Night Shift

MAGIC STEALS ILONA ANDREWS

I looked at myself in the mirror. I wore tiny black panties and a tomato red satin garter belt with black lace-up inserts. The price sticker had described the color as scarlet, but really it was tomato red. The garter belt held up black fishnet stockings. A matching bra did its best to push up my small boobs. It didn’t have much to work with. I wasn’t just skinny. When my body was made, someone had read the instructions wrong. I had tiny boobs, narrow hips, and thin chopstick legs with knobby knees.

I looked ridiculous.

The description of the bra had promised “enticing curves” and encouraged me to “flirt with your most stunning cleavage.” I leaned on the bathroom vanity and blew the air out. This sucked so much.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror. “You’re a weretiger. Confident. Aggressive. Roar.”

Still ridiculous.

It could be worse, I told myself. I could’ve gone for the chain mail bikini. The lingerie shop had one of those, too.

The sales clerk had recommended a floaty pink see-through thing with bows. Buying that was out of the question. I was already short and skinny. The see-through thing would swallow me. Besides, that outfit was a baby-doll outfit. Looking cute and sweet was the last thing I wanted to do, because tonight Jim Shrapshire and I had a date.

Jim Shrapshire ran Clan Cat, one of the seven clans in Atlanta’s Shapeshifter Pack. A werejaguar, he normally served as the Pack’s Chief of Security. Jim wasn’t just a badass. He was a badass who wrote a book for badasses on how to be a badder badass. Which is why, when Curran, the Beastlord and the ruler of the Pack, had to go on an expedition to the Mediterranean, he left Jim in charge of fifteen hundred shapeshifters. Curran had been gone for about a month and Jim was keeping the Pack together with iron claws. He was the smartest man I ever met. He was scary, funny, had muscles in places I had no idea muscles existed, and for some weird reason he liked me.

At least I thought he liked me. Things were complicated. As the alpha of Clan Cat, he was in charge of me and he’d been really careful not to take advantage of it. We’d been trying to date, except that Jim was busy and I was busy, too, so we barely managed a date every two to three weeks. When we did connect, we talked about everything under the sun and we made out. He let me set the pace. I decided how far we went and the first few times we got together, we didn’t go very far.

Kissing Jim was my definition of nirvana, but some small part of me never believed he was really there for me. Jim needed his equal: a powerful, aggressive, and sexy woman. He got me, Dali, a skinny vegetarian girl who had to wear glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms, threw up when she smelled blood, and was about as useful in a fight as a fifth leg on a donkey. To top it all off, my own mother, who loved me more than the whole world, wouldn’t describe me as pretty. She told people that I was smart, brave, and educated. Unfortunately none of it helped me right now, because tonight I wanted to be sexy. I wanted to seduce Jim.

I had the whole thing planned. I bought the wine. I cooked a big meal. I even made him a steak. I cooked it last in a separate pan to make sure no meat juices got onto my gnocchi. I may have gagged a few times from the smell and I had to use two forks to move it around because I didn’t want to touch it, but I was pretty sure it was cooked correctly. I chose this outfit, because the model wearing it in the ad looked exactly the way I wanted to be: she was tall, with double-D breasts, plump butt, tiny waist, and she had the kind of face that would make men turn to look at her. The lingerie was great on her.

I glanced back at my reflection. I wanted to knock him off his feet, not make him fall down laughing. If I hadn’t already put mascara on, I would have cried.

None of it might matter anyway. It was twenty minutes past eight o’clock. Jim was late. Maybe he got held up. Maybe he changed his mind on this whole dating thing.

The doorbell rang.

Ah! I spun around the bathroom, grabbed my blue silk kimono, slipped into it, and ran down the stairs.

The doorbell chimed again. I checked the peephole. My heart skipped a beat. Jim!

I swung the door open. He stood on my doorstep, tall, dark, and so hot, it made me weak in the knees. I’d been crushing on him for years and every time I saw him, my breath still caught. His scent washed over me, the sandalwood, light musk, and creamy vanilla of his deodorant; the hint of citrus and spearmint in his shampoo; and the fragrance of his skin, a complicated mix of tangy sweat and slightly harsh male smell, blending into a multi-layered chorus that sang, “Jim” to me. All of my smart words disappeared and I turned into a half-wit.

“Hey!” Oh, great. Hay is for horses.

“Hi.” He shouldered his way into the house. He wore dark jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket over it. Jim usually wore black. His skin was a dark, rich brown, his black hair cut short, leaving his masculine face open.

He leaned forward. I stood on my toes and brushed a kiss on his lips. He didn’t kiss me back. Something was wrong.

“I’ve got a bottle of Cabernet Franc,” I said. Jim cooked like a chef and liked wine. The man at the wine store told me this was an award-winning wine. “From Tiger Mountain Winery.”

He nodded. I didn’t even get a smirk.

What if he were breaking up with me?

“I’ll go get it.” My voice turned squeaky. “Go ahead and sit down.”

I went into the kitchen, got the two wineglasses, and poured the deep red wine into the glasses. He couldn’t possibly be breaking up with me.

I grabbed the glasses and went into the living room.

Jim was asleep on my couch.

Oh no. Last time I found him asleep in my house, a spider creature had been feeding on his soul. Not again.

I shoved the glasses onto the side table, grabbed his shoulders, and shook. “Jim! Jim, talk to me.”

He blinked and opened his beautiful dark eyes. They were glazed over as if he weren’t fully there.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

He peered at me. “I was challenged.”

In the Pack, personal challenges decided leadership. They meant a fight to the death. There was no mercy. “Who?”

“Roger Mountain,” he said.

Roger Mountain was a panther, vicious and ruthless. Jim was alive, so he had to have killed Roger, but I had seen Roger fight before. He tore his opponents into pieces.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Not that bad.”

“Jim?”

He raised the side of his T-shirt. His entire torso was dark. It took me a second to realize that it was one continuous bruise. Oh you silly idiot man. “Have medmages seen this?” The Pack had its own hospital and our medmages were some of the best.

“Sure.”

“What did they say?”

“They said it was fine.”

“I’m going to hit you with a wine bottle,” I growled. “What did they really say?”

“I spoke to Nasrin. She said bed rest for twenty-four hours.”

Of course, she recommended bed rest. The fight had to have drained Jim down to nothing, and changing shape took a lot of energy, especially now. Magic flooded our world in waves. When magic was up, spells worked and transforming was easier and still, if a normal shapeshifter changed form twice in twenty-four hours, Lyc-V, the shapeshifter virus, would shut your body down for a nap. I was exempt from this rule, because while I carried the virus, my magic was mystical in origin, but Jim’s wasn’t. With technology in control, a fight behind him, and two shape-changings, Jim should’ve been in bed, not here.

“So, instead of resting you shifted out of warrior form and drove here?” He couldn’t have been that reckless. He could’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.

Jim yawned. “I didn’t want to miss it.” He smiled at me. “You look really pretty.”

Oh you stupid dummy.

“I’m just going to sit here for a second,” he said and closed his eyes.

Jim was six feet tall. My couch was tiny. If he fell asleep here, he wouldn’t be able to walk in the morning. “Nasrin said bed rest, not couch rest.” I wedged my shoulder under his armpit. “Come on. We’re going upstairs to the bedroom.”

His eyes lit up for half a second. “Well, if you insist . . .”

“I insist.” I pulled him upright. I was a vegetarian weretiger, but I was still a shapeshifter. I could’ve carried him up the stairs except I didn’t think he would let me. “Come on.”

We walked up the stairs and I deposited him on the bed. I loved huge soft beds, and this one was a queen with a mattress topper so thick I had to hop to get onto it. Jim landed on it and sank in. I reached for his boots, but he sat up. “I’ve got it.”

His boots hit the floor. He lay back and closed his eyes. I slipped into the closet and pulled off my lingerie. I didn’t want him to see me in it. If he did, he might think that I had a plan for the evening and was upset because it collapsed. I didn’t care about the plan. I just wanted him to be okay. I threw on a pair of plain cotton panties and a white tank top, came out, and slipped into the bed next to him.

Magic rolled over us in an invisible wave. All of the electric lights went out and the feylantern in the bathroom stirred into life, glowing with gentle blue. My magic flowed through me. Excellent. He would heal faster during a magic wave.

“Sorry I ruined the date,” Jim murmured.

I snuggled up to him, my hand on his chest, careful not to press too hard. “You didn’t. This is perfect.”

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

I opened my eyes. I was lying in my bed. I inhaled deep and smelled Jim. His scent was all around me, the clean, citrus-spiced smell that drove me crazy. His arm was across my waist, his body hot against my side.

Jim was in my bed and he was holding me. I smiled.

Knock-knock-knock.

Someone was knocking on my front door. That was fine. They could keep knocking. I would just keep lying here, in my soft bed, wrapped in Jim. Mmmm . . .

“Dali! Open the door.”

Mom.

I jerked upright in my bed. Jim leaped straight up and landed on his feet, his arms raised, his body tense, ready to pounce. “What?”

“My mother is here!” I jumped to the floor, jerked a pair of shorts from under my bed, and hopped on one foot trying to put them on.

He exhaled. “I thought it was an emergency.”

“It is an emergency,” I hissed in a theatrical whisper. “Stay here! Don’t make any noise.”

“Dali,” he started.

I grabbed a pillow and threw it at him. “Shush!”

He blinked. I grabbed my kimono, tossed it over me, shut the door to my bedroom, and ran down the stairs, holding on to the rail for dear life so I wouldn’t trip. The last thing I needed was my mother finding out I had Jim in my bedroom. There would be no end of shock and questions and then she would want to know if we had set the date for the wedding yet and when are the grandchildren coming. I didn’t even know if Jim was serious.

I jumped the last seven steps, tied my kimono, and reached for the door.

The wineglasses. Oh shoot. I raced into the kitchen, grabbed the two wineglasses, dumped the wine down the sink, stuck them into the nearest cabinet, emptied the vegetarian curry soup into the sink, threw the butternut squash gnocchi into the trash, tossed the steak I made for Jim after it and shoved it deep into the garbage can in case my mother decided to throw something away. I washed my hands, ran for the door, and opened it.

My mother raised her hands. She was holding her bag in one and a box of donuts in the other. She was about an exact copy of me except thirty years older. We were both short and tiny and when we spoke, we waved our hands around too much. A woman about my age stood next to her. She had dark hair, big eyes, and a cute heart-shaped face. Iluh Indrayani. Like me, she was born in the U.S., but both of her parents had come from Indonesia, from the island of Bali. Her mother knew my mother and we met a few times, but never really talked.

Something bad had happened. The only time my mother brought visitors to my house who weren’t family was when some sort of magical emergency had taken place.

“You left me on the doorstep for half an hour,” my mother huffed.

“I was asleep.” I held the door open. “Come in.”

They walked inside, my mother in the lead. Iluh gave me an apologetic look. “So sorry to bother you on a Saturday.”

“That’s okay,” I told her.

We sat in the kitchen.

“Would you like something to drink?” I asked.

My mother waved her hands. “You talk. I’ll make coffee.”

Above us something thudded. I froze.

My mother stared at the ceiling. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked, my eyes wide. I would kill Jim. He could sit completely motionless for hours when on stakeouts. I’d seen him do it. He had to be dropping things on purpose.

Thud!

“That!” My mother turned predatory like a raptor. “What was that?”

Lie, think of something quick, lie, lie . . . “I’ve got a cat.”

“What kind of a cat?” My mother’s eyes narrowed.

“A big one.”

“I want to see,” Mom said. “Bring him down.”

“He’s a stray and a little wild. He’s probably hiding. I probably won’t even be able to find him now.”

“How long have you had him?”

“A few days.” The more I lied, the deeper I sank. My mother had a brain like a supercomputer. She missed nothing.

Mom pointed a teaspoon at me. “Is he neutered?”

Oh my gods. “Not yet.”

“You need to neuter him. Otherwise he’ll spray all over the house. The stench is awful. And when he isn’t out catting around, little female cats in heat will show up and wail under the windows.”

Kill me, please. “He is a nice cat. He’s not like that.”

“It’s instinct, Dali. Before you know it, you’ll be running a feline whorehouse.”

“Mother!”

My mom waved the spoon and went back to making coffee.

I turned to Iluh. She gave me a sympathetic glance that said, “Been there, endured that, got the good daughter T-shirt for it.”

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

Iluh folded her hands on her lap. “My grandmother is missing.”

“Eyang Ida?”

Iluh nodded.

I remembered Ida Indrayani. She was nice lady in her late sixties with a friendly warm smile. She still worked as a hairdresser. The family didn’t really need the money but Eyang Ida, Grandmother Ida, as she was usually called, liked to be social.

“How long has she been missing?”

“Since last night,” Iluh said. “She was supposed to come to my birthday party in the evening but didn’t show up. Sutan, he’s my husband, and I stopped by her house on the way back from the restaurant. The lights were off. We knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. We thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again. Her hearing isn’t the best now, and once she falls asleep, it’s hard to wake her up. My parents keep wanting her to move in with them, but she won’t do it. We went back to her house first thing in the morning, but she wasn’t there. She hadn’t opened her shop either, and that’s when we knew something was really wrong. My mother has a spare key so she unlocked the door. My grandmother was gone and there was blood on the back porch.”

Not good. “How much blood?”

Iluh swallowed. “Just a smudge.”

“Show her,” my mom said.

Iluh reached into her canvas bag. “We found this next to the blood.”

She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her purse. Inside it were three coarse black hairs. About nine inches long, they looked like something you would pull out of a horse’s mane.

“We tried going to the police, but they said we had to wait forty-eight hours before she can be declared missing.”

I opened the bag and took a sniff. Ugh. An acrid, bitter, dry kind of stench, mixed with a sickening trace of rotting blood. I shook the hairs out on the table and carefully touched one. Magic nipped my finger. The hair turned white and broke apart, as if burned from the inside out. Bad magic. Familiar bad magic.

Iluh gasped.

“I told you,” my mother said with pride in her voice. “My daughter is the White Tiger. She can banish evil.”

“Not all evil,” I said, and pushed a sticky-note pad toward Iluh. “Could you write your grandmother’s address down for me? I’ll go visit the house.”

Iluh scribbled it down and got a key out of her purse. “Here is the spare key.” She wrote down another address. “This is my parents’ house. I’ll be over there today. Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.” She would just get in the way.

“Do I need to pay you?”

My mother froze in the kitchen, mortally offended.

People often confused ethnicity and cultural upbringing. Just because someone looks Japanese or Indian, doesn’t mean they have strong cultural ties to their country of origin. Cultural identity was more than skin deep. Because of the nature of my magic, I was known to many Indonesians in Atlanta, and learning about the culture and myths of my parents wasn’t only a part of my heritage, it was part of what made me better at what I did. Iluh chose to have less ties to Indonesian families. Culturally she was more mainstream. You can’t be offended by someone who simply didn’t know how things worked.

“You don’t have to pay me,” I explained gently. “I do this because it’s my obligation to the community. Generations ago my family was given the gift of this magic so we could help others. It’s my duty and I’m happy to do it.”

