the Coalition did was help survivors and their families cope with the aftermath of attacks. It wasn’t until his voice answered thick with sleep that I thought about the time difference. “Anita, what’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry I woke you,” I said.
“That’s fine. What’s wrong?” His voice was climbing into normal range, the sleep slipping away from him as he started to focus on the perceived emergency.
“Why do you think anything’s wrong?”
“Because you just left to fly out on marshal business. When you’re hunting monsters, we’re lucky if you remember to text. A call means something’s wrong.”
I’d have liked to argue with him that I was more considerate than that, but he was right. I try not to pick fights with the people in my life when they’re right and I’m not. “I need help keeping our suspect in human form. I thought I was good at this, but he’s not like you and Nathaniel. He’s low level, only one form. I’d forgotten how different that could be.”
“Tell me what happened.” Micah’s voice was serious, thoughtful, a voice you’d trust your secrets to, and I had almost from the moment I’d met him.
It had been so unlike me to fall for someone so fast and so hard, but I guess what they say is true sometimes about when it’s the right one. Micah was my one, but he’d come into my life too late to be my only. He and I had been an item for five years, but we’d never been a traditional couple. We’d always been a threesome with Nathaniel, not a twosome. If we could have legally done it, we might have tried a four-way marriage, but legalities and public opinion being what they were, I was marrying Jean-Claude, and Micah was marrying Nathaniel. They would be my intended forever, and I would be theirs. We would intend to marry one another indefinitely while we waited for the law to catch up with our hearts.
Micah listened to me without interrupting, except to ask for clarification a couple of times. He was a good listener and didn’t waste time on stupid questions or accusations. He didn’t even tell me that I could have been killed or ask me what I had been thinking, slugging it out with a wereleopard without backup from another supernatural. If the tables had been turned, I probably would have said something along those lines to him, but then I never questioned which of us was the better man. Micah was the most reasonable person I’d ever met. He was more logical than I was, and I was very logical as long as I didn’t let my temper get the better of me. We were both calm and cool under pressure and ruthless when it came to survival. He would never accuse me of being a monster for resorting to violence like one of my ex-fiancés had. I would never call him a monster for being a shapeshifter like his ex-fiancé had. We valued each other completely, even the parts that scared other people—maybe especially those parts, because those were the parts that would keep you alive when the real monsters came.
“I can’t bring the Coalition into this unless local law enforcement invites us in,” he said when I’d finished.
“This is Newman’s warrant. He’ll invite you in if I ask him to.”
“Send it through official channels, and I can be there in two hours or less.”
“Less would mean you were borrowing Jean-Claude’s private jet,” I said.
“One of the perks of the three of us dating him,” he said like it was a given, when just a few months ago he wouldn’t have said it that casually.
Micah had been working his therapy hard to come to terms with certain things, and one of those things was our vampire master, who was the kind of man who had been making heterosexual men doubt their sexual orientation for centuries. Micah was lucky that Jean-Claude wasn’t into force, either metaphysically or in any other way, because he had the power to have rolled over my Nimir-Raj, my leopard king, and just about anyone else he wanted to seduce. Jean-Claude didn’t want anyone in his bed who didn’t want to be there. He believed in willing partners and true love, luckily for all of us.
“How long do official channels take?” I asked.
“Anywhere from two hours to two days. It depends on how much the other local cops don’t want the Coalition there and how much your friend Newman is willing to