.
About Luc
. About The Ark—both the casino boat and the ark in my dream.
About Luc.
About
The Book of Powers
.
About Luc.

Luc…Luc…Luc…

Enough already.

Not knowing the truth about someone I was so attracted to was more frightening than facing those predators outside the fight arena had been. For them to have obeyed his command made him more dangerous than any wild animal.

“Hey, are you okay?” Phoebe asked.

“Jeez, sorry. I phased out for a minute.”

“No worries. I understand. Are you sure you want to be here?”

“I needed to get out and do something that would make me feel better,” I told Phoebe. “The adopts could use a little snuggling.”

“Yeah, they already know you’re here.”

I glanced to the back of the store where animals yawned and stretched and paced in their cages. I smiled. Not knowing how much time I had with him, I’d hated to leave Shade, but coming to the store, at least for a little while, had been the right decision. Being with animals that need to feel loved always lifted my spirits.

Meows and whines greeted me as I entered the back room. As a member of the board of directors of the Animal Rescue League, I’d volunteered our store as an off-site adoption center. I stopped to give each cat or dog some TLC. The pet supply store fed my bank account, but it was the animals I helped that fed my soul.

Even so, my thoughts wandered back to Shade and how impossible it seemed that he could still be here. I wondered if he felt powerless stuck in his apartment with only Boomer for company. I’d looked for him to tell him I was coming here, but he hadn’t shown himself. Had he been angry with me? Or had he simply gone somewhere else? What if he didn’t come back? Of course he would. He was here for a reason.

If only I could figure it all out.

If only I knew what he’d wanted with Luc’s mother the night he’d died.

Asking her myself would be a start.

Getting on the computer in my office, I did a search for Elizabeth Reyes’s phone number. I found a few possibilities in the Chicago area. All but one of the numbers I called answered, but none of the people I reached had been shot. I wrote down that last number and address and stuck the note in my pocket.

“Hi, guys, sorry,” I told the animals, all of which were complaining at my lack of attention. “You want some chow, don’t you?”

I opened cans and filled their bowls and passed them out.

We generally housed about half a dozen homeless cats and two or three dogs. Right now, we also had a rabbit, an Easter reject. As happened every year, some parent caved in to a kid’s begging and bought a bunny. The day before Shade had died, one of the coppers had brought Cotton Tail to the cop shop to give away, and my brother had taken the poor thing and brought it to me.

“Hey, there, how are you doing?”

I picked up the rabbit and immediately its heart began pounding so hard, I feared it would have a heart attack. It jerked in my arms, and I rode on its terror.

Caged…a large hand reaching in…grabbing another rabbit and tearing it from the enclosure…the rising frenzy of yelps…a fast glimpse of the rabbit being thrown before a weird-looking dog…

My own heart was pounding now, and bile rose in my throat, but I swallowed hard and reined in my emotions so I wouldn’t frighten the poor rabbit. I gently stroked its back. “It’s all right, no one’s going to hurt you here,” I promised.

I lay my forehead against its furry ears and tuned in, hoping to calm it with soft thoughts and comforting whispers. Eventually, the rabbit stopped trying to leap from my arms. Its heartbeat slowed.

I couldn’t say the same for mine. What I’d seen had been totally unexpected. This had been no Easter bunny but a rabbit that had been owned by people who trained dogs. Wild dogs like the one that had shown me the animal habitat on the casino boat. Undoubtedly, Cotton Tail’s companion had been used as bait. And my brother may have lied about another copper bringing the poor guy in to give away. Shade had probably saved the rabbit himself.

I went over all I had learned, began putting together the big picture.

Shade must have thought he was going after a normal dogfighting ring to start, before he’d become aware that the fights had involved other kinds of predators. While a federal crime, dogfights were the purview of the Animal Crimes Unit that operated under organized crime, and Shade had been a homicide detective.

So he must have followed a trail left by a murder investigation straight to the animal fights. The murder investigation that Ethan had mentioned when I’d gone to see him. But why hadn’t Shade told Ethan anything he’d learned that linked those deaths to the fights and ultimately to the casino?

Undoubtedly he’d run into the very same things I had on that casino boat, including one Nuala Lazare whose thoughts I’d been able to read. Shade’s gift. He must have been able to read her thoughts and those of the employees. Had he, too, imagined he could hear the thoughts from animals in the habitat?

Last night’s dream whipped into me, making me think things that couldn’t be true. Predators both animal and human. Impossible.

I gave each of the animals in the shop a bit of attention, then got to work on inventory, wheeling boxes of supplies from the storeroom and restocking shelves while Phoebe waited on customers and worked on accounts using her laptop. We barely stopped for lunch. I went next door and got sandwiches and sodas and we ate in the store. Then back to work, my head still spinning with things that had nothing to do with Petopia. I forced myself to keep working, to focus on normal, daily activities. But my thoughts kept creeping back to how far from normal my life had become.

My mood altered. My mind spinning with questions, I was suddenly anxious to leave so that I could try to find some answers. And I wanted to make sure that Shade was still around. I had to be sure I hadn’t imagined everything. That I hadn’t imagined him.

I made it almost to the end of the workday before I decided to call it quits.

“I think I’m going to book out of here a little early.”

Phoebe put her arms around me for a big hug. “I knew it was too soon.”

“Hey, I almost got through the day.” Unable to tell her what had gotten into me, I shrugged and smiled. “I had to give it a try.”

“You always have something to prove. Now don’t rush back. I’ll get the kids to work extra hours,” she said, referring to our part-time high school employees. “They’ve asked me about it anyway. Take whatever time you need.”

