Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Vance

"What happened after that?"

She shakes her head. She's really worked up. "I don't know. I just ran. I ran wildly and lost my shoe and then I couldn't open the door and… and then you helped me."

She puts her arms around me again, weeping again. I hold her as she cries and soon enough, she's quiet and then sleeping. I gently set her on the couch and tucked a throw blanket over her. Then, I sit there on the couch and stare at her for a while.

I know enough about myself that I can admit that I'm a protector, a rescuer. I'm one of those guys who's always trying to take care of a damsel in distress. I have to tell you, though, that I've been attracted to my neighbor for quite some time.

She's beautiful. Yes, I'm shallow enough to admit that plays a role. I can't pretend her beauty doesn't drive a lot of the attraction. I can't help myself, though. I'm a Grey. Some call us Caldwell tigers. Some call us blue tigers. Some call us Maltese tigers. For all of our recorded history, we call ourselves the Grey.

There are three hundred and ninety-eight of us. Right now. That number goes up slightly or down slightly every year. Science can't prove the existence of our natural counterparts. That's because our natural counterparts don't exist.

There are reports of seeing blue tigers in the wild, which are really reports of seeing grey tigers in the wild. Just like housecats are called Maltese because of the color of their coats and not because of breed, people call grey tigers Maltese tigers.

But nobody has ever seen a natural Maltese tiger. The people who see grey tigers see shifters. It's that simple. Given that those who see them don't ever mention that they're close to twelve-hundred pounds, we know they've seen juveniles.

We are four times larger than a typical Indochinese tiger and more than twice as big as a Bengal tiger, so those who have actually seen a grey have seen teenagers just learning how to shift.That's the only way we would have been revealed to a human before the Great Disclosure.

Oh, that's what we call the coming out of shifters, when we announced ourselves to humanity a few decades back. Only the Grey call it the Great Disclosure. We're arrogant. We believe we're better at describing things, chronicling things, and discussing things. Of course, we know we're arrogant, and we freely admit it so that mitigates a bit of the arrogance, I think.

Anyway, there's a point to all this. The point is I'm a Grey, a Maltese shifter. We're not actually sure that there's any difference between Greys and other tiger shifters except for the colors of our coats. The real differences are just cultural.

Almost every Maltese tiger shifter ends up mated to a regularly colored tiger shifter. That's why there are so few of us.There's no way to tell if the gene is dominant or recessive. It behaves differently in different couples. We're essentially genetically identical to any other tiger shifters, at least as far as we can tell. There's an un-sequenceable amount of DNA in every shifter. No technology or knowledge can codify it. Who knows if that's the same. We certainly seem the same as other tigers.

But there are definite cultural differences.

And beauty is very important to a blue tiger. I don't mean luxury and excess. I mean that we think it makes sense to control our environment and how we experience it. Not everyone with a carefully designed and managed garden is a Maltese tiger, but you'll never find a Maltese tiger without one. Even in college, I had to live in an apartment with a big enough porch to create a garden.

Anyway, I'm trying to say that I appreciate beauty so I've been enamored of this curvy girl for some time now. It's not just her beauty, though. She's got a good head on her shoulders. I've overheard her in business conversations while she sits in her backyard. I've seen her deal with door-to-door hucksters trying to sell things to her.

She's seemed a little off over the last few days but until now, I thought it was all in my mind. I work a four-three/ three-four schedule. That's four days and nights at the fire station one week and then three days and nights at the station the next week. When you have either a four day or three-day gap in between seeing someone, it's easy to jump to conclusions.

Still, I like to know what dangers may be circulating in the neighborhood. This Maxwell sounds like he needs a lesson in respecting boundaries and being a shifter, well, that makes teaching someone those boundaries a bit easier.

I decide I can take a quick look around and be back without too much chance of harm. I'm still not sure about her story, but I know I want to be sure. I'm certain she believes she's in danger. I hope to be able to prove that she isn't.

I get up quietly and make my way out into the night. The one advantage to being a shifter is that most of us have an enhanced physicality from our animal form that makes stealth and strength batter than the average human's. So, in short, for a big guy, I can move very quietly.

I let my senses take over once I'm outside. I start walking the route she described having walked and I can smell her briefly here and there. A tiger shifter's sense of smell isn't superb like a dog's or anything, but I can still pick up more than the most gifted human.

I weirdly have a better sense of smell in my human form so I decide not to shift. And also, I really don't want to freak out my neighbors with some random sighting of a huge grey tiger roaming their suburban streets.

I come across the groceries she said she'd dropped. I catch her scent more strongly here and then, there's someone—someone or something—else. I try to work out who or what it could be as I gather up her groceries to bring back. There's an odd familiarity to the other scent. It makes my hair stand on end.

Something is definitely not right about this.

And her shoe is gone.

I can track her running. There are footprints in the freshly seeded lawn at the corner. One shoe on. One off. But her shoe is nowhere. That means her shoe was taken. Something is absolutely not right about this.

I head back to Toni's place. Carefully, I unlock and open her door. The last thing I want to do is startle her and give her another scare in such a vulnerable state.I can see, though, that she's still asleep on the couch. She's curled into a ball and my desire to protect her only gets stronger.

I decided to stay the night.

I take her groceries to the kitchen and put them away. There is a small bouquet of flowers and I find a temporary place for them, a tall glass I fill with water. There are some roses in the bunch and I think of the bushes that are hitting full bloom in my own garden. It seems she's also an admirer of beautiful things.

I manage to find another blanket for myself and settle into an armchair almost opposite to the couch. I've already locked the doors and checked the windows. Everything is still.

In very bad fire seasons, we often get only snatches of time for rest. So, as a firefighter, I've learned to fall asleep almost on command. But tonight, I find it hard to drift off. Toni is sleeping deeply, seemingly untroubled. That is a good thing.

I watch her for a while and try to tell myself I'm not getting involved more than I should and that she'll be able to go to the police in the morning about all of this and then, well, it will simply be out of my hands.But damn it, I know I'm lying to myself. I'm not capable of leaving a damsel in distress un-rescued.

My eyes drift over the door and the windows again. Nothing. I wrap the blanket as tightly as I can around my oversized frame and, finally, manage to sleep.