“But we can alter my future, right?”

“That’s the plan,” she said wistfully. “If you give in to the demon side of yourself, you will destroy everyone around you. You won’t be capable of love or compassion.” Her words sent a shiver down his spine as he remembered the way Ambrose had attacked him. She was right. The last thing he wanted was to become that version of his future.

“What mangy, nasty rat died on top of your head, and why would you keep it there?”

Nick frowned at the angry tone from two booths over. He looked up to see Wren, one of the busboys, trying to clean an unoccupied table that was filled with dishes, while a man with a small group in the booth next to it harassed him. Tall and lean with blond dreadlocks that fell over his face, obscuring most of his features, and all of his turquoise eyes, Wren didn’t appear much older than Nick. Extremely antisocial- as in Wren took it to a whole new level uniquely his own- he seldom spoke to anyone. Rather, he functioned like a ghost, moving ninja-style through the restaurant and doing his job without comment or complaint.

What the moron antagonizing him didn’t know was that Wren was a tigard. Half white tiger and half snow leopard. And like a mighty shinobi, he could strike fast and hard with very lethal accuracy.

Nick held his breath for the bloodshed he was sure was imminent.

“Hey, freak! I’m talking to you,” the customer in the booth behind Wren called out. The man looked to be in his early twenties and beefy enough to back his animosity. If Wren were human. “Are you deaf as well as dumb and grungy?”

His cronies in the booth with him laughed while Wren ignored them. Without so much as twitching an eyebrow, he pulled the empty glasses into his plastic tub and stacked up the small plates.

“Ted,” the overly siliconed woman beside him whimpered in a strident, nasal tone that begged for her to take lessons from Wren’s silence, “have mercy on the poor retard. He is just a busboy, after all. It’s actually nice of them to hire someone who is obviously mentally defective. Everyone should hire the handicapped.”

Nick looked around for his mom who would take the woman’s head off for saying that. He’d been smacked in the back his head by her enough to know better than to say something so vicious. Those lightning fast, out of the blue head whacks also explained a lot of his own mental damage.

“Yeah,” Ted snarled in response, “but that hair is stinking up the place and I’m trying to eat here.” He lobbed a ketchup soaked french fry at Wren. It landed on his white uniform sleeve and slid down it, leaving a long red stain.

Wren went ramrod stiff.

In that moment, Nick saw the tigard in Wren. The way he held himself low and rigid reminded Nick of a cat in the wild targeting its prey before striking.

The tiger lies low not from fear, but for aim.…

Wren blinked, then seemed to calm himself. He wiped down the table, picked up his tub, and moved on.

At least he tried to.

As he walked past the booth, the man shoved him. Wren stumbled and almost dropped the dishes. But at the last minute, true to his tigard genes, he caught his balance and kept the dishes from spilling out of his tub.

“That’s it, boy,” Ted sneered. “Run home to your mama.”

Wren met Nick’s gaze and the pain those words wrought infuriated him. He couldn’t stand to see anyone abused. It didn’t matter that he knew Wren could take care of himself. He wasn’t going to tolerate this and do nothing to stop it.

Climbing over Nekoda, he went to check on his friend. But no sooner had he stood up than the bully shoved Wren again.

Aw, buddy, it’s on … Nick pushed the man back toward his booth. “You need to sit down, shut-up and leave him alone.”

The man raked a sneer over him. “That’s some ego you got there, punk.” He laughed over his shoulder, at his friends. “You like a Chihuahua that thinks it’s a Doberman.” Facing Nick, he sobered and narrowed his eyes with deadly intent on Nick. “Now, you’re the one that needs to sit down and mind your own business before I shut your mouth for you.”

“Nick, let it go,” Kody said from behind him.

The man looked past Nick to where she sat in the booth. “Man, that’s one fine piece of—”

“You better lay off my girl and watch your language around her.”

The man laughed. “Punk, you’re toast. I know karate and am a third-degree black belt.” He punched at Nick.

Then Nick did what he did best.…

CHAPTER 5

Nick launched himself at the man and latched on to him with everything he had. Grunting, the man tried to flip him off his back, then he slammed Nick against the wall, trapping Nick between his steroid enhanced form and the brick. Ted used his body to slam Nick there repeatedly. Nick tightened his hold around the Ted’s neck, trying to find the carotid and cut off his blood flow there like Bubba had shown him.

You don’t gotta be strong, Nick. A little bit of pressure in the right place and you can own anyone.

Still, the man did everything he could to get Nick off him.

“That’s right. Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” Nick said arrogantly. “You might know karate, boy, but I know gorilla, and I’m a level-forty champion in it. Let’s hear it for Diddy Kong! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!” He mimicked the sound of a gorilla as he held on for dear life.

Her eyes filled with an equal mixture of humor and horror, Nekoda kept one hand over her mouth while Wren burst out laughing so hard he had to set his dishpan down before he dropped it.

“Oh my God, Nick! Nick! What are you doing? You don’t even know that man.” His mother came running over to them. “Get off that man’s back. Now!”

Nick hesitated. “Not sure that’s a good idea, Mama. He might kill me if I do.”

“You damn straight, punk! I’m gonna kick your—”

“You ain’t kicking nothing here, boy.”

The man finally stopped trying to buck him off his back as Dev or Remi or one of the quads grabbed Ted by his shirt front and held him still in one beefy paw of a hand. “Slide down, Nick. I’ve got it from here.”

It wasn’t until Nick’s feet were back on the ground and he saw the bow-and-arrow tattoo on Dev’s biceps that he knew which quad had saved him. “Thanks, Dev.”

