Neal laughed, and Conall cracked a smile.
“Thank you,” Neal said sincerely. Then he impulsively added, “Thank you for taking care of her.”
Their second handshake was considerably more friendly than the first, and Neal caught himself thinking that he could like this man, given time.
It was too bad he was leaving in just two weeks. Time was the one thing they didn’t have.
“I HAVEN’T BEEN RUNNING!” Gizelle blurted, when Neal finally encountered her, nearly a week later, just a day before the wedding.
She was standing at the steps to the beach holding two kittens that didn’t want to be held. A fluffy gray half-grown cat with white paws was squirming under one arm, while its sleeker, cream-colored companion had all four paws on Gizelle and was pushing out against her opposite arm with stiff, determined legs.
“It’s good to see you,” Neal said mildly, walking up the steps with his towel folded under his arm.
She was, as he had been warned, very different looking than the woman who had been a gazelle for so much of their friendship.
She still had wild, white streaks in her wavy dark hair, but it was back in a braid now. It wasn’t a particularly tidy braid, but it was out of her face, and she didn’t seem uncomfortable in her sundress. She moved less timidly, and she wasn’t trembling, or looking for escape. She was still thin, but her cheeks were not as hollow and her brown eyes seemed less haunted.
The gray kitten had oozed itself out of her arms so that only the back legs were still hooked around Gizelle’s elbow, body and head hanging down as she stretched white paws towards freedom. Gizelle shifted her grip, trying to gather both cats together.
The cream-colored kitten had orange Siamese points, and yowled accurately to the breed as it struggled gamely against the indignity.
Gizelle gently tucked paws and tails back into the crook of her elbow. The gray one started purring in defeat. The cream kitten struggled in earnest but Gizelle gently hung on. “These are my Christmas kittens,” she explained to Neal. “The angry one is Tyrant and the other is The Sweet One.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Neal said politely to the put-out, half-grown cats. “Where are you taking them?”
“There are humans on the beach,” Gizelle explained. “They don’t have animals in them, but Scarlet says that doesn’t make them bad people.”
“I heard,” Neal said; he’d been warned not to shift or do anything in front of the unexpected strangers that might cause them suspicion. He wondered what that had to do with the kittens.
A terrible thought occurred to him, confirmed when Gizelle went on.
“I thought I would see if they wanted voices,” she said cheerfully. “Because the kittens don’t have humans inside of them, and maybe they are lonely.”
Neal blinked at her. “You... can’t just mash them together into one body,” he said, as gently as he could. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Are you sure?” Gizelle asked skeptically.
“Positive,” Neal assured her.
Gizelle wilted. “It seems like it ought to work that way,” she said, sulky.
“Anyway, wouldn’t you miss your kittens, if you gave them away?” Neal said, hoping he didn’t sound too desperate.
Gizelle snuggled them both closer, to squawks of protest. “Yes,” she admitted. “But Tyrant is more Scarlet’s than mine anyway. Everyone thinks that’s very funny except Scarlet.”
She sat down on the steps and pulled Tyrant back down from the shoulder she was trying to scale. “Scarlet also said I shouldn’t bother the human people,” she said, sounding guilty.
Neal sat beside her. “It’s probably not a good idea,” he said sympathetically. “They don’t know about shifters, and they might be frightened.”
“Do you know, when we met, I thought you didn’t have a voice at first?” Tyrant was trying to bolt over Gizelle’s shoulder again, and was tugged gently back to the young woman’s lap. “Your wolf was so far away, so quiet.”
That wasn’t the case anymore, and Neal’s red-maned wolf chuckled in his head.
“He’s made up for lost time,” Neal said wryly.
As if I was the chatty one in this partnership, his wolf said snidely.
Neal waited to see if Gizelle would have anything to say about the comment; he’d heard from Breck that she could hear shifters’ animal voices.