Defender Cave Bear (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 1) Read online

  “We’ll go to my place,” he said.

  The car was only a block away, but it took all of Pete’s strength to make it there. Once he did, he half-fell against it, gasping for breath and soaked in sweat.

  “I… I can’t drive.” Tirzah’s voice shook in a way he’d never heard before, and when he looked down at her, he saw that she looked both afraid and ashamed.

  Pete felt terrible. He’d made that embarrassing display of his own weakness, and now she not only believed he couldn’t drive, she was blaming herself for being disabled! He rushed to reassure her. “I know. Don’t worry about it. I can drive.”

  She shot him an extremely dubious glance.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I was just catching my breath.”

  Tirzah looked even more doubtful, but opened the driver’s door for him. “Sit down. I can handle my chair.”

  Pete collapsed more than sat into the driver’s seat, then watched Tirzah balance on one foot to fold her chair and cram it into the back seat. She grabbed the roof and swung herself into the front seat with a lovely agility and grace.

  “You sure you can drive?” she asked.

  He straightened, gathering his strength. “Yeah. Don’t worry. I won’t crash.”

  People were starting to come back on to the streets, and were going about normal activities like nothing had happened. Pete was relieved that Jerry apparently hadn’t done anything permanent or even noticeable to them, but even more relieved that the temporary break in traffic enabled him to get to the freeway entrance much faster than usual. He felt dizzy and weak, and his wounds hurt badly. The drive to his house was manageable—probably—but he wasn’t sure he could handle being stuck in traffic for hours. And it wasn’t as if Tirzah could take over if he passed out over the wheel.

  To keep himself awake and distract himself from how absolutely terrible he felt, he said, “The fight. Tell me what happened.”

  “Right. Well, you—cave bear you—broke me out of this sort of stone bubble. And then Jerry turned into a—a sort of bat thing, like the gargoyles on old buildings—and attacked you. And then Batcat attacked it—”

  Batcat meowed at the sound of her name and scrambled out of Tirzah’s shirt and on to her shoulder. The cactus kitten poked its head out of Pete’s shirt at the sound of Batcat’s meow and clambered out to perch on Pete’s shoulder. Both kittens puffed up and hissed at each other.

  “There better not be a catfight on top of me right now,” Pete said.

  Tirzah plucked Batcat off her shoulder and deposited her in the backseat, then, much more gingerly, did the same to the green kitten. Ominous hissing and growling rose up, but Tirzah resolutely ignored it. “And then the cactus kitten appeared out of nowhere and it, um, it shot its needles at the gargoyle. The kittens distracted it until you got it. You hit it with your paw, and it smashed into a million little pieces of stone.”

  “And you…?”

  “I was totally useless,” Tirzah muttered. “Well—I chucked some rocks at it.”

  Pete had to work hard just to drive safely, so he didn’t dare take his eyes off the road or his hands off the wheel. He tried to put the equivalent of a comforting touch into his voice alone. “Hey. Don’t talk like that. You fought, just like I did. You got me out of there when I couldn’t even stand up by myself. Don’t put yourself down, okay?”

  “Okay.” Her voice trembled.

  “Say it like you mean it. We’re all alive, right? The enemy’s dead. We won.”

  “Yeah, we did win,” she said, and this time she did sound like she meant it. “We were a good team.”

  “No grandmas or gargoyles can stand against us.”

  Tirzah started to chuckle, then frowned. “I wish I knew how the grandmas are doing—Oh! I forgot, I’ve got the camera feeds on my cell phone.”

  As Pete exited the freeway, she fished her phone out of her purse. When they stopped at a red light, he glanced over at the video feeds on her phone, and was relieved to see that everything seemed back to normal. A couple people were scratching their heads and studying ordinary objects, apparently trying to figure out what had happened to them or what they’d been doing with them, like Esther with the broken cup measure.

  “It looks like they don’t remember any of it,” Tirzah said. “We could go back now, if you’d rather.”

