“Dali! What’s taking so long?”
I broke away from him.
He shook his head, his arms wrapped around me. “No.”
“I have to go.”
“No, you don’t.”
I wiggled and felt him. He was hard and ready for action.
“Jim, let me go. We can’t make out now.”
He nodded. “Yes, we can.”
“My mother is downstairs.”
He didn’t seem impressed.
“It’s that red thing, isn’t it?” I whispered.
“No, actually it was your little tank top and panties as you jumped out of bed this morning. Or specifically what was in them.”
“Dali?” my mother called.
I slumped onto him. “She isn’t going to let it go.”
“Which car are you taking?” he asked.
“Pooki.”
He set me down on the carpet. “I’ll catch up with you.”
Before I could say anything, Jim opened the window and jumped out of it. I sighed, yelled, “Coming, Mom!” and went to get dressed.
POOKI was my Plymouth Prowler. When you’re barely one hundred pounds and other shapeshifters make fun of you behind your back because you’re the only tiger who eats grass in the entire state, you have to do something to prove that you’re not a wimp. My thing was cars. I raced them. Unfortunately being half-blind meant I crashed a lot, but being a shapeshifter meant I walked away from most of it, so the risk balanced itself out. Jim kept forbidding me to race, as the alpha of Clan Cat. I kept disobeying him. Some things just had to be done. When I raced, I felt powerful and strong. I felt awesome. I couldn’t give that up no matter how many times I had mangled my cars.
Normally Pooki occupied a treasured spot in my garage, but a friend asked me to take care of his Corvette. He didn’t live in the best neighborhood and he was paranoid about his baby being stolen while he was out of town. So right now the Corvette chilled in the garage next to Rambo, my ’93 Mustang, and Pooki had to suffer the indignity of being parked in the driveway. I looked around. No sign of Jim. Hmm.
I unlocked Pooki, got in, and began to chant under my breath. The magic was in full swing and it took fifteen minutes to get the water engine running. Pooki had two engines, a gasoline one and the enchanted water one. Internal combustion engines refused to combust during magic, which made no scientific sense, because gasoline fumes still burned in open air. But trying to measure magic by Newtonian laws of physics and Gibbs’s thermodynamics was pointless. It didn’t just disobey those laws. Magic had no idea they existed.
The engine purred. I waited for an extra second, hoping Jim would jump into the car out of nowhere, but nothing happened. His scent was still on me. I sighed, backed out of the driveway, and drove down the street.
It was too much to hope for a whole day together. The Pack was keeping him busy.
I pulled up to the stop sign. The passenger door opened and Jim slid into the seat next to me. I clicked the locks closed. Ha-ha! He was trapped.
“I’m going to try to find Eyang Ida. She’s a nice old lady, who disappeared from her house and some sort of bad magic is involved.”
He nodded. “Can I come along?”
“Yes. Put your seat belt on.”
“I should drive,” he said.
I laughed.
“Dali,” he said, dropping into his “I’m a Serious Alpha Man” tone. “I’ve seen you drive.”
“Nobody drives Pooki but me. You know this. Seat belt.”
Jim clicked the seat belt in place and braced himself.
I stepped on the gas. We took the next turn at thirty miles per hour. Pooki didn’t quite careen, but he thought about it. Jim swore.
I laughed a little bit. “The magic is up. The fastest it will go is forty-five.”
Jim braced himself with his legs. If he were in his jaguar form, his fur would be standing up and all of his claws would be out, sunk into the upholstery.
We passed a crumbling wreck of an office building, jutting to the sky, its insides looted long ago by enterprising neighbors. Magic hated the by-products of technology, including pavement, computers, and tall buildings. Anything taller than three or four stories, unless it was built by hand and protected with spells, crumbled into dust. Atlanta’s entire downtown lay in ruins, and buildings still crashed without warning here and there. Most Atlantans didn’t care. Repeated exposure to fear-inducing stimuli creates familiarity, which in turn greatly reduces anxiety. We had acclimated to the chaos and technology. Falling buildings and monsters no longer terrified us. I wasn’t that afraid of monsters in the first place. I was one.
“When are you going to tell your mother about us?” Jim asked.
Never.
“You do realize that she met me, right?”
I made a hurrumph noise. That was all I could manage.
“I’m too old to be hiding in closets,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have to hide in a closet if you didn’t keep knocking things over.”
“What’s the deal?” he asked me.
Girls like me didn’t get guys like Jim. And if they did, they couldn’t keep them. Jim was everything an alpha of a Clan should be: powerful, ferocious, and ruthless. Clan Cat wasn’t the easiest clan to deal with. We all liked our independence and we chafed at authority, but we listened to Jim. He’d earned it. He ruled like an alpha, he fought like an alpha, and he was built like an alpha, too, broad shoulders, strong arms, great chest, a six-pack. You looked at him and thought, “Wow.” You looked at me . . . I was everything an alpha of a Clan wasn’t: physically weak, with an aversion to blood, and bad eyesight that even Lyc-V couldn’t fix, because it was tied to my magic. If I had transformed into some deadly combat beast, I might have gotten a pass. But my ferocious tiger image was only fur-deep. I would fight if my life was threatened, but to be an alpha, you had to live for combat.
Not that Jim was some sort of murder junkie. He went physical only as a last resort and when he fought, he went about it with a methodical precision, brutal and lightning fast. I loved that about him. He was so competent, it was scary sometimes, and I admired that he was so good at something he had to do. But I had also seen him in combat long enough to recognize the excitement in his eyes when he struck and the quiet moment of satisfaction when his opponent fell dead to the ground. Jim didn’t look for a fight, but when one found him, he enjoyed winning.
The shapeshifters were all about physicality and appearances. It was so unfair, I used to cry about it when I was a teenager. To top it all off, I did magic. Not only the tiger purifying magic, but actual, spell-based magic. I wrote curses in calligraphy. They didn’t always work. The shapeshifters mistrusted magic. They were magic and they had very little need for it. It just added to my overall uncoolness.
In shapeshifter society, an alpha couple acted as a unit. They upheld the laws together, they made decisions together and when they were challenged, they answered challenges together. In a challenge, I wouldn’t be an asset to Jim. I would be a vulnerability. So all of this magical fairy-tale thing that was happening, his scent in my car, his big body in my bed, and our stolen secret dates, was temporary. Soon Jim would wake up and smell the reality. He would leave me and that would rip my heart out. When that happened, and it was a when not an if, I wanted to nurse my wounds in peace. I didn’t want pity from my mother, my family, or the Pack. I got pitied enough as it was.
I didn’t even want to think about it. I just wanted to enjoy the magic while it lasted.
“Dali!”
I realized we were heading straight for a pothole, swerved, and hit the bulging asphalt, where a tree root had burrowed under the pavement. Pooki went airborne. My stomach tried to fall out of me. The Plymouth landed on the asphalt.
“Whee!” I grinned at Jim.
He put his hand over his face.