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He protested, but Newman made him back off and stopped him from commenting on us, which was good since I needed all my attention to keep Bobby from shifting. Usually when I was doing this, the shapeshifter wanted to stay in human form, so they took the help like a lifeline, but Bobby didn’t.
He poured his own “fire” into mine as if he wanted to burn us both up. It took me a few minutes to realize that if I couldn’t contain Bobby’s beast, he might trigger my own. If I’d been a full-blown shapeshifter, he might have brought on both our beasts and gotten us both killed, but I didn’t change form except for my eyes.
“Blake, your eyes. What the fuck is wrong with your eyes?” Livingston said.
“She’s one of them!” Duke yelled.
“Don’t shoot me, Livingston.”
“Don’t change, and I won’t.”
“Bobby, you’re going to get us both shot,” I said.
“I don’t want to get you hurt,” he said, but his voice had the edge of a growl to it.
“Then swallow your beast back down.”
“If I hurt Uncle Ray, I need to die.” His voice was barely human. He opened his mouth and flashed fangs.
Kaitlin screamed. I heard the door open but didn’t dare look away from the two men in front of me.
Newman said, “Get out of there!”
“Get out of here, Livingston,” I said.
“I won’t leave you in here alone with him.”
I stared at him with eyes that I knew were almost the same shade of yellow as Bobby’s, and said, “I won’t be alone with him, Livingston. He’ll be alone with me.”
That was enough for him. He backed away with the shotgun snugged against his shoulder still aimed at Bobby, though I was in the way of that aim.
“Don’t shoot either of us,” I said. I wanted to look at him as I said it, but I had to keep my eyes on the shapeshifter in front of me.
“If either of you starts bending bars, all bets are off,” Livingston said.
“Deal,” I said.
Really powerful lycanthropes change shape rapidly, almost gracefully, like ice melting to reveal a new form. But for the rest of them, it’s slow and painful a
nd kind of horrific. If you’ve ever dislocated a joint, broken a bone, torn a ligament, or ruptured a muscle, you know how much that hurts. Now imagine that every joint, bone, ligament, and muscle in your body is tearing itself apart all at the same time. That’s what a slow shape change is like, and that’s why even the most experienced of lycanthropes will lash out while the pain rips them apart. The bones begin to slide under their skin like they’re trying to stab their way out.
Bobby threw his head back and shrieked his pain to the heavens.
I jerked my hand off of Bobby as blood started running down his hands, and claws forced their way out over his fingernails. I hadn’t been near anyone who changed like this in years. He might be safe once he was fully leopard, but until then . . .
I dropped to one knee so two things could happen: Livingston had a clean shot that didn’t include part of me, just in case, and I could come up under what was left of Bobby’s chin with as hard an uppercut as I’d ever thrown. If the bones of his face had still been solid, it might have knocked him cold, but it just staggered him. I drove my other fist into his diaphragm, and leopard or man, if you can hit the right spot, it will knock the wind out of him. Since he was still standing on two legs, it bent him over a little, and I hit him in the face with my elbow on the right side of his face and then used my other elbow on the left side of his face. I grabbed the back of his neck to help his face meet my knee twice, and he was still moving. I drove my knees into his face until he slid out of my hands in a smear of blood, and I couldn’t tell whether I’d broken all the bones in his face or he was still trying to change into a leopard when he passed out. Either way, the fight was over.
21
THERE WAS ONLY one bathroom in the sheriff’s station, so that was where I went to clean the blood off my hands and dab cold water on the knees of my pants. I was hoping the blood wouldn’t set. I liked these pants. Not all the blood had come off my hands either, because some of it was fresh and mine. I’d managed to cut my hand on one of the surprise bones underneath Bobby’s skin. Normally hitting under the chin isn’t where you cut your hand in a fight. It’s usually the cheekbone or the teeth that are the problem. Hell, maybe it had been one of those moved down into his chin, or maybe it had been leopard bones out of place when I hit them. I stared at the cut on my knuckle and didn’t know what part of Bobby and his beast that I’d cut myself on. And just like that, I started to shake. The emergency was over. I could have my moment now. I’d been arrogant thinking I could control Bobby. When you’re hunting, you want the target to be as powerless and animalistic as possible, but when you’re trying to talk to them, you don’t want to talk to the animal. You need a human being in there who can hear you and think about what’s happening.
I found tears in my pants where Bobby’s claws had poked through. I hadn’t even known it happened in the heat of the fight. Even if my hand hadn’t been bleeding, I’d have been forced to get tested for lycanthropy, except that there was no need. I’d popped as having leopard-based lycanthropy years ago. Lucky it hadn’t been Newman in there, but of course he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to let them lock him inside once Bobby’s bones started sliding around. No, just me being so abysmally stupid.
I rested my hands on the cool edges of the sink and watched the blood begin to well up in the chunk I’d taken out of my knuckle. I let out a breath and stared at myself in the mirror. My skin was paper white; the dark brown of my eyes looked black, like holes burned into paper. I’d always thought that my hair was what made me look so pale afterward, but my hair was still back in its braid. Maybe it wasn’t the hair after all. Shock is what happens when your mind decides that it needs to protect you from experiencing everything around you, or when your body begins to shut itself down for the same reason. As far as I could tell, Bobby’s claws hadn’t cut anything but my clothes. Lucky for me he’d been in manacles. If he hadn’t been . . . No, don’t even think it. Well, don’t think too hard about what might have happened if I’d been just a little slower or less well trained. Nope, just don’t think about it too hard.
We still had a few hours until Edward would get here to back me up, but even he couldn’t protect me from my own arrogant stupidity. I’d never have taken such a terrible chance once upon a time before . . . before what? The only psychic ability I’d started with had been the ability to raise the dead as zombies. Of the eight of us old-time vampire hunters who had transitioned to being U.S. Marshals, three of us were animators, as in could animate the dead, which probably meant that our ability to raise the dead had given us more help against vampires than we’d first thought. Before I had fallen under Jean-Claude’s spell and eventually in love with him. Before he’d shared his vampire marks with me and I’d become more than human. Before I’d caught lycanthropy and held a rainbow of beasts inside me. We weren’t even sure why I didn’t shapeshift completely, but we thought it had something to do with the vampire marks getting to me first. Now I was going to marry Jean-Claude. Yes, we were in love, but he was also technically my master, which made me his human servant, though due to my own abilities with the dead, there was some debate on who was in charge of whom. Last year I’d raised a zombie army to combat one raised by an ancient evil vampire. So what was my short list? Necromancer, vampire slayer, Mistress of Beasts, Queen of the Dawn were all titles I’d earned among the supernatural community. It was a lot of power, a lot of magic. I’d let it give me delusions of grandeur, and those delusions had almost gotten me killed. All the wedding plans and any other plans I had almost went up in bloody ruins, because I thought I was the biggest, baddest thing in the pool. Fuck.
There was a soft knock on the door, and Newman said, “You all right in there?”
