Feral Nights (18 page)

“Congratulations,” I say. “How long have you two been married?”

“Twenty years tomorrow,” Mrs. Borgia-Simon replies. “This excursion is the other half of our gift to each other.” She loops her arm through her husband’s. “We weren’t much older than you are now when we first met at school. In our first-semester Alchemy and Incantations class, my mister yanked the still-beating heart out of a twelve-year-old wereotter.” She gives him a quick peck on the cheek. “As he squeezed its blood into the open mouth of a demon fetus, I knew I’d found the fella for me.”

I suppress a shudder. “And you sent your daughter to this same school?”

“Of course,” he says, beaming and patting her hand. “Nothing but the best for my girls.”

How nice. Steeling myself, I knock on the door of the second set of clients.

A vampire dressed like a rock star flings it open. He tosses aside the newly drained body of one of the maid-interns and extends a bloodstained hand to Mr. Simon. “I’m Victor,” he announces. “How do you do?”

As the men shake hands, I notice a necklace of what appears to be tiny human pinky bones around Victor’s neck. This monster takes pride in killing children.

What will they do to Yoshi? Lower-class vamps sneer at shifter blood, and our undead guests are aristocrats. They’re in this for sport. Heaven help us if they get creative.

Then again, the Simons don’t seem the least fazed by the idea that they’re in the presence of a supernatural predator, and that suggests they have the ability to call on malevolent magic of their own.

“My consort,” Victor says, gesturing. “The scintillating Elina.”

She sashays out the bedroom door of her suite, wearing four-inch spike heels and a black-and-red dress that plunges to her belly button. In my expert opinion as a Sanguini’s employee, it’s a clichéd choice at best.

In contrast, she seems to like the look of me. Raking her gaze up my body, Elina licks her lips with a forked tongue.

I go utterly still as she glides to nuzzle my ear.

Thinking mostly of my jugular, I point down the hall. “The reception is that way.”

Elina trails a finger from my cheek to my chin and pinches it hard enough to bruise. Her eyebrows have been plucked off and painted back on, and she’s missing her fangs. But those fingernails could slash my throat in a blink.

Maintaining a professional air, I address the group, “Should I not have an opportunity to say so later, I wish you a hunt to end all hunts.”

Victor bounds out, clasping Elina firmly on the butt. “The hunt!” he exclaims, interrupting our standoff. “I’m so sick of cowering in seclusion. I can hardly wait!”

“Seclusion?” Mrs. Borgia-Simon repeats. “Whatever would
you
hide from?”

Abruptly forgetting me, Elina rolls her shoulders. “We chose the wrong side in the last royal coup,” she explains. “Happens all the time, yet the piggish, smarty-pants eternal queen has banished us from court.”

“Her enforcers are ordered to destroy us on sight,” Victor puts in.

“Me, an Old Blood!” Elina whines. “I have been a treasured member of the aristocracy for centuries.”

Oh, hell and damnation. I’m no demonologist, but I’ve picked up a bit about the undead from working at Sanguini’s and the occasional hijinks that swirl around it.

Old Blood vampires are the reigning biggest of the baddies. They can enthrall potential victims, take several forms — including that of wolves and bats — dissolve into smoke, mist, dust, and shadows, and they’re physically more formidable than the more newly undead. Age is a power indicator, a status marker.

Mrs. Borgia-Simon sighs. “The underworld just isn’t what it used to be.”

In the conference room, the first row of uncomfortable chairs has been roped off for the clients. I show them to their places and join Sandra and the other interns in back.

Suddenly, in a showy puff of rusty black smoke, Cameron appears alongside the podium, modeling flowing black robes and an imposing-looking amethyst medallion.

Opening his scaly arms wide, he grins with pointy teeth and says, “Welcome to Daemon Island. I am your host, Cameron, the demon king.”

IT DRIZZLES STEADILY ALL NIGHT,
despite Noelle’s insistence that this is the dry season.

A black and blue butterfly alights briefly on my nose. It’s too pretty to eat.

I have insomnia again, and the exchange over mating with Noelle put me off my appetite. With each passing hour, the world looks sharper, even with the mist. Paxton must’ve been mixing a mild sedative in the food, something to dull our senses.

I pick up my plate and sniff it. I can’t detect anything specific, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I dump the gruel into the straw pile in the corner farthest from Noelle.

I gaze at her, sleeping in her hammock. Awake or unconscious, no one luxuriates like a female Cat. Every time she turns, stretches, I almost swallow my tongue. Even her soft snore is sexy, and, bonus, none of my friends has a prior claim.

When Noelle wakes up, I’m going to try shaking my cage again. Not that it did any good the last few times. These enclosures were built for far fiercer shifters than me. But I’m hopeful the storm may have swept the crutch to an edge of the roof. A matter of millimeters could make all the difference.

A cool wind blows through. It’s Travis.

“Is Aimee all right?” I whisper, careful not to disturb Noelle.

Travis positions his translucent form as if he’s sitting on an invisible lounge chair. “She’s had a stressful couple of days, but she’s hanging in there.” Before I could ask anything else, he holds up a finger. “The albino Bigfoot things? As slow as you move, they’re never going to toss you into a hunt.”

“Meaning what?” I reply.

“Breathe,” Travis says. “Nobody’s going to lobotomize you or surgically alter you so you’re forever stuck between animal and human form.”

We’ve seen the same horror movies.

“But they might slaughter you and sell your pelt.” Gesturing toward the next cage, Travis adds, “Not the Lion. She’s special to them. They’re hoping she’ll produce several cubs over the next couple of decades. Boreal hasn’t given up on the idea of snagging a healthy breeding male, but he’s expanded his efforts, seeking out black-market vendors of shifter sperm.”

