Shapeshifter - 11. The French connection

**Kelaste**

“It’s easy. We just have to keep you alive until Saturday, right?”

We were on our way out of the archives, heading for the baggage lockers to reclaim our stuff, and Noom was being antsy. I, for once, felt comfortably calm and collected. It was an amusing twist in behavior but giggling about it probably would make Noom worry even more. The looks he shot at my face were clear enough— I probably didn’t look anywhere near as calm and collected as I felt. I wasn’t a violent heart, and I had never liked horror films or mystery stories. Zombies were my worst nightmare, and romance my biggest love. Maybe this inclination towards total non-violence made me everybody’s victim. It sure felt like it most days, so I wasn’t going to argue. Of course, things had changed over the last few days. I had killed two people, or had it been three? So far, I had been doing a pretty good job at forgetting the things I had done in my feline-form, and I probably would keep it going indefinitely. I usually let people hit me until they got bored or tired and moved on. The biggest difference had been Noom, or rather, Noom being in life-threatening danger. It had triggered the ability for me to kill without remorse.

The way Noom had treated me in the beginning and still tended to now and then-- all that ordering around, the shoving, the sneering, the threats-- didn’t bother me at all. It still was a far cry from the way my father had treated me all my life; the difference being that Noom obviously had to force himself to do it. He tried not to let that on, but I saw it, I could taste it in the air. Something had broken Noom just as badly as I had been broken. Two cracked pots, who only had each other.

And now, my father was trying to have me killed, for money at that. Not only money, but for control over Flatlands Inc., the business he had built with my mother’s money. My money, as it seemed. My hands felt numb and cold.

“-el?”

I had always known there wasn’t much love lost between my father and me, but he hadn’t even tried to talk to me. I would have gladly given him a few of the shares, just enough so he could keep his god-damn power, if it bought me freedom and peace. But he hadn’t. He wanted all of it, without me being a nuisance. God, it hurt my heart to think about it.

A hand grabbed my arm and shook me softly. “Kel!”

Blinking up at Noom’s annoyed face, I tried to remember what he had said. I drew a blank. I hadn’t listened, not for a second. “What?” I snapped, blinked again, and repeated in a much lower, softer voice, “what is it?”

“You’re walking towards the highway. Our room is in the other direction,” he bit out, pointing a thumb over his shoulder mockingly. Now that he had my attention, he stopped, turned and walked back the way we had come, obviously expecting me to follow. A few steps after, he stopped again, this time cocking his head to the side and staring at something or someone in the sparse crowd around us. Something in his posture tensed, but he didn’t go for his gun and after a few more seconds, he rolled his shoulders and walked on.

“Come on, scrap! Suicide by car goes wrong more often than not,” he yelled over his shoulder, making everyone more or less stare at me.

“Sorry,” I muttered, sure he wouldn’t hear it, and turned to trot after him with a ducked head and people gawking at me.

We walked in silence for a good half hour, him constantly scanning the crowds for threats and snarling at everything getting too close to us, me staring at the asphalt and pondering my life. Relatives in France. That was the one thing my mind kept circling back to, which was funny, considering my own father was trying to have me killed. I had never given much thought to family, having lost my mother almost at birth. My father was a person even his own mother couldn’t possibly love, and my grandparents— my father’s parents— had declared me dim-witted and useless, and broken off contact. Come to think of it, why had I never asked about mother’s family? I had just assumed she hadn’t had any, because, why the fuck would anyone with people who loved them ever fall deep enough to consider marrying a bastard like Theodore DeLargo?

But now I had another family, and I had a name. Gael Lagrada, half French, half Spanish, if my linguistics skills didn’t let me down. My cousin and the beneficiary of my mother’s will if I died, and if he ever found out about it. I hadn’t mentioned his name to Noom or Mike, because I was afraid what they would think. I’d find out about him all by myself, as soon as this madness was over.

“Don’t look back, keep staring at my ass. Someone’s following us,” Noom hissed, brows knit together in a thunderous expression.

Speak of the devil. I blushed, because I actually had been staring at Noom’s backside without realizing, and scuttled closer so I could walk next to him instead of trailing after him.

“Is it the same guy?” I whispered, hyper-aware of the movements in Noom’s body. We were walking so close, I could hear the fibers in his muscles creak and groan.

Noom threw a few scattered glances at the displays to our right, using the reflections to keep track of whatever he had spotted, but again made no move to grab his gun. I knew where it was. I could smell it. I could almost taste the alloy it was made of on my tongue.

