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He laughed. “Basically. We do enjoy oursleep.”
He stopped on a ledge about halfway up the second story, watching me as I finished my ascent to the very top. The highest branch veered on an angle all the way to the vaulted glass roof. I scrambled up it and crouched where it bowed to take in mysurroundings.
I could see over the roof of the rest of the house from here, to the tops of the pines on the other side. To the south, the suburban road was visible between the trees, stretching off into the distance. A car puttered by below me, the driver completely unaware of me perched there watching him. The view of the long drop to the ground below made my pulse thumpfaster.
If this was how cat shifters did things, I had to say I completelyapproved.
I couldn’t jump through the window, but there were all sorts of possibilities for leaping my way down in here. I turned my gaze to the room beneath me. The shape and placement of the various protrusions made for their own sort of challenge. I fixed my gaze on a branch ahead of me and several feet below, bunched my muscles, and launched myself towardit.
My feet hit the artificial bark smack in the center. I grasped the sides of the branch to hold myself steady, exhilaration rushing through me. Without giving myself much time to think, I spotted an appropriate ledge and pushed offagain.
The feeling of free-fall raced through me for an instant before I landed. So sharp and giddying. I glanced around and threw myself down toward one of those bowls of bedding. This time I let myself land on my hands and knees. I rolled onto my back and snuggled into thecushions.
“Okay,” I said. “Thisisalmost as good as the climbingpart.”
“And the jumping part?” Marco said, hopping onto a nearby branch. His indigo eyes glinted. “You’re a pretty girl, my Princess of Flames, but you’re spectacular when you come that close to flight. It lights youup.”
The compliment lit me up in a totally different way. I pushed myself onto my feet. “Is this how you treat all the girls? Kidnap them and then seduce them with flattery and your awesomehouse?”
His eyelids lowered, his gaze turning more heated. “Not at all, princess. This is only foryou.”
His tone was serious enough beneath the flirting that my pulse skipped. I craved that intensity, but at the same time it sent my nerves jittering. How could I be that important to him, to anyone here, just likethat?
I leapt away from those worries, up one of the other slanting branches. “Well, you haven’t caught me yet,” I called back tohim.
I heard a laugh in his intake of breath. “Let’s see if I can changethat.”
His feet scraped the outcroppings just beneath me. I threw myself forward faster, leaning over so I could pull myself along with my hands as well. As if I were an animal even if I still couldn’t turn myself intoone.
I sprang from one branch to another, dashed up that one to a ledge, and abruptly found I had no way to keep going up. I’d almost hit the roof again. Marco was halfway up the branch behind me, loping up it with perfect balance. He hadn’t shifted either, but the feline in him showed in everymovement.
“Ran yourself into a corner?” he teased, slowing a little to draw out hispursuit.
Oh, no. I wasn’t letting him win yet. “No such thing,” I informed him. Then, as he reached the edge of the platform, I flung myself off it toward a branch at least a full floorbelow.
The exhilaration of the fall burst through me—and tugged free a memory from long, long ago. Scrambling onto the roof of a wooden playhouse and launching myself into the air. Feeling my wings unfurl and catch the wind just for a second before my child’s body hit the ground. Rolling in the grass and giggling, reveling in the glimpse of my futurepowers.
Mama! Mama, did you see thatone?
My feet hit the branch hard. My knees jarred, and the vivid glimpse of my past slipped away. I held there, inhaling shakily, my fingers digging into the manufacturedbark.
“Princess?” Marco said, lowering himself onto the branch just aboveme.
I shook myself, but my mind wouldn’t quite settle. Where had I been in that memory? Somewhere with my mother, obviously. But not New York. That had been before New York. In a shifter community somewhere? Was that where I was supposed to gonow?
I looked up at Marco. “You keep calling me ‘princess.’ Because my mother was pretty much queen of all theshifters.”
He nodded, watching mecuriously.
“She must have had some kind of official home, right?” I went on. “That people would know to come to, if they needed... I don’t know, official guidance orsomething?”
“There are four houses that are the official property of the dragon shifter line,” Marco said. “One near the center of each kin-group’s main territory. She’d have moved from one to another periodically or as needs required, usually with at least one of her alpha mates.Why?”
I bit my lip. “I just wondered if maybe she might have gone back to one of those homes. When she left New York, I mean. I guess if that symbol had to do with any of them, you’d have recognized it, though, wouldn’tyou?”
“Most likely. And if she’d returned to prime shifter territory, she wouldn’t have goneunnoticed.”
So much for that lead. But that line of thinking tickled up another question. “Aaron said you all knew me back then. When I was a little kid, before Mom and I left. Were we, like, friends,or...?”