  Pete weighed the odds of passing out over the wheel if he tried to turn around and drive all the way back, and didn’t like them. Rather than scare her by saying so, he just said, “We’re almost here. This is my neighborhood.”

  “This is where you live?” Tirzah asked.

  The astonishment in her voice made him see his neighborhood through her eyes. All the houses were identical except for their paint jobs, which were excitingly varied between blue with white trim, white with blue trim, blue with gray trim, and gray with blue trim. Everyone in sight had white hair, gray hair, or no hair.

  “Sorry,” she added. “It’s, uh, I’m sure it’s very safe. And quiet. It just looks like you having a house here is single-handedly pulling down the average age of the residents from 70 to 69.5.”

  “It’s actually my mom’s house.”

  “You live with your mom?”

  “Yeah.” He clicked open the garage behind their house and pulled into it. Once the garage door had closed behind them, he took a deep breath. He’d already made the decision to bring Tirzah to his home, so it couldn’t delay the revelation any longer. “And my daughter. Caro. She’s thirteen. My mother took care of her while I was overseas.”

  Tirzah stared at him. “You have a daughter? You never mentioned a daughter!”

  “I know. I—” A wave of intense dizziness swept over him, blurring his vision. He gritted his teeth, trying to ride it out. He decided to cut to the chase, just in case he passed out within the next few minutes. “Mom will have just left to pick her up from school, so they’ll both be back in an hour. And they don’t know about Apex, or the cave bear, or—or anything.”

  She groaned. “Or adorable flying kittens, right?”

  “Right. I don’t want my family involved in any of that stuff, okay? Jerry’s gone, so as long as all they know is that you’re the client I just finished protecting, they’ll be fine. As long as they don’t know anything else. And I don’t want them knowing I was hurt in a fight. Tell them I’m… sick.”

  “You’re covered in blood!”

  “I’ll clean up before they get here.”

  “What about seeing a doctor?” she demanded. “You can barely even stand up!”

  “I don’t need a doctor. Shifters heal fast.”

  Tirzah looked exasperated. “Let me get this straight. You’re asking me to hide two flying kittens in your mom’s house, conceal your gargoyle fight injuries, and dispose of your blood-soaked clothes, not to mention my blood-soaked clothes. In one hour. And then explain to your mother and daughter, who I’ll be meeting for the first time, who I am, why I’m here, and what was wrong with you, without ever mentioning that we got run out of my apartment by my mind-controlled neighbors and you got hurt in a fight with a gargoyle.’”

  “It wouldn’t just be you doing all that,” Pete protested. “I’d help.”

  “Pete, this is impossible.” She took her cell phone out of her purse. “Forget it. I’m calling your team.”

  “NO!” He sat bolt upright, twisting in his seat to make a grab for the phone.

  Everything went black.

  CHAPTER 13

  P ete lunged for Tirzah’s cell phone, and collapsed across her lap. His shoulder knocked the phone out of her hand, and it fell into narrow space between the seat and the gearshift.

  “Pete!” Tirzah bent over him anxiously. She could hear him breathing, but his skin was ashen and he felt clammy. She stroked his hair, which was wet with sweat and blood, then patted his cheeks. “Come on, Pete. You have to wake up. Come on…”

  His eyelids fluttered. He mumbled, “Don’t… Don’t call…”

  “I won’t.
I promise.” Under her breath, she said, “Can’t reach the phone anyway.” Then, pitching her voice for his ears, she said, “Just wake up, Pete, please? You don’t want to be sitting here when your daughter gets home.”

  That got him going. He struggled out of her lap, fumbled to undo his seatbelt, and opened his door.

  “Wait, wait!” Tirzah called. “I can help—”

  To her total lack of surprise, he tried to get out, and more-or-less fell out instead.

  “This is ridiculous,” Tirzah muttered. “Why did I promise not to call? I shouldn’t have promised.”

