“What sort of guardians?”
I gave him a little smile. “Tigers.”
Jim grinned. “Tigers, huh.”
“Mhm.”
He leaned forward. His face was calm and I wanted to kiss him. I couldn’t help it.
“You looked worried after that newspaper thing,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. I didn’t mean to make you—”
If he said “scared,” I would make him wear this damn bucket on his head. Vegetarian and half blind, I was still a shapeshifter, a predator. I had my pride.
“—upset.”
Hmm, upset I could probably live with. He didn’t need to know that. “I wasn’t upset.”
“My point is, I would never hurt you or your family.”
I raised my chin at him. “If you tried to hurt my mother, I would totally kick your ass.”
“Aha.”
“Yes. You would be lying on the ground, crying, ‘No more, no more,’ and I would be kicking you in the stomach, wham, wham, wham!”
He laughed softly. He was so terribly handsome. Here we were sitting two feet from each other, and we might as well be on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean.
“I don’t want you to do this,” Jim said. “I don’t want you to go there, I don’t want you to get hurt trying to help me. It’s not your job to save me.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“Look, tomorrow I’ll go in there myself, and if I choke somebody long enough, they will bring the snail.”
“Aha. And how do you plan on determining if they’ve brought a garden snail or a golden one?”
“I’ll spray somebody’s magic blood around until the snail lights up.”
“Good plan.” I dipped my ladle into the bucket and tossed the water at him.
He recoiled. “What the hell?”
“You’re delirious from lack of sleep.”
“Dali!”
“The poachers are smart and a lot of them have magic. Some of them can tell what kind of a shapeshifter you are from a hundred yards just by looking at you. If you go to the Underground tomorrow, you will fall asleep there, alone and helpless, and then the poachers will kill you and cut you into tiny pieces, and then your precious werejaguar bones will be sliced into thin wafers and put into wine, so some sicko can have magic powers in bed.”
He let out a frustrated snarl.
“It’s just like with the tea—somebody offers you a gift, and you turn up your nose at it.”
“You’re taking chances again. I won’t let you do it.”
“It’s cute of you to think you can stop me, Jim. Usually you order me around and I do what you say. I might gripe and I might make a fuss, but I will do it, because you are my alpha and I respect you. On this, you get no respect. You know nothing about this world. Your rules don’t apply here, but mine do. You will follow my lead and you will let me save you, Jim.”
Because thinking about you dying makes me hurt.
He opened his mouth.
“If it was the other way around, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I told him.
“I’m your alpha. It’s my job to keep you safe.”
“It goes both ways,” I said.
He rubbed his hands over his eyes. I tossed another ladleful of water at him.
“Quit it!”
“You looked sleepy.”
“I’m not sleepy, I’m at the end of my patience with this stupid hocus-pocus shit.”
“Whatever.”
Fine. He could be dense and pissed off all he wanted, it didn’t matter.
We sat in silence. Off to the side night insects chirped and seesawed sad little songs. Tomorrow would suck. It would suck so much, and we didn’t even know what was wrong with him. I wished the markets would be open already so we could get it done before he fell asleep again.
“Do you at least have a plan?” Jim asked.
“Yes. Most likely we’ll have to get down to Kenny’s Alley in the Underground. That’s where the most expensive animal parts are sold. I will go inside the shop. You will wait outside. I will offer them a lot of money for the snail. If I get in trouble, I’ll scream and you will get me out.”
“A hell of a plan.”
I wrinkled my nose at him.
“And if I fail to bring you back unharmed, your mother will skin me alive.”
“She might just turn you inside out.”
Jim had this funny long-suffering look on his face, and then his eyes sparked. “So does she grill every guy you bring home?”
I don’t bring guys home, you stupid, stupid man
. “Ignore it. She’s just worried. I’m almost thirty and still unmarried. It’s a big deal in my culture.” Not that he would understand.
“I like it how wealthy trumped black.”
“Jim, ignore it, okay?”
“Okay.” He raised his hands up.
Gah. “She’s desperate, all right? She just wants me to be happy, and she’s afraid I’ll never make a good match.”
“Why?”
Oh my gods. “What do you mean, why? Jim, look at me.”
He did. “Yes?”
What, now I had to spell it out? Talk about humiliating. “My mother tried to describe me in a glowing light: She went through all my virtues.”
“I’ve got that,” he said. “Especially the part about obedient and respectful …”
“Never mind that. She went through the whole list. If I could do origami, she would’ve mentioned it, too.”
“Okay, and?”
“Did she tell you I was pretty?”
He gave me a blank look.
“Did the word
pretty
come out of her mouth? At all?”
“No,” Jim said.
“There you go.” Happy now?
“So this is it? This is your big hang-up? You’re pissed off because your mother doesn’t think you’re pretty? Don’t let it bother you. It’s not important.”
Oh, you idiot. It’s not my mother I’m worried about. It’s you.
I waved my arms. “Jim, what’s the first thing you said to me when I asked you to describe the strange woman? Let me help you remember: You said she was beautiful.”
“And?”
“I bet you didn’t notice what she was wearing on her feet, but you noticed how hot she was.”
“She was barefoot and her feet were dirty.”
Him and his stupid memory. “That’s how it goes: Men are supposed to be strong, women are supposed to be beautiful. Well, I’m not beautiful. You can put me into a room of a hundred women my age, and I’ll be smarter than most of them put together, but it won’t make a damn bit of difference, because if you let a man into that same room and let him pick, I would be the last one left. If I were a normal woman, I could use my brain to earn money and then I would get plastic surgery. I would fix my nose, and then I would work some more until I could afford to fix my jaw and so on and so on, until I was pretty. But I’m not a normal woman. Lyc-V won’t fix my eyes, but it will undo any surgery. I know, I’ve tried. I’m stuck this way and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. And you say, ‘Don’t let it bother you,’ as if that’s supposed to make everything go away!”
