A Study In Shifters Read online

  Being a half-human, half-shifter didn’t exactly help my case, either. I didn’t just have an impressive title that I wasn’t worthy of, an impressive ancestor in whose shadow I couldn’t even hope to stand, but the Big Betrayal had also ruined the last thing I did have.

  My relationship with my mother.

  Nowadays, she could barely look me in the eye. And I would gladly trade all our wealth and fancy titles just to have her look at me with some semblance of warmth again.

  I walked into our penthouse with its impressive view of the Eiffel Tower. The living area was empty, but I heard rummaging from Mother’s bedroom. As I opened the door to her room, Mother turned around from her makeup table and looked at me disapprovingly. I swear, her face was permanently etched into a scowl. She had full red lips, a straight nose, and perfect, flawless skin. At any time of day or night, she looked like she had just starred in a TV commercial for perfume or shampoo. Pristine. Royal.

  I caught a glance of myself through the mirror on her makeup table. I looked a far stretch from royal.

  Mother’s hair was light blonde, almost silver. Hers was a color fit for fairy queens and princesses. Mine was brown, matted, and didn’t make me stand out at all. Her skin was porcelain. Mine was sickly pale from spending too much time cooped up in castles and underground lairs. She wore long dresses and diamonds, and my look usually mimicked that of a boring librarian.

  “So,” she said with disdain written all over her face, “they took you back.”

  I licked my lips. I could face any adversary and come up with a solid action plan, but around Mother, I was as dim and cowardly as a mouse. I dug my nails into my palms and forced myself to stand up straight. “They did.”

  “Of course they did.” Mother crossed her legs. She was wearing an expensive white designer suit. It looked impeccable. If I had worn something like that, it would be dirt-stained in seconds. “You have your father’s mind and his gift for antics. The very two qualities that got him killed.”

  She liked to focus on that. My father’s death. Him being murdered. Her suspicions about his job at the Conclave—the very thing that got him killed.

  With other people, I could often tell why they did what they did, but my mother was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, at least to me. I had no idea if she seemed so keen to remind me of my father’s early demise out of motherly concern for me and fear that the same fate might await me, or because it was her way of trying to get me to fit into her vision of what a shifter princess should be like, which obviously didn’t include nightly escapades into nightmarishly dark catacombs.

  Mother’s hand closed around the amulet she had around her neck, and I saw the anguish reflected in her eyes. Despite our differences and despite how cold she was toward me since the Big Betrayal, Mother did care for me. And she had cared for my father, too. She hardly ever mentioned it, but it was obvious: she still wore the amulet he had given her, kept it safe like a relic.

  “Balthy—I mean, Mr. Rollins was reluctant to take me back.”

  Mother crunched up her nose when I mentioned Rollins. Since he was one of the leaders of the snake clan, a royal just like my mother, she knew him well, and she despised him just as much as I did.

  “I expect one day that man will be unable to change back to his original appearance after shifting into a snake,” I said. “He’s taken on more and more characteristics of a viper.”

  The most powerful shifters, those who shifted often, started to mimic the behavior of their shifting animal, even when in their human form. My mother, too, suffered from this. She was a jaguar shifter, a royal, powerful, fierce animal. As she moved, she was equally as regal, equally as strong, even in her human form. Sometimes looking at her was like looking at an ever-changing canvas or at a TV screen frozen between two images: a woman at first, a jaguar the next moment, and sometimes if you looked at the right moment, something in between.

  Because my father had been a human, shifting had never come as easily for me as it did for full-blood shifters. And now, of course, it didn’t work at all anymore.

  Ever since Mannix appeared in my life. It seemed like he had put a curse on me that made my entire life fall apart.

  “Rollins is an idiot,” Mother said while she waved her hand as if he was a fly she could swat any moment. “He’s been trying to sabotage us in any way his Neanderthal mind can think of. Which isn’t a lot of ways, thankfully.”

  Balthy was one of the myriad shifters who couldn’t accept that the jaguars held the shifter throne. As La Duchess, my mother ruled over all the shifter clans. Ever since I’d been born, she’d struggled to hold on her title and the power that came with it. She had fought for it, tooth and claw, and it was tough, but she had defeated everyone who stood in her way. Yet, she still had to fight for my lineage, for my name. Because no one wanted to recognize her half-blood offspring as the next heir of the jaguar clan.

  I couldn’t quite blame them.

  Mother got up and dusted some imaginary dirt from her shoulder. “However, I’m still not convinced your screw-up during your last Conclave assignment wasn’t caused by an interference by one of those snakes.”

  I winced when she brought up the Big Betrayal. “You know it wasn’t.

  “The snakes have nothing to do with that.” I slumped down on one of the couches—which was probably more expensive than all the clothes in my wardrobe—and put a hand on my head. “Just a lone wolf.”

  Mannix. I couldn’t bring myself to say his name. Although it had been months since I’d last seen him, I feared saying his name would conjure him into the room. I felt slightly feverish, probably from dwelling on the past for so long. “I told you, I messed up. There’s no big cover-up, nobody trying to ruin our good name. Or what’s left of it.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.” Mother sat down next to me. She wasn’t very motherly, especially not nowadays, but she was fiercely protective. She also had a tough time accepting a member of our clan could screw up, let alone me, her own blood.

