Following Fabian (10 page)

Astrid pushed up an eyebrow. Working from
home
?

She leaned back in her chair and pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. When had been the last time she or Maria had actually been inside their apartment? Had they even left the heat on? She’d been living out of her duffel bag for so long that the concept she actually had a place to go home to seemed foreign.

She must have been still ruminating on the idea when Dana concluded the meeting, because she missed the dismissal.

Maria gave Astrid a nudge. “Dinner out? Missed you.”

Astrid scanned the room around her. Tamara had left, as had Dana and Sarah, and Sarah heaving herself up from chairs nowadays was a production no one could miss. Just how long had Astrid been zoned out?

She blinked and cleared the fog from her head. “Missed you, too.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Just being back here after such a long while, I guess. I never thought I’d call Durham home, but being kept out of our apartment for so long, I guess I didn’t realize how much the place had become a part of me. I’d like to spend more time at home.”

Maria laughed. “You and me both. We all need a place where we can calm our energy to neutral.”

“Right. I’ll have to take your word on that. But, listen, I’m going to pass on the dinner. I’m going to go home, unbutton my jeans, and stare at a television for at least an hour before I even think about cracking those files. Sorry, but not sorry, for being a slob.”

Maria shrugged. “Happens to the best of us sometimes. Every now and then, we just have to put our switches in the
off
position. I think you’re overdue.”

Sarah waddled back into the room, pulling her jacket on. “Hey. Overheard you. Why don’t you come to dinner?”

“Who?” Maria asked.

“Both of you. I can’t cook because I can’t stand on my swollen ankles for longer than five minutes, and since we’re all back, Patrick’s going to get the pub to cater. We’ll have everything from burgers to bean dip.”

“Yay, beans!” Maria said with far too much enthusiasm.

Astrid preferred her dips to come with at least a little bacon. And maybe a little more bacon on top of that.

“And…” A sly smile spread across Sarah’s face. “I’m sure Fabian will be there.”

“Who said anything about Fabian?” Astrid asked.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Maria said. “The energy around you spikes every time his name is mentioned.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Do you feel the same way when I mention David?” Sarah asked from the door, and that smile fell away.

She really went there. Astrid wouldn’t have thought her friend would stoop so low. Heat surged up from her heart to her cheeks, and she ground her teeth.

“What about David? Are you talking to that fucker again?” Maria asked, and her voice had gone low and taken on an angry edge. But then her expression softened as if she’d come to some profound realization. “No, oh
no
, love. When I bring up David’s name, the energy draws in. Ice cold.” She swiveled her chair to the side, and stood. Striding toward the door, she said to Sarah, “The one time she’d be justified in not being calm, and she won’t let the anger out. I don’t get it. I would have roughed him up and left him marinating in a puddle of his own piss.” She walked through the conference room door and called back, “See you at dinner, love.”

Astrid didn’t want to meet Sarah’s gaze, but she could feel it on the side of her face, boring into her.

If Sarah wanted to make her talk, it would be no difficult feat. She had a scary-as-shit psychic gift that impelled people to give up the secrets they held closest. While she had no qualms about using it during the course of an investigation, she hesitated to use it on her friends and loved ones. She said using it on them would breach the tightly knit trust the women had built over the course of three years. As Shrews, they weren’t always in control of their gifts because they didn’t know what they all were. They would go months without any discernible changes, and then—all of a sudden—new quirks and strengths would emerge from nowhere.

Maria had been the last one to undergo such a discovery, but she’d been coy about what exactly it was. Being her friend, Astrid didn’t push. When she wanted to share, she would.

“Want to talk about it?” Sarah asked from the doorway. “It must be hard. I think you’re the first one of us who’s been forced to interact with the people directly responsible for enrolling us in the study.”

Astrid cracked the knuckles of her left hand. “Thanks, but I don’t think there’s anything worth talking out. Every one of you can probably guess what I must be feeling. There’s plenty of blame to throw around, and I don’t want to open that can of worms.”

“Blame?” Sarah shifted in Astrid’s periphery, and when she looked up, she found Sarah leaning heavily against the doorframe. Astrid wondered if they’d all be so worn down if any others managed to get pregnant. Dana had been actively trying since she and Patrick got married. No one else had given it much thought yet.

“You blaming yourself?” Sarah asked, dark eyes narrowed.

“Like I said. There’s plenty of—”

“Nope.” Sarah put her hands up and shook her head. “Don’t go there. You had an emotional response to a traumatic situation. Some women might have gone home, curled up in little balls, and cried until they ran out of tears. You expressed your hurt in a more physical way.”