“And if the surgery did work, when would you stop having it?” he asked.
“When I walked into the room, and men turned their heads to look at me. I want to be beautiful. I want to be a knockout. I would trade all of my intelligence and all of my mystic tiger magic for that.”
The green glow backlit his irises. “And be what? A pretty idiot?”
“Yes!”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I glared at him.
“Nadene is pretty,” he growled. “Beautiful woman. Dumb as a board. She can’t keep a guy longer than a couple of months. Phillip left her and she wanted me to intervene so I went to talk to him. He told me that she was fun to fuck for a while, but being with her made him feel like he was getting dumber. They couldn’t have a normal conversation. He couldn’t handle it. And you want to be that? Are you crazy?”
“You don’t even notice the fact that I am female, Jim! I’m just a brain with a pair of glasses that you occasionally have to put under guard so it’s not damaged trying to have a little bit of fun. Did you ever ask yourself why I race?”
“I know why you race,” he snarled.
“Tell me!”
“You race because you have a chip on your shoulder the size of a two-by-four. You think that because it takes you two minutes to come to when you shift and because you’re not the best fighter we’ve got, you have something to prove. And you do this by making metal cages with four wheels go really fast without any point. You don’t win anything, you don’t accomplish anything, and you hurt yourself all the time. You’re right—that will show everyone how hard-core you are.”
“Aargh!”
“The only thing you’re proving is that the smartest woman I know has zero common sense. You have powerful magic, you’re smart, you’re competent, but none of that matters. I have a dozen Nadenes, I only have one you. What good would Nadene do me right now? And I know you’re female. I’ve noticed. This hysterical thing you’re doing right now, that’s female. If you were a man, I would’ve put your ass to haul rocks for the Keep a long time ago.”
I heaved up the bucket.
“Don’t do it,” he warned.
I hurled it at him, water and all. Water splashed, and then a completely drenched, pissed-off Jim grabbed the bucket, scooped water from the pond, and tossed it at me. Water hit me in a cold rush.
I turned around and stomped off.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“Away from you!” I sat on the bench at the far end of the pond.
“You’re supposed to keep me awake.”
“I can keep you awake from here. If I see you falling asleep, I’ll curse you with something really painful.”
“You do that. You’re still wrong.”
“Whatever.”
*
THE MORNING CAME
way too slow. Jim had almost dozed off four times and I ended up moving next to him, with my bucket. At some point he asked me if my girly emotional outbursts were over, and I swore at him for a while in Indonesian. And then he ruined it by asking me what some of the words meant, and of course I had to teach him how to pronounce them properly.
It’s good that my mother stayed inside, or I would have gotten another lecture on how to behave as a proper daughter.
It was seven o’clock now and we were standing on Pryor Street, in front of a grimy white arch marking the entrance to Kenny’s Alley. Set apart from the main Underground, Kenny’s Alley had no roof, and entering through the narrow ramp off of Pryor Street was the quickest way to get there. It was also the most dangerous—to get down, I’d have to walk up the narrow ramp that squeezed between two brick buildings, enter the old train depot, and then walk along the balcony and down two floors, all filled with people who’d kill me for a dollar. Sometimes people who entered the Underground through Pryor Street didn’t come out.
The wind swirled, rushing down the narrow gap between the buildings, and flung the Underground’s scents into my face: odors of a dozen of animal species mixed with the bitter stink of stale urine, human and otherwise, old manure, fish from a giant fishmonger tank, pungent incense, and salty blood. The revolting amalgam washed over me and I had to fight not to retch.
At least the magic had vanished during the night. Usually the miasma rising from the Underground made my head hurt.
“You don’t have to do this,” Jim said.
“Yes, I do.”
He reached over and put his arm around me. I froze. There was so much strength in that muscular arm that suddenly I felt safe. The scent of him, the comforting, strong Jim scent, touched me, blocking out other smells. I would know that scent anywhere. Here he was hugging me. I had wished for it and now I just wanted to cry, because no matter what I did, no matter how much I raced or how belligerent I got, he would never want me. Not in that way.
I stepped away from him, before I lost it. “I’m going inside. If I go inside a shop, give me about five minutes. If I don’t come out …”
“I’ll come in,” he promised.
“Don’t fall asleep.”
“I won’t.”
I looked into his brown eyes and believed him.
“Okay,” I murmured. “I’m going now.”
I turned and headed down the narrow alley, into the dark belly of the Underground. Panhandlers and street people lined the ramp and the balcony, swaddled in filthy clothes, hats and tins in front of them. This early in the morning they didn’t even bother begging. They just stared at me as I passed by, all except an old black man, who was doing a wobbly moonwalk across a covered walkway, gyrating to the beat of some melody only he could hear. His eyes were wide-open; he looked straight at me but didn’t see me.
The ramp led me up to the top floor, to a wide balcony. Kenny’s Alley stretched below: a dank narrow space, filled with stalls and vicious-eyed people, its brick floor barely visible beneath cages and refuse. I kept walking. The balcony ended and I took the stairs down to the lower floor, where vendors hawked their wares. Dull electric lamps were strung out between old Christmas lights, marking the little shops. Despite the hour, customers already flooded the market, men, women, and children of every color and race looking for the magic cure to their problems. They were what allowed the poachers to exist. They’d stop poaching if people stopped buying.