PREY

Someone was blinking and, whoever it was, he wasn’t alone. Several more sets of eyes appeared in the trees, each pair at least ten feet from the next.

We hadn’t just been sabotaged. We’d been ambushed.

Straightening slowly, I sniffed, wincing when the frigid air pierced my nose, throat and lungs with a thousand microscopic shards of ice. Fortunately, one good whiff was enough.

Strays.

“Three strays at your six o’clock, Faythe,” Vic said, anger threading a cord of danger through his voice as he stared over my shoulder. “No, make that four.” At my back, too? Damn it! “Five more straight ahead.”

I arched one eyebrow at him in question, and he gave me a grim smile. “We don’t stand a chance unarmed.” And there was clearly no time to Shift.

Two serpentine puffs of air floated from one of the stray’s nostrils with each breath. Moonlight shone on his glossy fur. Rage glinted in the reflective surface of his eyes.

Marc stepped closer to the hood and tossed his head, telling me to scoot towards the rear door. “Keep your backs to the vehicle and make them come to you.”

And that’s when the first cat pounced.

Find out more about Rachel Vincent

by visiting mirabooks.co.uk/rachelvincent and read Rachel’s blog at urbanfantasy.blogspot.com

Prey
Rachel Vincent

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Matrice, my editor, without whose amazing suggestion this story would not exist in its current form. Thanks for your patience, and for nudging my creative compass back to true north.

Acknowledgements

Thanks first of all to No.1, who handled almost every single detail of our recent move, so I could finish the rough draft I was working on, as well as the line edits for Prey. Without you to keep track of the details, I would live in utter chaos.

Thanks to Elizabeth Mazer for all her hard work behind the scenes, to the MIRA art department for the amazing cover (my favourite so far!) and to the entire production staff, for turning my little story into an actual book.

Thanks to Miriam Kriss, who handles all the business so I can bury myself in other worlds. To Vicki Pettersson, who kept me accountable during the revisions. And to Jocelynn Drake, who lets me complain.

And thanks most of all to my critique partner, Rinda Elliot, for all the hours spent helping me sort this one out. You keep me working. You keep me writing. You keep me sane.

One

“You planning to get there sometime this century, Vic?” I glanced at my watch, my foot tapping an anxious beat on the floorboard.

Victor Di Carlo shot me a long-suffering smile, then turned back to the road. “Speed limit’s seventy-five, Faythe. I’m doing eighty. But if you think you can get there faster on foot, be my guest.”

But of course, I couldn’t. Not even on four paws. A cheetah can run sixty-five miles an hour, but can’t sustain that speed for long. And I’m no cheetah. So I was stuck drumming my stubby nails on the passenger-seat armrest in Vic’s Suburban as it stubbornly maintained a speed I considered unacceptable.

“Relax.” Vic flicked on the left blinker, then moved the SUV smoothly out of the right lane to pass a lumbering semi. “We’ll get there on schedule, and Marc will be waiting.”

I nodded, locking and unlocking the passenger-side door until he glared at me. “Sorry.”

“Jeez, Faythe, you act like you haven’t seen him in weeks,” Ethan said, and I twisted in my seat to see him roll his eyes from the back row, his usual good-humored grin firmly in place. He was the youngest of my four brothers—only two years my elder—and the one most likely to beat me up in training, then bring ice for my bruises. “How long has it been?”

I stared out my window at empty fields and winter-bare trees growing dim in the late-afternoon light. “Nine weeks, tomorrow.” A lot had happened since Marc had been exiled, and the most notable example lay sleeping in the seat behind me.

Manx’s baby. Des. The two-week-old was fastened into a reclined, backward-facing car seat on the bench next to his mother. Who somehow managed to look disarmingly beautiful, even with drool trailing from her open mouth. Since the baby came, she caught her z’s when she could. Whenever he was quiet. As did the rest of us.

It turns out sensitive cat hearing comes with a serious downside.

In the past two months, Manx had given birth, and Kaci—the wild teenage tabby we’d taken in—had mostly settled into life at the ranch, though so far she’d refused to Shift. November had blown leaves from the trees, December had brought a rare Texas snowstorm, and the eighth day of January had crowned it all with an even less common and more beautiful layer of thick ice, which had yet to fully melt.

But I had not seen Marc. Not even once, in all those weeks.

Vic grinned at me for a moment before turning back to the traffic. “And I suppose it’s the stimulating conversation you miss, right?”

“La-la-la!” Ethan sang. He slouched in his seat and stuffed earbuds into his ears to block out the response he might not want to hear from his sister.

“Right now, I’d listen to anything he has to say, so long as I get to hear it in person.” Sighing, I snatched a paper cup from the drink holder and downed the last of my 7-Eleven coffee. It was cold. As I dropped the cup into the trash can wedged between the seats, Vic’s cell phone rang. He leaned to the right and dug it from his left hip pocket, then flipped it open without swerving an inch. I probably would have put us in the ditch.

“Hello?”

“Vic.” It was my dad. We could all hear him perfectly well, except for Manx, who was now snoring delicately, if such a thing was possible. “Your father came through for me. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

Vic’s sigh was audible, and his face suddenly drained of tension I hadn’t even realized it held. He smiled as the Suburban soared past another eighteen-wheeler. “I never doubted it.” But the relief in his eyes said otherwise. He’d been worried. We all had.

Springs squealed over the line—Greg Sanders leaning back in his desk chair. He’d probably called as soon as he got the news. “Remind Faythe to deliver my message to your family, please,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.

“I know, Daddy.”

My father chuckled. “Drive carefully, and let me know when you get there.”

“Will do.” Vic was still grinning like a clown when he hung up, and I doubted he’d even heard what he was agreeing to. Fortunately, I had.

“So, that’s three now, right?” I twisted in my seat to look at Ethan, who’d turned off the music and was no longer feigning sleep.

The backseat groaned as he searched for a more comfortable position. “Yeah. Uncle Rick and Ed Taylor.” Whose daughters both owed their lives to our Pride. I’d freed my cousin Abby after we were both kidnapped by a jungle stray intending to sell us as breeders, then we’d caught and killed that same stray before he could snatch Carissa Taylor. Their fathers were understandably loyal to mine. “And now Bert.”

Umberto Di Carlo—Vic’s dad—was one of my father’s oldest friends. We’d been counting on his support, but were far from sure we’d get it. After all, politics could uproot entire family trees, to say nothing of friendships.

Nine weeks ago I’d been acquitted—barely—of infecting my college boyfriend and then killing him in self-defense. On the last day of my trial—the day after Marc was exiled—Calvin Malone had made a formal challenge to my father’s leadership, petitioning to have him removed as head of the Territorial Council. Though he remained our Alpha, my dad had been temporarily suspended from his position of authority over the other council members, pending an official vote by all ten Alphas. That vote was scheduled for the first of February—two weeks away.

Since his suspension, my father and Malone had been fighting—figuratively—for a commitment of support from each of their peers.

My uncle had thrown his weight behind us immediately, and Edward Taylor had followed suit a week later. But our Pride’s other allies had asked for time to consider. To weigh their options. Their hesitance stung, but it made sense. However they voted, their decisions would have an irreversible effect on the council, and on the werecat community at large. After all, most of them had sons serving in Prides on both sides of the conflict. Brothers living in territories loyal to Malone. Daughters or sisters married to toms participating in the coup. I was lucky that three of my brothers—Michael, Owen, and Ethan—had no loyalties to anyone else. As for my brother Ryan, well, the less said about him the better.

The waiting was hard on Vic, but it was nothing compared to the effect the whole thing was having on our fellow enforcer Jace, whose stepfather had organized the attempt to unseat my dad. Jace felt personally responsible for Calvin Malone’s betrayal, though he could have done nothing to stop it.

“What about Malone?” I asked, doing a mental tally of the other Alphas.

Ethan pulled his earphones from his ears and wound them around one hand. “Last I heard, he has three votes, too. Milo Mitchell, Wes Gardner, and Paul Blackwell.”

Mitchell’s son, Kevin, had been kicked out of our Pride four months earlier for repeatedly helping a stray sneak into the south-central territory. Gardner was irate over our “failure” to avenge his brother Jamey’s death at Manx’s hands. And as far as we could tell, Paul Blackwell was siding against us because he legitimately objected to my father’s equal-opportunity approach to leadership. Apparently the saying about an old dog’s inability to learn new tricks held true for old cats, as well, and though Blackwell—unlike Malone—didn’t seem to hate women and strays, neither did he envision a place for them among the community’s leaders.

That left only two undecided Alphas: Nick Davidson and Jerald Pierce—another fellow enforcer’s father. And with both sides now scrambling to claim those votes, one thing was clear: the fight was about to get ugly.

“Parker’s dad will come through.” Vic sounded much more confident than I felt. “That’ll give us four.” But we needed Davidson’s vote, too. Four votes would only lock the proceedings in a tie, and we needed a clear victory. Otherwise, even if my father managed to hold on to his position, the peace would never last.

“How much longer?” I asked, my hand clenched around the car door handle.

“Our exit’s up next.” Vic nodded at the sign ahead, advertising food and gas in one mile.

About time! After hours on the road and too many cups of coffee to count…

I turned in my seat to see Ethan sitting up straight now and shrugging into his jacket. Manx was still asleep, her long black ringlets draping the back of the seat and the front of her blouse. She was the very picture of peace and happiness, of maternal bliss, in spite of very little rest and the unpleasant reason for our trip.

Des was born on the last day of 2008, which would have given Manx an extra tax deduction for the year—if she were a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant. But she was neither, which also meant she couldn’t board a plane. Which is how Vic, Ethan, and I wound up driving her from our ranch in eastern Texas to the outskirts of Atlanta, where Vic’s dad—and my father’s newest ally—was hosting Manx’s hearing.

I’d volunteered for the transport—normally a very dull assignment—because we had to drive through the free territory to get to Atlanta. Marc was in the free territory.

And in minutes, he’d be in my arms.

“Manx, wake up!” Leaning over the armrest, I shoved the bottom of the center bench seat hard enough to jostle the tabby, but careful not to brush her leg. She didn’t like to be touched. Considering the abuse she’d suffered, I couldn’t blame her.

Her eyes fluttered open, and in a single blink she banished the sleep stupor from her expression, replacing it with an instant alertness I envied. Followed by an initial, panicked search for her child, as if someone had stolen him while she slept. And that’s exactly what she was afraid of.

When she was still pregnant, we’d all heard her scream at night, crying in her sleep. The first few times, my mother had tried to wake her, but my father insisted she stop before she got a broken nose for her efforts. Fortunately, the dreams had ended when the baby came, and Manx insisted he stay in the bed with her. She said he slept better like that, but I couldn’t help thinking she was the one who really benefited. As did the rest of us, from the peaceful silence.

Manx relaxed when her eyes found Des, still asleep in his car seat. She pushed hair back from her face and looked up. “This is Mississippi?”

“Yup.” Vic flicked the right blinker on and veered onto the off-ramp as I settled back into my seat. I ignored the restaurants we passed, focusing on the Conoco station at the end of a strip of convenience stores.

By all accounts, Marc had settled into his new life as well as could be expected. He’d found a job and an isolated rental house, and was slowly carving out an existence for himself in the human world—a world that no longer included me. At least in person. But we spoke on the phone almost daily, and I’d even talked him through a partial Shift a month earlier. Though I’d only been ordered to teach my fellow Pride cats the partial shift, I was proud to say that Marc Ramos, my favorite stray, was the first tom to accomplish it.

Evidently he held more than enough suppressed anger to trigger the facial transformation. Not a surprise.

My eyes scanned the crowded lot. We’d scheduled a rest stop at Natchez, just beyond the Mississippi border, where Marc was supposed to join us and escort us across the entire free territory, including an overnight stay in the middle of Mississippi. But I didn’t see his car. Disappointed, I clenched my hands in my lap until my fingers ached.

Vic turned right into the parking lot, then pulled into an empty space at the rear. I started to get out and look for Marc inside the store, but Vic laid one hand on my arm as soon as I got the door open. “Can you stay with them for a minute? I have to pee.”

I glanced at Vic, then back at Ethan. Normally, my youngest brother would have been enough security for one postpartum tabby and an infant. But the free zone was unregulated, and Manx was skittish at best, even when she wasn’t about to be tried for murder, so we were trying to give her double coverage at all times. “Yeah, I’ll stay. But hurry up.” He smiled in thanks as I closed my door, then shut his own and made his way to the front of the building.

Des made a mewling noise behind me, and I twisted in my seat to see Manx bring the baby up to one exposed breast, where he latched on eagerly. The mewling became a soft sucking sound as he began to nurse. Again. Did that kid ever do anything but eat? Even with his androgynous baby face, I could tell the little monster was a boy by his appetite alone.

Still, I couldn’t help but smile as I turned to scan the parking lot out the driver-side window. The little guy was a true survivor. Just like his mother.

