The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04 Read online

  Finally he turned his head to look down at her. His hair was mussed, dark brown curls damp with sweat. There were fine spatters of something dark across his sun bronzed neck and a smudge of it high on his cheek. Pain creased his brow and tightened his jaw, and his eyes glowed like amber jewels, not human.

  “They’ve found me,” he said, closing those eyes. “My kind have found me.”

  Emma swallowed.

  That probably explained why the wounds were still bleeding.

  Emma met Ricky when he started working at the restaurant she waited tables at in college. They’d been working together for almost six months when she discovered he was a werejaguar.

  He never planned for her — or anyone — to know his secret. But one night a bunch of drunk fratboys decided to beat him up after he finished his shift because he refused them service. They wanted to teach the gay kid a lesson — Ricky was bi, not gay, but that was beside the point — and she stumbled across him and tried to help him, witnessing his accelerated healing in the process. He was forced to take a chance and reveal what he really was. Shortly after that Em's old roomie moved out, and Ricky moved in; it was safer for him to live with someone he could trust with his secret. That was three years ago. She’d only seen him in jaguar form a handful of times since that night, and his secret didn’t define him, but it was always there in the back of Emma’s mind, the knowledge that no matter how close she got to anyone else, she still couldn’t ever, ever tell them.

  If she was honest with herself, that had been part of the reason for Alan’s appeal — he was someone she never imagined getting all that close to. Someone who wouldn’t care about her secrets, wouldn’t delve too deep. Now she wasn’t so sure of that. It was no wonder she’d pretty much decided to break up with him.

  Ricky was still standing where she’d left him when she returned from the bathroom with the first aid kit. She stumbled again on the damn shoe and swore. “Ricky, come on.” She took hold of his arm; he was feverishly hot. “Sit down. If you can. Are you hurt anywhere else?” He shook his head and orchestrated a controlled fall into the armchair.

  Emma knelt and exhaled through her nose, willing herself to switch over to clinician mode. Still, she couldn’t help wincing as she peeled the denim of Ricky’s jeans away from the wounds in his left leg. The flesh of his thigh gaped in four lurid stripes, fresh blood bright against the wine-dark clotting.

  She took a deep breath. “So I’m thinking you’re gonna need stitches.”

  Ricky made a face at the exposed gashes. He looked pale and tired, his golden skin clammy. He didn’t look good, and Ricky never looked anything but good. It wasn’t the first time she’d treated him at home, since he couldn’t go to a regular hospital, but it was the first time he’d had anything more than minor injuries.

  Of course, “minor injuries” for Ricky wouldn’t be considered minor by most people. Like the time he stabbed himself in the palm slicing an avocado because he was distracted by a funny cat video on the laptop in the kitchen.

  He sighed, breath blowing a stray curl up off his forehead. “Never had stitches before. Do they hurt?”

  Emma prodded the swollen flesh surrounding the wounds, lightly, with her finger. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  She took his groan for a negative and dug in the kit for scissors, then went to work cutting through the leg of his black work slacks. She lifted the bloodied fabric away from his skin, tucked the tail of his shirt into the crook of his hip so it wouldn’t hang in the way. Without the torn fabric of his pants in the way, the wounds looked so much worse.

  “This is still bleeding,” Emma said, pressing a gauze pad against the side of his leg to prevent the blood from seeping onto the armchair cushion. She put the scissors down and looked up at him. “One of your own kind did this to you, right?” When he only nodded tightly, she bit her lip, considering. “Would the bleeding stop if you, y’know. Changed?”

  Ricky raked a hand through his hair and met her eyes. “Not a good idea right now.” He looked sheepish and miserable. Emma noticed the raw graze on his elbow again, and reached out to catch his arm before he lowered it.

  “You don’t have to, it’s nothing,” he said, trying to move away.

  “Be quiet, I’m the doctor here.” She kept hold of his elbow and grabbed a swab, pulled it open with her teeth.

  “You know I can’t get an infection. Besides, you’re not a doctor. You’re not even an intern.”

