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  SILVER FOX

  Silver Shifters #2

  By ZOE CHANT

  ONE

  DORIS

  “This wedding would be the perfect setting for a murder!” exclaimed Godiva.

  Hallelujah, thought Doris. Sadly, she was the only one who rejoiced.

  Jen’s fork clattered to her plate.

  “What?” Bird sat bolt upright, as if she’d been goosed by a cactus. She sent a furtive glance around the garden where her son’s wedding had been held, then clearly remembered that he and his bride were now safely on their way to their honeymoon.

  No one else had heard Godiva’s remark. The tables on the terrace were empty except for a few last holdouts, well-lubricated by the excellent champagne that Bird and her husband Mikhail had provided for her son’s wedding.

  Godiva, a white-haired, walnut-brown woman in her eighties, eyed her three friends in surprise. “What? C’mon, who doesn’t love a murder at a wedding?”

  “Me?” Bird said faintly.

  Godiva grinned. “That’s because you’ve got the softest heart west of the Mississippi, and you’ve never read any mysteries but mine. Hey. I’m not thinking Red Wedding. Just one victim, and a murderer no one would expect. Don’t make me say it!”

  “Godiva, not here,” Jen warned in an undertone.

  Godiva folded her thin arms, uttered a thundering snort, and said it anyway. “You’re turning into a bunch of old women!”

  “Ya think?” Jen crossed her arms, too. She was a foot taller than Godiva, and probably twice her size. She looked like what she was, a descendant of Vikings. Her rare smile flickered. Doris was glad to see it. There had been few smiles from Jen since she had been widowed.

  In fact, all four of them were what society delicately termed as ‘women of a certain age,’ meaning over fifty. They were all writers and in a writing group together. Godiva called them the Gang of Four.

  Doris was happy to move on to a murder. The wedding had been lovely. The day had been beautiful. The cake had been delicious, proven by the fact that there was nothing left of it but crumbs. It was altogether the perfect wedding to be the last one she would ever attend.

  But she hadn’t told anyone that. And she wouldn’t. Doris had learned long ago that some things were better left unsaid. Like when she turned sixty, two years ago. She’d stood in front of her bathroom mirror looking hard at her graying hair cut sensibly short, her saggy everything, and decided that some people were never meant for a first chance at romance.

  And that was okay! She’d decided on that birthday to embrace spinsterhood. Who needed a man? She had a great life teaching high school, volunteering at the synagogue, and cooking. She’d published three successful cookbooks aimed at single people.

  As far as Doris was concerned, romance was about as real as the mirages that sometimes appeared on the freeway during summer. She didn’t need that kind of illusion in her life. Nope nope nope.

  As the last guests got up to leave, Mikhail Long, Bird’s new husband, rose along with them. Tall, austere, and silver-haired, he sent Bird a quick glance, his face softening into a tender, intimate smile.

  Bird got up, her cheeks pinking to the same rose color of her mother-of-the-groom gown. “Excuse me, I need to play host.”

  Doris caught that glance between husband and wife, a silent communication as if they had been married for decades instead of a mere month. She was glad—truly glad—that Bird had found love at an age when most of the world thinks a woman’s love life is nothing but memory. She just didn’t take it as proof that the same thing would happen to her.

  Bird returned. “The guests are safely gone. We’ve got the whole place to ourselves. Godiva, Mikhail is willing to be the victim if you want someone covered in fake blood.” She put a protective hand over her beautiful silk dress.

  “No blood,” Godiva said, her black eyes narrowing. “This isn’t going to be a forensic details sort of story. This is a family drama . . . seething passions and secret resentments . . . with truckloads of cash at stake, of course. Murder always goes better with obnoxious rich people, right?”

  Godiva got to her feet, peering westward as the sun sank toward the Pacific Ocean beyond the garden. She swept her gaze over the empty terrace, the tables with dirty dishes, the wedding cake stand, and the flowers that still perfumed the air. “Jen! Use my cell. Start filming. Hot damn, I can finally feel the new book coming, after a solid month of crossword puzzles and cursing.”

  This was how Godiva always began her famous mysteries, with the other three recording or acting out the murder scenario, as she talked out the story. Godiva used these videos to write the opening scenes of her mysteries.

