The kids were giggling and squealing, a male voice said something that made others laugh. There were sounds of hammering when the guys put together their small-scale scaffolding to make the work easier and safer.
He’d closed his eyes when he felt the bed dip ever so slightly. He forced himself to keep his eyes shut and smiled
The cat came up and stopped by his hip. Derek opened his eyes and looked at the feline, not much bigger than an average housecat.
“There you are, sweetheart. May I pet you?” he asked, lifting his hand.
The cat leaned into his hip and Derek took it was a sign that touch was welcome. He petted the cat like he would’ve any stray cat he came across, and slowly Cal’s cat side started to relax a bit more.
“As much as I love you, sweetheart, would you let Cal out so we can talk through whatever just happened.” He scratched the cat under its chin and got a long purr in response.
Then the small body shuddered, and he had a lapful of grown naked male half on top of him.
“Fuck,” Cal said with such feeling, Derek chuckled.
“Okay T-shirt and boxers first, then talking,” Derek told him, and Cal got dressed.
When he was climbing back onto the bed, Derek opened his arms and after a second of hesitation, Cal moved close to him, pressing his ear against Derek’s shoulder as he cuddled in.
“It was the kids,” Cal said after long minutes of silence. “Joonatan’s kids.”
Derek thought for a few beats. “Human children?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know he’d bring them. I wasn’t prepared.”
Derek hummed and kept on petting Cal like the cat he was sometimes. They were both quiet for a while again, then Cal started to speak in a tone that told Derek he wasn’t fully in the bedroom with him, but reliving a memory.
“That last job they forced me to. It was a small town in… it doesn’t matter where it was. A human family living there had been hiking in the woods and….”
Derek made an educated guess. “They saw something they shouldn’t have.”
“I was sent in for backup. Just in case, just based on… seniority I suppose.” Cal tangled his fingers in Derek’s rattiest T-shirt and shook as he tried to control his emotions. “There were the parents, their teenaged daughter and their little ones, two little boys. They couldn’t have been more than three years old.”
“What were the orders?” Derek asked, knowing there were always orders.
Once he stopped trembling, Cal swallowed audibly. “To eliminate the witnesses if need be. To show them the shift and to… to see where it would go.”
“But something went wrong.”
“Yes.”
Derek squeezed Cal closer, feeling his sorrow fill the room like smoke.
“What happened?”
“I was the one shifting, I was the smallest there. The family had been taken to… to somewhere remote. I shifted. T-the daughter fainted, the mother screamed, the father started to pray like we were demons. The boys thought it was the coolest trick they’d ever seen.”
Cal’s tears were soaking into Derek’s shirt. “Then the mother tried to run. The newest enforcer lost it and shot her in the back. The dad attacked him, so the third guy killed him, too.”
“Oh God….”
“And the girl woke up to it all. I had to shift back, try to protect the kids, but just as I did, the new guy shot the twins—” The anguished sound that exploded out of Cal wasn’t anywhere near human, and Derek cried with him.
He didn’t have to ask what happened to the girl. Not after that.
Once Derek’s tears ran dry, he sighed. “When you got home you felt more safe as a cat.”
Cal nodded against his chest. “The cat muffled t-the memories.”
“But then I startled you.”
Cal tried to pull away, but Derek held onto him as much as he could. When Cal gave up and slumped back against him, Derek smiled with relief.
“You had just suffered an intense trauma. You know as well as I do that sometimes, traumatic things are worse if you’ve just shifted one way or the other. You shifted into your human form just to see something incredibly upsetting happen. I’ve never,everthought you were to blame about my eye, sweetheart.”