Iluh swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, I’m sorry you felt uncomfortable. Please don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Please find her. She is my only grandmother.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I told her.

I walked Iluh out to the door. When I returned, my mother crossed her arms. “Pay? What, like you’re some kind of maid?”

“Let it go, Mom. She just didn’t know.”

“She should know. That’s my point. Are you going over there?”

“Yes. Let me just get dressed.”

“Good,” my mother said. “I’ll make you dinner while you’re gone. That way when you come back, there will be something to eat.”

No! “Thank you so much, but I’m okay.”

“Dali!” My mother opened the refrigerator. “There is nothing in here, except rice. You might have to purify a house today. You don’t even have cakes for the offering.”

There was nothing in there because I was planning to store leftovers from Jim’s and my dinner. Jim, who was currently hiding upstairs and whom I had to sneak out of here. “I was going to go grocery shopping today. And I’ll steal some of your donuts for the offering.” I had apples in the fridge and my garden was in bloom. That would be plenty for the offering.

“I’ll make you something to eat. Look at you, you’re skin and bones.”

“Mother, I’m perfectly fine. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“Yes, you are. Your sink smells funny, your refrigerator is empty, and your trash is overflowing. And!” My mother pulled two dirty wineglasses out of the cabinet.

How did she even know? It was like she had radar.

“What is this? Have you been drinking?”

Help me.

“Drinking alone? That is not healthy for you. Look, you couldn’t even bother to wash the glass. You just got another one and then stuck the dirty one in there. That’s what alcoholics do.”

“I’m a shapeshifter, Mom. I can’t get drunk even if I tried.” Technically I could. If I drank an entire bottle of whiskey, I would be buzzed for about twenty minutes or so, and then my body would metabolize the last of the alcohol and I would be sober as a baby.

“Drinking, not eating, messing with stray cats.” My mother shook her head. “You know what you need? You need to meet a nice man. You need to get married and have lots of healthy children . . .”

I put my hands over my face.

Something thudded above us again.

“That’s it.” My mother marched to the stairs. “I’m going to see this cat.”

“You’ll scare him!” I chased her up the stairs. “Mother!”

My mother opened the door to my bedroom. It stood empty.

“Puss, puss . . .” My mother bent down and glanced under the bed. “Puss, puss . . . Does your cat speak Indonesian?”

Actually he does. He learned it just for me.

“I told you, he’s hiding.” Maybe he went out the window.

The door to the closet stood open. The tomato red lingerie I had left on the carpet was missing.

“Kitty, kitty, puss, puss . . .”

Jim was still here. I could smell him. I edged into the closet and raised my head. Jim stood above the door, legs propped up on the top shelves of the closet, his back pressed against the wall. The stupid lingerie hung from his fingers.

I wished I could fall through the floor.

Jim shook the lingerie at me and raised his dark eyebrows.

My mother turned around. “Why are you blushing?”

I had to get her out of my bedroom. “I really have to go and look for Eyang Ida,” I said. “I’m going to get dressed now.”

My mother looked at me.

“May I have some privacy?”

“Fine.” She shook her head and went out of the room. I heard her walk down the stairs, locked the bedroom door, sagged against it, and let out my breath.

Jim stalked out of the closet, moving completely soundlessly across the carpet and leaned against the door next to me.

“How much did that thing cost?” he whispered.

“Never mind,” I whispered back at him. “You did that on purpose.”

“Did what?”

“Dropped things. Are you a jaguar or an elephant?”

“I’m a stray cat, apparently. And your mother wants to neuter me.”

“She wouldn’t want to neuter you if you stayed quiet.” Neutering was the last thing he had to worry about. If she found him, she’d be overjoyed and run out of the house so we could get busy making grandchildren.

He grabbed me and picked me up. His eyes sparked with an amused light.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. “I’m mad at—”

His mouth closed on mine. His lips brushed me, teasing, coaxing, and I melted, opening my mouth. He brushed a single sensual lick across my tongue and I shivered. His scent swirled around me, amber and musk, and tangy sweet citrus, carrying me away to a secret place, where there was only Jim, my hot, crazy Jim, with his strong arms locked around me. His kiss grew intense, passionate, then possessive. Every stroke of his tongue said, “I want you.” I wrapped my legs about his hips and let him kiss me. Our tongues mingled, as we shared the same breath. He had no idea how beautiful he made me feel when he kissed me like this.

“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.

“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.

“Roll down your window,” I asked.

He did. The air drifted in, baked in the relentless heat of Atlanta’s summer. I closed my eyes and concentrated. In my mind, the cheery front wall of the house fell forward. Inside foul magic waited, rotten and terrible. It dripped from the furniture, slid down the walls in thick, dark drops, and coated floorboards with its slime. Every house has a heart, the echoes of its owner’s presence, and simple magic that turns a building into a home. The heart of this house was rotten to the core. Something had fed upon it and now it was dying.

Fear raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. This was bad. This was so bad.

The ugly magic noticed me. Hundreds of mouths appeared all over the slime, dark slits armed with sharp, black teeth. The slime stretched toward me, trying to take a bite. It felt familiar. This was Indonesian black magic. Things were out of balance here, way out of balance.

I opened my eyes. The house appeared so welcoming from the outside. Just you wait, you nasty thing. You have no idea who you’re trying to eat. I don’t know what you’re doing in this house, but I will purge you out. You don’t get to defile the home of someone I know.

“What is it?” Jim asked.

“Eyang Ida is a nice lady,” I told him, my voice tight with anger. “Something evil is squatting in her house and feeding on it. I’m going to get it out. This is going to get creepy fast. Do you want to stay in the car?”

Jim looked at me, his face completely flat.

“Jim?”

He leaned toward me and said in a quiet, scary voice, “I don’t stay in a car.”

Well of course. That would be ridiculous. Big Alpha Man does not stay in car. Big Alpha Man roar and beat manly chest. He’d locked his teeth. Jim was an incredibly smart man. That’s why I fell for him so hard. He was also incredibly stubborn.

I sighed. “Look, this is something I do. If you come with me, you have to do it on my terms. I’m going to do some magic and you will have to go along with it and not act like it’s stupid.”

“It’s your show.”

Say what you want about Jim, he always treated my magic with a healthy dose of respect. My calligraphy didn’t always work, but my Balinese magic was a different story. He had never seen that side of me before.

I popped the trunk open and got out of the car. Two chests sat in the trunk, the small one with my calligraphy supplies and the large one with all of my Balinese items. A box of donuts sat on top of the bigger chest. Jim’s eyes lit up. He reached for the box and I slapped his hand lightly. “No. Offering.”

I opened the large chest, pulled out a necklace of iron wood beads with a large black amulet hanging from it. A stylized lion, bright red with details painted in gold gleamed on the amulet. The lion had large round black eyes half covered by bright red lids, a wide nose with two round nostrils, two wide ears, and a huge open mouth filled with bright white teeth.

“Barong Bali,” I told Jim, as I put the necklace over his neck. “King of spirits and sworn enemy of Rangda, the Demon Queen.”

Jim studied the amulet. “So how often do you do things like this?”

“About once every couple of weeks,” I said. “There is usually something untoward going on.”

“And it’s an insult to offer you money for it?”

“The legend says that a long, long time ago on the island of Bali, there lived an evil sorcerer. He was a terrible man who summoned demons, cast curses, and stole children and young pretty men and women to drain them of their blood so he could use it in his dark rituals. A man called Ketut had had enough and he asked Barong Bali for the strength to destroy the sorcerer. Barong Bali spoke to Ketut and told him that he would grant him powers to banish evil, but in return if any villagers came to Ketut for help against the dark magic, neither he nor his family could turn them away. Ketut agreed and Barong Bali made him into Barong Macan, the Tiger Barong. Ketut defeated the sorcerer and his descendants have guarded the balance between evil and good ever since.”

“Do you think it’s true?” Jim asked.

“I don’t know. But I’m a tiger, I have the power to banish bad magic, and people come to me for help.”

“Are you afraid that if you started charging for the services, you would be tempted to prioritize?”

I glanced at him in surprise. Wow. Nailed it. “Yes. Right now rich and poor are equal to me. I get no compensation either way, except for the satisfaction of restoring the balance and doing my job well. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“There should be some reward for this,” he said.

“People leave gifts,” I told him. “Sometimes money, sometimes food. Mostly on my doorstep or with my mother. I never know who they are from but I appreciate it always.”

I opened the large chest and took out the statue of Barong Bali. It was about a foot tall, but size didn’t matter. “Please put him under the tree.”

Eyang Ida had loved the tree. It grew with her as she aged, and I could feel traces of her in the tree’s branches. The tree’s spirit loved her. It would help us.

Jim set the statue by the tree roots. I slipped my shoes and socks off and took my offering out of the chest. I had made it in the house before I left. Jim regarded the banana leaf twisted into a small basket, the elaborate palm leaf tray, and the arrangement of flowers and fruit, and raised his eyebrows. I added a donut to it, took it to the statue, knelt, and placed it at Barong Bali’s feet. Jim knelt next to me.

I sat still, sinking into meditation, and let my magic permeate the lawn. It flowed through the soil, touched the tree roots, and spiraled up the trunk into its leaves. A subtle change came over the magic emanating from the tree. The spirits noticed Jim and pondered his connection to me. If there was enough of a bond, they would recognize it. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure if there was enough of a bond.

“So is the sugar-glazed donut a traditional Indonesian offering?” he asked.

Smart-ass. “No, the traditional offering calls for cakes. In this case I’m offering something that I like very much. The effort in making canang, the offering, is what counts.”

“Why don’t you just do your sticky-note thing?”

The last time we went into a house corrupted by magic, I had written protection kanji on a sticky note and stuck it to his chest.

“Because this dark magic is of Indonesian origin. I’m much stronger at my native magic than I am at writing curses on pieces of paper.”

The spirits still weren’t sure. I couldn’t just leave him on the lawn here. He would beat his chest and follow me into the house. I had to show them why he was important.

“Jim?”

“Yes?” he said.

“I need help.”

“I’m here,” he said.

“I need you to think about why you first asked me out. Like really think about it.”

“I asked you out because—”

I raised my hand. “No, please don’t tell me.” I was too scared to find out. “Just think about it.”

“Okay.”

I knew exactly why I had a crush on Jim. It wasn’t just one thing, it was the whole thing. He was one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. When Curran painted himself into a corner, he went to Jim and trusted him to think of a way out of it. He looked . . . Well, he was hot. Unbearably hot, like the kind of man you might see in a magazine or on TV. There was this raw masculinity about him, a kind of mix of male confidence and power. He was so unlike me. I was small and slight, and he was large and corded with muscle. I liked that duality, the contrast between me and him. It turned me on and I watched him when he wasn’t looking. I knew the way he held his head, the angle of his shoulders, the way he walked, unhurried and sure. In a crowd of identically dressed men, I would instantly know my Jim.

But what made me fall in love with him wasn’t his smarts, his looks, or even the fact that he was lethal. All that was great, but that alone wasn’t enough. So I opened my heart and let the spirits look within. My life was often chaotic. I got scared. I lost my temper. I freaked out. I was never sure if my curse magic would work or not. I was helpless without my glasses and that scared me, too. But Jim . . . Jim could take a single step into my chaos and suddenly my problems sorted themselves out. He tackled them one by one with his calm logic and then he would turn to me and say, “You can do this.” And I realized that he was right and I could. He believed in me.

A warm feeling spread through my bare feet and streamed through me, all the way into my fingertips until they were tingling.

“Something’s happening,” Jim said, his voice calm.

“Let it happen.”

Jim sat very still. Muscles tensed and gathered on his frame, as if he were about to pounce. The spirits were touching him and he clearly didn’t like it. Apparently “let it happen” meant “get ready to kill.”

The amulet on his chest shuddered. The Barong Bali’s eyes snapped open with a metallic click. The spirits recognized our bond and granted their protection to him. Of course it also meant that Jim would see things through my eyes now. It would be a bit of a shock.

“The spirits granted you the gift of sight,” I said. “Now you can see the world as I see it. It’s only temporary. If you take off the amulet, you will become magic blind again. Also it will likely stop as soon as this magic wave is over.” I rose to my feet. “We’re going to enter the house now. You might see some really weird stuff. Don’t freak out.”

He gave me another flat Jim look.

We walked to the door. I put the key in, turned it, and swung the door open. The house lay before us, dark and cold. A faint stench of carrion drifted through the air. Jim shifted his stance, falling into that loose, ready pose that meant he was ready for something to leap on him and try to rip his neck open. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and let my power roll in a wave from me.

Jim snarled.

I opened my eyes. Viscous, fetid magic dripped from the walls all around us, sliding along the panels, translucent and dappled with blotches of darkness.

“What the hell is this?” he growled.

“This is you dipping a toe into my world. Stay close, Jim.”

The walls near the door were lighter, the foul magic patina thinner, but at the end of the hallway, the magic grew thick. I could see the open kitchen window from where I stood, and the dark slime pouring through the frame into the house. Whatever it was came from the backyard.

Small fang-studded mouths formed in the slimy magic, stretching toward me. Jim jerked his knife out. It was huge, dark grey, with a curved tip and serrated metal teeth near the handle.

I took a deep breath and raised my hands, my movements slow and graceful, hands bent back, fingers wide apart, trembling.

The evil magic paused, unsure.

In my head the bamboo flutes sang, with the metallic sounds of the xylophone setting the beat. I opened my eyes wide, bent my knees, my toes up off the floor, and turned. Magic pulsed from my body. The slime around us evaporated, as if burned off by an invisible fire. Bright sunlight spread in a wave, rolling over the walls, floor, and ceiling purging the rot. It cleared the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and slid over the window frame. The dark slime dropped out of sight.

Weird.

“Holy shit,” Jim said.

I frowned. “This is wrong.”

“What do you mean wrong? That was fucking unbelievable.”

“Usually when a house is this corrupted, the magic is deeply rooted. It should’ve taken more than two dance steps to clear it. I don’t understand this. There is so much corruption, but it’s all really shallow.”

I marched to the kitchen and opened the door to the back porch. The backyard opened onto a stretch of woods. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees, a narrow gate ajar. The foul magic hovered between the trees, coating the bark, dripping, and waiting. It felt me and slithered deeper into the woods.

Where are you going? Don’t run. We’re just starting.

I crossed the grass, walked through the open gate, and kept going into the forest, Jim right behind me. The magic streamed away from me. I chased it down a path between the massive oaks. The same scent I had smelled on the coarse hair in my kitchen filled my nostrils: dry, acrid, bitter scent. Almost there.

The path ducked under the canopy of braided tree limbs bound together by kudzu. I followed it, moving fast through the natural tunnel of leaves and branches. The green tunnel opened into a clearing. A massive tree must’ve fallen here and taken a neighbor or two with it. Three giant trunks lay on the grass. The surrounding trees and kudzu laid claim to the light, greedy for every stray photon, and the leaves filled the space high above us, turning the sunlight watery and green. The air smelled wrong, tainted with decay. It was like being in the bottom of a really deep, scum-infested well.