“Looking for me?” Something tapped on the glass behind me, and I jumped, then whirled fast enough to hit my head on the sun visor. Marc stood outside the window, looking warm and welcoming in a worn brown leather jacket and an old pair of jeans. His smile widened as I fumbled for the door handle. But in my excitement I couldn’t find it, so he opened it for me, nearly ripping the door from its hinges.

My feet never hit the ground. One moment I was in the front seat, the next I was in his arms, my legs wrapped around his waist, his mouth soft but insistent beneath mine. People stared—I saw them over Marc’s shoulder— but then they smiled and went about their business, except for a few kids, who giggled at our display.

Evidently reunions look much the same in any species.

“Your hair grew,” Marc whispered, and the warmth of his breath against my ear gave me chills that had nothing to do with the ice half coating the parking lot.

“You cut yours.” I ran my hand through cold, short curls.

He put me down, but still held me close. “Yeah, I figured with the new life, why not try a new look? What do you think?”

Grinning, I stepped back for a better look. “Not bad.” Marc would look good in an orange clown wig, if he decided to wear one. Still, though he’d only lost two inches, I couldn’t help missing the rest of his hair. But nowhere near as badly as I’d missed him.

I was threading my arm through his when a familiar scent caught my attention. A stray scent, and—oddly enough—one I knew.

Daniel Painter.

I froze, and my grip tightened around Marc’s arm as my pulse raced. I scanned the parking lot for the stray who’d ratted Manx out in exchange for a chance to join our Pride. If he could keep his nose clean in the free zone for a year.

Keeping his nose clean did not include picking a fight with a delegation of Pride cats as soon as we crossed the border. And there was no way in hell that his presence in that particular parking lot was a coincidence…

Two

“What’s wrong?” Marc’s gold-flecked brown eyes darkened as he frowned, glancing around in search of whatever had set me on edge.

“Dan Painter’s here.” My fingers brushed his leather-clad arm as I turned, trying to glance around the parking lot inconspicuously.

A flicker of annoyance flashed across Marc’s expression. “I know. I can’t shake him.”

I felt my eyes go wide and gave up the search for Painter to stare at Marc. “He’s tailing you?”

“Sort of.” Marc flushed, and I knew there was more to the story than he wanted to tell me.

“And you’re just…letting him?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “He’s not actually causing any trouble, so I don’t feel justified pounding on him. He just hangs around and asks questions about the Pride, and the way we—you guys—do things. Where we come from, how we control bloodlust, why there are so few tabbies, why there aren’t any strays in the Pride. Well, not anymore, anyway.”

Marc was a stray—a werecat born human, and later infected through a bite or scratch from a werecat in feline form—and he remained the only stray ever admitted into a Pride. Even if he was no longer officially a part of that Pride.

“The guy never shuts up. Seriously, he talks all day long.”

I smiled. Kaci had a very similar habit, and as much as I liked her, I’d started to value long-distance assignments simply for the peace and quiet. Surely his job provided the same relief. “At least he can’t bug you at work, right?”

Marc’s flush deepened. “He joined my crew last month. We frame houses together now. Every day.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s so cute! You have a sidekick. A little mini-me.” Though if memory served, Painter wasn’t much smaller than Marc.

“Whatever. Forget about Painter.” His gaze flicked behind me to the back passenger-side door, which my brother had just opened and stepped through. “Hey, Ethan, how’s monogamy treating you?”

For the first time in his life, the family Casanova had been dating the same girl for four straight months. Our mother was thrilled, and for once she was fantasizing about a wedding that wouldn’t involve me in a veil.

“It’s like eating white rice for every meal,” Ethan said, right on cue.

Marc grinned. “Hey, if you’re eating every day, I’d say you’re a lucky man.” His words were for Ethan, but his eyes were on me. Apparently he missed my…rice.

Ethan shrugged, unmoved. “I guess. How’s the construction business treating you?”

Marc scruffed one hand through his newly shorn curls. “It’s like swinging a hammer eight hours a day for minimum wage.” And just like that, they were all caught up.

Still in the SUV, the baby hiccuped, and I glanced over my brother’s shoulder to see Manx buttoning her blouse. Then she climbed out of the car and lifted Des from his seat, wrapping him gently in a blue knit blanket.

“How are you, Manx?” Marc stuffed his hands into his pockets to show the tabby he had no intention of touching her. We’d discovered that approach—especially coming from the toms—kept her fairly relaxed.

“Good, thank you.” Her exotic accent—she was Venezuelan by birth—made her statement sound striking, rather than common. She beamed a brilliant smile at him and held the baby slightly away from her body, wordlessly inviting him to peek.

“Wow.” Marc’s eyes went softer than I’d ever seen them as he stared at Des, and I wasn’t sure whether I should be amused or worried. “Do I get an introduction?” he finally asked.

Manx’s smile widened. “This is Desiderio. He is my heart’s desire.”

“We call him Des,” I added, ever helpful.

“He’s beautiful. May I?” Marc pulled one hand from his pocket and mimed stroking the baby’s cheek.

Manx hesitated, and her smile froze for an instant. Then she took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Of course.”

Marc ran the back of one rough finger down the child’s face. When he reached the corner of Des’s mouth, the baby turned toward his touch, lips pursed and ready to suckle. Marc laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“I see you’ve met our latest addition,” Vic said, and I looked up to see him walking toward us from the convenience store, a white plastic sack in one hand.

“He’s amazing,” Marc said, and on the edge of my vision, Manx’s posture relaxed a little more.

“Yeah, he is.” Vic set his bag on the front passenger seat and glanced at the baby with that gaga look most toms assumed when confronted with members of the next generation. Yet more proof that propagation of the species was indeed their biggest goal in life.

Vic shut the car door and embraced his former field partner in a masculine, back-thumping greeting. Then he stepped away and glanced from me to Marc as Ethan settled a long coat over Manx’s shoulders, careful not to touch her. “You’re not going to believe who I ran into inside.” He tossed his head toward the building.

“Dan Painter.” I grinned.

Vic huffed. “You smelled him?”

I nodded. “He and Marc have…bonded.”

Vic’s brow rose in amusement, but a dark look from Marc kept him from pressing for details. “This cold can’t be good for the baby,” he said instead, still grinning at Marc. “Let’s get done here and get on the road.”

Marc and I flanked Manx on the way into the building, where he waited outside the ladies’ room while she and I went inside. She changed the baby’s diaper on a fold-down table while I made use of one of the stalls. Then she asked if I could hold him while she relieved herself.

“Oh, I don’t know.” My heart thudded in panic. I’d literally never held a baby, and whatever idiot had said all women possessed some kind of maternal instinct was wrong. “Can’t you just…put him down for a couple of minutes?”

“On the ground?” Manx glared at me, and I shrugged helplessly. She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I will ask one of the men.”

I sighed heavily. “Give him here.” I could not let Marc know I was…hesitant to hold a baby. He’d never let me live it down. “What do I do with him?” I held my arms out football-style, as I’d seen my mother do often enough over the past two weeks.

Manx placed the baby gently in my arms, settling his little head securely into the crook of my elbow. “Nothing. He is sleeping. Hold him for just two minutes.”

I nodded, afraid to move anything but my head for risk of waking Des.

Manx hesitated, her hand on the swinging metal door. Then she shot me a smile that couldn’t quite relieve the nervous lines spanning her forehead and stepped into the stall.

I stared at the baby, taking in each detail up close for the first time. He was unbelievably small. Like a doll, but more fragile. His cheeks were round and red, his nose sprinkled with tiny, colorless bumps. His hands and feet were wrapped in the blanket, but a wisp of straight black hair showed above his forehead.

I saw no trace of Luiz in him, thank goodness.

But then, I saw no trace of Manx, either. I saw only a baby, cute in a red, squirmy kind of way, and perfectly tolerable when he was sleeping.

“Thank you.” The stall door swung open and Manx stepped out. She washed her hands, then took her baby back, and only then did the worry lines fade from around her mouth.

On our way through the store, we passed Dan Painter in line at the counter, holding a big bag of chips, a handful of Slim Jims, and a two-liter of Coke. I tapped him on the shoulder as I passed, and when his eyes met mine, he nearly choked on the chunk he’d already torn from one of the meat sticks.

I laughed. He obviously remembered our first meeting, when I’d knocked him unconscious with one swing. I like to leave a good first impression.

In the parking lot, Manx buckled Des into his car seat in the SUV, which Vic had already refueled and warmed up. Ethan had claimed the front passenger seat, which was fine with me. I was riding with Marc.

Squeezing into his tiny, low-slung car felt weird after weeks of riding in Vic’s Suburban, but it was a good kind of weird. Familiar and easy. And sorely missed.

We pulled from the lot first, and Vic followed as the last rays of daylight deepened to a dramatic red and orange. Then darkness descended, and Marc and I were together—and alone—for the first time in months.

Unfortunately, we were also on the road, which made anything more than conversation impossible. Or at least impractical.

“So, how’s your dad holding up?” Marc twined his hand around mine on the center console as outside, small buildings and restaurants gave way to open fields, then long stretches of woods.

“Okay, I guess.” I shrugged. “He’s pretty quiet lately. I don’t think he wants anyone to know how hard this whole sucker punch from Malone has been on him. The council’s completely fractured. Manx’s hearing should be interesting, considering the current coup-in-progress.” And though I would never admit it aloud for fear of sounding like a coward, I was greatly relieved that my responsibility to Kaci meant I couldn’t stay for the trial. Hanging out in a room full of angry Alphas did not appeal to my sense of adventure. Or my survival instinct.

Marc changed lanes, and I watched in the side-view mirror as Vic followed his lead. “Who’s on the tribunal this time?”

“Taylor, Mitchell, and Pierce.” Fortunately, that particular combination of Alphas gave Manx a decent shot at a fair trial. Taylor had thrown his weight behind my father, Mitchell was firmly in place behind Malone, and Parker’s dad was still sticking to his Switzerland routine. But on the downside, getting those three to agree on anything—much less a verdict—would not be easy.

“And Wes Gardner’s going to be there, of course.” Because his brother was one of Manx’s victims.

“I assume Michael’s going in a professional capacity.”

“Yeah.” While werecat law didn’t mirror human law exactly, as an attorney, my oldest brother was by far the most qualified to assist Manx in her defense. He’d be flying to Atlanta the following day, shortly after his wife—a human woman and honest-to-goodness runway model named Holly—left for a photo shoot in Italy. Michael was lucky his wife traveled so much, and that she stayed too busy to ask many questions. She knew nothing of our werecat existence. Theirs was definitely an odd marriage, but it seemed to fit them both well.

Marc glanced in the rearview mirror, then briefly at me before turning his eyes back toward the road. “How’s Kaci? Still refusing to Shift?”

“Yeah. I’m starting to really worry about her. She’s tired all the time, and listless, and she only perks up when I let her watch me spar. She seems to think if she learns to defend herself in human form, she’ll never have to Shift again.”

“What’s the doc say?”

I sighed. “Her symptoms are similar to chronic fatigue and depression. And if she doesn’t give in to her feline form soon, her body will start shutting down a little at a time, until she’s too weak to move. He says refusing to Shift will eventually kill her. And by ‘eventually,’ he means soon.”

“Damn.” Marc looked surprised for a moment, then concern dragged his mouth into a deep frown.

“I know. I feel like I’m failing her.” I loosened my seat belt and twisted in the bucket seat to face him. “I mean, I’m supposed to be taking care of her, and instead I’m letting her wither up and die. She deserves better than that, but I can’t convince her to Shift. She won’t even listen when I bring it up anymore.”

“So what are you going to do?”

I shrugged, scowling out the window at the ice-glazed power lines running along the highway. I couldn’t get used to that question; until recently, I was rarely allowed to make my own choices, much less someone else’s. But Kaci wasn’t old enough or mature enough to choose to suffer. She was my responsibility.

“I don’t know. But I’m not going to let her waste away. She’s fought too hard for survival to give up now. Especially over something as simple as this.”

Unfortunately, Shifting wasn’t simple for her. The last time she’d been in cat form, she’d killed four people, including her own mother and sister. But that kid was strong. And stubborn enough to make sure nothing like that ever happened again, even if she had to kill herself to prevent it.

The rest of the Pride was counting on my strength and stubbornness to override hers. In the beginning, I’d thought it would work. But after nine weeks with no success, I wasn’t so sure.

“Dr. Carver said to call him if she hasn’t done it by this time next week. He’s going to try to force her Shift.” With an intravenous cocktail of adrenaline and a couple of other drugs.

Marc’s head swiveled to face me, eyebrows high in surprise. “Into cat form? Is that possible?”

“We’re not sure. In theory, it shouldn’t be much different from forcing someone into human form.” Which we had to do occasionally, in order to question uncooperative strays, or stop them from shredding anyone who came near. “But in practice…well, no one’s ever tried it. I hate to experiment on a child, but she’s really leaving us no choice.”

