Читать книгу Sexy Beast VI - Lydia Parks - Страница 11

“Ya think they’re gettin’ it on?” Deacon sat on the floor with his back against the bed.

Jazzy looked up from the magazine she’d been staring at and laughed. “Nicky and Beth? Not if it’s up to them. They’re both pretty shy.”

“Nicky didn’t look all that shy tearing out that dude’s throat.” Logan’s soft comment brought Jazzy up short.

“That was so freaky,” she said. Her head filled with images she’d been trying to forget. The fear in the kid’s eyes. The disbelief. The deadly and utter silence of Nicky’s attack, then the snarl and those deep throaty growls…and all that blood.

“Well, it’s something to think about,” Matt said from his perch on the bed near Logan. “Be sure you don’t piss Nicky off or he might want another wolf sandwich.”

“Nicky? He’s our friend.” Jazzy leaned her chair back against the wall, going for nonchalant. Inside, her stomach felt like it was tying itself into knots.

“Nicky might be, but what about the wolf?” Logan sat Indian fashion on the foot of the bed. “When you shift, do you think like a person or an animal?”

A loud knock on the door interrupted the silence following Logan’s question. Jazzy opened the door and smiled at AJ. “When you’re a wolf,” she asked, “do you think like a wolf or a man?”

AJ shrugged. “Depends. When we’re out running or we’ve got a task at hand, we’re fairly rational. Throw a fat doe or a juicy rabbit into the mix—or a female in heat—and all bets are off. C’mon. Dinner’s on. Your friends Nick and Beth will be there in a few minutes.”

“Nick? Not Nicky?” Deacon laughed. “I told you. They’re gettin’ it on.”

They climbed the stairs behind AJ and followed him into a huge kitchen–dining room combination with a long table at one end that could have seated at least twenty people. It was set for nine.

Tala and Mik were both in the kitchen. Tala sat on the counter with a glass of wine in her hand while Mik tossed a huge bowl of salad. He wore a shirt and jeans with a white chef’s apron and looked totally domestic. For some reason, Jazzy found it hysterical.

The scent of something spicy and Italian filled the air. “I hope you like lasagna,” Tala said. “It was the one thing I had enough ingredients for without a huge shopping trip.”

“There they are.” AJ waved as Nicky and Beth wandered into the kitchen. The two of them held hands.

Deacon jabbed Jazzy with his elbow. “Wish I’d bet cash on that one.”

“Shhh.” Jazzy bit back a giggle. She hoped like hell she never got that lovesick look on her face. Nicky and Beth looked absolutely sappy.

Within a few minutes Mik had cleared off a long section of the kitchen counter and Tala set up tons of food and stuff to drink, for everyone to help themselves.

Jazzy loaded her plate with thick slices of sourdough bread, a pile of salad, and a big square of lasagna. Everyone took a seat and started eating right away. No one talked about Nicky’s attack, though midway through dinner, Mik glanced at the clock over the sink and turned on a small television for the six o’clock news.

The dead kid in the park was the lead story, blamed, of course, on rival gang activity and dangerous dogs out of control. Tala breathed an obvious sigh of relief. She smiled at Nicky. “Looks like we’re all in the clear on this one, but we can’t risk another incident like this.”

Mik stood up and reached for a big jar of pills on the kitchen counter. “I want you guys to start taking one of these every day. They contain the same nutrients as you’ve been getting from the grasses in Keisha’s garden, just compressed. I expect the rest of you will be making your first shift within a day or two.”

“We made some calls,” AJ said. “The property I was hoping to take you to up near Mount Lassen is unavailable to us, but I checked with friends and they said we can use their place in the redwoods. It’s out of the way, very rugged and wild, a perfect location to make your shift without risk of an unwanted audience. I’m going to talk to Anton, our friend, later tonight and find out what all we’ll need to take up there.”

“We’ll leave early in the morning.” Tala took one of the big pills from Mik and swallowed it down with a sip of wine. “Is there anyone who might be worried about any of you? Family or friends?”

Logan carefully set his fork down on his plate. Jazzy noticed that his table manners were impeccable. She’d been really nervous, watching to see how Tala and the guys ate, copying their every move. Logan seemed naturally comfortable at a nice table. Once again she wondered where he came from, who he was.

“We don’t know a thing about you,” he said. At least he wasn’t being confrontational. Jazzy breathed a sigh of relief.

“You’re right.” Tala smiled. There was absolutely nothing threatening about her, unlike the big Indian guy who hovered beside her.

“Let’s see…Mik and AJ were cellmates at Folsom when Ulrich Mason, the head of Pack Dynamics, found them and realized they were Chanku. He managed to get their sentences commuted and got them out of prison. They were lovers behind bars and still are. In our society, they are also bonded, which means they are a mated pair.”

