“Parrots are highly intelligent birds.” She reached up and squeezed his shoulder. He was a good guy, her Nik. Too bad they didn’t have more sexual chemistry—but then again, she’d learned that lovers were a hell of a lot easier to find than friends, and Nik was her best friend.
She patted his shoulder. “What I was saying before I was interrupted is that Nik can do the same thing with people that he does with stuff like the bricks back there. He can touch somebody and get strong flashes of their history—like bad or embarrassing things. The shit people try to repress. And he doesn’t have control over it; he can’t decide who he can and can’t pull stuff from.”
“That would be . . . horrid,” Cage said, frowning. “What about with shifters and vampires?”
“He can only read shifters if we’re really upset or emotional, or have completely let our guard down and let him in.” Robin thumped Nik on the ear when he shot her another glare over his shoulder.
“What about vampires, Niko?” Robin asked. She thought Nik was going to break his jaw one of these days from grinding those pretty white teeth together.
“How the hell would I know?”
“Exactly.”
She might as well annoy Cage too. Robin pulled the ponytail he’d tied his hair into, then grabbed the leather cord and jerked it off. Unbound, his hair fell to his shoulders and was the color of her lightest feathers when she shifted into her golden eagle form. Most of her feathers were dark reddish-brown, the color of her hair, but her wings had tips of golden brown like Cage’s mane, which was soft and fine as silk, but thick, with just a touch of curl.
He shifted around to face her. “Have a hair fetish, do you, little bird?”
“Ooh, flirty.” And sexy as hell. Maybe this one was more dangerous than Aidan Murphy, at least for her. “So, even in this light, I can tell your eyes have gone kind of silvery green. That means you’re pissed off at me?”
Anger and hunger, the Vampires 101 dossiers had said. That’s what would cause their eyes to lighten. “Or do you need a blood transfusion?”
Cage shifted to look at her more closely, and she had a foreign urge to squirm under his examination. His eyes had lightened even more, and she couldn’t decide if it made her want to fuck him or fly away.
“Guess it’s not too soon to start your lessons in the ways of the vampire,” he said, his deep voice taking on a silky quality that caused her heart to do a stutter step. “Three things will cause a vampire’s irises to lighten.”
Well, she knew two. “Yeah, yeah, anger and hunger. What’s the third one?”
He reached back and stroked a finger along her jawline. “Arousal, little bird.” Then he turned back around and laughed. “You’ll have to decide which one applies to the present situation.”
She didn’t hear Nik laughing, but his shoulders were moving up and down suspiciously, so she thumped him on the ear again for good measure. “Well, never mind about me; back to Nik. Let him touch you—unless you have secrets you want to keep.”
Cage swept his fingers through that silky hair, which gave him a kind of reckless-rogue look. Then he held his arm out in front of Nik. “There’s some ugly shit hiding inside this skin, but go for it.”
“Is ‘go for it’ secret vampire code for ‘get that predatory eagle-girl away from me’?” Nik glanced back at her with a look that said they’d be discussing all of this later. Good. He was awfully fun to fight with.
“Oh no, I can handle the eagle girl.” Cage, on the other hand, didn’t look at her at all, and she considered that comment a challenge. “I was offering to let you touch me—on a purely professional basis, of course—to see if you can read anything off vampires. Oh, and take the next left, third house on the right.”
Nik brought the SUV to a stop in front of a long, narrow building that reminded Robin of the modified shotgun houses back in New Orleans, especially the new rows of buildings erected after Hurricane Katrina. But this was bigger, and obviously a new construction, identical to a half-dozen other houses scattered along the block, all painted white. Bo-ring. At least in New Orleans the houses were all painted different colors, from pastel to garish.
Nik hadn’t moved, so she squeezed his shoulder again, gently this time. “Go ahead and try. It’s just us here, and you need to know what to expect before you meet more fangaroos.”
Cage twisted in his seat, and she wished the light were better out here so she could see his expression. “Fangaroos?” He laughed, which transformed his features from hard planes to drool-worthy, and—oh, holy pelicans—she saw fangs. She’d known he had them, of course, but it had been theoretical up to this point.