  She began to pace. “Mikhail, thank you for offering to be the corpse. Maybe next story. I had a male vic last time. Remember Bird in that traffic cone orange tie? That was the first time we met you, flyin’ outta nowhere and taking down poor Jen in the world’s best tackle.”

  Doris caught another of those swift, secret smiles between husband and wife.

  Godiva clearly didn’t notice. She gazed into the distance. “Bird, you are . . . Minnie Witherspoon, elder daughter of Constantine Witherspoon IV. The family calls you . . . Aunt Minnie the Meanie. You’re a penny-pinching witch who knows all the family secrets. A mistress of blackmail!”

  Bird, the youngest of them in her mid-fifties, loyally tried to assume a penny-pinching expression, but her sweet, round face framed by curly gray hair wasn’t made for meanness. She looked more like she’d bitten into a wormy apple.

  Godiva whirled and pointed at Doris. “You’re Minnie’s baby sister . . . Oona the doormat, everyone’s favorite punching bag. Minnie expects you to clean up after the reception, as she was too cheap to pay the caterers for that.”

  Doris rose slowly. Acting was second nature to her, and not just because she taught high school drama. She had been slipping in and out of roles her entire life, mostly in self-defense. She felt the wedding fade away as she pulled Godiva’s words into herself, creating Oona.

  Her shoulders hunched and she began biting her thumbnail as she shuffled away from Minnie the Meanie.

  “After no sleep last night, it’s one insult too many. While Minnie starts to march away—no, that direction, Bird, toward the gazebo—to gloat over the huge stack of super-expensive presents—Oona sees the solid gold cake plate . . .”

  Doris grabbed the plastic cake plate covered with bits of frosting and crumbs.

  “ . . . and in a fit of silent rage, creeps up behind Minnie—perfect, perfect—and conks her across the noggin!”

  Doris swooshed the plate down, tapping it lightly against Bird’s head. Oops. She’d streaked Bird’s hair with frosting.

  Bird, who served as victim in most of these scenarios, was used to being splattered and splashed with fake blood. On one memorable occasion, she’d used toothpaste foam around her mouth to represent poison. She flopped across the wooden steps to the gazebo, letting her head hang over the side. Bird was the first to admit that while she had no talent whatsoever at acting, by now she was very good at being skewered, shot, smothered, stabbed, hanged, and poisoned.

  “ . . . Oona freezes! She realizes what she’s done,” came Godiva’s voice as narrator.

  Doris froze, staring down at Bird’s healthy pink complexion as she lolled with her mouth open and her eyes closed.

  “Oona looks at the murder weapon . . .”

  Doris stared down at the cake plate—the golden cake plate, a family heirloom handed down for generations. Guided by Godiva’s whispering voice, she scuttled back to the cake table and used napkins to feverishly clean the bloodstains off the cake plate, rubbing and rubbing Lady Macbeth-style. Then she grabbed handfuls of her skirt to pick up the cake plate so that no fresh finger prints
would mar the gold.

  “ . . .she lets out a laugh of triumph . . .”

  Doris uttered her best Lady Macbeth cackle.

  “Whoa, Doris, that’s incredibly creepy,” Bird whispered, still sprawled on the gazebo steps.

  “Then she sees the dent on the golden plate, made by Minnie’s noggin! Oh no! She’d left evidence of her evil deed!”

  Doris froze, her mouth falling open in horror.

  “She hears footsteps in the hall!”

  Doris clutched the cake plate to her chest. Then, before Godiva speak again, she flung the cake plate down, hoping to obscure the dent by making it look as if it had been knocked off the table. She clutched the napkins—the bloody napkins that had rubbed away her handprints as well as Minnie’s blood—and began to scuttle away.

  “Perfect! Doris, that was amazing! In two minutes, I got a whole life for Oona—poor boring Oona, everybody’s gofer—”

  Each word stabbed into Oona. Doris.

  Godiva stopped abruptly at the sound of fervent applause. On the pathway on the other side of the gazebo, a dapper man stood clapping.

  “Joey!” Bird abruptly sat up, no longer a corpse. “You came!”

