Tiger Magic

“What the hell?” Carly peeled back the tape and found a cut surrounded by a nice bruise right below her left eye.

Flashes of memory returned—Carly going downstairs for yet another snack, sensing someone, trying to turn on the light. The punch, the fall, and then Tiger over her.

Tiger.

No, couldn’t be. But who, then, had bandaged her face and put her to bed? She couldn’t have done this good a bandaging job in her sleep.

Carly ran from the room and out into her kitchen. She looked wildly around, but she saw nothing out of place. No one here, and no evidence of anyone being there in the night.

Wait, yes there was. Her back door was unlocked. The lock wasn’t broken, but someone had unlocked it, either using a key or by picking it, then had closed it nicely without relocking it. Carly clearly remembered checking the doors before she went to bed, as she did every night, and the door had been locked.

In the living room, she found that a sofa pillow was missing from her couch.

Carly stared at the sofa, hands on her hips. What kind of thief picked his way into a house, knocked out a helpless woman, stole her sofa cushion, bandaged her up, and left again, politely closing the door?

Bizarre. She drew a breath, wincing as her bruised cheekbone moved. She let out the breath, locked the kitchen door, and went back to her room to get ready for work.

* * *

Connor sat up in bed and yelled. The intruder in the predawn hour was stealthy, almost Shifter stealthy, but he’d made a sound that penetrated Connor’s sleep.

Connor was in Tiger’s bed, in Tiger’s loft room, which used to be Connor’s. He hadn’t needed to move back in here now that Tiger was gone, but for some reason, Connor felt safer here, as though Tiger’s presence had gifted the room with some kind of protective mojo.

Until this morning. The man was a bulky black smudge in the lighter gray of the morning, in black fatigues, with a blackened face and a black knit hat. The only color on him was a couple of Tiger’s shirts he had bunched in his hands.

Connor’s Shifter took over. His body fought the sudden change, which hurt like hell, and the shirt and underwear he’d slept in tore away. By the time he became his young lion form, the intruder had rushed out the door to the tiny landing.

Connor crouched down on the bed on four paws, and sprang from there to the doorway. Not fast enough. The intruder was down the stairs, and there was Kim, with Katriona, in his path.

Kim screamed but had the sense to move out of the way. Connor leapt from halfway up the stairs onto the intruder below.

Who rolled out of the way and kept on going down the next flight of stairs. Liam and Sean were coming in the back door by the time Connor made it to the bottom, both running. The human man swung around and charged out the front, Sean and Liam after him.

Connor ran behind them, his tail, which he could never manage, waving in his rage. He galloped out onto the porch and down the steps to find the intruder on his back, having been taken down by Dylan.

Spike was there too, probably for an early tracker meeting or something. The human man looked up at the ring of Shifters around him—Liam, Sean, Dylan, Glory, Andrea, Spike, and Connor, panting behind them.

“Who is this?” Liam’s voice held a savage growl, rage working its way up from a deep well. Liam could be laid-back and charm the devil, but Connor knew that his uncle had an ocean of anger, hurt, and grief in him, mostly about the death of Connor’s dad, Kenny. Liam had worked through that, and he had Kim now, but when he was very angry, that old bitterness and rage seeped through him to make him a deadly enemy.

The man on the ground kept his mouth shut. Sean reached down, wiped the black off the man’s face with a tissue, and remained staring down at him. “No idea who that is,” Sean said.

“Some kind of pervert, looks like,” Glory said. She ripped Tiger’s shirts out of the man’s hands. “Stealing Shifter clothes. What were you going to do next, break in and steal my bras?”

“Glory,” Andrea said to her aunt in her calm tones like still water.

“Doesn’t matter,” Glory said, showing her teeth in a smile. “I don’t wear any.”

The man looked back and forth among them, his expression stoic, but his scent betrayed his alarm. No outright fear though, Connor thought. Strange. The alarm was because he’d been caught.

“What do we do with him?” Liam’s question was not so much a question, or at least, it was rhetorical. From Liam’s scent and the way his eyes had gone Shifter white blue, he’d already decided what he wanted to do.

“You can’t kill him, son,” Dylan said quickly. “Not worth the price.”

Liam’s rage rose, the scent of it hot. “He came into my house. He endangered my mate, my cub, and my brother’s cub.” Liam had become ultra-protective of Connor, Kenny’s son, again going back to taking the blame for Kenny’s death.

The intruder now started to exude some fear. Liam wasn’t the pushover he appeared to be, and Dylan, a man who looked even more frightening than Liam, was trying to calm Liam.

Spike growled in agreement with Liam. Spike, recently discovering he was a father, had become a fierce protector of cubs.

“Hold it together,” Sean said, his voice the calmest, but also with an underlying hint of feral anger. “How about we make an example of him?” His smile was frightening. “Sounds like fun.”

“Aye,” Dylan said.

Connor shifted—painfully—back to his human form, too furious to mind being naked in front of his enemy. “Let me help. He scared the shite out of me.”