Cipher (14 page)

“Yeah, the sausage stuff.” Anna eyed her and shook her head. “Did you tell Andrew you didn’t want me anywhere near you or your roommate?”

Kat froze, one hand suspended over the table in the act for reaching for a glass of water. “I—what?”

“Come on, Kat. I’m not a rocket scientist or an empath, but I know when people wish they didn’t have to be looking at me.”

There it was, blunt and so unrepentant that it took a few moments for Kat to realize that the emotion churning through her was relief. The truth had been festering, an ugly emotion that shamed her so deeply she’d never given it voice. She was Kat—nice, sweet Kat, and she wasn’t allowed to be petty and jealous.

Kat dropped her hand to rest on the table. “It’s hard sometimes,” she admitted, and the truth felt like dropping a heavy bag full of schoolbooks at the end of a long walk home. Light and freeing, even if her words carried the ghost of pain. “He ditched me and picked you. Not your fault, but it didn’t make it easier. Especially since you’re not that easy to hate.”

“You’d be surprised how many people manage it,” Anna told her. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”

According to Andrew, she’d been wrong about
everything
. “What’s that?”

“He never ditched you.”

“Yeah, he tried that line too. He disappeared from my life and never talked to me. That’s my definition of ditched.” Kat gripped the edge of the table and met Anna’s gaze squarely. “If this is some shapeshifter thing I’m not getting, I wish you’d tell me. Because no one else will.”

The blonde laid down her fork. “It’s not human emotion, for starters. It’s not that sentimental. It’s
visceral
. Andrew damn near ripped out his own heart to protect you, but not because he had some macho, noble idea that it was better for you. In our world, if you don’t know how to take care of someone, you have to walk. Make room for someone else, someone who can.”

Well that was…typically egocentric shapeshifter bullshit. “Because obviously that’s your choice to make, right? I mean, what say could
we
have in it?”

Anna snorted. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question, because you should know the answer by now.”

This time, she said it out loud. “Well, it’s bullshit. You can’t trade the rest of us around like baseball cards. And if it’s such a universal truth, why the hell has Alec been giving Andrew such a shit time over it?”

“He’s an alpha shifter,” Anna reminded her. “We’re hypocritical assholes.”

Apparently. Kat laid both hands on the table. “So let me get this straight. If Andrew sticks around and I get hurt, it’s his fault. If he sticks around and hurts me, it’s his fault. If he leaves and I’m sad…it’s his fault. If he leaves and someone else hurts me…” She trailed off and tried to come up with a polite way to ask a question that didn’t feel polite at all. “Could you all
be
any more self-centered or condescending?”

“Nope.”

Yelling about it was less fun when Anna agreed with her. Slightly perturbed, Kat sat back. “I don’t know how shapeshifters survive, if almost all of you are like this. How do you stand each other long enough to have babies?”

“You think we’re all like this?” Anna tossed her head back with a laugh. “Sweetie, if that were true, we’d definitely all have killed each other by now. I’m only talking
alpha
shifters, and it just so happens that New Orleans is lousy with us. Lucky you.”

As many times as she’d noticed that all of the shifters in her life—save Sera—seemed obnoxiously dominant, she’d never stopped to consider why, or if that was unusual. “Why is New Orleans different? I mean, I know Alec’s made it into the safe place, but if shit is so bad everywhere else, wouldn’t the submissives
want
to live here?”

“You think all the subs run away from home like Nicky Peyton?” Anna shook her head as she drew one leg up to rest on the vinyl seat. “Hell no. Even if they want to, they stay put. Right where their more dominant relatives or spouses want them to be. Usually,” she added with a nod toward Sera.

Kat glanced around to where Sera was leaning over the bar. She said something Kat couldn’t hear, and the man on the other side burst out laughing.

Sera had run away from home at seventeen. Walked off her high school campus one day and climbed into a car with Josh. They were across state lines before anyone realized she was gone. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t tried to talk her friends and family around. Not that Franklin would have been talked around, and Sera would have had to obey.

So she’d run. And she’d regretted it.

Shivering, Kat turned back to Anna and lowered her voice. “Josh made my skin crawl. He treated her like a princess, but it was never right. It was like…deathless love that you knew was going to end badly. It was Romeo and Juliet.” If Romeo had been in his midthirties and had a mullet.

