Twice Bitten (Chicagoland Vampires 3)

I nodded. Even if I hadn't taken his words to heart, the expression in his eyes signaled clearly enough that he was trusting me with something momentous - the right to watch a shape-shifter work his personal magic.

"Sir," I said, recognizing his authority. When Gabriel nodded and turned back for the door, the first line of defense against Adam's coming attack, I risked a glance at Nick. He'd stripped off his T-shirt, revealing a fuzzy - but bruised - chest, and was pulling off his jeans. Not expecting the show - weren't shifters supposed to rip through their clothes? - I turned away again, but not before Nick had caught me inadvertently peeking.

"It's not entirely necessary to strip down," I heard him say as fabric fell to the floor, "but these are my favorite jeans."

I bobbed my head in understanding but kept my eyes averted.

"If you want to see it," Nick quietly offered, "you'd better look now." The only vampire alive to see a man shift into . . . something? No way was I going to miss that.

I glanced back, catching the Full Monty of a very naked and well-honed journalist. He had athletic feet, long, lean calves, and firm thighs. His shoulders were strong, his arms muscular, but he was also bumped and bruised, cut and bitten. He'd clearly taken a beating at Gabriel's hands. Nick nodded, and then it began . . . and my mouth gaped open in shock. It wasn't what I'd expected. I'd seen Under world and the rest of the movies that detailed the transformation from human to wolf. I'd assumed the change was a physical one - a gory shifting of muscle and bone, an exchange of paws and fur for human skin and feet.

But there was nothing anatomical about this. I raised a hand to shield my eyes as light flashed around Nick's body, a cloud of shifting colors as the magic - thick enough to take tangible form - swirled around him.

I'd always thought, as was the common vampire understanding, that shifters were like us - superpredators who'd come into existence as the result of a genetic mutation that altered the form of their bodies. That was not what this was, this gentle light and haze of color. Shifters were predators only secondarily.

First, and foremost, they were magic - clean, pure, inherent magic.

Not like us.

Gabriel turned to face me, his amber eyes alight with predatory arrogance. But the emotion softened. I shook my head.

"I've seen that look before, Merit. It's neither as good nor as bad as you think." I looked back at Nick, who was still wrapped in the fog of it, invisible through the mist that cocooned him. And then the mist changed shape, from the tall, lean form of a man, to something low, something horizontal.

And when he padded toward me through that mist, low and feline, a sleek, black cat - cougar? jaguar?

puma? - in the middle of a bar in Chicago, my heart nearly stopped. He was tall - his head high enough to reach my elbow, his coat so sleek and black he gleamed like velvet beneath the overhead light, his paws heavy, big enough to take a chunk out of a vampire, should he feel the urge. There was no mistaking his power. There was also no mistaking his health. Where Nick had been beaten and bruised, the cat was healthy. Maybe that was why he'd asked to shift, so that he could heal himself and lose the bumps and bruises. And maybe that was why he'd had to ask - because Gabriel had prevented his recuperation.

They might have imagined themselves to be casual, relaxed, less strategic and anxiety-ridden than vampires . . . but there was assuredly a hierarchy in the shifter food chain. And hierarchy mattered.

Nicholas padded toward me and nuzzled his face at my thigh.

"Now who's 'Kitten'?" I murmured, and although the low, grumbly sound he made was decidedly feline, it was still sarcastic.

"All right, children. Let's get ready for showtime. Breckenridge, take care of Merit." He lifted his gaze to me. "You'll be a soldier, a warrior, someday, when you're ready. That's the legacy of you and yours.

You nicked me, even without your steel. But he is my brother. This is my fight, my family's fight, so I'm asking you to defer."

"You don't want my help?"

Gabe barked out a laugh. "I'm Apex, and he's kin. This is the natural order of things, the way our world operates. There's nothing you can do but get hurt, and get Sullivan pissed at me. In the event I survive this, I sure would like to avoid that."

My heart stuttered, but I was smart enough to take his advice, at least until honor required me to intervene. I looked around the room and decided on a table that sat in one corner, the stack of cards from the poker game atop it. I crawled beneath it - a vampire hiding from a fight. Sure, it was a little humiliating, but I, too, was hoping to walk out alive.

Nick followed me, then turned and arranged his haunches on the floor, putting himself between me and the door - a few hundred pounds of now-feline shifter between me and whatever hell was about to break loose.

Gabriel began the methodical process of stripping off his own clothes, the muscles of his body taut beneath them. When he was done and stood naked before the door, he crossed his arms, and we waited.

When Adam finally pushed open the door to the back room, there was shock in his expression.

I decided not to take it as a compliment that he was surprised I was still alive.

"What - happened in here?" he asked haltingly. He was scrambling, I imagined, to analyze the situation, to figure out whether there was a way to salvage the script he'd developed or whether he needed to write a new ending.

"I'm still alive," Gabriel pointed out. "Nick is also still alive, as is Merit. Everybody wave." I skipped the wave, but offered up a lip-curling snarl, which I directed at the boy who'd led me right into a trap - a trap he'd created.

"So just give me the basic refresher," Gabriel said. "The point was, what, to take out Tony, frame him for the attack on the bar, and have me assassinated? And when that didn't work, you decide to take me out yourself, take out Merit, frame her for my murder, and assume control of the Pack?" He crossed his arms over his chest. "And when that's all said and done, what? You take on the Houses and lead the Packs into genocidal glory?"

Adam's features hardened, his lips pulling into a thin line. And then his eyes darkened, and he stepped onto his soap box. "And what have you done for us?

We have meetings, while vampires are treated like celebrities. They control the spin. We're part of this world - one with this world, like nothing else in existence - but we act like children running behind their mothers' skirts!"

I had to admit, that speech wasn't exactly hard to come by these days. Although the shifters at the convocation hadn't made it, Celina and her cronies had. It was the same argument made by vampires who wanted power in the human world. I'd heard Celina say it, and two weeks ago I'd heard Peter Spencer make the same argument.