Page 19 of Chained
Terry let the chain drop but otherwise remained still. “I should have kno— Dammit, Ididknow. In the back of my head. I just ignored my own good sense.” And he should have known better; that kind of carelessness got an agent killed.
Edge blinked slowly at him. “You’re not…. You know I can shift my form.”
“To a dog, yes.” Terry furrowed his brow. “Can you do other things to? Or just the mastiff?”
“Just the mastiff.”
“Okay, good. I never heard of a shifter with more than two forms, but there’s always something new under the sun. Or the moon—although I guess that’s more a thing with wolves than dogs. Huh.”
“But you’re not….” Edge sat up and shook his head in confusion. “You’re not surprised.”
“Well, there were clues. Your chain for one. And I’m no expert on dogs, but you seem a little too well-trained to be an ordinary mutt. You seem sort of—I don’t mean to insult you, but you seem a little clueless about some ordinary people stuff. Like music. Plus, the third dog disappeared as soon as Edge the man appeared. Hey, the other dogs. Also shifters?”
Edge nodded. “My brothers.”
“Wow. Okay, I guess that makes sense.” Were they the only dog shifters in existence? It seemed unlikely, but in any case, that wasn’t important at the moment.
“You’re not shocked that I exist.” Edge let out a shuddery breath. “You said something about vampires. I thought you were kidding, but you weren’t.”
“Nope.” Terry sat up too. “Have you ever met one?”
Wide-eyed, Edge shook his head.
“They’re a mixed bag. Some of them are out-and-out monsters, but some are pretty decent. They tend to skulk, and even the good ones have swollen egos—Look, I’m the Lord of Darkness!—but maybe if I were two hundred years old, I’d be full of myself too.”
“How do you know this? People don’t— We’re secrets, creatures like me and my brothers.”
Terry chuckled darkly. “Not very well-kept secrets. Some people know. Whitaker, for instance.”
Edge briefly closed his eyes, then gave Terry a look filled with despair. “He has connections. Do you?”
Shit. Edge’s very personal secret had been exposed, but Terry didn’t feel comfortable divulging his. They were both still naked, and Jesus Christ, he still yearned to touch and taste Edge. “I think mine are different than his,” Terry hedged. “I’m a good guy, if that helps.”
“Good guy. Good dog.” Edge flung himself off the bed and stalked toward the door.
But Terry’s side of the bed was closer to the door, and he sped over to block Edge’s way. “Don’t go.”
That brought a growl. “Why not? I’m good for fucking or guarding. You don’t want one and I can do the other from the hallway. In my other form.” It was possibly the longest string of words he’d uttered in Terry’s experience. It was also a little heartbreaking.
“I’ve enjoyed your company. Honestly. I don’t hang out with other people much. It’s been nice having you around—even if you’re guarding me or spying on me or whatever Whitaker has you doing.” He set a hand on Edge’s shoulder. “And who says I don’t want to sleep with you anymore?”
Many emotions had raced across Edge’s face over the past half hour. This one said that he suspected Terry might be insane. “I’m not human.”
“Maybe not exactly, but you’re a gorgeous and very attractive man.” And because he still saw doubt in Edge’s eyes, he continued. “Look, my personal definition of personhood is broad. You fall very easily within it.”
He wished he could tell Edge about other men he knew who’d fallen in love with… non-Homo sapienspartners. It was a side effect of working for the Bureau, since you tended to spend a lot of time with a variety of interesting beings. One of those men, a former agent, ended up in a relationship with a goddamndemonfor fuck’s sake, and now they did private-eye work that occasionally interfaced with the Bureau. Terry had spent three days with them on a stakeout in Santa Monica. It had been interesting, to say the least.
But he couldn’t tell Edge about that, not without raising more questions he couldn’t answer. And Edge still appeared skeptical. Terry squeezed his shoulder again, then cupped his cheek. “Can you at least tell me a little about yourself?”
Edge momentarily leaned into the touch before taking a step back. “What?”
“The things you couldn’t say when you didn’t want me to know who you are. Where are you from? How did you get here? What about your family—you have brothers, but who else? Why the fuck do you work for Whitaker?”
Although Edge looked indecisive, at least he didn’t try to barge past Terry and out the door. He crossed over to the window instead and stood looking out, hands on hips. Terry waited. Enjoyed the view, because Edge’s ass was the finest he’d ever seen, but otherwise he remained patient and passive. He wasn’t in a hurry tonight.
Terry could tell when Edge had reached a decision by the firming of his shoulders. Edge spoke without turning to face him. “I don’t know where I’m from. It was… a building. Big. With a yard where we could play but surrounded by walls. Other litters lived there too, some older, some younger. Five or six of them, all males. I don’t know if the female pups were somewhere else. Humans… trained us. They took our mother away when we were weaned. I don’t know who sired us.”
Edge fell silent, and Terry thought that was the all the biography he’d get. Honestly, it was more than he’d expected, and even those few sentences had given him plenty of information to digest. Plenty of information to upset his stomach, actually. Was someonebreedingdog shifters the same way they might breed real dogs? And Jesus, what was it like for Edge to grow up in that kind of environment? He might not be human, but his emotions and reactions seemed similar to everyone else’s.