Eyang Ida sat on the trunk. Her skin had a sickly grey tint, her eyes glassy and opened wide. She stared right at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. The magic swirled around her, so thick, it was almost opaque black.

I stopped. Jim paused behind me.

“Is that her?”

“It’s her.” I raised my hand to stop him if he tried to go to her, but he didn’t move. He really did trust me. I had asked him to stay close and he followed my lead.

Ferns rustled to the left of me and a creature stepped into my view. About ten inches tall, it looked like a tiny human, with dark brown skin, two legs and two arms. Long, coarse hair fell from its head all the way past its toes, dragging a couple of inches on the ground like a dark mantle. It stared at me with two amber eyes, each with a slit, dark pupil like the eyes of a blue temple viper, then it opened the wide slit of its mouth, showing two white fangs, and hissed.

“What is that?” Jim asked.

“A jenglot,” I said. Just like I thought. This was one of the traditional Indonesian horrors. Except that judging by the amount of magic in that house, there had to be more of them. A lot more. “It’s vampiric.”

Another jenglot crawled out onto the trunk. A third pair of eyes ignited in the hollow of a tree.

“It and its family stole Eyang Ida out of her house,” I said. “They will feed on her blood’s essence and when there is no more essence left, she’ll become one of them.”

The woods came alive with dozens of eyes. Big tribe, at least fifty creatures. I had expected fifteen, maybe twenty. But fifty? Fifty was bad.

“Are they hard to kill?”

“Yes. They are hardy. Setting them on fire helps.”

“There are a lot of them,” Jim said.

“Yes.”

“You might need some help . . .” Jim’s voice was very calm. He weighed our odds. The numbers weren’t in our favor.

With a soft whisper, a creature slithered onto Eyang Ida’s lap. If it had legs, this jenglot would stand at least a foot tall, with hair twice as long, but it had no legs. Instead it had a snake’s tail, long and brown, like the body of a spitting cobra. The royal jenglot.

The jenglots rustled through the greenery, circling us. They would swarm us in a moment.

Normally when I changed shape, for a minute or two, I had no idea where I was or why I was there, but in this case, with Jim next to me, I had to take a chance.

I took off my glasses and handed them to Jim. “Here, hold this for a second.”

He raised his eyebrows and took my glasses.

I let go. The world swirled into a thousand blurry lights in every color of the rainbow. Ooh, so pretty. Pretty little color bubbles.

A familiar scent swirled around me, captivating. Ooh, Jim. Jim. He was here, with me! Jim . . .

What is that smell?

Ugh. Nasty, disgusting scent. Unclean. Ew.

A jenglot! There was a jenglot coiling on Eyang Ida’s lap. Gross. Wait, what was Eyang Ida doing here? Where was I?

The Queen Jenglot raised her head, opened her mouth, and hissed at me, the black magic behind her flaring like demonic wings.

What? Outrageous. The nerve. Who did she think I was?

I stomped my huge white paw onto the ground and roared. The sound of my voice rolled like the toll of a giant’s gong, deafening, and my magic followed it like a blast wave. It touched the closest jenglot. The ugly creature hissed in panic, broke into pieces, as if instantly turned to ash, and disintegrated. All around me, jenglots vanished, breaking into ash and melting into thin air. The Queen Jenglot hissed, flailing. Its magic tried to fight me, but my roar swallowed it like a raging forest fire swallowed a puddle. The Queen vanished.

The disturbing stench disappeared. The woods exhaled, liberated of the evil taint, but Eyang Ida didn’t move. She was still bound. Not for long.

I padded to Eyang Ida on my big soft paws and curled by her feet, my left front paw on my right. Hold on. I will free you, too.

I faced Jim and let my magic spread from me. Flowers pushed through the moss at my feet, blooming into tiny yellow and white blossoms. A blue butterfly floated next to me, bouncing on soft wings. A white one joined it, then another and another . . .

Jim stared at me, his jaw hanging open.

My magic slid up the tree trunks. The oaks above us groaned, their branches moved, compelled by my power, and a ray of sunlight, pure and warm, fell on the old woman’s face. Eyang Ida took a deep breath and blinked.

Jim dropped my glasses into the moss.

THE problem with being a shapeshifter is that you can never keep your clothes on, which is why I always carried a spare outfit in my car. So when we pulled up in front of Eyang Ida’s son’s house and Jim carried the fragile old lady to the front door, I was able to knock with my modesty intact.

The door swung open and Wayan, Eyang Ida’s son, saw his mother. He grabbed her from Jim and ran inside. The family swarmed us and pulled us into the house. The air washed over us, bringing with it aromas from the kitchen: tumeric, garlic, onion, ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon, and the roast duck. Bebek Betutu was cooking somewhere nearby.

Everyone was talking at once. What happened, why, does she need to go to the hospital? I answered as fast as I could. She was attacked by black magic; she will be okay; no, the hospital isn’t needed, just bed rest and lots of love from her family; no, thank you, I wasn’t hungry . . . After the first twenty minutes, the storm of questions and excitement died down and Iluh got through to us.

“Thank you for saving my grandmother!”

The relief on her face was so obvious, I hated to shatter it. “It’s not over yet.”

Iluh’s face fell. “What do you mean?”

“I need to talk to you,” I told her.

A couple of minutes later Jim, Iluh, her mother Komang, and I sat in the wicker chairs on the back porch, away from the family’s buzz. Iluh and Komang looked alike: both pretty, graceful, and tall. Komang held a degree in chemical engineering. My mother and she had come to Atlanta as part of the same corporate expansion just after the Shift.

I faced Komang and spoke in English for Jim’s benefit. “This is Jim. He is . . .”

Oh gods what should I call him . . . If I introduced him as my boyfriend, it would get back to my mother.

“We work together,” Jim said.

Nice save.

“And we’re dating.”

Damn it!

Komang raised her eyebrows. “Congratulations!”

Argh! I almost slapped my face with my hand.

“Won’t it cause an issue at your workplace?” Iluh asked.

“It won’t.” Jim gave them a smile. “I’m the boss.”

I glared at him. What the hell are you so happy about? He grinned at me and patted my hand with his.

I turned to the two women. “Your mother was attacked by jenglots.”

Komang blinked at me. “A jenglot? How bizarre. She was always afraid of them. She saw one when she was a child. It wasn’t real, just something a taxidermist made out of some horsehair and a dead monkey, but it terrified her. She had nightmares about it for years.”

There was no such thing as coincidence when it came to magic. “Usually when a jenglot tribe appears, it begins with a Queen. She enchants a person and begins to feed. When the magic essence of the person is exhausted, he or she becomes a jenglot. The jenglot magic begins to poison the area. One by one the tribe grows. A typical tribe is about five to eight members. More than twenty, and the tribe becomes a swarm. We saw at least fifty jenglots around your mother.”

“Fifty?” Komang opened her eyes wide.

“Yes,” Jim said.

“A swarm of this size would have to steal a person every week,” I said. “There is no way fifty people vanished in Eyang Ida’s neighborhood and nobody noticed. Not only that, but because jenglot magic is so toxic, it poisons the area around their nest. It is difficult to purge. The purification in Eyang Ida’s house took very little effort.”

“What are you trying to say?” Iluh asked.

“Someone summoned the jenglot swarm. I think someone deliberately targeted your grandmother.”

The two women looked at each other.

“But why?” Komang asked.

“Eyang Ida has no enemies,” Iluh said.

“No personal grudges?” I asked. “No irate neighbors? Nobody jealous or mad at her? Any frenemies?”

Komang glanced at Iluh. “Frenemy?”

“A fake person who pretends to be nice but secretly hates you,” Iluh said. “I don’t think so.”

Komang shook her head. “No, she would’ve told me.”

“It doesn’t have to be someone with a grudge.” Jim leaned back in his chair. “Most homicides are committed for three reasons: sex, revenge, or profit.”

“We can rule out sex,” Komang said. “My mother was happily married for over fifty years. My father died two years ago and she isn’t looking for romance.”

“Revenge is probably not a factor either,” I said. “Your mother was universally loved and respected.”

“That leaves us with profit,” Jim said.

“She had a life insurance policy,” Iluh said.

Komang drew herself back. “Are you suggesting . . .”

Uh-oh. “It’s not connected to the life insurance,” I said quickly. “You need a body for the life insurance, and if everything had gone as planned, Eyang Ida would’ve become a jenglot. She would be declared missing and the family would have to wait years before she would be officially listed as deceased.”

“What other things of value did she have?” Jim asked.

“Well, there is the house,” Komang said. “You’ve seen it. It’s not something I would expect anyone to kill her over. People don’t murder each other for thirty-year-old three bedroom, two baths. Her car is safe and runs well, but it’s not expensive.”

“Any artifacts?” I asked. “Cultural items? Sometimes people don’t realize they own things that hold valuable magic.”

Komang sighed. “She collects My Little Pony toys.”

Iluh nodded. “You should’ve gone to the bedroom. She has shelves of those. She thinks they are pretty. She sculpts them out of modeling clay and paints them.”

That’s something I would’ve never guessed.

Iluh bit her lip.

Jim focused on her. “You thought of something.”

She exhaled. “It’s probably nothing. Eyang Ida owns part of the building where her salon is located. A few months ago a law firm contacted her asking if she would sell it.”

“I remember that,” Komang said. “We’ve looked over the proposal. She owned that place for years, so she turned them down.”

Jim turned alert, like a shark sensing a drop of blood in the water. “Did they say on whose behalf?”

“No.” Komang frowned. “I think the client remained anonymous.”

“Do you remember which law firm?” I asked.

“Abbot and something,” Komang said.

“Abbot, Sadlowski, and Shirley!” Iluh said, her face lighting up. “I remember because if you put all the capitals together you get—”

I giggled. Iluh giggled back.

Komang gave Iluh a disappointed mother look.

“They should’ve rearranged their names,” Iluh said.

“It’s a place to start,” Jim said.

I drove through the quiet streets to Eyang Ida’s salon. It was the best place to start. We could go after the law firm, but no lawyer worth his or her salt would divulge the name of their client if the client wished to remain anonymous. Right now, with the attempt on Eyang Ida’s life having failed, was the best time to snoop around and see if anyone was unsettled by it.

Jim sat in the seat next to me. It was the strangest thing. His face was relaxed, his pose lazy. Jim had only two modes: menacing and waiting to menace. He usually worked so hard on being scary, he intimidated people while he was asleep.

I slowed down, just to keep him languid a little longer. The way he sat now, draped over the seat, made me think of him lying on a blanket on the grass under the peach trees. Just lying there, quietly napping, with the sun on his face. I could lie next to him, read a book, and bring us some iced tea when we got thirsty . . . In another universe.

“What was the plan, telling Komang that we’re dating?” I demanded.

“Just keeping the record straight,” Jim said.

“You just told my mother’s BFF that I have a boyfriend. I’m going to get a call from her.”

“You can handle one phone call,” he said.

“And then the phone calls from my uncle and my aunt, and my cousin and my other cousin, and my once-removed cousin’s second daughter, and my roommate from college whom I haven’t seen in four years . . .”

Jim smiled.

“It’s not funny.”

“If you called them all together and made one big announcement, it would save you some trouble,” he said.

Ha. Ha. Oh so funny. “Is that why you’re inviting me to the barbeque? So you can knock it out?”

“They already know,” he said.

Great. Magic alone knew what he told them about me.

We pulled up in front of a long rectangular building. Built with sturdy red brick, it faired the magic well—the walls seemed mostly intact and the roof was in good repair. Five businesses occupied the building. First, Ida’s Hair Place, closed and dark, the door intact; then Vasil’s European Deli; followed by Family Chiropractic and Wellness Center; F&R Courier Service; and Eleventh Planet, a comic book store.

“Why offer to buy just one business?” I thought out loud. “That would make no sense.”

“Exactly,” Jim said.

“There is nothing super great about this location. The street has some traffic but it’s not really busy.”

“And the parking lot is more than half empty,” Jim added.

That was true. Two cars waited by the comic book shop, a horse tied to the chiropractor’s pole shifted from foot to foot, a large truck sat by Vasil’s Deli, and a bunch of bicycles rested in the bike racks by the courier service. I concentrated. I felt nothing mystical or magical about this location. It was thoroughly . . . average.

“Whoever this person is would have to either make the offer for all of the businesses—” Jim started.

“Or be one of the business owners in the building looking to expand,” I finished. “I feel an urge to shop.”

“As an attentive boyfriend and your caring alpha, I fully support you in it.”

Every time he said he was my boyfriend, I had to fight the need to go, “Wheeeee! He said he was my boyfriend!”

We got out of the car and walked toward Eyang Ida’s salon. Walking next to him always made me notice how large he was. He loomed above me, almost a foot taller than I was. He was walking next to me, wasn’t he? How did that even happen?

“Jim, why are you here?” I asked.

“Do you want me to be somewhere else?” he asked.

“No!” Poor half-blind Dali, sounding so desperate. “I meant that you have the Pack to run and here you are with me. You’re almost never with me.” Okay, now I’d gone from desperate to pathetic.

“I know,” he said. “But you are Pack. This is Pack business. The rest of the Pack will hold on for one weekend. They know where to find me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

We were almost to the door.

Jim stopped. I looked at his face. His eyes were warm and I stopped with my foot up in the air. His eyes were never warm. Merciless, guarded, hard, yes, but not warm. Not like this.

“I want to know what you do,” he said quietly. “I want to hang out with you and spend time with you. I like us being together.”

I almost melted right there. And then guilt mugged me. I’ve been avoiding the Keep. I could’ve gone and spent time with him. He was busy and probably miserable and I’ve been selfish and worrying about who would think what. That wasn’t me.

I reached over, ducked under his arm, rubbed my head against him, and smiled. He squeezed me to him, the tips of his fingers lightly sliding over my skin. Oh my gods, he did the cat thing. It made me want to pull his clothes off just so I could touch more of him.

We stopped by the door and sniffed in unison.

Hmm, let’s see, Eyang Ida, car fumes, a half dozen scents of soaps and shampoos, five different people scents, all about a day old—must’ve been her customers . . . Nothing fresh except Iluh’s scent deposited a few hours ago. She must’ve came to the salon to check on Eyang Ida.

“You think she could’ve done it?” Jim asked.

“Iluh?” I turned it over in my head. “No. I think she loves her grandmother. But also Iluh doesn’t have strong ties to the community. Jenglots don’t exactly slither around in the street. They are unique to Indonesia. She might have known of them but not where to get them or who could summon them.”

“Do you know who could summon them?” he asked.

“And that right there is the thing.” I frowned at him. “Most people from Bali do a little bit of magic. Every time you make an offering, you do magic. It’s not uncommon for people to occasionally sacrifice things. But jenglots are tied to black magic. A typical witch doctor might make a jenglot like a voodoo doll, and then feed it magic and blood and hope it would come to life and do his bidding. Or they might buy an aborted fetus, embalm it, and make a tuyul out of it.”

Jim blinked.

