Skin Trade(116)

The lovely eyes with their uptilted edges had nothing delicate in them when she glared at me across the table. Why wasn’t she mourning her dead boyfriend? Easy: she didn’t know he was dead yet. She’d gone into this room before the fireworks. I sat across from her and knew that the man she loved was dead, and I didn’t tell her. I was saving it for when I thought it might gain me something in the questioning. Did that make me a bastard? Probably, but after the crime scene I’d just seen, I could live with that.

“Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?” she asked at last. Her voice dripped with hostility.

“We’re waiting for someone,” I said, and even managed a smile, though I wasn’t able to push it all the way up into my eyes.

Edward was leaning against the far wall. He smiled wonderfully at her. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Chu, but you know how it is.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t know how it is. I know that the police put surveillance on my house, and came and dragged me away. Apparently, I’m a suspect in the slaughter of the SWAT officers and our local executioner.”

I reacted to it, just a tightening of the shoulders, but she felt it, saw it. My pulse went up just a notch. “Who told you that?”

She smiled at me. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes, either. “So that is why I’m here.”

“We didn’t say that, Ms. Chu,” Edward said, in his happy Ted voice.

“You didn’t have to; she reacted to it.” She gave me the full weight of those pale eyes.

I stared into those pale tiger eyes in the human face and felt a thrill of fear, or adrenaline? She meant to spook me, but adrenaline isn’t good for you when you carry beasts inside you like furry hitchhikers.

I’d been shielding as hard as I could. Hard enough that she hadn’t picked up on the fact that I wasn’t completely human. Interesting to know that I could shield well enough to pass for prey to Paula Chu. But that tiny spurt of adrenaline was enough to make the white tigress get to her feet and gaze up the long distance of that interior landscape.

It was Chu’s turn to tense. My turn to see it and give her a satisfied smile. Her voice was even a little shaky around the edges. “You can’t be one of us.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She touched her white hair. “You aren’t pure.”

“I survived an attack,” I said. Which was true; if she thought that meant I was a full-blown weretiger, not my bad that she misunderstood.

Her face was instantly scornful. “Then you don’t understand. It’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”

“Help me understand,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “I thought that if you became a shapeshifter, they took away your badge.”

“I’m with the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service. The rules are a little more lax.”

She kept giving me that suspicious look. Her dainty nose flared as she sniffed the air. “You don’t just smell of tiger; you smell of our clan. You smell like white tiger. That is not possible.”

I shrugged. “Why isn’t it possible?”

“You should smell like tiger, but only regular, orange. One of us could attack you and make you a tiger, but you’d still not be clan.”

“You mean I wouldn’t turn into a white tiger, even if a white tiger were my attacker.”

She nodded, and she was puzzling over me. “Exactly.”

The white tigress had risen to her feet and was beginning to trot up that long, dark path through the forest that was not, in a place that only dreams should have been real. I had concentrated and gotten her to slow, then stop. She began to pace around the path, like something caged. But she had stopped, and that was all I cared about.

Chu leaned a little closer over the table. “I smell white tiger. You smell like clan. Are you hiding from us? Did you dye your hair and put contacts in? Your skin is white enough to pass.”

“Sorry, but I’m all natural.” I wanted to glance back and see Edward in his corner, but didn’t dare. I knew he was there and would help if I needed it, but he was mostly there in case Paula Chu tried to go all tiger on our asses. We had been told to wait for Detective Ed Morgan before questioning her about the crimes. So far, we hadn’t broken that rule. Just two shapeshifters talking shop.

She half-rose from her chair. The manacles kept her hands from rising and kept all of her from standing completely, but Edward still said, “Sit down, Ms. Chu, you’ll be more comfortable that way.”

She gave a sound that might have been a laugh, but was all bitter. She let herself fall back into the chair. “Yeah, I guess it is more comfortable.” She stared at me, and I felt the first trickle of her energy like a hand searching in the dark for another hand to hold.