Kate Daniels 02 - Magic Burns

bowl.
    Outside the window was dark. “What time is it?”
    â€œEarly morning. You’ve been out for about six hours.” He fixed me with a hard stare. “What do you want?”
    I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
    He spoke slowly, carefully shaping the words as if I was slow or hard of hearing. “What do you want for the maps?”
    I wanted to hit him in the mouth really hard. “One of the Pack members came to me for help. If I tell you, will you promise not to punish the persons involved?”
    â€œI can’t promise that. I don’t know what you’ll say. You should tell me anyway. I’m curious now and I don’t like being out of the loop.”
    â€œAnd have you embark on a bloody rampage?”
    â€œI grow tired of your mouth.” Bones shifted under Curran’s skin. The nose widened, the jaws grew, the top lip split, displaying enormous teeth. I was staring into the face of a nightmare, a horrible meld of human and lion. If a thing that weighed over six hundred pounds in beast-form could be called a lion. His eyes never changed. The rest of him—the body, the arms, the legs, even his hair and skin remained human. The shapeshifters had three forms: beast, human, and half. They could shift into any of the three, but they always changed shape completely. Most had to strain to maintain the half-form and to be able to speak in it was a great achievement. Only Curran could do this: turn part of his body into one shape while keeping the rest in another.
    Normally I had no trouble with Curran’s face in half-form. It was well-proportioned, even—many shapeshifters suffered the “my jaws are way too big and don’t fit together” syndrome—but I was used to that half-form face being sheathed in gray fur. Having human skin stretched over it was nausea inducing.
    He noticed my heroic efforts not to barf. “What is it now?”
    I waved my hand around my face. “Fur.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œYour face has no fur.”
    Curran touched his chin. And just like that all traces of the beast vanished. He sat before me fully human.
    He massaged his jaw.
    The beast grew stronger during the flare. Curran’s irritation caused his control to slip just a hair.
    â€œHaving technical difficulties?” I asked and immediately regretted it. Pointing out loss of control to a control freak wasn’t the brightest idea.
    â€œYou shouldn’t provoke me.” His voice dropped low. He suddenly looked slightly hungry. “You never know what I might do if I’m not fully in control of myself.”
    Mayday, Mayday. “I shudder at the thought.”
    â€œI usually have that effect on women.”
    Ha! “Is that before or after they pee on themselves and show you their furry bellies?”
    He leaned forward. “I’m leaving. Last chance.”
    â€œMyong came to see me.”
    â€œOh,” he said. “That.”
    The muscles on his jaw went tight. We sat in grim silence for several minutes. I waited until I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Myong,” I said gently.
    â€œYou know who she wants to marry?”
    She wants to marry my “ex–could have been” boyfriend whom I accused of kidnapping, sexual torture, and cannibalism. “Yes.”
    â€œAnd you’re okay with it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBullshit,” he said.
    â€œMaybe I’m not as okay with it as I want to be. But I don’t want to keep them from each other.” Seeing Myong, well, it stung. I shouldn’t have cared that Crest clearly thought she was better than me, but it did bother me a little. She was without a doubt more beautiful, elegant, refined. But she was also so…so dying swan. The kind of woman who, if asked to make tea, would return from the kitchen to tell you the water was boiling and expect you to deal with that emergency while she waited demurely next to you.
    â€œI think I’ve been rather reasonable about this whole situation,” Curran said.
    â€œHow do you figure?”
    â€œThey are still breathing, aren’t they?”
    Maybe he truly loved her and losing her hurt. Maybe it was his ego talking: a proud alpha, left by a beautiful woman for a normal human, a wimp, pretty much disliked by every shapeshifter who met him. I wished I could make it better for him and for me. But the only way to do so lay through setting them