“It’s a thing,” I told him. “But anyway, I would know. I am the chosen of Barong. I’m the White Tiger, a force for good, and I guard the balance. When a black magician does something like create a jenglot or unleash a tuyul, it creates an imbalance and I correct it. It would be the same if I tried to use my power for something unnatural, like stave off a normal illness in my relative. I could save them for a time, but a chosen of Rangda, the Demon Queen, would appear and undo what I had done. The balance must be maintained. Right now there is no champion of Rangda in the community. He went to live with his daughter in Orlando, because he is elderly and she is worried about his health. And if there was a new one, he or she would come and talk to me. It would be my business to know about them and their business to know about me.”

“You would talk?” Jim asked.

I nodded. “We would both be guardians of balance. Do you remember that Russian, the one who is the priest of the God of All Evil?”

“Roman?” Jim asked. “Yes. Nice guy.”

I spread my arms. “It’s like that. I could have a nice, civil meal with the chosen of Rangda. Not that we would like each other and some of them do go nuts and become aggressive in her name, but it’s about balance. Summoning fifty jenglots, that’s not balance. That’s some crazy shit, that’s what that is.”

We stopped by the deli. It looked dark. The paper sign read: CLOSED. I tried the handle. Locked. Hmm. If Vasil was being eaten by jenglots, too, there was something seriously bad going on.

We moved on to the Family Chiropractic and Wellness Center.

“Are you going to menace them?” I asked. “Because if you are, they won’t talk to me, so you can just wait outside.”

Jim gave me a flat look and held the door open for me. I walked into a quiet reception area. The walls were painted a soothing mint green and large metal flowers decorated the wall. The air smeller faintly of rose geranium and lavender. Someone must’ve been warming some oils. A man in his thirties smiled at me from behind the counter. “May I help you?”

“Hi.” Jim approached the counter, his hand out. I looked at his face and my jaw dropped. Jim, the “punch through solid wall to get to the bad guy” Alpha, was gone. He looked . . . friendly. Concerned but friendly. Like he lived in a suburb and invited neighbors over for cookouts friendly.

Jim was shaking the man’s hand. “My name is Jim Shrapshire. This is my colleague, Dali. Her relative owns a salon two doors down from you.”

“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Cole Waller. We noticed Ms. Indrayani wasn’t here today. Is she alright?”

I picked my jaw off the floor and made my mouth move. “She isn’t feeling good this morning.”

Concern touched his face. It seemed genuine. “Sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

To tell him or not to tell him? If I didn’t tell them, and this was connected to the property, they could be in danger.

“I’m afraid it is. Someone used magic to target her.”

“Seriously?” The man turned back and yelled, “Amanda!”

A blond woman emerged from the depths of the office. “Yes?”

“This is my wife, Amanda. She’s the chiropractor.” The man came out from behind the counter and stood next to his wife. “Someone tried to hurt that nice lady who owns the salon.”

Amanda blinked. “Ms. Indrayani? Oh my God, what happened? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine for now,” Jim said, his face concerned. “We believe someone targeted her because they want this property. Have you received any buyout offers?”

Cole frowned. “Yes. Yes, we have.”

He walked back behind the desk, opened a filing cabinet, riffled through the files hanging on the metal racks, and produced a piece of paper. I glanced at it. Abbot, Sadlowski, and Shirley letterhead, letter, enclosed offer to purchase. Dated two months ago.

“Did you agree to sell?” Jim asked.

“We thought about it,” Cole said. “The price was generous.”

“But this place is our own. It’s about five minutes from our house. We have an established client list,” Amanda said. “And our son’s school is only ten minutes from here. The bus drops him off two hundred feet down the street. It’s so nice. He walks here, gets a snack, does his homework and then we go home together. If we moved, he would have to be dropped off near our home and with the phones not working during magic, we wouldn’t even know if he made it or not. My older brother died on his way from school. He was run over . . .”

“We said no,” Cole finished for her and hugged her gently.

“Do you have any idea who the buyer is?” Jim asked.

Cole shook his head. “Got to be someone in the building. I’ve talked to some people, but nobody admitted it. The thing is, they’re offering two hundred and fifty grand. If it’s one of the owners and the other four got the same offer that makes it a cool million for the building. I can’t imagine any of us pulling together that kind of money. There is Vasil, who runs the deli. He works six days a week and half day on Sunday. Then there is the courier place next door. Never see more than three couriers there. The guy who runs it, Steve Graham, is some sort of fitness nut. Runs marathons and complains about how in the future magic is going to make everyone fat. Makes his couriers ride bicycles.”

“Dotes on his daughter,” Amanda said.

“Yes, he talks about her all the time.”

“The Eleventh Planet is run by two college kids,” Amanda said. “They host card games and have a tip jar on the counter. I’d be surprised if they have two nickels to rub together.”

“The thing I don’t understand is why,” Cole said. “The building’s kind of old and the location is great for us, but it’s not exactly Central Market Lane.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual?” I asked. “Strange behavior from the other owners, odd magic?”

“Unusual?” Amanda shook her head. “Well, Vasil isn’t here today. I suppose that’s unusual. He’s usually here like clockwork. A very nice man.”

“Do you think they’ll come after us?” Cole asked.

“It’s a possibility,” Jim said.

Amanda sighed. Her shoulders drooped. “God, if it’s not one thing, it’s the other. You know, even with all of the things that go on, I never worried about magic. I mostly worry about traffic accidents.”

Cole put his arm around his wife again.

I handed him a card with my name and phone number. “If something strange does happen, please call me.”

STEVEN Graham turned out to be a spare man in his forties. He looked like a bicycle enthusiast, his body toned, his frame narrow, and his movements economical, as he stood behind a counter, the wall behind him lined with sample box sizes and price stickers. The lone courier remaining in the office, on other hand, looked more like a doorman in some nightclub. Big, broad shoulders, chest slabbed with muscle. He gave Jim an I’m-a-bigger-man stare. Jim looked at him for a moment. The courier crossed his arms on his chest. Ha-ha.

When we were young, we could hide behind tables and chairs when threatened. But once we reached five, that behavior wasn’t acceptable anymore, so we folded our arms on our chest, forming a barrier and protecting vital organs. Judging by the courier’s clenched teeth and fists, he was building one hell of a barrier between himself and Jim. That’s right. My Jim is scary. It won’t help you, anyway.

“Shipping or notice?” Steven Graham asked.

“Neither,” I said, while the courier and Jim looked at each other. The place smelled like packing supplies: cardboard and glue. Plastic tape had become too expensive a while ago and now the boxes were sealed with homemade paper tape dipped in glue made by blending cornstarch with boiling water. That’s exactly what I smelled, and tons of it.

“I’m a relative of Ida Indrayani, who owns the salon in this building. She was magically attacked, and we’re looking into who might be responsible.”

Steve took a step back. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine for now,” Jim said.

“What the hell is this world coming to?” Steve shook his head. “Was it a sexual assault?”

What? “No,” I said. “It was a magical assault.”

“I keep telling my daughter, you have got to carry Mace. There are perverts and murderers in this world, but what are you going to do? You can’t send children to school in a tank. What happened to basic human kindness? You know, the good things.” Steve waved at the courier. “You can stop scowling, Robbie. Excuse him. We got robbed a year ago. He’s my security. He’s here to look scary.”

“And if things get serious?” Jim asked.

Robbie flexed his chest at him. Oh you silly, silly man.

“Stop that.” Steve waved at him.

“We’re were wondering if you received any offers to sell this property,” I said.

“As a matter of fact, I have. Some lunatic offered me a lot of money for it.” Steve shrugged. “I would’ve taken it, too. My kid wants to go to TCU. Forty grand per year. For-ty. I wrote them back, but I never got a reply. I think it was a bogus offer. The amount of money was outrageous for these premises.”

“If you received a notice, you may be a target as well,” Jim said.

“Well, that’s just great. Fantastic.” Steve shook his head. “Because it’s not enough my people get assaulted on the street, now this, too. One of my guys was riding by a fence last month and it sprouted teeth and tried to eat him. Ruined his back wheel.”

“Do you have any idea who might be wanting this building or why?”

Steve shrugged. “Who knows? Sicko idiots are everywhere. This is what happens when people stop living right. You know, you’ve got to be eating clean. You’ve got to take care of your body. It’s about your carbon and magical footprint. I’ve been here eight years. I’m the oldest business in the building and I’ve got to tell you, it’s nothing special.”

“Thank you for your time.”

“Sure, sure.” Steve pulled a card from the holder and offered it to us. “Think of us if you need to ship something.”

We went outside. “Sexual assault?” I raised my eyebrows.

“He has a daughter. He’s probably constantly worried she’ll get assaulted,” Jim said.

We strolled down to Eleventh Planet.

“You’ve made a weird face,” Jim said.

“I was picturing that guy inside the shop on a bicycle. I can’t do it. But I can picture him with a club in his hand just fine.”

“Imagine that,” Jim said.

“Speaking of weird faces, you smiled in the chiropractor’s office!”

Jim shook his head. “I don’t remember that.”

“I saw it! I was there. It happened, Jim.”

His eyebrows furrowed. His face turned so grim, that if he attempted to smile, it would probably crack and shatter into pieces. “You must be mistaken.”

“Jim!”

He smiled at me. It was a brilliant, dazzling smile. It almost knocked me off my feet. Usually when Jim showed his teeth to people, he did it because he was about to kill them.

“Before I became Chief of Security, I worked for Wendelin. You remember her?”

I did. Wendelin wasn’t someone you’d forget. When she joined the Pack, she decided to call herself Wendelin Fuchs, which stood for Wendelin Fox, just like I chose to call myself Harimau. With my eyesight and aversion for blood, I knew I would be in for a rough road, so I chose my last name because every time I said it, it reminded me that I was a tiger. Wendelin chose hers because she wanted to mislead people. She turned into a wolf, ruthless, cunning, and so scary, even Mahon, the alpha of Clan Heavy who turned into a giant Kodiak, made the effort to avoid her. I had no idea Jim had worked for her. When I met him, he was beta of Clan Cat and as far as I knew, that was all he did. When Curran made him the Chief of Security after Wendelin retired, everyone, including me, was surprised.

“For the first three years with her all I did was covert work,” Jim said. “Pretend to be someone you’re not. Go to the right place at the right time, listen, talk to people, be likeable and be convincing. It wasn’t my favorite part of the job, but I’ve learned to be what people expect me to be. People expect the Chief of Security to be a scary hardass, so I give them that. Werecats expect their alpha to show teeth every time someone steps out of line, so I give them that, too.”

My heart sank. “Does this mean that if I expect caring boyfriend Jim, you’ll give me that?”

“No,” he said. “You just get me the way I am, which means you’re screwed. I’m mostly an asshole.”

I put my hand on the door handle of Eleventh Planet. “Can you do a comic geek?”

“What will I get if I do it?”

“What do you want?”

“Make me dinner tonight,” he said.

Dinner. Offering food was a special thing to the shapeshifters. Our animal counterparts showed affection with food. It said so many things without words. I care about you. I will share what I have with you. I will protect you. And sometimes it said I love you. I’d made him dinner before, but the way he said it now sent little shivers down my back. I forced my voice to sound casual. “You’ve got a deal.”

THE owners of the comic shop were college kids. We only met one, Brune Wayne, a short blond guy in his early twenties, who spent way too much time at the gym, waved his arms when he talked and immediately explained to us that he was named after his grandfather and lamented that he was only one letter away from being Batman. His partner in crime, Christian Leander, was helping his parents with some furniture today. The comic book shop was just like all the other comic book shops in Atlanta. With computers gone, paper books and comics once again became a viable form of entertainment, and the shop was doing good business.

Jim knew way more about comics than I had expected. He and Brune had clicked and Brune showed us around, talking nonstop. It was too bad about the nice old lady, and they did get a letter but they thought it was a prank, because nobody would pay crazy money like that, so they threw it in the trash. And these are hand-painted miniatures. A local guy makes them. Look, they are magic. The dragon’s eyes glow. Isn’t that like the coolest thing?

By the time we got out of there, my ears were ringing and I had so many comic book titles and superhero names stuck in my hair, I’d need to shampoo twice to get it all out. But one thing was clear. Brune didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

Frustration nagged at me. Anyone who could summon a whole swarm of jenglots was dangerous and wasn’t afraid to kill. So far all we had were possible victims. Pulling off that kind of magic took dedication and years of practice. None of them felt that powerful, magically, and none of them seemed to have the kind of money hiring someone of that power would require, not to mention dropping a million on buying up this property.

We had to make progress and soon, because he or she would try to finish what they started. I couldn’t face going back to the Indrayani family and telling them, “So sorry your beloved grandma is dead because I was too stupid to figure out who was responsible.”

“Look,” Jim said.

A car pulled up to Vasil’s Deli. A man got out. He was in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair. He walked up to the deli’s door, keys in hand. His fingers were shaking. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot. He dropped the keys, crouched to pick them up, finally managing to get one in the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside.

Jim and I walked toward the deli. The CLOSED sign had been flipped to OPEN. The man was sitting in a chair, slumped over the counter, nodding off. Jim opened the door and I saw it, the dark furry cloud of magic, wrapped around the man, hanging off his back like a revolting liquid sack bristling with boar quills. Thin, slimy strands crossed his neck, garroting his throat, and stretched across his face, trying to worm their way to his nose and his eyes.

I jumped onto the counter and grabbed his hands. The magic hissed at me. The liquid sack on the man’s back broke and a nest of black furry snakes erupted, wriggling toward me, each armed with a dark beak where the mouth should’ve been. Jim cleared the counter and sliced through the phantom snakes with his knife. His blade passed through them. They didn’t even notice.

I pushed with my magic. The beaks struck at me, gouging bloody wounds in my arms. I pushed harder, trying to purge the awful darkness. It persisted, tightening around the man. I strained. The magic slithered back, retreating from his face but clenching to his back.

The man opened his blue eyes and looked at me.

“Mr. Vasil?” I asked.

“It’s Mr. Dobrev,” he said quietly. “Vasil is my given name.” He looked at my hands holding his. “Don’t let go.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“Dali, talk to me,” Jim said, his face grim.

“You see the magic?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Right now I’m holding it back, but this is all I can do. If I let go, it will swallow him again.”

“Why is this happening to me?” Mr. Dobrev asked.

“We don’t know,” I said. “When did it start?”

“Two nights ago. At first it was just a heaviness, then a headache. I went to bed early. I thought I had caught the flu. Then she came.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

He leaned to me. His voice shook. “The hag.”

“Tell me more,” I said. “Tell me about the hag.”

His face went slack. He had big, rough hands, the kind strong men who work with their hands a lot get, and his calloused fingers were trembling. He was terrified. “I opened my eyes. The bedroom was dark. I felt this oppressive weight on my chest, so heavy. Like a car. My bones should’ve cracked and I don’t know why they didn’t. And then I saw her. She was sitting on my chest. She was . . .” He gulped the air. “Thin . . . like a skeleton. Long, matted grey hair, black fur on her arms, and fingers with talons, like a bird. Long talons, just like in the painting.”

“What painting?”

“A painting I saw . . . long ago. She sat on top of me and stared. I couldn’t call out to my son. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even wriggle my toes. We stayed like this for hours. I finally fell asleep and woke up tired. So tired. Last night she came again. I could barely move this morning. I think she’s trying to kill me.”

