Ascanio blinked. “One?”
“It had three.” I got up and pulled a change of clothes from my bag. My other me was about twenty-five percent larger, but my long-sleeved T-shirt had a lot of stretch in it. I pulled it on and put on my pants. They were more like capris now and they were tight on my calves. “I’m going out.”
“Like that?”
I pulled out my knife and sliced the hems of my pants. Much better. “Who’s going to stop me?”
“But you’re…not in human shape.”
Yes, and I was sick of being ashamed of who I was. I looked at him for a long moment. “If I change back into a human, I’ll need a nap. I don’t have time for naps. If someone has a problem with the way I look, f**k them.”
“Uhh…”
“And stop looking so scandalized. I covered my boobs, didn’t I?”
“But I still know they’re there. I saw them.”
“Treasure the memory.” I grabbed my bag off the table.
Ascanio jumped in front of the door. “Can I come with you?”
“No.”
He fluttered his eyelashes at me. “I’ll be very quiet.”
“No.”
“Andrea, I’m sick of being stuck here by myself. Please, please, please, can I come with you? I’ll be good.”
He’d been cooped up in the office for the last few weeks, at first because he was injured, then because he wasn’t and we wanted to keep him that way.
“I’m going to look for a murderer. If you come with me, you’ll get hurt when we run into trouble on the way. And then I will have to have a very unpleasant conversation with Aunt B, which will go like this: ‘You won’t join Clan Bouda, you broke up with my son, and you let that sweet precious boy get hurt.’”
Ascanio picked up my desk with one hand and held it four feet off the ground.
“It’s not your muscle I’m concerned about. It’s your brains. Or lack thereof.”
He set the table down. “Please, Andrea.”
He was going stir-crazy and doing broom drills. I could relate. I’d been there.
“Can you drive?” If I put my seat all the way back, I’d fit into the Jeep, but driving with my size-twelve feet and three-inch claws would be a challenge.
“Do the People navigate vampires? Of course I can drive.”
“Alright.”
He jumped three feet in the air.
“Now, while you’re with me, you will be acting as a representative of our firm. That means you will be respectful and polite. If some jerk calls you an ass**le, you’ll call him sir. Even if you have to throw him on the ground and break his legs, you will still call him sir while doing it. You follow my lead and you follow my orders. That means not taking the initiative and starting fights without my express command. Do you get me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Excellent. Go get your knife.”
He ran into the supply room and came out with a tactical bowie knife in a sheath on his belt. The bowie, a “Mercenary Guild” model, boasted a sixteen-inch black blade and weighed almost two pounds. You could chop small trees down with it. It would be sufficient.
“Let’s go.”
He hesitated. “Carrie and Deb are in our parking lot. I saw them from the window.”
I went to the back and carefully glanced out of the window. Two boudas waited for us by my Jeep. The one on the left, Carrie, a tall Italian-looking woman in her mid-forties with dark shoulder-length hair, leaned against the vehicle, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Olive-skinned, Carrie had a kind of raw-boned hardness about her that said you’d have to rip her arms off before she’d stop coming after you. Deb, her buddy, was about ten years younger, looked softer, rounder in the face, and stood two inches shorter. Her red hair, cut in a fluffy carefree bob, flared about her tan face. Her brown eyes brimmed with humor. She cracked up easily and usually went for the gut in a fight.
Aunt B used them for light enforcement jobs. That old bitch was at it again. Aunt B and I never saw eye to eye. She’d helped me once during the flare, when the magic made me lose control over my body, but that was the only moment of kindness I had ever seen from her.
“What are you two doing here?” I murmured to myself.
“Maybe they have some pamphlets that will save our souls and make sure we’re right with the Lord,” Ascanio said.
“Did those nice church ladies come by again?”
He nodded. “I asked them if a man died and then the woman remarried, and the three of them met in heaven, would it be a sin for them to have a threesome, since they were all married in God’s eyes. And then they decided they were late to be somewhere else.”
A little bit of knowledge was a very dangerous thing.
In the parking lot, Deb crossed her arms and kicked a tiny rock. It flew out of our view like it had been shot from a cannon. Deb watched it go, winced, and hid behind the Jeep. Carrie shook her head.
Any shapeshifter in the Pack’s territory had three days to present themselves to the Pack, at which point they would either obtain a visitor’s permit, allowing them to carry out their business; they would petition to join the Pack; or they would be asked to leave. While I was in the Order, Aunt B made no move to bring me into the fold. I thought she didn’t want to cause a problem with the knights. I discovered I was wrong—she left me alone because Raphael had a thing for me and then we became an item. The moment we had a falling out, she came after me like a shark.
Aunt B wanted me to play ball, join Clan Bouda, and be one of her girls. I’d been in a bouda clan once. No thanks.
“We could go out the front door,” Ascanio said.
They thought they could intimidate me. Well, they should have brought a lot more people, because I was done doing things by the book. “Hell, no. We’re going out the back. Whatever happens, you stay out of it or I will never take you with me anywhere.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I marched out through the back door.
The boudas took me in, fur and all. Their eyes widened.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going like that?” Carrie asked.
Wrong thing to say. Wrong, wrong thing to say. “Wherever the hell I please.”
“I don’t get it.” Carrie shook her head. “Are you trying to provoke Aunt B? What, your life’s too nice and you need some misery?”
I grinned at them. See the teeth? Take note, you’ll see them up close if you’re not careful. “Can I help you, ladies?”