Part of me wanted to tell my best friend everything. She knew I had a special connection to animals, and that Shade and I could read each other, but she didn’t know how deep those abilities went. It wasn’t something I talked about. It made me different. Plus I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me. The last thing in the world I wanted was to have Phoebe look at me with doubt clouding her expression. I definitely couldn’t tell her about Shade’s ghost.

Anxious to see him, I power walked home.

Petopia was in Lakeview, the high-end part of the northside neighborhood, about a mile west of Lake Michigan. I tried to make the five-minute walk home stress-free. Tried to get my mind off murder and animal fights and terrified rabbits and be at peace with the sun shining down on me. I cut off busy Lincoln Avenue to a side street where narrow city lots held some single-family homes but mostly two- and three-flats. Over the last dozen years, the neighborhood had seriously gentrified. Some of the beautifully landscaped yards were maintained by a service. Two men with big lawnmowers and uniform shirts worked across the street from each other even as I passed by. The smell of cut grass filled the air.

Personally, I enjoyed tending to my own garden. Gardening could be healing, yet it wouldn’t make me forget all that was pushing at me to be resolved.

But how to find the truth?

Luc…Luc…Luc…

A flash of my experience with him the night before when walking the dog shot a shiver through me despite the warmth of the day. I didn’t want to go there again. And I did, more than anything. Luc—at least to me—was the equivalent of human catnip. He could be seductive and irresistible, and being near him made me long to step outside my usual self.

He could know more than he was saying about Shade’s murder. I had to keep that in mind, not let Luc affect me again.

As if I’d conjured Luc by thinking of him, I felt a familiar sensation along the pathways of my nerves. I grew aware, but when I stopped in front of my two-flat and looked around, I saw nothing on the parkway.

Even so, my body began to tingle with need, and it took everything I had to ignore the seductive sensation. Luc had to be here somewhere. Rather than give him the advantage by waiting for him to show himself, I changed direction and headed down the gangway sidewalk to the backyard where we could talk in private.

No footsteps behind me.

No sense of his presence.

Damn. Had I blown it? Or had I simply imagined feeling him?

When I opened the back gate, Luc was already there waiting for me. Standing near the bench under the shade of the crabapple tree, he was gazing around, taking in his surroundings. Heart-stoppingly attractive in a bronze shirt with a white tee beneath, he looked at home amid my hydrangeas and roses and the perennials that had replaced the grass. This was my special place where I came when I needed to center myself, and Luc seemed comfortable here, as if he fit right into the landscape.

Not liking that, I closed the gate behind me and said, “Here to try to make me forget again?”

He shrugged. “I doubt that would work.”

“Then
why
?” I made my mind go blank to keep him from getting inside my head.

“I was simply checking up on you, making sure you were all right.”

Which didn’t make sense to me. “Why?” I asked again.

“I told you I owe you.”

“You do, don’t you?” I changed direction and narrowed the distance between us, not stopping until I got into his personal space. “And you probably don’t like owing anyone anything very much.”

“And you what?” His gaze narrowed on my face. “Have a way I can obliterate the debt?”

“I do.”

I wanted to lick my lips, but not only had they gone dry, so had my mouth. I was playing with fire here, and I knew it. He dipped his head so close to mine that his breath fluttered across my face.

“Shall we go inside?” he asked.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Your pulse jumped.”

“Perhaps because I don’t trust you.”

His lips were nearly brushing mine when he said, “I have your best interests at heart.”

“Right.”

When he didn’t answer, simply stood so close that I had trouble breathing, I felt as if he could seduce me right there, right in the middle of my own backyard, and I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to stop him. He ran a thumb down the side of my face. Sensation jumped from neuron to neuron, lighting up my internal network and spreading throughout my body.

I stood frozen. Unable to move.

My breasts swelled and my nipples tightened and in one tiny corner of my mind, I got the picture of his mouth on them, doing unspeakable things, while his hands explored lower territories now wet with anticipation. Rather,
I
would be unspeakable, so caught up in sensation that I could only make unintelligible sounds.

And then he removed his thumb from my jawline, and I jerked back to reality. Whatever he’d been doing to entice me flatlined. Relieved, I was able to take a deep, normal breath.

How had he done that?

My face flamed. Despite my best efforts, he undoubtedly knew everything I was thinking.

“Not everything,” Luc said, looking distinctly unhappy.

Unhappy
why
? He’d had power over me for that moment. Maybe he hadn’t wanted that kind of power but hadn’t been able to stop himself.

Now I was smiling. Not an all-out, wide mouthed grin. More like an ironic curve of my lips. Maybe I had some power over him, as well. Now if only I could make him talk.

I tested that hope, saying, “Maybe you can tell me why someone wanted your mother dead.”

His brow furrowed. “If I knew…”

“What?”

“I’d fix things.”

Somehow I didn’t get the feeling that would involve turning in whoever had shot his mother and killed my brother to the police.

“What was your mother into? Something to do with the casino? Or with the animal fights?”

He looked as if I had struck him. And then he scowled at me, making me quake inside. Just a little.

“My mother is one of the most decent human beings that you would ever hope to meet.”

An odd way of putting things. Was he trying to tell me that Elizabeth Reyes wasn’t
something else
the way he was? I didn’t want to consider what I’d learned about my own lineage if
The Book of Powers
was to be believed.

“Does that mean you want me to meet your mother?” I asked. “That you’ll introduce us?”

“Stay away from her.”

“Why? She knows what happened the night my brother was murdered. You owe me, remember. You said you have my best interests at heart. My best interests mean I find out who killed my brother and see that justice is done.”

“Oh, justice will be served. It’s merely a matter of time.”