A Monster and a Gentleman (9 page)

A small smile touched her lips. “Yes.”

“So now you know...my future.”

“Yes...and no.”

“Holy shit.” Oren put his head in his hands. She could tell his future. Not in a vague predictions way, but in a concrete use-the-Force-we-are-all-connected way.

“There is no future, not really, only possibilities.”

“But still, you can see those possibilities.”

“Yes.”

“I know, from every movie ever made, that I shouldn’t ask this, but what did you see for me?”

“You’re future was gray—”

“Oh God, I’m going to die.”

“No, all the images I see in the future are gray, but yours was fog.”

“I’m going to die in fog?”

She huffed. “If you were about to die, I would know. I would weep for you.”

“You would?”

Their gazes met, held. “I would, and I think it would not only be the keening of the banshee.”

Oren wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, but it felt like something intimate had passed between them. “So I’m not going to die?”

“You will die someday, but I don’t know when, so don’t ask me.”

Oren closed his mouth.

She laughed. “You future wasn’t clear. Sometimes it is that way, sometimes it is not my place to know. But I did see some things.” She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. Her eyeballs moved under the lids and her fingers twitched. He drank his water in silence, not wanting to interrupt her.

She opened her eyes and gasped, causing Oren to yelp and almost drop his glass.

“What, what did you see?”

“Nothing for you to fear, but it was harder than I thought to sort through the Seeing.” She rubbed her temples. “I see success in your possible futures.”

“That’s the best news I’ve had all day.”

She raised a brow. “But was that success from selling my Clan’s, my people’s secrets?”

“If that’s what you saw, then you aren’t in sync with the Force or whatever.” Oren pushed to his feet. “I didn’t do it. I know my past makes me the most likely suspect.”

“I know. I saw your past.”

He turned. “Well, then I guess I have no secrets from you.”

“Of course you do. I could not See all of a person’s life, even if I wanted to. I only See those things that changed or influence the energy of your life.”

“Then ignore my past and listen to what I’m telling you right now. I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t. I like Luke and Runako and the other guys, and even if I didn’t, I want this to be a success as much as they do.”

Maeve was still sitting calmly in the middle of his floor. “I know.”

He stopped. “You do?”

Maeve watched Oren pace. He was tall and lean with a trim, hard body. As humans, most of her Clans-men were massive, their powerful true forms represented in their heavily muscled human bodies. Oren was different. His arms were corded with lean muscle, and she could see the way his ass flexed as he moved.
 

She blew out a breath and shifted, trying to calm her arousal. That’s what she’d felt in the car when she was on top of him—arousal. No male had made her feel that way in a very long time.
 

“You do?”

“Yes.” Maeve assured him. She knew he wasn’t the one to blame after seeing his future, but she’d wanted to test his reaction. “I couldn’t see all the possibilities or far into your future, but from the things I could make out, your potential futures involved success because the movie was made.”

“That’s good.” Oren sat down and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but I think I should point out that even if the information is leaked, the movie might still get made. I could have leaked the information and then profited from the success of the movie.”

“No, there is no movie if our secret is exposed too soon.” If their secret was exposed, if they lost control of this situation, they would all go home and spend time together, as a Clan, before angry humans showed up and murdered them all.
 

“No movie?”
 

“No.” Maeve toyed with a lock of hair, debating whether to say more. “Did they tell you why we need to do this now?”

“You mean come out of the closet? Yeah, a bit. I know you—your Clan is it? That you’ve moved around a lot to stay hidden, because humans have almost found you. But now there’s not a lot of places left to go. And I think someone said that the spell that lets everyone turn into humans is new too.”

“That is part of it. Living in secret is not a realistic course, and the wonderful shifting spell is new.” It had taken her years, but she’d figured it out. “But there is another reason.”

“What’s that?”

“There are some humans who already know.”

Oren sat back. “What?”

“There is a group of humans who know we exist. They think we are demons from Hell. They’ve kidnapped, tortured and killed many of us. They killed Runako’s sister and tortured Seling.”

“Seling? But he’s so...”

“Mellow? He hides his anger, and his pain, well.”

“If they know about you why isn’t that information public? Why isn’t it all over the news?”

“They think they are waging a war against evil demons, while at the same time they hope to find a way to use us to make themselves strong.”

“There was something Jo said the other day I didn’t understand. She said the wolf people, or something like that. Did she mean Blackwolf?”

“You know them?”

“They’re a security company, only they provide the kind of security that comes with guns mounted on tanks, and everyone who works there is ex-military.”

“Those are the men.” Maeve bit the inside of her cheek to hold back the hurt and fear that came when they were mentioned.

“And they know you exist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh...shit.”

“Yes.”

“So if they see the...”

“Yes.”

“Oh fuck.”

“If I keep talking, will you keep using different curse words?”

“Crap on a cracker.”

“Ohh, that’s a good one!”

Oren shook his head and smiled. Maeve’s belly tingled.
 

“The situation was bad enough before I knew all that. Now it’s worse. I guess that explains why you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe we can work together. I came up with some stuff. I’d planned to look into it myself, to clear my name.”

“Show me what you have.”