“That’ll teach me not to fuck with a cop, right?”

“It’s not even that. Dana was a cop, and she’s never been that kind of cruel. What he did makes my lunch threaten to come up. I don’t know if I would have reacted the same way as you, but I don’t fault you for it. I do find it interesting that after you took that sledgehammer to his car, he still wanted to keep you and tame you.”

“I think the taming more so than the keeping part. It would have been an accomplishment for him, is all.”

“Did he say anything? In South Dakota, I mean.”

Astrid shook her head. “Nothing. In fact, I don’t think I spoke a word to him directly. Rodriguez was doing most of the talking.”

“Well, if they’re able to track down the troupe again, perhaps we could send Maria if we need to have a Shrew there at all.”

“If Fabian goes, I have to go with him.”

“Rodriguez speaks Spanish.”

Astrid studied the scrapes on her knuckles she’d earned while dragging Fabian out of the campsite. Shrews healed quickly. In a couple of days, the scabs would be gone and the scars practically invisible. “I’m looking forward to getting some shooting practice in,” she said, hoping that’d put an end to Sarah’s line of questioning. What could she possibly say that wouldn’t sound corny? Certainly not “he just
gets
me.”

Lame.

Sarah’s gaze bored into Astrid’s cheek for a long while, and then she sighed and moved away from the doorway. “See you at dinner.”

“If you must.”

“
Mierda
.”

The senior Felipe Castillo drummed his fingertips along the side of his borrowed truck and sighed.

Perhaps
borrowed
was the wrong word. He’d stolen it, but just for a little while, just as he’d done numerous times in the past. He was always careful, always returned the items he’d used, and usually in a better condition than when he’d found them. That’s how he’d made his way in the past thirty-some odd years.

He really was invisible in that he rarely left a trace. Invisibility could only get him so far, though. Phasing used to be easy for him. He could pass from solid to air in the blink of his eyes and feel no strain from it when he shifted back, but the shifts were getting harder now. His mother had warned him when he was a young man not to stay as air for too long or snapping back would be harder. Eventually, impossible. He’d heeded her warning for many years, but what choice did he have now? He was too far gone.

Maybe one day he’d fade away all together—to never be able to pull his body back into its physical shape. Maybe that’d be exactly what he deserved—to still be alive and have his soul bound to the Earth when he wanted nothing more than to pass away from it. He’d be a living ghost. Fucking shame if that would happen now that he had a renewed passion for life—the granddaughter who didn’t have a name yet. She was quite obviously meant to be a Gabrielle like the grandmother she’d never know. His wife had always stolen all the attention in a room without trying.

Maybe he’d have to be less discreet in dropping name hints.

Movement in the dirt lot in front of him roused him back to his mission. The caravan had pulled over for a while to regroup. Senior had caught up to the splintered troupe near the Canadian border with North Dakota, and if they got that far, he wouldn’t be able to follow. He didn’t have the credentials to drive across the border. He could abandon the truck and walk across it, but then he’d have to borrow another. Too tricky.

He suspected the only reason this group was lingering as long as they were was because they were getting their paperwork in order. If they’d acquired new troupe members since their last border crossing, there may have been people in the group who didn’t have the legal documentation to leave the country. Jacques usually held onto his employees’ passports as a means of control, so either he was with this group, or he’d delegated the paperwork dispensation to one of his toadies. The latter didn’t seem likely.

An older gentleman Senior didn’t know finally tossed his cigarette butt to the ground and strode to the door of the camper he’d emerged from ten minutes prior.

Senior had been waiting for that man to turn his back so he could slip out of the truck.

He did, closed the door softly, and drew a long, cold breath into his lungs. He closed his eyes and sensed the air around him, imagined pulling it into himself, and
through
him. His limbs went weightless and he felt like a helium-filled balloon tethered to the ground by only a thin thread.

He had no arms. No legs. No
anything
. Everything that made him a man had been diluted by the air elements around him. He couldn’t control the wind, but he could be a part of it. The only thing binding together the thing that was Senior was his spirit. When he was ready to pull himself back together into the shape he’d been born with, it would all be there. He hoped.

He mentally directed himself to the makeshift campsite and through the back wall of the vehicle the portly smoking man had entered. He passed through the small, cramped bedroom, past a fetid-smelling lavatory on his right, and studied the women at the kitchenette table. One older, two younger. He didn’t recognize them, either. He knew most of the older performers, but this woman, and the man from outside—they were strangers to him.

