Deceptions: A Collection (15 page)

My sword arm is mighty.

I will not falter.

I will not fail
.

Yeah, I really do have to go through those few lines sometimes, just to level out. It keeps me focused.

I will not falter.

I will not fail
.

Nor will I show any sign of fear to the guy in my office. I don’t know who he is. He hasn’t given me a name and I didn’t plan on asking for it until I know if I’m doing business with him. I’m thinking I’d rather
not
do business with him, truth be told. I had a bad feeling about this already and we hadn’t even started talking about the job yet.

How do I get myself into these messes? Oh, right. I’d been praying, hoping—pretty much anything except standing out on the street corner holding up signs that read:
I need work
! I should be more careful about what I wish for. That streak of luck that was part of my heritage was probably what had landed him here. I’d needed work. Now I had work. I also had a lesson in
be careful what you wish for
.

I’d been doing this a few years and I’d learned to recognize the shit jobs from the good ones. This could be very profitable.

Profit is
good
. I like profit. I like money. I don’t get to see enough of it.

But I was kind of concerned about the warning in my gut.

Profitable, yes. This guy was bad, bad news, though. And every last instinct inside me was screaming,
bad, bad, bad…get away from him, get away now now now now
!

All the more reason I had to stay calm. All the more reason not to show that I was afraid. No showing any sign of fear—things like a racing heartbeat, increased respiration, sweaty palms, fidgeting. No. Forget the fidgeting. Plenty of people were the squirming sort and it had nothing to do with fear.

I fidgeted all the time, even when I wasn’t afraid.

I’m not afraid—damn it, I am aneira. I’ve got fricking noble blood and this shifter can stand there sneering at me all he wants. What do I care?

“You know, we had a bet.” Mr. Badass sat in the chair across from my battered desk, slumped in a boneless sprawl not many humans over the age of three could manage.

I didn’t think he was a wolf. Wolves were very…rigid. Anally so.

If he was a wolf, he’d be in a three piece suit, pressed within an inch of its suitly life, and he’d probably have a duo of backup lawyers to witness everything. And he wouldn’t have sat in my chair with that boneless sprawl, either. Hard to do with a stick up the ass, really. The members of the wolf pack
always
had a stick up their collective asses.

I had no problem working with the local wolf pack. Don’t get me wrong. Most of them are big on courtesy, and all about order and rules, and as long as I didn’t cross them, they left me alone. The problem was when the job involved some of their assholes; their assholes tried to rip off body parts and eat innards and it got messy sometimes.

But they paid well. I could use a nice-paying job.

We had two main were factions down here. Cat and wolf. But he didn’t have to be local, and I didn’t like to assume.

I’d figure it out in a minute. If I had the nose of a shapeshifter, I’d have him pegged already, but I’d get there. I was good at it, unusually so. I could see the energy hovering about them and I could usually see some echo of their animal hovering about them, a skill I knew I could trace back to my aneira roots.

We were good assassins because we could understand our marks, learn them, know them and figure out the best way to kill them.

Still, anybody who knew what to look for could peg a shifter from a mile away and this guy was no different. Most of them didn’t bother to batten down the hatches and they let all that raw power hang out there for the entire world to see.

They were all caged energy and strength and they emanated…something. Just…something. You meet a shapeshifter and find out what he is, and you realize what the something is once you’ve seen it.

He had the something. I could sense it hovering above him, power coiled and lying in wait. There was
a lot
of it, too. But he kept it chained in too tightly for me to read it as easily I’d like.

His jeans had rips at the knees. His T-shirt was clean, but faded and wrinkled and over it, he wore a flannel button down. I don’t think any of the wolves I knew even had an inkling what flannel was.

“Don’t you want to know what the bet was?” he asked, watching me with an odd little smile on his face.

“Bet?” I said, echoing his words.

“Yeah.”

Unable to stay still, I took a pen from my desk and twirled it around on my fingers, watching him, waiting for him to elaborate. The silence stretched out for over a minute. It wasn’t wasted time. He watched me. I watched him. A wide grin curled his lips, his teeth flashing white against the darkness of his skin. I started thinking about the Cheshire cat.

Bingo. A cat. Even as I thought it, I could almost see that lazy energy around him flex its claws and stretch, giving me a feline smile. There were a handful of creatures to pick from in the were pool and it varied from country to country. Here in the States, the dominant creatures were cat, wolf and rat, with a few bears thrown in for fun.

Narrowing my eyes, I asked softly, “Is this a local job?”

“Local?” He studied me curiously.

“Local. As in are
you
local?”

A faint smiled curled his lips. “Yeah. I’m local.”

Shit
. This was wonderful. Just wonderful. I had some sort of cat shifter in my office. And you can’t outwait a cat. Even I knew that. Since he was here on business, and since I was running a business—sort of—I figured I needed to get this over with, because I needed him out of my office. I wasn’t working for a damn cat, not if he was from the Orlando clan. This wasn’t courier work—I could already tell. If it was, he would have already dumped whatever and left. So that meant it was something bigger, and I wasn’t interested.

I preferred to keep my investigative work to something a little steadier than the local cat pack.

They were
insane
.

I’d do busy work for non-humans and I didn’t mind working for the wolves. I didn’t mind courier work between any of the local factions, really. That was actually ideal, because it was quick, it was easy and it paid pretty damn well. But if I had my way, I’d never work for the cats. They were dangerous.

Unlike the wolves, they weren’t quite so keen on following rules and since my office was incorporated in East Orlando—an area that had recently been recognized as ANH territory, if I accepted a job from the cat pack, it was pretty much CYA:
cover your ass
.