  Emma rewarded that by pressing the swab straight onto his grazed elbow. She shook her head as he hissed in response. “Such a baby. The worst is yet to come.” She dropped the swab and grabbed a bottle of iodine solution, squirting it over the wounds even though she already knew Ricky was immune to infection. “I’m going to stitch you up now,” she said, dabbing at the wound to make sure it was dry enough. “And while I do, you’re going to tell me exactly how this happened.” She straightened and looked at him, pushing tangled hair away from her face, daring him with her eyes to contradict her.

  “Yes, Doc,” said Ricky, one corner of his mouth twitching up.

  “So hilarious. I’m just dying.” She poked him in the arm. “Talk.”

  There was a long silence as Emma threaded the needle. Finally, before she could issue a last warning, Ricky spoke. “I was ambushed on the way home from work,” he said, closing his eyes. He tensed, the long curve of muscle along the top of his thigh bulging. Emma hadn’t bothered with anesthetic; its effects wouldn’t last long enough. “I finished around two.” He hissed as the needle pulled the surgical thread tight, closing the corner of one wound. “Crossed through the park. I should have felt them before I got close, but I wasn’t paying attention. I’m an idiot.” He looked at her then, and his face tightened into an anguished frown. Emma found that frown, on his face, almost as disconcerting as the wound she was stitching up.

  “You’re not an idiot.” Emma stopped herself from asking what he meant by the comment about feeling their presence before he knew they were there. One thing at a time.

  When he didn’t continue, she tied off a stitch and looked up at him. “Them?”

  Ricky looked away. His bottom lip trembled once before he clenched his jaw. “Em…”

  “How many?” Emma managed to keep her voice from climbing a pitch.

  He met her eyes again. “Three of them,” he said. “And they weren’t jaguars.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment. “They were ocelot maidens.”

  Emma blinked, mind boggling. She hadn’t known minds could actually boggle, but hers definitely did.

  She cleared her throat. “Uhhh. Ocelots. Okay. Fine.” She tried for sounding reasonable and made it.

  “Ocelot maidens , Em. They can’t change.”

  She paused the stitching to stare at him. The dog shifted restlessly against her legs. “I’m searching for a way to say what the hell without saying what the hell, Ricky, but it’s a struggle.”

  He looked pained. “The ocelot maidens used to be regular shapechangers, but they were cursed. Now they’re just tiny little kickass bitches you don’t wanna arm wrestle. Or so I’ve heard.”

  Emma blinked. “And you call them maidens why? No wait, don’t answer that.” Focus on the important stuff , she told herself. Just focus. “They did this to you? But how? You said — they can’t…” Oh God, this was nuts.

  Ricky drew himself up, looking wary. “They can partially change, enough for claws and teeth.”

  And she’d thought her night was strange before any of this. She ducked her head and resolved to focus on stitching Ricky’s leg. It had started to heal on its own — too slow. It wasn’t like in the movies; the flesh didn’t simply meld together, but stretched in wispy, silken strands, all the way from the bottom-most visible point inside the wound, where everything was red, stripy muscle, up to the top-most layer of Ricky’s tan skin. Like watching something magical and gruesome grow before her very eyes. Every other ribbon of blindly seeking skin dissolved, unable to heal.
/>   “Okay. Ocelot maidens.” Emma steadied her hands. “What did three ocelot maidens want with you?”

  Ricky’s leg tensed beneath her hands. “I don’t know. I got away from them; I didn’t stop to ask questions.” Color rose in his face.

  He was lying. Emma had no idea why, but she knew him well enough to be able to tell. “So, you have no idea why a gang of ocelot maidens tried to attack you. Ocelots, Ricky, not jaguars, which would make some kind of sense to me, but ocelots. Maidens. Whatever.” Emma tied the end of her stitch and snipped the end off, her movements quick and irritated. She put her hands on her hips and sat back, fixing him with a hard stare. She didn’t risk glaring at him, or she’d laugh, because he was sitting there looking very shamefaced with only half a pair of pants on. But she did stare. Hard.

