Ty didn’t seem to notice her slip; he was shaking his head slowly. “No, it’s harder to find each other out in the city. Fewer of us, more precautions. Not a lot of places to shift and run.”
“Where do you go to shift?” Misty asked curiously. She’d had a hard enough time the few years she’d been stationed in Missoula, and Los Angeles was far and away a bigger city.
“Way up in the mountains, north of the city. It was a heck of a drive, so I don’t get out there very often, especially since my nieces and nephews grew up.”
Misty blinked. “So when was the last time you shifted? Before the fight today.”
Ty’s eyes went faraway. He started counting on his fingers. “Three—three weeks? No, maybe more like a month.”
“What?” Misty couldn’t even imagine it. “No wonder you’re feeling burnt out!” Then she bit her lip. “Sorry, that was presumptuous.”
“No,” Ty said on a sigh, “no, you’re absolutely right. One of the things I mean to do while I’m here is get out into the forest and run. Maybe with the guys.”
“Why not right now?” Misty asked.
He blinked. “Right now?”
It was impulsive, and maybe a bit forward, but Misty suddenly didn’t care. So what if Ty looked at everyone the way he looked at her? He was looking at her right now, and she could see a dawning excitement on his face.
And she couldn’t be a part of putting off a shift-and-run for Ty for one more minute. She’d be going absolutely crazy after a month.
“That sounds...like exactly what I need.” Ty’s voice thrummed with eagerness. “Let me just get the check.”
“Oh, I have cash—” Misty started rummaging in her pockets for her wallet.
“No, absolutely not,” Ty said firmly. “I asked you to dinner. I’m paying. Besides, my mother would come right down from Heaven itself to grab me by the ear if she knew I let a woman pay half.”
Misty realized she’d been babbling on about her childhood and her father all this time, but she hadn’t asked Ty about his own family. It sounded tantalizingly large, given that mention of nieces and nephews earlier, and his mother must have been a force to be reckoned with.
She was about to ask, but Ty had lifted a hand to snag the check from the waitress, and the next few minutes were involved with cards and tip and so on. And the second he signed the receipt, Ty was up out of his seat, looking back at her. “Ready to get going?”
More conversation would have to wait. This was the most important thing right now. “Ready,” Misty agreed as she stood up to follow.
Ty eagerly led the way out into the parking lot. He stopped to drop his wallet, phone, and jacket in his car—all items that might not come along with a shift, unlike regular clothes—and then paused. “Should we drive somewhere first?”
Misty smiled. “We could. But the forest is right there.” She gestured at the woods behind the lot. Oliver’s was on one end of the town, backed right up against the beginning of the rise of forested mountain.
Ty shook his head, wondering. “It’s crazy to think that you can go out to eat at a restaurant in town, and then shift and be in the wilderness right outside the door.”
“Believe it,” said Misty. “Want to get going?”
“Do I.”
She led the way a few yards into the forest—pretty much the entire town knew about shifters, even those who were regular humans, but Oliver’s got the occasional tourist, and in any case it was considered bad manners to shift out in the street where anyone could see you.
As sheriff, Misty had plenty of cause to be grateful for that unspoken rule; she was pretty sure that there would be a lot more shifted fights in town if people felt like they could just go for their rivals in public whenever they got angry.
So they went a little ways into the forest. The sun had set long ago; the days were getting shorter, and the chill in the air was even more evident now that it was night. It was already snowing just a little uphill, and the snow would come to town very soon.
She paused in a tiny space between the trees, not really large enough to be called a clearing, and looked at Ty. He was camouflaged well in the darkness, his skin fading into the forest the way a white person’s wouldn’t, but she knew exactly where to look. It was like she had some kind of strange sense of his body heat; she’d felt him at her shoulder the entire time they were walking.
“Here’s good,” she said. Her voice was hushed, though she couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t like this was a secret from anyone.
“All right,” he responded, just as softly, and shifted.
The low light made it almost impossible to see him in his shifted form, but once again, that didn’t seem to matter. Misty could sense the dense musculature of the jaguar, the big, soft paws, the twitch of his tail. His eyes shone in the moonlight.
He sat back on his haunches, as if to say, Well? Your turn.