“It’s like being married,” Mik said. He got up and stood behind AJ, rubbing his shoulders in a gentle caress. “One thing you’ll learn once you make your first shift is that your libido sort of takes over afterward.”

“As in, you really, really want to get laid.” AJ smiled. He reached up and touched Mik’s hand on his shoulder.

“What about you?” Jazzy frowned when she looked at Tala. “I thought you were with one of these guys.”

Tala laughed. “I am. I’m with both of them.”

Jazzy blinked. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

“I was working the streets,” Tala said. “It was a crappy little town in New Mexico when my pimp finally got a bit too rough. I stowed away in Mik and AJ’s SUV to get away.” She gazed at both men with the same sappy look Jazzy had seen on Beth’s face. Then she laughed out loud. “They were both so hot, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I kept the two of them.”

“Actually, she was like a little stray puppy tagging along. We felt sorry for her.” AJ’s sexy, loving smile spoke volumes, and when Mik leaned over and kissed Tala’s cheek, Jazzy felt her eyes well up with tears. To have someone love her like that…she blinked away the moisture and smiled.

“What’s Pack Dynamics?” Logan stood up and began clearing plates from the table, much to Jazzy’s surprise. No one else seemed to notice how out of character that seemed.

But then, she didn’t really know his character, or anything about him.

“It’s an investigative agency founded by Ulrich Mason. He’s retired now and living in Colorado, but all of us, including Mason, are Chanku. His daughter and son-in-law run the business. They’re the ones using the property up near Lassen. Tia’s pregnant and I think Luc wanted to get her away to himself before the babies take over their lives.”

“Babies? As in plural?” Beth had a huge smile on her face. Deacon was right. She and Nicky had definitely been having sex if she was smiling about babies.

“They’re not positive,” Tala said, “but Ulrich’s convinced she’s carrying twins. Tia’s not so thrilled about even a hint there might be a twofer.”

“If it was me, I think I’d rather shoot myself.” Matt rolled his eyes. “My parents had twin daughters after they adopted me. They were little monsters.”

When the laughter died down, Tala said, “Well, Tia would never have horrible babies. She’s just the sweetest thing. You’ll meet her and Luc before long. Tinker and Lisa, too. Lisa’s my sister, Tink’s her mate. They’ve moved over to the main house to be with Luc and Tia.”

“They’re all Chanku?” For some reason, it made Jazzy feel better, knowing how many of them there were.

Tala nodded. “There are a bunch of us that I know of. Two bonded pairs in Maine, four bonded pairs in Montana—two of them have babies—and a pair in Colorado, the three of us here, and two pairs at the house over on Marina, here in the city. That’s twenty-one adults. And of course, now the six of you, which tells me there must be a lot more around.”

Mik agreed. “Probably a lot more than we realize. Our goal is to find as many as we can. One thing we know is that we get our Chanku heritage through the females.”

Tala shrugged. “Of course you do. Evolution would obviously pick the smartest and best of a species.” She flashed a grin at Mik.

He growled and everyone else cracked up.

“Mik’s right,” Tala said. “All the offspring from a woman carrying the Chanku genes will be capable of becoming shapeshifters, even if their mother never developed her potential. Whether the father is Chanku or not doesn’t seem to matter. It’s sad, really, because those that never find out what they are lead such sad lives, always wondering what’s missing, why they’re never totally happy.”

“Horny all the time and never really knowing why.” AJ raised his head and looked at all six of the younger ones. “I would venture to say that most of you have had sex when you didn’t even like the person, or you’ve not cared what your partner’s gender was, or if you even liked them.”

The guys all looked guiltily at one another. Jazzy glanced at Beth and both girls shook their heads.

“I’ve always hated sex,” Beth said. “I was raped by my stepfather and it’s never been good for me. Until now.” She smiled shyly at Nick. He grabbed her hand and held on.

Jazzy nodded. “I was brought into this country as part of the sex trade.” She’d never admitted this to anyone before, not even her friends, but for the first time in her life she felt no shame about her past. If Tala could admit to being a prostitute…

“I was six years old when I came here,” she added. “At first there were just pictures and lots of touching by disgusting old men, but by the time I was ten I was an experienced whore. I might have been little, but I was old enough to know I didn’t like what they did to me. At least I survived. A lot of the other girls died of AIDS.”

“You’re all lucky to be alive,” Tala said. There was no laughter in her voice now. “Thank your Chanku heritage. For whatever reason, we appear to be impervious to human illness. AIDS and other STDs don’t touch us. I haven’t had a cold since I started on the nutrients, and rarely before. You might have been HIV positive before, but once you started nibbling on those grasses, once the changes started to happen in your bodies, any virus in your system would have been removed by a whole new set of antibodies.”

It was quiet around the table. Jazzy felt a new sense of family, even stronger than it had been before, when she’d been part of the group they called the wolf pack.