  Swearing under her breath, she opened her own door, slung her purse across her chest, hopped out of the car, and opened the back seat. Spike and Batcat had reached some sort of wary détente, glaring at each other from opposite ends of the shelf behind the seats. When Tirzah dragged out her wheelchair, Batcat flew out and perched on her shoulder, and Spike flew out and then over the car. Tirzah used a combination of hopping and hanging on to the car to haul her chair to the other side, where she found Pete sitting on the floor, head in hands, with Spike on his shoulder and chewing on his ear.

  She braced herself and the chair against the car. “Get in.”

  “I can stand—”

  Remembering what had worked to motivate him before, she said, “You want your daughter to come home from school and find you bleeding on the garage floor?”

  That did it. Pete reluctantly levered himself into the chair. “What about you?”

  “I’ll hang on to the back and hop. Just don’t go fast.”

  Pete glanced up at her with a glint of humor. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

  What she really wanted to do was quiz him about the daughter he’d never bothered to mention. What was she like? Were her mother and Pete still a couple, or was his girlfriend someone else? If he was still with the mother of his child, why was he living with his mother?

  Tirzah forced herself to save the questions for later. Pete didn’t seem in any shape to answer them, and she had her hands full just trying to escape the garage. You had to go up a step to even get into the house. Pete had to get out of the chair, lean against the doorframe, drag the chair up the step, sit back in it, and then help Tirzah up.

  She used a wheelchair for a reason; though she could use her left leg to stand on, it wasn’t strong. A wheelchair allowed her to get around far more easily than crutches would, and without exhausting herself in the process. She’d tossed her crutches into a closet almost a year ago, and barely taken them out since. Now, as she hopped along at the back of the wheelchair, trying not to skid on carpets, bang into furniture, or knock Pete into anything, she wished she had them with her.

  She was so busy concentrating on just making it through that she got only the vaguest impression of the house, mostly consisting of “not accessible,” “really not accessible,” and “way too much furniture.” By the time they made it into Pete’s bedroom and then the connected bathroom, they were both tired and sweating. Once they stopped there, the kittens flew off their shoulders and perched on opposite ends of the bathroom, Batcat atop the half-open door and Spike on the ceiling light.

  Pete slid out of the chair and sat down on the floor. He leaned against the bathtub with his head tilted back and throat exposed, breathing heavily, eyes half-closed.

  Tirzah sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “How’re you doing?”

  He made an indistinct sound that did not suggest anything along the lines of “Just fine,” then said, “I have to get out of these clothes.”

  “Do you know if you have a pair of—” Before she could say “scissors,” Pete put his hands on either side of his collar. His biceps bulged as his shirt ripped in half. A pair of bloody rags dropped to the floor.

  His muscular chest and back were scored with painful-looking slashes. To Tirzah’s relief, they’d stopped bleeding, but he’d lost plenty of blood already if he couldn’t even walk. She once again wished she could take him to a doctor.

  Pete, looking down at himself, apparently came to the opposite conclusion. With a mind-boggling degree of casualness, he remarked, “I knew I didn’t need a hospital. Shallow cuts like these always bleed a lot. I’ll be fine if I rehydrate and rest a bit.”

  “Rest, rehydrate, and eat a steak,” Tirzah suggested. “That’s what you’re supposed to do when you give blood, right?”

  He smiled faintly. “That’s the kind of prescription I like.”

  “Let’s start with rest and rehydrate. Unless you have a steak in here.”

  “I wish.”

  She filled a glass with water from the sink and handed it to him. His hands shook, spilling some water over the rim. She put hers over his, steadying him as he drank. When she refilled the glass, he was able to hold it himself.

  “I should clean those cuts,” she said. “They might have gargoyle germs. Where’s your first-aid kit?”

  “In the cabinet in the kitchen, over the sink.”

  “I’ll get it. Let me just make sure I’m not tracking blood all over your house.” Tirzah wetted a washcloth and cleaned all the blood off her chair, then used another to dry it. She tossed the gory washcloths into the pile with his shirt-halves, then looked down at her own clothes, which were very noticeably stained with Pete’s blood. “I am not going to greet your family looking like Lizzie Borden.”