Jim looked at me.

“The old hag syndrome,” I said. Most of my magical expertise was tied to what Westerners considered Far East, but I had some education about European myths. You can’t live in the U.S. and not be exposed to it. “Before the Shift, people thought it had to do with deep sleep paralysis, which occurs when the brain transitions from rapid eye movement phase to wakefulness. Sometimes mental wires get crossed and the brain partially wakes up but the body remains paralyzed, as if we are still asleep. It feels like a great weight is pinning you down and you are frozen. Before the scientific age, people thought it happened because of demons, incubi and succubi, or sometimes, old hags. If the legends are true, she’ll feed on him until he is dead and I don’t have the power to purge her like this.”

“We’re going to have to kill the hag,” Jim guessed.

That’s why I loved him. He was smart and quick.

“Mr. Dobrev,” I said. “I need you to fall asleep.”

He shuddered like a leaf. “No.”

“It’s the only way. We will be right here. When she comes, we’ll take care of her.”

“No.”

“You will wake up, Mr. Dobrev. You don’t know me, but trust me, you will wake up. Go to sleep now, while you still have some strength left.”

He looked into my eyes and let go of my fingers.

“Take a deep breath,” I told him, trying to sound confident. “It will be okay. It will be fine.”

The dark magic rolled over him. Mr. Dobrev took a long shuddering breath. He looked like he was drowning.

“It’s okay,” I murmured. “It’s okay. I’m here. I won’t go anywhere.”

“Please,” he said. “Why me? Why . . .”

I felt so terrible for him. He was so scared. But it was the only way. “Let it happen,” I murmured.

Gradually his eyes lost their light and turned glassy. He blinked, then blinked again, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.

“If the myths are true, she has to become corporeal to kill him,” I said. “When that happens, we have to get her first.”

Jim pulled a second knife from the sheath on his hip.

We waited. The shop was quiet around us.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “It has to be connected to Eyang Ida. That’s just too big of a coincidence. But jenglots and the old hag are literally from opposite sides of the planet. No magic user should be able to summon both.”

“We need to look into that law firm,” Jim said.

“He did say he saw the hag in a painting before?” I asked.

“Yes.”

It meant something. We sat and waited.

I had no idea how much time had passed. It had to be close to an hour. Jim brought my cursing kit to me and I sat with it, my ink, brush, and papers ready, staring at the deli meat cuts behind the glass under the counter. I was hungry. The rest of the shop was filled with shelves crowded with canned goods, Slavic-themed snacks and every fruit and vegetable that could be pickled. I really wanted to try some, but taking without permission was stealing.

A few minutes after Mr. Dobrev’s breathing had evened out, the furry magic began to crawl ever so slowly, shifting from his back onto his chest, and finally now it sat right under his neck, a big ugly blob that took up all of him all the way to the waist.

The roar of a water engine came from the outside. I glanced through the glass storefront. A yellow school bus rolled down the street.

The sack on Mr. Dobrev’s chest trembled.

I leaned forward.

A ripple shifted the fur. Another. It looked like a tennis ball rolling under some revolting blanket.

I pulled a paper out and began writing a curse. The curse had to be fresh, so I would finish it the second before I actually slapped it on her. I paused with my brush in the air. One stroke left.

Outside a boy, about ten or eleven, turned the corner and walked toward the building. Must be Cole and Amanda’s son.

A thin black talon broke the surface of the fur. Something was about to come out.

The air in the middle of the street wavered, as if suddenly a cloud of vapor had escaped from underground and got caught in a dust devil. What in the world . . .

The air turned, twisted, and shaped itself into a car. What the hell? I’ve never heard of a magic car appearing out of thin air . . .

My brain blazed through the evidence, making a connection. My older brother died on his way from school, Amanda’s voice said in my head. He was run over . . . Oh my gods.

The car turned solid. Its engine revved. There was nobody behind the wheel.

“Jim!” I pointed at the boy. “Save him!”

He whipped around, saw the car, the boy, and leaped right through the window into the street, shards of glass flying everywhere.

A knobby elbow pushed its way out of the sack, followed by a bony hand, each finger armed with a two-inch, black talon. The hag was coming.

Jim dashed across the parking lot. The car, a huge ’69 Dodge Charger, snarled like a living thing, racing straight for the boy. Jim sprinted, so, so fast . . . Please make it, honey. Please!

The head of the hag emerged, one baleful pale eye then the other, a crooked long nose and wide slash of a mouth filled with shark teeth.

The muscle car was almost on the boy. Jim was ten feet away.

Please, please, please don’t get killed.

Jim swept the boy off his feet and the car rammed him and smashed into a pole.

It hit him. Oh gods, the Charger hit him. Something inside me broke. I froze in agonizing horror.

The hag crawled out of the magic and perched on Mr. Dobrev’s chest, clutching at him with her long, creepy toes. She was my size but emaciated, bony, her meager flesh stretched too tight over her frame, while her skin sagged in loose folds and wrinkles.

The car revved its engine. It was still there. It didn’t disappear and that meant its target was still alive.

Jim leaped over the Charger’s hood, the boy in his arms, landed, and sprinted to us.

The hag reached for Mr. Dobrev’s throat. I painted the last stroke on the curse and slapped it on her back. “Poisoned daggers!”

Three daggers pierced the hag, one after the other, sticking out of her back.

The Charger reversed and chased after Jim.

The hag screeched like a giant gull, spat at me, and kept going. It didn’t work.

I grabbed a new paper, wrote another curse, and threw it at her. The curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls had worked for me before. The hag clawed at the paper. It pulsed with green. Strips of paper shot out and fell harmlessly to the floor. They should’ve tied her in knots. Damn it!

The car was feet behind Jim. Please make it! Please!

The hag clawed at Mr. Dobrev’s neck.

I grabbed a pickle jar and hurled it at her head. It bounced off her skull with a meaty whack. She howled.

“Get off him!” I snarled.

Jim leaped through the broken window. The Charger rammed the opening, right behind him, and stopped, its engine roaring, wedged between the wall and the wooden frame. Stuck!

I grabbed another jar and jumped on the counter. The hag screeched in my face and I pounded her with the jar. “Get off him, you bitch!”

The Charger snarled. The metal of its doors bent under pressure. The car was forcing its way in.

The jar broke in my hand. The pickle juice washed over the hag. She clawed me, too fast to dodge. Her talons raked my arms, searing me like red-hot knives. I screamed. She let go and I saw the bones of my arms through the bloody gashes.

Jim released the boy. The child scrambled to the back of the store. Jim leaped to the Charger and hammered on the car’s hood, trying to knock the vehicle back. The Charger roared. Jim planted his feet, gripped the hood, and strained. The muscles on his arms bulged. I’d seen Jim lift a normal car before, but the Charger didn’t move.

I punched the hag in the head, putting all my shapeshifter strength into it. She wasn’t getting Mr. Dobrev as long as I breathed. The hag clawed at me again, screaming, slicing my shoulders, her hands like blades. I kept punching her, but it wasn’t doing me any good.

Jim’s feet slid back. A moment and the car would be through.

It was a car. I knew cars and Jim knew hand-to-hand combat. “Switch!” I screamed.

Jim glanced at me, let go of the car’s hood and leaped onto the counter. His knife flashed and the hag’s right hand fell off.

I dashed out of the store, jerked a mirror off Pooki’s driver side, and ran back in. The Charger was halfway in, its wheels spinning. I wrote the curse, slapped the paper onto the hood, and planted Pooki’s mirror on it.

Magic crackled like fireworks.

The car’s hood buckled, as if an invisible giant punched it with a fist. Its left front wheel fell off. Its hood bubbled up, as if another punch had landed. The windshield cracked. Something inside the car crunched with a sickening metallic snap. Water shot out through the hole in the hood. The roof of the car caved in. Both passenger and driver doors fell off. The headlights exploded. With another crunch, the entire vehicle shuddered and collapsed into a heap, looking like something with colossal teeth had chewed it for a while and spat it out.

Jim stopped next to me. He was carrying the hag’s head by her hair. We looked at each other, both bloody and cut up, and looked back at the car. Jim raised his eyebrows.

“The curse of transference,” I said. “This is everything I’ve ever done to Pooki. Except all at the same time.”

Jim looked at the ruined car. His eyes widened. He struggled to say something.

“Jim?”

He unhinged his jaw. “No more racing.”

BEING a shapeshifter had its disadvantages. For one, smells ordinary to normal people drove you nuts. If you burned something in the kitchen, you didn’t just open the windows, you had to open the entire house and go outside. It meant the dynamics within the shapeshifter packs and clans were unlike those of a human society. And by the way, most of those dynamics were bullshit. Yes, we did take some of the traits of our animal counterparts: cats had a strong independent streak, bouda—the werehyena—females tended to be dominant, and wolves exhibited a strong OCD tendency, which helped them survive in the wild by tracking and then running game over long distances. But the entire pack hierarchy was actually much closer to the dominance hierarchy of wild primate groups, which made sense considering that the human part of us was in control. And of course, the most important disadvantage was loupism. In moments of extreme stress, Lyc-V, the virus responsible for our powers, “bloomed” within our bodies in great numbers. Sometimes the bloom triggered a catastrophic response and drove a shapeshifter into insanity. An insane shapeshifter was called loup and there was no coming back from that road. Loupism was a constant specter hanging over us.

But right now, as I poured water over my arms to wash away the blood, I was grateful for every single cell of Lyc-V in my body. My gashes were knitting themselves closed. If you watched close enough, you would see muscle fibers slide in the wounds. It was incredibly gross.

Amanda was sitting on the floor, holding her son and rocking back and forth. The boy looked like he wanted to escape, but he must’ve sensed that his mother was deeply upset and so he sat quietly and let her clench him to her. Cole hovered over them, holding a baseball bat and wearing that tense, keyed-up expression on his face men sometimes get when they are terrified for their families and not sure where the danger was coming from. Right now if a butterfly happened to float past Cole on fuzzy wings, he would probably pound it into dust with his bat.

Mr. Dobrev was staring at the hag’s head Jim left sitting on the counter. He’d walked around the store for a minute or two, surveying the damage, and then come back to the head and stared.

“Mr. Dobrev,” I called. “She’s dead.”

“I know.” He turned to me. “I can’t believe it.”

“You said you saw her in a painting before?”

“When I was a boy. She looked exactly like that.”

I was right. I was completely right. Good. Good, good, good, I hated not knowing what I was dealing with.

Jim stepped through the door, pale-faced Brune behind him.

“Where is Steven?” I asked.

“He grabbed a bicycle and went to his daughter’s school to check on her,” Brune said.

Well, I could certainly understand that.

Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“I’m okay,” I told him.

For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.

“We thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It’s not. It’s curse based, Jim.”

He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.

“Most magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn’t also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can’t be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“So when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knew it was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”

“Logically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.

“That’s what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don’t know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It’s not a mythological being. That’s something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”

“Amanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”

“This magic isn’t spell based or talent based. It’s curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn’t met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let’s say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”

Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”

I waved my hands at him. “That’s not the point.”

“No, that’s the kind of information I need to know.”

“Okay, probably I could.”

Jim’s expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

“Jim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can’t get it anyway; you’re a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”

“Can cats be affected by human gonorrhea?”

“Not necessarily, but the curse would still try to infect the cat. If I wanted to make a curse more specific, I would define it as ‘any creature with only one leg,’ which would spare the three-legged cat. Even more specific: any man with one leg. There is a limit to how specific you can get. Back to our current situation. I believe someone has cursed these people to fall prey to their worst fear. I am not sure exactly how this curse was structured, but I think it manifests the irrational fears they had since childhood. The curse relies on them to supply it with the details of their worst fears. Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots, so she got a giant swarm. Dobrev was afraid of a hag, so it gave him a hag. And when it came to Amanda’s fears, it made a living car. That’s what Amanda saw in her mind when she worried about her son.”

“Makes sense,” Jim said. “But wouldn’t that take a lot of magic?”

“Yes and no. Cursing is a pay-to-play magic. If there is a curse, there must be a sacrifice. My curses don’t always work, because the price I pay is small: special paper, special ink, special brush and the years I spent learning calligraphy. This”—I raised my index fingers and made a circle, encompassing the ruined shop—“this would take a real sacrifice. Blood or flesh or something.”

Jim frowned. “What’s so important about the building that makes it worth that kind of sacrifice?”

He read my mind. “Exactly. I don’t know. But whoever this person is, they are committed. This isn’t going to stop. There will be more. What is Brune afraid of?”

“Brune!” Jim barked.

The comic book owner stopped. “Yes?”

“When you were a kid, what were you afraid of?”

“Being short.”

“You are short,” I blurted out.

“Yes, but I’m ripped.” Brune flexed behind Jim. “So I’m okay.”

I had no idea how being short could kill you. My body still hurt all over as if someone had put me through a meat grinder and thinking about it made my head hurt.

An imperceptible shift rolled over us, as if the planet somehow turned over in its bed. The magic vanished. The electric lights came on in the shop.

Everyone exhaled.

I dropped Jim off near a Pack safe house. He wanted to take a shower and change clothes. I drove to the meat market and bought another big steak. And then I drove home. I needed to take a shower and make dinner.

Magic always had a price, but in cursing that price was very clearly defined. Pay the right amount of the right commodity—the more precious, the better—and get desired result. And whoever was cursing the store owners knew exactly how far he or she could push it. The curser had cursed for their worst fears to manifest, trusting that the manifestations would kill them. He or she didn’t curse them to die. That would’ve required even greater sacrifice, his life or the life of a loved one. Just any life wouldn’t do. A sacrifice had to come at a real cost to the one casting the curse.

All of this made me anxious. We’d stopped three attempts to murder the store owners. That meant three sacrifices wasted. The person would come after us. I had no idea what my worst fear was. Well, no, I knew. My worst fear was that I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t woman enough, sexy enough, hot enough. I’d analyzed myself to death. I had the kind of brain that refused to stay quiet, except when Jim was near. Then it shut up and let me bask in my quiet happiness.

I got home, took a shower, and inspected the kitchen. My mother had been through it. There was cooked rice and a vegetable curry on the stove, and the fridge had been restocked with everything from tofu and cucumbers to apples and watermelon.

I’ve learned that Jim, like most shapehsifters, didn’t care for overly spicy food. He would eat it heroically, but he preferred lighter seasoning. I filled a pot with water, unwrapped the steak and dropped it in.

Blood. Ew. The scent drifted to me from the water. I got a wooden spoon and swished the steak around to get all of the blood and possible contaminants off. I pinned the steak with a spoon and poured the water off, then I got a clean towel, laid it on the counter, slid the steak onto it and patted it dry with the towel. So far so good.

I transferred the steak to a cutting board; got some garlic, squeezed it through a press; added a little tiny bit of pepper, salt, and a little bit of olive oil; smushed it all with a spoon and spread it on the steak.

I could still smell the meat.

And now I reeked of garlic. Hi, Jim, I’m your sexy garlic-smelling date.