“Have you told her?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed my forehead, fighting off frustration. I hadn’t seen Marc in months, and I wanted these few hours together to pass pleasantly. “But she doesn’t think we’ll do it. She says she’d rather be tired for the rest of her life than risk hurting someone in cat form.”

“Yeah, but would she rather be dead?”

I closed my eyes and let my head fall against the headrest. “Honestly, I think she would. She’s horrified by what happened last time, and we still can’t get her to talk about it. But I’m hoping that if I can—”

My eyes flew open as Marc’s car jerked beneath us and started to sputter.

“What’s that?” I sat straight in my seat, staring out the windshield at nothing but darkness, broken by two overlapping cones of light from the headlights.

He didn’t answer, but his hands tightened around the already misshapen wheel—a casualty of many past temper fits—and his frown deepened.

The car sputtered again, then began to shake, like it was trying to die. Steam rolled from beneath the hood, white as snow against the cold, black night.

Marc veered slowly onto the right shoulder, glancing back and forth between the windshield and the rearview mirror. I twisted to watch as Vic came to a stop behind us. We got out, crunching on a layer of ice, and Vic joined us at the front of the car, where Marc pulled a penlight from his pocket and popped the hood. He shined the light on parts I didn’t recognize, grunting in frustration. Then he knelt and shimmied under the car, in spite of the frigid concrete at his back.

Seconds later he emerged, scowling. “My radiator hose is slashed.”

“Son of a bitch!” Vic muttered, as Ethan stepped out of the SUV, followed by Manx, clutching the bundled baby to her chest. “You can’t drive long like that. No more than ten, fifteen miles. Had to’ve happened at the gas station.”

Marc nodded in agreement, then his eyes met mine, his face lit unevenly by the headlights. “We’ll pile into Vic’s SUV with everyone else, and I’ll have mine towed.”

Obviously, that wasn’t how I’d intended our reunion to go, but it could have been much worse, especially considering that some asshole had sabotaged Marc’s car. What if they’d cut the brake line instead?

Pissed now, I jerked open the passenger-side door and leaned in to grab the sodas Marc had bought at the Conoco. And that’s when I saw them. Two pinpoints of red light in the trees across the street. Those lights went out, then appeared again a second later.

Eyes. Cat eyes, reflecting the little available light. Someone was blinking, and whoever it was, he wasn’t alone. Several more sets of eyes appeared in the trees, each pair at least ten feet from the next.

My stomach twisted in on itself, churning around my road-trip munchies in fear. We hadn’t just been sabotaged. We’d been fucking ambushed.

Straightening slowly, I sniffed, wincing when the frigid air pierced my nose, throat, and lungs with a thousand microscopic shards of ice. Fortunately, one good whiff was enough.

Strays.

“Um…guys?” I hissed as the first dark form slunk out of the woods and into the moonlit night, uncommon confidence in each silent step.

“We see them,” Marc whispered, and I glanced over the roof to find him backing slowly toward the trunk of his car.

“Three strays at your six o’clock, Faythe,” Vic said, anger threading a cord of danger through his voice as he stared over my shoulder. “No, make that four.”

At my back, too? Damn it! “Five more straight ahead.” I nodded at the trees across the street and stepped to the side so I could close the car door.

Gravel crunched on my left, and my brother spoke from his position near the passenger side of the Suburban. “This makes no sense. Strays are loners.”

Yet several had united to fight us in Montana two months earlier. This new trend made me nervous. As did the cats creeping slowly toward us—from all directions. Each in cat form. At a glance I counted eleven of them now, and there were only five of us, even if Manx could fight holding a baby. Which she could not.

“Manx, get in the car with Des,” Marc ordered. Manx climbed through Vic’s rear driver-side door without a word and shoved it closed.

Okay, make that four of us.

“Faythe?” Marc had his trunk open now, and he held something out to me. I inched toward him with my arm extended, sliding for a moment before I could steady myself on the thin layer of ice beneath my boots. Something long, cold and hard hit my palm—a shovel, still caked with dried dirt.

I arched one eyebrow at him in question, and he gave me a grim smile. “We don’t stand a chance unarmed.” And there was clearly no time to Shift. I shivered from the cold, but knew I’d soon be sweating from exertion.

Marc tossed a second shovel to Vic, who caught it one-handed, then he pulled a small ax from the trunk and wrapped both hands around the twelve-inch rubber grip. He hefted it briefly, as if considering, then handed it to Ethan, who’d come to a stop on his left.

“You ready for this?” Marc asked, pulling a crowbar from the trunk for himself before slamming it shut.

“Looking forward to it.” Ethan removed his earphones from around his neck with his free hand. He wound them around his MP3 player and slid both into his front pocket, then gave the ax an experimental swing. “What, no samurai?” He swung the ax again, then shrugged, green eyes glinting in bleak humor. “I guess this’ll do.”

“Okay, let’s go.” Marc stalked toward the SUV and stopped at the driver-side door. “Manx?” He tapped on the window, and her head appeared between the seats. “Don’t come out, no matter what.”

She nodded.

Marc checked to make sure the keys were still in the ignition—they were—then turned to me, his features severe in the harsh, reddish glare of his own taillights. “If this goes bad, get them out of here. Don’t look back, just drive straight to the ranch.” I started to protest, but he ignored me. “I’m serious, Faythe. Get them back safely. I’ll haunt your ass till the day you die if you let something happen to that baby.”

I nodded, more alarmed by the tone of his voice than by the cats, the nearest of which was now only a couple of feet away, slinking across the near lane eight feet to my right. Two serpentine puffs of air floated from his nostrils with each breath. Moonlight shone on his glossy fur. Rage glinted in the reflective surface of his eyes.

Marc stepped closer to the hood and tossed his head, telling me to scoot toward the rear door. “Keep your backs to the vehicle and make them come to you.”

And that’s when the first cat pounced.

Three

The furry bastard flew at Marc, claws bared, hissing through a mouthful of pointy feline teeth. He ripped four jagged slashes in the sleeve of Marc’s jacket. Marc slammed the rounded corner of the crowbar into the side of the cat’s head on the upswing. I swung my shovel like a golf club and hit the stray’s right flank. A hideous yowl splintered the frigid night. An instant later, Marc buried the short end of the crowbar in the top of the cat’s skull.

The body hit the ground at Marc’s feet. He wrenched the crowbar free with a wet sucking sound and was already swinging again when the next cat approached, screeching in the back of his throat, fur standing on end.

Another stray leapt at me head-on. My shovel met him in midair. His skull rang the metal blade like a cymbal, and he scampered back to regroup, whimpering, claws scraping the ice-slick concrete with each step.

A series of grunts, growls, and hisses on my left told me Ethan was holding his own, and from the rear of the Suburban came the crunch of a shovel hitting pavement, as Vic kept two more strays occupied.

After the initial surge, none of us had a chance to help anyone else. The cats had us outnumbered three-to-one, and only the car at our backs kept us from being surrounded and dispatched in short order—right there on the side of the road, in plain sight, should anyone happen upon us.

And no sooner had that thought passed through my head than two broad beams of white light appeared on the road, in the direction we’d come from. Headlights. Humans were coming. The fight was about to get unbelievably, irreversibly bad.

But instead of racing past—which I assume most humans would do when confronted with a pack of big black cats attacking a group of stranded motorists—the car slowed as it approached, nearly blinding us with the glare from its headlights.

I blinked and swung wildly as my eyes watered, missing my target completely. Sharp teeth sank into my left arm, and I kicked out blindly. My steel-toed boots connected with an underbelly, bouncing off what could only have been a rib. I clenched my jaw to keep from screaming as the cat tried to back away without letting go of my arm.

Grunting with effort, I swung the shovel one-handed. It thunked into something hard, and the stray released my arm. A secondary dose of relief came when the car pulled forward, removing his high beams from my retinas. But he didn’t take off. Instead, the driver pulled onto the shoulder in front of Marc’s car and killed his engine.

What kind of dumbass human is this? I thought, batting at the next cat, though my hands were so cold I could barely grip the shovel. The stranger would either come out with a gun and start shooting, or he’d get himself killed. Maybe both. Either way, those of us who survived would have one hell of a mess to clean up.

A car door slammed, and footsteps crunched into ice and loose rocks on the side of the road. “What the fuck is this?” Dan Painter shouted over the cacophony of yowls, hisses, and snarls. He stomped toward us carrying the biggest hammer I’d ever seen, and suddenly I understood: Marc’s sidekick had followed us. And for once I didn’t mind being tracked.

“Where’s Manx and the kid?” Painter demanded as he passed the trunk of Marc’s car, thus far completely unmolested by the other strays.

“In the Suburban.” Marc grunted, swinging the crowbar hard enough to sink the business end into the side of an unfortunate stray, just below his rib cage. “You just gonna stand there?” He ripped the metal free and the cat snarled, lashing out with a paw full of unsheathed claws.

“Just figurin’ how best to jump in.” An instant later Painter exploded into motion, swinging the hammer like a baseball bat. His first blow hit the rump of the cat Marc was fighting, and sent him sprawling. His second shot knocked the legs out from under the cat who’d replaced the first one. Then two more strays jumped Painter, and he was fighting alongside us, full force.

“What the hell kind of hammer is that?” I asked, panting from exertion as I swung for another blow.

“FatMax Xtreme framing hammer,” Painter said, posing for a moment like a salesman in an infomercial, as the cat in front of him collapsed. “Precision balanced—feel the difference.” With that, he took aim at another stray’s leg. Bone crunched and the unfortunate knee bent backward. The cat collapsed, screeching nonstop on the slick pavement.

I swung my shovel again and again, but no sooner had I knocked one cat back than another stepped up, snarling and slashing at me. Three cats lay unmoving on the side of the road by then, but more had replaced them—there were at least fifteen strays still up and slashing. Where the hell were they coming from, and why were they working together? I’d never heard of such a large band of strays, and a unified attack against Pride cats was completely unprecedented.

Well, except for that time in the Montana mountains…

I braced my feet for another blow and sent one cat sprawling. Another pounced at me before I could reset my swing, and his claws tore through denim and into my thigh, just above my right knee.

Pain ripped through my leg, and I knew from the powerful scent and the disturbing warmth that my blood was flowing freely. I kicked instinctively with my left leg, and followed that with another blow from the shovel, this one powered by anger, as well as fear. And to my extreme satisfaction, that bastard hobbled away from me with a dislocated shoulder, mewling like a newborn kitten.

Meow, meow, motherfucker.

But then the previous cat was back. I swung my shovel. He ducked, plastering himself to the concrete. I heaved the shovel over my head, preparing to use the blade like a giant ice pick. But he lunged forward before I could bring it down. His jaw snapped closed over my right ankle, and he pulled. I fell on my ass, and my teeth clacked together. The cat tugged again, and I slid several inches across the icy asphalt. I screamed, shock and pain momentarily washing not only logic, but training from my mind.

Then Des screeched from inside the car, and my focus came roaring back. I sucked in a deep, painfully cold breath and fumbled over my head for the driver-side door handle with my empty fist, praying Manx had locked it. She had. My new grip halted my slide across the concrete.

Finally stable, I kicked the cat’s skull with my free foot. Then I smacked him with the shovel. The stray released my leg, and I scrambled to my feet using the shovel as a crutch. I kicked him again, this time in the jaw, already caked with my blood. Then I settled my weight onto my good leg and resumed fighting, ignoring the pain as best I could. On my left, Ethan dropped to one knee, swinging his ax up. The blade caught a stray beneath his jaw, and almost cleaved the cat’s head from his neck. The body hit the ground with a nauseating two-part thud—first the torso, then the nearly detached skull—and Ethan was in motion again. I would have been impressed, if I’d had time to think about it.

But I didn’t, because Vic screamed on my brother’s other side, near the end of the car. Then he stumbled into view and fell to the gravel on his rump. The cat he’d been fighting pounced, driving his shoulders to the ground.

“Ethan!” I shouted in midswing, because my brother was closest. He glanced at me, then followed my gaze to Vic.

“I’m on it.” He lunged to the left, swinging even as he dove for Vic’s shovel. His blow glanced off the nearest cat, but he came up with a weapon in each hand. Swinging wildly now, Ethan knocked the cat off Vic with the shovel, then threw the ax end over end so fast I could hardly trace it. The blade thunked into the side of another cat, who dropped to the ground, chest heaving and pouring blood.

Ethan picked Vic up and nearly tore open the rear door of the Suburban—that one was unlocked, thankfully. Then he shoved Vic into the cargo compartment and slammed the door. As soon as he turned, another stray was on him.

“Marc!” I shouted, aiming my shovel at an anonymous feline torso. “Vic’s hurt.”

“I know.” He knocked his opponent out with a blow to the head, then kicked a cat about to charge me. There were only half a dozen strays left standing now, and most of those were hurt. We’d won, even outnumbered and in human form. Or so I thought.

A deep bleating roar from the woods across the road caught my attention. Reinforcements. We were exhausted, and the fucking strays had backup. From the sound of it, the troops were still a mile away or so, but when they arrived, we’d be screwed. Or worse—dead.