  “Borrow something of my mom’s. It’d be a bit big on you, but—”

  Tirzah could not even begin to express her horror at the idea of meeting Pete’s mother for the first time while wearing some outfit of hers which Tirzah had borrowed without asking permission. “Pete, I am not just helping myself to your mom’s clothes!”

  Pete frowned. “I’m not sure Caro would be okay with you borrowing hers.”

  “I wouldn’t be okay with that, either!” Tirzah was still processing the fact that Pete even had a daughter. She was dying to meet Caro, but she knew teenagers, not to mention having been one herself, and if there was one thing she was sure of, it was that no teenage girl appreciated some random adult borrowing her clothes.

  “Take that, then.” Pete pointed to a shirt on a hanger on a hook on the door. “That’s mine.”

  Tirzah hung on to the door handle, stood on tip-toes, and dragged the shirt off the hanger. Once she had it in her hand, she was instantly extremely conscious that she’d have to undress to put it on, and that if she left the bathroom to do so, she’d get blood on the carpet or bed or something. And also, that Pete was bare-chested already, and enough blood had gotten on his pants that he’d have to take them off even if he didn’t have any below-the-belt injuries. She looked away, and caught her own face in the bathroom mirror, blushing fiery red.

  “I’m turning my back,” Pete said. “Let me know when it’s okay to turn around.”

  “Thanks,” Tirzah muttered. Her ears and cheeks still felt like they were on fire. She stripped off her clothes (to her intense relief, her bra and panties were fine) and yanked on Pete’s shirt in record time. It said WORLD’S BEST DAD in huge letters across the front and hung almost to her knees, becoming a sort of embarrassingly short shirt-dress. She sat down in her chair, pressed her legs tight together, then wedged some of the fabric between her thighs for good measure.

  “Done!” Tirzah spun the chair around. And got a good look at Pete kneeling with his back to her, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

  She tried not to stare too hard at him. But she was still staring when he turned around, and then she caught him staring. They both dropped their gaze to the floor, then looked up and away.

  “I’ll go get the first aid kit,” Tirzah said hurriedly.

  “Thanks. Hey, where’d the kittens go?”

  “They’re perched…” Tirzah’s voice trailed off as she saw that they were no longer perched where she’d last seen them, or anywhere else. “Somewhere in the house, I guess. I’ll collect them on my way back.”

  She fled the bathroom and the mostly-na
ked Pete as fast as she could, which was not very fast as his bedroom had thick carpeting that made her feel like she was pushing her chair through deep water. While she was huffing and puffing and trying not to think too hard about the impending meeting with his family or how she was dressed for it, she did a quick flying kitten check. They were nowhere in sight.

  The hallway was hardwood, which was great for thirty seconds. Then she encountered a throw rug that bunched up under her wheels and stopped her cold until she rolled it up and shoved it to the side. Then she reached a huge china vase decorated with painted cacti, resting on a delicately balanced pedestal that she had to maneuver around with about one inch of clearance.

  The kittens weren’t in the hallway either, which was initially a relief as they at least weren’t about to knock over the cactus vase, and then was much less of one when she contemplated searching the house for them. From what she’d seen of it on her way in, it was an obstacle course of random pieces of furniture, each decorated with a minimum of three breakable objects.

  And also cacti, which someone, presumably Pete’s mom, seemed to collect. Everywhere she looked, there was a cactus. The living room had more cacti than she could count. There were cacti on the windowsills, cacti on tables, cacti on pedestals, cacti in hanging baskets; fat cacti, skinny cacti, flowering cacti, smooth cacti, prickly cacti, furry-looking cacti. And that wasn’t even counting the decorative cacti sculptures and dishcloths with cactus prints.

  Tirzah dodged an elegant table holding a collection of blown glass cacti and went into the kitchen. It had a little round cactus on either side of the sink, a tiny potted cactus glued to a refrigerator magnet, and an entire lovingly tended cactus garden atop an inconveniently located table.

  What it did not have: a cactus kitten. Nor did she see Batcat.