Curran pushed away from the wall and put his monster arms around her gently. “It will be okay,” he said quietly. “Kate will find him.”
I didn’t know if I should be happy he had complete confidence in me or mad because he was making a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. I decided on happy, because I could see a mine buried in our path and I had to tell them about it.
George cried soundlessly, worry and anger leaking out from her eyes. She had watched my back during the trip to the Black Sea. She’d fought for the Pack and she’d sacrificed her arm to save a pregnant woman from being murdered. She was the one who was always upbeat, always confident and comfortable in her own skin. She laughed easily and she said what she thought, because she had no trouble defending her opinion. And now she was crying and frantic, and it made me angry, as if something had gone really wrong with the world. Life was unfair, but this was pushing it. I had to fix this.
George stepped away from Curran and rubbed her face with her hand, trying to erase the tears.
“We have a problem,” I said. “Once we start pulling on this string, the other end might lead back to Clan Heavy. Even if George officially hires us and Cutting Edge to look for Eduardo, Jim can still block it. It’s in our contract. When the Pack authorized seed money for Cutting Edge, they put in a clause that in the event a member of the Pack is implicated in any crime, the investigation has to be cleared by the Beast Lord. Jim has the power of veto.”
“Who put that in?” George growled.
I nodded at Curran. “He did.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said.
“So how do we get around this?” I asked.
Curran looked at George. “I am going to ask you a question and I need you to think about it very carefully before you answer. Have you ever heard Eduardo Ortego express an intention to leave the Pack as part of my separation staff?”
Nice. If Eduardo left the Pack with Curran, then Curran would have both the authority and the duty to protect him.
George drew herself to her full height. “Yes.”
I had a feeling she had just lied.
“I also intend to leave the Pack with you,” she said.
Oh boy.
“Think it over,” Curran said. “This means you’ll be severing ties with your clan. Your parents won’t be thrilled either. If it turns out that your father had nothing to do with Eduardo’s disappearance, you might regret it.”
“Give me the contract,” George said.
Curran didn’t move.
“Curran, give me the paper.”
He walked over to the shelf, took a binder from the top, and opened it to a blank separation contract. “Once you sign it, you have to completely separate yourself from the Pack within thirty days.”
George took the pen and signed her name on the line. “That’s not a problem. I can leave tonight.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. “You have to go back.”
“Why?”
“Because we can’t walk into the Keep and start an investigation,” Curran said. “We’re blocked by Pack law. You know this. It’s a trade-off: we don’t attempt to influence people into leaving with us, and Jim can’t interfere if they do. We’re no longer part of the Pack, but you still are.”
“You have to go back, do your job, and listen,” I said. “You’re well liked and respected. Eduardo was well liked, too. You might hear something. If someone from Clan Heavy did make Eduardo disappear, your being there will be a constant reminder of that. The guilt will eat at them and they might feel bad and come clean, or at least point you in the right direction.”
“I can fight,” George growled. “Just because I have one arm . . .”
“I know it doesn’t slow you down,” Curran said. “But I need you inside the Pack. Talk to Patrick. On your worst day you can run circles around him. Compliment him for looking out for you. See what he knows. It might help us find Eduardo.”
She thought about it. “Okay.”
I pulled the writing pad closer to me. “Now, I need you to tell me about Eduardo. Where he lives, what his family is like, what he likes to do. Tell me everything.”
Thirty minutes later we were done.
“I should go home,” George said.
“We have more than enough bedrooms,” I said. “Why don’t you spend the night?”
She shook her head. “No, I want to be home in case he calls. You will find him, Kate?”
George was looking at me with a familiar anxious hope in her eyes. I had seen it before in the faces of people driven to their breaking point. Sometimes you love someone so much that when something bad happens to them, you’ll do anything to keep them safe. If I promised to make Eduardo magically appear if George stabbed herself in the heart, she would do it. She was drowning and she was begging me for some straw to grasp.
I opened my mouth to lie and couldn’t. The last time I promised to find someone, I found her chewed-up corpse. That was how Julie came to live with me. “I promise you that we will do everything we can. We’ll keep looking and we won’t stop until we find something or you ask us to walk away.”
The relief was plain in her eyes. She hadn’t heard a thing I said except “we’ll find something.” “Thank you.”
George left. I headed upstairs while Curran lingered downstairs to check the doors. It was our nightly ritual. He checked the doors downstairs and I checked the windows on the second floor, while Julie checked the third. I climbed to the second floor and stopped. Julie sat on the landing, wrapped in her blanket. She was holding a stuffed owl.
I remembered the look on Julie’s face when she told me she’d seen the torn-up body of her mother. It was seared into my memory. After Julie’s father died, her mother drank too much and didn’t pay as much attention to Julie’s existence as she used to, but she loved her daughter deeply and Julie loved her back with the single-minded devotion of a child. A piece of Julie’s childhood died that day, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never bring it back. I had wished so badly that I could have found Jessica Olsen alive, but she died before I had even started looking.
