Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (46 page)

Nik did tell me some of what he’d overheard back there, of course.

Most of it was what I’d thought...meaning that Evers and Razmun had been setting me up with those mob guys, presumably to have me eliminated. They’d gotten me on the case to pull suspicion off Evers if I disappeared.

So Razmun had been using Evers to find me, and thus Nik...and Evers had been using Razmun to get me killed without going to jail for murder one.

One big happy clusterfuck of mutually screwed-up benefits.

Nik did hint that Razmun seemed to have another motive going on there, too. He implied it had something to do with the trafficking of live humans, but Nik didn’t get much into the details. Or maybe he just didn’t know the details yet. In any case, I got the impression that Razmun might have been looking a bit further ahead than Evers and his psychotic revenge gig.

I got more of the story on where Nik himself had been, too, meaning for those few hours where I couldn’t reach him via the lock. Apparently Nik totally freaked when he found out I’d been grabbed. He ran for the door, still a cat, and began yowling to high heaven to be let out. He said he knew it was a risky thing to do, but he “had few good options,” in his words. He’d already cased the room and there was no other way out.
 

None he could access in cat form, anyway.

Razmun put two and two together and had some of the mob guys grab him.

Nik said he contemplated shifting right then and there, even with the Russians watching, but Razmun had him tightly by the neck, and might have broken it during Nik’s shift...which was sort of the point, I guess. Before Nik could decide what to do, Razmun actually choked him to unconsciousness...then threw him in the trunk of his car.
 

So, as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who had that not-so-pleasant experience.

When Nik woke up, he’d been in human form, naked, and lying in the dark trunk of a car parked out at that meth ranch where I’d been held captive along with Hilary and Jazzy. Of course, he hadn’t known that last part until later, but he looked for me, felt me relatively close and in danger, and came to find me as fast as he could.

He hadn’t told me how he got out of the trunk, but I could guess. I think I dreamed about that, actually, after Gantry left.

In my dream, I had dragon-like claws. I screeched, crammed into a too-small space, trying to tear my way out of a metal box, seeing light through the long slashes made by my glass-like nails. It hurt like hell. I was also angry, frightened, half out of my mind...desperate, maybe.

When I woke up, I was sweating.

I lay stretched out on the beat-up leather couch that matched my office chair, and that I’d dragged off the lawn of the same yard sale with Gantry, Irene and Jake a few days before, loading it up on a beat-up pick-up truck with the chair and the old desk.

I was no longer alone.
 

I flinched a bit, startled, when I saw someone sitting next to me, perfectly still.

He laid a hand on my arm, as soon as I had.

“Sorry,” he said, stroking my skin. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

I smiled at him, stretching on the long couch.

“You know, this thing is about a hundred times more comfortable than Irene’s crappy hide-a-bed,” I informed him.

Nik smiled, but the more serious look didn’t leave his eyes.

Still fighting to wake up, I pulled myself up to a sitting position on the couch.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Nik only looked at me for a minute, his eyes a light green, one of the colors I still didn’t have a real interpretation for. I almost saw confusion on his face, but there were other things there, things that made me nervous for some reason.

“Nik?” I said. “Did something happen at the meet today?”

Nik looked over at that. He shook his head, once. “No,” he said.

“Then what’s wrong?”

He met my gaze directly, and I watched his eyes shift a few shades darker. “Do you want me to leave? To go with Razmun when he goes?”

Nik’s voice was blunt, but I heard the hurt there.

I sighed, relaxing back into the soft leather. “Haven’t we been over this?”

“Gantry implied you’d changed your mind,” Nik told me.

I pressed my lips together, feeling my face tense a little as I remember the conversation with Gantry earlier that day. And his kiss out of the blue.

“He kissed you?” Nik said.

I heard anger in his words that time.

Sighing again, I sat up more, laying my hand on Nik’s leg. “Look,” I said, ignoring his second question. “Gantry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That, or he’s lying.”

“Did he kiss you?”

I shook my head, but not in a no. “It doesn’t matter.” Feeling another rush of anger from Nik through the lock, I found myself biting my lip, even as more thoughts ran through my head. Thoughts about how much I’d been pushing Nik away, about whether it was fair to let him stay here on Earth, separated from his own kind for the rest of his life. Could I really let him stay, surrounded by humans, the same race that enslaved him all of those years?

“You do want me to go,” Nik said, his voice cold.

I shook my head again. “No,” I said. “But some part of me thinks I should let you go, Nik.”

I felt another flush of anger from him, but Nik didn’t speak.

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I forced my mind off that, away from what might be going on in Nik’s head, and back on what was going on in mine.

Did I want Nik to go? Seriously?

The thought hurt me somehow, even as I fought with my own conflicting feelings.

“Why would you want to stay, Nik?” I said finally.

He gave me a hard look. I winced a little, maybe trying to prepare myself for what he might say, but he didn’t say anything. He looked away from me instead, staring at the floor of our small one bedroom apartment. The apartment I’d picked out with both of us in mind. With the thought that Nik would be here with me, working with me, but having his own life, too.

“You don’t want that anymore?” he said, his voice low.