There’d been no condemnation, not a single negative comment about her and Beth. She glanced at Tala and got a big smile in return.

“For now,” Tala said, “we need to see if there’s enough stuff around here for you guys to wear. I see Nick found some clothes. That’s good. Nothing worse than a naked guy at the table.”

Mik patted Tala on the knee. “We do have our standards. Tala happens to think they’re too low.”

Laughing, Tala hushed him. “We’re leaving early in the morning for Anton’s place up north. I’m tired. I’d love to skip that trip to the store.”

They finished their dinner, talking about the trip north. What it would finally feel like to run on four legs through the towering forests of their dreams.

Somehow, Logan and Jazzy ended up doing dishes while the others went in search of extra clothing. Since his earlier posturing, Logan had grown quietly introspective.

Jazzy liked him a lot more this way.

“You gonna go with them?” Logan started rinsing dishes and adding them to the dishwasher.

“Aren’t you?” Jazzy slid the leftover lasagna into a smaller dish and covered it with plastic wrap.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s all happening pretty fast. We don’t know them.”

Jazzy stared at Logan. “I don’t know you.”

“Huh?” Logan straightened up and frowned at her. “You’ve known me for almost a year. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. I know your name is Logan. I know you showed up one day when we were all hanging out on Stanyan. I know you followed us when we moved to the garden in the park, and I know you like to be in charge. That’s it, Logan. And by the way…is Logan your first name or your last?”

His broad shoulders slumped and he looked away from her. Jazzy’s instincts suddenly went on high alert. “Logan? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowned. “You don’t know what’s wrong?”

“Don’t know my name. Don’t know how old I am. Who I am.”

“But…you’re Logan. I don’t get it. Isn’t that your name?”

He shook his head. “I woke up in the hospital a little over a year ago. I found out later that someone found me unconscious near Glide Memorial Church and called an ambulance. I’ve got some memories, but they’re all screwed up with TV shows and fictional stuff, so I can’t tell what’s true.”

Jazzy wrapped her fingers around his forearm. This time he didn’t pull away. Instead he looked directly into her eyes. It felt as if he was trying to talk to her, but without words. She jerked her head and the buzzing in her brain stopped, but she didn’t look away. “Your name is Logan, right?”

He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was the name I remembered on the ID tag one of my nurses wore. I needed a name. I took his, but to this day I don’t know if it was his first or last name or if I noticed it because it was familiar. When I got better, they discharged me. One of the doctors said my memories should come back at some time, but they haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”

“Do any of the guys know…?”

He shook his head again. “No, and I don’t want you to tell them.”

“Why’d you tell me?” Jazzy raised her chin. He trapped her once more, holding her prisoner with the feral intensity of his gaze. The harsh sound of his voice was urgent, insistent.

“Because you’re different, Jaz. Because you matter.”

Then he blinked, and Jazzy watched him disappear once again into his cocky, all-knowing, and irritating persona. He tugged his arm free of her grasp and went back to rinsing the plates from dinner.

Somehow, she’d ended up in the same big SUV they’d ridden in before, but this time it was just with Mik, Beth, Nicky—who, now that he’d gotten laid, wanted to be called Nick—and Logan. Tala, AJ, Deacon, and Matt were in Tala’s smaller vehicle, and they were all headed somewhere into the redwoods of Humboldt County in northern California.

Last night they’d called some guy everyone talked about in hushed voices. He’d told them his cabin would be stocked with fresh food and clean linens, so they didn’t have to take much of anything. Jazzy wasn’t sure who Anton Cheval was, but he must be someone important to these people. Even Mik seemed to hold him in awe.

Jazzy sat by herself in the middle seat, scratched at her itchy, tingly arms, and stewed most of the way north. Beth and Nick had the backseat to themselves and spent an inordinate amount of time staring into each other’s eyes. Made her sort of nauseous, to be honest.

Logan was up front with Mik. They were getting along famously, now that Logan had dropped his cocky bastard attitude. In fact, she’d never heard him quite as animated as he’d been over the past hours while Mik drove north. They’d talked about the Chanku, the history of their kind. The fact they were so heavily controlled by their overactive libidos that sex sometimes got in the way of smart thinking.

So what else is new? Jazzy slumped down in her seat and stared sightlessly out the window. Wasn’t that usually the way things worked? Of course, on the other hand, she’d really been hoping for something to happen last night, once she knew they’d have beds and a roof over their heads. She wasn’t sure exactly what, but sleeping on a rollaway in the bedroom with three snoring, farting guys hadn’t been it.

She’d sort of had some strange idea of sharing the bed with Logan, especially since that little window he’d opened into the real man, but they’d all flipped a coin for the big bed and Deacon and Matt got it—with a row of pillows jammed between them. She knew Matt swung both ways, so the pillows had to be Deacon’s idea. Like Matt was going to make a move on him with both Jazzy and Logan in the room?