  “Can we talk about something else, please?” I asked. I was afraid that if I was forced to focus on the past for one more second, those tears that wouldn’t come during my cousin’s funeral would now stream down my face like a river.

  And I couldn’t cry. I still didn’t deserve to cry or to grieve about what happened to her.

  Little Amaranth. She was five years younger than I was, but we’d always been best friends growing up. As shifter princesses, with our parents travelling from one important convention to another, life could get pretty lonely, but Amaranth and I had always had each other.

  Until I let her down in the most horrible way.

  “Fine. Let’s talk about something else then. The upcoming clan meeting in Paris at the end of this week,” Mother suggested.

  “Ugh,” I groaned. The one topic I possibly dreaded even more than the Big Betrayal was the upcoming clan meeting, The Gathering of Clans. Once a year, the clan royals of all shifter species across the globe gathered in one major city. Security was top-notch, and it required months of preparation. This time, the Gathering would be in Paris, and my mother was overseeing the preparations.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You want to talk about the ball. Again.” How could Mother expect me to even focus on a ball for one second when Mannix was still out there? When he could still be hurting people? When I hadn’t even begun to atone for my part in all the pain he had caused.

  Mother sighed. “I know you don’t want a ball, Marisol, but it’s the perfect opportunity for you to meet someone. All the royals will be there, and I’m sure you’ll find a suitable match there… You’re almost of mating age, and well, time waits for no one.”

  I rolled my eyes, exasperated that she couldn’t understand a ball was probably the last thing on my mind. “You think I’m some sort of Cinderella who will waltz down the stairs and stumble right into the arms of her Prince Charming, preferably a full-blood shifter who is powerful enough that his mere presence will cause
all the other clans to stop fretting about the fact the jaguar clan’s only heir is a half-blood.” My voice was laced with sarcasm. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but fairytales aren’t real life, and I doubt your fantasy will become reality.”

  “You can complain all you want, but this ball is happening, and you will be there,” Mother said sternly.

  My inner jaguar growled at her, enraged, but Mother ignored the annoyed look on my face.

  “It’s only a few days from now, so we don’t have much time to rehearse, and considering our…precarious situation…” She said those last words while looking at me, making me feel solely responsible for the fact I was alive, which wasn’t my fault at all, objectively speaking. “We can’t afford any mistakes. So, run down the schedule for me.”

  I sighed. We’d been over this before, practically every day for the last two months. Still, I wouldn’t be able to wriggle my way out of this one, so I started droning on about the schedule for the three days of clan meetings.

  “First, the clans will arrive at ten in the morning. We will formally greet them in the grand room of Castle Beauvord.”

  Mother glanced at her mirror image and fixed her coiffure, pushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Sitting like that, she resembled the ice queen from the fairytale, and I could see why everyone was intimated by her. You wouldn’t guess it by her posture, but I saw her cringe ever so slightly when I mentioned Beauvord.

  Castle Beauvord was an ancient chateau on the outskirts of Paris. It had been in my mother’s family for centuries. Yet, we rarely frequented it because with just the two of us remaining, it was too vast and empty, and it had too many ghosts and remnants of the past. I didn’t know the whole story, but I picked up some rumors here and there—Beauvord was where my mother had met my father, where they’d had their epic romance. She dreaded going to that place, and I figured part of it had to do with my father’s memory still haunting the halls of the impressive mammoth of a building.

  “Then, we will have a formal dinner with all the clans. Next, the clans will retreat to their various hotels in the city.” The peace between the clans was so fragile that we’d booked separate hotels for each clan to avoid trouble as much as possible.

  Mother nodded approvingly and motioned for me to continue.

  “You will meet with the clans separately. The schedule of who will be summoned when will only be determined on the day itself, as a security precaution.”

  The Gathering of Clans required a lot of security precautions. They seemed a little over the top for me, but it had only been fifteen years since a clan member was brutally killed on the way to a private meeting with the leader of the clans. Fifteen years seemed like eons to me, but for the clans obsessed with history and heritage and bloodlines reaching back hundreds of years, it was recent enough that they still brought it up every time they could. Like nagging, wrinkled grandmothers who enjoyed reminiscing about their childhood but in reality, they often recounted the same old story over and over.

  “Good, good.” Mother smiled at me encouragingly. “And then?”

  I was glad she was smiling at me for once, but still, it didn’t make me feel very good. The only reason she was smiling was because I was giving in, allowing her to mold me into the perfect shifter princess she wanted me to be.

  “The second day, there will be another formal dinner with the clans, followed by a ball.” The word alone made me nauseous, and I pulled a horrified face while I said it. Mother had made it clear I would have to dance, and while I was quite the dancer—over a decade of professional dance instructors should take the credit for that, not some ability I was born with—I hated dancing in front of others. I knew my mother insisted on me taking these classes, though, and knowing the schedule by heart. She was training me to take over for her eventually… A thought I didn’t even want to fathom in my mind. If I could still be as easily deceived as Mannix had deceived me… How could I ever rule a clan?

