“I can’t take the Collar,” Tiger said before any of them could speak. It would incapacitate him, maybe kill him, and he couldn’t let it. Not yet.
The sensations in his body and mind confused him and made him angry. Without a word, he turned from them and started down the green.
He headed for Spike’s house. Spike had gone with Carly, which left Jordan alone with his mother and grandmother again. Dylan should have stayed with them. Tiger would make sure they were all right, as well as see if looking after Jordan would soothe his jangled nerves. He had to think, and he had to make some decisions.
The simple cell phone Liam urged him to carry at all times buzzed on his belt. Tiger snatched it up, hoping it was Carly, not Liam demanding he return home.
The number was not one he recognized. He clicked on the phone as Connor had taught him and growled, “Yes?”
“It’s Walker. Get somewhere you can talk to me alone. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Carly answered the phone at the small desk tucked away in a corner of Armand’s gallery, all but hidden so customers wouldn’t see that they worried about anything as gauche as business.
Connor was napping in the back office after having complained some more about last night’s lack of sleep. Spike and his tatts had earned the interest of an artist who’d come to see Armand, and the artist was looking Spike over, having him stand in sunlight and so forth.
“Gallery d’Armand,” Carly said in her best quiet but friendly tones. “How may I help you this afternoon?”
“I need you to get away from Connor and Spike,” Tiger’s voice was almost a whisper. “And meet me.” He gave directions to a spot in the warehouse area south of Ben White, near the freeway.
Get away from Connor and Spike? Carly didn’t dare glance behind her at Spike, who might read in her body language that she was suddenly nervous. “I’m not sure I can,” she said.
“Talk to me like I am a shopper. Don’t change your voice.”
A shopper. He meant a gallery patron. Carly drew a breath. “Well, I’m certain we could accommodate you, sir,” she said briskly, “though it might be a little bit of a challenge.”
“Don’t take Dylan’s truck. The Bureau men know what it looks like.” A hesitation. “So do the Shifters.”
He wanted to evade Shifters too? Shifters like Liam? What the hell had happened?
Carly couldn’t ask with Spike behind her, even though he was all the way across the gallery. She’d learned by now that Shifters had great hearing.
Tiger’s voice was quiet, but she read the agitation in him. He was asking her to make a choice.
Liam had been adamant that Tiger not leave Shiftertown, and Carly had seen the rage between Liam, Tiger, and Dylan. Tiger wasn’t the most normal of guys, even for a Shifter—she’d seen that in the way others treated him and in the way the others lived their lives. Liam, Sean, Spike, Ronan—they had children, families, friends, a defined place in the Shifter world. In the same way, Carly had a loving mother and three great sisters, friends, and a job with Armand and Yvette, a childless couple who treated her like a daughter.
Tiger had no one. In the warmth of the Shifter community, the Shifters either feared him or watched him, ready to stop him when he went over the top. Tiger was alone in a crowd.
What Carly had observed in the three days she’d known him was that every time Tiger went berserk, it was to defend himself or someone else. Couldn’t they see how gentle he was with the kids, how much the kids liked him? No child trusted a person they’d seen hurt others.
Carly’s father had been a bad person. Difficult for a twelve-year-old girl to understand when her father leaves without a word. An adolescent takes it personally, and Carly did. She’d spent a long time wondering what had been wrong with her before realizing that she hadn’t done anything wrong at all.
Thinking back over what life had been like with her father—his alcoholic tempers and compulsive gambling, his daylong harangues at her mother—Carly had come to the adult conclusion that he’d had a lot of problems he hadn’t bothered to acknowledge, problems that had made Carly’s home life hell for twelve years.
Tiger was absolutely nothing like him.
All this went through Carly’s head in the few seconds Tiger waited for her answer.
Carly could turn around and call out for Spike, telling him that Tiger was running from Shiftertown for whatever reason. Or she could believe that Tiger had a very good reason for wanting her to meet him and to keep Spike and Connor from finding out and following.
She chose.
“I’ll take care of it,” Carly said, speaking in her helpful-assistant tones. “Don’t you worry.” She heard Tiger’s breath of relief, and she decided to risk a question. “And how did you find the number for our gallery? Were you referred?”
Tiger sounded puzzled as he answered. “Phone book.” And he hung up.
Carly bit her lip as she reached into the desk drawer where she kept her purse and pretended to look for something. Connor was in the office, where a back door led to the small parking area on the alley. She knew she’d never get past him without waking him up. If she went out the front, past Spike, even with the excuse of going out for gelato or whatever, Spike would follow her.
She felt Spike’s gaze on her. Carly pulled a lipstick from her purse, frowned at it, and said, “Yvette, I’m just going to the ladies’.”
Yvette, who’d been in low-voiced conversation on the other side of the gallery with Armand, nodded. Carly’s palms sweated as she dipped her hand into Yvette’s purse resting next to hers and took out Yvette’s car keys. Carly slid them noiselessly into her own purse, then took up the purse and put it over her shoulder.
She walked as casually as she could through the alcove that held two very nice but small restrooms and one broom closet. Neither bathroom had windows, so the movie staple of the woman or man climbing out the bathroom window to escape everything from a bad date to death by assassins was out. Beyond the broom closet, however, was the emergency exit.