Oren walked out of the room and Maeve stretched. She hadn’t lied to him. In many of his futures, she’d seen success. At least, that’s how she interpreted the vision of him standing onstage clutching more little gold statues to match the ones she’d seen in his past. The females her Clans-men had mated with had told her what the person responsible might be expecting—fame and fortune, appearances on TV and in newspapers. She’d seen those things, but always with an image of him holding a statue or standing with the human mates her Clans-men had chosen, or the males themselves. If his fame came from exposing them, they would not stand with him.

In other futures, he was one of the first casualties of the war between monsters and humans, dying defending someone she could not see, though she could tell that it was one of her people.
 

She wouldn’t tell them, any of them, that if they didn’t find the leak and stop him, nothing they could do would prevent the war.

Armed with a stack of papers and a roll of Scotch tape, Oren came back into the living room.
 

Maeve was now sitting on the couch.

Well, sitting wasn’t exactly how he’d describe it. She was lying upside down, legs dangling over the back, hair pooled on the floor.
 

It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at her without the curtain of hair hiding her body. She was slender but with nicely curved hips and breasts. The short dress—which said
I love Los Angeles
in sparkly letters—had ridden up to the top of her thighs, and her legs were long and pale as cream. Her breasts were firm mounds under the thin material of her dress.

Oren yanked his gaze away. She had to be at least fifteen years younger than him, never mind that she was a whole different species.
 

“What is that?” She rolled over, righting herself as he took a seat in the chair next to the couch.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. If someone wanted to expose the monsters, there was better footage than the kiss scene. Any of the raw shifting scenes would be better. There’s some really gruesome stuff that might have gotten people’s attention.” They’d filmed the men shifting from human to monster, and monster to human, though they’d planned to only use a few bits of that footage.
 

The guys’ transitions from one body to the other would be the bulk of the visual effects department’s work. It was too gruesome to be used, especially when they planned to tell the world it was real—those weren’t the images they wanted to stick with people. They were keeping some untouched footage, such as close-up shots Javier, the second AD, had gotten of bones breaking through skin.

“You think that the person is not trying to expose us?”

“No, I think that they couldn’t get any of the more damning footage.”

“Where is the footage? How would someone get it?”

“How much do you know about computers?”

“I do not have one, but I have a smart phone. And I’ve watched lots of TV and movies.”

Oren looked at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering where she was keeping a phone. “All right, why don’t you just let me know if there’s anything you don’t understand?”

“I will.”

Oren took a blank piece of paper from his stack and fished a pen from his pocket. He made a crude flowchart of how the film was transported to him.

“We’re filming in digital.” He looked at her and when she nodded he kept going. “Depending on where the camera is and what it’s doing, the footage is either sent to a laptop or is sent directly to the editing trailer I have on set. If it’s sent directly to my system, then there’s nothing stored in the computers that run the monitors.”

“What about when it’s stored on the computer, could someone have copied that?”

“They could have, but I don’t see how. We’re talking about massive amounts of information for every second of film. To copy the footage would take time and equipment, and the computers come to me every time a camera is broken down.”

“Who breaks down the cameras?”

“I’ll get to that in a second.” Oren drew lines and boxes, trying to show her the path the information took. “I take all the footage to the offices, which is where we were doing the dailies. Dailies are—”

“I saw
Living in Oblivion
.”

Oren laughed. “Okay, that might not be the best movie about making a movie, but it covers the basics.” She smiled at him, and the desire to kiss her was so strong that he had to slip his free hand under his leg so he wouldn’t reach out and grab her. “The dailies. Right. So I’d do the dailies in my office. Lots of people would come watch—almost all the above-the-line and department head people.”

“But all they’re doing is watching.”

“Yes...” He didn’t say anything else, wanting to see if she came to the same conclusion he had.

“But they could have taken a picture of the movie, a picture of a picture.”

“Exactly.” Oren whipped out his phone and pulled up the blog. “Do you see these numbers and letters on the bottom of the picture? Those help me edit, and they show up on the dailies, so I know that’s where they got it. If they’d known enough to download the footage, they probably would have had the software to strip that off.”

Maeve tipped her head to the side. “Whoever took these pictures—” she pointed to his phone, “—did it on the day you were watching this scene.”

“Exactly.”

“This is good. The fewer people I must touch, the better. Is there anyway to know who was there?”

“That’s what I’ve been working on.” Oren turned over his stack of papers, revealing his suspect list. “Based on what I remember and who’s usually there, these are all the people who were in the room when we watched the dailies.”

Oren had printed out IMDb entries for everyone but the Calypso Production owners—ten people in total. He spread them out on the table facing Maeve, who leaned forward to examine each picture. When her hair fell over the sheets, she grabbed it and quickly braided it.

“Who do you think did it?” she asked after she’d examined each sheet.

“That’s the problem. I don’t want to think any of them did it.”

“This one.” Maeve pointed to Jo’s sheet. “She is mated to Tokaki.”

“Mated?”

Maeve looked up at him. “Humans are able to form and break relationships with relative ease. For my people, it is different. Once we found the being we are meant to love, our mate, we stay with them for life. We do not divorce, do not cheat.”