  “Get over yourself,” Mother said. “You already established your distaste for balls in a dozen different ways, but you’re not weaseling your way out of it. What happens on the last day?”

  I gritted my teeth in an effort to get through this. “The third day, we will have a large meeting with all the clans, where the matters discussed privately with all the separate clans will now be discussed by everyone.” Mother had already warned me that this part of the negotiations was the trickiest. Separately, the clans were difficult to deal with. Put them all together, and you’d rather get a tooth pulled without anesthesia than handle them.

  “Then, the clans will leave again, one by one. Each clan has a limousine or several, and they’ll get flanked by our cars and hired bodyguards. Once all clans have left, you and I will go back to the penthouse because it’s better protected than Castle Beauvord.”

  Exhaustion overwhelmed me, and I felt drained at just summing up what would need to happen. Today had been a long day, stretching into eternity, and I longed to just crawl in bed and sleep.

  “Good.” Mother nodded at me approvingly. “I know you wanted to explore Beauvord afterward,” she said without looking at me, “but it’s really for the best we head back to the city as soon as possible. We’re much better protected here. Beauvord is almost impossible to protect since it’s so humongous.”

  I shrugged. Since Beauvord was the castle my father grew up in, I’d nagged enough about wanting to go there, even explore the place on my own, but she always found ways to keep me from doing so.

  “How is your etiquette class?” she asked, grilling me even further. She had forced me to take etiquette classes so I wouldn’t look like a complete fool during the ball. If I didn’t know what fork to use for what course, I’d never find a suitor—at least not if I followed Mother’s logic. Finding a suitor was about equally as low on my wishlist as actually going to the ball, so I didn’t worry too much about that.

  “It’s fine. I know where to put all the cutlery, how to curtsy, and how to behave like a proper royal.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at her. “It’s not that difficult to memorize.”

  Mother glanced at me through the mirror without turning her head toward me. “Come here,” she said.

  I stood up and walked over to her. “What is it?”

  She looked straight at me now, her icy gaze boring into mine. She grabbed my hand, a gesture so intimate I could barely believe it. It had been months since she’d last touched me. We didn’t really do things this close, mother-daughter things.

  “I love you.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t, frozen in shock. It had been months since she’d said those words. She hadn’t said them since Amaranth died.

  “And I’m proud of you.” She still held my hand and still gazed at me. For once, there was no blame in her eyes. I felt the walls that I’d put up long ago to protect myself from how indifferent she usually behaved, slowly start to melt. She shook her head, a hint of sadness clouding her gaze. “You look so much like your father.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to that, just stood there open-mouthed and as silent as a stone statue while my inner jaguar howled at the comment, feeling a weird sense of pride.

  A few seconds passed, then she let go of my hand and turned away from me. She instantly transformed again into the cold, icy La Duchess. From the moment she let go of me, I missed her—my mother, not the royal she often had to be. “You should go ask Bernard what’s for dinner,” she said, referring to our live-in chef.

  I nodded, knowing the moment had come and gone, and that it might take months, if not years, before my mother would say anything of the sort again. She barely showed weakness, barely showed emotions, especially not to me, but I knew she loved me despite all that.

  “Okay,” I said, turning on my heel. Before I could leave the room, the doorbell rang.

  “Are you expecting someone?” I asked Mother, frowning.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  I heard Martin, our butler/bodygua
rd open the door, and almost threw up when a slithery voice hissed an answer. Balthy. What in God’s name was he doing here?

  “Is Rollins here for a meeting?” I asked Mother.

  She stood up, dusted off her dress, and softly shook her head. “No.” Then she walked past me into the hallway where Martin introduced our guest.

  “Thank you, Martin, you can go,” Mother said in her usual haughty tone. When I was younger, I used to think she used that tone because she was full of herself, convinced we were better than anyone else because of our family name and lineage. But I’d learned, especially after the catastrophe that cost my cousin her life and alienated us from all the other shifter families, that her haughtiness was a defense mechanism. It was an act, a play, and one she had to perform for my benefit.

  When everyone had turned away from us, she only had her sense of pride and her legacy as a royal jaguar shifter to rely on. I didn’t have that; and after I saw my cousin die in front of me, I didn’t even have my own animal side to rely on anymore.

  Being a half-blood meant that the other royals looked down on me—some even hated me for what I was—and they would probably prefer a sack of potatoes on the throne than me. I’d seen evidence of that already when my last mission failed and the whole Conclave, save for Saldor, turned against me like vultures waiting for me to make my fatal mistake.

  I’d seen a lot of jealousy and hatred while working cases for the Conclave, but in the seventeen years I’d been alive, I’d never seen people turn against one another as fast as the Conclave I’d once trusted had turned against me.

  Not that they were wrong. I deserved their scrutiny. I deserved their hate.

  Mother had stood up for me, though. She’d protected me, and I came to realize that she couldn’t allow weakness, couldn’t show it, even for a second, or it would be her downfall. Our downfall. She’d told me as much when I came to her crying, came to her for help that she offered even though I’d expected her to brush me off.