Diaries of an Urban Panther (4 page)

BOOK: Diaries of an Urban Panther
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“Now, I’m waiting to see if you’ve been infected. It takes in some people but not in others.”

“Why?”

“Depends on the person’s blood.”

“What about the blood?”

“Depends on if there is magic in it already.”

Wasn’t that some mythology he’d cooked up? But wasn’t I healing too fast for it not to have infected me? The wounds were through muscle; wouldn’t that be deep enough to infect someone with a mystical disease? God, I sounded like I was at work. Of course, I did do most of my work sitting on a couch with a cup of coffee. But not at three in the morning and not across the cushion from a mad man—or any other man for that matter. Maybe I was the one going crazy.

He must have read my thoughts, which at this point, I wasn’t discounting. “I’m not sure if your healing is because you’re a Perfect or if it’s the disease.”

The P word caught my attention more than the notion of lycanthropy or being filleted alive. “What exactly is perfect to you?”

Garrett just smiled that soap star smile. “It means you are perfect in every way.”

My hysteric laughter echoed off the bare, wood-paneled walls. “You obviously didn’t see me in high school with the zits and the braces and the frizzy, frizzy hair.”

He waited to continue until after my fit of panicked giggles had subsided. “It means you were created for a specific purpose. There has been a prophecy. That’s why I was sent to watch over you.”

“But you asked out Jessa, you were following . . .” And then it hit me. I was always with Jessa when she spotted him and how else would he know how I took my coffee. “You were following me.”

There was that look again, that dark look where he dropped his chin slightly and looked through his long lashes. It made me stop breathing and my skin grow hot. But maybe it was the coffee still steaming in my hands.

His voice was soothing as I dropped my gaze into the shaking liquid. “You’re wandering through life. You live alone and nowhere for very long. No family, few close friends. Something is missing and you can’t figure out.”

“You’ve got it wrong,” I protested. “I live alone because I want to live alone. I’ve got no family because they died in a car accident. I just moved here because I broke up with my boyfriend and I don’t have millions of friends because I work seventy hours a week. Not because I was created. And nothing’s missing. I’ve got my job, my house. And there is not an ounce of magic in my blood.”

My overzealous rebuttal didn’t stop his explanation. “Your potential is lying dormant until the time is right. It’s all part of being fated for a specific purpose. Just like I have a specific purpose.”

My jaw had clenched into a tight knot, but I managed out, “And what would that be?”

“To find people.”

“And shoot things with guns?”

He shrugged. “Happens. Mostly it means I’m on the sidelines watching.”

His sentence, though simple, was all too familiar. The life on the sidelines. Watching other peoples’ adventures. Watching other people get the promotions and the happy endings. Watching as you’re stuck in a holding pattern.

I took a moment to sip on my coffee and think. God, what’s so wrong with me that I can’t attract a normal stalker who wants to just have his way with me and leave me in little pieces for the city to pick up. I get a self-help guru with prophesies.

Why wasn’t I running? Why wasn’t I taking the hot coffee in my hands and throwing it in his face? Because the truth of it hummed through me. Vibrated along my skin and warmed me like a blanket. He spoke in familiar words of familiar worlds that I’d been surrounded with my whole life.

“So, if I choose to believe that I’m a . . . “ I couldn’t even say the word. It was too absurd. “Was getting attacked in the back alley part of the fated destiny or whatever?”

He looked down at his coffee and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know.”

“Well if you were sent to watch over me, what were you watching for?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me much.”

“Well who sent you?”

“Can’t tell you yet.”

“What the hell? Give me something. This is my life we are talking about here.”

Frustrated, I stood and he matched my position with a speed that blurred his form. It was just like the movies, like when vampires sped across the room to capture their victims. I froze in place as he stepped closer to me. My heart pounded, rattling my ribcage, as he looked down at me.

“I will never hurt you,” he said softly, tenderly almost as he reached out to take the hot coffee from my hand. “I was just sent to keep you safe.”

