Dance in Shadow and Whisper (Marionettes of Myth #1)

Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Carmi's stupid brother flirted with anything that had breasts.

Did he even realize the way Kali watched him as he batted his long, silvery eyelashes at Ave? Or when he got down on his hands and knees to scrub the floor in her bathroom as she stood back to oggle? Or when he flicked at her tiny pieces of chopped green onions that Carmi had laboriously sliced himself?

Communist Manifesto, Toivo.

Way to do things wrong.

Though Carmi wasn't really much better about any of it either. It was easier to not think, to shut everything off, and it was easier to keep moving and moving and never stop. Something had to distract him at all times, and it didn't matter what it was. Making the cats puffy or making Elliot puffy, anything sufficed.

As long as he didn't have to think about how his life had been gutted.

After a long day of chores, they sat down together for a perfectly normal home-cooked vegetarian meal where every hand had played a part in producing it—their first in a while.

Even Elliot, who decidedly believed they were the omen of the Christian apocalypse, joined the table. Toivo and Ave continued to fight over who had earned the right to set down all the silverware, and as Carmi glared at the two and their blistering sexual tension, Kali sat forward in her chair, the rat dog in her lap and encased in her hands. "I thought of something else, Elliot."

Elliot looked as ill as Carmi felt while listening to Toivo and Ave, but he swallowed down all of his vomit to look at Kali. "What else?"

"Um..." She had such gusto, and she lost it when she drew upon the visual she needed. Carmi picked at his toes in the chair beside her as she fidgeted with the rat dog's little squiggle tail. "I'm not very familiar with the shifter world, but...there was this enormous white tiger."

He stopped.

Which made Ave stop as well. She looked at him, and then Kali. "What?"

Elliot waved a hand to shoosh her, earning a sassy jut of Ave's head and hips with her eyebrows raised. He ignored her and zeroed in on Kali again. "How enormous? Enormous-enormous?"

Kali hugged the rat to her chest. It licked at her fingers as she leaned away from the heat of Ave's glower. Heck, even Carmi and Toivo leaned away. "I don't remember exactly," Kali said. "It's still really fuzzy, since I had a paw on my chest that could crush me like a banana, but...maybe about the size of an SUV or bigger. There was a man standing behind it too, but he's even harder for me to remember. He just had a very...frightening grin."

Elliot stared.

And stared some more.

Finally he folded over and removed his glasses so that he could scrub his face. The scent of his panic amplified in the room, and when he looked up, his hair stuck out like wild bunchgrass. "A vampire, right? No, of course he was a vampire, silly question, especially since you don't remember him. Oh, no, not just any old vampire. A vampire lord. Oh, no, not just any old vampire lord, either."

Not just—

What.

The two forks that Toivo had wrestled from Ave clattered to the floor. Kali hadn't caught on yet, and Carmi refused to. He slapped his hands down atop the table so suddenly that the rat started and whimpered. "How the hell did you come to that conclusion?"