Skin Trade

I’d been shielding as hard as I could. Hard enough that she hadn’t picked up on the fact that I wasn’t completely human. Interesting to know that I could shield well enough to pass for prey to Paula Chu. But that tiny spurt of adrenaline was enough to make the white tigress get to her feet and gaze up the long distance of that interior landscape.

It was Chu’s turn to tense. My turn to see it and give her a satisfied smile. Her voice was even a little shaky around the edges. “You can’t be one of us.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She touched her white hair. “You aren’t pure.”

“I survived an attack,” I said. Which was true; if she thought that meant I was a full-blown weretiger, not my bad that she misunderstood.

Her face was instantly scornful. “Then you don’t understand. It’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”

“Help me understand,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “I thought that if you became a shapeshifter, they took away your badge.”

“I’m with the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service. The rules are a little more lax.”

She kept giving me that suspicious look. Her dainty nose flared as she sniffed the air. “You don’t just smell of tiger; you smell of our clan. You smell like white tiger. That is not possible.”

I shrugged. “Why isn’t it possible?”

“You should smell like tiger, but only regular, orange. One of us could attack you and make you a tiger, but you’d still not be clan.”

“You mean I wouldn’t turn into a white tiger, even if a white tiger were my attacker.”

She nodded, and she was puzzling over me. “Exactly.”

The white tigress had risen to her feet and was begi

Chu leaned a little closer over the table. “I smell white tiger. You smell like clan. Are you hiding from us? Did you dye your hair and put contacts in? Your skin is white enough to pass.”

“Sorry, but I’m all natural.” I wanted to glance back and see Edward in his corner, but didn’t dare. I knew he was there and would help if I needed it, but he was mostly there in case Paula Chu tried to go all tiger on our asses. We had been told to wait for Detective Ed Morgan before questioning her about the crimes. So far, we hadn’t broken that rule. Just two shapeshifters talking shop.

She half-rose from her chair. The manacles kept her hands from rising and kept all of her from standing completely, but Edward still said, “Sit down, Ms. Chu, you’ll be more comfortable that way.”

She gave a sound that might have been a laugh, but was all bitter. She let herself fall back into the chair. “Yeah, I guess it is more comfortable.” She stared at me, and I felt the first trickle of her energy like a hand searching in the dark for another hand to hold.

“Don’t try to read my energy with yours,” I said, and I tried to shut the shields back as tight as when I’d started the interview. But the white tigress was still pacing on the path. She couldn’t get past my orders to stay where she was, but I didn’t have enough control to shut her down completely. That knowledge made my heart speed just a little. It let the tigress inside me start moving down the path again. It made Paula Chu take in a great, noisy breath of air. Her eyes actually fluttered closed, and she shivered in her chair.

The white tigress inside me began to hurry along the path. I could try to tough it out, or I could leave the room. Normally, I’d have toughed it out, but I couldn’t afford to fall to the ground and start twitching. I’d had a near-change cause blood to flow from under my fingernails. If I did that where the Vegas police could see me, being kicked off this case was the least that would happen.

I stood up. The tigress was ru

“Anita, are you all right?” Edward asked, moving a little away from the wall.

I shook my head. “Need some air,” I said.

The woman on the other side of the table opened her eyes and said, “You’re powerful, but you’re new. You don’t have the control yet.”

I went to the door and banged on it. “Hit the buzzer,” Edward said. He’d moved closer to me and to the suspect.

I fumbled for the buzzer. I heard it sound. Nothing happened. Someone had to let us out. Until this moment, I’d been okay with that. I pictured a brick wall across the path of the tiger in my head. She stopped ru

My pulse was still thudding in my throat, but there was relief under the taste of my own heartbeat. I could do this; I’d been practicing for months so I could control my beasts and travel out of town without a posse of wereanimals to help me control all that internal strife. What was it about these tigers that made the control so much harder? Or was it simply being too far away from Jean-Claude and our power base? That thought sped my pulse up again. What if I couldn’t control my powers if I was too far away from… my master? I really wished I hadn’t thought of that.

The tiger in my head hunkered down, pushing her body against the ground of that impossible place. I felt her body tense for the spring and realized my mistake too late. Tigers can jump eighteen to twenty feet vertically. My brick wall hadn’t been tall enough. She was over the wall in one muscular bound, and ru

It was Paula Chu who said, “You are in control, not the beast. That must always be so.”

“It’s your energy that’s fucking with me.” I put another wall in the tiger’s path. This one was metal, tall and shiny, so tall that it lifted through the trees. She wouldn’t jump this one.

“I am not doing enough to cause this much trouble, even among the newly found.”

I shook my head, still not looking at her. “I don’t know what it is about your clan, but your energy fucks with me. It just does.”

“That would only be true if you were a born member of our clan, lost and now found, but if your coloring is real, then you ca

The white tiger in my head snarled and paced before the steel wall. She bared those glistening fangs and roared at me. The sound reverberated along my spine as if she’d turned me into some human-sized tuning fork.

“I hear your call,” she said, and her voice was strained.

“I’m not doing it,” I said. I hit the buzzer again, but I knew now. Shaw, or someone, was watching. They wanted to see what would happen to me if I stayed in here long enough. If I changed shape for real, I’d lose my badge. The only thing that had saved it was that I had too many types of lycanthropy, and they couldn’t prove that I was a real shapeshifter. Shaw would love proving that. I wouldn’t just be off this case-I’d be off every case, forever.

“You are calling for aid. It is a distress call, but only our queens can make the call that loud.”

I tried to make the roaring tiger inside me be quiet, but she wouldn’t. She just kept calling for help. Shit.

“What do I do to stop it?” I asked.

“I can help you calm it, but I would have to touch you to do it.”

“Bad idea,” Edward said, and took a step closer to me.

I shook my head and looked at him. “If she can help me?”

“And if she makes it worse?” he said.

We looked at each other. The intercom that fed into the room came on. “What the fuck are you doing in there, Blake? The other tigers are going apeshit.”

“Let me out,” I said, “and it’ll get better.”

“You ca

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Let me quiet you. It is the way of tigers to calm the young and the inexperienced.”