“Dunno, dun’ care,” he drawled, automatically falling back into his habitual street slang as he concentrated on his task. “There’s two ways how this’s gonna go. One, he has our room booby-trapped, and he’s creepin’ after us to make sure we go pop. Two, he doesn’t know where we’re stayin’, and he plans to assault us as soon as nobody’s around to see.”

Fear prickled up my back in a breath-taking rush, blowing my pupils and making the day so much brighter than it should be. My breath shuddered through half-parted lips as I tried to get a grip on my emotions, but at least my feet didn’t care if I was afraid or not— they just kept following Noom’s pace and let me deal with my shit. And as it always was, I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t shot up for more than a day. And no shakes, so far. Huh.

“What do you think we should do?” I whispered, although our tail probably was too far away to listen in even if I talked in a normal voice.

Noom grinned. It was an ugly, evil grin, and it made his eyes sparkle with a dark kind of joy.

“Just one thing we can do. Ambush that fucker right back.”

~*~

There was a special taste to the quiet panic I felt, walking up the same street we had taken in the morning. I knew in the front of my mind how I was supposed to act: natural. But now that I had to concentrate on it, I just couldn’t remember how I usually acted. I kept rolling my shoulders, stumbling, hitching my breath and nudging Noom with my shoulder as I inched closer to him, and I knew I shouldn’t do all those things, but I just couldn’t stop.

Just as we turned into the small side street leading to the back of Strummin’ Joe’s, Noom grabbed me, pushed me against the wall and corralled me in by slapping his right hand against the wall next to my face. I twitched to attention, staring at him wide-eyed and shocked.

“You’re giving us away, stop fidgeting,” he hissed angrily, leaning close to my face. His blue eyes reminded me of cornflowers, piercing and sharp and entrancing. I could feel his breath puff against my lips, felt the rough texture of cinder stones and plaster scrape against the exposed patches of skin on my lower back, and his scent flooded my nostrils, running hotly through my veins and directly down into my crotch. My lips parted, and I must have made some kind of soft noise, because Noom suddenly shuddered, hissed, and leaned in to catch my mouth with his.

His tongue traced the seam of my lips, first softly and inviting, then demanding when I didn’t react fast enough. He kissed me hard enough to cut my upper lip against my teeth, coating our dancing tongues with the sweet, intoxicating flavor of blood.

I groaned, straining to press my swollen cock against his body, but he wouldn’t let me. Each time I tried to move forward, closer to him, he pushed me back against the wall, sometimes hard enough to make me huff. It only inflamed me more, especially since he seemed to take a special care not to interrupt our kiss.

I had to touch him. The skin over his abs felt blazing hot to my cold fingers, and I tried to grab his sides to pull him in closer, shivering with excitement.

“Nu-uh,” he whispered roughly, swiftly grabbing my arms to encircle my wrists with just one of his hands, breaking what little contact I had to his body. As he pulled my arms over my head, a trail of his unique scent wafted into my face, almost blinding me with need. I knew his scent, and my body knew what usually followed soon after smelling him, loosening up in a way that sent tingles through my nerve endings.

I struggled as he held my arms up against the wall, effectively trapping me. I could have gotten him off me easily, but I seemed to forget my own strength as soon as he touched my body, and I honestly couldn’t think of anything more erotic than him manhandling me in public where everyone could see. He ended my weak fight with a sharp, quick bite in my lower lip and another wash of watered-down blood. The only thing holding my body together was my new set of clothes. Without them, I probably would have been set aflame by now.

Noom didn’t need to touch my dick; I was ready to shoot right there, pressed against that dirty wall.

There was a strange noise to my left at the end of the street, but I was too busy to give it a second thought. Noom didn’t react to it, so I didn’t either, and instead whimpered when he moved his left leg, pressing his muscular thigh against my raging cock, nailing me to the wall even more securely. That simple contact, the heat spreading though his jeans and into my crotch, made me see stars.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. Moaning, I started to hump his leg, my eyes closed with ecstasy, my breath huffing against his lips where they hovered just an inch away from mine. Just a few movements brought me so close to the brink, I had to bite my lip once more to keep from coming. I didn’t fully understand why I didn’t want to shoot yet, but I didn’t question it. The pain of denial was exquisite.

