I sigh. “Yeah, but you never know.”
“You never know what, exactly?”
“California’s barely recovering from the earth-splitting and the coup,” Xolotl says. “I told her to pack a bag for emergencies, which apparently includes socks.”
“If something goes wrong, do you think I can run in these?” I hold up the gorgeous Louboutin heels Xolotl “made” for me. “Not at all. It’s game over. So.” I walk back for the socks.
“Well, I need to hitch a ride. While you go to your interview, Xolotl and I have some unfinished business.” He bobs his head, his eyes wide. “Right?”
“Sure,” Xolotl says.
No matter how hard I push, Gabe won’t tell me what’s going on, and it feels unfair to press Xolotl to betray my brother’s confidence. I only ask one thing, as he prepares to take me to Anaheim, California. “Is it legal?”
Xolotl frowns.
“If you don’t know that, is it dangerous?”
He shakes his head. “It’s safe.”
I sigh. “Fine.”
“We’ll also be very close to you, where you’re doing your interview,” Gabe volunteers. “Stop worrying about it. It’s between me and your boyfriend.”
I can’t help worrying, though, and it sort of distracts me during the interview, which goes badly. I’m literally talking to the third person in the lineup when the boss walks in and makes a ‘finger across the throat’ sign that I clearly wasn’t meant to see.
Or, oh no, what if she literally just didn’t care whether I saw it? Was my interview that bad? They walk me to the front of the office after that, and my four-hour interview’s over in an hour flat. How embarrassing. The only good news is that, thanks to my bond, I’m able to call a cab and follow the tug of our bond to wherever Xolotl’s doing whatever he’s doing with Gabe.
I groan out loud when it leads me to the Santa Anita racetrack.
I should’ve known. No one in the world has been more obsessed with horse shifters than Gabe. In fact, he was the one who read and read and re-read the journals left to Amanda Saddler. He’s never had a chance to ride a horse shifter, but he’s heard all the stories.
The very first one, Aleksandr, won the Grand National with his now-wife. The next one who shifted, Grigoriy, won some kind of show-jumping thing. Then Adriana’s husband, Alexei Romanov, of the Romanovs, won some kind of flat race.
Or actually, maybe he lost, but he lost to another shifter. I’m a little fuzzy on the details. But all the horse shifters have one thing in common—they’re way faster than any real horse. And I know Gabe’s been chomping at the figurative bit to ride one.
And win money.
More than anyone I know, Gabe has this insatiable belief that he was destined for something great, that his good luck is just around the corner. He enters the lottery religiously. He enters raffles. And he’s always talking about when he will meet a shifter, or save the world, in that order, preferably. He has not an ounce of shifter blood in him, but for some reason, he still prays that he’ll be able to turn into a horse.
Of course he made some deal with Xolotl to race today.
I do what any good girlfriend would do, and I buy a ticket. Gabe must’ve gotten false papers from Leonid. We get all our fake documentation from him, since he literally runs a government. It’s a snap for him to get us the documents we need, and then we can just say that the horse is Russian.
In spite of myself, I get more and more excited as their race draws closer. I’m pretty sure they entered the stakes race, because one of the horses is named The Death God. It’s a little too on the nose to be a coincidence. It’s just a basic listed stake, since Xolotl has done exactly nothing before now. I do wonder where Gabe got the money for the entry fee.
And then I remember his college fund.
Surely he wouldn’t. . .but it’s Gabe. And he’s going to be riding a horse-shifter. Of course he’d gamble everything he has. He probably bet anything he had left on himself as well—to win.
I’m not gonna lie—as they line up, Gabe’s an obvious anomaly in the line of tiny jockeys. He looks like an elephant lined up next to cows. Xolotl’s just as stunning in his horse form as I recall, but he looks out of place, too. The other horses are thoroughbreds, and to enter, Xolotl would need thoroughbred papers, but he’s clearly not a thoroughbred. He looks like a beefy warmblood or an athletic draft, right down to the feathers around his hooves.
Hopefully he doesn’t move like one.
When the buzzer sounds, the horses leap forward, but Gabe and Xolotl seem to be having some sort of misunderstanding. They take off late, and as I watch, I can’t help laughing.
Loudly.
The people next to me are actually irritated and shush me repeatedly.