“Logan? You mind getting that gate? Here’s the key.”

Jazzy blinked herself awake when she heard Mik’s voice. She must have fallen asleep miles ago, because the scenery sure had changed and she really had to pee. Logan grabbed the key ring Mik handed to him and climbed out of the car. He stretched and then walked around the front and opened the gate. Mik drove through, followed by Tala’s vehicle. Logan closed and locked the gate and got back in the car.

Jazzy took a good look around her and realized that while she’d been stewing and napping, they’d left the dry foothills and entered a thick forest of unbelievably huge trees and monster-sized ferns like something out of a movie. The air was damp and foggy, the ground smelled like wet dirt and mushrooms.

A chill ran along her spine when she realized she recognized the smells, the trees, the very essence of this place. “I’ve been dreaming about this forest. I recognize the way it smells, but how could I? I’ve never been here before.” She rolled her window down and took another deep breath.

Mik glanced back over the seat and grinned broadly before he answered her. “It’s something to do with our genetic instincts. The feral part of our nature exists even if we never truly morph into Chanku. We’ve all had the same dreams. Haven’t you ever awakened exhausted, feeling like you spent the night hunting on four legs? Awakened some mornings with a coppery taste in your mouth as if you’d eaten something wild and bloody the night before?”

Jazzy didn’t answer him. She couldn’t, not when her mind was spinning with remembered dreams and events that had never really happened.

Or had they? Might she literally have run as a beast in her dreams? Left her physical body and hunted fat rabbits in some other dimension? For some reason, the concept didn’t feel all that impossible.

At least no more impossible than turning into a wolf. She scratched at her raw, itchy arms.

“That’s going to go away, too,” Mik said. “The itching starts about the time you’re ready to make your first shift. I swear it’s from your bones wanting to jump out of your skin. Once you shift, the sensation seems to just disappear.”

Jazzy glanced at her raw, itchy forearms and hoped Mik knew what he was talking about.

Many gates later, they pulled into a small clearing with a perfect log cabin in the midst. Unbelievably tall trees blocked out all but the finest rays of sunlight, and huge ferns grew right up to the front porch.

There were signs of recent construction, but the grounds were immaculate and the new wood already showed signs of incipient growths of the thick moss that seemed to be everywhere.

“Anton told me he’s had extra rooms added on, mainly to accommodate his packmates and the babies, so there should be plenty of space for all of us.” Mik climbed out of the car and stretched. It had been a long drive from San Francisco, over six hours with a brief stop for lunch.

Tala pulled her smaller car into the clearing and parked. They all got out, craning necks and looking skyward. Jazzy shivered and rubbed at her arms. She’d had another of those big pills this morning, and already she felt different. Sound seemed to envelope her. After a moment, it suddenly dawned on her that she heard the beating of hearts, the perceptible rush of blood.

She noticed a faint buzzing in her ears, as if many voices spoke at once. When she tried to concentrate, the sound grew louder but the voices were less distinct. Shaking her head, she grabbed a small bag of borrowed clothes out of the back of the SUV and followed Beth and Nick up the front steps.

AJ had the door unlocked and they all trooped in. “We’re lucky Tinker and Lisa had a set of keys to this place,” he said. He pulled the window blinds open. Light streamed into the cabin.

The living area was fairly compact, with a small kitchen and great room connected beneath open beams. A standard picnic table filled the opening between the two rooms, rustic but perfectly appropriate for a cabin in the woods. One doorway led off to a large bedroom and bath; another, newer-looking door opened into a hallway with four matching doors along its length.

“AJ, Mik, and I will take the master bedroom. You guys can split the extra rooms up however you want. You’re on your own. I’m beat and I’ll be taking a long nap, folks. If you get hungry, Anton said the caretakers would leave the refrigerator stocked.” Tala stepped back into the great room. “Looks like just four rooms and Anton said each has its own bathroom, so someone’s going to have to share.” Tala grinned when she said that and glanced toward Beth and Nick.

They both blushed. Jazzy decided this might be interesting. Someone else would have to double up, too. She wondered who that might be.

“Jazzy and I will take this room. Right, Jazzy?”

Logan’s deep voice sent shivers along her spine. She turned and looked at him in amazement. He’d not said a word to her the entire trip.

“We’ll see,” she said. She walked past him and opened the first door. Nothing fancy, but definitely comfortable with a king-sized mattress on a simple frame, bedding folded on top and a door leading to a private bathroom. “I’m claiming this one all for myself. Maybe I’ll want to share, later.” She shrugged. “Maybe I won’t.”

“Beth and I will take this one.”

Nick grabbed the door next to Jazzy’s. She didn’t wait to see what the others did. The bathroom beckoned.