no different. Most of them didn’t bother to batten down the hatches and they let all that raw power hang out there for the entire world to see.
They were all caged energy and strength and they emanated…something. Just…something. You meet a shapeshifter and find out what he is, and you realize what the something is once you’ve seen it.
He had the something. I could sense it hovering above him, power coiled and lying in wait. There was a lot of it, too. But he kept it chained in too tightly for me to read it as easily I’d like.
Not a wolf, though. I knew that much. Too laid back, too easy.
His jeans had rips at the knees. His T-shirt was clean, but faded and wrinkled and over it, he wore a flannel button down. I don’t think any of the wolves I knew even had an inkling what flannel was.
“Don’t you want to know what the bet was?” he asked, watching me with an odd little smile on his face.
“Bet?” I said, echoing his words.
“Yeah.”
Unable to stay still, I took a pen from my desk and twirled it around on my fingers, watching him, waiting for him to elaborate. The silence stretched out for over a minute. It wasn’t wasted time. He watched me. I watched him. A wide grin curled his lips, his teeth flashing white against the darkness of his skin. I started thinking about the Cheshire cat.
Bingo. Not a wolf. A cat. Even as I thought it, I could almost see that lazy energy around him flex its claws and stretch, giving me a feline smile. There were a handful of creatures to pick from in the were pool and it varied from country to country. Here in the States, the dominant creatures were cat, wolf and rat, with a few bears thrown in for fun.
Narrowing my eyes, I asked softly, “Is this a local job?”
“Local?” He studied me curiously.
“Local. As in are you local?”
A faint smiled curled his lips. “Yeah. I’m local.”
Shit. This was wonderful. Just wonderful. I had some sort of cat shifter in my office. And you can’t outwait a cat. Even I knew that. Since he was here on business, and since I was running a business—sort of—I figured I needed to get this over with, because I needed him out of my office. I wasn’t working for a damn cat, not if he was from the Orlando clan. This wasn’t courier work—I could already tell. If it was, he would have already dumped whatever and left. So that meant it was something bigger, and I wasn’t interested.
I preferred to keep my investigative work to something a little steadier than the local cat pack.
They were insane.
I’d do busy work for non-humans and I didn’t mind working for the wolves. I didn’t mind courier work between any of the local factions, really. That was actually ideal, because it was quick, it was easy and it paid pretty damn well. But if I had my way, I’d never work for the cats. They were dangerous.
Unlike the wolves, they weren’t quite so keen on following rules and since my office was incorporated in East Orlando—an area that had recently been recognized as ANH territory, if I accepted a job from the cat pack, it was pretty much CYA: cover your ass.
Bring your own back-up, make up your will, just in case, and be ready to die if you don’t have sufficient back-up. I don’t.
The damn cats were likely to try to rip my arms off if I screwed up. Or just to avoid paying me. Yes. Attempts had been made. It’s a good thing I’m handy with all sorts of sharp, shiny objects.
“What sort of bet?” I continued to watch him, searching now for some kind of sign on just what type of cat he was. His physical features weren’t much help. Oh, he was a treat to look at, definitely; probably several inches over six feet, muscled enough to make it clear he actually worked at it, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull. I couldn’t quite make out his ancestry. Multiracial, I suspected. Maybe Polynesian and black? Or Native American and black? Something else entirely? Whatever he was? Didn’t matter, because he was practically a visual orgasm. And his eyes were amazing.
Deep, dark gray. Like thunderheads piling up on the sky right at sunset.
Amusement danced in those eyes, but it didn’t make them any less formidable. “When you opened this joint,