“What sort of guardians?”
I gave him a little smile. “Tigers.”
Jim grinned. “Tigers, huh.”
“Mhm.”
He leaned forward. His face was calm and I wanted to kiss him. I couldn’t help it.
“You looked worried after that newspaper thing,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. I didn’t mean to make you—”
If he said “scared,” I would make him wear this damn bucket on his head. Vegetarian and half blind, I was still a shapeshifter, a predator. I had my pride.
“—upset.”
Hmm, upset I could probably live with. He didn’t need to know that. “I wasn’t upset.”
“My point is, I would never hurt you or your family.”
I raised my chin at him. “If you tried to hurt my mother, I would totally kick your ass.”
“Aha.”
“Yes. You would be lying on the ground, crying, ‘No more, no more,’ and I would be kicking you in the stomach, wham, wham, wham!”
He laughed softly. He was so terribly handsome. Here we were sitting two feet from each other, and we might as well be on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean.
“I don’t want you to do this,” Jim said. “I don’t want you to go there, I don’t want you to get hurt trying to help me. It’s not your job to save me.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“Look, tomorrow I’ll go in there myself, and if I choke somebody long enough, they will bring the snail.”
“Aha. And how do you plan on determining if they’ve brought a garden snail or a golden one?”
“I’ll spray somebody’s magic blood around until the snail lights up.”
“Good plan.” I dipped my ladle into the bucket and tossed the water at him.
He recoiled. “What the hell?”
“You’re delirious from lack of sleep.”
“Dali!”
“The poachers are smart and a lot of them have magic. Some of them can tell what kind of a shapeshifter you are from a hundred yards just by looking at you. If you go to the Underground tomorrow, you will fall asleep there, alone and helpless, and then the poachers will kill you and cut you into tiny pieces, and then your precious werejaguar bones will be sliced into thin wafers and put into wine, so some sicko can have magic powers in bed.”
He let out a frustrated snarl.
“It’s just like with the tea—somebody offers you a gift, and you turn up your nose at it.”
“You’re taking chances again. I won’t let you do it.”
“It’s cute of you to think you can stop me, Jim. Usually you order me around and I do what you say. I might gripe and I might make a fuss, but I will do it, because you are my alpha and I respect you. On this, you get no respect. You know nothing about this world. Your rules don’t apply here, but mine do. You will follow my lead and you will let me save you, Jim.” Because thinking about you dying makes me hurt.
He opened his mouth.
“If it was the other way around, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I told him.
“I’m your alpha. It’s my job to keep you safe.”
“It goes both ways,” I said.
He rubbed his hands over his eyes. I tossed another ladleful of water at him.
“Quit it!”
“You looked sleepy.”
“I’m not sleepy, I’m at the end of my patience with this stupid hocus-pocus shit.”
“Whatever.”
Fine. He could be dense and pissed off all he wanted, it didn’t matter.
We sat in silence. Off to the side night insects chirped and seesawed sad little songs. Tomorrow would suck. It would suck so much, and we didn’t even know what was wrong with him. I wished the markets would be open already so we could get it done before he fell asleep again.
“Do you at least have a plan?” Jim asked.
“Yes. Most likely we’ll have to get down to Kenny’s Alley in the Underground. That’s where the most expensive animal parts are sold. I will go inside the shop. You will wait outside. I will offer them a lot of money for the snail. If I get in trouble, I’ll scream and you will get me out.”
“A hell of a plan.”
I wrinkled my nose at him.
“And if I fail to bring you back unharmed, your mother will skin me alive.”
“She might just turn you inside out.”
Jim had this funny long-suffering look on his face, and then his eyes sparked. “So does she grill every guy you bring home?”
I don’t bring guys home, you stupid, stupid man. “Ignore it. She’s just worried. I’m almost thirty and still unmarried. It’s a big deal in my culture.” Not that he would understand.
“I like it how wealthy trumped black.”
“Jim, ignore it, okay?”
“Okay.” He raised his hands up.
Gah. “She’s desperate, all right? She just wants me to be happy, and she’s afraid I’ll never make a good match.”
“Why?”
Oh my gods. “What do you mean, why? Jim, look at me.”
He did. “Yes?”
What, now I had to spell it out? Talk about humiliating. “My mother tried to describe me in a glowing light: She went through all my virtues.”
“I’ve got that,” he said. “Especially the part about obedient and respectful …”
“Never mind that. She went through the whole list. If I could do origami, she would’ve mentioned it, too.”
“Okay, and?”
“Did she tell you I was pretty?”
He gave me a blank look.
“Did the word pretty come out of her mouth? At all?”
“No,” Jim said.
“There you go.” Happy now?
“So this is it? This is your big hang-up? You’re pissed off because your mother doesn’t think you’re pretty? Don’t let it bother you. It’s not important.”
Oh, you idiot. It’s not my mother I’m worried about. It’s you. I waved my arms. “Jim, what’s the first thing you said to me when I asked you to describe the strange woman? Let me help you remember: You said she was beautiful.”
“And?”
“I bet you didn’t notice what she was wearing on her feet, but you noticed how hot she was.”
“She was barefoot and her feet were dirty.”
Him and his stupid memory. “That’s how it goes: Men are supposed to be strong, women are supposed to be beautiful. Well, I’m not beautiful. You can put me into a room of a hundred women my age, and I’ll be smarter than most of them put together, but it won’t make a damn bit of difference, because if you let a man into that same room and let him pick, I would be the last one left. If I were a normal woman, I could use my brain to earn money and then I would get plastic surgery. I would fix my nose, and then I would work some more until I could afford to fix my jaw and so on and so on, until I was pretty. But I’m not a normal woman. Lyc-V won’t fix my eyes, but it will undo any surgery. I know, I’ve tried. I’m stuck this way and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. And you say, ‘Don’t let it bother you,’ as if that’s supposed to make everything go away!”