Chapter 15

Sean was waiting for me this time, fiddling with his phone and frowning.

"Shit, fuck, I'm sorry I'm late," I said, and handed him the dispensary bag as he looked up. "Light up if you want, but I need information. And a favor." He really wouldn't like that, but then…shit. "And another one after that, probably. If that party's still happening, I need to get in. First info, though. Did Cunningham leave the hotel? Did he take, uh, my guy with him?"

I had a hundred other questions running through my mind, and the energy of momentum fizzing in my blood, but I forced myself to shut up and give Sean a chance to answer.

Gods, maybe I could get around killing Cunningham and ruining the rest of my life. Not that Cunningham didn't deserve to be killed, but with a tiny bit of hope for another solution now glimmering in front of me at the end of the tunnel, I could admit that Raven had a point. There were better ways.

Sean produced a lighter, eyed me with his brows furrowed, and said, "Okay, we'll come back to the favors, but I really don't know much. I think they went to the house last night after the chair thing. His limo left. And your guy's not around this morning. I guess he went too."

Just hearing your guy , Raven referred to by someone else, made my heart skip a beat. Gods. I needed to get a grip.

Raven had been moved, okay, that sucked, but I'd suspected as much. Of course, that was the best case scenario, that he'd been sitting tight-lipped and frightened in that limo. Worst case…

I couldn't. Not if I wanted to function. I pushed it back, pushed it down, forced myself to focus on the here and now.

The lighter clicked, Sean inhaled deeply, and a plume of smoke trailed past me, borne on a fitful little breeze that whistled mournfully around the corner of the garage.

"He hasn't canceled the party, as far as I know," Sean said after another deep inhale, in that weird, suffused, holding-a-lungful stoner voice. "Still happening tomorrow night. And—"

He broke off in a raw-sounding coughing fit, smoke exploding everywhere, and I winced, ground my teeth together, and felt my eyes begin to glow. I will not shake it out of him. I will not rip his fucking face off.

"I can't get you in," he said at last, right as I thought I might burst into flame myself. "There's no way. Everyone's ID gets checked. You talk to MacKenna about that job yet?"

Fuck.

"I will in a minute," I said. What the hell. Now I'd need to ask Declan if he could get me into the party, anyway, since I knew from the tone of Sean's voice that if I pushed him any further on this, I'd lose what little help he'd still be willing to give me. So I might as well annoy Declan once instead of twice. "Right now I need the first favor. A smaller one," I added, as he shot me a look. "I need you to make a call from your phone."

I took out my phone and pulled up Raven's number, messaging it to Sean. "Call the number I just sent you and say you're a scheduler needing to change a massage appointment," I said. "Put it on speaker. And then ask if he has a minute to talk to a manager."

Hopefully the tone of Raven's voice and his response to that would let me know if it'd be safe to take the phone and talk to him myself. Not the greatest plan, but it was all I had. Calling him from my own phone was too damn risky.

Sean shook his head, but he got his phone out and poked at the screen.

"I'm calling your guy, aren't I," he said. "Fuckin-A. You owe me a job. And those drinks."

He dialed, hit the speaker button, and took a hit off his joint.

One ring. Two. My heart thrummed, and I held my breath.

Click. "This mobile customer is not available," said a bland, tinny recording. "Thank you."

And the line went dead.

I nearly keeled over dead myself, the sun-baked asphalt of the alley and Sean's concerned face and the condoms on the fence flapping in the breeze all going spinny for a second.

Cunningham had taken Raven's phone. Somehow, I hadn't expected that, even though I should have.

"You think he switched providers?" Sean said, and I choked on something between a laugh and a groan. "Or, you know, not?"

"Not," I ground out. "Thanks for trying. Give me a minute, okay?"

"Okay," he said dubiously.

Okay. Another sign that Raven was now an actual prisoner changed nothing. It simply meant I'd have a harder time getting to him, and I'd never expected it to be easy.