  Mikhail ran to Bird, offering his hands to pull her to her feet.

  Doris, Godiva, and Jen had heard about Mikhail’s friend Joey Hu, but they’d never met him. They all stared as he walked toward them, still applauding.

  “Straight from the airport,” Joey said. “I seem to have missed the wedding, for which I apologize. But have I lucked into one of G.T. Hidalgo’s famous book openings, happening before my nose?”

  He smiled around in open delight. Joey Hu was a quick-moving, slender man slightly taller than Doris, with a pointed chin and unruly blond hair going to silver at the temples. His dark eyes were wide-spaced below his slanting brows. He looked as if he was Mikhail’s age, but he moved like a young man.

  “Come, meet everyone. Let me get you something to drink,” Bird exclaimed. “As you guessed, this is Godiva . . .”

  Doris couldn’t look away from Joey Hu, though she couldn’t say why. He wasn’t imposing like Mikhail Long, but he was very handsome and moved with an agile, fluid grace. It was unusual for an Asian man to have blond hair, but it suited him. He was elegantly dressed, which was miraculous given that he’d come straight from the airport, after a long flight from . . . hadn’t Bird said he was visiting family in China?

  Her gaze tracked him as he offered his hand to Bird. His fingers were long and clever-looking, with nails neatly trimmed and buffed. When he passed Doris, his friendly smile turned her way.

  Their eyes met, and every cell in her body was charged with light.

  His eyes glowed golden—real gold, the breathtaking gold of stained glass windows—and he stood still.

  The world stood still.

  Doris hadn’t had a hot flash in years, but she felt like she was having one now. Except it wasn’t only heat, but a bright golden light that shimmered through every nerve. In that moment the entire universe came apart and then refit together in a new pattern.

  No.

  She wrenched her eyes away, realizing she was still standing over the cake table with crumbs and frosting splattered down her dress. Doris backed up and plopped into her chair.

  She stared down at her frosting-smeared hands as Bird and Mikhail welcomed Joey, showering him with questions. Doris easily picked out Joey’s voice from theirs. It was such a compelling voice, neither high nor low, his words quick, like a running stream, with laughter threading through. He spoke with the slightest Chinese accent, which only made it even more compelling. Another shiver ran through her as he explained that his plane had been delayed because of a storm.

  Doris gave in to temptation, and took a single quick peek. He was staring right at her.

  She looked away again, but the after-image lingered. All last summer Bird had talked about this amazing friend of Mikhail’s. Doris hadn’t paid much attention, but now every word flashed in her memory as if written in letters of fire: popular, a born flirt, everyone loves Joey…

  In other words, a player.

  Nope.

  Nope. Nope. Nope.

  Doris was comfortable. She was secure. She knew who she was: Doris Lebowitz, spinster.

  Everybody knew that spinsters and the drama that people called romance went together like dry ice and lava.

  “ . . . and this is Doris Lebowitz, who wrote the cookbook with that recipe you liked, remember, the night before you left on your trip?”

  Doris made herself meet those brown eyes again—ordinary dark brown, not gold—and smiled politely. She got firmly to her feet as she said in her most cordial voice, “So very nice to meet you. Alas, it’s late. I have pies to bake for the homeless dinner tomorrow.”

  Her heart hammered against her ribs and her fingers trembled as she swung her purse over her shoulder and marched away.

  TWO

  JOEY

  Mate! Mate! Mate! Mate!

  Tian Hu Jiu Wei, (or simply Joey Hu, as the rare Nine-Tailed Silver Fox preferred to introduce himself to the world), held his breath. Deep within him, his fox leaped around in a circle, barking in crazy joy. But the human part of Joey sighed in regret as beautiful, entrancing Doris turned her back on him and decamped as if all the hounds of Hell were at her heels.

  “Did she really say ‘alas?’” Jen murmured.

  Godiva turned to skewer Joey with a glare. “What just happened?”

  Joey’s heart thundered, but he did his best to hide it. “We just met.”

  Inside him, his fox was still shouting, Matematematematemate!