“Bang up job, Garrett. If I’m infected, won’t you kill me like you killed that thing in the alley?”

He paused. It was a chilly pause that cooled the air in the room, cooled my fevered skin.

“If we get you help, no,” he said in a low voice, looking away from me, taking a step back.

He didn’t have to say the other part of the answer. If I didn’t get help, he might not have a choice. I forced myself to swallow even though my mouth was bone dry.

“So there’s help?” I squeaked.

He gave me a small smile and a nod. “There’s a woman in Waxahachie, another shifter, who’s already volunteered to help.”

“Help how?” The vision of some creepy blood cleansing rite in the middle of a field under a full moon jumped into my head. I need to stop watching my own movies.

“She was the prima of the Pride here in Dallas but moved away to be a Shala to anyone who needs it.”

I shook my head. “There were too many new words in the sentence to make it intelligible.”

He chuckled. “You’ve got an interesting way of putting things, Miss Jordan.”

“It’s a gift.”

 

Chapter Three

 

G
arrett put his car in park across the street from my house. It was an older model Bronco, something made before both of us were born. The back was full of various and sundry things covered with a canvas tarp that rattled as we drove and the leather on the seats was cracked. It didn’t even have a tape player in it, just one of those radios with the sliding, light up dial. But he looked like he belonged in it somehow. And it was more than just the dark jeans and flannel shirt he was wearing.

He turned in the seat to face me but I stared at my house, like it was a foreign country. “I’ll check in everyday.”

I nodded like a child, looking down at my hands folded on top of what was left of my shirt and skirt from the attack, dried blood stiffening the satin. I’d decided after he made me scrambled eggs that morning that he wasn’t going to kill me. He wasn’t necessarily giving me the whole story, but he wasn’t going to kill me.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave his car, though, and walk into my house. It looked so different from across the street. Or maybe it was me who was different.

“Here,” he said softly as he handed me something. “Just in case.”

I slowly took the piece of paper from his hand. On it was a phone number scrawled in black ink.

“Stalkers have business cards? Is there a union too?” I smiled weakly.

Garrett chuckled. “Jokes. You must be feeling better.”

I looked at the paper in my hand and flipped it over. Nothing special, just a piece of cardstock with his number on it. It was fitting somehow. No frills.

“What happens next?”

“I’ll keep looking, keep asking to try to find answers. You just need to keep an eye out. Call me if something goes wrong.”

“What hasn’t gone wrong already?” I finally looked up at him. Backlit by the morning sun, he looked like he should be shooting a GAP commercial and not walking me through a traumatic aftermath. The golden highlights in his hair danced with the sunlight and his eyes were more of a hazel this morning than the dark chocolate from last night.

With a deep breath, I opened the door and stepped out into the morning. The heavy metal door slammed shut with its own weight, shattering the silence of my perfect street. Tentatively, I scanned the street to see if anyone was anywhere. Nope, just me. I took in a deep breath amazed that there was no pain and took my first step to cross the street.

“Hey,” I heard as I stepped up onto the sidewalk in front of my house.

I turned around and had to shield my eyes from the rising sun.

“It can be done,” he said as he stood by the driver’s side, looking over the hood of his car. “Lots of people do it.”

I didn’t have a witty comeback, so I kinda waved and walked up the sidewalk to my house. It felt like the walk of shame back in college, like everyone was watching me as I turned my key in the door, like everyone knew what happened to the poor single girl in 2G.

A
fter my shower, which was clean and filled with my scented soaps, I was able to see my back. As of 8:30 on Tuesday morning, the four wounds that caused nerve damage and severe blood loss were nothing more than four dark shadows across my left shoulder. The bite marks and other small scrapes on my hands and knees were nothing more than a bad memory and writing fodder.