Determined to take my break while I could, I set my shovel on the ground and leaned against the side of the car, frigid against my back, even through my jacket. My sore arms hung at my sides and I took several deep breaths, letting the cold reinvigorate me. The air smelled like blood and pine, an oddly festive combination.

My arm throbbed where that bastard had bit me, and though frozen blood crusted the rip in my pants, my leg had stopped bleeding. But it hurt with every move I made.

Marc watched me inspect my wounds, his eyes shining in the glare from the Suburban’s headlights. He glanced from me to the woods, where the reinforcements presumably raced toward us. “Faythe, get in the car,” he said over the disharmonious yowls of the injured cats. His eyes never left the trees, though he was breathing hard and bleeding from countless gashes. “With you and Manx gone, they’ll have no reason to keep fighting. Ethan, get them out of here. Painter and I will clean up, and I’ll call you when we leave.”

“I’m not leaving you behind!” I shouted, and only when my breath puffed up in front of my eyes did I realize I could no longer feel my fingers. Or my nose. I’d cooled down too quickly after that first round and was now getting stiff.

Marc nodded to Ethan, who sidestepped an injured but still hissing cat and pulled open the driver-side door. He shoved me inside before I could protest, then climbed in after me.

“Buckle up,” he ordered, already sliding the gearshift into Drive. “If you go through the windshield, I’m not stopping for you.” He swerved around several motionless feline forms glinting with moonlight and blood. We slid for a moment on ice, and I whacked my head on the window, then gravel crunched when we pulled off the shoulder and back onto the road. As we drove away, I saw Marc and Painter walking backward toward the trees on our side of the road, each pulling two dead cats by the tails.

“We can’t just leave them,” I insisted, as Manx crouched over Des in the car seat behind me.

Ethan sighed, eyes on the rearview mirror. “They’re moving bodies, not storming the Bastille. They’ll be on the road in a couple of minutes.”

“We should have helped,” I snapped, turning to stare through the rear window as Marc went back for another corpse. How many had we killed? “And what the hell do you know about the Bastille?”

He shrugged, squinting into the patch of road illuminated by the headlights. “Angela wrote a paper on the French Revolution.”

“And you read it?” My tone conveyed more than adequate skepticism. Angela, his girlfriend, was a college senior. It was an odd pairing, to say the least, but their “relationship” had outlasted my most conservative estimate by nearly three months.

No one had won the office pool.

“I am literate. And no, we should not have helped Marc and Painter. We should get Manx and the baby to safety.” Ethan wiped a dark smear from his forehead with the back of one palm. “Not to mention Vic. He’s bleeding pretty badly.”

Oh yeah.

The crinkle of plastic drew my eyes to the third row, where Vic was spreading black plastic sheeting across the seat, to catch his own blood. Even injured, he was trying to protect his upholstery. Must have been a guy thing.

But my brother was right—a decidedly odd turn of events. So I took one last look at Marc and Painter and made my way to the back of the vehicle to see what I could do for Vic. Then we did what I couldn’t remember any Pride cat ever doing before: we ran from the strays.

We’d been driving for about ten minutes when Marc called my cell phone.

“You guys okay?” I asked by way of a greeting, as I fiddled with the vent above the rear bench seat. I’d bandaged Vic as well as I could, then stayed in the back to keep an eye on him.

Over the line, Painter’s crappy old engine protested as he accelerated. They were on the road, too. “All scratched up, but I’ve been worse,” Marc said.

“Me, too,” Painter spoke up, his voice slightly muffled from distance to the phone.

“What happened?” Des started to fuss behind me, and I looked up to see Manx dig a capped pacifier from a pale blue diaper bag.

Marc exhaled deeply over the phone. “After you guys left, their motivation faded. We dragged the dead ones into the trees. Same with the unconscious ones.”

“What about the rest?”

“The strays who could walk hobbled off on their own. We knocked the rest of them out and moved them into the trees with the others.”

“How many bodies?” Vic called from behind me, his excitement obvious, even through the pain in his voice. I’d never heard of Pride cats facing foes in such great numbers before, and we’d more than held our own. The news would travel fast, and surely even my father’s opponents would be impressed. How could they not be?

“Six dead,” Marc said. “Five unconscious. Seven more injured, but awake until we fixed that oversight. At least three got away.”

Ethan whistled as he changed lanes, and I did the math in my head, gasping at the total. “Twenty-one strays, all working together?”

My brother huffed. “Plus however many would have been in the second wave.” The very thought of which made me shudder.

“What do you think they wanted?” I said into the phone, staring out the window at the passing darkness. After the ambush, my imagination was working overtime, and I kept thinking I saw eyes staring out at me from the woods.

“Well, they weren’t dressed for conversation,” Marc said. In fact, they weren’t dressed for anything, which was his point. It was impossible to negotiate—or even make demands—without human vocal cords.

The strays had come to kill. But why?

“We need to call Dad.” Ethan flicked off the high beams when headlights appeared on the road in front of us.

“Already have.” Soda fizzed and Marc gulped in my ear, and I pictured him drinking directly from Painter’s two-liter of Coke. “He’s sending a crew to take care of the bodies.” He paused for another drink. “There’s a Holiday Inn just off the Meadville exit. Check in and get several adjoining rooms. Preferably on the back side. We’ll be there in half an hour.”

Adjoining rooms would make it easier to keep an eye on Manx and the baby, and parking in the back would help hide our vehicles, in case the second wave of strays came looking for us.

“Got it. See you in a few.” I hung up the phone and immediately wished I’d told him I loved him, especially considering how close we’d all just come to dying. “How you holding up, Vic?” I twisted again to look at him in the constant ebb and flow of the highway lights, now that we were on an actual highway, instead of some dark, two-lane back road.

“The bleeding’s slowed,” he said, accompanied by the crinkle of plastic. “But my arm stings like a bitch.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you all fixed up.”

Forty-five minutes later, I sat in the center of the left-hand bed in the hotel room Vic and Ethan would share. Their room was connected by a currently open set of back-to-back doors to another room, where Manx sat in a wheeled desk chair, nursing Des. Again.

Marc and I had our own room, next to Manx’s, but not connecting. A little privacy was all we’d be able to salvage from the botched transport/reunion. That, and dinner together, if Ethan and Painter ever returned with food.

“Okay, let’s take a look at the damage,” Marc said from the end of the other bed. He clenched the shoulder of Vic’s T-shirt and pulled. Seams split with a rapid-fire popping sound, and the detached material slid fromVic’s arm to the floor. We’d learned through experience that the torn-sleeve approach was much easier than making the patient pull his shirt over his head with an injured arm.

I sucked in a deep breath at the sight of Vic’s gored arm, and my fist clenched around the hideous orange-and-yellow-print comforter. But Marc didn’t even blink. He’d seen worse. Hell, he’d been through worse.

So had I, come to think of it. I fingered the healed slash marks on the left side of my abdomen as I stared at Vic’s arm. My scars were ten weeks old, and still pink, a permanent reminder of Zeke Radley and his Montana band of loyal/crazy strays—which had just been dwarfed by the gang we’d faced an hour earlier.

“What do you want for the pain?” Marc asked, angling Vic’s arm into the glow from the lamp on the bedside table. Why don’t hotel rooms ever have overhead lights?

Vic grimaced. “Whiskey.”

“You’re in luck.” Marc smiled as he lifted a white plastic sack from the floor; he and Painter had made a supply run on the way. He pulled two bottles from the bag. One was Jack Daniel’s, the other hydrogen peroxide. But the clink from the sack as he set it down told me Marc was prepared for Vic’s second and third choices, too.

For the next twenty minutes, I watched Marc clean and stitch Vic’s wounds, grateful that they were shallow, if long and ugly.

I was next. We’d decided the bite marks on my arm could simply be bandaged, since they hadn’t torn. But my leg needed stitches, and apparently that fact was nonnegotiable.

Marc held my arm to stabilize me as I hobbled across the dingy carpet to the cheap dinette, wearing only the tank top and snug boy-shorts I usually slept in. My pants had gone the way of Vic’s shirt and the remains were now draped over the unused chair on the other side of the table.

Marc knelt next to me and ran one hand up my bare leg, ostensibly inspecting the gashes above my right knee, and neither of us even pretended I was shivering from cold, or from shock. He hadn’t touched me in months, and the pain of my injuries couldn’t trump the feel of his hand on my skin. Squeezing. Stroking. Lingering…

I clamped my jaws shut on a moan of both pain and pleasure, unwilling to embarrass either of us with my lack of control.

“You ready?” Marc asked, and I nodded hesitantly. In spite of many past injuries, I’d never had homemade sutures, and had certainly never surrendered to them with nothing more than Tylenol for pain. Well, Tylenol and whiskey—not my drink of choice, but apparently sitting for stitches wasn’t a margarita-sippin’ kind of event.

He smiled sympathetically and lifted my leg to slide a clean white towel from the bathroom beneath my thigh. “Take a couple of drinks while I get you cleaned up.”

For once, he didn’t have to tell me twice. On the table sat two glasses. One Manx had half filled with whiskey, the other with Coke and ice from the vending machine in the lobby. I picked up the first glass and made myself gulp twice before chasing the contents with half the cup of Coke. I barely felt the sting of peroxide on my thigh because of the flames of whiskey in my throat.

Marc laughed and poured more soda. Then he picked up the thin, curved suture needle.

The hardest part was holding still. The needle didn’t hurt much more than the gashes themselves. So as long as I didn’t look, I was mostly okay. Even so, within minutes I’d finished both glasses, and Vic crossed the room to refill them for me with his good arm.

We were both half-drunk, and probably looked pretty damn pathetic. The alcohol would wear off quickly, thanks to our enhanced metabolism, but I had a feeling the pathetic part would last a while. And leave scars.

Like I didn’t have enough of those already…

By the time Marc had sewed up my thigh, and cleaned and bandaged both my ankle and my arm, Ethan and Painter were back with dinner: five large pizzas, three more two-liters, and two dozen doughnuts.

Manx refused to leave Des, even with him asleep in the middle of the bed in the next room, with the connecting doors open. So she took a paper plate full of pizza back to her room. The rest of us spread out on the floor of Vic and Ethan’s room, pizza boxes open, plastic cups filled with one combination or another of soda, ice and alcohol. I had more Coke, with Absolut Vanilia, which Dan had picked up because he thought it might go down easier for me. He was right. If I held my nose while I swallowed, it tasted like Vanilla Coke.

Sort of.

“So, how is the kid?” Dan asked, a slice of pizza poised to enter his mouth, point first. “She any closer to Shifting?”

I shook my head. “She won’t even talk about it. And when you try to make her, she puts on her earphones and turns her music up loud enough to damage her own hearing.”

Vic grinned at Ethan, and spoke with his mouth full. “Michael says you should never have given her that damn thing.”

“Whatever.” Ethan tossed his crust into a half-empty pizza box and grabbed another slice. “She’s not turning up her music because she doesn’t want to Shift, or because she doesn’t want to talk about Shifting. She’s turning up her music ‘cause she’s a teenager. And because she doesn’t want to hear any more of that psychobabble bullshit you all spout at her 24/7.”

“We’re not spouting psychobabble, we’re trying to keep her healthy,” I insisted, sipping from my cup. “But you’re right. Michael’s full of shit.” My brother grinned, so I continued. “Listening to that MP3 player is the closest she’s ever going to get to a normal teenage activity. Well, that and ignoring the advice of her elders.”

“You’d know.”

“Bite me,” I snapped. But Ethan was right, of course. I’d recently begun seeing things from the far side of the generation gap, and the view from the adult side sucks.

“How long’s it been since she Shifted?” Dan asked, reaching for another piece of pizza.

“More than two months.”

He frowned. “Has anyone ever gone that long without Shifting?”

I searched my memory, but came up blank as Marc shook his head. “No one I can think of.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Ethan grinned. “I’m not one to deny my animalistic urges.”

I’d probably never heard a more truthful statement.

“Speaking of which, any idea what that whole ambush was about?” I asked, around a mouthful of Meat Lover’s. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Not even from Zeke Radley and his Pride.” I raised the cup again and drank deeply that time. I was more relaxed now that the alcohol had kicked in, and was determined to enjoy my buzz while it lasted. “I thought strays were mostly loners.”

Painter sat straighter as all eyes turned his way for verification from our resident expert. “Yeah, for the most part. But strays’ll come together if they have a good reason to, just like anybody else.”

“Like a common enemy?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How had we become that common enemy?

“Yeah. Or somethin’ they wanna know.” His cheeks flushed. “Like how to fight. To take care of themselves, you know? Like Marc’s been teaching me.”

And Marc was a fine instructor, if his protégé’s performance that night was any indication. Painter was damn talented with a hammer.

“So, did you know any of those toms we fought?” Vic asked, and I heard a thin thread of tension in his voice, though his expression seemed amiable enough.