I switched over to a new message to Declan. He'd say no. But I still had to ask. Anyway, if I ended up storming Cunningham's mansion after all, I wouldn't have another chance to keep my promise to Sean, so no time like the present.

Hey, sorry to bother you. Cunningham's having a big party at Audacity tomorrow night. Are you invited? Any chance you can get me a plus one? I need to get in there. It's urgent. Also, a dude I know needs a valet job. Is the Morrigan hiring? I owe him. He's all right, just kind of a stoner.

The message went through, Sean lit up a second joint, and I breathed shallowly and waited.

Within a minute, much sooner than I'd expected given Declan's busy schedule, the phone buzzed in my hand.

Let me guess, that valet works at Audacity and already tried to get you in, and that's why you owe him , Declan sent, proving once and for all that he was a lot smarter than me—if the fact that he owned a major casino hotel and a successful strip club and I worked on the stage of said strip club hadn't already made it clear. Every valet in Vegas is a stoner. I was when I was one. Tell him to send his resume to my attention, it'll go on the top of the interview pile.

After a second, another message came in.

I'm not invited, I'm glad to say. Heard what happened last night. Don't get involved.

If he'd already heard, he could've passed that on to me immediately instead of sitting on it, that sneaky fucker.

Thank you, Sean will email , I sent back. And then after thinking for a second: I'm already involved. If something happens, my parents will need someone to tell them. Sorry.

His reply: I'll take care of it, but don't let it come to that.

And that was that from Declan, I knew. He'd made up his mind.

"Email your resume, and put his name on it, and you'll get an interview," I said, in lieu of a lot of obscenities. "I may not see you around, Sean. Thanks for everything."

He called after me as I walked away, his tone somewhere between worried and pissed, but I let it wash over me. At least I'd taken care of my obligation to him. That was something.

Next, the cash for Louie, and then I'd have to make the call. Kill Cunningham, or try to add another option to my dwindling list?

But as it turned out, another option came to me.

My phone rang as I walked in my apartment door. Not a number in my contacts, and it had an area code I didn't recognize, either.

If Raven had managed to steal a phone…I fumbled to answer it so fast I almost snapped a claw. "Yeah?"

"Tony?" said a pleasant, medium-pitched male voice that distinctly wasn't Raven's. "I'm Blake. We haven't met. Not through any fault of mine."

Blake. Declan's mate, who wanted to hang out at Lucky or Knot, much to Declan's horror.

With or without Declan's brains, I knew he couldn't possibly know Blake had called me.

Fuck, exactly what I needed: Declan MacKenna hunting me down in a jealous rage. Great. I had to get Blake the hell off the phone before he somehow talked me into letting him in the back of the club when Declan wasn't looking, or something equally suicidal. Like I didn't already have enough problems with other alphas wanting to kill me for being involved with people they thought of as theirs.

"Blake," I said warily. "Nice to meet you. Um, I'm not working for a few days, so I can't really—"

He burst out laughing. "I'm not trying to get you to take me to Lucky or Knot behind Declan's back," he said, and then laughed some more. "That would be hilarious, just not for you. I'm not that much of an asshole. I used to be, and that would be…ha! Okay, no. But you still can't tell him I called. He told me about you and your problem, and I have an idea." His voice had been quivering with barely suppressed mischief, and now he lowered it—clearly for dramatic effect, because he had to be a mile away from Declan and his alpha hearing if he expected this phone call to be a secret. "So…Tony. How do you feel about posing as a trained circus tiger?"

***

In the face of Raven's precarious, dangerous captivity, how I felt about posing as a trained circus tiger obviously didn't matter much, if at all.

And yet.

It was Friday afternoon, the sun pouring down out of a cloudless sky into the narrow parking lot attached to a local shaman's office and workshop. I tilted the small paper bag I held toward the light, illuminating a brown, grainy, waxy lump of spell components—that I was supposed to swallow before I shifted that afternoon, for fuck's sake—and wrinkled my nose against an odor that gave notes of oregano, maple syrup, unwashed socks, and most disturbingly, tiger piss. Not even mine, either. I hadn't given the shaman a sample.