Noom, unfortunately, was ready to shoot too. As he kept me pinned against the wall and groaning like a wanton whore, he did a strange little twist with his hips and suddenly had his gun sandwiched between us. I didn’t realize what he did until a muffled shot reverberated against my chest, blinding my sense of smell with a blazing hot cloud of burnt gunpowder, and a bullet shell that made its way right into my collar. I was deaf from the whip-like crack of the gun, nose-blind from the stink of sulfur, and a small, blazing hot shell burned lines of pain across my chest and belly as it merrily clinked through my shirt, out at the bottom hem and onto the street.

Chaos.

In that moment of absolute, acute, panicked silence, there was only Noom.

Noom, staring derisively towards the end of the street, where a guy in a trench coat was in the process of falling down backwards, dropping the gun he had pointed at me just a second ago. Noom, putting up his gun, letting my arms go to switch on the safeguard. Noom and his winter-calm, blue eyes, giving me a lazy, self-satisfied smirk. His lips formed a few words, but there was just silence and a ringing in my ears.

It took him a few tries to understand I couldn’t hear him. When he did, he grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the creaky stairs leading up to our apartment. I stumbled after him, every step an echoing, dull thud through my body. I had experienced partial deafness once, when my father had slapped me wrong and ruined my ear, and it was just like it. I had healed quickly enough back then, and I would again, this time.

I wanted to ask Noom what we should do about the dead man lying in the street, about what we were going to tell the police when— not if, I was sure— they’d come knocking, and I wanted to talk about where we should run to next. But being unable to hear, I was afraid to talk, too disoriented to make the first move. It was a simpler thing to just follow Noom’s lead.

Noom stopped me at the door, leaning forward to inspect the edge of the door frame. It took him almost a minute to find the single strand of hair he had jammed in the upper edge between door and frame when we had left, but he did. The door hadn’t been opened since we had left. He shoved me into the dark hallway like an unruly child, making me stumble and catch myself at the bathroom door. When I turned around, he was already closing the door between us. Huh.

Frowning, I hurried into the bathroom to catch a glimpse at the dead man from the window. My ears were still ringing, but my hearing was already coming back in bits and pieces. It was an irritating feeling and it made my eyes water in the most annoying way, as I tried to watch Noom pick up the empty shell. He also went through the corpse’s pockets and took his gun, switched the safety off and shuffled around a bit, hovering above the dead man. When he seemed to have found the best position, he shot the body once more and then simply walked back.

I felt something beneath the sole of my boot, a short, soft vibration, almost impalpable. I blinked, then my body just dropped, quicker than my brain could catch up, quicker than I thought was possible.

The window glass above me shattered into a million tiny shards as a bullet crashed through it.

The next bullet bit right through my hand as I rolled towards the door and my attacker. Where the hell had he come from?

The third shot hit me right above my left clavicle, and I could feel the bullet ricocheting through my rib cage, tearing up at least one of my lungs and god knew what other organs, but the adrenaline kept me going. My attacker did get two more shots off, but they went wide as I barreled into him, crashing him into the wall opposite of the bathroom door. I still couldn’t hear everything, but the way the plaster cracked and puffed up clouds of dust was enough of a sign for the force of our altercation.

The assassin tried to get his gun hand away from my grasp, fighting hard against my grip and failing to move me more than an inch. I looked waifish, and my attacker had a good half foot on me, but in this, I beat him. I could probably lift him above my head and throw him a good few feet without breaking a sweat if I wanted to. Unfortunately, that only acerbated the damage the bullet inside had done.

I started coughing up blood as soon as he hit the wall, and it didn’t seem to lessen as I held him there. I could hear Noom crashing against the front door through the gauze-like haze my hearing had become, but it felt like an eternity to wait for him breaking down the door. The guy in front of me, having been subject to an almost constant spray of foamy, coughed-up blood, was screaming, his face showing a comical expression of sheer panic. He had seen the bullets hit, and he could still see the holes his shots had ripped into my hand and the flesh above my clavicle, but here I stood, holding him against the wall like he would do with an unruly five-year-old, spitting blood from a place people usually didn’t tolerate that well without having a case of death.

I liked it. He should be afraid, he should shit his pants for what he had almost done to me. He’d be dead as soon as Noom got through that door, anyway, but those last moments of his existence had better be filled with regret.

My vision started to go fuzzy around the edges, when Noom finally got the door open. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but my boiling blood made it feel like an eternity and then some. Although everything seemed to move in slow motion, I was stunned by the sheer speed with which Noom cocked the stolen gun, pointed it at the guy, and shot him right there, in our small hallway. As I stumbled back from the collapsing dead man, Noom dropped the gun and charged forward, catching me as I went down myself.