“So some rich hunters can bag the king of the jungle,” I mutter. “Big freaking deal.” Out loud, it sounds like I have species envy.

“It is a big deal,” Travis informs me. “From what I’ve overheard, not even the Mantle of Dracul has a male Lion head to display as a show of strength and cruelty. Boreal could charge twice what he’s asking now if there was a maned Lion in the mix.”

A sliver of moonlight illuminates the curve of Noelle’s haunches. “I have to get her and Aimee out of here.” I caught most of what Paxton whispered to Yoshi, but I’m not about to leave the girls’ lives in their incompetent paws.

Bad enough that “cupcake kisses” were Aimee’s code words for Yoshi. I wonder if Travis knows that she’s moving on.

Gesturing to the roof of the cage, I ask, “Where’s the crutch?”

Travis points to the upper-left corner, the one opposite Noelle. “Right there.”

I shuffle over, climb as high as I can, and, bracing myself with my feet, use my free hand to try to catch hold of it. “I don’t feel anything,” I gasp.

“You’re not able to reach close enough,” Travis says. “With the wind and rain . . . Maybe try again in the morning.”

Sliding down, I ask, “You okay?”

Travis says, “I just wish I could do something to help.”

“Be with Aimee,” I tell him. “Even if she doesn’t know you’re there, I can’t stand the thought of her being all alone in the lodge with those arctic asshats.”

“Will do,” the Dillo ghost replies, dissipating in the humid air.

“Who’re you talking to?” Noelle mumbles in a sleepy voice. “God?”

Travis has disappeared, though he might still be listening.

“Sorry I woke you,” I tell Noelle. “How do you feel?”

She yawns, stretches her arms. “Fuzzy.”

I explain my theory about the food being drugged.

“That would fit with Paxton’s MO,” she observes, repositioning herself. Now we’re face-to-face, resting on our stomachs. “When I first met him at Basement Blues, he was dealing transformeaze.”

“The shift-freezing drug,” I say.

She nods. “There’s an underground circuit of shifter music clubs in big cities and remote honky-tonks across the countryside. I sing in this blues band, Fayard and the French Horns, and we didn’t really take off until we started using. The more animal form we looked, the better the audiences liked us. The money was solid, and the applause felt even better. Before long, the drug seemed necessary, and not just for business purposes.”

My dad warned me about transformeaze. Except for very young adolescents and hybrids, most werepeople typically have no trouble with control during and throughout a shift. It’s painful but natural, and we’re still ourselves. Animal is the form, not the mind inside it.

You start toying with that . . . I can’t imagine losing myself, what makes me Clyde, and going all renegade Possum. That’s scary enough. But unleashing an inner Lion could get deadly fast. “Did you have issues with control?”

“That’s why I stopped. Never try it, Clyde. Transformeaze is distilled from a demonic spell. Under the influence, I did things I’ll always regret.”

I take that to mean she did
someone
she’ll always regret. I hate Paxton that much more for taking advantage of her. I search my mind for something that will reassure Noelle that I don’t think less of her for what she’s been through. “You’re so graceful. I can barely get in and out of my hammock without fumbling all over myself.”

Her lips curl. “I’m so graceful?”

“What?” I reply, blushing. “You are!” Despite the limp. I can’t remember the last time I came right out and complimented somebody. I haven’t even admitted to my parents that the kits are cute. “What color are your eyes in fully human form?”

“More brown, but I like them better this way. That’s not the transformeaze. The various species of Cats — Lions included — tend to be better than other shifters at holding on to superficial animal-form features.”

“It’s worse for you here,” I say. “Nobody wants to mate me to some strange Possum girl.” Not that I’d necessarily mind.

Noelle props her chin on her fists. “Tell me about Possums.”

I blink. “I’m not really qualified to speak on behalf of all of Possum kind.”

That makes her laugh. “Then tell me about you.”

So I do. We talk for hours. I tell her about Mom and Dad, Cleatus, Clara, Claudette, and Clint, about Waterloo High, working at Sanguini’s, how I got hurt so badly.

Turns out she’s from Atlanta, her parents work for Coca-Cola, they have a Maine coon named Aesop, and her mother collects porcelain mouse thimbles. Fascinating.

As the sun comes up, I talk about Aimee. “We’d been hanging out for a while, but after I woke from the coma, she was the person most there for me. She even tracked down VHS copies of
Galactica 1980,
plus a VCR for us to watch them on, and suffered through the whole set with me, just so I could say that I’d seen it.”

“
Galactica 1980
?” Noelle repeats. “Never heard of it.”

That bothers me more than it should. “I take my geek cred very seriously.”

I don’t get into Aimee’s relationship with Travis or how he died. I’m more self-conscious about what I say now that I know he might be listening.

Besides, I don’t want Noelle to think that I’m holding what Ruby did against all of Cat kind . . . because I’m not, at least not anymore.

Noelle confirms that two of her toes and a bone in her foot were broken when she was captured. “You should’ve seen it, all swollen up, before I could shift it partly out. It looked like a bloody stump. Paxton —”

“He’s worse than those arctic asshats,” I say. “Because he’s a shifter, it’s —”

“More personal somehow,” Noelle says along with me. “I like you, Clyde. I really do. If we could ever find our way out of this hellhole —”

“We will,” I promise, forcing myself up to once again try shaking the crutch from the top of my cage.

THE TEMPERATURE COOLS
Wednesday at sunset, though last night’s rain did nothing to break the humidity. The ground is muddy, messy. Cats are known for our fastidiousness. Keeping watch in a treetop, I’m cleaner and more content up high.