Feral Nights (8 page)

Our cover story is that Yoshi is shopping for a lease. Not hugely original, but it gets us in. We pick up a couple of brochures and chat up the receptionist about the fitness center and laundry facilities. Fortunately, the salesperson is occupied with another prospective tenant.

We thank the receptionist and excuse ourselves, making noises about checking out the pool. The complex is huge, made up of eight separate four-story buildings, painted off-white with brown trim. It’s about five years old, in an affluent neighborhood, convenient to downtown, Mopac, and the lake.

We find Building F on the far side of the property.

“Are you from family money?” I ask, figuring a music-promotion internship, assuming it paid at all, wouldn’t be lucrative enough for Ruby to cover the rent.

“Not so much,” Yoshi replies as we march up the outside staircase.

He hesitates at the door of apartment F409, Ruby’s apartment, and we exchange a ready-for-anything look. Yoshi knocks, waits a minute, checks to make sure no one’s around, and then shoves the door open, breaking the lock.

“Hello?” he calls. “Ruby?”

No answer. No alarm, either. It must be nice to have super strength.

I follow him in. The unit is a one-bedroom — beige walls and carpeting — with a living-dining area, bathroom, and kitchenette. “The electricity has been turned off.”

He tries the sink. “The water, too.”

I do a quick sweep, mostly to reassure myself that the apartment is unoccupied.

“Hurry,” Yoshi urges. “The cops may be watching the place.”

“The Dillos, too,” I say. I can’t believe I’m in Ruby’s apartment. If Clyde finds out, he’ll be furious that I didn’t bring him along. Not to mention that I’m here with Yoshi.

The apartment apparently came furnished in durable earth-tone fabrics. Ruby’s clothes still hang in the closet and overstuff the hamper and lie in clumps on the bedroom carpet. Her bountiful collection of sparkly cosmetics and toiletries clutters the medicine-cabinet shelves. She left a half-stocked fridge, too. The eggs have gone bad, along with the milk, fruits, and veggies. It smells awful, no doubt worse to Yoshi.

He shuts the refrigerator door fast.

When I open a kitchen cabinet filled with brown rice, pistachios, and cereal boxes, a dozen tiny beige moths fly out.

“Ruby hasn’t been back here in a while,” Yoshi muses, crossing the apartment. “If she hasn’t paid in as long, she’s far enough behind on the rent to be evicted. So, why hasn’t this place been cleaned out? Leased to someone else?”

“The economy?” I guess. “Maybe they have several other units identical to this one available, or maybe they’re hoping Ruby will come back, or . . .” I recall my parents’ latest tiff over finances. “She might be paid up — sending checks from who-knows-where or having the money automatically transferred each month from a bank account.” I suspect that Zaleski and Wertheimer know the answer.

In the bedroom doorway, Yoshi is holding up a black leather corset with black lace trim and red satin ties. “Good luck fitting into that,” I tease.

“My sister wore things like this in public,” he mutters like it just sank in. “There’s hardly anything else in the closet except her clothes from home, shoved to the back.”

“Do you smell anyone?” I ask. “Besides Ruby, I mean.”

Yoshi lifts his nose. “Human, but it’s off somehow.”

“Probably the vampire,” I say. “From what I hear, it’s a sort of echo scent.”

“And another Cat,” Yoshi adds. “But that’s somehow strange, too.” He tosses the corset onto the sofa and returns to the bedroom.

A high-school yearbook on the coffee table catches my eye. I open it to the section on the senior class and find Ruby’s photo in the
K
s.

I’ve seen pictures of her before, of course. Clyde has shown me. She exudes slinky sauciness — every inch the kind of woman who could seriously rock a leather corset.

In her school photo, Ruby looks sweet, not sex kittenish. Without the severe makeup or the skunk stripe in her dark hair, she’s a different girl.

At Waterloo High, my green highlights and tats are no big deal, but it’s all relative. I would’ve stood out as much at this small-town Kansas school as Ruby did here in Austin (even at Sanguini’s). Paging back, I find Yoshi’s picture — that irresistible smile — and then check the index. Neither Kitahara sibling appears except in their class photos. No science club, no homecoming court or sports teams. Like most werepeople, they kept a low profile — possibly lower than most, given the size of their school and hometown.

