Her Secret by Tara Fox Hall

dishes
to the sink. Theo was eating in the other room, the crunching of
chicken bones just audible over the TV.
    “I’m going to bed,” I called.
    The crunching stopped. “I’ll be in shortly,”
he replied. “I’m going to be in cougar form, as an FYI.”
    I put the cats and dogs to bed, and then
crawled into bed myself. Theo came in just as I was falling asleep.
A few moments later, the bed groaned under his weight as he leapt
onto the bed.
    I looked sleepily into his light yellow eyes.
“Don’t get any ideas.”
    Theo rolled his large eyes, then batted me
lightly with his paw. He curled up in a circle next to me, and
began to purr. I stroked his head, then his flattened nose and his
small ears. He grinned happily, purring louder.
    We’d never done this in the old days. But
since his return from being taken, some nights Theo slept with me
in cougar form. Despite my earlier crack, he’d never acted as more
than a pet, a companion who wanted platonic love and affection.
That would’ve been fine, but I suspected that he wasn’t doing it to
experience a new intimacy with me. He’d done this with Tasha, and
he missed her deeply.
    He’d slept like this with her, curling
himself around her body...
    I pushed aside my hurt. This was good for us
to share, no matter the reason. Theo spent so much time in cougar
form now that he had total recall of everything that he did while
he was a cougar. Moreover, he had complete control, so much that
the cats and dogs would tolerate his animal form, even if they were
still leery.
    “Goodnight, Theo.” I shut off the light, and
we lay together in bed, his purr still rumbling low in the
darkness.
    * * * *
    The next morning, I went into work early with
Theo. Right after we arrived at Danial’s, he left to patrol the
grounds, and I went up to Danial’s office. There was a note waiting
from Danial, asking me to handle the email first.
    I booted his computer, and began looking
through the company email of Solutions, Inc. There were over thirty
valid emails, but that was usual for a week’s time.
    Danial did consulting to large companies,
fixing them structurally to increase profitability and make them
more efficient. Yet he was better known for his excellent work in
the line of
finding-out-what-the-hell-had-happened-when-something-went-wrong.
The majority of the email was of that type: high tech detective
work.
    Also per usual, some of those potential
clients wanted more than just their mysterious problem resolved:
they wanted the instigator taken out, too. There were also a few
carefully worded emails looking for revenge and justice outside the
courts: hit requests.
    There was a time not long ago when Danial
handled those kinds of cases, too. But killing for hire had gotten
Danial more than a few death threats. One had led to an attempt on
my life not long after we’d met. Danial had given up that business
soon after.
    Those needed to be forwarded onto Devlin, the
new handler of deserved revenge, with a question mark and a number.
Then I would reply to the person and tell them that we couldn’t
help them. Devlin would either contact them directly, or not. What
worried me wasn’t the potential deaths these emails represented, it
was that I had to contact Devlin this morning. It would be the
first contact we’d had since the night we’d said goodbye...
    Maybe it could be put off. How would Dev
handle these anyway, if he was in Rio? Wait, Brian had said he had
a demon, Titus. He must know teleportation, as Terian did. Devlin
could be anywhere instantly.
    What if Devlin teleported here when I was
working? That simultaneously worried and exhilarated me. Abruptly,
that all changed to worry visualizing the night Devlin arrived at
my back door. If he’d teleported then to my house, he could
certainly do it again. What if he showed up some night Theo wasn’t
home?
    Desire welled up within me. I rummaged in my
purse quickly, and popped another yellow pill. I’d been taking them
at