I went to the phone to call my mother. My purifying magic came to me from my father’s line. But the curses, spells, and the systematic approach, that was all my mother. She saw things clearly, the way I did, and she had more experience.

My answering machine blinked with red. I pushed a button.

“Dali, this is your mother.”

Like I wouldn’t know.

“Komang called. She says you were there with a man.”

I leaned against the island.

“She said the man was very dark and said he was your boyfriend! I want to kno . . .”

I clicked the next message.

“This is your aunt Ayu . . .”

Click.

“Dali!” My cousin Ni Wayan. “My mother told me that you have a boyfriend . . .”

Click.

“Boyfriend? What?”

Click.

Click.

Click.

“Dali,” my uncle Aditya said. He was all the way up in North Carolina. The magic has been down for an hour. How did they even get ahold of him this fast? “I am so happy for you.”

I pressed Delete All and dialed my mother’s number. I didn’t know what was sadder, the fact that my family lived to gossip or that all of them were so overjoyed that some male person finally took an interest in me.

She didn’t pick up.

I listened to the answering machine come on with a click.

“Hi, Mom. Thank you for the food. I found out what’s wrong with Eyang Ida. Please call me back when you get in. I need some advice.”

I hung up and looked around the kitchen. I felt so alone all of a sudden. Was this what it would be like when Jim and I broke up?

Sometimes it was best not to get into relationships in the first place. Then you never had to deal with heartache. And we hadn’t even had sex yet.

Not that sex always improved relationships or somehow magically fixed them. My first sexual experience wasn’t amazing. I was fifteen, my then-boyfriend was sixteen, and it was the first time for both of us. We were both awkward and nervous enough to turn the whole thing into one long fumble. He kept asking me if I liked it and I kept thinking, “If that’s all there is to it, wow, that’s a letdown.” When we finished, he asked me if it was good for me and then he asked if I thought he had a small penis.

We quietly broke up after that. We never talked about it; we just went our separate ways. I’ve had relationships since. I dated a gorgeous blond guy in college. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. He turned out to be dumb as a board. He was attracted to me because he bought into the whole mystical sexy Asian girl thing. Combined with my turning into a white tiger, he was sold. The sex was great, but eventually we had to talk. He was disappointed I wasn’t Chinese, and I never understood why he thought I would be, because I don’t look Chinese at all. He didn’t know Indonesia was a country. He couldn’t find it on a map even after I showed it to him several times. I told him about Bali and gave him a book with pictures. One night, about two months into our relationship he was laying on the bed next to me and asked me if I would wear a kimono for him like a geisha. And then he asked if we had geishas where I was from. I realized it had to stop.

There had been a couple of guys since, but I always knew they weren’t the One. It didn’t make me any better at relationships.

I sighed. I was brooding. I didn’t like to fail and since my brain ran across a roadblock, it now turned inward in sheer frustration. The One would be here any minute, if the Pack didn’t kidnap him to save the world or resolve some life-shattering crisis. He would be starving. I needed to make him that steak.

I had just managed to slide the steak off the pan onto the cutting board when the doorbell rang.

Jim.

I ran to open it.

Jim stood in the doorway. He was wearing black again. Black jeans, black T-shirt, and black boots. The scars on his arms where the hag had sliced him up had healed to narrow light lines. His gaze snagged on me.

I was wearing shorts, a white tank top, and a blue apron with white-yellow flowers. The apron was a bit too long. I realized I was still holding a spatula. There was something in the way Jim looked at me, with a kind of lingering appreciation, that made my heart speed up.

“Come in,” I said, my voice squeaky.

“Thank you.”

I locked the door behind him. Awkward blind tiger girl is awkward. What else is new?

He stalked into my kitchen. I liked the way he moved, like a massive cat, unhurried, almost lazy, unless something interested him and then he would become all blinding speed and overwhelming power. His scent followed him. He had no idea, but he could make me do all kinds of stupid things just with his scent alone.

He sat on the stool at the counter.

“I made you a steak,” I said and poked at it with a spatula. “It’s still hot.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t you want to eat it? I know you’re hungry.”

“Not right now.”

“It will get cold.” Here I went through an obstacle course to make him the thing, and he didn’t even want it, silly man.

“It’s best to let the steak stand a few minutes after cooking.”

“Why?” Was it me, or was there a strange almost purring quality to his voice.

“If you cut it right away, all the juices will run out and you’ll get a dry piece of meat.”

“Ew.” I waved my spatula. “Please keep your carnivore details to yourself . . .”

He caught me by my shoulders and leaned close. Oh my gods, things were happening. His lips touched mine, hot and gentle, forging a connection. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I dropped the spatula on the floor, closed my eyes, opened my mouth and let him in. His scent swirled around me, intoxicating, the pressure of his lips on mine deliberate but careful. I lapped at his tongue, my hands stroking the broad width of his shoulders. The muscles were so taut with tension under my fingertips, as if his whole body vibrated with barely contained power. The hint of it sparked an eager need inside me. I wanted him to let go for me. I wanted the real Jim. If I could do that, I could do anything.

His kiss deepened, growing possessive, rougher, turning from a tender invitation to a commanding seduction. Breath caught in my throat. A slow velvet heat spread through me, tightening my nipples. I kissed him back, stroking his tongue with mine and giving him a taste, then pulling back. He kissed me harder. The taste of him sent shivers down my spine. My muscles turned warm and pliant. A soft ache flared between my legs. My head turned dizzy. I had to take a breath. I was losing what little control I had and I wanted so much for it to be good for him.

His arms gripped me, the hard, powerful muscle sliding against my shoulders as he pulled me closer. I pulled back and he let go. We broke apart. I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me and in the depth of his dark irises I saw raw, overwhelming desire.

Oh my gods, I would do anything if he kept looking at me like that.

He wanted me. Oh he wanted me so badly.

I leaned in and nipped his lower lip.

He tipped my head back, his mouth closing on mine, the thrust of his tongue wild and hot. My apron went flying, and then his hands slid under my tank top. His rough thumb caressed my right nipple, sending tiny electric shocks through me. I leaned against that touch, grinding against him, his lust driving me out of my mind. It was all for me. He was excited for me. He was kissing me. His hands gripped my butt and he hoisted me on his hips. The long, hard shaft of him thrust against the aching wetness between my legs. He was hard for me.

I wanted it to be the best sex he ever had.

He tore himself from my mouth. “So beautiful.”

Please, Jim, please. Touch me, kiss me, love me . . .

He kissed my neck, nipping the sensitive skin, each pinch of his teeth adding fuel to my fire. I moaned, caught in the whirlwind of sensations, and rode him. I wanted him inside me. I needed to be full of him.

He jumped off the chair, his hands on my butt, caressing me, and I kissed him all the way upstairs. He dropped me on the bed and pulled off his shirt. Muscle corded his frame like steel cables. Excitement dashed through me. His boots and pants came off. He was huge. Oh wow.

He leaned over me and then I had no clothes on. I reached for his neck and pulled him down on top of me. He dipped his head and his mouth closed on one nipple, while his hand stroked the other. The wave of pleasure rolled through me and I arched myself, my hands in his hair. His mouth moved to the other breast. My whole body was keyed up, ready for him, as if I was perched on the edge of a scalding bath and I needed to take a plunge.

He reared above me and I reached for him. My fingers found his hard length and I stroked it. Jim growled. I laughed and wrapped my legs around him. He lowered himself on me, his weight on his arms, his expression wicked and hot, so hot.

“Yes?”

What? Of course it’s a yes. “Yes . . .”

He thrust into me, fluid and deep. Pleasure exploded in me and I moaned his name. He built to a smooth, rapid rhythm, sliding inside me, thick and hard, each thrust a burst of ecstasy. I locked my fingers on his back and matched his rhythm. We were one and I was losing myself in the sheer physical bliss of it. He made love to me like I was a goddess. I tried to hold on and stay there with him, but the pleasure crested inside me and dragged me under. I melted into a soft, happy climax. Jim moved faster inside me, pounding, intense, his whole body so rigid, the muscles of his back were trembling under my fingers. His face turned feral. He grunted and I felt him let go inside of me. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

For a while we stayed just like that and then slowly he slid his big body to the side and pulled me to him.

“Mine.”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“You’re all mine.” He grabbed and hoisted me onto him. “Mine, mine, mine.”

I laughed and sprawled on top of him.

JIM was a cat. And like all cats, he liked soft places, sleeping, and lying around. We hadn’t left the bedroom. We napped, we cuddled, we had sex again and it was glorious. And now we just lay together enjoying each other’s company. We were both starving but going downstairs was just too much effort. Outside the sun slowly set. The world was growing dark.

“About the barbecue,” I said. “Should I bring something?”

“No, they’ve got it under control.” He was playing with my hair. “I called and told them you would be coming for sure. You’ll have to cut them some slack. They’ve never dealt with anyone like you.”

“Anyone like me? Indonesian?” They probably didn’t expect him to bring home someone like me. What if they didn’t like me?

“No,” he said. “Vegetarian.”

I stared at him for moment.

“It’s a barbecue,” he said. “We’re werecats. Everything is either meat or has meat in it. I explained to them about stuff not touching. They bought a new grill for you, but they can’t figure out what to grill on it . . .”

I snorted and laughed.

He grinned back at me. My handsome, smart Jim.

“Just a fair warning: you might end up having corn seasoned in three different ways . . .”

I giggled.

“They’re excited,” he told me. “You’ll have to answer questions. If it gets too much, tell me and I will snarl and make an ass of myself.”

“Diversion tactics!”

“That’s right. Anything for my beautiful girl.”

He said I was beautiful. I smiled.

“I called in a request to the Pack,” Jim said. “Let’s see if they can dig up anything on that law firm.”

The doorbell rang. Who could that be? I slid off the bed and glanced out of the window. My mother, my aunt, Komang, and her daughter stood on my doorstep. Oh no.

“My family is here,” I hissed. “Do not make noise.”

He laughed at me.

“Jim! I’ll strangle you.”

“Okay, okay.”

I ran into the bathroom to clean up, threw on fresh clothes, and ran down the stairs.

Oh no, the stupid steak again. I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed the cutting board with the steak, and whirled around. Where to put it? Not the cabinet, Mom would find it. Not in the fridge either, it would contaminate all my groceries . . .

I jerked the wooden cover off the oversize bread basket, stuck the cutting board and the steak in there, pulled it closed, and raced for the door.

My mother raised her hands. “Again?”

“I was sleeping.”

“I thought you were chasing after that stray cat you adopted.” She walked inside and the other three women followed her.

“You got a cat?” my aunt asked.

“It’s a stray,” my mother said. “She adopted him.”

I sighed, shut the door, and followed them into the kitchen. We sat at the table.

“About that boyfriend . . .” my mother said.

“There is no boyfriend,” I said. “It’s someone from the Pack. He was helping me and he was just being funny. He’s a practical joker.”

Komang opened her mouth. Aulia made big eyes at her and Komang closed her lips and sat back.

“Anyway, I found out about jenglots.” I explained about the cursing and the property. “This magic user is very dangerous and powerful. It’s one thing to summon a mythological horror like a hag. But this person also summoned a living killer car. People believe in old hag syndrome, but most of us would instantly dismiss a killer car as complete nonsense. He or she doesn’t require a mythological basis for their summonings. So if someone was afraid of ghosts, this person would conjure a murderous ghost for them even though ghosts do not exist.”

“So this person will try to kill grandmother again?” Aulia asked.

“I believe so,” I said. “But he or she will come after the comic book guys, the courier shop owner, or me first. This person is clearly targeting everyone in the building and I’ve made them very angry. They must’ve sacrificed something personal and now that sacrifice is wasted because of me. They may want to get me out of the way.”

My mother frowned. “What is so special about that property?”

“I don’t know. I’m checking into it. It is likely that . . .”

Jim walked into the kitchen. He was wearing a white towel around his hips and nothing else. His skin glistened with dampness—he had obviously just taken a shower.

I stared at him in horror.

He nodded to my aunt, my mother, and the two other women. “Ladies.”

Then he walked to my silverware drawer, got a fork, took a plate out of my cabinet, walked to the breadbox, speared the steak with his fork, put it on the plate, turned around and walked out.

This did not just happen. It did not happen.

Aulia looked at me with eyes as big as dessert plates and mouthed, “Wow.”

All four of them stared at me.

I had to say something. I opened my mouth. “As I was saying, I think the next two targets would be the comic book store guys and the courier shop owner. Their curses are likely already in place. Then me, because I made this person really angry. So Eyang Ida is safe for the time being.”

“That’s good to hear,” Komang said. “Thank you for everything you’ve done. We will be going now.”

She got up. Aulia jumped up as well.

“I am going, too,” my aunt said, her voice too high.

I followed them to the door. Aulia was the last one through it. She turned around, pointed up, pretended to flex, gave me a thumbs-up, and fled. I took a deep breath, walked into the kitchen, and sat down.

“I knew,” my mother said.

What? “Since when?”

“He came to see me after you saved him from the spider woman.”

How did I not know this?

“He said he wanted to date you and he understood if I had a problem with it because he wasn’t Indonesian, but that it wouldn’t stop him. I told him that you were special and if he wanted to try and win you, he could knock himself out. I told him that prettier men tried and failed.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that was fine and you were beautiful enough for both you and him. And that’s when I knew.” My mother smiled. “True beauty isn’t in how big your breasts are, or how large your eyes are, or how pretty your nose is. All that is temporary. Breasts sag, skin gets wrinkles, waists become wider, and strong backs stoop. I tried to teach you this when you were younger, but I must’ve done a bad job, because you never learned it. True beauty is in how that person makes you feel. When a man truly loves you, the longer you are together, the more beautiful you will be to him. When he looks at you and you look at him, you won’t just see the surface. You will see everything you shared, everything you’ve been through, and every happy moment you hope for.”

Her eyes teared. “Your father died a middle-aged man, balding, with a round belly and when I looked at him, he was more beautiful to me than when we first met and he was twenty and all the girls panted after him.” Her voice trembled. “After thirty-two years, we were more than lovers. We were family.”

I swiped tears from my eyes.

“You either have that bond or you don’t,” my mother said. “If the bond isn’t there, no matter how pretty the two of you are, you’ll go your separate ways. You’ve changed, sweetheart, since the two of you started going out. You don’t lose your temper as often. It used to be one wrong word, and you had all your claws out. He must make you happy. So. If you like him, I like him. If you hate him, I hate him. But I think he loves you and that’s all any mother could hope for.”

My mother got up and left.

For a while I sat at the table crying and I didn’t even know why. About five minutes after the door closed Jim came down from upstairs and put his arms around me. I leaned against him and let him hold me.

MAGIC flooded during the night, but the phone rang anyway. It wasn’t for me. It was for Jim. He listened to it for a long time, while I made us breakfast and wondered why I wasn’t freaking out about the fact that someone in the Pack clearly knew Jim was spending his nights with me.

“Wait a minute.” Jim pulled the phone from his ear. “Dali? I’ve got a guy at the courthouse. Want to hear what he’s found?”

“Yes!” I waved the kitchen towel at him.