Ruby kept her yearbook handy. Did she miss the life she left behind?

I hear a soft “Oh” from the other room and put the book down. “What is it?” I ask, joining Yoshi in the bedroom.

Glancing up from the nightstand drawer, he grimaces. “I can deal with the fact that my sister is no longer a virgin. But I in no way needed to know that she’s into flavored glow-in-the-dark condoms.” He runs a hand through his dark hair. “It makes no sense.”

Overwhelmed by the awkwardness of the situation, I begin channeling my mother. “Condoms not only prevent pregnancy, they’re also helpful in combatting the transmission of —”

“That’s not what I meant.” Yoshi shuts the drawer. “Condoms are worn by men.”

I reject a couple of possibilities before replying, “Everybody knows that.”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Didn’t everybody know Ruby’s into girls?”

I sure didn’t. “Since when?”

The Cat shrugs. “Based on the collection of vintage Diana Rigg–as–Emma Peel posters hanging in her bedroom at Grams’s, I’d say, since forever.”

So Yoshi’s sister morphed from a gay, small-town sweetheart to a bitchy, big-city hetero (or at least bi) seductress-assassin. No wonder he’s confused. “Why don’t I take the bedroom and bath?” I suggest, feeling protective of Ruby’s privacy, or at least Yoshi’s sensibilities. “You search the rest of the apartment.”

I discover that Ruby stashed a silky blindfold and a set of handcuffs in the lower drawer of the nightstand. I leave them there. I also leave the discarded black thong under the bed and the collection of Kama Sutra oils on the bathroom windowsill.

I’m completely unqualified to get a read on any of this. The only boy I’ve more than kissed was Enrique. It wasn’t that huge of a deal, but he does know that I wear a padded bra. I never kissed Travis. He was shy. I was gun-shy.

Not that it’s helping to dwell on it now.

Ruby has a passion for self-help paperbacks that reminds me of my mother — the self-help part anyway, not the specific topics. Under discarded clothes, on the toilet tank, and in the corner of her chaotic closet, I come across titles like
Leather, Metal, and Other Aphrodisiacs
and
Love Yourself: Batteries Optional.

Moving on, I discover that Ruby wore cinnamon musk and burned sandalwood incense. She tucked a black-and-white snapshot of herself and Yoshi into the mirror over her dresser. They were about nine and eleven years old, and they’d posed, cheek to cheek, facing the camera, with their cheeks puffed out, blowing paper party horns.

I occasionally peek in on him, searching beneath couch cushions or under the kitchen sink. We’ve left dozens of fingerprints. We should’ve worn gloves.

I’m feeling between the mattresses when I hear something slam and rush to investigate. A cabinet door is swinging from the top hinge, and Yoshi’s shaking his hand.

“What happened?” I ask. “Did the kitchen cabinet mock your hair?”

Yoshi faces me, gripping the granite counter behind him. He broke the skin on his knuckles. “I’m no detective,” he says. “This is ridiculous. I feel like a goddamned werewolf, sniffing around.”

Is Yoshi usually a hothead — an unsettling quality in anyone, but especially a werepredator — or is it his fear for his sister making him act this way? “Focus,” I say.

Nodding, he pulls one of the drawers completely out and sets it on the table.

“Have you gone through these old receipts?” I ask, moving in to take a closer look.

There are a lot of them, mostly crumpled. I begin smoothing out each one in turn. Most came from boring places like the grocery store or gas station.

“Ruby spent a fortune on dry cleaning alone,” Yoshi says, batting at a little beige moth. “I can’t imagine how she afforded any of this.”

“She never pulled a paycheck at Sanguini’s,” I reply, “but Davidson Morris had been giving her money for a while.” That sounded sleazier than I meant it to.

Yoshi holds up a faded receipt. “Enlightenment Alley. Do you know it?”

“It’s a shop off Anderson Lane,” I reply, brightening. “The owner . . .”

“What about him?”

“Paxton!” I exclaim. “He has a college-age son by the same name.”

“Shh!” Yoshi goes still. “Someone’s coming. We should go.”

