“This better be important, getting me up so early,” Michael said, yawning widely.
True to his quokka form, Michael was also kind of short and dumpy in human form as well, with a tangle of dark hair he was always pushing out of his eyes, and glasses he was always shoving up his nose.
Right now, he was dressed in his usual getup of tracksuit pants and a t-shirt, despite the cold, and he reallydidlook like he’d just gotten up.
“I appreciate it,” Rhys said. “I wouldn’t have called if it hadn’t been urgent.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said, with feigned ill-humor. “Whatever. And who’s this?”
Rhys glanced at Maisie. “This is Maisie. She’s…” Instinctively, he’d been about to tell Michael that Maisie was his mate, but he cut himself off quickly. Somehow, it seemed right that Maisie should be the first person to know.
“She helped me out when I was in a tight spot,” Rhys finished lamely. “Seriously bad. Which is why I’ve come to see you – I need your help figuring out what the hell’s going on.”
Michael squinted at him, head tilted, very obviously not believing a damn word Rhys had said. Rhys telepathically tried to project the wordPLEASEat him as loudly as he could, begging him to not pursue the topic.
Apparently it worked, because Michael huffed a little sigh before nodding in an extremely fake fashion.You’re going to tell me all about this later,his eyes said, even as his mouth said, “Sure, no worries.”Also, you owe me one. Big time.
Rhys nodded back gratefully, not bothering to look to the side to see Maisie’s reaction. He could almostfeelher disbelief radiating off her at that unconvincing display, but, thankfully, she didn’t comment.
Everyone here thinks I’m full of shit! And okay, I kind of am, but it’s not my fault!
“Have a seat,” Michael said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of a sofa that was piled up with papers, food wrappers, and all kinds of other crap.
While Rhys would’ve normally bristled at the directive, he knew damn well that he was being done a huge favor here, so he obligingly picked up a pile of junk off the sofa and looked around for somewhere to put it… before Michael just went up to the sofa and swept a bunch more of it straight onto the floor, sending paper and chip packets fluttering to the ground.
“Well, when in Rome,” Maisie muttered, doing a bit of her own rubbish removal and sending a stack of old pizza boxes to the floor with a vicious swipe of her arm. She looked oddly satisfied.
Shrugging, Rhys dumped his armful of papers in the corner, not worrying too much about where they went. Itwaskind of satisfying, if only because he knew he wouldn’t have to be the one to deal with it later. And at least he knew that the furniture was in enough of a state of disrepair that his wet clothes couldn’t make things any worse.
He sat himself down on the sofa, ignoring the way his griffin rejoiced when Maisie sat next to him, almost close enough to touch. Not that he wasn’t doing his own little bit of internal rejoicing, but he had bigger worries on his mind. Like how the hell he was going to explain everything that had been going on in front of Maisie.
Maybe ithadbeen a mistake to bring her here.
Michael sat down on his computer chair and turned it to face the sofa, one eyebrow lifted expectantly.
“Well, I’m here. What’s this urgent problem that you saw fit to wake me up about?”
Rhys opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.
Shit.
Sweat broke out across his brow. He really hadn’t worked out what he was going to say. How on earth could he explain any of this, without mentioning the existence of shifters?
“Uh… Well, you see, it…”
It was almost –almost– a relief when the door at the back of the room exploded.
Chapter 7
Over the past half hour, Maisie had been starting to feel… well, notcomplacent, exactly, but a little jaded. A little world-weary. Like nothing could surprise her anymore.
Hot guys with bullet wounds falling through her window? Been there. Top-secret government agent types whisking said guy away to deal with the green goo oozing from his flesh? Done that. Go up to some random hacker’s fetid, cockroach-infested home office? Sure, why the hell not.
But okay, maybecomplacentwasn’t too far off the mark. Because, she had to admit to herself, she hadnotbeen expecting to see an exploding door.
She hadn’t evenrealizedthat there was another door back there, shrouded as it had been in both shadows and piles of empty old Bundy cans alike.
Maisie knew this last one because a cascade of cans was currently flying past her in the wake of said explosion, making one hell of a racket and, she had to admit, scaring the living crap out of her. On one level of her mind she knew that she should be worried about the explosion itself, which would surely catch upwith her within the next fraction of a second, but mostly she was just thinkingshit, that’s loud.
