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Well, I could try, right? I was probably the more experienced fighter, definitely far dirtier in technique, and those both meant something even if he towered over almost everyone—human or shifter—in Night Falls.
“Please don’t hurt him, sir.”
There were tears in the young woman’s voice, the quality of her tone matching her mother’s last goodbye. An ugly cocktail of emotions whirled inside my chest. I felt weak, undone by this slip of a girl and her soft plea. Well, not a slip. She had a stack of curves on her, but she also was barely past being a cub. College years, perhaps, but not much more.
Damn—to have a child this age, Justine must have gotten pregnant right after she ditched me. The only cat totem I could smell in her was her mother’s. But I had a clear picture in my mind’s eye of who her father would be. Henric the Asshole, a smarmy cat who had served as the chief lackey of Justine’s father.
Forcing myself to sit up, I fixed a hard stare on the young woman.
Emerald eyes took my breath away and stopped my heart for all of a second before I steeled myself against them. I pushed to my feet, the initial encounter robbing me only of my balance and not my strength.
“We’ll talk inside,” I huffed, stepping onto my porch and heading straight for the kitchen.
I banged around in the cupboards and refrigerator while Doone and the woman stood just inside the cabin’s threshold. Their position made me crankier than I already felt. Like they were forcing me to actually invite them in, to suggest they make themselves comfortable. That grated, especially since I didn’t want Doone comfortable, not one iota.
Unless he didn’t know who he was bringing to me.
But that would make him a damn fool and he still deserved to be uncomfortable.
“You just happened to find her out by the cabin?” I growled from the kitchen as I filled three glasses with iced tea. “Or up Buckley way?”
She answered before Doone could.
“We encountered one another by the spring near the cabin,” she said, moving away from the door until she could see me. She stood with her hands on her hips, the stance yet another reminder of her fiery mother. “I jumped off a freight train a little north of Fifield and cut through the woods until I found an old abandoned track and followed it north on foot.”
“How’d you know about the abandoned track?” I snapped. “Or are you just dumb enough to walk until you get lucky?
The minute the word “dumb” left my lips, I both regretted it and felt a warning pulse from Doone. Heard the growl that left his lips, too, but the she cat made a gentle hand gesture in his direction that worked to calm him.
Slowly reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a cellphone, the fancier kind with a screen about the size of my palm.
“I bought this and a truck load of minutes.”
“How’d you know where to look?”
This time, my question held a little less growl, but twice the curiosity. Had Justine sent her daughter in search of me? And for what purpose? Ill or good? I knew the cats her father had led were in Illinois, not too far from the wolf packs from Champaign that had attacked us last fall. Maybe someone had recognized me and word had gotten back to her.
Mosa, as Doone had called her, didn’t answer right away, taking the time instead to put the phone away and remove two things from her pocket. Coming closer to the kitchen area, she placed a hundred dollar bill on the counter and slid it toward me. In faint green ink I could barely see to read, someone had written the name of the town I called home.Night Falls…
I pushed the bill back at her, my impatience growing as she put the money away before showing me the other item she had removed.
A driver’s license with her picture and a name.
Amanda Mallory
“Come closer,” I ordered, the tone of my growl too much for Doone to tolerate.
Before this Mosa or Amanda, whichever was her real name, could comply, he was up in my face…
Correction, his chest was in my face.
The man is a fucking mountain stacked on top of another mountain.
She intervened before I was stupid enough to get in a fight with a double-decker mountain.
“It’s okay,” she said, the smooth feline purr of her words like a needle piercing my heart.
More liquid than water, she slid between me and the wolfling who had three times as much muscle as common sense. Further risking the big lug’s wrath, I leaned in close and took a long sniff along the woman’s hair. I didn’t need to smell Justine on her or in her to know she was her mother’s daughter. Their shapes were different and Justine was the darkest of beauties, but I knew those eyes, knew the distinctive slide of words.