Something feral and angry sharpened Anna’s gaze for just a moment before vanishing. “Sometimes you think someone’s being treated like a princess, but what they’re really being treated like is a favorite pet or a doll. Property.”

Harsh words for the possessive interest Kat had never been able to put into words. Maybe she’d been too innocent to understand then. Now she knew better. “Thanks for looking out for her. I didn’t want to drag her into another mess. Not when she’s getting back on her feet.”

Anna picked up her cup again. “She’s a good kid.”

“For what it’s worth, Anna, I never hated you. Maybe I wanted to, and maybe I hated myself for the urge, but I never hated you.”

“Believe me when I say it’s understandable.” Anna finished her coffee and propped her elbows on the table. “Now, are you ready for the good news?”

That depended on if their definition of
good
diverged as sharply as their definitions of
ditched
. “Lay it on me.”

“He’s figured it out. That he’s the one who can get it done.”

“Oh.” Maybe to Andrew, it was that easy. Walk away when he couldn’t handle it and come back when he could. It was
instinct
after all, and humans weren’t allowed to hold instinct against shapeshifters, no matter how much they’d hurt you. Derek had pulled that one on her for years, smothering her like she was a kid and blaming instinct every time she tried to push back.

Before she could frame a more meaningful response, Sera appeared, squeezing into the booth next to her. “Y’all playing nice over here?”

“Mostly.” Anna tilted her head and sighed. “It’s hard as hell trying to explain some of this crap without losing a lot in translation.”

Sera flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder and pushed a cup of coffee toward Kat. “If you thought coming in here smelling like you spent the night under Andrew is going to distract me from the part where you got shot, you’re going to be massively disappointed.”

Kat flinched, heat filling her cheeks. She’d forgotten—again—and her conversation with Anna seemed a hundred times more awkward now. “Shit, Sera.”

“Don’t ‘shit’ me. You got
shot
.”

Relating the story from the start took most of Sera’s break, and earned Kat a blistering lecture on communication and asking for help that only ended when the bartender flagged Sera down to pick up an order.

When she was gone, Kat took a sip of her coffee and grimaced when it turned out to be lukewarm. “Do they teach that speech about protecting your people in shapeshifter school?”

“Closest thing to shapeshifter school is Conclave training, and you don’t want to know what they teach you there.”

Kat had more guesses than she wanted. “How to rip up men and torture psychics?”

“For starters. And hey, maybe they’ve expanded the curriculum since I left.” Anna prodded at her cold omelet. “What’s this shit you’re mixed up in that’s got people trying to off you?”

“I don’t even know.” The zip disk was a foot away, tucked safely in her bag, and it took effort not to reach out and touch it. “Someone who doesn’t want me knowing why my mother was so dangerous she ended up dead.”

“Got any leads?” She shook her head without waiting for an answer. “Of course you do, or they wouldn’t be after you. Dumb question.”

“Yeah.” Kat folded her arms and watched as Sera stopped at the table with the toddler again, bending down until the girl got a fist full of Sera’s ponytail. Kids loved her, and Sera loved them back with an outward pleasure that masked the echoes of pain that Kat caught in unguarded moments.

Glancing back at Anna, Kat tilted her head toward her roommate. “She’s doing okay, right? Is she staying with you?”

“Mmm, over the bar. I tried to get her to take the bedroom, but she insists on sleeping on the couch.”

It sounded like a Sera thing to do. “As long as she’s safe. If there are shifters after us…” Anna bristled with power as dominant as Andrew’s. Sera was a quiet submissive who could be bent to a stronger shapeshifter’s will no matter how viciously she fought. “I don’t want to drag her into my crap.”

Before Anna could answer, John dropped onto the booth beside her with a heavy sigh, a kitchen towel slung over one shoulder. “You around next weekend, Kitty Kat? Jimmy Aucoin’s gonna play here Friday night.”

One week, and it seemed like a decade away. She already couldn’t begin to make sense of the events that had transpired—open an email on Monday, wake up in Andrew’s bed on Friday.

By next week she could be married. Or dead. “I don’t know. Things are hectic right now, but if they settle down, I’ll be there.”

