“Do you go in cat form, or do you shift into Jane?”
Most vampires and humans in Winter Court of the DarkQueen did not know the I/we of Beast was not always Jane. Most did not know how to talk to not-human-forms. Koun knew how to talk but did not always act with knowledge. Koun asked two questions at one time. Could only ask one. Beast waited. Stared at Koun.
Koun pursed lips, thinking. “Do you hunt vampires in cat form?”
Beast licked paws and muzzle free of blood, rough tongue getting all blood and meat-bits from paws and toes and off pelt. Shook head no.
“Shift then. I’ll weapon up.” Koun turned and left kitchen, closing door softly.
Beast looked at office area. Met Brute eyes, blue as sun on ice. Brute shook head and went back to big mattress in office corner. Turned three times and curled into ball with lizard. Beast raced up stairs and into sleeping room. Went to place where Bruiser kept clothes. Nosed open door. Found Bruiser best shoes for dancing. Carried one to empty room and hid in empty closet. Could bite holes in dead-cow-skin-shoes with killing teeth, but did not want to make Bruiser sigh. Hiding shoe was enough. Chuffed. Padded back to bedroom, to bathroom, and leaped into place where humans lay in hot water. Was cold on Beast belly. Took claws off of Jane.
What the heck are you doing?Jane shouted at Beast.
Beast reached into Jane skinwalker magics and thought about Jane half-form. Did not know what would happen when shifted. Did not know what form I/we would be. Most of Jane people did not know of Jane shifting problems. Some knew secret. Beast liked secrets. All cats liked secrets.
Silver mist rose, shot through with dark motes of skinwalker power. Let muscles go limp on cold white tub. Pelt shivered hard as magics rose. Pain quivered through Beast.Painpainpain...
***
I don’t cuss out loud. Mostly never. But if anything in life deserved cussing, shifting deserved cussing. There were times when shifting was painless, but it didn’t happen often. I figured that was because I learned to shift by trial and error instead of over years with a teacher. This timethe pain was so bad that when the shift ended, my lungs were stuck in the exhale position.
Panic clawed at me, and I fought through the pain, forcing my lungs to expand. Air whooshed in with a sucking judder. I gasped in several breaths.
“Dang cat,” I wheezed. “This tub is freaking cold!”
Inside me, Beast whistled with laughter. Which was a new sound. I had a feeling it portended nothing but trouble.
I reached a hand to the tub’s edge and saw my knobby knuckles. I was in half-form. Which was pretty brilliant, actually. I could stay in half-form longer than human. My belly gripped my insides in hungry claws and growled. I patted it. “Gimme a minute,” I said to it.
I pulled myself out of the tub and into our room, closing the bedroom door. Bruiser and I had this wing to ourselves most of the time, but I was fairly prudish. Nudity was not one of my comfort zones.
I opened my closet and turned on the light. Smart lights had been an option, but if we wanted to move around in the dark, with bad guys outside, then smart lights were stupid. The bright lights illuminated the mirror and the hanging rack for my brand-new armored leather. Seven sets, four in different shades of matte black, and three sets in colors. There was more armor in New Orleans, with and without leather exteriors; I had an extensive armor wardrobe. I chose a charcoal camo set. The moon was nearly full, making pure black foolish.
I held the armor up in front of me and studied myself in the cheval mirror. I never turned out the same way twice when I shifted into half-form. This time I was a six-foot-tall monster with human-looking amber eyes, furred cat ears placed high on my head, a half-human / half-cat nose on a cat snout, extralong canines, and my black hair to my waist. I had a mixture of skin and pelt on my face, human boobs with skin, pelt down my back, thighs, lower belly, and legs. I’d never win a beauty contest, not even in a cat show. I grinned at my reflection, and I was horrible to look at. Yeah. I was enough to make even a vamp pause in fear. I was the shapeshifting, skinwalker, Dark Queen of the Mithrans.