Senior had picked this particular camper to investigate because it’d been in the lead position of the caravan, a location usually reserved for Jacques. Jacques, however, was nowhere to be found.

The women at the table chatted over a fine meal of steaks, mashed potatoes, and fresh vegetables—far better fare than Senior had ever had when he was on the road—and the man at the front, rooted through his duffel bag in search of something muttered under her breath.

Senior tried to make sense of his chatter and watched him toss wads of cash aside as he riffled for some other thing in the bag.

“You seen ’em? I ain’t seen ’em,” the man said, ostensibly to his wife.

She kept right on sawing at her steak and didn’t look up at him. “No, I haven’t seen them. I don’t know nothin’ about your arrangements with that man. You don’t tell me nothin’ after you meet with him, and I don’t go lookin’ for information.”

The man stood and pulled his holey undershirt down over his distended belly.

Senior would have rolled his eyes if they’d been solid at the moment. He’d never had the luxury of excess. Neither had his boys.

“Any other time, you’d be poking around acting nosy like the Cat you are, but you gonna tell me this one time, you didn’t go looking?”

She cut off a piece of steak and stuffed it into her mouth. She chewed for about thirty seconds before responding. “If I don’t know nothin’, none of this shit’s going to blow up in my face when the cops catch up to us.”

The man waved a dismissive hand at her. “We’re not gonna get caught. We just got to keep moving, like Jacques said. Hope he catches up soon, ’cause we’re going to need more cash once we cross the border. Costs a lot of money to disappear.”

So, Jacques was nearby. Senior settled into the corner behind the table to listen in.

“I still think this was a bad idea. Money or not,” she said. The sparkling jewels on her rings caught the light as she dragged her fork through her potatoes.

Pretty jewelry for a probable criminal.

“When we get to where we’re going, are there going to be other Cats? We gonna be able to finally find mates for these girls, Billy? Or is that another lie Jacques told you to get you off his back after he kidnapped them last year?”

As if on cue, the two young women at the table lifted their heads from their meals and turned their faces toward the man the woman had called Billy.

Senior committed that name to memory.
Billy
. They were Cats of some kind. Born, most likely. To the best of Senior’s knowledge from associating with so many shapeshifters in the past, only born Were-creatures experienced the insuperable compulsion to choose a mate.

“He said there are Cats where we’re headed, and I tend to believe him,” Billy said with a huff.

“What kind of Cats?” the woman pressed. “If they ain’t Mountain Lions, they ain’t doing us a lick of good. You tell him they gotta be Catamounts?”

“I told him.”

“And?”

Senior floated to the front of the camper.

“And he said it weren’t a problem.” Billy shifted his weight, and then turned his back to the women so they didn’t see the look of panic on his face when he knelt over his bag once more.

Ah. Trouble in paradise.

Perhaps Billy had already learned that Jacques’s word meant very little. He was a master at luring people in and making them think they hit the jackpot, when in reality, all they’d hit was a brick wall…one that would quickly close around them and box them in.

“Word’s gonna get around, Billy,” the woman said. “You mark my words. Folks will hear about it. It’ll pass from one Cat group to the next, and folks’ll find out where we came from and how you left those Cats out to dry without a leader amongst them. It was all little boys and weak-ass women.” She chewed a bit more, swallowed, and added, “And Patrick. Oh, I’m sure he’ll take a bite out of your hide if he ever catches up to you.”

Patrick?
Why did that name sound familiar to Senior?

“He’ll never find out. And what difference does it make now? He’s hooked up with that bitch detective.”

Ah.
Things were starting to make more sense. Piecing together snippets of conversation he’d gleamed at his son’s house, he knew exactly which Patrick they were referring to now. And which “bitch.”

“He would have never hooked up with our girls, anyway. I told you he weren’t before you sent them boys out to scratch him up. You thought he’d take one look and fall in love. Ha.” She shook her head, oblivious to the glowers of the girls. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

“So, what do you reckon we do, then, since you’re so intent on playing Monday-morning quarterback?” Billy stood and jammed his fists onto his hips. “Hmm?”

“You don’t wanna hear what I think.”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“All right then.” She set down her fork, pretty as she pleased, and pushed back from the table. Standing, she tossed her cloth napkin onto the tabletop. In just four cat-like strides, she was nose-to-nose with her husband. “I’ll tell you what I think. You ain’t gonna like it, but I’m gonna lay it on you the same way you laid it on me earlier this year when you spilled all about how you were catting around, no pun intended, with them Wolf bitches.”