“How about you, Lenoir?”

“I don’t make plans, John. You know that.”

He laughed. “Course not. Little rambling Anna.”

“Plans aren’t the best idea in New Orleans,” Kat pointed out. “Making them is lots of fun until you realize someone or something is always going to come along and break them.”

“Those days are over,” John insisted. “The place is finally calming down—and I, for one, am gonna enjoy it.”

Yeah, that was a guilt-punch to the gut.

“Don’t you have shit to do?” Anna asked him. “Chef-type things back in the kitchen? Make me another omelet.”

He said something in response, something no doubt both creative and obscene. Kat heard the sounds, but the words drifted away into meaningless noise as Andrew stepped through the front door.

For a moment, he stood in the late-morning sunlight, and Kat held her breath. The flutter was back, the one she’d had in her hapless innocence, when his mere presence had filled her with imagination with possibilities. Not just the flutter, she had
tingles
, the kind that came with high school crushes and the driving urge to make out in dark corners.

She had no idea what they were or where they were going, but sometime in the last week he’d resurrected her ability to hope. To imagine something between them besides pain and loss. It was exhilarating.

It was terrifying.

It was kind of turning her on.

Her heart beat too fast, and Anna would hear it. So would Andrew, and Sera, and probably any number of patrons who were shapeshifters she didn’t recognize. There was no subtlety in the world of supernatural senses, and no privacy.

Half the people in the room knew she wanted to jump on Andrew, and the rest could probably make a pretty good guess.

He stopped beside the table and smiled down at her. “I got things squared away with Alec. How’s it going, Anna? John?”

They murmured their hellos as Kat oh-so-carefully didn’t touch him. Considering what had happened last time, being within five feet of him seemed risky enough. Instead she gripped her bag as a reminder to keep her hands to herself. “Sera yelled at me until she felt better, so I’m ready to go when you are.”

“I’m parked right outside.” And he seemed eager to go.

John grinned and slid out of the booth. “Y’all take it easy.” He disappeared back toward the kitchen.

Anna spared a glance for Kat as she refilled her coffee cup from the small carafe on the table. “Let me know if you need any backup, okay?”

That the offer had been made to her, and not to Andrew, was a gesture Kat appreciated. “I will. Thanks, Anna.”

“You’re welcome.”

Outside, the crisp January morning had her digging a scarf out of her bag. “Sera seems okay. I think Anna is really good for her.”

“I think so too.” Andrew rested his hand on Kat’s shoulder, drawing her closer. “I didn’t clear the trip out to Alec’s house, after all. He gave me a lecture about independence and initiative, so I said fuck it.”

“Go us. Breaking and entering.” Leaning into his side felt nice. Fuzzy, but nice. “It’s not like we’re going to trash the place or anything.”

“Unauthorized entry,” he corrected. “I have a key and security codes.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Would you feel better if we were likely to get arrested?”

Kat stepped off the sidewalk. “I guess not. So how was Alec? I haven’t gotten any email from him in a couple days. Not even the profanity-laced ones when he breaks something.”

“Up to his ears in Conclave crap.” He unlocked the doors and opened hers. “There’s some stuff going on right now.”

“Uh-oh. Worse than usual?”

“No, just—” He climbed in and slid the key into the ignition before falling still, his hands on the wheel. “Derek and Nick are going to have a baby.”

Kat froze, the seatbelt clutched in one hand. “Derek and Nick—” Oh
shit
. The faint hurt of not hearing it from her cousin personally was swallowed up by a far more intense emotion—sympathy. “Nick is going to kill him before it’s over. Derek has turned overprotectiveness into an extreme sport.”

“Apparently, she’s fine but doesn’t feel great, so he’s freaking out.”

That was Derek. “The first time I got the flu after he became my guardian, he took me to the clinic three times. Franklin finally had to tell him he was doing more harm dragging me back and forth than he would be by letting me puke my guts out at home. And that was
before
he got turned and got all the crazy shapeshifter instincts.”

Andrew closed his hand around hers. “He’ll call you after he settles down. Alec only told me because there are rumors floating around already, and he only knows because Derek’s been asking Carmen for advice.”