"This is probably the worst idea of my entire life," I said, as soon as the door to the shop closed behind us and the weird, cranky old shaman who'd made the lump presumably couldn't hear us anymore and get offended. "Actually, strike that. I'm not taking responsibility for this. Blake, this is the worst idea of anyone's entire life."

I glanced at him sidelong and found him grinning, blue eyes sparkling with delight. He "used to be" that much of an asshole, huh? Yeah, I wasn't going to be the one to break it to him, but I doubted he'd changed as much as he thought. Dick. A helpful dick, and possibly an evil genius, but a dick nonetheless.

"I just wish I could be there to see it," he said with a sigh. "I haven't been to a party that sounds this fun in years. But Declan would lose his mind. He obviously couldn't come with me to keep an eye on me, because Cunningham wouldn't let him on the property, and Declan's a little overprotective."

Coming from an alpha, and about an alpha, that statement carried more weight than it would have otherwise.

Translation: Murderously, obsessively possessive.

Well, I couldn't blame Declan. Raven had inspired some similar feelings in me, and anyway, Blake would be most people's idea of a strong nine, maybe even a ten if you went for charming blonds.

"No worries," I said, choosing not to comment on their relationship. After all, I'd only met Blake an hour ago, when we rendezvoused at the shaman's shop. He hadn't wanted to miss out on any of the prep for his crazy plan to get me into the party, and he needed to be there for the next part of it anyway. "With my luck, someone's going to film it and put it online."

"Gods, I fucking hope so," he said, with a level of relish I found off-putting. Ugh. Strong nine or not, Declan could have him. Did he know what he'd gotten into when he'd mated this guy? "Anyway, I'm great at blackjack, but my poker face isn't the best. It's probably just as well."

I got in the passenger seat of Blake's car, since Blake had sweet-talked the shaman into letting me leave mine there for now while I used his magical concoction. After all, I'd be arriving at Audacity in a form that didn't lend itself to operating a motor vehicle.

Besides, I'd spent last night, after I'd gotten off the phone with Blake, making some alternate arrangements for transportation.

My buddy's cousin's girlfriend the part-time concierge still hadn't gotten back from her trip to Mexico, but she'd responded to my desperate, begging text messages from a poolside bar, according to the photo she'd also sent me of sparkling blue water viewed through a sparkling blue cocktail. She hadn't spent a ton of time in the fanciest parts of the hotel, but she'd given me a few pointers on how the staff got in and out, and a couple of shortcuts through the labyrinth of service corridors that crisscrossed Audacity's multiple buildings.

And with that information jotted down, I'd had to text Sean again, hat in hand. After a tense negotiation, he'd agreed to leave one of the valeted cars, unlocked with the keys in the glove box, in a discreet corner of the parking garage near a set of emergency stairs. Only my oaths, on my life, that I'd get him a job at either the Morrigan or Lucky or Knot when he inevitably got fired for negligence convinced him to agree.

Also, it sounded like he had his eye on a specific casino regular's car. It really didn't pay to piss off the valets, it turned out.

"So I met this big cat trainer guy because I broke up a fight he was having with his brother at a roulette table at the Morrigan," Blake began as he started the car.

And then he was off to the races, chatting to me about all the craziness he'd seen at Declan's casino, about how he missed rainy weather and generally spending time outside living in Vegas, and which fancy restaurants in town—exactly zero of which I could afford to eat at—had the best cheesecake, ranked as a top five with two honorable mentions. Good thing Declan had a lot of money, because Blake sounded eager to spend it. To be fair, he also couldn't say Declan's name without smiling and turning pink, and he smelled the way Declan did: like contentment, satisfaction…love.

Envy gnawed at my guts. I'd give a lot to make Raven look and smell that way when he talked about me. Declan and Blake hadn't had the easiest path to a deliriously happy mating, though, so maybe there was hope for me yet.