“Not friendly-like.” Dan took another bite, but then his chewing slowed to a stop as the reasoning behind the question sank in. He swallowed thickly. “I had nothin’ to do with that. I fought with you guys.”

So he had, greatly strengthening our odds. And he could easily have been killed.

But Marc’s eyes had gone hard, and his expression sent a chill up my arms, in spite of the hotel heater and my alcohol-induced flush. “Dan, did you tell anyone we were coming through tonight?” His voice had gone deep and scary, and no one was chewing anymore.

Painter shook his head, eyes wide. “Just Ben. He’s interested in Pride politics and wanted to meet you guys. I told him I’d introduce him. But he never showed up.”

“Damn it, Dan!” Marc stood in a lightning-fast, fluid motion and kicked an unopened bottle of soda across the room. It crashed into the door and rolled away. “You may as well have handed us over bound and gagged. The whole damn ambush was your fault!”

Four

Painter’s face flushed, and he shook his head vehemently. “Ben wasn’t there tonight.” The stray stood uncertainly, backing away from Marc out of instinct even a human would have understood. “He wasn’t with the toms we fought.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t cut my hose, or tell someone else where we’d be,” Marc growled, advancing on him slowly as we watched. “You need to understand something, Dan. You will never be a Pride cat if you don’t learn when to keep your mouth shut!” With that, he grabbed Painter by the arm, ripped open the hotel door and tossed him out into the parking lot.

Before the door swung shut, I caught a glimpse of Dan as he stumbled across the sidewalk and reached out to steady himself on the hood of the Suburban. He looked shocked, and as disappointed as an orphan at Christmas, still clutching a half-eaten slice of Supreme in one hand as the door slammed in his face.

“Will he be okay out there?” I asked, as Marc threw the dead bolt and stomped across the carpet toward us.

“Who cares if he isn’t?” Marc folded his legs beneath himself as he dropped to the floor at my side. But his glance at the door gave away his conflict. Painter was a friend, and he clearly hadn’t betrayed us intentionally.

“Well, I guess that explains why the strays didn’t attack him until he took a swing.” Ethan wiped a smear of pizza sauce from the corner of his mouth with the back of one hand. “He’s their source.”

“Yeah, but he did take that swing, and he didn’t feed them information on purpose,” I insisted, glancing from one stony male face to another. “He fought alongside us, and even if the strays were inclined to spare him for further use, they won’t be now. And they’re probably still out there…” I let my sentence fade into silent censure, aimed pointedly at Marc.

“He’ll be fine.” Marc grabbed another slice of pizza and tore into it, speaking again only once he’d swallowed. “If getting rid of him were that easy, I’d have done it weeks ago. He’s probably in the front office right now, renting the room next to ours.”

The rest of the meal passed as Marc and the other guys got caught up after more than two months apart. After dinner, I checked on Manx to find her curled up asleep with the baby, both of them fully clothed, a paper plate scattered with pizza crusts on the floor beside the bed. I pulled a blanket from the empty bed to cover them, then closed the connecting door on my way out.

Ethan and Vic were already arguing over the remote control, so Marc helped me into my jacket and ripped pants, and we took one half-full box of pizza back to our room.

The door closed at my back, cutting off the biting January cold, and Marc’s hands were all over me, warming me everywhere my skin was exposed. Then exposing even more.

My hand opened, and the pizza box thumped to the table. His fingers slid beneath my jacket, pushing it gently down my arms and over the bandaged bite marks. The jacket hit the floor and I stepped over it, then winced and nearly went down when my full weight hit my injured leg.

Marc caught me, then lifted me. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled his ripped, bloodstained shirt off one arm at a time, while he supported my back with first one hand then the other. His shirt hit the floor. I nibbled on his collarbone. Four steps later he set me on the edge of the bed, and I let him pull my ruined pants off. His followed quickly as I pulled my tank top over my head and squirmed out of my underwear.

And finally, after months apart, we were alone, with nothing between us but memories and need…

Later, I lay next to Marc on the bed farthest from the door, propped up on my right elbow, my chin in my hand. I was bruised all over, and I ached from head to toe after the fight, but I pushed my discomfort aside, determined to focus on Marc for what little time we’d have together.

“You hate it, don’t you?” My left index finger traced the long-healed claw-mark scars that had brought him into my life fifteen years earlier, when he was infected by the werecat who’d killed his mother. My parents felt responsible for him because he was orphaned and infected in our territory, so my mother nursed him through scratch fever, then my father made him the first and only stray ever accepted into a Pride.

“Hate what?” His chest rose and sank beneath my hand with each breath, and our mingled scents surrounded me with an almost physical presence. It was intoxicating, just being near him, but the knowledge that his company was only temporary kept me from being truly content.

I ran my fingers over each hard ridge of his stomach. “Living here. Surrounded by humans.” Marc had lived with us for half of his life—for all of his life as a werecat—until my father had been forced to choose between us. Marc was exiled as part of the under-the-table deal that eliminated execution as a possible sentence at my hearing.

Marc went willingly. He would do nothing to endanger my life, even if it meant living without me. But that was proving every bit as hard as we’d known it would be. Marc hadn’t lived among humans since the day he was scratched, and had, in fact, ceased thinking like one around the same time. He no longer knew how to relate to humans, which probably frustrated him even more than it would a Pride cat, considering he’d been born among their ranks.

He shook his head slowly, as if considering. “I don’t hate it. It does no good to hate something you can’t change.”

“How very Zen of you.” I smiled skeptically at his unusual display of composure, because we could change his location. As soon as my father’s position on the council was secure, I would do whatever it took to get Marc back into the south-central Pride.

But in the meantime… “Have you made any friends? Other than Dan Painter?”

“I don’t need friends,” he insisted, turning his head to grin up at me. “I just need you to visit more often.”

Unfortunately, we both knew that was impossible, especially now.

My father had hired Brian Taylor—Ed Taylor’s youngest son, and Carissa’s brother—to help pick up the slack when he’d been forced to exile Marc. Brian was a year my junior, which made him the youngest enforcer on the payroll. But he was also a quick learner, and eager to impress his new Alpha and earn the respect of his fellow toms. In short, the kid had real potential.

Still, he didn’t have anywhere near the experience Marc had, so while we weren’t technically shorthanded, neither were we truly running at max capacity. I’d been temporarily paired with Vic, my father’s right-hand man now that Marc was gone, and we were always working. Always. Patrolling the territorial boundaries, chasing down trespassers, teaching my fellow enforcers the partial Shift—after Marc mastered it, Jace and Vic picked it up quickly—and working with Kaci during every spare moment.

But this particular moment was mine. Ours.

“I’m here now.” I laid my palm flat on Marc’s chest, so I could feel as well as hear his heart beat in sync with my own.

“So you are…” He rose to kiss me, and I lay back on the pillow, sighing when his delicious weight pressed me into the mattress. I arched my neck and let my hands wander his torso as his mouth trailed over my chin and down my throat. Every hard plane on his body was as familiar to me as my own face. I knew how he’d gotten each scar, and at one time or another I’d tasted them all.

“Maybe we could take an extra day,” I murmured into his ear, rubbing his thigh with my knee as I wrapped my good leg around him. “Surely full-scale attack and a slashed radiator hose warrant a bit of a delay….”

“Somehow I doubt the council will see it that way.” His right hand slid up the back of my thigh, then cupped my rear, shifting me gently into position.

“Screw the council—” I whispered, not surprised to hear my voice go hoarse with all-new need. One romp wasn’t enough to alleviate the ache of a two-month absence. That would take many, many…

Three brisk knocks on the door drenched the moment like a dunk in an ice-cold pond.

Marc sighed, and collapsed on top of me for a moment before rolling off to search for his pants. “Hang on!” he growled, as the knocking started again.

“Don’t let me interrupt…” my brother called through the door. “I’ll just stand out here and freeze my balls off while you two get reacquainted. No hurry.”

“Damn it, Ethan!” I stepped into my underwear, one hand on the pressboard bedside table for balance as I favored my injured leg. Then I pulled my tank top over my head and tugged it into place, already hopping toward the entrance as Marc zipped his pants. He settled onto the end of the bed with a sigh, and motioned for me to go ahead.

I slid the chain free and twisted the dead bolt, then jerked open the door to find my youngest brother grinning at me, hands stuffed into the pockets of a jacket much too thin to ward off the biting January cold. “I swear, you two have no self-control. You’re like animals.”

“Asshole.” But I couldn’t summon real malice, knowing he wouldn’t have interrupted us without a good reason. I tried to step aside and let him in, but I wasn’t fast enough. Ethan brushed past me into the warmth of the bedroom, and I stumbled back. My weight hit my injured leg and I hissed, then fell on my ass with all the poise of a hippo en pointe.

Ethan just kicked the door shut and hauled me up by one arm, even as I heard Marc rise from the bed behind me. “Way to go, Grace.” Then my brother frowned as his gaze settled on the three parallel rows of stitches on my thigh, and the bandages still circling my ankle. “Why haven’t you Shifted? You should be half-healed by now.”

“I’m fine.” I hopped along as he led me toward a chair. “And I will Shift. I just…haven’t had a chance yet.” I snuck a glance at Marc and smiled. Shifting into cat form can accelerate healing by as much as several days, as the body tears itself apart, then puts itself back together in another form. But Shifting while injured is far from comfortable, and it wasn’t at the top of my to-do list, especially considering all the other, more pleasurable ways to amuse myself in Marc’s company.

“Uh-huh.” Ethan rolled his eyes—like he was one to criticize—and turned from me to Marc, who watched us solemnly, waiting for whatever news the messenger bore. “Jace and Brian just loaded eight dead cats into the back of the van, and left seven more still unconscious.”

They would drive the corpses back to the ranch to be destroyed in the industrial incinerator—the type most farmers used to dispose of dead livestock.

We used it to get rid of evidence. Though we’d never had quite so much to dispose of at once before.

Marc arched both brows. “Only seven unconscious? Several must have wandered off on their own.” And two more had died since we’d left them.

“Sounds about right. Damn, that was some brawl.”

“It was a fucking ambush.” Marc dropped into the chair opposite mine and pulled the bottle of Absolut forward. “In the ten years I worked for your dad, I never once saw that many strays in league. This gang was several times the size of Radley’s, and they meant business.”

Ethan flipped open the pizza box and picked up the largest remaining slice. “So you think they were after Manx?”

Marc glanced at me before nodding, and his eyes lingered on mine in concern as he twisted the top from the bottle. “And probably Faythe, too. Did you see her ankle? One of them tried to drag her off in the middle of the fight.”

A growl started in the back of my throat, and my hands clenched into fists in my lap. It was always the same old song and dance with most strays, and frankly, I was getting pretty damn tired of the whole snatch-and-grab routine.

Marc gulped from the bottle, not bothering with a chaser. “I mean, how often do two tabbies travel through the free territory together? We may as well have painted a target on the back of the Suburban.”

“It’s not like we had another option.” I chose a slice of cold pizza at random. “Manx can’t fly, and avoiding the free zone would have added several days to the trip.” And I would never have even gotten a glimpse of Marc that way.

“I know.” Marc sighed. “Where’re Jace and Brian?”

Ethan swallowed his bite and twisted the lid from a half-empty two-liter of Coke. “Covering the cargo in the back of the van of a thousand corpses.”

Which meant Jace wasn’t up for seeing me and Marc half-naked together. He could accept how I felt about Marc—grudgingly—but drew the line at seeing it in person. Which we all understood.

Ethan closed the soda and met my eyes, his own oddly solemn. “Mom can’t get Kaci to cooperate with you gone, so I’m going to drive the van back with Jace, and Brian will go on with you guys.” Which was no doubt why they’d risked driving the corpses back into the free zone. “Okay?”

“Sure.” Other than me, Kaci was most comfortable with Jace and Ethan. For some reason, the wonder twins could always make her smile, even when I would have sworn she didn’t have the strength. “Tell Kaci I’ll call her tomorrow. And please be careful. What would happen if you two got pulled over with eight bodies in the back of the van?”

Ethan grinned, green eyes sparkling. “We hope the cop’s a cat lover.” He took another bite, then gestured with the crust of his pizza. “But we won’t get pulled over. It’s not like we’ve never driven home with a body in the back before.”

Unfortunately.

Two short, sharp knocks sounded on the door, and we all turned as Ethan yelled, “Come on in, Jace. They’re not doin’ it. Yet.”

That was my brother. Mr. Sensitivity.

Jace opened the door and stepped inside, then quickly shoved the door closed and leaned against it, pushing brown waves out of his bright blue eyes. “Hey, how’s life on the outside?” he said, greeting Marc first out of respect, even though he no longer had any rank within the Pride. Most other toms wouldn’t have done that, especially considering that I’d chosen Marc over Jace. But Jace was a good guy. My father didn’t hire any other kind.

“Can’t complain.” Marc stood to shake Jace’s hand with just a hint of formality. “How’s everything at the ranch?”

