Second Nature (26 page)

"I didn't think so," her mother said and coughed. "They never were this bad before. Maybe it isn't the cats." She sneezed again and dug for some antihistamines in her purse.

"Why don't you take your mother for a walk and show her around the neighborhood while I clean up the kitchen?" Griffin suggested. "That will give the medication time to kick in away from the house and its feline inhabitants."

Jorie pictured the mess in her kitchen. The thought of leaving Griffin alone in her house was also a little unsettling. She scolded herself for her distrust — after all, Griffin had gone to great lengths to help her out — but still she couldn't help it. "I can't ask you to do that."

"You're not asking; I'm offering." Griffin turned to Helen. "Mrs. Price, would you please exercise your authority over your stubborn daughter and get her out of here?"

Helen laughed, then sneezed again. "What authority? That child always had a mind of her own. And please, call me Helen."

The easy interaction between the two of them was a surprise — maybe because it never came easy to Jorie.
Didn't she say she's not good with mothers? I better get out of here before Mom starts telling tales of my childhood.
"All right," she said. "If you really don't mind." At least this would convince her mother that she had considerate friends and felt comfortable enough with them to leave them alone in her home, even if she wasn't.

"I don't mind, and the pastries will keep until later," Griffin said.

"Thank you." Jorie gave her a nod. Saying "thank you" was getting easier.

*  *  *

"This was a good idea," Helen said when they reached the forest at the edge of town. "Now that we're away from the house, my allergy is getting better. Really strange."

Jorie wasn't so sure that it had been a good idea. It wasn't just the nervous tingling in her stomach at leaving Griffin alone in her home. Now that they were alone, she hardly knew what to say to her mother to keep the conversation going. She realized that Griffin had provided most of the conversation and had kept her mother entertained during dinner.
Griffin just barged in and took over.
It had overwhelmed Jorie, but she also knew she should be grateful. At least her mother was having a good time and had stopped worrying about her for the moment.

Isn't that what you wanted?
It was, but she didn't want that new aspect of her relationship with her mother based on a lie. There were already too many of them in her life. "Mom," she said, "it wasn't me who made that excellent dinner. Well, I made the spaghetti, but Griffin did everything else. She even brought the pastries."

"I know," her mother said.

Jorie stopped walking and stared at her. "You knew?"

Chuckling, Helen slipped her arm through Jorie's to get her moving again. "You could never cook to save your life, and it would take a minor miracle to change that."

Her mother didn't seem upset, but Jorie still felt as if she had disappointed her again. "I'm sorry," she murmured.

A soft squeeze to her arm made her look up into her mother's smiling face. "I don't mind. You might be a terrible cook, but at least you have wonderful taste in friends."

That only served to make Jorie feel worse. Was Griffin really her friend? She had certainly acted like it all night, and by now, Jorie knew her body language well enough to realize that it wasn't all an act. Griffin could become her friend — if she let her.

"How did the two of you meet?" Helen asked.

"Griffin is a zoologist," Jorie said. She knew her mother had once hoped she would get a degree too. Maybe now she could at least impress her by presenting a friend with a PhD. "She helped me with research for one of my books."

"How long ago was that?" With unerring precision, Helen found the one question that Jorie had tried to avoid.

She couldn't very well tell her mother that she and Griffin had only just met. Despite the good job Griffin had done at pretending to be familiar with Jorie and her life, Helen would instantly know that their friendship was just a trick to make her stop worrying. "It seems like an eternity," Jorie answered. It did. A lot had happened in the week she had known Griffin.

"I'm so glad," Helen said and squeezed her arm. "You were never one to make friends easily, and when you did, they usually didn't stay around for very long. What's different about Griffin?"

Jesus, Mom! Stop asking questions I don't have an answer for.
Jorie hated lying to her mother, so she forced herself to think about it and gave an answer that was at least partially true. "She really makes an effort to get to know me. She listens; she doesn't judge, and she has yet to run away because of my lack of social or cooking skills." As she said it, Jorie realized that it was all true. No matter what she did and how slow to trust she was, Griffin didn't let it deter her from wanting further contact.

