Milla
It was quiet. Too fucking quiet. Part of it was because of storm closures messing with the airports. Flights had been cancelled, rescheduled, and delayed more times than I could keep up with. From what I could piece together, Louie was still waiting on his third to arrive, but I wasn’t holding that as Gospel truth. With all the rescheduling, he might have already arrived, and the computer just hadn’t tracked it well or, more likely, he got in a car and drove. In any case, no one was relaxing just yet.
At least the satellite was now connected and functioning, which allowed me to spend my time at Shotgun Row instead of my home. What a waste of money that had been. I felt more at home in this dilapidated wanna-be-crew commune than I ever had there. Most couples getting together would choose the nicer of the two places as their humble abode and we did the opposite. Although, to give him credit, the row house I first walked into was nothing like the place I was now calling home. The guys helped him fix it up, and now they’d even managed to finagle Internet, something Tansy thanked me for with a daily box of donuts.
“Wanna blow me?” Justice called from the front room as I did my thing on my laptop snug in the bed that still smelled like our morning liaison. Or possibly one of the ones from the night before. In any case, working with his scent around me was something a girl could get used to.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something. In five minutes?” I held in a chuckle as all the ideas of how he might respond filled my brain. My guess was he’d come in all hard and hanging out with a puppy dog face, but the man never ceased to shock me, so who the fuck knew.
“It will take all the spontaneity out of it if we plan it,” he whined as he walked up and leaned against the doorframe, a cup of coffee in his hands.
“Is that for me?” I asked optimistically, the scent of the caffeinated perfection beckoning to me.
“So, you aren’t worried about the lack of spontaneity, only the lack of coffee?” He strutted over, sitting on the edge of the bed as he handed me my coffee.
“That word doesn’t mean what you think it does.” I took a sip, never letting my eyes leave his. “If you ask for something, it, by default, becomes premeditated.”
“Why did I have to find someone so fucking smart. Can’t you just fall for my charms?” And that was when the puppy dog eyes appeared. He and I both knew our banter would end with our mouths on each other, but it didn’t stop us from playing the game.
“Wanna blow me is an example of said charms?” I queried, watching as his jeans lost some of their looseness.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” He fell back on the bed, giving me the side eyes to put down my coffee, push the computer out of the way, and join him, which I, of course, did because his charms might not be conventional, but they seemed hardwired to my libido. “I read your mind, felt your needs then offered a way for you to meet said needs.” He rolled onto his side, settling his hand on my hip. As crass as he sounded, he wasn’t wrong. He’d done all of those things even if I’d not been aware of them at the time. “Charming as royalty, I’d say.” I reached down, slipping my hand between his jeans and skin but not putting it in far enough to touch him where he wanted it most. Shit, where I wanted it most, for that matter.
“What are you working on that has your mind not on sucking me?”
He was rewarded with my hand dipping low enough to brush his head as I tried to focus on his question and not how I wanted to proceed in getting him to explode.
“Charming. Yep. That’s you.” I swiped a drop of pre-cum off him before removing my hand from his jeans and licking it clean. My answer was not one to be befuddled by lust even if it hung heavy in the air with us—always. “I was just looking at flights and crap. They should be at the same location today or more accurately tonight.”
“Don’t worry.” His hand cupped my cheek, the mode of the room changing like a switch had been flipped. Blow jobs were no longer in the forefront, safety and comfort were. I had a good mate. “We got your back.”
“I know.” And it was the only thing giving me the strength to help Marie. “I just—taking a life at the request of a reaper is kind of fucking with my head.”
“Speaking of head.” It was as if he sensed I was about to get too dark too fast and needed a break. Good mate. Mine.
Mine, my gator chomped at me. She wanted a claiming mark. I did, too, but human me needed ducks in a row first. Gator me didn’t give a fuck and wanted to sink her teeth into him now.
“You are incorrigible.” I dropped my eyes to his jeans before bringing my lips to his as I worked the button, stopping as both our phones went off.
“Who the fuck is bothering us?” If things with Louie were already escalating, ignoring the text for the time we were getting somethin’ somethin’ could be the difference between life and death, and we both knew that, already reaching for our devices. “I was just about to get what I have been wanting all day long. I blame you.”
He laughed at my bad humor before opening his phone, his jaw dropping. I looked at mine to find a group text from Tansy to all of us at the row, Gina, and two others, my guess being Bruno and Leon since they were the only other shifters that I knew of in the area.
Help needed at Starr’s ASAP
“Shit. Let’s go.” Justice was off the bed and out the door faster than I could get up. I found him waiting in the vehicle, which was already running as I took my seat beside him. Having Tansy text all of us with no details wasn’t a good sign.
The drive to town was silent, the tension and anxiety strong. What had gone unsaid was how I missed them all reconnecting. If they hurt Starr, it would haunt me for the rest of my life. She was a good person. My only hope was that her abilities had somehow warned her enough for her not to be caught in the middle of it all.
We pulled up to her home where there were far more vehicles there than if it was nothing, but they were the wrong type. Etienne’s police car was there, but no ambulance or fire truck or anything indicating an emergency of that sort. There were, however, a couple of work vans and a box truck as well as the obligatory neighbors being nosey and watching things unfold.
I climbed out of the car as it stopped, not even waiting for Justice to engage the parking gear first.
“What’s going on?” I asked Tansy, who was currently staring at the front door of the home.
“He won’t let me help.” She pouted and, just like that, I knew everything was going to be okay and that this had nothing to do with Louie. If it had, not only would Tansy not be there, but she wouldn’t be pouting about her overbearing mate.
I wrapped my arm around her, waiting for her to continue, as Justice reached us.
“We need help emptying the place of furniture and such. We’re going to put what we can in the box truck and go from there.”
As if on cue, Bruno and Leon came out carrying a television, their jeans wet to the knee.
“Shit, water.” I could feel the tension leaving Justice as the true problem came into focus. What a sad state on our lives that someone’s house being filled with water was a relief. “This is a water problem. We assumed… Fuck it. Yeah we’ll help,” he mumbled mostly to himself as he wandered into the house, me close behind.
The house had water everywhere and, depending on the room, sometimes up to my thighs. The inspector told me building into the land the way they had was a dumb idea.. Of course, he’d been talking about natural flooding and not the water main that had somehow exploded right under her place.
“You okay?” I asked Starr after we’d been working for a solid hour, our shoes saturated, but the water finally under control, thanks to the plumbers and city working every bit as hard as we were.
“It’s only stuff, and I moved my important things yesterday.” She spoke as if this were nothing and, given the fact that she was still living in denial over her sister’s death and waiting for her to return home, I could understand why. This was nothing in her scheme of things.
“Why didn’t you call us yesterday or stop this?” I asked, practically swallowing my soggy shoe.
“That’s not how it works,” she explained, not bothering to hide her gift from me, which, in a way, was the biggest honor she could give me. It meant she trusted me at least to some extent. “I just got the feeling I needed to move certain things to the shop, so I did.”
“I think most of it is salvageable.” Justice came up behind me in the now-empty room. “But I don’t think this place will be. At the very least, you are going to need to go down to the bones and re-Sheetrock.”
“I don’t belong here,” she started, and before we could ask her what she meant by her cryptic statement of gloom, her face fell, her eyes widening and changing from deep-blue to almost black.
“Row. Get everyone to the row. All who fur, scale, or fly. Now. No humans. None. Not even those carrying scales or bites. No humans.”
Starr’s voice was not her own, and in any other circumstances, we’d have stayed to figure out what the fuck had just happened, but from the intensity of what had played out before, there was no time for that. We needed to get to Shotgun Row.