I dressed in a pair of comfortable lounge pants with a white tank top and sipped coffee out of my favorite mug, a ceramic turtle mug I had gotten at some aquarium with swimming Ridgley’s on it. Something about the blues and greens usually calmed me. But not today.

As I stared at the perky curtains in my kitchen, my brain was filled with thousands of questions, racing around so fast I felt dizzy. What just happened? Was he telling the truth? Am I meant for something more? Have I been lying dormant? Am I destined to attract insane men for the rest of my life or is it just a phase?

I needed to do something. I couldn’t just sit here. Idol hands and everything.

So I did the one thing I knew I did well, something that would take my mind off all this supernatural stuff. I went upstairs to my office, flipped on my computer, and started returning messages.

“Y
es, Sera. I know I missed the conference call on Monday but I really was just deathly ill,” I tried to explain without too many details as I paced around my office on my cordless. “But if you’d check your e-mail, you’d see I’ve already sent the changes you guys needed.”

The woman on the other end of the phone was quiet for a moment as I heard clicking and typing.

“Oh, these are good,” she said, enthralled with the edits made that morning. My brain kicked into overtime to not think about what had happened to me and focused on what happened to Jada and Smith in
Everville
.

“That’s why you pay me the measly bucks,” I joked as I plopped down in my oversized desk chair and put my feet up on the little space of desk not cluttered with scripts and contracts and half-written ’zine articles and all the other projects I had taken on just to have an office to sit in.

“We wouldn’t have this problem if you would move back to LA, Violet.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose under my backup pair of glasses. I hadn’t had the guts to go around the back yet to try to find my usual pair. Frankly, I was thinking I might never put my trash out again. “We’ve been through this a thousand times, Sera. I don’t want to live in LA. Have no desire to be within ten feet of
him
. And things are working fine with me here in Dallas.”

“But Dallas is so . . . Midwest. I don’t understand how you can stand all the cows and spurs.”

“You obviously haven’t seen a good pair of Wranglers,” I countered.

Sera laughed. She had the best laugh, a breathy sort of high-pitched giggle. She was another writer for Cloak and Dagger, my production company, producers of such cinematic feats as the
Beast of Briar Lake
,
Fear the Dawn
, and
Snake Mountain
. Quality film making. She connected me to the life I had left behind (read:
ran away from
).

“I don’t know why I like it here, but I do,” I tried to explain to her again. “And when the writers are happy . . .”

“The scripts are juicy,” Sera finished. “I know.”

“Besides, I don’t want to fall into the ocean. I mean, what could happen to me here besides hitting an armadillo on the way home?”

Sera laughed again, but I didn’t. I scratched my shoulder against the back of my chair and sighed. Finally giving up on the chair, I got up to scratch my back against the door frame.

“Fine. You’re off the hook this time but we really need you in LA for the summer schedule meeting. Drew’s not happy with the video conference call things. He’s convinced someone’s going to hack the feed.”

“Lovely Drew. How is he?”

“Good. For Drew. I’m sending you the next project he’s green-lighted. Kyle tried to draw up a plot but it’s terrible.”

I tried to keep from clenching my jaw so tight at the mention of
his
name so I wouldn’t break teeth. “What’s the general pitch?”

“Some werewolf thing,” Sera said casually.

I choked on the air itself as she went on. Damn Kyle. Even in my hours of despair, he could push my buttons from across the country. And since we were together for two years, he unfortunately always knew exactly which buttons to push to turn me into a quaking mass of patheticness.

“Something about a newly turned werewolf trying to figure out if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. You know, the moving of dark armies, seductive psychics, and such. Right up your alley.”

I stopped breathing and my skin began to burn. Flashes of everything in the past four days, stories from my childhood, moments from old horror movies raced around my head. My knees went weak, and I fell to the floor. The phone slipped from my hand and I could feel the rip of the claw down my shoulder like it was happening again, like I was still in the darkness of my alley alone.

Sera’s voice echoed out through my moment of insanity. “Violet? Are you okay?”