“Not the same without you, man,” Jace said, and I smiled as Marc exhaled deeply, and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Thanks.”

I knew better than anyone else how much that sentiment meant to Marc, and I could have kissed Jace for it—if that wouldn’t have made everything infinitely worse.

Finally, Jace’s eyes found me, and concern washed over his face as he stepped forward. “Your dad didn’t say you were hurt.”

“I don’t think anyone’s told him yet.” I clutched the arm of my chair to keep from self-consciously touching my wounds. “I’m fine, though. One Shift should take care of the limp.”

“Well, do it soon,” Jace said, then turned to Ethan, his jaw tight with whatever he was not saying. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” Ethan took one last gulp of Coke and snatched a slice of pizza for the road. “You guys be careful.” He pulled me up and into a bear hug. “Mom will never forgive any of us if her only daughter comes home disfigured.”

I twisted out of his grip when the hug got too tight. “After tonight, she ought to be grateful I’m coming home at all.”

“Can I be there when you tell her that?” Ethan asked, still grinning as he headed for the door.

“Yeah, I’m considering a rephrase.” I followed him, hobbling along with my arm intertwined with Marc’s. “Seriously, though, will you tell Kaci I’m fine? We’re all fine. And we’ll be home in a couple of days, good as new.”

“Will do.” Ethan followed Jace outside, to where my father’s van was now parked next to Vic’s Suburban. “Mom said she fell asleep playing PS3 after dinner.”

I frowned, shivering in the sudden cold as I gripped the door frame. “I’ll talk her into Shifting when I get back. One way or another.”

Ethan opened the passenger-side door as Jace started the engine. “I know.” My brother grinned one last time as Jace backed my dad’s ancient van out of the parking space. Then they were gone.

I closed the door and twisted to find Marc watching me with a new heat in his eyes. So we picked up right where we’d left off….

Six hours later, my cell phone rang out from the dark. I sat up, blinking, and reached over Marc to feel around on the nightstand, aiming vaguely for the bouncing, glowing mound of plastic.

I couldn’t reach it, so I levered myself over Marc with my elbow in his chest. He grunted and his eyes flew open, and I gasped when my bad leg twisted beneath me, because I still hadn’t found a chance to Shift. But then my fingers closed around the phone and I eased my weight back onto the mattress, flipping the phone open without reading the name on the display.

“Faythe?” It was my dad, and he sounded infinitely more alert than I was. Which was probably a very bad sign.

“It’s five in the morning, Daddy.” I shrugged when Marc rubbed sleep from one eye and mouthed, What’s wrong?

“I know what time it is,” my father snapped, and his tone brought me instantly awake. “Ryan’s gone.”

Five

“What?” I said, as Marc sat up and clicked on the lamp on the nightstand.

I’d expected to hear that Kaci had Shifted, or that Jace and Ethan had arrived home safely with the bodies. Or even that they’d been pulled over on the way home and arrested on some weird murder and illegal-corpse-disposal charge. But I didn’t quite know how to react to the news that my middle—and least favorite—brother, Ryan, had pulled a Houdini. “How?”

“I honestly don’t know. I was up tending the incinerator, and went down to the basement for spare flashlight batteries, and he was just gone. The cage door was standing wide open, and the lock was missing.”

Damn. But why would he take the lock?

Ryan had spent the past six and a half months locked up in our basement prison cell, as punishment for playing the role of spy and jailer in a scheme to kidnap several U.S. tabbies—including me—to be sold to Alphas in the Amazon. When we’d caught him, he was thin and weak. But he’d grown healthier in captivity, eating my mother’s cooking, despite the lack of sunshine, fresh air and exercise.

But that did not explain how he’d escaped. The cage was built to stand up to toms in the prime of life, fueled by rage and fear. He should not have been able to break the lock on his own, and he had access to nothing with which to pound it off.

“Any idea how long he’s been gone?” I asked, rubbing my forehead in frustration.

“Owen took his dinner down at seven, and everything was normal. So it could have been anytime in the past ten hours.” The weariness in his voice spoke volumes, and had little to do with the early hour or lack of sleep. With my father’s position on the Territorial Council so tenuous at the moment, Ryan’s escape was a blow he really couldn’t afford. Malone would use that as just one more piece of evidence that my father was an incompetent Alpha. Which was not true.

“Did he leave a trail?” Marc ran one hand through short curls he’d probably forgotten he’d sheared.

My father sighed over the line. “Yes, but it did little good. Owen tracked him for about a mile and a half, then lost the trail shortly after he found his clothes. It looks like Ryan Shifted and took to the trees.”

Cats can’t track animals like dogs can, and the same holds true for werecats. We use our keen sense of smell to scavenge and to identify one another, and our eyes and ears to find prey during an active chase. However, we lack the necessary instinct to follow a cold trail on scent alone, and once Ryan was in the trees—no doubt walking the limbs like a splintered forest path—he was beyond our immediate grasp. Which probably infuriated Owen, my third brother.

“So what do you want us to do?” I sipped from the cup of lukewarm water Marc handed me from the nightstand.

“There isn’t much you can do.” My father’s desk chair squealed in my ear, and I could easily picture him sitting in his office in his blue striped robe, glaring at the empty room. “Just ask Marc to keep his eyes and ears open. I’m pretty sure Ryan’s headed your way.”

Because Mississippi was the closest free territory to the ranch, thus the easiest for Ryan to reach. In theory. Unfortunately, we now knew there was an exceptionally large band of very angry strays roaming near the border, and one whiff of Ryan’s Pride-cat scent would likely set them off again.

My idiot brother had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fucking volcano, and I had a sudden bleak certainty that the next body we buried might break my mother’s heart.

Marc exhaled heavily and scowled. He and Ryan hadn’t exchanged two civil words since June, and Marc no longer officially worked for my father. But he would never say no to my dad. “I’ll be looking for him,” he said, well aware his former Alpha could hear him, even several feet from the phone.

“Thanks.” My father ordered us to get some sleep. Then he hung up.

We didn’t sleep.

After the ambush, injuries, and Ryan’s escape, sleeping seemed like a waste of time, especially considering that Marc and I only had a matter of hours left together. So we made other, better use of the predawn hours.

When the first direct rays of daylight glinted through the gap in the faded motel curtains, I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that if I didn’t see it, it didn’t exist. But morning would not be ignored.

Marc sighed and kissed my jaw, just below my ear. “You hungry?”

I shook my head on the pillow, but he only laughed and tossed the covers back. Werecats were always hungry. “Why don’t you Shift while I grab some breakfast. Then I’ll take another look at your leg.”

“Oh, fine.” I sat up naked in bed, hoping to tempt him into putting off the food run. No such luck. His eyes lingered, but the rest of him did not. Ten minutes later he was showered, dressed and headed toward the IHOP across the street.

Alone, I knelt on the floor to Shift.

The usual pain of the transformation was intensified in my leg, especially the flesh over my thigh, which burned and throbbed with an acute agony. The skin pulled and stretched, and for a couple of minutes I worried that the stitches would pop. But when the Shift was complete, my leg felt much better. Still tender, but fully functional.

I stretched with my forepaws extended, rump in the air, tail waving lazily. Then I sat up and groomed the fur over my left shoulder until it lay properly. After that I explored my surroundings. I’d never been in a hotel room in cat form, and everything looked and smelled very different with my feline senses. Which was not necessarily a good thing.

As a human, I’d been blissfully unaware of the traces of whoever’d had the room before us, but as a cat, I couldn’t ignore the lingering stench of strangers’ sweat, stale coffee, old takeout, and seafood-scented vomit in one corner of the bathroom. I was afraid to get too close to the bed, for fear of what I’d smell there.

After a mere five minutes in cat form, I’d had enough. I Shifted back and stepped into the shower, glad I’d brought along my own shampoo—a familiar scent to help wash the others from my memory.

I was drying my hair when a cold draft around my ankles announced Marc’s return. The scents of bacon, eggs, syrup and fruit told me he’d ordered nearly the entire IHOP menu. I was halfway through my first pancake when his cell rang out.

Marc dug in his right pocket and pulled out his cell phone—one I hadn’t seen before. New job, new house, and a new phone, since my father no longer picked up the cellular bill. Everything had changed.

“It’s your dad,” he said after a glance at the display, then flipped his phone open. “Hey, Greg, what can I do for you?” As if he were still on the clock.

“I spoke to Bert Di Carlo this morning and reported last night’s ambush. With both Vic and Faythe injured—” Ethan and Jace had obviously reported my condition “—Bert and I would feel much better about this trip if you’d accompany the delegation for a bit longer than we’d planned. You have permission to go as far as Birmingham. If you’re interested.”

Marc grinned and glanced at me. “Of course I’m interested.”

“Good.” I pictured my father nodding, signaling the end of the discussion. “Put Faythe on the line, please.”

Marc handed me his phone, still smiling as he speared a link of sausage with a plastic fork. I was grinning like an idiot, too, thrilled by the prospect of a couple of extra hours with Marc, even if we’d be stuck in Vic’s car along with the rest of the delegation.

“Hi, Daddy.” I dipped a slice of bacon in a puddle of syrup and bit into it, covering the mouthpiece to keep from crunching into his ear.

“How’s your leg?”

“It’s fine. Just three slashes above my right knee, and bite marks around my ankle. I Shifted this morning, and the wounds have closed nicely. I’m not even limping.”

“Ethan said you handled yourself very well. I’m paraphrasing, of course.”

I grinned and speared a tangle of hash browns, more pleased by the compliment than I would have admitted. “So did he. The boy swings a mean ax.”

My father chuckled. “Call me when you get to Bert’s place.”

“I will.”

My dad said goodbye and hung up, and I handed the phone back to Marc, still smiling.

Twenty minutes later we were on the road. Vic drove, and Brian took the passenger seat, with Manx and the baby in the middle row. Marc and I sat in the back, his arm around my waist, my head on his shoulder. His scent and warmth, along with the rhythmic jostle of the van around us, lulled me into a peaceful trance, and I was almost asleep when Vic spoke up from the front, eyeing us in the rearview mirror.

“Hey, Marc, isn’t that Painter’s car behind us?”

Marc twisted, and I turned to look with him. Sure enough, there it was—a grimy white Dodge Daytona, with a fist-size dent in the front bumper.

Marc scowled. “I told you he wouldn’t be that easy to lose.”

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. Let him follow us.” Marc’s jaws bulged in irritation. “I’ll need a ride back from Birmingham anyway.”

The rest of the trip was blessedly uneventful. Even with several bathroom and breast-feeding breaks, the winter sun was just past its zenith when we pulled into a Shell station off the highway, a couple of miles south of Birmingham. While Vic pumped gas, I made myself say goodbye to Marc.

We’d planned for him to drive me back across the free zone—the guys would stay with Manx for the duration of the trial—but after the previous day’s ambush my father wouldn’t hear of another trip through Mississippi. So I’d be flying back.

“It’s not forever,” Marc insisted softly. But it may as well have been.

My hand lingered on his chest, his on my waist, and only when Dan Painter pulled up behind us in his sick-sounding car did Marc let our foreheads touch. He whispered goodbye and kissed me. Then he pulled open Vic’s passenger-side door, pushed me gently onto the seat and closed the door again.

I rolled the window down and stole one more kiss, then he smiled and turned away.

“Need a ride?” Painter asked, one arm hanging out his car window.

Marc scowled. “Do you think you can resist announcing our whereabouts to any future opponents we may encounter?”

“Dude, I told you that was an accident. I had no idea some asshole was gonna round up the posse and come out guns a-blazin’. What do you want, a formal apology?”

“A little silence would suffice,” Marc snapped, stomping around the car. He jerked open the door and slid onto the seat, just as Vic emerged from the convenience store. Marc waved to him, then turned to Dan. “Let’s get out of here before someone gets a whiff of you. No one gave you permission to leave the free zone.”

With that, Dan stomped on the gas and they roared out of the parking lot and back onto the highway.

The rest of the drive was much less pleasant, but peacefully dull. And if not for several crying spells from Des, I might have made up for the sleep I’d missed the night before. But when the Atlanta skyline came into view, Manx began to fidget. Her foot bounced on the floorboard. Her nails tapped on the armrest. She stared out her window and didn’t seem to hear Des when he began to fuss, waving tiny red fists in the air.

“Manx, you okay?” I leaned over the bench seat with my chin resting on my folded arms.

She never looked away from the window. “That is Atlanta?”

“Yeah. See that big round building? That’s a hotel. I stayed there once with Sara. Her mom took us for a weekend downtown after she graduated from high—” I fell silent when I noticed Vic watching me in the rearview mirror, his eyes brimming with pain and full of nostalgia.

Sara Di Carlo, his only sister, had been raped and murdered seven months earlier by the jungle stray Ryan had fallen in with. Days later, his younger brother, Anthony, died during our attempt to capture Sara’s killers.

The Di Carlo family’s wounds were still fresh, and the tragedy didn’t end there. With no tabby to bear its next generation, their family line would die along with Vic and his brothers, and with no descendants, they would eventually lose control of their territory.

