Nalini Singh - Night Shift

“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.

“It’s not that bad!”

“Dali, are you ashamed of introducing me to your mother?”

“No!”

“Is it because we are planning on having sex before the wedding?”

“No. My mother is from Indonesia, but she’s been in the United States for a long time.” Not to mention that she would be so overjoyed that I was having sex in the first place, she would probably call all of our relatives and tell them about it. They’d throw a party to celebrate.

“Then why do I have to hide?”

Think of something quick . . . “You know, this introducing thing goes both ways. You haven’t introduced me to your family either.”

He nodded. “Okay. We’re having a barbeque this Sunday. You’re welcome to come.”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. A barbeque with Jim’s family? With his mother, his sisters, and his cousins . . . Oh no.

Jim reached over, put his fingers under my chin, and pushed my jaw up to close my mouth. “The way you’re driving, you’ll bite your tongue off.”

I was smart. With all of that brain power I had to manage some sort of smart way to escape. “I can’t just show up unannounced.”

“I already told them that I would ask you, so they know you might be coming.”

“Oh so you just assumed I would show up?”

“No, but I thought there might be a possibility that you wouldn’t turn me down.”

He just refused to be ruffled and he was so logical about it. It was hard to argue with logic.

I made another turn. We’d swung into an older neighborhood. Magic destroyed tall buildings, breaking them down into dust, but it also fed tree growth. The people-friendly trees, red maples, yellow poplars, red and white oaks, which usually grew in carefully managed spaces to shade the front lawns, had shot upward, spreading their thick limbs over the road and their massive roots under it, bulging the asphalt in waves. The street looked like a beach with the tide coming in.

“Dali, I need to know if we’re on for this barbeque.”

“Driving on this road is just awful. They should do something about this.”

“Dali,” Jim growled.

“Yes, I will come to the barbeque, fine!”

He shook his head.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

I pulled up before a small yellow house and turned off the engine. “This is it.”

The house sat in front of us, a typical one-story ranch-style home, its walls bright with cheerful chicken yellow paint. A neat front yard, recently mowed, stretched to the front door, shadowed by an old redbud tree. A dozen bird feeders and wind chimes, some plain, some with shiny colored-glass ornaments, hung from tree branches. It looked so neat and bright, just the way you would imagine a grandmother’s house should be.

I really hoped nothing bad had happened to Eyang Ida.