“No problem. Now let me take out the trash and I’ll be right back to help clean up the mess he made.”

Nick gulped as he met his mother’s furious glower. Dude, don’t leave me. Cherise Gautier might be a tiny little slip of a woman, but she scared the snot out of him. Especially when she eyed him like she could go through him, like she was doing right this very second.

His butt was already doused in gas. She was about to throw it into the fire pit and roast marshmallows over his carcass.

“Mama, I can explain.”

“No. I don’t think you can. I know you can’t.” She let out a sound of supreme exasperation. “You don’t fight, Nick. Not for any reason. You know this. How many times do I have to tell you before you learn to listen? Huh? I raised you better. You’re not an animal to just grab someone and start pounding on them for no reason. What were you thinking? I’ll tell you what you were thinking. Nothing. Nothing at all. And I expect better from you than that. You’re at an age now where they’ll send you to jail for fighting. Do you understand me, boy? Jail. Prison. Just like your daddy.”

She leaned in to whisper harshly. Except her idea of whispering was loud and clear, even over the music playing. “And at my job, no less. Are you trying to get me fired again? You are, aren’t you? You’re not going to be happy until we’re living on the street, eating out of Dumpsters and I have to prostitute myself to feed you. You are grounded until you graduate. You hear me? You’re never getting a car or a license. Ever. You’re too hotheaded for one. You have no business driving a car when you can’t even sit and do your homework without flipping out and attacking an innocent stranger! What? Someone’s going to cut you off in traffic or blow their horn at you. Are you going to drag them out of their car and beat them on the street for it? Are you? You’re just like your father. Violent to your core. You don’t know how to stop yourself. You take everything too far and you overreact without thinking it through or taking a minute to consider the consequences. You’re going to get yourself killed one day because you can’t see past one second of what’s going on.”

With every word she spat at him, and she kept going, and going … and going, he felt like he was being slapped and stomped. Like he was the lowest scum-sucking parasite ever born.

Dev let out a sharp whistle behind her.

Jumping in startled alarm, she turned around to see him.

“Cherise, settle down. You’re giving the poor kid a concussion with that verbal beating. It’s all okay.”

She glared harshly at Nick. “No, Dev, it’s not. He knows better. And—”

“Cherise,” Dev said again, cutting her off. “I was on my way over here to do something a lot more extreme than what he did to that jerk.”

She scowled. “How do you mean?”

“Nick was protecting me,” Wren said in a tone so soft it was barely audible.

Dev nodded. “That dick was insulting Wren and Kody, and when he went for Wren’s back and attacked him, Nick stopped it. Besides, Nick wasn’t beating on him, Cherise.” Dev started laughing. Hard. Which really didn’t help Nick’s deflated ego in the least. “Your boy was hanging on for dear life—like a scared kitten on a wild bronco.”

Oh yeah, just emasculate me on the floor, Dev. Thanks.

Dev kept on laughing. “Damn, to have had that one on camera. We could have made some serious money. It was hilarious.… ‘I know gorilla.’ Priceless, Nick. Just priceless.” Dev laughed until he was coughing from it.

Nick wanted to crawl under something. The only thing that kept him from feeling any worse was that Kody had seen him fight for real and knew he normally did a little better than this. Jumping on someone’s back was only used when he went up against someone who outweighed him by a couple of hundred pounds.

And that was just in the man’s arm weight.

“Thank you, Nick,” Wren said, inclining his head to him. Wren’s pet monkey, Marvin, stuck his head out of Wren’s apron pocket where he must have been sleeping and chattered at Nick as if in approval.

Dev clapped him on the shoulder so hard, Nick stumbled. “You got some serious stones on you, boy. You grow some more, and fill out, and we’ll hire you for bouncing.” Dev kept snickering. “Gorilla,” he muttered again as he wandered back toward the door. “I gotta tell Aimee that one.”

Now that they were alone, except for Kody, who slid back into the booth in an attempt to be invisible, his mom swallowed.

“I’m sorry, baby.”

But Nick was still too raw to listen. She had verbally slapped him—again—in front of everyone, and he was tired of being publicly humiliated for doing a good deed. “No, Ma. You’re not. You do this to me all the time. You make up your mind without bothering to find out any of the facts. You always assume I’m in the wrong, no matter what it is. When I was accused of stealing, you wouldn’t even listen to me tell you what had happened. And even when I forced you to hear it, you called me a liar in front of the man and the cops. You refused to stand up for me. You looked at me then, like you did just now—like I’m your worst disappointment and you’re sorry you kept me. Like I’m nothing. I was just a baby, Ma, and you let them take me all the way to the police station in a squad car. You said it would be good for me to see what happens to criminals—that maybe I’d think twice before I stole something else. I was a scared little kid, Mama. Most of all, I was innocent. I don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful, but I’m a real good kid. All I think about, morning, noon, and night, is taking care of you. Of not letting you down like everyone else has done. I do exactly what you tell me to. I keep my grades up and I work thirty hours a week before and after school. No matter how tired I am or what time it is, I walk you home every time you have to work at night. And I think I’ve earned a little benefit of the doubt from you once in a while. But it don’t matter how much I do that’s right. In your eyes, when it counts most, I’m always wrong.”

Tears choked him, but he wasn’t about to let them show. He was stronger than that. “You know all those fights I’ve gotten into at school, Mama? The ones you have repeatedly reamed me out over? They weren’t for me. I ain’t never had a fight because someone insulted me. I’m tough. I can take it. God, I’m so used to it that it flows over me like water over a duck. What I was defending in those fights was your reputation when they insulted you.”