Which was why my father hoped that, if all parties were amenable—and if she survived her trial—Manx might join the southeast Pride. She could never replace Sara, of course. But she could help the Di Carlos hold on to their territory. Help them reclaim their future. If she were willing.

But at the moment, Manx didn’t look very happy to be in Georgia.

“So, we are close?” she asked, and I thought I saw her chin quiver.

Manx was one of the toughest tabbies I’d ever met in my life. Tougher than my mother, who’d once kept the Alphas in line single-handedly, and who’d saved my life only months earlier. Tougher than me, by far. And maybe even tougher than Kaci, who had to live every day of her life knowing what she’d accidentally done to her family. Manx had survived abduction, brutal beatings, the loss of her tail, serial rape, and the murder of two infant sons. Somehow, she’d come out of a living hell stronger than ever, and determined to hunt down the bastard who’d both sired and murdered her children.

But now Luiz was dead, and she was on trial for multiple counts of murder. If she was convicted and sentenced to death, the son she’d fought to save would never even know his mother.

After years of torture and months of running and fighting, now Manx was scared. And it almost broke my heart.

“About forty more miles.” Vic flexed his injured arm stiffly, his free hand still on the wheel. “Mom has the guest room all fixed up for you and Des. She even dug up Sara’s old crib. It’s ancient, and I think it’s pink, but it’ll give him somewhere comfortable to nap.”

The sun had just dipped beneath the horizon when we pulled into the Di Carlos’ long, arched driveway, beyond which their beautiful, old Italianate house was lit by several strategically placed floodlights.

Vic’s family lived outside of Canton, Georgia, in the house they’d bought when Vic was still a toddler, and had been renovating ever since. It looked like a big white-framed box, lined in black-shuttered windows and crowned with four redbrick chimneys. As the SUV bounced over the gravel driveway, headlights illuminated an elaborate porch, complete with columns and latticed arches, lined in evergreen shrubs.

The property sat in the center of a broad, flat lawn that was green in the summer, but brown and crunchy in the middle of January.

In back of the main house stood a large detached garage, above which sat the former servants’ quarters. But the Di Carlos had long ago enclosed the garage and turned the entire building into an apartment, where their enforcers now lived.

Beyond the apartment were several acres of private woodland, a necessity for any large group of werecats. It was a place for them to run, play, and hunt, without being bothered by the surrounding human population.

Since the trial would begin the following morning, I’d expected the driveway to be full, cars parked in rows out back, even. But there were only three vehicles ahead of our van, all of which probably belonged to Vic’s family.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, pushing open the car door. The temperature had dropped when the sun went down, and I pulled my jacket tight around me, shivering in spite of the layer of leather.

Vic stepped onto the driveway, boots crunching on gravel. “The guys park around back. They’re probably in the apartment, lying low.”

Which I could easily understand. Large Alpha gatherings made me nervous, too.

“My mom and dad are both here.” Vic eyed the two cars parked closest to the house. “But I don’t recognize that one.” He nodded to the beige sedan we’d parked behind.

I bent to read the sticker on one corner of the rear windshield. “It’s a rental. Michael must already be here.” Thank goodness. I didn’t want to be the only one representing my family, even just for a few hours. As much progress as I’d made in the think-before-you-speak department, slip-ups still happened, at the worst possible times, and Alphas Gardner and Mitchell were already angry enough with the south-central Pride.

“My dad said the Alphas all took rooms in town, so they probably won’t show up until tomorrow morning,” Vic said, as if he’d read my mind. Or my expression.

“Oh.” Good.

At the back of the van, Brian was stacking luggage on the ground. I zipped up my jacket and grabbed two suitcases, then followed Vic up the sidewalk toward the house. We were halfway there when the door creaked opened and a tiny woman in creased jeans and a dark blouse appeared on the porch.

“Victor!” Donna Di Carlo raced down the steps and stood on tiptoe to hug her son, heedless of the bags he held, or the cold that must have blown instantly through her thin shirt. She looked older than when I’d last seen her, the lines on her face deeper, her hair grayer. Losing two children was likely the hardest thing she’d ever endure, but Vic’s mother was strong; she hadn’t let it kill her.

In that respect, she reminded me of Manx.

“Why does it take a tragedy to get you to visit? Just once I’d like to see you when nothing’s wrong. When you just came home to say, ‘Mom, I love you.’”

“Mom, I love you.” Vic grinned, but there was pain beneath his pleasant expression. He hadn’t seen his parents since Sara and Anthony’s funeral, and I suspected he wouldn’t see them again for quite a while. Because being home made him remember.

“That’s much better. Now go put those bags in the front hall before they freeze out here.” Vic did as he was told, and his mother turned her eagle-sharp eyes on me. “Faythe Sanders, I’d say it was nice to see you, if you didn’t look so thin. Has your mother stopped cooking?”

“No, ma’am, and I haven’t stopped eating, either.” I smiled. “But I burn a lot of energy on the job.”

“Job?” She looked confused for a moment, hands propped on hips that flared from her tiny waist. “Oh, yes. You’re enforcing for your father. Hardly a proper line of work for a young woman, but if you’re going to fight like a man, I can certainly feed you like one.” Her smile softened the sting of her censure. “Come on in. We’re about to sit down to a big pot of gumbo. You like gumbo, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’ am.” I followed her up the porch stairs and into the long central hallway, where I dropped the bags I carried next to those Vic had abandoned before he’d disappeared.

“Bert, come on out and say hi,” she said, taking the jacket I shrugged out of.

But before Umberto Di Carlo appeared, soft footsteps clicked on the hardwood behind us, and I turned to find Manx standing in the doorway, a blanket-wrapped bundle clutched close to her chest. Her gray eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed from the cold beneath her smooth, olive complexion.

“Well, you must be Mercedes.” Mrs. Di Carlo propped her hands on her hips again and stepped forward boldly to inspect Manx, who towered over her by at least six inches. “My, aren’t you a beauty. I’ll have to warn my boys to keep their distance.”

Whether she was thinking of Manx’s fear of being touched, or her status as a serial killer, I wasn’t sure. Either way, her greeting obviously wasn’t what Manx had expected. The tabby stared at Vic’s mother and clutched the baby tighter.

“Well, come on in before you let out all the heat.” Mrs. Di Carlo ushered Manx into the entry, and Brian slipped inside carrying two more suitcases before she could close the door. “And who is this little gentleman?” Mrs. Di Carlo leaned over to peer at the baby’s face, the only exposed part of his tiny body.

“This is Desiderio Carreño.” Manx’s eyes went soft as her gaze fell on her baby. “He smiled just this morning.”

“Did he!” Mrs. Di Carlo beamed, clearly thrilled by the news, though she’d barely even met the child. “Well, this is a pleasure. We haven’t had a baby in the house in such a long time. I’ll show you to your room.”

Manx and Brian trailed our hostess up the central staircase, and they’d no sooner vanished from sight than a door opened down the hallway, admitting Umberto Di Carlo into the entry. His wide-set brown eyes brightened the moment they landed on me.

“Faythe! Come in and warm up. Your brother and I were about to indulge in a predinner drink. Join us!” He turned without waiting for my reply, and I followed him through an arched doorway into a room filled with overstuffed furniture, dark woods and thick rugs. On the far side of the room, facing a cozy arrangement of couches and chairs, logs blazed in a stone fireplace, casting jumping shadows on the warm, wood-paneled walls.

Michael stood when we entered, frowning in concern the moment his eyes found mine. “Dad told me about the ambush. Are you okay?” He took my arm before I could protest and pushed my sleeve up carefully to expose the half-healed bite marks I hadn’t bothered to rebandage that morning.

“I’m fine. None of us was seriously injured, which is a miracle, considering how badly we were outnumbered.”

Michael looked half relieved and half jealous to have missed the excitement.

“Sit!” Vic’s father ordered pleasantly, after a glance at my new scars. His footsteps thundered as he crossed the room toward a small cherry bar in one corner. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Scotch?” Michael sank onto the left-hand sofa beside me, and Bert nodded in approval.

“Just like your father.” He pulled a half-empty bottle of Chivas Regal from beneath the bar and poured an inch into two short glasses, then looked up at me. “Faythe?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” I’d had enough alcohol the night before to last the rest of the month, at least.

He nodded and crossed the room to hand one glass to Michael. Then he sat on the sedate green couch opposite us, resting a thick hand on the scrolled arm. “So, how are things at the Lazy S?”

“A little tense right now,” I admitted, scuffing the toe of my boot on the red and gray rug.

Michael cleared his throat. “I can’t tell you how much my father appreciates your support, especially at a time like this.”

Di Carlo nodded gravely, and I could see that his decision to back our dad hadn’t been made lightly. “The council’s going to hell in a handbasket, Michael, and if someone doesn’t stand up to Calvin Malone, it’s only going to get worse. But I’m afraid this one won’t be won easily.”

“Nothing worthwhile ever is.” Michael frowned sagely, and I knew the conversation would turn quickly to unpleasant politics. If I didn’t deliver my message soon, I’d lose my chance.

“Mr. Di Carlo…”

“Child, call me Bert.” He grinned, and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “I saw you streak through your father’s office in the buff when you were no higher than my knee. I’d say that makes us friends.”

I flushed, but nodded. “Bert, my father has an idea he wanted me to mention to you. About Manx. Mercedes. Assuming the tribunal finds in her favor… Well, she’s lost her whole family, and you’ve lost your daughter…” I broke off, unsure how to continue. Saying it aloud made it sound like I was trying to restructure the Di Carlo family—sticking my nose in where it definitely didn’t belong.

But Bert finished the thought for me. “Your father thought we might want to keep her?”

“Well…” I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, but… “Yes. Assuming she gets along with everyone. And wants to stay, of course.”

Bert nodded and sipped from his glass. “I have to admit I’ve had similar thoughts. Your father assures us that her crimes were the result of severe physical and emotional trauma…”

“Of the worst sort,” Michael interjected solemnly.

“…and that she’s no longer dangerous. Do you agree with his assessment?”

I really wished he hadn’t asked me that. But sure enough, the Alpha was looking at me, rather than at my older, wiser brother, and I wasn’t going to bullshit one of my father’s few sworn allies.

“Mr. Di Carlo—Bert—Manx has survived things I can’t even imagine suffering. Horrors no one should ever have to experience. For years, she was never touched by a man who didn’t hurt her. Years. And the very thing that pulled her through—an iron-hard survivalist instinct—is what led her to kill those toms. They touched her. She thought they were going to hurt her, or her unborn baby. So she defended herself. Preemptively.”

I hesitated on the next part, then finally leaned forward to let him see how earnest I was. “Is there a possibility it could happen again? Yes. Unfortunately, I think there is. If she feels threatened, I think she would lash out in self-defense. Or baby-defense. But she’s been with us for four months now and has never raised a hand to anyone. I think if you give her a chance to get used to your family, and to the idea that no one here means her any harm, she’ll come around eventually. I think she wants a normal life, and it won’t take too much effort to convince her that you can be trusted.”

For a moment, the southeast Pride’s Alpha only stared at me, still processing my blunt speech. As was Michael. “I see,” Di Carlo said finally. Then he smiled. “Well, I suppose it’s worth a shot. Assuming the tribunal sees fit to let her live.”

And I knew from personal experience just how big an if that really was.

Six

“Well, this looks nice.” Once you get over all the pink. I ran my hand along the crib railing and nudged one of the mobile’s lace butterflies into motion. Vic said his parents had set up a crib for Des, but he hadn’t mentioned any of the other stuff. My gaze took in a white wicker rocking chair, some kind of bouncy seat with stuffed bumble bees suspended over it, a changing table piled high with accessories and necessities, and a dirty-diaper storage…contraption…thing. Which I was pretty sure hadn’t even been invented when Sara was born.

The Di Carlos had gone shopping for Manx’s baby.

“Very nice,” Manx agreed. But tears stood in her eyes, and in spite of the room full of furnishings, she still clutched the baby to her chest, as if he were the only thing keeping her above water in a swirling, churning whirlpool of fear and confusion.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, then immediately regretted the question. What wasn’t wrong? “Do you want to…maybe… put him down while you get settled in?” I gestured awkwardly toward the crib, and Manx glanced at the baby bed as if seeing it for the first time.

But instead of moving toward it, she met my gaze, her gray eyes magnified by tears. “What will happen to me, Faythe? The truth. Vic says all will be fine. What do you say?”

Well, shit. I picked up a stuffed lamb from one corner of the crib and played absently with the soft, curly wool. “Manx, I honestly don’t know. This is kind of unprecedented.” I was the only other tabby who’d ever been on trial in the U.S., and my case wasn’t much like hers, in spite of the surface similarities. The charges against her were more serious—three counts of murder to my one count each of murder and infection—yet her chances of getting off were much greater than mine.

Which was probably exactly what she needed to hear.

