Page 34 of Lucky or Knot
And yet he might as well have vanished back into whatever godsforsaken fairy place he’d left when he’d chosen to come to the human world and get in trouble.
Desire beat in my blood and burned in my nerves, but I gritted my teeth and forced it down. I shifted and ran through the desert for a full night, terrifying the ever-loving shit out of every poor fox and lizard and mouse that usually lived a naturally and blissfully tiger-free existence.
Early morning, the fourth after I’d left him at the Silver Lode, found me high up on a rock overlooking the desert and the rising sun to the east, with Vegas a weird glittering lump off to the west. I shifted back to my human form, shaking out my fur as it vanished into me, and flopped down to stare up at the sky stretching above me, pink-washed blue, endless nothingness except for a single wheeling raptor, probably looking for one ofthose scared mice.
Simple. A predator, prey, life and death, night fading into day.
No magical coins or debts owed, no manipulations or tricks or lies.
The rough stone under my skin would’ve been much more comfortable in a tiger’s furry body, but while shifters kept our ability to reason while in our animal forms, it took effort. The scents of desert flowers and prey, the brush of the wind in my whiskers, the faint far-off rustles and squawks and yips of the desert’s life came to the foreground with a tiger’s senses.
But now that I’d shifted back, I could think clearly again.
Genuinely clearly.
Because either the shift or just the passage of a bit of time had finally driven out the last of Raven’s magic, that I’d absorbed with my poorly judged licking and kissing. It was far more obvious now in its absence than while I’d been under his spell.
Unlike the hawk and its intended victim, nothing about Raven or his situation was simple, at least not on the face of it. Alpha magic might have a lot of advantages—strength, healing, keen senses, an innate ability to dominate and command—but it didn’t lend itself to anything requiring subtlety. His magic, on the other hand…it wound itself around you like smoke, seeped in along the edges, manipulated and tricked and lied. If anyone had the perfect skill-set to deal with a bad bargain and a fairy-wrought coin with a mind of its own, he did. I didn’t. So the logical thing would be to leave him to it.
And the logical, human part of me, the part that could understand how incredibly not-simple Raven and his predicament really was, knew I ought to continue my trajectory of the other night. I’d walked away. I should keep walking.
But even human-shaped, even free of magical influence, I had to recognize that my instincts and the deepest part of mynature insisted that no, it really was incredibly fucking simple. He was mine. He belonged to me, and he was in trouble, and I had to protect him. End of story. Cunningham and the bargain and the coin were nothing but obstacles in the way of what had to be. Difficult obstacles, maybe, but not complicated.
It felt like that moment in the club all over again, when Raven had made his proposition and I’d had to admit to myself that I’d been negotiating terms, not disagreeing with the underlying premise. The instant I’d seen him, possibly even the instant I’d scented him, it’d been all over.
Now I had to face the same uncomfortable realization: there’d never been the faintest chance in hell that I’d shrug and let it go, the way Declan had—correctly but unrealistically—told me I ought to.
It had nothing to do with Raven’s literal enchantment of me. He’d enchanted me much more lastingly with his very being, with his laughter and his tears and his stubbornness.
I had to get him the hell away from Cunningham. Ideally, I’d rip Cunningham’s face off and feed it to him sideways in the process. And then…well, then Raven would probably rip me a new one in turn for interfering in his business.
…Except that he’d cried. He’d taken my knot, and he’d cried because I hadn’t hurt him, and he’d told me that he’d wanted me to kiss him.
Whether he’d ever admit it or not, he needed my help.
And he’d get it. Whether he liked it or not.
Tigers had a particular talent for basking, and even in my human skin I could bask like a motherfucker.
So I lay there on my rocky perch until the sun had fully breached the horizon, basking in my new understanding, blinking lazily up at the brightening sky and tracking a second raptor that’d joined the first in its morning hunt.
A predator seeking prey, life and death, a new daybeginning.
Raven was mine. And he needed me.
Simple.
***
Since I’d already taken the day off work, knowing the club would be too loud and claustrophobic after a night spent in my wild tiger’s body and mind, I went home to shower and then headed straight back out again to do some recon. Raven’s DMV records might not be the most accurate—I mean, Ty Tania—but Cunningham’s Audacity Hotel, where Raven had claimed to live, seemed like the place to start.
A few calls to other service-industry friends I’d met during my year of hanging out in off-Strip bars late at night got me the phone number of a parking valet at Audacity, with a warning that he wouldn’t talk to me unless I brought him weed. A text to the same friend at the Silver Lode yielded a potential introduction to his cousin’s girlfriend, who worked as a concierge assistant at Audacity four days a week. (Luckily for his job and our friendship, he’d laughed himself sick when he saw the bed, filmed the damage to post anonymously online, and then colluded with housekeeping to cover it up.)
The girlfriend apparently had gone on vacation, though, so I tried the valet first, texting him with the name of our mutual friend and an offer to meet up and smoke on his break.
His reply was encouragingly enthusiastic, although I’d had no idea phones even had that many emojis relating to smoking pot.
Half an hour of driving around buying weed later found me leaning against the wall of a parking garage near Audacity, as casually as a weretiger stripper waiting to bribe someone with drugs could lean. The alley boasted an inspiring view of concrete dust, traffic cones, and a chain link fence with a couple of usedcondoms caught in its gaps and fluttering limply in the cold breeze.