Billy tried to ease back a pace, but the driver’s seat prevented farther travel in that direction. He swallowed as his wife leaned in closer.

“Maybe we deserve to keep runnin’ for some of the shit we’ve done, that’s what I think. Maybe we deserve to be separated from our kind for selling them out. But it ain’t fair for our granddaughters to be on the run like this, when everything that’s happened is because of your bright ideas.” She poked his shoulder with her index finger. “I say you pin
I’m so fuckin’ sorry
notes to their shirts, take them to the airport, buy them tickets to North Carolina, and send them to Patrick on the first flight out of this God-forsaken hinterland. We’re not snow Cats. For that matter, we’re not
show
Cats, and I saw the way Jacques was eyeing them like he wanted to snatch them up. Mm-hmm. You think you’re in the free and clear and that he won’t be looking at our girls again? What’s he gonna do? Put some spandex on them and teach them to walk the goddamned tightrope? See how many of their nine lives they can use up?”

Billy swallowed again.

What could he say, really? He probably knew his wife was right as surely as Senior did. Senior had seen it time and time again. Jacques would recruit a mother and father act into the circus only to make a grab for their children and grandchildren, too. That’s how he’d engaged the services of his
muscle
—the shape-shifting Visas. He’d made an arrangement with a few bodyguards thirty years ago, and now had their entire families more or less eternally bound.

“Whaddaya say, Billy? Huh?” The woman’s hands shifted to claw form at Billy’s neck.

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Eh…you’d really send ’em back for those bitches to babysit?”

The sharp tips of her claws punctured his stubbled flesh and he let out a howl of pain, but he wouldn’t dare move. The Cat in front of him meant serious business, and Senior didn’t put it past her to scratch his throat out to have her way. She had an air of
I’m through with your shit
about her.

“You can call ’em what you want, but I keep my ear to the ground. I heard about the way they took that Bear Chauncey in, and the Ridge siblings, too. Mortal enemies, right? There they went and welcomed a bunch of Bears into their ranks even when they’re at war with the rest of ’em. What you did was wrong, Billy. You started that shit. You sent them boys to scratch Patrick up, and when he wanted to fight ’em, you let ’em run. They ran straight into Gene’s territory and he would have fucked ’em up for good if those women you keep calling
bitches
hadn’t gone in with their guns and pulled ’em out. Now Patrick’s babysitting
our
Cats, and the Shrews are still dealing with the Bears. That ain’t fair. It ain’t fair for them, and it ain’t fair for the girls. Send. Them.
Back.
” She emphasized each word with a poke of her clawed finger, and he hissed with each.

Billy cut his gaze toward the table. “Well, what do y’all want? Don’t mind your grandmama’s crazy talk. Don’t feel like you need to make her happy, it’s all up to you. She’s going through the change, is all, and is probably a little emotional.”

The woman raked her paw across her cheek and left bleeding runnels as she bared her sharp teeth at her husband.

Billy let out a primal sounding Cat scream, and clutched his face.

Somewhere in the distance, a vehicle door slammed.

Maybe someone coming to check up on these loud hillbilly Cats.

Senior eased away from the feuding couple and moved toward the bathroom again. He didn’t want anyone to accidentally walk through him. With it being more difficult for him to phase, the last thing he needed was someone else’s essence commingling with his.

One of the girls stood, and her shifting yellow-green eyes marked her for the Creature she was. “Send me back,” she said. “I’ll grovel to Patrick and Dana if I have to. I’d rather eat kitty litter than to be in that man’s freak show when he sets it up again.”

The other girl tossed her napkin onto the table and slid out of her booth seat. “Me, too. Cassie and me will be all right together. Just get us to an airport, and you won’t have to worry about us.”

Billy dragged his tongue over his dry lips. “I…I can’t. I—”

The woman brought her other paw across his second cheek, and he hissed. “You dirty motherfucker. You already promised ’em to Jacques.”

“Ju-just for a year. Real short-term contract. It was good money, Vettie. We would have been set for life, the four of us. Could have gone anywhere.”

Senior had heard that promise before. A man didn’t need a contract if he were already holding on to everything of importance to the person who signed it.

One of the young women scoffed. “I’m out of here. Fuck this shit, Granddaddy.” She strode toward the small bedroom with her sister on her heels.

“You know, I could kill you for this,” Vettie whispered, putting her teeth so close to Billy’s jugular vein that if Senior could have gasped, he would have. “And no Cat group I run to would find me at fault for it. You ain’t got the good sense to even wash the stink off your dick after you screw around.”