Oh, right, panther shifter,she thought as he balanced on top of the narrow metal cabinet and shook the vent before growling in frustration.
“Shit, this thing is actually welded in place.”
“A lot of them are, unfortunately.”
He made a face as he hopped back down, landing lightly on both feet. She realized that there was a pretty good chance that AJ could do that too, and she had a brief and dizzying idea of what babysitting him was going to be like in the future.
“Yeah, I've found that out the hard way a few times. I need another look at those blueprints, figure out where this vent goes..”
As Luca pored over the maps, the theme music for the next episode ofThe Splendor of Love in Water and Firestarted playing, and Macy turned it down with a wince. The opening used a lot of traditional flute music, which was good, but a little shrill for her ear. She much preferred the drums of the ending and—
“Hey.”
Even as engrossed in the blueprints as he was, Luca looked up.
“Hm?”
“So. The first time I saw the cerastes, I was judging the Lincoln girls' science fair where they wanted to see if taiko drumming affected the intelligence of mice.”
“...Does it?”
“Unclear, they never got to give me the presentation. And the second time we saw the cerastes a few hours ago, we were, you know.“
Luca grinned.
“As a matter of fact I do know.”
“Brat. But I seem to remember knocking my heel against the ground.”
She could see the moment the revelation hit Luca as well.
“Play the ending to the last episode again.”
Macy cued up the episode again, and the mournful sound of heavy drumbeats filled the room, low and insistent. It wasn’t a match for the faster taiko drums that the Lincoln girls had used for their project, but apparently it was close enough, and she looked up to meet Luca’s eyes. For just a moment, they flashed a bright green in the dark, the eyes of a hunting cat, and her breath caught in her chest. It would have maybe made sense if it was fear, but it wasn’t fear at all.
I am never going to be afraid of this man, never in all my life,she thought, almost awed, and then he came across the room toward her, pulling her up so fast she had to drop her tablet on the sofa to keep it from clattering to the floor.
“God, I love you,” he whispered right before he kissed her, and then his mouth was on hers, and all she could feel was his arms around her body, holding her so close to him, the heat where they touched, the need in her that was only going to keep rising until it was sated in one way.
The noise of protest that Luca made when she pulled away made her want to laugh and to groan in agreement. It seemed like the worst kind of injustice that they had know each other this long and had still not managed to tear each other’s clothes off.
“Come on, big guy,” she said, stepping back with a grin. “Get the snake, get the girl.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
∞∞∞
It wasn’t an amazing plan. Luca felt that an amazing plan was one that you were certain was going to work, and this one had more fail-points than he liked. At the end of the day, though, cerastes were so rare and so shy that no one knew anything about the way they behaved in the wild, let alone how they behaved in the wild as full adults capable of navigating a world that was increasingly dangerous to them.
“Every cerastes that we know of has a name the rescuer gave them,” he said as Macy connected her tablet to the Bluetooth speakers the Lincoln girls had left behind. “That’s how few of them we have. There’s this polar bear shifter in Norway who has a pair of juveniles named Tove and Tuulikki, and we know that they’ll eat black and brown rats but not white ones. We don’t know anything about what this one’s going to do.”
“Well, we learn new things every day,” Macy said pragmatically. “Sometimes the things we learn pertain to the care and feeding of enormous endangered not-really-snakes.”
She checked her settings, played a brief bit of soft jazz over the speakers before nodding.
“Okay, we’re good to go. And before you ask again, yes, I know what I’m supposed to do.”
He looked at her expectantly and Macy sighed.
