Pixie The Lion Tamer (Shifters, Inc.) (9 page)

Uneasy, he glanced up at the clock on the wall, and started moving towards the back of the ballroom to wait for the lights to go out.             

“You dance divinely,” said the man whose name probably wasn’t Craig Biltmore. 

Pixie doubted that very much;
waltzing was not in her repertoire of skills.

His accent was very similar to Ion’s.

Pixie glanced across the room, and saw Dominick watching her, and she felt safer.  She knew, somehow, that Dominick would die before he let anything happen to her.

“What is your real name?” he asked, as they slowly glided across the dance floor. 

“Marie Cahill,” Pixie said
uneasily. This wasn’t starting out well.

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’ve met Marie Cahill.  You are lovely, but you look nothing like her.”

His hand still rested in the small of her back, his other hand holding hers up high as they spun and twirled.

Pixie tensed.

She waited for him to say something, but he just kept moving, graceful as a gliding swan, leading her along.

             
She stared at him, and he smiled and stopped dancing.

“
Why haven’t you called your bodyguards, then?” she asked.

He ignored her question.  “I assume that means my brother killed Marie and her husband.  A pity, they were a lovely couple.”  He didn’t sound
particularly distressed.  He sounded as if he was talking about having to cancel dinner plans, or some other event that ranked on the “mildly disappointing” scale.

Pixie felt queasy.  These
men who played with life and death, who played with people as if they were puppets, sickened her to her very core.  “Who the hell are you people? And what is the matter with you?” she hissed

“Something that can’t be fixed, I’m afraid.   I’d much rather talk about you.  Tell me about your life.  Are you happy?”

“Everything’s just peachy,” Pixie said coldly. 
“Couldn’t be better.”

“
I’m glad to hear it.  That lion shifter back there.  He’s your fated mate, I see.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Of course he is.  I can see things, my dear, things that other people can’t see.   I know he’ll treat you well.  You’ll have beautiful children.  You’ll have a long and happy life.”

For the first time, she heard real emotion in his voice, a strange yearning wistfulness
.

“He isn’t,” she insisted. “He already met his fated mate, and she cheated on him.  He swore never to be with another woman again.”

“Nonsense. That doesn’t happen with fated mates,” the man said. “There was some dark sorcery there.  Believe me, I am an expert in such things.”

Pixie stared at him.  None of this was going as planned, and nothing that he was saying made sense.

But then, he let go of her hand and reached around his neck, fishing under his collar.  He pulled off a golden chain with an enormous red ruby attached to it, and dropped it into her hand.

“I assume that my brot
her sent you here to steal the Bloodstone,” he said.  “And here it is.  Did he tell you why you were the only one who could take it from me?”

“No,” Pixie said, startled.  She stared at the prize in her hand. Could it truly be this easy?

“Of course he didn’t,” Craig said, and then the room went dark.

             
There were shouts of dismay, and calls for calm.  People pulled out their cell phones to use them as mini flash-lights.  The fire-eaters’ torches gave off an eerie red glow.

Pixie ducked and ran
, the ruby clenched in her hand.

She
tripped over someone, scrambled to her feet, made it to the door, and Dominick grabbed her arm.  Shifters had excellent night vision, even when they were in human form.

With Dominick guiding her, t
hey pushed their way down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back, with no problem.

It had all gone much too smoothly.
It made Pixie nervous when things went this smoothly.   “Craig just gave me the necklace,” she told Dominick.  “I swear I felt like he knew I’d be here. How?”

There were dozens of p
eople pouring out the back door, and they were swept up in the tide of humanity.  Half a dozen catering vans sat at the back door.  Nobody was paying attention to them.

The catering van was waiting exactly
where Ion had said it would be, in a large  paved lot directly outside the kitchen door.  None of Craig’s men seemed to have followed her.  Then again, why would they? He’d handed the necklace to her.

The
back door to the back of the van swung open as they approached.  Ion was in there, with half a dozen armed men.   Still wearing those glasses; how could he see in the dark with those things? Pixie wondered. 

He
gestured at them impatiently. 

“Get in!” he snarled.

Pixie and Dominick stopped, a dozen feet from the back of the van.  “Give us the antidote, and I’ll give you this,” she said, holding up the jewel in her hand.
  “Throw it to me.”

Ion
’s face contorted, and he lunged forward, reaching out with a claw-like hand. “Give it to me! Give it to me now!”

Before Pixie could say anything else,
they were surrounded by more bodyguards who slipped from the shadows, pointing guns at them.  Ion wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

Party goers, spotting the guns, screamed and scattered.

              The guards jabbed at Pixie and Dominick with their semi-automatics, and hustled them into the back of the van.

             
The van shot out of the parking lot, screeching onto the road.  He lunged at Pixie and grabbed the jewel from her hand.

             
The second he had it in his hand, his face flushed dark red with rage.

             
“You think this is funny?” he demanded.

             
“What are you talking about? That’s the jewel you wanted,” Pixie protested. 

             
“It’s a fake! Your friends are going to burn and die!” he raged.

             
As he spoke, the jewel cracked open, and a scroll of paper rolled out.  He read it quickly, then threw the fake jewel to the ground, screaming and swearing.

             
“I’ll kill you!” he raged at Pixie.  “You’ll die like your mother did, you bitch! You’ll die screaming!”