“The law firm that sent the letters only exists on paper,” Jim said. “It was active about eight years ago but Shirley retired from law practice five years ago and moved away, Sadlowski died shortly after, and Abbot died about a year ago. But the firm still exists as a legal corporation. It’s registered with the Georgia Bar Association under John Abbot.”

“The one who died?”

“No, different bar number.” Jim frowned. “This is where it gets interesting. I also had them check into the building. It’s old, pre-Shift. The records are sketchy, but apparently it used to be a strip joint.”

“I don’t see why it’s so valuable.” Strip clubs sprang up in Atlanta like mushrooms.

“It was a full-nudity strip club,” Jim said.

“And?”

Jim shrugged. “I don’t understand what the deal is either. A full-nudity license is more expensive, but that’s about it.”

“What was the name of the club?” I asked.

Jim repeated the question into the phone. “The Dirty Martini.”

“Is the license still active? Can they pull up prior owners?”

“Good idea. Check if that license is still active and see about the last owner,” Jim said. “Oh and, Tamra? Check the alcohol permit for me.”

“Why alcohol permit?” I asked.

“A place with the name Dirty Martini is likely to serve alcohol.” Jim tapped his fingers on the table. He was thinking about something. I could see it in his eyes.

Minutes passed by.

“Okay,” Jim said. “Thanks.”

He hung up and looked at me.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“The club owner’s name was Chad Toole. He was indicted twelve years ago on money-laundering charges, convicted, and sentenced to thirty years in prison,” Jim said. “He died while incarcerated. Guess who represented him?”

“Abbot, Sadlowski, and Shirley?”

He nodded. “You were right. License is still active. The strip club hasn’t been open for eleven years, but apparently John Abbot has paid that license every year.”

“That had to cost a fortune.”

“Oh it did.” Jim nodded.

“So let me get this straight. Chad Toole owns a strip club. He gets in trouble, hires John Abbot to represent him and turns the club over to him as payment for legal services. Chad goes to prison and dies. John Abbot’s firm divides the club into five shops and sells it as retail space?”

“Looks that way.”

“I am confused. If John Abbot sold the club, what’s the point of paying for the permit?” I thought out loud. “Permits are tied to the address. John Abbot must’ve only sold four shops and held on to one. He still owns a chunk of the original building. That’s the only way his permit would be valid.”

Jim grinned. “Exactly. There is more. The club also has an up-to-date liquor permit, paid in full again by John Abbot.”

He looked at me.

“Why is that significant?” I asked.

“Because it is illegal for a full-nude bar to serve alcohol in Atlanta’s city limits. Topless bars can serve it, but the dancers have to wear a G-string.”

I crossed my arms. “How do you know that?”

Jim gave me a look. “It’s my business to know.”

Aha. “So if it’s illegal . . .”

“It’s not. This law was relaxed after the Shift and then tightened again, but Dirty Martini must’ve been grandfathered in. It is the only wet full-nudity strip club in Atlanta. In the right hands, it would be a gold mine.”

“But the club doesn’t exist anymore,” I said.

“As long as the permits are on file and the physical location is unchanged, I don’t know that the city would care.”

I leaned against the island. “Okay. John Abbot, the lawyer, secretly owns one of the five shops. He decides he wants to bring back the club. He tries to buy out the other four shop owners, so he can reopen Dirty Martini and make a fortune. Except they don’t want to sell, so he gets them cursed to get them out of the building? This John Abbot was willing to kill five people over a strip club?”

“People killed for less,” Jim said.

“I don’t suppose there is a picture of John Abbot or an address?” I asked.

“The address is the same as the former strip club. He also could hire someone to manage one of the shops for him.”

I ran through the list of shop owners in my head. “I think we can eliminate Eyang Ida and Vasil Dobrev,” I said. “They were targeted.”

“We can eliminate them because they were personally in danger. We can probably eliminate the chiropractor, even. I saw her face. She loves her son. But we can’t discount Cole,” Jim said.

“You think he could try to kill his own son?”

“People are fucked-up,” Jim said.

I couldn’t argue with him there. “So we have Cole, the kids from the comic book shop, and Steven. All of them seemed harmless.” The kids were probably too young to be involved, but we couldn’t discount them based on their appearance alone. Magic Atlanta did all sorts of fun things with people’s age and looks.

“We haven’t met the second kid,” Jim said.

“That’s true. We can go there and meet him now.”

“Good idea.” Jim got up. “I’ll drive.”

I just laughed and got my keys.

I was two blocks away from the shopping center when I saw a man running full speed down the street. He was wearing a T-shirt with a Hulk’s fist smashing the ground and glasses, and he carried two identical toddlers.

Behind him two teenage boys tore down the street, their faces blanched with fear.

“Step on it,” Jim said.

I pressed the gas pedal and Pooki shot forward. In two breaths we saw the building. People were running from Eleventh Planet, scattering in all directions. A crowd blocked the door of the comic book store, pounding with their fists on the door.

What in blazes was going on?

In front of us a woman stood in torn clothes, her head oddly indented. She turned to look at us. A raw, red wound gaped where the left half of her face used to be. She screeched and reached for our car with gnarled fingers.

The hair on my arms rose. Someone in Eleventh Planet was afraid of zombies.

“Not worth damaging the car,” Jim said.

I stood on the brakes. Pooki screeched, slowing down. Before he rolled to a stop, Jim leaped out and pounced on the zombie. The knife flashed in his hand and the zombie woman’s head rolled off her shoulders. Jim caught it. So gross. So, so gross.

The woman’s body toppled.

I jumped out of Pooki. He threw the head at me. I grabbed it. Rotten magic touched my fingers and recoiled. The head melted, the skin and muscle dripping off it, turned to white ash, and disappeared.

Ha! Unclean. My magic worked on it. There were no such thing as zombies in our world, but whatever these things were, I could purge them.

Jim pulled a second knife from the sheath at the small of his back. His eyes shone with green. “Let’s do this.”

We walked to the crowd of zombies blocking the comic book shop. I never felt so badass and completely terrified at the same time in my whole entire life. There were so many . . . If my magic failed, they would rip me apart with their rotten teeth. For some reason the image of yellow rotting teeth stuck with me. I shivered and glanced at Jim. He just kept walking, like he had no doubt I would lay waste to the whole horde of zombies.

The zombies moaned at the comic book store, oblivious to us.

“Hey!” Jim roared, his voice deep and laced with a snarl.

They turned and looked at him.

“Fresh meat,” Jim said.

The mass of undead turned and ran for us, gnashing their rotten teeth, their hands stretched for us like claws. Jim spun like a dervish, his knives out. Heads rolled.

I took a deep breath, stepped next to him, and walked into the crowd. My magic waited for my orders.

I am the White Tiger. An invisible aura flared around me.

A huge zombie with half of his guts hanging out was running straight at me.

What if it didn’t work? A pang of panic shot through me. No, can’t think like that. I focused on the zombie. He was over six feet tall, arms like tree trunks.

You are an aberration. You skew the balance.

The zombie spread his arms, moaning, ready to crush me with his bulk.

I will restore the balance. I will purify this land.

He reached for me. My magic surged, the aura coating me gaining a weak, pale glow.

The zombie touched me. Foul, dark-colored fluid dripped from his fingers. He froze as if petrified, his flesh running off him in dirty rivulets. A blink and he became ash.

I could do this.

Another zombie grabbed me and melted. I held my arms out and walked right through the crowd. They fell all around me. Some bumped into me, some tried to bite me, some attempted to claw my back, but in the end all of them became liquid, then ash. Next to me Jim carved a path through bodies, each strike of his knife finding the target with deadly precision. Limbs fell as he cleaved them off, driving the knives with superhuman strength. Heads tumbled, severed clean off the rotting necks. Skulls cracked as the knives pierced the brain inside.

We kept going. It felt so right. So right. If only all fights would be like this.

The last zombie melted at my feet.

Jim straightened, splattered by gore, and winked at me.

I smiled at him and looked into the store. Three dead zombies lay on the floor, two bludgeoned and one beheaded.

Jim rapped his knuckles on the door.

Two heads popped out from behind the shelves, one blond—Brune’s—and the other dark haired, probably Christian Leander’s. I made a funny face and posed against the carnage next to Jim.

The two guys left their hiding spot. Leander was carrying a replica sword that looked like it belonged to some barbarian and Brune was brandishing a crowbar.

They stepped over the dead bodies and Brune carefully opened the door.

“Hi,” I said, with a bright smile.

“Hi,” the dark-haired guy said.

“Are you Christian?”

He nodded.

“Are you afraid of zombies?”

He nodded again.

Right.

“Have you seen your neighbor today?” Jim asked. “Steven Graham?”

“No,” they said at the same time.

“What about Cole?” I asked.

“Cole and Amanda left,” Brune said.

“They went down to Augusta,” Christian said. “Until whatever this is blows over.”

“How sure are you?” Jim asked.

“I saw them board the leyline last night,” Brune said. “Amanda wouldn’t get into the car after what happened yesterday, so I gave them a ride in my cart to the leypoint.”

Jim glanced at me, a question in his eyes.

“No,” I said. “Augusta is too far for the curse to work.”

Cole wasn’t our guy.

“Thank you,” I said and shut the door. “Steven.”

Jim’s face snapped into a harsh mask. “Let’s pay him a visit.”

WE got Steven’s address from his bodyguard at the courier shop. At first he didn’t want to tell us, and then Jim asked him if he was left- or right-handed. The bodyguard asked why and Jim told him that he would break the other arm first, because he wasn’t a complete bastard. The bodyguard folded.

Now I was driving through an upscale neighborhood to Steven’s building. All of the houses on both sides of the road had really tall fences topped with barbed wire and at least three acres of land. Life in post-Shift Atlanta required fences and plenty of space between them and the house, so you could shoot whatever was coming at you.

“What’s the deal with you?” Jim asked.

I’d been thinking about the zombie fight. “Nothing.”

“I have three sisters,” Jim reminded me. “I know what nothing means.”

“What does it mean, Mr. Female Expert?”

“It means you’re upset about something, it’s been bothering you, but you don’t want to bring it up because you’re not sure you’re up for the conversation that might follow. Sometimes it also means I am supposed to magically guess why you are upset.”

I harrumphed. It seemed like a good answer.

“You know I’ll never figure it out on my own,” Jim said. “Don’t be a chicken. Just tell me.”

Come on, tiger girl. You can do this.

“I just want to be clear. This isn’t a needy commitment thing.”

“Okay,” he said, stretching the word.

“Where is this relationship going, Jim?”

“This is the kind of question that can explode in my face,” Jim said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“I mean what happens from here?”

“We discover if Steven is responsible, beat his ass, go to your place or my place, and celebrate.”

“Are you being deliberately obtuse?”

“No, I’m being very precise in my answers.”

Grr. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that we continue this relationship.”

“I thought that was a given,” he said.

I waved my hand. “Let me keep going with this, or I’ll never get to the point. Where do you see us a year from now, if everything goes well and we stay together?”

“Are you asking about marriage?” he asked.

“I’m asking about mating.” Mating in the shapeshifter world was a firm declaration of being in a relationship. Some couples married, some didn’t, but mating cemented the relationship.

“I never liked that word,” Jim said, “But yes. Mating. Marriage. This wasn’t the way I wanted to approach this.”

I made a conscious effort of will not to freak out because the word marriage came out of his mouth. This had to be said. “That would make me the alpha of the Cats.”

“Yes.”

Words came out of me, tumbling one over the other. “What happens when we’re challenged, Jim? My purifying powers don’t work against shapeshifters. The magic won’t always be up. I can’t always use my cursing and even if I could, they wouldn’t respect me for using magic. You and I both know that they understand and respect physical prowess. They would see me as a freak. Not only that, but I would be a liability. If you stand there and protect me so I have time to write my curses, that makes our battle strategy predictable. It would anchor you to one place. I’m not a fighter, but even I understand this. We sacrifice mobility and the element of surprise. I will get you killed, Jim. I’m not an alpha. I’m a half-blind, vegetarian tiger.”

There it was. It lay between us now, out in the open.

Jim opened his mouth.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be badass,” I said. “I do. I would like nothing more than to grow giant claws and do the kick and spin and disembowel everything around me thing, but I can’t.”

Jim nodded and opened his mouth again.

“And it’s not even the blood, because I can bite. It’s just that I’m not good at fighting. I’m not vicious. I’m scared of getting hurt. I am afraid of pain. I don’t want you to die because of me.”

Jim looked at me.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” I asked.

“Are you done?”

“Yes.”

“Dali, you are a tiger. You’re the largest cat on the planet and you weigh over seven hundred pounds in your beast form.”

I took a deep breath. If he were about to chew me out because I was a tiger and I couldn’t fight . . .

“Wait,” Jim said. “Let me finish.”

I cleared my throat. “Okay. Continue.”

“You have accelerated healing even by our standards.”

“That’s true.”

“You don’t have to be a good fighter for us to make a good team. If you just sit on our attacker for a second, that’s enough for me to kill them.”

I opened my mouth and closed it with a click.

“You’re concentrating on weakness. It’s good to be aware of your weaknesses, but you need to think in terms of assets. What strengths do you have?”

I glanced at him.

“You have bulk,” he said. “You have healing. You have paws the size of my head. You are majestic.”

“Majestic?”

“Your fur is so white, it almost glows. You’re this huge majestic creature. When I look at you in your animal form, you look otherworldly. There is almost a touch of divinity about it. The psychological effect of it is staggering. You look and think, ‘How the hell do I even fight this?’ I guarantee you, any attacker will hesitate. Even if they think you are weak, they will still hesitate. That hesitation is all we need. If they are unsure, if they question their judgment, psychologically we won the fight, because let me tell you, fighting me requires complete commitment. I don’t play.”

I tried to process what he was saying.

“You’re the smartest woman I know,” he said. “Think strategically and use that agile brain. Also you just drove past the house.”

I brought Pooki to an abrupt halt, reversed, and parked by a large, two-story mansion. The house stood quiet.

We got out and walked to the wrought iron gate in the six-foot fence. Jim kicked the lock. The gate swung open.

“Is that what you first thought when you saw me?” I asked. “That I was majestic?”

“Yes,” he said. “You asked me at Eyang Ida’s house why I am with you. I’m with you because you’re smart and beautiful, and you are not like anyone I know. No matter how hard things are, you throw yourself into them. During Midnight Games you walked into a cage with trained killers not knowing if your curses would work, because you knew other people were counting on you. That’s what you do. You step up.”

He stopped, stepping too close to me. His voice was quiet. “I watch everyone around me, waiting for a knife in my back. I can’t help it. The paranoia is so deeply ingrained now, it’s a part of who I am. It isn’t about what they would do, it’s about what they could do. I have friends, but I never forget that friendship is conditional.”

“Curran wouldn’t stab you in the back.”

“He would if the circumstances were right.”

“Jim, do you really live always expecting people to turn on you?”

He nodded. “It’s like going through life holding my breath.”

“That’s terrible.” I reached over and stroked his cheek with my fingertips. “People are not like that. Some people are like that, but most people are honest and kind. Our friends. Curran, Derek, Kate, Doolittle, they are loyal to us.”

