Alterant (Belador #2)(2)

She swallowed the lump threatening to choke her.

Feenix leaned back. “Peetha?”

“You bet, baby.” She hugged him, inhaling his warm, leathery smell, then lowered him to sit on the island counter.

The uncharred half of the pizza tasted better than it looked. And she’d have made all the same ooh and ahh comments even if it had been a mud patty.

“Nutth.” He opened his mouth wide.

She tossed him the two lug nuts from her pocket.

He caught the steel snacks with his tongue and chomped them like M&M peanut candies.

She eyed her watch. Time had a grudge against her.

Delaying the inevitable wouldn’t make walking out that door any easier. And arriving late for a Tribunal meeting would be considered an insult—a guaranteed thumbs-down. She washed her hands. “I have to go out for a while, so don’t cook anything else while I’m gone, okay?”

“Yeth.” He watched her from his roost on the kitchen island, eyes beaming pure happiness.

“You’re the best.” She touched his wide nose with her finger, smiled, and headed for her bedroom.

The sound of Feenix’s wings flapped behind her.

Ten-foot ceilings allowed him to fly over her head in the hallway and reach the bedroom before her. When she strode into the room, he was perched in the center of her bed.

Feenix said, “You come back?”

The million-dollar question, but he asked the same thing every time she left. “As soon as I can.”

“What ith thoon? One, two, five, theven, eight?”

Did he mean minutes or hours? He’d just learned to count to eight. Time was a whole other concept. She was thinking more in terms of years, but rather than stretch the truth any further, she changed the topic. “How’s your counting coming?”

“Good.”

“Count for me.”

He bent his legs and leaned over to count each toe around his potbelly. “One, two . . .”

She picked up her dagger off the nightstand and slid it inside her boot. She didn’t walk the streets unarmed.

When Feenix stopped counting at eight, because he had eight toes, she told him, “Thought we were working on nine and ten this week.”

“What ith nine ten?” He looked up at her with big orange eyes full of curiosity.

“I’ll tell you on the way to the door.” She headed to the door in her living room that opened into the exit tunnels.

Feenix needed a reason to count more than his toes. She told him, “Your horns are nine and ten.”

He grunted unintelligible happy noises as he thumped down the hallway at her heels.

When she reached the door she turned around. “Are you going to practice?”

His eyes rounded as he realized he had new information. “Yeth, dammit.”

“No cursing.” She wanted to blame Quinn, one of her two closest friends, for irritating her to the point she’d said that word in front of Feenix, but the fault was hers.

“Thorry.” He smiled, tongue poking out one side of his mouth.

“That’s okay. I know it was an accident. Promise to be good and practice counting while I’m gone and I’ll get you a hubcap.”

His scaly forehead wrinkled with confusion.

She explained, “A hubcap is like a silver pizza.”

He waddled in a circle, clapping and fluttering his wings, making happy sounds. She’d make sure Tzader, the other person she trusted most in this world, brought Feenix a hubcap if she couldn’t.

She could if the Tribunal cut her some slack tonight and treated her equal to everyone else.

Was that asking too much?

Just one time she’d like to be judged on her own merit and not her tainted blood.

She had to go now or she’d never leave. Bending down, she gave Feenix one tight squeeze and said, “Where’s your gator?”

He looked around and spied his favorite stuffed toy, then flew to his beanbag. After settling into the cushy bag he cuddled his stuffed alligator.

That was the picture she’d take to her grave.

“Bye, baby.” Shutting the door quickly, she hurried through the concrete hallways to her garage area. No point in taking her GSX-R motorcycle out tonight. She had almost an hour to make the twenty-minute walk to Woodruff Park, where she’d get teleported to the meeting.

She hated teleporting almost as much as she disliked Sen, the liaison who would escort her to the Tribunal, but that was life in her world.

Walking across the garage, she used her kinetic power to access the elevator that took her up two floors to street level. She stepped out and scanned the pitch-black area through special sunglasses that protected her ultra-sensitive vision even at night. Similar to looking through night-vision goggles, she’d been born with vision that perceived the street and surrounding area in shades of blue-gray. Her strange DNA had gifted her with a deadly reaction to sunlight as well.

Sunshine wasn’t an issue this close to midnight, but preternatural creatures could hide in the dark jungle of steel and concrete she’d have to traverse between here and Marietta Street. Quinn owned her building and didn’t like charging her rent, but she insisted. She’d live life on her own terms.

Independence meant something different to everyone.

Unless someone had lived trapped in a basement the first eighteen years in this world, she doubted they could understand what independence meant to her.