“I’ll never understand what you see in that man,” Ghastek said.
“He loves me,” I told him, and escaped.
CHAPTER 10
I PARKED MYSELF in front of the Shiva fountain. When Curran ran, he took on an odd shape, neither a lion nor a human but a strange beast: compact, powerful, built for speed. Most shapeshifters had two shapes, animal and human. Those with talent could hold a warrior form. I had never met anyone who could turn part of his body into one shape while keeping the rest in another. Except for Curran. He restructured his body for whatever purpose he saw fit.
A sticky warm puddle formed on my shoulder. Conlan drooled in his sleep.
Car horns blared. A man leaped over the vehicles that were stopped at a traffic light. He sailed over them like they were nothing, landed, and kept running, long legs pumping. That couldn’t be . . . Yep, my honey-bunny running in human form.
I waited. He saw me. He didn’t slow down; he just adjusted course.
A hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty. Damn, he was fast. He shouldn’t be that fast, not after running for several miles.
Sweat slicked his hairline, darkening his blond hair. His longer blond hair. His hair was at least two inches longer than it had been this morning. Maybe more.
What the hell? The only time his hair grew into a mane was during a flare. We weren’t due for one for another two years.
Twenty-five yards.
It’s hard to look sexy with a drooling child on your shoulder, but I did my best. “Come here often?”
He slowed. For a moment I thought he’d stop, but he moved forward in a slow, sure way, not walking, but stalking, foot over foot. His hair was definitely longer. It framed his hard, handsome face. Gray eyes looked me over, checking for wounds. Our stares connected. A lion looked back at me and my heart sped up. Suddenly I was aware of every inch of distance between us.
He closed that distance, moving with a dangerous, borderline-feral edge. He looked like my husband, was my husband, but there was something alarming in the way he held himself. I turned to keep him in view.
He pounced. It was lightning quick, and if I’d wanted to get away, I wasn’t sure I could’ve matched his speed. I didn’t want to get away. His arms closed around me and he kissed me. The kiss scorched me, so intense it was almost a bite. I gasped into his mouth.
“Okay?” he asked me.
I had been until he kissed me. “Yes.”
“Conlan?”
“Fine. Just tired.”
He squeezed me to him. “What happened?”
“Had a run-in with a sahanu at Biohazard. You’re crushing me.”
He let me go.
“That’s twice in two days. We have to stop meeting like this,” I told him.
“Are you planning on continuing to run into fights?”
“I didn’t run into her. She hunted me down.”
Two Toyota Land Cruisers emerged from traffic and roared their way to the parking lot. Each of those carried eight people. Great. First, he dramatically ran over, then he kissed me like the world was ending in public, and now he’d brought a crew of mercs with him, enough for a small siege. All the navigators piloting vampires on the walls of the Casino had to be loving the show.
“You brought two meat wagons with you? Did you expect to fight an army?”
“They followed me.” He grinned at me, baring his teeth. “What happened to the sahanu?”
“She’s dead. I’m not. The People patched me up. I need to talk to you. And Barabas.”
“Good, because I’m not letting you go anywhere without me.” Gently, he took Conlan off my shoulder.
“Letting?”
“You heard me.”
The doors of the nearest meat wagon opened, and people waved at us.
“Where did you park?” he asked me.
I pointed at our Jeep on the left.
“I’ll get the car,” he said, and took off with Conlan.
Okay.
I trotted to the closest meat wagon. Faces looked at me, some dirty, some blood-spattered. Douglas, Ella, Rodrigo . . . Curran’s elite team. The roar of the enchanted water engine was deafening, so I had to scream.
“What the hell are you all doing here?!”
“We followed him!” Ella yelled.
“So, what, you just pile into cars whenever he gets a thorn up his ass and chase him around the city?”
“We were on the job,” Ramirez told me in his bass voice. “We were finishing up the gig when he said his wife was in trouble and took off.”
“We chased him all the way from Panthersville,” Ella added.
Curiouser and curiouser.
“Thanks for coming!” I told them.
“Where is the fight?” Douglas demanded.
“I already killed everybody,” I said. “You gotta be faster next time.”
They jeered at me, and I jogged to the Jeep. Five minutes later we rolled out of the parking lot.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Just had a feeling,” he said.
“That’s it? A feeling?”
He nodded.
Odd.
Maybe it was me. Maybe I’d subconsciously called him while fighting. I’d have to ask Erra if that was possible.
“What’s happening with your hair?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It keeps growing.”
“Are we about to have another flare?”
“I don’t know. How bad was the fight?”
“It wasn’t bad.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” he said quietly. “You went to the Casino.”
“I got scared. She said she would kill our son and eat him. I bashed her face in. It was overkill.”
He reached over and squeezed my hand.
“Curran, he can’t cloak. Ever since he turned, he’s been shining like a star. And I was so used to having him with me, it didn’t even occur to me that he can be tracked. That’s how she found us. I put our kid in danger.”
“It’s okay.” He squeezed my hand again. “You protected him. You will always protect him. You’re his mother. They would have to kill both of us to get to him. Think about it.”
They would have to go through the two of us. Many had tried before, and all of them had failed. Even my father.
“We’ve got this,” he said. “We’ll kill them all.”
Our son snored in his car seat without a care in the world. As he should.
Curran was right. We would kill them all.
ONCE UPON A time the Guild was housed in an upscale hotel on the edge of Buckhead. Tall buildings didn’t weather magic well, and the hotel proved no exception. Its shiny tower had broken off and toppled, leaving a five-story stub. The Guild put a makeshift roof on it, cleaned it up a bit, and called it a day.
A couple of years ago, as the Guild teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, a giant had made some exciting modifications to the roof with his fists, which forced a remodel. About that time Curran and Barabas joined the Guild and eventually took it over. Barabas ran the admin side, Curran served as the Guild Master, and a year and a half ago, the mercs unanimously voted me in as a Steward, which meant whenever the mercs had problems or grievances with either of them, they ran to me and I fixed it. I’d needed the added responsibility like I needed a hole in the head. In fact, I wasn’t even at the meeting, because I’d gotten held up getting a boggart out of a local middle school. The mercs conveniently voted in my absence and then presented me with the Steward’s scroll when I showed up, dripping slime and picking trash out of my hair.
Bob, of the Four Horsemen, had held the unofficial position of Steward before me and apparently put himself in the running, but after he tried to raid the pension fund, his street cred took a beating. He never did warm up to either my or Curran’s presence. His Furriness, never one to waste resources, sent him down to Jacksonville to run the brand-new satellite Guild. Within three months Bob tried to stage a coup and declare independence, and the Jacksonville Guild expelled him. We had no idea where he was or what he was doing.