Page 40 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Shocked, she stiffened. “No! Of course not! We merely have to protect ourselves! We want to come out of the shadows and coexist peacefully, but we have enemies—”
Gregor stood and glared down at her, radiating tension. “Protect yourselves with automatic weapons? With land mines?”
“Gregor,” she said, hard. “Sit down.”
He must have seen something in her face because he complied, begrudgingly. He folded his arms across his chest and gazed unblinking at her, all the softness from before gone.
She downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the low table beside her chair with a sharp clink. “We have a lot of enemies, and they’re very nasty, Gregor. This isn’t about hurting people, this is about protecting ourselves from those who want to hurt us.”
He looked dubious, so she said, “Do you remember the man who was in your office that day I came with the Cézanne? The one who was with the police—the German with a shard of ice where his heart is supposed to be?”
Lips as tight as his jaw, Gregor gave a curt nod.
“When I was taken to the police station, he tortured me.”
It was as if he was an overfilled balloon that had been pricked with a pin. He visibly deflated. Weakly, his face paling, he said, “What?”
“They know, somehow, about us. They were”—she grimaced, then went on, determined—“experimenting on me. Running tests, seeing how I reacted to different stimuli, that sort of thing. They know about us, but they don’t know, and we have to protect ourselves if we’re going to take the risk to be out. Maybe it started with that video a few years ago,” she muttered, “stupid Constantine and his stupid disco fight—”
“Wait. Wait.” Gregor sat forward in the chair again, hands spread wide. “The infamous video in the disco in Rome? With the…the uh…” He trailed off into silence, unable to say it himself.
Eliana gazed at him from beneath her lashes. “Panthers. Yes.”
He visibly blanched. She saw him replay it in his mind, the grainy cell-phone video caught by a bystander at a popular nightclub that showed the bizarre sight of six impossibly huge black panthers engaged in snarling, bloody battle on a dance floor before the police had shot one and captured two others. She’d seen it herself because it had received a lot of air time before being roundly dismissed by the authorities as fake. At least publicly.
“Huh. Huh,” he said, turning it over in his mind, wrapping his head around it. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled a long, quiet breath. “Cat sidhe after all, eh?”
“Every culture has their shape-shifter myths,” Eliana said gently. “Some of them are just closer to the truth than others.”
He sat on that for a minute, recalibrating, and Eliana waited, watching his expression flit from one emotion to another, her heart in her throat.
Had she done something very, very stupid?
After a while, his lips quirked. “Should have known when you stole my soul,” he murmured.
Relief coursed through her, and she let out the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. “Silver-tongued devil.”
“Thieving feline.”
She grinned at him, and he leaned over and grasped her hands, suddenly grave again. Vehemently he said, “Promise me you’re not going to pull a Montecore on me. Or anyone else for that matter.”
“Montecore?” She was confused. “What’s a Montecore?”
Utterly serious, firelight shining red and gold off his ginger hair, Gregor stared at her and said, “The white tiger that ate that fruit loop Las Vegas magician. Roy what’s-his-name. You know, in the show at the Mirage hotel.”
She laughed weakly and leaned over and pressed her hot forehead to their joined hands. His fingers against her flushed skin were ice, ice cold, and she guessed he wasn’t nearly as composed as he was pretending to be. With a low, rumbling laugh tinged with the merest hint of entreaty, he said, “Because I fancy keepin’ my head attached to my body, lass, if you don’t mind.”
“I promise I will not eat you,” she said solemnly. “But that little dog of yours…”
Gregor gasped in mock outrage, and she lifted her gaze to his face. His hazel eyes sparkled down at her. “Although you might be doing me a wee favor there.”
Eliana shook her head, overwhelmed by gratitude and the dawning realization that her father’s dream of living in the open—the dream she was working toward—might actually be plausible. If one human could accept her, why not ten? Why not a hundred?
Why not all of them?
“Well, then, let’s see what you can do, princess. Go ahead and show me.” He made a gesture with one hand, encouraging, but she shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said, knowing what he wanted. “I can’t Shift when I’m hurt.”