Bring your own back-up, make up your will, just in case, and be ready to die if you don’t have sufficient back-up. I don’t.

The damn cats were likely to try to rip my arms off if I screwed up. Or just to avoid paying me. Yes. Attempts had been made. It’s a good thing I’m handy with all sorts of sharp, shiny objects.

“What sort of bet?” I continued to watch him, searching now for some kind of sign on just what type of cat he was. His physical features weren’t much help. Oh, he was a treat to look at, definitely; probably several inches over six feet, muscled enough to make it clear he actually worked at it, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull. I couldn’t quite make out his ancestry. Multiracial, I suspected. Maybe Polynesian and black? Or Native American and black? Something else entirely? Whatever he was? Didn’t matter, because he was practically a visual orgasm. And his eyes were amazing.

Deep, dark gray. Like thunderheads piling up on the sky right at sunset.

Amusement danced in those eyes, but it didn’t make them any less formidable. “When you opened this joint, most of us figured you wouldn’t make it a year.”

“A year, huh? That’s all you gave me?” I made myself smile and rested my chin in my palm. I’d bought the practice from a guy I knew—a private investigator who’d decided he wanted to get out of the business while he could. And while property in Orlando was still worth something. Things had gone downhill around the same time I’d been coming through the mess with the rats and I’d used the money I received for my part in the ‘clean-up’ to buy this place.

The parks were still a big tourist draw, but Orlando no longer held the attraction it once had. Even the snowbirds had given up. The tourist traps still did okay, but they had the money to spell their properties and that made mortals feel safer.

It wasn’t that the place was a cesspool of danger, death and decay, but people perceived it as such and perception was everything. The parks got by because of the thrill aspect. Orlando was a thrill a minute…you had the amusement parks for the kiddies, and then if you really wanted to walk on the wild side, you could go out to East Orlando…and see shapeshifters in the raw.

Well, not really. But that was the rumor. People came here thinking you’d see them rip loose and find their beast right in front of you. It was crap. Shapeshifters didn’t lose control around humans. It led to ugly things like modern day versions of witch hunts, but with shifters as the quarry, and bloodier, nastier, more widespread results.

Besides, they didn’t see the point in losing control in front of humans. Humans weren’t worth it to them. They were like annoying fleas. A nuisance, but just a part of life. And sadly, a flea collar didn’t help.

Me? Now I can honestly say I have seen them lose their skin. I’ve been known to provoke people. But if I ended up hurt or dead, nobody was going to issue a quarantine or kill order, especially if it was on the job.

I wasn’t human enough to matter, really.

All in all, East Orlando was safer than mortals thought, but mortals didn’t like living here anymore. Not in the old part of town where the parks were or in East Orlando where all of us freaks had set up camp.

Sadly, it meant my job pickings were getting slim. The first few years, I’d had things like cheating spouses and background checks and stuff to keep me busy, but lately, not so much.

Focusing on the matter at hand, I said, “So, I made it through the year. Yay, me, right?”

“You made it through the year and then some. Surprised us.” He continued to study me, still smiling. That cagey grin had me thinking about a cat watching a mouse right before it pounced. And I suspected that was exactly what he wanted me to think.

Sighing, I tipped back in my chair and put my boots up on the desk. I hate this shit. Why do they have to act like this? Territorial. Pushy.
You’ll be terrified and show it
.

“Well, seeing as how I lasted six years…and counting, I guess some of you had egg on your face.” I laced my hands over my belly and held his gaze.
I’ll be damned if I act like the mouse, you overgrown tomcat
.

His smile widened.

I started thinking about where else I could live. Someplace with a bigger human population so I didn’t have to keep tolerating the posturing bullshit.

Shapeshifters and vamps were everywhere, but there were only a few hotspots. East Orlando was one of them. Outer Indianapolis, Honolulu, Upper Denver, Anchorage, North Toronto, Buffalo…those were some of the others.

I wondered how Boise would suit me. I could live in Boise. Humans out-numbered the non-humans fifteen to one there, from what I heard. Humans still outnumbered non-humans here, but it was more like five to one in Orlando and with those odds, they considered the paranormal population the stronger one.

They called us non-humans. Made up a bunch of nice little acronyms and laws and shit. As long as we ‘belonged’ to the ANH and followed the laws laid out by them, we could exist peacefully. ANH—the Assembly of Non-Humans.

The Assembly was our governing council, headed by people we elected, with a couple of human emissaries so everybody could pretend we played nice with each other.

Pretend. Shit.

“Hmm. We’ll keep the bets running. When you took on the Gruer job, some of us were pretty sure you’d either lose your shirt or your life.” His eyes dropped. “Might have been nice to see you lose your shirt, but I still thought you’d run out of luck at some point.”

Gruer had been one of the human emissaries. He was in jail now for taking bribes. They’d only charged him with the human crimes and he’d be out in a year. Somehow I didn’t think he’d be alive long after that. His other crimes had included crimes against NH children. There were rumors of the prices people had put on his head. Yeah, we weren’t supposed to screw with humans, but sometimes, they met with unhappy accidents, and if the bodies disappeared…?

Well.

As long as they couldn’t prove anything…that was the big thing, I guessed. Gruer would get his own.

“Gruer was a stupid-ass, cruel bastard. You seriously thought he would chase me out? Thought
he
could kill me?” Not damn likely. I curled my lip at him. Seriously, they were betting on me? What the hell? “Don’t the shifters have better things to do with their money?”