My eyes snapped open and I was on the plush carpet of my office. I scrambled for the phone. “Fine,” I forced out, after gasping in a few breaths. “I have to go but I’ll have something to you by the end of the day.”

“Great. We need something ASAP. Call you at 5:00 your time.”

I turned off the phone and dropped the handset to my side. I sat limp on the floor, staring wide eyed at my lavender wall.

T
he phone rang at one o’clock. It was Jessa. Could tell by the ring. This was the time of day she called to tell which fancy man took her to which fancy restaurant. Which made my usual lunch of green tasteless things seem even more tasteless.

“What’s wrong?” Jessa asked midsentence about her morning.

“Nothing. How are you?” I asked trying not to sound too distracted, as I pushed peanut butter around in the jar with a celery stick and balanced my cell on my shoulder.

“The guy from CyberTalk just took me to lunch. He’s really excited about the Silver Ball idea for his launch.”

“That’s great.”

“So I thought drinks on Friday to celebrate.”

It was always drinks on Friday to celebrate. But some weeks, if it wasn’t for her celebrating, I wouldn’t get out of the house. In the instant the phone rang, I had decided not to tell Jessa about what happened. Not even a modified version where there wasn’t a werewolf in the back alley. Rehashing it wasn’t going to do me any good right now and Jessa would only freak out and demand that I move in with her. And that was
so
not a good idea.

“Sure,” I said with a shrug that I was sure she could hear in my monotone voice.

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m in weird mood.”

“It’s because all you do is write. You need to get out, rub some elbows. Meet someone new, an actual person.”

She meant I needed to meet a man. Jessa’s big deal was that I lived in my head and not in the real world. She complained I made the men in my head better than any man I could meet in real life. If only she knew what had brought a new man into my life. If only she knew why I was in a weird mood.

“Did I mention Ben started calling again?”

“Uh-oh,” I said and I knew she could also hear my rolled eyes.

“Nope. Not this time. I was strong and told him exactly what you told me to say.”

This was a change. I perked up and listened carefully, putting the peanut butter down.

“I told him I didn’t need his run-around anymore, and if he wanted me back, he was going to have to prove he was worth getting back with.”

“Really? Wow, go Jessa. What did he say?”

“He said he understood and he would spend every day proving he was the one. So right now I’m looking at two tickets to
Carmen
and two dozen roses.”

I would die if a man gave me tickets to
Carmen
. They sold out before I even knew they were on sale, not that I had anyone to go with.

“So you have a date for Saturday?” I asked.

“Where in
The Rules
does it say I have to take him to the opera?”

I shook my head. “I think that was the point, Jessa. For him and you to go together.”

“But I don’t know if I want to date Ben again. It was fun and all, but I’m glad he ended it.”

I wanted to pound my head against my countertop; this was the same girl who nearly drowned herself in tequila shots when he broke up with her. I had to spend a whole day on the floor of her bathroom with her to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid, like call him.

“So what are you going to do with the tickets?”

“I dunno. You want them?”

I choked on my celery stick. “Serious?”

“Sure. Meet me for lunch tomorrow and they’re yours.”

I wanted to jump at the chance but something held me back, something in the lilt of her voice. “Meet you
where
for lunch?” I asked suspiciously.

“Cafe Brazil?”

Seemed innocent enough. Cafe Brazil was our place. I’d been there a million times and the coffee was amazing. But then again, I’d been into my garage alley a million times as well. Maybe I was being paranoid. Can’t think of a single reason I might be paranoid about leaving my house for the rest of my life.

“And maybe afterwards we can get manicures,” she added in quickly.

I looked down at my toes. It wasn’t like anyone besides me was going to see them and I really didn’t have the cash for the places that she liked to go. But it got me out of the house and that was the one thing I knew I had to do. Get out, keep going. Worked before. Why wouldn’t it work now?

BOOK: Diaries of an Urban Panther
9.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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