"Huh?" I breathed, fuzzy with arousal. "What do you mean, mature?"
Sir paused, pulling back to arch a brow at me from behind his black-framed glasses. "You have nine tails. Kitsune might be secretive, but only a fool would estimate one of the Nine at less than a hundred years old. I bet you're insanely powerful, aren’t you, Chris?" His light eyes gleamed with ... something. Something more than just arousal or anticipation of a good fuck. It was almost like greed. Or fascination.
"Uh, something like that." I frowned, winding his tie around my hand again to pull him back to me. "Now, weren't we in the middle of something?" As I pulled his lips back to mine, shaking off the weird feeling of unease, I brushed my free hand down his dirty fur coat.
To my shock, he leapt back from me like he'd just burned himself, and I gasped.
"What …" I panted, licking my lips as Sir stared back at me like a caged animal. "What just happened?"
"Do not touch my fur," he snarled at me, all traces of flirtation erased from his cold gaze. “You do not ever lay a hand on a skinwalker’s pelt. Where is your sense of propriety?”
"Uh, excuse me?" I laughed caustically. "You were touching mine, remember?"
The strange man—Sir—glared back at me for a long moment as my chest heaved and confusion creased my face. "This was a mistake," he muttered eventually, despite his gaze flickering to my tails with … hunger? Wow, I was getting really bad at reading people, because that just didn't seem right.
"No shit," I whispered, still a little in shock. What the fuck had just happened? I knew that a shifter’s fur was an erogenous zone; it was for all of us. Hell, that was why he'd been stroking my tails in the first place! So what was his problem? Skinwalkers were rare; how the fuck was I supposed to know they were special snowflakes?
"I need to leave," he said, mostly to himself as he adjusted his glasses and tie, then, without waiting for another word from me, turned to leave the dark alleyway we'd just been making out in.
He barely made it two steps, though, before he pulled up short.
"You won't be going anywhere, friend," Mikhail's soft, menacing voice trickled out of the darkness and I cursed silently. Of course he’d fucking followed me. He would have been pissed as hell about me not returning his calls, and this wasn't the first time he'd interrupted what could have been a great, anonymous fuck for me. Maybe Bex was right about him thinking he was my dad? Gross.
"Mik, fuck off," I snapped, throwing all respect for my superior out the window. Fuck him. If he wanted to watch me making out in an alleyway, he wasn't acting as my boss. "This has nothing to do with you, I'm not on the clock tonight."
"You—" My new acquaintance turned back to look at me in a new way, with surprise and … respect? Yeah, I needed to put myself back into basic training for emotion-reading. "You work for him?" He jerked his thumb toward Mikhail, who I could just make out in the shadow of a parked truck. A small smile pulled at Sir's lips and I frowned.
"Uh, yeah. Why? You two know each other or something?" I asked, and Sir snorted a little laugh.
"You could say we're old friends," he replied, turning back to Mik so I couldn't see his face anymore.
This was getting weird. Mikhail Ravena didn't have friends, not that I knew of. So how the hell had I wound up with my tongue down this guy’s throat?
"I take it you didn't introduce yourself then?" my boss asked the guy I had been just about to let fuck me against a concrete wall. Fucking hell.
"I did," Sir responded, "in the same way she did. Isn't that right, Chris?"
Mik stepped out of the shadows and arched a brow at me.
"Uh," I dodged his intense gaze. "Seems like you two need some time to catch up. Fae-Bitch will be wondering where I went anyway." Picking up my bag— with a sleeping Ziff inside, of course—I made to leave the alley, but Mik's friend was still blocking the way. When I tried to squeeze past him, his hand clamped onto my upper arm, and I froze.
"I don't think so, Chris," he told me, shaking his head. "If you work for Mik, then you're one of his trained pets. Unfortunately, that means I have to kill you."
"Fucking sorry, what?" I scoffed. "Hate to break it to you, sunshine, but that's not happening." Sure, my magic was bound, but I was still a kickass assassin in my own right. I threw an elbow back into Sir’s face, connecting solidly with his nose and feeling a satisfying crunch of cartilage and glasses. The pain from my hit loosened his grip on my arm enough that I slipped from his grasp and scooted a couple of safe yards out of his reach.
Too late, I realized he was quicker than I'd given him credit for. As I'd twisted and ducked to break his hold on me, he'd grabbed the strap of my bag. When I slipped out of his reach, my bag slid free from my shoulder with barely even a brush on my skin.
The psycho had Ziff.
"Give him back," I ordered, but couldn't help the quiver in my voice as I extended my hand. The blue-eyed devil gave me a humorless smile back, wiping his bloody nose on the sleeve of his shirt as it healed with shifter speed.
"Of course, I do apologize, your bag must have gotten caught on my watch or something." He took his broken glasses from his face and folded them, slipping them into his pants pocket. "Here." He held Ziff's bag out to me, but it still required I close the distance I'd just gained in order to take it.
"Thea, don't," Mik hissed from nearby, and I flicked my gaze over him, noticing he'd glided a few steps closer to me. He was tense like I'd never seen him before, which told me this guy was probably more dangerous than he looked. But … Ziff …
Not hesitating a moment longer, I closed the few steps between myself and Sir, and snatched the bag from his outstretched hand. He moved with the lethal grace of a wild animal. While my focus was on taking the bag from him, his other hand shifted into deadly looking claws which he swiped at my ribs in a move that would have disemboweled me had I been a fraction slower in my reaction. As it was, he only nicked me as I twisted free with a swish of tails.
"Nix! Stop!" Mikhail bellowed, and I gasped.
"Nix?" I repeated in a startled squeak. "Nix Locklear?!"
The guy I'd literally been planning to fuck if all had gone to plan, dipped a sweeping bow to me, like some sort of 1920s gentleman. "In the flesh," he acknowledged, "however, that’s the problem we now face. You've taken my scent, and we all know how good a kitsune's nose can be for tracking. No matter how much I change my physical appearance, you'll forever find me. I just can't have that."
Holy. Shit.
I looked from Mik to Nix and back again.
My dossier had said to be on the lookout for a tall, thin, Native American man with ebony hair, brown eyes, and bronze skin. Except for the tall part of that equation, this guy was the exact opposite: pale, muscular, blond-haired and blue-eyed with skin as white as fucking snow.
“Mik,” I began, and my boss exhaled sharply, like he knew he’d made a mistake.
“A skinwalker can change more than just their animal skin, Thea,” he told me, and I felt all the blood drain from my face. “It’s not something they can pull off more than once a century, but Nix …”
“You like the new look?” he asked, the edge of his mouth curling up at the corner. Even that ugly smile was sexy, and I hated him for it. “Before I started my current research project, I figured out how to speed up the process. I’d explain the complexities of DNA absorption to you, but you wouldn’t understand. It’d just be a waste of time on both of our ends.”
"Nix, that's enough. Thea isn't going to hunt you; she's just a foolish kit who needs to learn how to answer her fucking phone." This last part was growled at me, but I just flipped Mikhail off. The foolish kit comment stung, and my cheeks flushed with heat.