Laurell Hamilton - Affliction

Nathaniel said, ‘I hadn’t heard the rumor that we lose the ability to talk. It’s not true.’ He stepped a little ahead of me, with a glance to make sure I was okay with it; I was. ‘If I were going to shift to leopard form and eat somebody, it wouldn’t be any of you guys. I see beautiful, hot women every night at work. They’re worth eating. You guys are so not my type.’ They laughed; some of it was a little nervous, but they laughed.

Someone in the back called out, ‘Should we be insulted?’

Nathaniel flashed that brilliant smile, the one he used to charm the men who brought their women to the club. ‘Yes.’ More laughter, and this time it was that deep, rumbling male laughter. ‘I could never do your job, but I can trail the Crawfords for you. Anita will put me on a leash just like the dog that was up here.’

‘Why put you on a leash if you aren’t dangerous?’ Travers asked.

‘Because I’m going to look like a big-ass black leopard and I don’t want to get shot by some hunter. With a beautiful woman leading me around on a leash, they won’t shoot me. They may think they’re hallucinating, but they’re less likely to shoot me by accident.’

They couldn’t argue with him, and they stopped trying after a little while. Nathaniel charmed them, kept making them laugh, and we got our way.

‘Since when did you get to be this charming?’ Ares asked.

‘I’ve always been charming,’ Nathaniel said, ‘but I’ve learned how to talk to guy-guys thanks to hanging around with all the guards.’

Ares nodded and sort of shrugged. ‘Wow, not just a pretty face after all.’

Nathaniel smiled. ‘If I tease you for noticing I’m pretty, it might give the other tough guys the wrong idea, so I’ll just strip instead.’

Ares rolled his eyes and turned his back, acting as a barrier to help block everyone else’s view. Nicky did the same on the other side. I stopped Nathaniel with his jacket off and the shirt halfway unbuttoned. He looked at me.

‘Let me change into my other work clothes, before you strip down.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because if you’re naked at the same time that I’m out of that much of my clothes I may get distracted.’

His smile broadened, and he wrapped his arms around me, drawing me in against his body. We were mostly hidden by the car and Nicky and Ares, but … ‘Not a good idea to get all romantic on the job, honey.’

‘I know, but I love that you can admit how much my body moves you now. You fought so long to not want me.’

I shook my head. ‘I wanted you; I just wouldn’t let myself admit it out loud even in my own head.’

‘Then kiss me now, before we get nude, and maybe you’ll be able to resist my charms.’

I laughed, and then he kissed me, and there was no more laughing. I changed clothes and once I was securely in jeans, combat/hiking boots and T-shirt, it was time for me to put on my whole kit.

I started with the vest, specially made to hold the curves that men didn’t have. I put on the two wrist sheaths complete with silver edged-blades, but honestly once I put my jacket on they’d be hard to reach. They were for emergency use and had saved my life more than once, but tonight was all about the guns. The Browning BDM moved to a thigh holster, the Sig Sauer P238 .380 went in a MOLLE-rigged holster on the front of the vest for a cross draw if I needed it. In a tactical sling I had my AR-15 M4-styled carbine, which had replaced my MP5, which had replaced the mini-UZI before it. The AR was chambered in 6.8 SPC for literally more bang for my buck. It was also frangible, which meant it shattered once it entered a target, so if I shot bad guy A, the round wouldn’t go through him and into good guy B. Frangible did mean that if you missed the bad guy and accidentally shot the good guy first, they were going to have a very bad night, but I didn’t plan on missing. Normally when I wore the Browning in its shoulder rig, I had a knife sheath attached to the back of it so that the hilt was hidden under my hair. The blade was almost as long as my forearm, but tonight I had something else at my back. It was called a sock, or a sleeve, but it attached to MOLLE straps on the back of my vest and held my Mossberg 500 Bantam. The shotgun was originally designed with the idea that it would fit a tween-age boy’s arms and hands better, and it probably did, but it was great for us shorter women, too. I carried the sleeve angled diagonally across my back for a right-hand cross draw over my shoulder. I’d tried it riding straight up my back, but having something tall at the back of my head had just bugged me, so I’d changed it. If I’d been in an urban setting with buildings, I could have had the shotgun and the AR on tactical straps and just pushed one behind me while I carried the other, as needed, but with trees and other vegetation there was too much of a chance of the guns catching on something if they were hanging semi-loose. I needed to be able to run without worrying about getting caught on the trees, and with the butt of the Mossberg just a little above my shoulder it was out of the way until I needed it. My cross was tucked inside my shirt for much the same reason, so the chain couldn’t get caught and broken as we moved through the forest. I’d probably feel if my cross got knocked off, but I might not find it if it fell to the leaf-covered floor in the dark. We were hunting preternatural creatures tonight – if they were zombies, the cross wouldn’t do a damn bit of good, but if they weren’t zombies … holy objects were good things to have. Extra shotgun shells were strapped to the stock, and in a pouch on the vest, more shells, extra rifle magazines, and a small flashlight. My off-hand thigh had extra magazine pouches for the pistols. My phone went into a pocket on the pants that I could fasten down. I put a heavier leather jacket over all of it, because it was colder here in the mountains. Someone had said we were over nine-thousand-feet elevation. Yeah, that’d be colder.

Ares and Nicky put on their vests and dangerous toys, too. Once we were dressed and armed to the teeth, it was Nathaniel’s turn to take off his clothes, all of them. When he was gorgeously naked, standing in the chill mountain air as if it weren’t cold at all, I just stared.

Al called from the front of the SUV, ‘Blake, don’t get distracted back there, okay?’

I said, ‘When I don’t get distracted by Nathaniel nude, I’ll be dead.’

Nathaniel smiled at me and then said, ‘Unless you want your clothes ruined you’ll have to step back.’

It took me a moment to realize what he meant, which said just how distracted I was. I nodded and stepped back far enough to be out of the splash zone. With new wereanimals there was blood and clear fluid with the form change. With practice the blood stopped and the clear liquid was less, but there was always some, as if the clear fluid helped grease the works as the man became beast or the beast became man. Though it was almost always less messy to go from animal back to human than the other way around. I’d asked all my wereanimal friends why that was, and they didn’t know either. It just was.

Nicky and Ares moved out from the car, too, so they’d be outside the splash zone. Nicky stayed turned outward, watching the dark, but Ares turned around. I might have asked why, but Nathaniel chose that moment to release his beast.

It was a wash of energy so strong it hit me like heat, as if I’d opened the door to an oven I didn’t know was there. I’d never felt his beast like this, a wash of heat, energy, power that swept over me, through me, and I felt the beast inside me that matched his rise and snarl white fangs in the coal-black of its fur. My leopard’s eyes were a dark gold, like antique coins filled with life and heat. I tried to ground the energy the way I’d been taught, sending it into the pine-covered ground underneath my boots, but my leopard didn’t want that rush of energy shoved into the ground to help make the trees grow better. My leopard wanted to come out and play with that heat. I couldn’t change shape, but that didn’t mean my beasts didn’t want me to.