Armand, fortunately, didn’t have a fire alarm rigged up to the door. But if Carly opened it, the glare of the sun outside might shine back down the hall.
She had to risk it. Carly waited until several loud vehicles passed in front of the shop. Spike turned to glance at them. At the same time, Carly opened the back door a little, slid through, and closed the door as quietly as she could.
Yvette’s car was five feet away. Now to hope that Connor hadn’t woken up and was looking out the office window.
Carly got into the car, closing the door so it only clicked. She set her purse on the passenger seat, put on her seat belt, and started the engine.
No one came flying out through the office door or the emergency exit. Carly backed the car out of its parking spot as slowly as she dared, then drove down the alley.
She passed the backs of four more shops before she turned onto a small driveway that led out to the main street. From here she turned right, even though she needed to go left to get back to Austin. She didn’t want to risk driving past the gallery and its wide plate-glass windows.
Carly had to drive around a few blocks, once down a street that was still dirt, before she emerged onto the main road again. Then she drove as fast as she dared. At any moment, Spike would figure out that she was taking way too long in the ladies’ room, or Yvette would go in and find her not there. Spike and Connor would leap into Dylan’s truck, and they’d be on her ass in minutes.
There was only one paved road, a two-lane highway, that led back into Austin, so she couldn’t take a circuitous route to lose any pursuit. If Carly drove too fast, she might get pulled over, giving Spike a chance to catch up. Too slowly, and he’d catch up anyway.
Despite her fears, the road behind her remained clear. Carly breathed easier when she reached the tangle of Austin traffic and turned from the narrow highway to the 290, approaching the heart of Austin from the north and east. She w
ent south on I-35 and got off on a frontage road near Ben White, driving onto back roads that led around the warehouses.
These were active warehouses with trucks and men working, some of whom stared at Carly as she went by in Yvette’s Fusion. Good thing Yvette had come to the gallery independent of Armand, and Carly hadn’t had to use the BMW. That would have been remembered.
She saw Tiger waiting in the shadow of a warehouse, right where he said he’d be. He’d covered his striped hair with a baseball cap, and she couldn’t see his Collar under the high-necked T-shirt he wore under a flannel shirt. Lounging against the side of the building, he looked like just another Texas boy waiting to go back to work.
Carly pulled over. She popped the locks on the doors, and Tiger slid inside, lifting Carly’s large purse and settling it on his lap.
“We need to go somewhere and talk. Somewhere safe, where they won’t find us.”
“All rightee.” Carly’s fingers shook. “You’re scaring me, Tiger. What happened? How did you get here?”
“I talked to Walker. He drove me a ways, and I walked the rest. Do you know where to go? Not your house.”
Carly thought rapidly. “Yes. Yes, I do. It’s a bit of a drive.”
“Good. But not in this car. Park it, and we’ll take another.”
Carly stared at him. “You want me to steal a car? It’s one thing to borrow Yvette’s—I can convince her I needed it—but you’re talking about grand theft.”
“You’ll be found in this one. Park it.”
She stared at him a moment longer, then she shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Carly put the car in gear and drove it around the corner from the warehouses to the line of chain hotels that faced the freeway. She parked Yvette’s car in a back lot among similar-looking vehicles, locked the car, and dropped the keys into her purse.
She and Tiger walked through the lot, Carly trying to match Tiger’s ability to look purposeful and nonchalant at the same time. He didn’t bother telling Carly why he’d called her out there, what had happened, what was wrong. Any question was met by silence.
Tiger stopped by a car that looked a bit older and well used, and stood with his back to it while he tried the door handle. That car was locked, but a few rows and a couple more tries later, he found another well-used one that was unlocked.
“What do we do now?” Carly asked. “Hot-wire it?”
The parking lot was deserted except for the vehicles. The sun beat down, reflecting on the metal, fiberglass, and asphalt. Beyond the squat hotels, the freeway ran heavy, the day drawing to its close.
“Connor taught me,” Tiger said.
He opened the driver’s-side door, but Carly forestalled him. “I’ll do it. I can’t think what they’d do to a Shifter if you were caught driving a hot-wired car.”
His gaze flicked to her. “You know how?”
“I was a rebellious teen, and I hung out with other rebellious teens. We weren’t all that bad, but we were mischievous.” Carly slid into the driver’s seat while Tiger went around the other side.
“Lucky us,” Carly said. “He left the keys in it.” She laughed a little as she moved the worn gearshift and brushed at least a year’s worth of crumbs off the dashboard. “Maybe he doesn’t care about it being stolen.”
“He?” Tiger asked, his brows drawn. “How do you know a male owns this?”
“Because only a guy would let his car get this dirty. The windows are tinted, that’s good. If I could only roll . . . mine . . . all the way . . . up.” The window stuck three quarters of the way, and Carly stopped trying. But the stuck window proved to be convenient, because the air-conditioning didn’t work.
Carly drove carefully out of the lot, and as she had when she left the gallery, she avoided driving past the fronts of the hotels. She went back into the warehouse area, then onto Ben White again, heading west.