“Of course I do!” I said, exasperated. “Nik, quit with pretending you don’t know how I feel. I get that the Gantry-kiss thing bugged you, but let it go, okay? This is too important. I don’t want you to end up hating me for encouraging you to stay. How can you really be okay with losing all connection to others of your kind?”

“They aren’t gone yet,” Nik muttered. He looked at me. “Some might stay. You don’t know.”

“What if they don’t?”

Nik frowned.

I could tell my questions were frustrating him as much as his were me, though.

Neither of us wanted questions. We wanted answers.

Solid, unambiguous answers.

“I love you,” he said. He looked at me, his eyes holding a near challenge. “I wanted to tell you after we made love...or during...or when you’d said you would stay with me.”

I smiled, shaking my head a little. “So many conditions,” I teased.

“Not
conditions,”
he said, a touch of anger reaching his voice. “I didn’t want you to feel guilty, if you ended up asking me to leave. I was trying to give you space to decide. I did not want to be controlling...not with my words, and especially not through the lock. I am trying to be a good mate with you. To not do to you what was done to me.”

I blinked at that. Probably because it hadn’t even occurred to me, but now that he’d said it, it made total sense. Especially given what I knew about Nik, and how he tended to think about things. Especially given what he’d told me about lock-mates he’d had in the past. I forgot sometimes that being bonded to Nik made both of us vulnerable to one another. I also remembered what he’d told me about a “good” lock-bonding, about how that meant respecting the other’s mind and free will.
 

Remembering Gantry earlier that day, threatening Nik...threatening me, indirectly, and threatening Nik...I felt my jaw tighten again.

It would be the most selfish thing in the world if I told Nik to stay here.

He wasn’t safe here, and I knew it. He probably never would be.

Nik let out a bitter-sounding chuckle. “But no doubt, I’ll be safe with Razmun,” he muttered.

I smiled, trying to lighten his expression when I nudged his arm. “Was that sarcasm?” I said. “Because you’re getting pretty good at it, if so.”

I felt another wash of frustration through the lock I shared with Nik, and I shook my head, cutting him off before he could voice it.

“Stay,” I told him, my voice decisive. “Well...do what you want. Do what makes you happy, Nik. But I want you to stay.”

Nik looked at me, his mouth hard. “You are humoring me.”

“No.” I shook my head, more sure as I said it. “No, I’m not.” Biting my tongue as I weighed the other thing back and forth for a few more seconds, I realized I’d made up my mind on that score, too. “...And no other people, Nik,” I told him. “I promise.”

He stared at me for real that time, his eyes shifting to a paler green.

He didn’t speak, though.

I watched his face, trying to decide if he’d understood me the way I meant it.

“Nik?” I said. “Do you need me to say it some other way?”

His face smoothed, even as I watched.

Before I could make sense of the expression forming there, he caught hold of me around the waist and leg, pushing me back down to the couch. I let out a yelp of surprise but it was more than half a laugh that time, even before he lay down on top of me. Once he had me there, and held my wrists in both of his hands, he stared at my face again, his expression serious, but also carrying a heat I recognized.

“No,” he said. “That was enough.”

Smiling up at him, I laughed again.

“If Gantry kisses you again,” he informed me next. “I’m going to punch him.”

I laughed louder that time. “Your funeral, man.”

Nik smiled back, but that heat never lessened in his eyes. Looking up at him, I realized he wasn’t responding because he didn’t have to. I also realized that in any real fight between him and Gantry, it would probably be Gantry who’d end up in the hospital.

Somehow, the thought shocked me a little.

I guess I’d bought into the whole indestructible marine thing more than I’d realized.

More than that, it hit me suddenly, why Gantry was so angry about me being with Nik. Gantry knew Nik was stronger than him, too. He’d known that all along...or for a good long while, anyway, maybe not long after he found out what Nik was.

Gantry was afraid of him.

Before I got much further in that train of thought, Nik lowered his head.

He kissed me, so gently it disarmed me, even as I felt a flood of affection towards me through the lock link we shared. I kissed him back, doing it almost before I could wrap my head around what we were doing, where it would probably go this time, despite all of the stops and starts of the last however-many times we’d started this and gotten interrupted, freaked out, or whatever else seemed to always come between us.

A few minutes after that, the last of my misgivings were pretty much wiped out of my mind.
 

Maybe I really am a bit dumb when it comes to Nik.

I didn’t really think so, though.

I knew Nik was dangerous. I even knew he might be a threat to national security in some sense, just like Gantry said. But I didn’t really believe it. I also didn’t believe he was dangerous to me. In fact, I was ninety-nine percent sure he was the opposite.

Whatever Gantry feared of Nik’s strength or his intelligence or his shape-shifting, I knew Nik. I knew he’d never hurt me. I knew he’d never hurt anyone, of his race or mine, unless he had a damned good reason.

At that point, that was enough.

Hell, life is dangerous.
 

I first learned that when I was a kid, when Jake and me were constantly being left on our own by our drunk mother. I learned it in foster homes, from bullies at school, from guys who followed me home in New York...and lately, from my job.