“Without being spotted?” I ask in a low voice. “How? There’s only one way out.”

“And I busted the lock,” he says. “They can come in without a key.”

Yoshi slips the shop receipt into his jeans pocket, takes my hand, leads me across the living room into Ruby’s bedroom, and locks that door behind us. Then he unlatches the one window that doesn’t open to the front of the apartment.

“Are you crazy?” I ask, gauging the drop. “We’re on the fourth floor. I’m a human being, remember? I don’t heal like a shifter.”

Yoshi shoves the window open wide. “That’s why we’re going up.” He ducks through, straddling the sill, and offers his hand again. “Do you trust me?”

Trust him? I wasn’t even willing to let him drive.

From the living room, I hear a man with a slight Mexican accent. Whoever it is has already come inside and started pounding on the bedroom door. “Ruby?”

Yoshi swings all the way out the window, grabbing onto who-knows-what for support. “Come on!” he urges. “Wrap your arms around me. Hurry!”

I latch on to his neck and hook my legs around his waist, hyper aware of the intimacy of our embrace. Using a gutter downspout for balance, Yoshi launches us up and grasps the roofline. A short, pained breath escapes him.

I whisper, “You all right?”

“Shouldn’t have punched the cabinet,” he replies through gritted teeth.

Yoshi takes a deeper breath and then raises us both to the top. We land in a heap on our sides in each other’s arms. Scared as I am, it feels good.

“Ruby!” the man shouts out the window. “Ruby, we can help you!”

I try to catch a glimpse of the intruder, but Yoshi holds me in place.

After a while, we hear Ruby’s front door shut. We crawl across the roof to peer over the parking lot. Below, a middle-aged Latino priest and a teenage guy large enough to wrestle professionally climb into a light-blue van and drive away. Appearances can be deceiving, but they don’t look like bad guys. I ask, “Is Ruby Catholic?”

Yoshi rubs his forehead. “She wasn’t when she left Kansas.”

I BLEW IT YESTERDAY
with Yoshi. We faced off, eye to eye, man to man, Opossum to Cat. Which begs the question: What was I thinking, trying to use dominance against him?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to project “prey shifter,” but I went too far the other way. I went against my better instincts, against everything I know about the food chain. It was also self-defeating. I made a total idiot out of myself in front of Aimee, and for what? I didn’t learn thing one about Ruby in the process. And to think how I’ve been strutting around, talking large about battling evildoers in the name of justice.

Who am I trying to kid? I’m Clyde Leonard Gilbert, a dishwashing, babysitting sophomore marsupial. It’s so freaking unfair.

Wolves and Cats get all the girls. They get all the glory.

They don’t fail their dead best friends.

The mystery of the day? On her way home from church, Nora texted me, asking that I meet her at this abandoned construction site. I’m looking at a five-story metal-beam shell beside a huge asphalt parking lot, hidden from view of the steady traffic on Mopac by hills and trees. Nora asked that I come alone.

I don’t have long to chat. Aimee is stopping by later to help me take care of the quads while my parents “make an appearance” at a wererat retirement brunch.

Leaning against my SUV, I say, “I feel like I should know a code word.”

Nora gives me a hug. “How’re you feeling, Clyde? You really up to taunting strange werepredators in my kitchen?”

“I’m sorer this morning than I was yesterday.” I lift my leg, testing for flexibility. “I’ve tried to shift a couple of times. If I can make it all the way to full Possum, my human form might reboot when I turn back.”

What I don’t say is that any effort to transform hurts like a mother, and I don’t want to try it on painkillers or muscle relaxants. Wereopposums don’t stress over controlling our animal form the same way that Wolves or Bears or, for that matter, Cats do. Unless we’re cornered, our response to conflict is usually to bolt or play dead. But nobody likes to lose it. I have nightmares about showing tail in the boys’ locker room at school.

“You’re growing up,” Nora says, opening her car trunk. “Getting yourself into all kinds of trouble.” She pulls out shiny silver crutches.

“I have a pair at home,” I tell her. The crutches are supposed to be the step between the chair and walking normally again, assuming I ever can walk normally again.