  Nine-tail foxes were powerful tricksters. But they had other kinds of magic as well. For Joey’s entire life, he had been sensitive to love in all its degrees and expressions. He did his best to aid those who faltered on the road to love, and delighted in others finding joy and happiness. But in recent years, as his human whiskers turned to silver, he had begun to wonder if the ultimate joy of finding one’s mate was ever to be his.

  Yes! His inner fox yipped, prancing in that dizzying circle. Yes! Yes!

  Bird, that kindly soul, said, “Maybe Doris has an early day tomorrow. You know she does so much volunteer work at the synagogue . . .”

  Godiva looked even smaller than Joey had imagined, and twice as fierce as she stated, “Those pies got baked yesterday. I know, because I helped peel the apples.”

  “Maybe ants got in them?” Bird said in a soft, hopeful tone.

  Godiva was still glaring at Joey, but with her brow furrowed in question.

  Joey, normally never at a loss for words, could not think past his sheer, giddy exhilaration. In one second, his life had changed forever. He’d met his own beautiful mate, with bright, intelligent eyes and a mouth made for kissing. Hidden under some enveloping blue thing, he’d caught hints of entrancing curves.

  And she had turned her back and walked away.

  Deep down, a tiny fox voice yowled Matematemate!

  Wild joy was foremost in his mind, but beneath it lay a tumble of other emotions he had no time to sort out. Joey felt as if he’d plunged into a fast-moving stream, and a single false step would send him tumbling over the rocks to drown.

  The others had seen . . . something. Mikhail’s astonished gaze told Joey that Mikhail had recognized that moment for what it was. But two of the three humans didn’t know about the mate bond, and Bird’s head had been turned as she introduced him to Jen.

  Joey held his breath as he watched them begin to doubt what they’d seen, and work their way to an explanation that made sense for humans.

  Godiva turned to tall, pale-haired Jen. “Did you hear her phone go off? It could be that fan-damn-ily of hers again.”

  Joey’s inner ears flicked up. “Ah, family problems?” He clasped his hands tightly behind his back to hide how much he wanted to run after Doris. Protect her. Defend her. Explain to her. Talk to her—spill every detail of his life, and listen forever to hers. Offer himsel
f, body and soul.

  Godiva snorted, a startling sound from so small a woman, splintering Joey’s thoughts. “To be fair, Doris’s family is basically okay. It’s just that they all think they’re Broadway stars and she’s the stage manager.”

  Jen, whose icy wall of grief Joey could sense, dipped her chin in a tiny nod. “True. On both counts.”

  “Welp.” Godiva got up. “Maybe it was a hint that it’s time to beat feet. We’re the last wedding guests, so it’s about time our butts went out the door.”

  Bird began to protest, but Godiva waved her off, then took her phone from Jen and brandished it. “At least I’ve got this scenario in the bag, heh! It’s definitely time to hit the road. It was a great wedding and a great day.” She cackled. “If I get cracking, I’ll have pages for Friday at the writers’ group, instead of silently gagging at Bill’s tripe. It’ll be his turn to have steam coming out of the ears: two female characters, a murder, and not a hooter in sight, ha, ha!”

  Bird—who had frosting in her hair, Joey noticed with a flutter of silent laughter—escorted her two friends out, leaving Joey alone with Mikhail.

  Mikhail, the Imperial Warrior Knight, looked down from his towering height, his expression troubled. “Joey, you know I haven’t been mated for long. But . . .”

  “Yes.” Joey breathed the word.

  Mikhail turned his head, as if he could see in the gathering darkness. “Doris?”

  Joey’s inner fox leaped up. Matematemate!

  “Yes,” said Joey.

  Mikhail looked puzzled. “But . . . you’ve met her before.” It wasn’t quite a question. Mikhail was at once too shy and too formidable for that.

  Joey knew what he meant. The mate bond was not subtle—at least for shifters. One look, and you knew. For non-shifters, it was complicated.

  His bond with Doris was an hour old, and it was already complicated.

  He drew in a deep breath, his nerves alight with the fire of promise. Challenge. He shook his head. “I’ve never met Doris. Remember, I wasn’t there at your wedding. The Empress summoned me to give my witness report about Cang’s betrayal and the Oracle Stone.”