Julie didn’t talk about it. She never said her mother’s name. One day we were walking down the street past a yard sale and Julie stopped without saying a word. She walked over to the box of toys and pulled out a big stuffed owl toy, just a ball of brown velvet with two dorky white eyes, a yellow triangle of a beak, and two flappy wings. She hugged it and I saw a heartbreaking desperation in her eyes. I bought the owl on the spot and she took it home. Later she told me she used to have one like it when she was a toddler. That owl was a secret treasured memory of being happy and being loved, sheltered and protected by two people who adored her, never suspecting that the world would one day smash it all to pieces. It had been a year since we found it and she still hugged it when she went to sleep.
“I gave her the rest of the apple pie,” Julie said. “I hope you don’t mind. She’s a bear and they like sweets. It made her feel better.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“You’re going to find him, right?”
“I’m going to try.”
“I’ll help you,” Julie said. “Tell me if you need anything.”
“I will.”
She gathered up her owl and her blanket and stood up. “I like Eduardo and George. They’re always nice to me.” She hesitated. “I don’t want her to feel what it’s like.”
My heart tried to flip over in my chest. It hurt. “I know.”
Julie nodded and went to the third floor.
I would find Eduardo. I would find him because he was my friend, because George had suffered enough and deserved a chance to be happy, and because I knew what it was like to have someone you love ripped away from you.
CHAPTER
3
IT WAS MORNING, the tech was up, a
nd I was in our sunlit kitchen, making a small tower of pancakes. Julie’s school didn’t start until nine, because traveling through the dark in post-Shift Atlanta was too dangerous for kids, and we made our own hours. In our line of work, we weren’t guaranteed a lunch and we weren’t always home in time for dinner, so breakfast was our family meal. Shapeshifters had faster metabolisms than normal humans and they consumed a shocking amount of food. Curran was no exception. I had a pound of bacon baking in the oven—cooking it on the stove resulted in burned bacon, a cloud of smoke, and everything around me covered in bacon grease. Two pounds of sausage simmered in another pan, and I was on my tenth pancake.
The sun shone through the windows, drawing long rectangles on the tiled floor, sliding over the light stone of the countertops, and playing on the wood of the cabinets, setting their dark finish aglow with red highlights. The air smelled of cooking bacon. I had opened the window and a gentle breeze floated through the room, too cold but I didn’t care.
After breakfast Julie would go to school and we would go to the Mercenary Guild. It was the best place to start looking for Eduardo. According to George, Eduardo’s family wasn’t in the picture. His parents lived somewhere in Oklahoma, but Eduardo didn’t keep in touch. He had no siblings. He was friendly with everyone, but George was his best friend. He spent all of his time with her.
Julie stomped into the kitchen and landed in a chair, tossing her blond hair out of her face. A long smear of dirt crossed her face. More dirt stained her jeans. When I found her on the street years ago, she was starved, almost waifish. She was fifteen now. Good food and constant training were paying off: her arms showed definition, her shoulders had widened, and she held herself with the kind of ready assurance that came from knowing an attack could come at any moment and being confident you can repel it.
“I want a new horse.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
Curran shouldered his way into the kitchen from the back porch. Blond, broad-shouldered, and muscular, he moved like a predator even in his human form. It didn’t matter if he wore fur, beat-up jeans, and a simple gray sweatshirt like right now, or nothing at all; his body always possessed a coiled, barely contained strength. A month ago he had gone to our first job together in his other shape and the client had locked himself in the car and refused to come out. Curran turned human, but the client still fired us. Apparently human Curran was still too scary, probably because no matter what kind of clothes he wore, they did nothing to tone down his face. When you looked into Curran’s clear gray eyes, you knew that he could explode with violence at a moment’s notice and he would be brutal and efficient about it. Except when he looked at me, like now. He stepped close to me and brushed a kiss on my lips. Mmm.
“That’s nice,” Julie said. “I still want a new horse.”
“Request denied,” Curran told her.
I flipped my pancake. This ought to be interesting.
“What? Why?”
“Because ‘want’ is not a need.” Curran leaned against the kitchen island. “I saw you in the pasture. You don’t want a new horse. You require a new horse. Lay your case out.”
“I hate Brutus,” Julie said.
I glanced through the window at the pasture, where an enormous black Friesian stalked in circles along the fence. Brutus used to belong to Hugh d’Ambray, my father’s Warlord. Killing Hugh was my life’s ambition. I’d tried twice now and each time he had dodged death with magic. That’s okay. The third time would be the charm.
After our last encounter I ended up with Hugh’s Friesian, and Curran, who didn’t care for horses, for some reason decided to keep him when we retired from running the shapeshifter Pack. The stallion was impressive and Julie decided to ride him to school. I told her it was a bad idea, but she insisted.