He caught my hand and kissed it. “I love this about you.”

My heart was beating too fast. “Jim . . .”

“I watch everyone, but when I watch you, all I feel is . . . that I want to be with you. You will never lie to me. And if I need help, you will be there. With you, I breathe.”

I put my arms around him. I just wanted to make it better for him, to somehow shield him from that. His arms closed around me, his hard body pressing next to mine.

“Everyone has that someone who is most important to them,” he said, his voice so low only a shapeshifter could’ve heard it. “That one person who trumps the rules. You are that to me. I would do anything for you.”

The world stopped. I just stood there, shell-shocked. He did just say all that to me, right? I didn’t imagine it?

“You never answered,” he said quietly.

“Never answered what?”

“If you would be the cat alpha with me.”

He was asking me . . . “I didn’t know it was a question.”

He pulled away and met my gaze. “It is.”

“Yes,” I said in a small voice.

Jim smiled.

We walked up to the door. Jim tried the handle. It turned in his hand. He swung the door open. We sniffed the air in unison. Steven was home. No other human smells troubled the house. What in the world did he do with his daughter? Maybe she didn’t live with him?

Jim walked through the door. I followed him on soft feet, tracking the scent. The inside of the house was almost completely empty. No knickknacks. No furniture for the knickknacks to rest on. No pictures on the walls. The house was stripped bare. Only the curtains remained, blocking out the bright light of summer.

I smelled blood and alcohol. Never a good combination.

We turned left into a vast room and stopped.

Steven Graham, completely nude, sat cross-legged in a circle of salt in the corner of the room. His right foot stuck out. It looked wrong, deformed, and it took me a moment to figure out that it was missing all of its toes except for the big one. A small plate sat in front of him, next to a box of matches. On the plate, soaked in some sort of clear liquid, lay a bloody nub of flesh.

I squinted. A severed hairy toe. Ew.

He’d been cutting pieces off himself for his sacrifice. Ew. Ew. Ew.

The salt was probably a ward, a defensive spell. I tried to reach for it with my magic. Yes, a ward and a strong one.

“John Abbot?” I asked.

“I used to be John Abbot Junior,” Steven said. “I changed my name to Steven Graham a long time ago.”

Oh. Now this made sense. John Abbot was his father.

“What’s the deal with the strip club?” Jim said.

“My old man was a lawyer,” Steven said. “I worked for his firm. Most people would’ve made me a partner, but no, my old man made me into a junior associate. When Chad Toole got indicted, he was low on money, so he turned the strip club over to my dad. In its heyday owning that place was like printing money. Magic wiped out the Internet. All online porn was gone. Video was gone. Live girls were the only option. I wanted that club. I’ve always wanted one. I like women. Owning a strip club like Dirty Martini is like a fucking paradise. All that pussy and it’s all yours. No strings, no guilt, just go for it and indulge.”

Okay, there was something more disgusting than chopped-off toes.

“The old bastard wouldn’t give it to me. Said he wasn’t in the titty-bar business. I fucking hated my father. All my life he’s been screwing me over. He treated me like slave labor. I worked for him and that damn law firm for almost nothing, then he’d complain I was billing too many hours.

“Then, money went missing from an escrow account. Turns out my father, the famous John Abbot, had been stealing money from his clients. Suddenly he needed someone to take the rap for him. Suddenly it was all ‘son’ and ‘my boy’ and ‘will you go to prison for me.’ I told him I’d take the blame for his stealing, but he had to sign the club over to me. I got it in writing. I confessed to taking the money, got disbarred, and served two years in prison.”

Steven leaned forward. “I was soft. Weak. You have no idea what that place did to me. What it was like. It was hell. I sat in that damn cage for two years, beaten, raped, abused, and I kept thinking: When I get out, I’ll have my club. It kept me going. I’d live like a king once I was out. All the booze, women, and money I wanted waiting for me.”

Steven gave a harsh laugh. “I come out of prison and find out my father remodeled the place and sold it off one chunk at a time. See, there was a loophole in the paperwork he signed. He couldn’t sell the place completely, because I owned a chunk of it, but he could divide it into parts and sell those as long as I got one. One office. The fucker. I gave him two years of my life. I ruined my career for him and he screwed me over again.”

His eyes glinted in the light. He looked deranged. He must’ve sat for two years behind bars and thought every day about that stupid club. It was supposed to be his big reward when he got out, and his father betrayed him. All of his hatred for his father had somehow tied into that club. Now I understood. Steven had to have it. He would do anything to own Dirty Martini. He would hurt anyone, kill anyone, just so he could walk through its doors.

“I couldn’t wait for my father to die,” Steven said. “I would’ve killed him years ago, except he had a provision in the will that if he died a violent death, I’d get nothing. So I had to go on and put my life together. I changed my name. I got this dinky little business. All the while, he was still breathing. It was torture, that’s what that was. I killed him every day in my head.”

Okay, he was insane. Clinically insane.

Steven pointed at the walls with a sweep of his hand. “He finally died, the bastard. I’ve got his ‘palace.’ I’ve sold everything he owned. There is not a trace of him left.”

“I get all that,” Jim said. “I don’t get why you’re chopping off your toes.”

“They’ve got a new policy now,” Steven ground out. “Use it or lose it. As of this year, only active establishments that pass inspection will get a liquor license. For years I’ve been giving them money and they had no issue with it and suddenly now they want to inspect the club. I had to get the people out or I’d miss my window. The permits and license never lapsed, the ownership of the building was never interrupted, since I still own a part of it, and I’ve got enough seed money to open doors in a couple of months. When it came time to renew, I’d be golden. Except those fuckers wouldn’t sell to me. I offered them a fortune for their crummy little spaces and they said no.”

“You’re killing people to start a strip club,” I said. “Doesn’t that seem extreme to you?”

He looked at me. Like looking into the eyes of a chicken. There was no intelligent life there. He’d become so focused on that club, it consumed him.

“You know what your problem is?” he asked. “You don’t know what your mouth is for. After I’m done with your boyfriend here, I’ll fix that.”

Great. “Is that how you talk to your daughter, too?”

“I would, if I had one,” he said.

So he lied about that, too.

Steven struck a match and sat the toe on the plate on fire. “Let’s see what the two of you are afraid of. The way this works, the one with the strongest fear wins. Good luck, lovebirds.”

A darkness spun in a tight knot against the opposite wall, a twisted chaotic mess, shot through with streaks of violent red, and spat out a shapeshifter in a warrior form. He stood eight feet tall. Monstrous muscle bulged all over his frame, some of it sheathed in gold fur with black rosettes and the rest covered with dark human skin. He looked like he could rip a person in half with his hands. His shoulders were huge. His legs were like tree trunks. Claws thrust from his oversize hands. His jaws, studded with razor-sharp teeth longer than my fingers, didn’t quite fit together. Long streaks of drool stretched from the gaps between his teeth, dripping to the floor.

A hot, furious scent sliced across my senses like a knife, familiar, but revolting. It was like stuffing your mouth full of copper pennies. It was the scent of rape, murder, and terror, the horrible stench of human and animal gone catastrophically wrong. My nose said, “Jim,” and then it screamed, “Run!” This is what madness smelled like.

The beast opened his mouth, staring at us with glowing green eyes, and snapped his nightmarish teeth.

“Oh, this is just wonderful,” Steven said. “You cost me five toes. I’ll enjoy this and after it’s over, I’ll go get my strip club. I bet they’ll sell now.”

“Jim,” I said. “I’m afraid of rejection. What exactly are you afraid of?”

Jim’s face was grim. “Of going loup.”

That’s why this abomination smelled familiar. It was Jim. Except he was bigger, faster, and stronger than my Jim. Loups were more powerful than shapeshifters, shockingly so. Jim would have to fight the better version of himself and he had only me for backup. The loup Jim was a shapeshifter. None of my curses would work against him.

“Dali,” my Jim said. “Focus. Help me kick his ass.”

The loup Jim snarled.

My Jim went furry. One second he was there and the next his clothes ripped and a half man, half jaguar spilled out, seven feet tall, corded with muscle and ready to fight.

I had to change shape. At worst I had about a minute of disorientation, at best fifteen seconds. I didn’t have fifteen seconds. Jim was in danger. I grabbed onto that thought and chanted it in my mind, trying to dedicate everything inside me to that one idea. Jim was in danger. Jim was in danger . . .

The world dissolved into a thousand bokeh, blurry, colorful points of light. They swirled and melted, chased away by a revolting scent.

. . . in danger. Jim was in danger. Jim was in danger.

There was a loup in the middle of the room. He smelled like Jim, but he wasn’t Jim, because Jim was in danger. Sharp spikes of adrenaline shot through me. My legs trembled in fear. I was small and weak and I . . .

The loup lunged. He was going straight for Jim. He didn’t think I was a threat.

Complete commitment. I charged and rammed the loup. My shoulder smashed into him. The loup went flying and bounced off the ward. Jim flashed by me and carved at the loup’s midsection with his claws. Blood spattered on the floor. The loup spun and kicked Jim. I heard bone crunch. Jim flew past me, knocked backward.

I had to keep this thing occupied. I charged the loup again. He sidestepped me, so fast, and raked my spine, from the hackles to the tail.

Oh my gods, that hurt. That hurt so much. He’d ripped me open. I smelled my own blood.

Don’t you faint. Think! Use your brain. I whipped around and roared at him so loud, the windows shook. It was the kind of challenge no cat would ignore.

The loup turned to me and roared back. Jim seized the opening and lunged at him, his claws like blades, slicing and cutting. They rolled across the floor. I chased them, trying to get in a bite or a claw, but they were moving so fast, they were almost a blur. The loup whipped around, matching Jim blow for blow, and raked its talons across Jim’s chest. Blood drenched the fur. Jim roared, pissed off and hurting. I lunged for the loup’s leg. He spun and kicked me in the face, right on the nose. Blood drenched my eyes, as his claws tore my skin. I still lunged, missed, and ran into a wall. Ow. Everything hurt now. My wounds were burning.

I shook my head, flinging the blood from me and willing my skin to seal, and spun around.

The loup got ahold of Jim’s arm, bent it back, exposing his chest, and thrust his claws into it.

No!

I charged, roaring.

He let go of Jim and whirled to face me. I put myself between Jim and him. The loup lunged at me, sinking claws into my fur. Pain burst in me. I didn’t think I could hurt that much. I snapped at him and sank my teeth into his thigh. The hot burst of blood on my tongue was the most disgusting thing I ever tasted. I locked my big teeth on his leg and flung him from me.

The loup rolled to his feet. He was hurt, but we were hurt worse. The floor in front of me was wet with blood. Everywhere. Jim was outmatched. He fought so well and tried so hard, but that thing was so big.

Jim landed next to me, bloody, his eyes glowing so bright they looked on fire. “Remember what I told you in the car?”

He told me a lot of things! I scrambled to remember. Blah blah blah, strength, weaknesses, sit on him? Sit on him? What kind of battle strategy is that?

Jim roared. It was the rolling, coughing jaguar roar. The loup was a male jaguar. He wouldn’t be able to resist.

I made a move forward.

“No!” Jim barked.

What? What was he thinking? He didn’t want me to help?

Jim roared again. The loup leaped across the room. They ripped and clawed at each other.

Jim wanted my help. Some men tried to do it all on their own, but Jim didn’t have that kind of ego. Jim cared only about results and objectives. It had to be a diversion. What would he need a diversion for? For me to sneak up close.

I padded forward on soft paws, circling, carefully staying out of the loup’s field of vision. I was getting light-headed and I couldn’t even figure out if it was my body going into overdrive trying to repair me or if I was finally going to pass out from all the blood fumes that were making me sick. The memory of pain flashed through me. I was so scared to get hurt again.

None of it mattered. I couldn’t allow this thing to emerge into the world. It would kill and rape and devour and it would cut a path of destruction through the city before it could be stopped.

I couldn’t let Jim die. I loved him. He was my everything.

I was directly behind the loup. Jim saw me. The loup had him in a death grip, his arms around Jim, his claws digging into his back.

I braced myself.

With a roar knitted of fury and pain, Jim tore out of the loup’s grip, leaving shreds of his flesh on the abomination’s claws. Jim jumped and kicked the loup in the chest with both legs. The loup’s body hit me, and he fell over me, landing on the floor.

I jumped on top of him and dug my claws into the wooden floorboards.

The loup strained, trying to push me off, and carved my back with its claws. It burned like fire.

I just had to hold on for a few seconds.

The loup clawed me again. It hurt. It hurt so badly. I didn’t know I could hurt any worse. I was wrong.

The loup howled and bit my shoulder. My bone crunched under the pressure of his teeth.

I just had to hold on.

Jim landed next to me. His enormous jaguar jaws gaped open, wide, wider, wider . . . His bite was twice as powerful as that of a lion. He could crack a turtle shell with his teeth.

The loup reared his head.

Jim bit down, his massive fangs piercing the temporal bones of the loup’s skull, just in front of his ears. The bones crackled like eggshells. Jim’s teeth sank into the loup’s brain. The abomination screamed. His claws raked my back one last time and went limp. Jim squeezed harder. The head broke apart in his mouth and he spat the pieces onto the floor and crushed the sickening remains with his foot.

I crawled off the body. Every cell in me ached. Wounds gaped across Jim’s frame. He was torn up all over.

Jim landed next to me, leaned over, and gently licked my bloody face with his jaguar tongue. I whined and rolled my big head against him. He kissed me again, cleaning my cuts, his touch gentle and tender. I love you, too, Jim. I love you so much. Guess what? We won. It was worth it.

“You can’t get me,” Steven said. His voice shook a little. “I’m in the ward.”

We turned and looked at him with our glowing eyes. Silly man. We have faced our worst fear. There was nothing he could do to us now.

“We’re cats,” Jim said, his voice a rough growl. “We can wait hours for the mouse to leave the mouse hole. And when the magic wave ends, your mouse hole will collapse.”

Steven’s face turned white as a sheet.

“Squeak, little mouse,” Jim said, his voice raising my hackles. “Squeak while we wait.”

“DO I look okay?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “You look gorgeous.”

“Is my lipstick too bright?”

“No.”

“I should’ve braided my hair.”

“I like your hair.”

I turned to him. We were sitting in a Pack Jeep in front of a large house. The air smelled of wood smoke, cooked meat, and people.

“Don’t be a chicken,” Jim said.

“What if they don’t like me?”

“They will like you, but if they don’t, I won’t care.” Jim got out of the car, walked over to the passenger door, and opened it for me. I stepped out. I was wearing a cute little dress and a sun hat. My back was a little scarred and Jim was limping and careful with his right side, but that couldn’t be helped. In a month or two, even the scars would dissolve. Steven wouldn’t be so lucky. The world was better without him in it.

Jim was ringing the doorbell.

Help. Help me.

“Don’t say anything up front,” I murmured. “We can just let them sort of come to terms with it . . .”

The door swung open. An older African-American woman stood in the doorway. She wore an apron, and she had big dark eyes, just like Jim.

“Dali, this is my mother,” Jim said. “Mom, this is Dali. She’s my mate.”