To Luca’s surprise, Macy’s grin was mischievous and sweet as sugar.
“Sorry, but I’m curious about how everything works and why it’s happening. You’ll be putting up with all kinds of annoying questions for this job, at least.”
Luca smiled reflexively. If you had asked him how he felt about questions on the job before this, he might not have knownhow to respond. Now though, with his mate looking up at him as if he was doing the most interesting job in the world, he realized that he sort of loved it.
“It s flour,” he said. “You sprinkle it on the ground to let you see where the snake’s gone and where it might go. I want to see if the cerastes comes back this way.”
“Neat. Where to next?”
“Well, where does this vent lead?”
“Ooh, we have a copy of the building’s blueprints stored in the archives. Come on.”
CHAPTER FIVE
∞∞∞
So at some point, she fell asleep.
It wasn’t her fault. She was a morning person, an early riser, and she’d gotten up extra early for the science fair. Then all the everything had happened, and she was leading the most attractive guy she’d ever seen around City Hall, squinting at the blueprints they’d pulled from the archives, talking seriously about where the cerastes would choose to go.
Oh, and there was the true mate thing. Couldn’t forget about that.
Macy would have been lying if she said she’d never thought about it. She’d known Rikki and her family for years—they’d gone to school together, and she was well-versed in shifter culture. When Rikki met Wil right after high school, she’d had a front-row seat for the drama and wonder of a pair of young shifters recognizing each other, the flurry of getting to know each other while at the same time winding their lives together, the occasional scuffle as things fell into place.
What’s it like?she had asked Rikki, and Rikki had shrugged with a helpless grin.
Like being in the eye of a tornado,she said finally.Not in terms of destructive power, but more like something you can’t really imagine until it happens to you.
It appealed to her, the idea that there was someone out there who she was meant for and who was meant for her, but beyond the occasional daydream, she had never really thought about what it would be like. Even in her more lurid fantasies, it had never looked like... well.
Luca Reyes took her breath away.
There was no other way to say it. Even standing still, the man drew her eye like he was the only spot of color in a black and white world. It would make sense, she supposed, just because he was handsome, but it was more than that. It was the way he moved, soft and quiet, but so gentle when he was handling his nephew. It was the way he looked at her, as if she was the sun was coming up, and the way she could almost feel his heart echoing hers when they locked gazes.
He would have been an arresting presence all on his own, and then there was the fact that he was hers.
Hers.
The word echoed through her head until it threatened to remove everything else that had been there. It felt like a fairytale, and at the same time, there was something underneath that knew it was truer than anything else in the world.
He was hers, she was his, and the only thing that kept her from proposing that they hit the road to figure out what that meant was the fact thatthere was still a giant snake loose in Clearwater City Hall.
“It’s not exactly a snake,” Luca had explained to her as he sprinkled more flour around the upstairs hallway. “The cerastes have been around since before snakes lost their legs, and the fossil records suggest that they looked just the same. So we guess that they’re a relative, but yeah, not proper snakes at all.”
“Are there any books about them? Can I read those books if there are?”
“There are some guides. I can get you hooked into the cryptid book loan system if you like.”
Luca sounded diffident when he offered, but she caught the way he cut his eyes towards her as he did, gauging her reaction, and she couldn’t help smiling.
“Better than flowers,” she declared. “I can speed-track you a proper library card to the town library as a thank you.”
From the way he grinned at her, brief and beautiful as heat lightning, she knew she had said the right thing, and now all she had to do was to get this man alone with her at her apartment to figure out what the reward for that was, but first there was stilla snake loose in City Hall.
Macy followed him through the darkened halls, directing him through some of the maze-like corridors in the basement, stopping to insist that they both got water, and then it sort of got a little hazy until she blinked, sitting up in the cool blue light before dawn. She woke up on the small couch in her office, curled up so she’d fit, with the afghan she kept for cold days draped over her.
Wait, where’s—