  He squirmed under her gaze, his tan cheeks getting darker still, eyes so pale against the bronze of his skin they were almost yellow. He didn’t try to worm his way out of trouble by making fun of her seriousness. Something inside Emma dropped like a stone. Things could only be about to get worse.

  Ricky took a deep breath and let it out slow. When he spoke, he sounded tired, and somehow resigned.

  “The ocelot maidens are royal servants. They only ever act at the command of the king.” He sighed apologetically. “I know how it sounds, there’s just no other way to explain it to you.”

  She stared at him. “The king.”

  He nodded. A look crept into his eyes — something older than the Ricky she knew, something hurt. “The king of the Central American jaguars,” he said.

  Emma fixed more thread on the needle and set to work with the stitches once more. “You have a king,” she said finally. “What does this king want with you?”

  “I don’t know.” He glanced away from her again. “He shouldn’t want anything with me, shouldn’t even know who I am. And the ocelots, I’m surprised to have seen them outside of the palace.” He didn’t look surprised; he looked ashy and shaken.

  Emma listened to the five am quiet, straining her ears. All she heard was the shallow sigh of the dog breathing at her feet, her own pulse wet in her temples, the click and hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

  “Ricky,” she said after a deep calming breath. “All this weird ocelot maiden stuff aside, if this king somehow wanted to get in contact with you — by kidnapping you — would his people be likely to give up just because you got away from a few of them at the first try?”

  Ricky’s face stilled. His amber eyes went round and intense as a tiger’s, and Emma glimpsed the shape of something animal in the architecture of his face, the wideness of his jaw, the sweep of his temples. Like a fish beneath dark water, there and gone before she got a good look.

  She couldn’t help it; the skin on the back of her neck crawled. And there was something about the look of dread on Ricky’s face when he talked about the “king.”

  Whoever this guy was, he was not a nice person.

  Which meant somebody bad was after Ricky.

  He shook his head, damp curls bouncing. “You have nothing to worry about, I promise. If nothing else, they would never risk confronting me in front of a human, even if they could find out where I live. And I’m pretty sure I lost them.” He didn’t seem very convinced of himself, but he hurried on, eyes wide and bright, worry tugging at his full mouth. “They followed me from work because it was the first place they picked up my trail. I’m not that easy to track.”

  His feigned nonchalance in the face of being stalked and attacked made Emma’s chest tight. She knew a little of how hard he had struggled to extricate himself from the world he left behind, even if he never told her many details. She knew he left Mexico when he was fifteen, crossed the border illegally — easy enough in jaguar form — and took whatever menial work he could get while moving around frequently enough to prevent anyone from finding him. A few years later, it was safe enough to settle down, and a couple of years after that he got the job at the restaurant where Emma was waiting tables. The three years they’d been roommates was the longest he’d ever stayed in one place.

  Of course, he never gave the impression he was breaking any kind of tribal law, or whatever they called it. But he wanted nothing to do with the world he was supposed to be a part of, and now the king was after him.

  The king, Emma. Does he wear a crown, carry a scepter? This is absurd. And now you know you’re close to flipping out, because you’re talking to yourself.

  The sarcastic voice of her own coping mechanism failed to make the threat any less real. And it was a threat. Ricky was familiar with the nastier side of his kind; Emma had seen that side of Ricky on a few rare and terrible occasions. But always and only in defense of her.

  She trusted him with her safety, but if what he said about the reluctance of his kind to deal with humans was true, then it wasn’t her safety they had to worry about.

  “However they found you,” she said, “they’ll find you again. Won’t they?”

  His silence was answer enough.

  She finished the last stitch and packed away the things she’d used to patch him up. Then she gave Ricky a level look. “What are you going to do, really? Can you hide from them?”

  His eyes darkened. Emma fancied she saw memories shifting behind them. When he didn’t answer, she bit her lip and looked away. Would he leave everything behind to run from them? It seemed absurd; he had an apartment, a job, hobbies, friends. Well, only one friend, actually — her. It might look like he had a whole life he couldn’t just walk away from, but when it came down to it, she was the only other person he was really close to.

