between him and a tree, scraping my arm against it in the process. The endless tangle of the Everglades spread out in front of me and my gut crawled as I studied the terrain. Just off to the left, I saw the glint of water…and a long, reptilian form. Another gator. Damn it.
“So you’re a liar, then?”
I spun on my heel.
“No,” I snapped. I don’t lie. Even though the aneira had never bothered to teach me many of their more honored traditions, it seemed as though some of those traditions had come to me simply through my blood.
My heart is strong. My blood is noble—Once upon a time, honor had been everything to the aneira, or so the legends said.
I didn’t lie.
And when I gave my word, I felt honor-bound to keep it. If I thought I couldn’t keep a promise, I simply didn’t make it.
In the quiet, white-hot heat of the day, I glared at him. “Are you happy?” As I went to turn, I shot another look to the water and suppressed a shudder. The gator was still there. If it moved, I’d hear it, but the fear was still twisting inside me and shutting it off would be about as easy as stopping the flow of the St. Johns River.
A big arm came around my waist. “The gators aren’t going to bother you.” His hand spread wide over my belly. “I’ll tell you what I am, but you can’t tell anybody…not until I say it’s okay. Nobody in the clan knows what I really am. They made an assumption when I came to them and I let them think it.”
“Why do that?”
“Because I’m one of just a few…” He turned his face into my hair and I had the weirdest sensation he was breathing it in. “I was orphaned. Like Doyle. When I was a kid. I’m hunting down the fuck who killed my parents, and one day I’ll end that bastard’s miserable existence. But until then, nobody can know. If I tell you, I have to trust you won’t share it with anybody.”
“Why would you tell me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The hard, heavy thud of my heart against my ribs left me breathless and it was a few seconds before I could breathe. “The thing with the bow isn’t quite that personal, Damon. Not much of a trade. Look… it’s just a…”
“Leopard,” he murmured against my neck before I could say another word. “Clouded leopard out of Borneo. There is only a handful of my kind left. My father came from Borneo and I took after him. My mother was human, lived in New Zealand. Everybody assumed I came from one of the Himalayan packs. A lot of them interbreed with humans and when they made the assumption, I let them…it suited my purposes.”
Leopard. As the puzzle of that settled into my brain, my lids drifted down. “Didn’t I just tell that you didn’t have to tell me?” It was a heavy weight. He’d kept it secret for a reason, and whatever that reason was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to carry the burden.
“I wanted to. I want you to know what I am. Now…the bow.”
“It sings.”
Off in the distance, I heard the slight shift as the gator moved around. He had noticed us, I thought. Shivering a bit, I took a breath and blew it out. “Weapons…we hear them. The modern weapons are just static and noise mostly, although this bow, there’s craftsmanship in him. Somebody worked on him—cared,” I murmured, stroking the compound bow and smiling a little as I sensed a small pause, almost like pleasure, in its music at the back of my mind. “Every weapon I own, I picked because it spoke to me in some way. I could hear something singing to me the minute we went through the door in the back room. And the minute he opened that cabinet and I saw her…”
“Her. You talk about them as though they live.”
“For me, they do.” Rustling in the grass drew my attention and I looked over. The spot on the bank where the gator had been lying was empty. “Now…you can stand here and chat all you want, but I want to move.”
He laughed a little. “Okay, baby girl. But you ought to know…I could have that gator for lunch if I wanted.”