I dressed fast and pulled on the special boots thatexpanded to the sides to fit both human and half-form paws. I strapped on the Benelli spine harness, a double-thigh holster rig in case I shifted back to human and needed the nine-mils, and slid my blades into the blade sheathes. I debated on the sword, but I still sucked at swordplay, even with the last six months of practice. I braided my hair and twisted it into a sloppy bun. If an enemy got close enough to grab my hair, I was already dead. Into a pocket, I stuffed the Glob, a magical thingamabob that sometimes did things to protect me. I was scary and armed to the teeth. Literally. I snarled, seeing my fangs. I was at war, and I needed every weapon I had.
My warlord, Grégoire, aka Blondie, and my primo, Edmund, who I had started calling Eddie the Great on cell calls just to needle him, were taking over the European world in my name. They were pals of mine, as much as fangheads can be pals. Eddie was also the emperor of Europe, the Blood Master of all the European territory, and my vamp primo. It was complicated.
In my name, Grégoire, Edmund, and my warriors had defeated the last powerful vampires who were still active in Europe. Not that I had planned all the vamp bloodshed, but to keep European humans and witches safe from marauding bloodsuckers, and to reassert peace, I had let it happen. Yeah. In my name. I hated vamp politics.
Unfortunately, the dregs—and some of the remaining most powerful vamps—of Europe had escaped to all points of the globe, the strongest heading here to take my position. Leo had been fighting European vamps for centuries, and things had only gotten worse when I arrived on the scene.
I loped downstairs into the kitchen to find three vamps and a human, Koun, Tex, Thema, and Alex. And that was an amazing sight—a blue-and-black-tattooed Celtic warrior in modern night camo armor, a gunfighter from the Old West wearing six-shooters on each hip and an ARGO Benelli shotgun like mine strapped to his back on top of buckskin-toned armor, a black warrior in matte black armor, a woman so powerful she sometimes wore silver in her ears as a warning to others—silver being a dangerous, burning, sometimes even an incapacitating allergen to vamps—and Alex, a mixed-race human... not teenager. He was anadult now. A very pretty adult with curly ringlets, slightly greenish brown eyes, muscles, and a sense of self-confidence that oozed from his pores along with the garlic stink. The four of them were standing around the bar, checking comms and weapons. Lots and lots of weapons.
I walked around them and stopped, seeing the mess on the floor. “Dangcat!” I found the Clorox cleanser and sprayed the dried blood. The vamps watched, still as statues, until I grabbed the paper towels and started to clean the floor.
Tex grabbed my arm. “No, Janie—My Queen,” he amended.
“Why not? My cat did this.”
“We weren’t sure if you wanted the floor left this way. But you ain’t cleaning the mess. It’s not, uh,seemly. For a queen.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to stamp my feet. My clan were working hard to make me act like a queen, like the Dark Queen of the Mithrans, which I was but which I hated. So far, I pretty much sucked at it.
I blew out a frustrated breath, placed the roll of paper towels in his hand, and walked between the vamps, muttering about dang cats. Opening the fridge, I took out a stack of well-marbled steaks, turned on the stove grill, and switched on the fan above it. I tossed a steak onto the grill and waited. Behind me, Tex and Koun cleaned up my mess. Thema was above cleaning up after a cat. She lounged against the wall, polishing a blade, her black eyes on the glinting steel. Not that she missed anything happening around her.
The steak began to sizzle. When it was slightly brown on one side, I salted it and flipped it and salted that side too. When it was mostly no longer raw, I turned off the burner, opened a package of oversized naan, which was the best bread ever made on the face of the earth, and tossed the steak into the middle. I bit into the steak sandwich. Nothing in this world was as good as ultrarare beef. Except maybe oatmeal, and there wasn’t time for that too. I needed the calories that I had used up shifting. My skinwalker magic helped power my shifts, but there wasn’t enough magic inside me to do it all, and I was once againskinny as a rail, so I had to eat, a lot, to make it through a shift. And when shifting multiple times, like in the middle of the night, I needed to eat a huge amount of food. “Let’s go, then,” I said, chewing. “We got enemy vamps to behead.”