  “Will you just pack up and go?” She didn’t want to hear the edge to her voice; didn’t want the question to be loaded, but it was.

  Ricky braced himself with a hand on the arm of the chair, stood, and reached out to pull her into a gruff hug. “Hey. I wouldn’t do that, Em. I won’t.” He squeezed, and she let him, even though the tail of her braid pulled against her back. “I don’t know what they want from me,” he murmured against her hair. “But it’s probably something I don’t want to give them.” His breath stilled for a moment; the echo of his last comment sang between them like a struck magnet. The dog whined. She wondered again what the hell she was going to do with him.

  Ricky sighed, chest rising under her cheek. “I’ll have to go to them eventually,” he said. “I don’t want to be brought to them like a prisoner. They might be rethinking their approach now, since I didn’t respond so well to the whole midnight grab scenario.”

  Emma heard the tentative smile in his voice, but his arm around her shoulders was still tense, almost thrumming. She stepped away from him, unwrapping his arm like a scarf. She shook her head to resettle the mass of her hair. “Your kind must be seriously lacking in manners, if they thought you’d respond at all to the whole midnight grab scenario.”

  Ricky’s smile died. “You have no idea.”

  3

  The world beyond Emma’s apartment was still dark when she stepped into her small kitchenette and set the gun on the breakfast table. It made a solid sound against the tabletop, final but full of possibility.

  Leaning against the sink, Ricky stared, from the gun to her, and back again. The hum of the microwave filled the silence; the bubble-drip of the coffee percolator punctuated it. It might be too early in the morning to think straight, definitely too early to have a gun on the kitchen table, but at least there was coffee.

  “We don’t need that,” Ricky said warily.

  Emma gave him a dry look and opened the refrigerator. “We need something. Maybe if I’d started that muay Thai class when I was like six years old instead of six months ago, I could channel my inner Black Widow, but that’s not how it happened.” She grabbed butter and jam and cream cheese, put them on the table. “I feel better with the gun, thanks.”

  Ricky turned to the coffee machine, tension bunching his shoulders. “Statistically speaking you’re more likely to have a gun turned against you than
—”

  “I’d rather live with that risk than the knowledge that if something happened I’d have no way to protect myself. Lesser of two evils. Maybe when you’ve been reincarnated as a single woman living on her own, you can tell me all about how relevant statistics are to your sense of bodily safety, Ricky,” Emma said with zero animosity. It was an old argument. “Until then, I have the gun. I practice regularly. I know how to use it.”

  The microwave chimed. With unerring instinct, the dog padded into the kitchen, claws clicking, and stopped a couple of feet into the room with his ears cocked questioningly.

  “Come on, mister.” Emma patted her thigh — she’d put on her oldest and comfiest pair of jeans — and the dog came and sat obediently beneath the table.

  Ricky sighed, grabbed plates and set them out. “He needs a name.”

  “I was afraid of that.” Emma pulled the bagels out of the microwave and set it on the table. “I can’t keep him. The apartment’s too small, and I work too much. He needs a proper home.”

  The smell of warm bagels filled the kitchen. Ricky made a low rumbling sound, grabbing coffee fixings out of the cupboards. “Maybe he needs a home with someone he trusts.” He avoided her gaze when she turned to look at him, placed sugar and cream on the table. “Pam’d let you take him to work anyway.” He glanced up at her finally, eyes crinkling at the corners with a vague smile. “I think Bruce is a good name.”

  Emma frowned, bit her lip. Pam would let her take the pooch to work. “Bruce?”

  Ricky jerked his chin at her chest, indicating her faded t-shirt. “Evil Dead.” He sat and so did Emma, curling one leg beneath her butt. “Bruce Campbell. Plenty of other cool Bruce’s too. Bruce Wayne, Batman. Bruce Banner, the Hulk.”

  It was a good name. Weird, but good. She bent down, looked under the table, where the dog lay in his usual pose, head on paws, spooky eyes rolled up to watch her. “Hey there Bruce. How’s that?” His ears flicked forward, nothing more.