“Take the emotion out of it,” Curran said. “You will better persuade the other person if you make them understand the reasons behind your request. You have to demonstrate that in your place they would come to the same conclusion. Once they agree with you, saying no to you becomes much harder because they would be arguing with themselves.”
Once a Beast Lord, always a Beast Lord. Old habits died hard, and in his case, they probably never would.
Julie thought about it. “He doesn’t obey any of my commands and he keeps trying to throw me off.”
“You’re not heavy enough,” I said. “Hugh weighs over two hundred pounds, closer to two fifty in full armor. You’re too light. Hugh isn’t gentle with his horses either.”
Julie glared at the Friesian. “He’s stupid.”
“He is. It makes him easier to train for battle.” I poured more pancake batter into the pan.
“And mean. Last time I took him to school, he tried to break through the stall to fight with another horse.”
“He’s a war stallion,” Curran said. “He’s been taught to view every other horse as a challenge.”
Julie’s eyes narrowed. “If I keep getting hurt, it will cause both of you emotional distress and you will have to pay for my medical bills. If I lose control of him, he may injure another horse and you would be financially responsible for the damages. And if another child got hurt, you would feel terrible.”
Curran nodded. “Valid points. Bring it home.”
“I need a normal horse,” Julie said. “One I can ride to school and leave in the school stables without any of us worrying about it. A city horse, who would respond well to commands and wouldn’t throw me and hurt me.”
With the constant dance of magic and technology, horses were the most reliable method of transportation around the city. Julie’s school was four miles out and biking there was out of the question. Magic constantly gnawed on roads, and a lot of them were in disrepair. She’d have to carry her bike a third of the way. Not to mention that the amount of books she had to drag to school made it hard to maintain her balance. I’d lifted her backpack a couple of times and it felt like it was stuffed with rocks. On the other hand, if anyone attacked her and she managed to swing it in time, she’d brain them for sure . . .
“Much better,” Curran said.
“I’ll call Blue Ribbon Stables after breakfast,” I said.
Curran raised his head and leaned to glance at the front door. A moment later I heard a vehicle slide into our driveway.
“Who is it?”
“I’m about to find out.” Curran rose smoothly and went to the door.
I heard the door swing open. A moment later a tiny Indonesian woman with long dark hair and thick glasses swept into the kitchen and dropped into a chair.
“Dali!” Julie smiled.
Dali waved at her. After we retired, Jim Shrapshire, Curran’s best friend, became the Beast Lord. That made Dali the Beast Lady. She now had my job with all the pain and trouble that came with it.
“Consort,” I said. “You honor us.”
“Fuck you,” Dali said. “Fuck your shit. I quit.”
I laughed and reached for a potato. Dali, despite being a weretiger, was a vegetarian. Pancakes alone wouldn’t hold her over. Julie came over, picked up another knife, and started peeling next to me.
Curran came in. “Did you know there is a dent in your front bumper?”
“I know,” Dali said. “I hit some trash cans on the way over here. I was frustrated and needed something to hit.”
The neighbors would just love this. “What happened?”
“I had a fight with Jim.”
“Why?” Curran asked.
“Desandra.”
Figured. Of the seven Pack clans, Clan Wolf was the largest and its new alpha was . . . colorful.
“There is no privacy at the Keep,” Dali said.
You don’t say.
“I thought of going to my old house or to my mother’s house, but Jim would check for me there. So I came here.” Dali stared at me. “I liked my house. Li
ving in the Keep sucks.”
“I know,” I told her.
“Can I stay for breakfast?” she asked.
“Of course.”
I had just pulled the bacon out of the oven and flipped the hash browns when another car pulled up. Curran laughed and went to the door.
“He didn’t.” Dali actually growled. I didn’t realize she could.
Jim walked into the kitchen. Some people had special talents. Some were charming. Others were clearly intelligent. Doolittle, the Pack’s medmage, could put patients at ease just by saying hello. Jim’s special talent was menace. Six feet two inches tall and built like he could punch through solid walls and dodge a bullet at the same time, Jim projected a concentrated promise to kick your ass. It emanated from him like heat from a sidewalk. He never actually threatened you, but when he entered a room full of hard cases, bigger men backed off, because when he looked at them, they heard their bones breaking.
And now I would have to be very careful about our morning conversation. Any mention of Eduardo could set off alarm bells in Jim’s head. The last thing we needed was him shutting down our investigation.
“Hail to the Beast Lord!” I waved my spatula for emphasis.
Jim spared me an ugly look and turned to Dali.
“You followed me!” Dali jumped out of her chair, her face furious.
“I didn’t. I came here to talk to him”—Jim pointed at Curran with his thumb—“about his money. We just happened to be going to the same place.”
“You knew I was here.” She squinted at him. “You have your goons following me, don’t you?”
“They’re not goons. They’re our security people. And yes, I have them following you. We’re in a dangerous position. We just took over the Pack and I don’t want any surprises.”
“You’re a paranoid control freak.”