There was a look of bone-deep panic and anguish on his face, when he finally realized the extent of my injuries. He pulled me into the kitchenette, eyes wide and glassy with shock and tears, babbling something I couldn’t yet understand. My head was still fuzzy due to the blood-loss but lying down and not having to physically exert myself helped. I stared at the white ceiling above me, plagued by waves of dull, throbbing pain, unwilling to move and still exhilarated to be alive, when Noom appeared in my vision with his cell phone, ready to dial.

I grabbed it with my right hand and threw it away, coughing up another crown of red foam.

“No,” I gasped, unable to articulate myself properly, “hospital.”

Noom was livid. He grabbed my collar, yelling at me loud enough to make me understand him. “I won’t let you die like this!” he screamed, almost slapping me before he remembered I was hurt.

A short burst of regret hit me. I should have told him after the last gun fight, when I actually had been able to talk instead of gasp. “Won’t,” breathe, “die.” I coughed for a moment, and the world got darker. My time was running out. “Can’t die. Head’s fine. Head’s fine, won’t die.”

I got one last impression of Noom’s helpless, teary face, then I finally blacked out.

~*~

A rush of pain finally got me to gain consciousness again. It was followed by a wave of sounds, telling me that at least my hearing had decided to come back, not that it helped that much. I tried not to move and make the pain worse, but I twitched when someone wiped my forehead with a wet cloth. The sudden movement made me groan, then cough, and it just multiplied the hurt.

“He’s awake,” I heard Mike say from right behind my head, and I rolled my eyes up to give him a confused look. What was he doing here? And where was here?

Noom appeared in my line of vision as he stepped up behind Mike, gazing down at me with an exhausted expression and a cell phone pressed to his ear. Our eyes met and he smiled tightly, then spoke into the phone.

“You were right, he seems to be getting better already.” He half turned, a look of concentration on his face as he listened to whatever the voice on the other end of the line told him, and threw in his own bits and pieces.

“So we just… wait, and then feed him, and everything will be alright?” Pause. “I honestly don’t give a fuck, I won’t hustle him into talking to you when he’s in pain.” Another pause. “I don’t care who your family is, I’m here and you’re not, so get over it. I say you’ll have to wait until he decides to call you.” Another pause, then Noom grinned, tugging at his hair with one hand. “Did you just call me a dickhead in French?”

The conversation went on like that, but listening in just confused me, so I turned my eyes back to Mike and his blood-dotted wash cloth. I wanted to ask him what was going on, but I was too afraid of new pain to talk. He seemed to get it, though.

“We didn’t know what to do with you,” Mike explained, frowning. “So Noom had me kinda assault that old lady you talked to today, and she mentioned the French people. That wasn’t the most fun thing to do, but I get it. You looked… dead. You still do, you know?” He hesitated for a moment, squishing the wet cloth and staring down at the pinkish drops of water that appeared between his fingers.

Shaking himself, Mike continued. “We had us a fucking good time finding your Frenchies, you know? There are too many people with similar names over there. Took us a good three hours to find the right Gael Lagrada, and then another half hour to convince him we weren’t crazy. When he finally decided to help, the first thing he asked was if your head was still attached.” Mike stared at nothing with wrinkles on his forehead, a mixture of confusion and dismay on his Norse face. I agreed with his expression. It was a damn strange thing to ask. Carefully, I nudged my chin up, a silent invitation for him to continue.

“When Noom said yes, that Gael guy told him to get a scalpel and go hunting for the bullet in your body. Can you believe that? With a straight voice, too. ‘Cut the bullet out of him first,’ he said, like it was no big deal. Noom said no, well, actually, he screamed no. They had a good fight over that, but Noom wouldn’t be moved. He said, you had lost too much blood to go butchering around in your body. So now we’re in a tight spot.”

Mike took a breath to continue, only to be interrupted by the sound of Noom saying good-bye and crouching down next to me. Instead of telling me the tale of Gael, Mike looked at Noom and gave him an expectant look. “So, what did the Frenchie say?”

“We’re supposed to get shitloads of food for him and lock him in. If he blacks out and changes, we’re supposed to run before he eats us, and he’s expected to call that pompous ass back as soon as he can,” Noom summed up, then looked down at me. His face twitched, unable to decide on one single expression, and the muscles across his arms and shoulders rippled with tension, as he tried to hold on to himself instead of touching me like he wanted to. “And we’re gonna have a talk about this, as soon as you’re well,” he promised me. There was real anger in his voice, but beneath that was a joy weighing much more than any anger ever could.