             
Pixie’s mother had gone into a coma when her liver failed, and died in a hospital bed.  What was he talking about?

             
Dominick let out a warning grown, and fur rippled on his face. “Touch her, and you die,” he snarled, moving in front of Ion.

             
Before Ion could do anything, Pixie heard the sound of screeching tires and honking horns coming from all around them outside the van, and then they slowed to a halt.

             
“What are you doing?” Ion bellowed.  His face was purple with rage.  His sunglasses had fallen off, and his face was contorted with fury.  He barely looked human.  “Don’t stop, you fools! I’ll kill you!”

             
“Sir, we’re boxed in!” one of the men yelled from the front.

             
Pixie could hear men running towards the van, and then a pounding on the van’s rear door, and then the sound of metal tearing.   The rear door was yanked open.   Dominick chose that moment to shift, and as Ion’s men pointed their guns at the group of armed men who had pulled the door open, he pounced.

             
There was screaming, and the spray of hot blood, and then Pixie and Dominick fell out of the van onto the ground.  They were about twenty blocks away from the mansion now, in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Playa Linda.

             
Pixie landed on top of Dominick, in his massive lion form.  He still had his jaws clamped on the head of one of the guards, who was gurgling his last breath.

             
Ion had scrambled towards the front of the van.  His bodyguards moved in front of him.  The door to the van was pulled shut.   Sirens were wailing, and the cars which had boxed in the van took off, scattering in traffic.  The catering van took off too.

             
Dominick shifted back into human form and stood there naked, wiping blood from his face.  The guard lay silent at his feet, in a spreading pool of blood, and the air smelled like copper.  Pixie struggled not to retch.

             
“Are you all right?” he asked Pixie.

             
“I’m fine. We don’t have the antidote, though. Damn it to hell. What are we going to do? They don’t have much time left!”  As she spoke, Pixie took off the blue wrap she had slung around her shoulders and handed it to Dominick, who wrapped it around his waist like a sarong.

             
“Your friend Anastasia might come through for us.  By the way, I recognized some of those guys who saved us,” Dominick said.  “They were the security who worked for Craig.  He sent his guards after us, to save us. Why?”

“
I don’t know, but I do know why he stole that jewel from his brother,” Pixie said.  “Apparently all this is a shakedown over money.  I palmed the note and read it really quick when he wasn’t looking.  The note told Ion that in exchange for the ruby, he wants a hundred million dollars and the deeds to all of their property.  He told Ion he wants to meet with him tomorrow, but he didn’t say where.  He said he’d be in touch. I guess he likes to play the same games as his brother.”

A car pulled up next to them
, and Fraser stuck his head out of the window.  He had three of his goons with him.

             
“Get in!” he yelled.

             
Pixie and Dominick quickly scrambled into the back seat.

             
“Nice loincloth, lover boy,” Fraser said. “And Pixie, you clean up real nice.”

             
“Don’t push your luck,” Dominick snapped.   “How did you find us?”

             
“Oh, that was me,” Pixie said.  “What I was going to tell you, right before Craig asked me to dance, was that when I went to the restroom, I stole someone’s cell phone.  I called Tyler and gave him our location and told him Ion’s plans, and put the phone back before she even noticed it was gone.”

             
“You returned it? Pixie, are you a reformed thief?” Dominick asked in mock astonishment.

             
Pixie punched his arm. “Reformed? You take that back, you bastard.”

             
“I’ve got some good news, in case anyone cares, “ Fraser said.  “Anastasia’s waiting for us back at the warehouse.   She says that they caught the guy who created the virus.  That means they’ll be able to make the antidote.”

             
“Oh, thank God,”  Pixie said fervently.  “Because Ion screwed us over and didn’t give us the antidote, if he ever even planned to.  That bastard.”

             
Then she flopped back in her seat.  “We still have a ton of questions.  What did he mean when he said my mother died screaming? She died in a coma, and how would he even know anything about my mother?  And why does he want that particular ruby so badly?”

Anastasia
, Hillary and Tyler were waiting for them at the warehouse when they pulled up almost an hour later.   Empty pizza boxes and soda bottles had been tossed into an upended empty wooden crate.   Tyler, as usual, was hunched over his laptop, and he was still wearing the same clothes he’d arrived in a day and a half ago.   Hillary was sitting on a couch, with a towel spread out underneath her so she didn’t actually have to touch the furniture.  She was wearing a new outfit, a lilac linen trouser suit; she must have gone home at some point.

Anastasia was reading a book.  She glanced up when they came in, and she
didn’t look like someone who had good news to deliver.

“Everything went to hell,” Dominick told Tyler.

“We heard,” Tyler said. “Fraser kept us updated.”

“So please tell us that you have good news,” Pixie added.
“Do we know how to make the antidote? Ion escaped without giving it to us, assuming that he ever really planned to, and he’s furious because he’s been double crossed by the person we were supposed to steal the jewel from. ”

“
Authorities in France have found the man who created the plague, a wizard who actually calls himself Plague,” Tyler said. “His real name was Elmer Witherspoon.  Go figure.  Anyway, he used to work as a laboratory assistant, and apparently he stole plague samples that were being stored at the facility where he worked, and started peddling magic-enhanced versions on the black market.  Through him, we found out who Ion Barbu and Craig Biltmore really are.   The antidote…that’s where we’re running into a problem.”