He sat in front of me, blocking my progress, and for a disconcerting moment he did look like a house cat, straight and poised, his slim tail giving a nonchalant flick.
“Luis.” I fell on my knees. It smelled like him, even now. More fur than skin this time, but it was him.
He licked my cheek, his rough jaguar’s tongue scratching painfully. Laughing weakly, I hugged him. His fur was soft and warm. I buried my face in the scruff of his neck. He remained patiently still.
“He waited for you.”
Ahmed appeared at the back of the club, tying closed a dressing gown over bare legs and bare chest. His hair was wild. He must have just woken up. He must have waited, too. I wondered if the two of them had gone running on the Mall, when their animals took over. They could have hunted pigeons.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said to the jaguar. “Either of you.”
Luis stood and rubbed the length of his body against me before flopping down on the floor and licking his paws, then using them to wash his face.
Ahmed shrugged. “He was worried. I said you could take care of yourself. Then, it seemed that you couldn’t. By then it was too late to do anything.”
“I was shanghaied.”
“So it seems.” He sat next to me, lowering himself, propping himself with his hand, as if he were an old man with creaking bones. I didn’t hear any bones creak.
“Ahmed, I need help.”
“What do you need? I can give you a safe place to stay, to hide you.”
I shook my head. “Not for me. For Alette. Leo’s the one who shanghaied me, and I think she’s in trouble.”
He frowned. His whole expression darkened, eyes narrowing, like how a dog looks when it growls. But I couldn’t back down. Couldn’t flinch.
“You don’t owe her anything,” he said. “She offered you hospitality, then failed to protect you.”
A technicality. He harkened back to the old traditional ideals of hospitality, where people had to offer shelter to travelers who would otherwise fall prey to robbers or wolves on the wild, ungoverned roads. There was something else going on here. The wolves were the ones I was asking for help.
The jaguar had fallen asleep, his lean ribs rising and falling deeply and regularly. He’d curled up beside me, his back pressed to my legs, where I sat.
I said, “If something happens to Alette, Leo will be in charge of the city’s vampires. Do you want that?”
“And what if Leo was acting on her orders?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You are too trusting.”
“Alette’s been . . . kind to me.”
“And I have not?”
“It’s not that. But someone has to help her.”
“Please take my warning as a friend, as an elder: don’t involve yourself with them. It’s not your concern.”
He sounded so somber, so serious, using the tone of voice a favorite high school teacher might, when he put his hand on your shoulder and urged you to think twice before hanging out with “that crowd.” Almost but not quite patronizing. Utterly convinced that I couldn’t take care of myself.
Not that I had a real excellent track record in taking care of myself. But I couldn’t ignore my instincts.
If I hadn’t been watching him, absently stroking the fur across his ribs, I wouldn’t have noticed Luis begin to shift back to human. It happened slowly, gradually, the way ice melts. His limbs stretched, his torso thickened, his fur thinned. Bit by bit, piece by piece, cell by cell.
“What are you doing here, Ahmed? This place, this little empire of yours—you say this isn’t a pack, that you aren’t an alpha. But everyone treats you like you are. You expect to be treated that way. Maybe you rule by politeness and respect instead of brute force. You promote this ideal of a safe haven so you don’t have to fight to keep your place. And it works, I’ll give you that. It’s the best system I’ve seen. But you ignore everything that happens outside your domain. And I can’t do that.”
If I’d given that speech to any other alpha male I’d ever met, I’d have started a fight. I’d offered a challenge to his place—at least, as subtle a challenge as his claim to the place of alpha here was subtle.