The car held the stench of old cigarettes, old coffee, mud, and other things Carly didn’t want to identify. When she could move down the road at a decent speed, air blew through the half-open windows, even if the air was oven hot. When she had to stop for a light or for backed-up traffic, however, the stuffiness made her gag. Perspiration trickled down her face and between her shoulder blades.
Tiger wouldn’t talk. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and slouched against the door as though he wasn’t worried as Carly made her way through the streets.
At one point, Carly’s cell phone rang. She wasn’t moving at the time, stuck in a merge of cars coming off Mopac. She grabbed the phone from her purse, but the number had no name attached to it, and she didn’t recognize the number.
“Connor,” Tiger said looking at it.
“This phone has a GPS tracker,” Carly said. “If they can use that to locate us, we’re screwed.” On the other hand, she had no intention of throwing an expensive smartphone out the window. Whoever picked it up would have access to all her contacts and maybe her bank account, she didn’t know. Or maybe they’d so helpfully call all her friends and family until she was found.
Tiger yanked the phone from her and ended her inner debate by closing his massive hand around it. The ringtone squeaked and went silent, and bits of black plastic rained down to join the junk on the floorboards. Tiger sifted through the wreckage until he found the chips, and he broke those too.
“Well, I guess that’s one solution,” Carly said. The traffic started, and she drove on, her mouth dry.
“You have any more cell phones?” Tiger asked. “Or gadgets? Connor says other things have locators in them.”
“Not with me. They’re at the house.”
“Good.” Tiger went back into his relaxed state against the door, and Carly hoped the door was solid enough to take his bulk.
She drove on, winding through streets, heading for the Bee Cave area. No one seemed to be following her, though the few people they passed in more affluent neighborhoods turned heads as the old car sputtered by.
Carly turned off a little north of Bee Cave into a neighborhood that was fairly new, with large houses and winding streets. She made it to the house she needed as shadows were lengthening, afternoon finally turning to evening.
“Hang on,” she said, opening the car door in the driveway. “I’ll run in and open up the garage. We can’t leave this pile of junk on the street. It will definitely be noticed.”
Tiger was alert now, his eyes changing to the golden sparkle they took on when he was thinking about changing into the tiger. “Who lives here?”
“My sisters. Don’t worry, they’re in Mexico. I have the keys. I’ll hurry.”
Before Tiger could argue, she shut the door and tripped up the small flight of steps through the landscaping to the front door. A key on her ring fit the locks, and Carly pushed her way inside.
A beeping sound startled her, and for one panicked moment, Carly forgot the alarm code. Her fingers knew it, though, and soon the alarm was off.
Carly went out through a back passage to the garage and punched the control to open the garage door. Then she drove the car into the garage, Tiger still in it, turned off the ignition, and closed the garage door.
She coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. “This thing really stinks.”
Tiger didn’t answer. He followed Carly as she got out of the car, entered the house again, and led him through the back passage to the main part of the house.
“Your sisters live here?” Tiger stopped to look around the giant kitchen and the high-ceilinged living room beyond. “How many?”
“My two oldest sisters. They and my mom and my other sister all went to Mexico to shop. I didn’t go because Armand needed me for the exhibit opening.” Carly huffed. “See how well that worked out.”
“So much room for two people,” Tiger said, turning to take in the echoing space.
“True, but they earned it. My sisters run a decorating business together. Althea and Zoë, that is. The one just above me in age, Janine, is marri
ed and a teacher. I’m the youngest.”
Tiger pulled off his baseball hat and dropped it onto a chair, combing his fingers through his hair, ruffling it and making it look sexy. The black and orange strands no longer seemed odd to her.
“Why don’t you live here with them?” he asked. “It would be safer for you.”
Carly opened the refrigerator. Sneaking out of the gallery, stealing a car, and fleeing across Austin—very slowly—had given her an appetite.
“Like I said, I’m the youngest. I wanted to go out on my own, see if I could do it without everyone looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. We’re close, my sisters and me, but they do tend to be a bit overprotective, and at times, downright bossy. Ooh, pasta salad.” She drew out a plastic container, popped the lid off, sniffed it. “Seems okay. Someone needs to eat this before it goes bad.” Carly plopped it onto the counter, then dove back into the refrigerator. “There’s plenty of lunch meat in here. Want me to make you a sandwich? And while I’m at it, you can explain to me why you told me to steal Yvette’s car and duck out of the gallery without alerting Spike or Connor.”
Tiger sat on a stool on the other side of the breakfast bar, which was open to the rest of the room, and leaned his arms on the counter.
“I will tell you everything, Carly. From the beginning. Stop, and listen.”
His face was grave, mouth turned down. Carly ceased her flustered puttering, dropped the fork she’d taken up into the pasta salad, and waited for him to start.
Tiger’s position, leaning forward toward her, made his T-shirt open at the neck, but the shadows were such that Carly still couldn’t see his Collar.
Then she frowned. She reached out, hooked one finger around the ribbed neckline, and pulled it down. Her heart beat faster.
Tiger wasn’t wearing a Collar at all. His skin bore a thin red crease across his throat, but the Collar had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY