Not that everyone who visited the place was a supernatural, but the humans who tended to return were the sort who didn’t mind the rumors that Dixie John dabbled in voodoo. If patrons saw the regulars acting oddly, they shrugged it off and went on about their business.
They probably didn’t imagine that the pretty redhead taking orders turned into a coyote sometimes, or that the bartender wasn’t just skilled at anticipating their orders—he really could read their minds.
Kat loved Dixie John’s. During the worst months after Andrew had been attacked, John had given her sanctuary within the walls of his restaurant. At Mahalia’s, she always felt compelled to paste on a smile and pretend she felt healthy and happy, or the staff would tell their boss—and their boss’s husband. Derek had enough to worry about without reports that she was moping about, even if she was.
John never tattled. Kat had written her thesis in a cozy corner booth, sustained by coffee, music and some of the best damn cooking in the state. John had even given Sera a job, one where she made decent enough money to feel independent as she struggled to find her place. There was something soothing about the big man’s steady presence, an odd mixture of determination and utter belief in fate.
It had done wonders for Sera, that was for sure. Kat pushed through the front door and found her roommate bent over a table, making faces at a toddler whose shrieks of laughter hit Kat a moment before the wave of youthful glee.
The few minutes it took to settle her psychic barriers firmly in place gave Sera time to cross the room.
Even in jeans and a T-shirt, Sera attracted the gazes of most of the men she passed. Her curvy, pin-up girl looks made Kat feel like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, an insecurity not soothed when Sera nodded to the back booth. “Anna’s waiting for you. I’ve got to get a couple orders in before I take my break.”
Time alone with Anna. Fabulous. Kat managed a smile. “Okay.”
Sera sighed, clearly exasperated by the lukewarm response. “Be nice, Kat. Be nice, and I’ll bring you coffee, okay?”
“I’m nice.” But the admonition reminded her of a blurry moment in a motel in Alabama. Andrew, holding her foot and whispering that he’d never be nice about Miguel.
As she started toward the booth, Kat forced herself to admit that it was hard to be nice about Anna.
Blonde, petite, practically a damn bounty hunter—Anna was everything Kat wasn’t. Including a shapeshifter, one who’d been able to handle Andrew’s strength in the first months after his transformation.
With a shapeshifter’s instincts, she’d understood him, probably in ways Kat never would.
Every time she looked at Anna, all Kat could see were the ways she hadn’t been enough.
Even now. Anna was halfway through one of John’s omelets, and she waved at Kat as she lifted her coffee cup. “This place is insane. Did you know John mixes his own andouille?”
“Is that the sausage?” Kat slid into the opposite side of the booth and dropped her bag onto the seat next to her. “He’s a great cook.” See, she could be nice. She was the damn queen of polite, meaningless chitchat about breakfast foods.
“Yeah, the sausage stuff.” Anna eyed her and shook her head. “Did you tell Andrew you didn’t want me anywhere near you or your roommate?”
Kat froze, one hand suspended over the table in the act for reaching for a glass of water. “I—what?”
“Come on, Kat. I’m not a rocket scientist or an empath, but I know when people wish they didn’t have to be looking at me.”
There it was, blunt and so unrepentant that it took a few moments for Kat to realize that the emotion churning through her was relief. The truth had been festering, an ugly emotion that shamed her so deeply she’d never given it voice. She was Kat—nice, sweet Kat, and she wasn’t allowed to be petty and jealous.
Kat dropped her hand to rest on the table. “It’s hard sometimes,” she admitted, and the truth felt like dropping a heavy bag full of schoolbooks at the end of a long walk home. Light and freeing, even if her words carried the ghost of pain. “He ditched me and picked you. Not your fault, but it didn’t make it easier. Especially since you’re not that easy to hate.”
“You’d be surprised how many people manage it,” Anna told her. “But you’re wrong about one thing.”
According to Andrew, she’d been wrong about everything. “What’s that?”
“He never ditched you.”
“Yeah, he tried that line too. He disappeared from my life and never talked to me. That’s my definition of ditched.” Kat gripped the edge of the table and met Anna’s gaze squarely. “If this is some shapeshifter thing I’m not getting, I wish you’d tell me. Because no one else will.”
The blonde laid down her fork. “It’s not human emotion, for starters. It’s not that sentimental. It’s visceral. Andrew damn near ripped out his own heart to protect you, but not because he had some macho, noble idea that it was better for you. In our world, if you don’t know how to take care of someone, you have to walk. Make room for someone else, someone who can.”
Well that was…typically egocentric shapeshifter bullshit. “Because obviously that’s your choice to make, right? I mean, what say could we have in it?”
Anna snorted. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question, because you should know the answer by now.”
This time, she said it out loud. “Well, it’s bullshit. You can’t trade the rest of us around like baseball cards. And if it’s such a universal truth, why the hell has Alec been giving Andrew such a shit time over it?”
“He’s an alpha shifter,” Anna reminded her. “We’re hypocritical assholes.”
Apparently. Kat laid both hands on the table. “So let me get this straight. If Andrew sticks around and I get hurt, it’s his fault. If he sticks around and hurts me, it’s his fault. If he leaves and I’m sad…it’s his fault. If he leaves and someone else hurts me…” She trailed off and tried to come up with a polite way to ask a question that didn’t feel polite at all. “Could you all be any more self-centered or condescending?”
“Nope.”
Yelling about it was less fun when Anna agreed with her. Slightly perturbed, Kat sat back. “I don’t know how shapeshifters survive, if almost all of you are like this. How do you stand each other long enough to have babies?”
“You think we’re all like this?” Anna tossed her head back with a laugh. “Sweetie, if that were true, we’d definitely all have killed each other by now. I’m only talking alpha shifters, and it just so happens that New Orleans is lousy with us. Lucky you.”
As many times as she’d noticed that all of the shifters in her life—save Sera—seemed obnoxiously dominant, she’d never stopped to consider why, or if that was unusual. “Why is New Orleans different? I mean, I know Alec’s made it into the safe place, but if shit is so bad everywhere else, wouldn’t the submissives want to live here?”
“You think all the subs run away from home like Nicky Peyton?” Anna shook her head as she drew one leg up to rest on the vinyl seat. “Hell no. Even if they want to, they stay put. Right where their more dominant relatives or spouses want them to be. Usually,” she added with a nod toward Sera.
Kat glanced around to where Sera was leaning over the bar. She said something Kat couldn’t hear, and the man on the other side burst out laughing.
Sera had run away from home at seventeen. Walked off her high school campus one day and climbed into a car with Josh. They were across state lines before anyone realized she was gone. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t tried to talk her friends and family around. Not that Franklin would have been talked around, and Sera would have had to obey.