I couldn’t help it, I smiled, then grinned, although I probably looked frightening. My mouth tasted like coagulated blood, and Mike had already told me I was in a bad shape. But who cared? I was alive, and not in a hospital.

Mike interrupted our short moment. “We need to get that dead guy out of your room, and quickly, before someone discovers your dead friend in the back alley.”

Noom looked torn. “I don’t want to leave Kel alone,” he grumbled and finally gave in to the urge to touch me. His fingers brushed my head, and I closed my eyes, relishing the small contact. I still hurt all over, but pain was a fleeting thing, and an old friend of mine. I would heal, sooner or later.

“Noom, you can’t just sit here and hold his hand, waiting for the police or another one of those fuckers,” Mike barked and slapped the side of his head.

Noom jumped up with such speed, I blinked at his knees for a moment before realizing he had moved at all. When I finally found his face again, he had one hand bunched into Mike’s collar, while the other hand hovered above the spot at his back where I knew his gun had to be. At least he didn’t pull it, which told a lot about the amount of respect he felt for Mike. He would have pulled the gun on me, for sure.

Mike just stood there, watching Noom sneer at him with that twitchy face, waiting for him to decide how he wanted to proceed.

In the end, Noom let go of Mike and moved his hand away from his gun at the same time, sighing. He didn’t look happy, but the short burst of rage had burnt out just as quick as it had come. “Fine,” he murmured, “fine. Let’s carry assassin-boy over there down to the street. If we’re lucky, they’ll think they killed each other.”

Mike and Noom got to work quickly, efficiently and in silence, carrying the dead guy down the flights of stairs and into the back alley, where they stayed for a good half hour, probably rearranging the scene. I closed my eyes, concentrating on keeping my breathing even and calm. It still hurt, but my lung was healing just fine. My hearing was fine, too, and I listened to the distant noises on the street below, feeling numb and disconnected.

I didn’t know how much time had passed, but when the door opened once more, I sat up instinctively and only felt a short, sharp pull in my chest, instead of the blinding pain from before.

Me sitting up had Noom freeze at the entrance to the kitchenette. His eyes went wide for a moment, then he tensed his shoulders, shook himself and came closer. Very close. Crouching before me, he touched the half-healed hole above my clavicle, tracing the edges of the obviously healing wound with wonder in his face.

“I wouldn’t have believed this, if I didn’t see it myself,” Mike murmured from the door. He was back to keeping his distance, as it seemed, which was fine by me. I felt weak and hungry and not in the mood to be crowded or pawed by anyone but Noom.

“I still don’t. But man, it would be great if I healed like that,” Noom replied, then leaned forward to kiss me just as I started to feel like a third wheel. It was a short, soft kiss, nothing but a quick touch of lips against lips, then he was back to staring at my face.

“We need to leave, right now. Can you walk?” he asked, already grabbing my arm.

Could I? I wasn’t sure, but I tried. Getting up made me hurt in so many different places, I didn’t bother counting them, and I did have to lean heavily on Noom to get on my feet, but I found out I could. I didn’t want to start from scratch though, so I held on to Noom and pointed to our half packed shopping bags. “We need to take those,” I explained, and Mike inched closer to pick them up.

“We need to clean this place thoroughly, your blood is everywhere,” Noom retorted, “those bags are the least of our problems.”

I shook my head, wobbling my way towards the door, tugging Noom with me. “No, we don’t. My blood won’t come back as human. They’ll think a cat has been slaughtered here, unless they bring in experts. And if they do, those experts will probably declare the samples corrupted, because there’s no way human and cat DNA could ever get mixed like this.” My chest stung with every breath, but my voice sounded okay.

Noom followed my pull reluctantly. “That the reason why you didn’t want to go to the hospital?”

“Yeah. They won’t believe DNA such as mine could exist, until they see me with their own eyes.”

As we reached the door, Noom finally sped up, wrapping an arm around my waist to help me stay upright. Mike was already at the bottom of the stairs, carefully peeking around the corner to keep an eye out for onlookers. We walked down with Noom holding me to his side and me on grabbing-duty; his other hand was busy holding on to the butt of his gun on his back, because you never knew when the next killer might jump out of the bushes.

My heart hurt as I looked back at the bright red door, hobbling down the stairs as I was. We had only slept here one night, but I had liked it, and I missed it already. How many times would I have to run? How long was this going to last? I clutched harder at Noom, trying to keep frustrated, exhausted tears from my eyes as we joined up with Mike, hurrying away from the two dead men lying splayed in the street, towards nowhere.