Blake didn't seem to need any replies to his nonsense, so I tuned him out, staring out the window at the passing suburbs. All I saw was Raven. I'd dreamed about him the night before during what little fitful sleep I'd managed to get. He'd walked away from me, and I'd called his name and chased him until I fell into a pit and woke up.

Finally it dawned on me that Blake had fallen silent.

"I'm sorry," I managed. "The, um. I'll have to try it sometime."

"I wasn't talking about cheesecake anymore," Blake said after a second. "But if you really want to try Declan giving you a foot massage while you drink martinis, I guess you could ask him."

My head whipped around and I stared at him, unable to tell if he was fucking with me or not.

"You weren't really talking about that." I was glad I'd missed it, if so. Some things, you just didn't want to know about another dude.

Blake grimaced. "Yeah, actually I was. You weren't listening, so I wanted to see how far I could go before you noticed. Sorry. Not sorry? Anyway, I get why you're so distracted. I genuinely am sorry about that, and I wish I could do more besides wish you luck tonight. Declan actually wanted to help you, not sure if you picked up on that. But he has a lot of enemies, and he can't afford to stir them up, not while he's still getting the new Morrigan off the ground. Also, he didn't think he could morally justify helping you get yourself killed."

"You're doing enough. I can't believe you figured out who Cunningham hired for entertainment tonight, and managed to get him to agree to this."

Blake shrugged. "He owes me. Also, you know. People tend to talk to me. I hear all kinds of things about what's going on in town."

"I owe you too, now," I said, and meant it.

Crazy or not, Blake's plan promised to get me into the party, anonymous and unsuspected. The edible spellbag on which I'd spent the money I should've given Louie would make me smell like a normal, non-shifter tiger, fooling all of the supernatural beings who'd be present at Cunningham's party. Blake's acquaintance the trainer had agreed to leave his regular tiger at home and take me along in its place to—I didn't know what, exactly. Perform on a stage? Surely I could do that as well in my tiger body as I could in my human body. Hopefully they wouldn't want me to wear glitter or shake my ass, because that'd be a really fucked-up party.

In a few hours, I'd be in the same room as Raven. At least, I hoped and prayed I would be, and that he hadn't been locked up somewhere, or hurt too badly to appear in public—and no, I had to shut that train of thought down before I lost my shit.

Blake shifted a little in his seat, probably smelling my anger, or simply feeling it in the air. "I'm sorry again," I said. "I keep thinking about him. About what could be going on. I'll keep it together."

"Declan had to bail me out of some trouble one time." Blake's tone suggested a massive understatement, there. "He thought it was his fault. It kind of was his fault, actually. But he was so fucking worked up—I get where you're coming from, Tony. And I promise we both have your back if you need it. Declan might not have wanted to encourage you to get yourself in trouble over a fae who probably wouldn't reciprocate, but I'll talk to him later on tonight once it's too late for him to do anything about it except wait to see what happens. If he gets mad, I'll work my magic."

Oh, and there was an image I both did and didn't want. There didn't seem to be much to say to that except thanks, and Blake managed to keep his mouth shut until we pulled up in the dusty driveway of a small ranch and circus training facility on the edge of where the suburbs became the desert.

A short, crazy-haired young guy in a white suit who seemed way too nervous and jumpy to work with big cats came out to meet us, shook our hands, introduced himself as Axel, and ushered us into a large barn. There weren't any actual cats present, unless you counted me, but there was one of those livestock trailers like you'd see on the freeway carrying horses around, only much sturdier.

"So we'll take this to Audacity," Axel said. "Like I talked about with Blake on the phone, we need to head over pretty soon, and we won't have a lot of time to prepare once we get there. My team's already on their way, they'll do all the setup, so it'll just be us in the trailer, in case you, um. I don't know, need to change back for some reason? The tigers I work with respond to voice commands, so I guess that won't be a problem, right? I mean, you understand English as a tiger?"

My instinctive revulsion for the cage-trailer must've shown on my face, because Blake smoothly stepped in between me and Axel, hiding my reaction, and said, maybe a little bit pointedly, "Tony's a professional stage performer in his human form, so you'll be able to work smoothly together. I know," and he cleared his throat and glared at me, a lot pointedly, "that you have a reputation as a tiger trainer and that you're doing us both a favor, so just tell Tony what the schedule is and what's next. And hey, he won't bite you if he's in a bad mood, so win win."

Axel nodded, looking less like he'd run away any second now. Blake really did have a gift with people when he wanted to, seemed like.

"I wouldn't count on it," I muttered, low enough for only other alpha shifter ears to pick it up.

Blake's lips twitched. "Behave," he whispered back, and followed Axel, volubly running through all the polite small talk that I simply couldn't manage.

Christ. A fucking cage on wheels. Voice commands? I mean, this was demeaning for a non-sentient tiger, let alone a weretiger. Maybe a rabbit or something, they didn't have any dignity to lose. But a tiger? An apex predator? Ugh.

Raven's smile as he pointed out that I didn't have a lot of dignity left to lose flashed through my mind, and that little aching knot under my sternum that hadn't gone away since I saw him last gave a twist and a throb.

Dignity be damned. This was how I could get to Raven.

The shaman had promised me that his magical glob would give me a full twenty-four hours of not smelling like any kind of shifter, so I took it out of the bag and bit the bullet, literally and figuratively. Blake produced a bottle of water from somewhere or other, and I took it and guzzled every drop, forcing the spell down my throat.

Definitely tiger piss, and no amount of maple syrup, or bottled water, could cover that up.

Fuck my life.

As I undressed, I folded my clothes and handed them to Axel to put somewhere in his truck. I probably wouldn't get a chance to retrieve them if all went to plan. But I had to pretend to Axel that I'd be leaving with him and not causing any trouble at the party, or he wouldn't cooperate. I'd taken inspiration from Raven's story the night we met, suggesting to Blake that he tell Axel I'd lost a bet with another weretiger. Axel had agreed, since he'd thought it was harmless enough, but I knew one wrong move and he'd bail on me.

Blake took my phone, wallet, and keys. We'd discussed it while we waited for the shaman to fill our order, and he'd promised to drop them off at my apartment. The apartment door locked automatically when you closed it behind you, and if and when I ever got home, I could always ask the property manager to let me in, or break the door and worry about it later.

At last I stood at the foot of the ramp leading up into the barred trailer, and I turned to Axel, who'd turned bright red and was staring fixedly at my face.

I smirked at him—and then remembered that Declan MacKenna's mate was there looking at my naked alpha body too, and stopped being amused. Hopefully Blake would leave this part out when he told Declan about it later.

"I'll tap a paw or blink once for yes and twice for no," I said. "I'll have the same comprehension, but a tiger's vocal apparatus won't form human words. And if you make the mistake of actually treating me like an animal you've trained when we're not performing, I will bite you. And then I'll transform back to human and kick your ass. Got it?" Axel nodded convulsively, eyes wide. I sighed, but it had to be said. "Also, if you say anything about my name, my species, or anything relating to cereal, you're dead meat. And thank you," I added belatedly. "Blake, wish me luck."

"Good luck," he said, and I started my shift, flowing into my tiger form, bones and joints twisting around, muscles lengthening and strengthening, all the sounds around me suddenly gaining depth as my vision narrowed down to a desaturated palette full of tiny details that even a human shifter's eyes wouldn't catch.

I prowled into the trailer, sniffing the traces of two other tigers, one male, one female. The scents indicated relative contentment, at least, not anger or fear. And come to think of it, Axel had all of his limbs, protruding parts, and presumably his internal organs, some of which I'd expect to be missing if he made a habit of mistreating his cats. Twitchy or not, maybe the guy wasn't so bad after all.

Mmm. That smelled like someone had been feeding these tigers some incredibly fresh wild boar, at some point recently. All right. Axel might not be the worst.

Resigned to my fate, I flopped down onto the more or less clean trailer floor, and Axel shut the door behind me.

We were on our way to Cunningham's party, and Raven.

Nothing else mattered.