"I'm not judging or running away either. I hope you know that." Helen's intense blue eyes looked deeply into Jorie's. "And there are a lot of other people, potential friends, out there who won't judge or run either. You just have to give them a chance."

Jorie struggled not to get defensive. Her mother meant well and didn't even realize that she was criticizing the way Jorie lived her life, putting her own standards and expectations on Jorie.

"Griffin is a really good start," Helen said when Jorie stayed silent. "Come on. We should get back to the house. If you tried to cook dinner, you probably left Griffin with one hell of a mess in your kitchen."

*  *  *

As soon as the front door closed behind Jorie and her mother, Griffin hurried to the bedroom.

Will lay curled up on Jorie's bed. He lifted his head when the door opened but settled back down after catching Griffin's by now familiar scent.

Griffin sat on the edge of the bed. She took a moment to run gentle fingers through the fur on his neck, making him purr. Then she directed her gaze to the worn notebook on the bedside table.

Finally.

One hand still stroking Will, she reached out and carefully opened the notebook.

What's this? Egyptian hieroglyphs? Did she encode this in a secret language?
She squinted her eyes and put on her reading glasses, but it was still hard to decipher what was written in the notebook. Most were hastily scribbled notes with many abbreviations used. A lot of them were crooked, not following the lines in the notebook, and some words were even partially written over others.

She writes in the notebook when she wakes up in the middle of the night,
Griffin realized,
sometimes maybe even without turning on the light. Maybe these are sudden ideas that came to her just before she fell asleep or right after she woke.
The crooked handwriting and the notebook's position right next to the bed made it likely.

Griffin tried to make sense of the words, but they were snippets of dialogue, fragments of sentences, and words without context. Deciphering it was taking too long. Jorie and her mother would return soon, and she needed to clean the kitchen.

With one last scratch behind Will's ears, she closed the notebook. She played with the idea of stealing it but then decided against it. Jorie would notice it was gone, and at this point, Jorie's trust was more important than getting her hands on the notebook.

It didn't hold the big revelation that she had expected anyway. At first glance, it seemed the notes in the little book were just a few spontaneous ideas, not the carefully prepared questions and answers of an inside source.

With every day that went by, Griffin's doubts grew. If Jorie had a Wrasa informant, why hadn't she written down any of the information he gave her as she had done during her meetings with Griffin? Both her instincts and her rational mind pointed in the same direction: there was no traitor. But then, how did Jorie know so much about the Wrasa? Coincidence?

The maharsi of the past had firmly believed that there was no such thing. Everything happened for a reason.

Griffin had just stacked the last of the plates in the dishwasher and put away the now clean pots when she heard the front door being opened.

"You didn't have to clean the whole kitchen all by yourself," Jorie said when she reached the doorway and took in the once again spotless kitchen. The scent of relief and gratefulness mixed with the fragrance of annoyance at the intrusion.

"I didn't mind." Her cat side wouldn't have been able to stand seeing the mess in the kitchen without doing anything about it for long. "I put the pots where it seemed most logical to me, but if you can't find something, call me."

Helen Price stepped next to her daughter. The red blotches on her cheeks were gone, and she had stopped wheezing and sneezing. Griffin hoped the antihistamine would continue to do its job. Some allergic people reacted strongly to the presence of cat-shifters. Wrasa sweat contained a protein that was very similar to the protein in cats' saliva, so just shaking a Wrasa's hand could cause allergic reactions or asthma attacks in allergic humans. It was just her luck that Jorie's mother was one of them.

"Thank you for cleaning up and for the wonderful dinner," Helen said warmly.

She knows?
Griffin looked at Helen, then at Jorie, not sure what to say.
Jorie's mother is a clever woman. I need to be careful around her.

"It's okay." Helen smiled. "I've known for a long time that my daughter's cooking skills are limited to making sandwiches. You, on the other hand, did some serious magic, assuming you stepped in for some last-minute rescuing and had to work with the meager contents of Jorie's fridge and cupboards."

"Oh, no, that wasn't magic. No supernatural abilities in my family, I'm afraid," Griffin said, returning the smile. It was the truth. Shape-shifting was quite natural for her kind and had nothing to do with magic. "I leave the magical abilities for Jorie to describe in her stories."

"How about some pastries?" Jorie asked, sounding uncomfortable with the subject.

So it wasn't just me. She's uncomfortable talking about her writing with her mother too.
"Not for me, thanks," she said. "I think I better get going. It's getting late, and I'm sure you have a long list of things you want to do tomorrow, now that your mother is visiting." And she had to give her report to an impatient tas.

A tiny wrinkle between Jorie's brows told Griffin that Jorie didn't look forward to having to entertain her mother for the next few days, without having time for herself or her writing. Griffin could relate. Constant socializing with no time to wander off alone and shift was one of the most irritating things while on a mission. "Something wrong?" she asked, lowering her voice, as Jorie accompanied her to the door.

"No," Jorie said. "Everything's fine."

Her scent told Griffin otherwise.

Griffin continued to look at her.

"It's just that... with my mother here, I won't have the time to write even a single word the whole weekend." Jorie sighed.

This was Griffin's chance to immerse herself more fully into Jorie's life. If there really was no inside source, she had to find out more about Jorie and the story itself. "I could take your mother out to have breakfast tomorrow," she said. "That should give you at least an hour to write."

"Two if you eat like you did last time," Jorie said with a smirk.

"Probably." Griffin chuckled. She couldn't help liking Jorie's snarky sense of humor. "So, what do you say?"

Jorie hesitated. "I'm not sure if it's a good idea to just unload my mother on you. She's here to see me after all, and it wouldn't be fair to send her off just so that I can work on my story." She glanced to the living room, every inch the guilty-looking daughter.

Soft footsteps announced that Helen was about to step out of the living room. Griffin used the early warning of her sensitive ears to take the decision out of Jorie's hands. "Why don't we just ask her?" she suggested.

"Ask me what?" Helen wanted to know.

"Nothing," Jorie said quickly.

Helen's penetrating gaze wandered over to Griffin.

And here I thought only Wrasa mothers had perfected that kind of gaze.
Griffin suppressed a chuckle and gave Jorie a faux regretful shrug. "I was wondering if you'd like to have breakfast with me tomorrow."

"Oh, yes, we'd love to have breakfast with you." Even beneath the perfume Helen wore, Griffin smelled that her enthusiasm was real. "Wouldn't we, Jorie?"

Another awkward pause from Jorie. "Not we, Mom. Just you."

"That way, Jorie can have a few hours for her writing, and I get to eat my breakfast without Jorie counting how many pancakes I have," Griffin said, putting all her feline charm into her smile.

"All right," Helen said without hesitation.

"Only if you really don't mind, Mom," Jorie said. Her scent indicated that she felt guilty and torn between wanting her mother to stay with her and wanting to get her out of the house so that she could write. "I don't want you to think I don't care that you're here to visit me or that I don't want to spend time with you. It's just that I'm working on a book in a new genre, and if I want to publish it next year, I need to write every day."

"Calm down, Jorie. It's fine," Helen said.

If only my fathers reacted like that. When I visited them, they expected me to spend every damn minute with them and the whole pride.
Griffin had resented it. Like Jorie, she needed time just for herself.
Helen is a lot more tolerant and understanding than Jorie gives her credit for.

"But I have two conditions," Helen said. Her blue eyes twinkled.

Griffin cocked her head and waited.

"I pay for breakfast, and I get to grill you about how Jorie is doing out here in the wilderness," Helen bargained.

Jorie groaned. "This was a bad idea. I think I should show you around town tomorrow."

"Oh, no. We can do that later. Tomorrow morning, your friend and I are going to have pancakes," Helen said. She gave Griffin a conspiratorial smile.

Let her think that she's going to interrogate me while in truth, I'll be the one who is going to grill Mom without the ever-observant Jorie watching my every move. And earning a few brownie points with Jorie for babysitting her mother will be a nice side effect.
Helen was so much more open, so much less cautious than Jorie. "Don't worry," she said, winking at Jorie. "I won't give away all of your secrets."
Because I don't know them,
she added silently.
Yet.