“Okay, on the bright side, I don’t think they’ll vote to execute.” I glanced at Manx, then at the door open into the hall. Everyone else was downstairs, and none of the tribunal members had arrived yet, but I wasn’t taking any chances. “Why don’t you sit? I need to explain something to you.”

Manx’s beautiful lips thinned in dread, but in the end her curiosity won out. While I closed the door, she laid the sleeping baby in the crib, then collapsed into the rocker as if it were a massage chair. I settled cross-legged onto the bed.

“Okay…” In the absence of my own punching pillow, I had to make do with a frilly sham from Manx’s temporary bed. I pulled it onto my lap and traced the lacy pattern as I spoke. “You’re on trial for killing three toms, but that’s not all this hearing is about.”

Her forehead knit into several thin lines. “What does that mean?”

I wasn’t sure how much my mother had already explained to her, so I started at the beginning. “It’s political.” From what I’d gathered, the South American Prides’ council held much less authority over individual Prides than ours did, so our political struggles were largely foreign to her. “You know my dad was suspended as head of the Territorial Council a little while ago, right?” I asked. She nodded. “Well, his enemies will probably try to use your trial to manipulate more Alphas into siding against my father. This is as much about him and the way he dealt with your…crimes as it is about you.”

Her frown deepened. “I do not understand.”

I exhaled slowly, struggling with how best to explain. “Some people think my father should have punished you for killing Jamey Gardner. Jamey’s brother Wes is Alpha of the Great Lakes Pride, and Wes is pushing for the death penalty for you.”

Manx nodded, but her hand began to tremble on the arm of the rocker. She’d known execution was a possibility, of course, but knowing something and hearing it spoken aloud were two entirely different animals. To which I could personally attest.

“But like I said, I don’t think they’ll do that. You are a tabby, and we really don’t have any of those to spare.” Which was probably the only reason I was still breathing.

The tribunal had threatened me with execution, too, but that threat had merely been a bargaining chip meant to force Marc out of the Pride and me into a marriage with someone else. Someone they considered a more appropriate match for me than a stray.

They’d gotten rid of Marc—for the moment—but I’d rather die than let someone else decide who I would marry. Or that I would marry at all. That decision was all mine, and if the council thought otherwise, they could happily go fuck themselves.

Regarding Manx’s trial, my best guess was that they would spare her life because, unlike me, she was obviously willing to bear desperately needed children. But there was a catch. She was not willing to be touched by a man. Any man, other than Dr. Carver, whom she’d shown no attraction to. And that would seem to make any future children from her pretty damn hard to come by.

Fortunately, Michael had come to Georgia in a professional capacity, and would no doubt emphasize to the tribunal that Manx was still severely traumatized, but that with time, she would recover and hopefully go on to live a normal life. Including a husband and more children.

Though I personally thought that husband would have to be a brave soul indeed…

“So…if they save me? What then?”

“Oh, now you’re asking the tough questions.” I smiled, trying to relax her. And to avoid mentioning that whatever happened after her trial would depend heavily on her sentence. “But the way I see it, you have a few options. You can come back to the ranch and stay with us. Everyone would love to have you. Though I don’t think the council will let you stay in Texas forever.”

With both me and Kaci on the ranch, the south-central Pride was already estrogen-heavy, and the other Alphas would never let my father “keep” three fertile tabbies.

“If you don’t eventually join another Pride, I suspect our Territorial Council will choose one for you.” Which meant she would be claimed by the Alpha who wielded the most power. “And they would probably expect you to marry one of their sons.”

And if, by some catastrophe, Calvin Malone wound up in charge of the council, Manx might live the rest of her life as his daughter-in-law, which probably wouldn’t be much better than life in captivity with Luiz.

I’d only avoided a similar fate myself because my father was reluctant to force me into a marriage, and because he remained convinced that I would eventually marry Marc on my own. But all of Manx’s close family members had died in a hostile takeover by a neighboring Pride, shortly after she had been kidnapped by Miguel and Luiz. In fact, her disappearance was probably what had weakened her father’s hold on his territory—without her, he could promise his members no heir.

So Manx and her son were alone in the world and, as with me, my father was the only thing standing between her and an unwanted marriage.

Manx’s eyes widened, and the blood drained from her face as that fact sank in. “They would force me to…”

“No!” I started to take her hand, then thought better of it and snatched mine back. “Not like Luiz did. The council would never stand for that.”

But was forcing her into marriage any less reprehensible than what Miguel and his brother had done? Sure, she wouldn’t technically be raped, and neither Manx nor her children would be in any physical harm. But she’d be expected to submit on her own, night after night, to a man she didn’t love, so that she and Des would have a safe place to live.

Because if Manx ever refused to bear the next generation, her life would cease to have value, and there would be little motivation for some members of the council to keep her alive. Which was exactly what I’d been told during my own trial.

My blood boiled just thinking about it. The North American Prides were no more civilized than our neighbors to the south! We just dressed up barbarism better, cloaking injustice and oppression—and hell, prostitution—in pretty words like duty and honor.

What a load of shit!

Part of me wanted to march downstairs and demand every cat in the house join me in a protest, pushing for a tabby’s right to chose her own future. Fighting for it, if necessary. But the other, wiser, more logical part of me knew that merely demanding change would accomplish nothing. And fighting would only put me back on the stand next to Manx.

If I wanted to change the system, I’d have to do it from the inside. Jace had told me that, and he was right. I could see that clearly now. And I also knew that it wouldn’t happen quickly. Not in time to save Manx. To keep her out of Malone’s household, we’d need a more immediately accessible alternative.

Fortunately, we might have one…

My throat ached with all the angry words I was holding back to keep from scaring the crap out of her. So I took a deep breath and slowed my pulse, hoping that if I stayed composed, she would, too. Then I forced a comforting smile and launched into the alternative.

“Or, if you like the Di Carlos and they like you, there’s a good possibility that you could stay here.” I glanced down to find my hands twisted around a handful of satin and stuffing, and had to swallow past the lump in my throat in order to speak. “Last summer, they lost their daughter, Sara, shortly before her wedding. Miguel killed her. They’re hurting pretty badly, so if you decide not to stay here, I’d ask you to please break it to them very gently. The last thing they need is more pain.”

“Vic misses her.”

Surprised, I looked up to see that Manx’s tears had actually fallen. “He talks to you about Sara?”

She nodded slowly, wiping moisture from her cheeks. “She was smart, and beautiful, and strong. She spit in Miguel’s face.”

“Yeah.” I laughed and blinked moisture from my own eyes. “That was Sara. She was halfway through a degree in economics, and planned to finish before having kids.” A decision I’d greatly respected.

But now she was dead, and the Di Carlos had no heir, and no way to hold on to their territory once Umberto retired. Or died.

“They’re good people,” I said, looking around at the room they’d fixed up for Manx and Des. “And who knows? You might decide you actually like Vic or one of his brothers. So maybe just think about it?”

“I will.” Manx nodded earnestly, blotting her long, dark lashes with a tissue from the changing table. “If I live.”

I wanted to tell her that she would. That everything would be okay, one way or another. But I couldn’t swear to it, and I wasn’t going to lie to her. And she seemed to respect that.

“Faythe, I need a…um…” Manx paused and closed her eyes, probably searching for the right word in English. “A favor.” She met my eyes again, and the depth of her gaze alone emphasized the importance of whatever she was about to say.

“Yes?” I held my breath, and could hear both our hearts beating. No, all three of our hearts.

“If I die, will you take Desiderio home? To your mother? I have not asked her, but I think she will take him.”

For a moment I was so horrified by the necessity of such a question that I couldn’t answer. I’d known arrangements would have to be made for Des, just in case. But Manx making those arrangements herself, less than twelve hours before the start of her trial?

I could barely even conceive of that kind of courage.

“Please,” Manx whispered, misinterpreting my silence, her eyes deep gray pools of despair.

“Of course I will,” I assured her. Relief washed over Manx, and she slumped against the back of the rocker, as if now that we had that out of the way, she could finally relax.

I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone look quite so pleased when contemplating her own death.

That night after dinner, I tried my hardest to keep Donna Di Carlo from putting me up in Sara’s bedroom. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I stopped arguing when I realized she might take my refusal as an insult.

I didn’t mean it as one. Sara’s pictures still topped the dresser, and her old stuffed animals reclined on the bed. Her room looked like a shrine, and I didn’t want to disturb it. But her mother was tired of seeing it sit empty and clearly wanted me to get some use out of it.

So I lay down in Sara’s bed just after eleven o’clock—and was still awake three hours later. I couldn’t sleep with her staring down at me from the walls, asking me wordlessly why I saved Abby but couldn’t save her.

Her eyes haunted me.

Finally, around two-thirty in the morning, I snuck out of her room and down the hall to Vic’s, where I climbed into bed with him. He barely even noticed. He just scooted over to make room, then went back to snoring softly.

I would never have gotten in bed with Jace, because Marc would never have forgiven either of us. He knew that Jace and I had made a real connection, and that Jace would be happy to revive it. But Vic and Marc had been partners for years, and Marc trusted him completely. Mostly because Vic had never shown any interest in me sexually. He was a friend, and one who would understand why I couldn’t sleep in his dead sister’s bed.

In minutes, I was asleep, but I woke up with the first rays of sun and crept back into Sara’s room to keep from hurting her mother’s feelings.

I dressed and showered early, and after breakfast I said goodbye to Michael, Manx and Brian. Then Vic drove me to the airport in Atlanta. My plane landed in Dallas just before noon, and I made my way to baggage claim, where Jace waited, his blue eyes sparkling in the fluorescent glow from overhead. Kaci stood at his side, chestnut waves in a ponytail behind one ear. She had her hands stuffed into the pockets of a faded pair of jeans, her jacket unzipped over her favorite long-sleeved tee.

She hadn’t seen me yet, and was anxiously scanning the crowd. Then Jace tapped her shoulder and pointed me out.

Kaci’s hazel eyes found mine, and her face lit up with relief and excitement. She took off through the throng, hair trailing behind her, moving at human speed because of her weakened state. And hopefully in consideration of the people around her. Even so, Jace panicked the moment she left his side. I could see it in his eyes. He’d lost sight of her in the crowd, and was seconds from seriously losing his cool.

I caught his eye and shook my head calmly; I could see her.

A second later she collided with my midriff, but lacked the strength to even push me back. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she mumbled into my jacket, and her arms tightened around my waist.

“What? Why wouldn’t I come back?” I dropped my bag and put both hands on her shoulders, prying her away gently until I could see her face. She was panting from the brief exertion, and her face was flushed with effort beneath the sickly pallor of her skin—a recent development.

But I smiled to reassure her, and she grinned back, evidently convinced I was real.

Kaci stepped back and took my bag in both hands, already turning toward Jace when she spoke. “Greg said you were hurt, and I thought you’d stay in Georgia till you got better.”

I took the bag from her, afraid she’d keel over with the additional weight. “I’m fine, Kaci. See?” I stomped my right foot on the floor, demonstrating my own sturdiness. “Not even a limp. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I Shifted.” I switched to a whisper in concession to the presence of so many humans. “Shifting can heal injuries in a fraction of the time it would have taken if I stayed in human form.”

“Well, good for you.” Kaci shrugged and headed for Jace, dismissing my less-than-subtle hint with an easy toss of her hair. “I’m not injured.”

I growled beneath my breath. Two months earlier, I would never have believed a thirteen-year-old could be harder to deal with than an infant. I guess that’s why nature starts most women off with babies and lets them grow into teenagers.

Jace took charge of my bag, and I gave him a quick hug. “How’s the leg?” he asked, eyeing me carefully when I pulled away.

“Just a little sore. But these make me look badass, huh?” I pushed back my sleeve to show off my new battle scars, and he whistled in appreciation, then laughed. “Where’s Ethan?” I asked, tugging my sleeve back into place.

Kaci grinned, pulling her MP3 player from her front pocket. “He’s trying to hook up with the girl at the Starbucks counter.”

I scowled. “Hook up with her?” I wasn’t sure whether I should be more bothered by Kaci’s too-casual phrasing, or my brother’s obvious disdain for the concept of monogamy. Guess he was getting tired of white rice.

Kaci nodded sagely. “Yeah, but I don’t think he’s really after coffee.”

Jace grinned sheepishly at me over her head, and I rolled my eyes. “Let’s go home. And no more hanging out with Ethan. You’re supposed to be under the supervision of your mental elders.”

We retrieved my brother from the food court, where he sat in front of a tall cup of something slathered with whipped cream, across from a girl in a green Starbucks apron. He grinned all the way to the car.

During the three-hour drive from the airport, Kaci fell asleep against the car door, her earbuds in place, blasting the latest teen-angst anthem. I watched her breathe, amazed by how peaceful she looked, all things considered.

Because Kaci Dillon had not led a peaceful life. Not even for a werecat.

Kaci wasn’t born into any Pride. In itself, that wasn’t incredibly unusual, as the ever-growing population of strays might suggest. But Kaci wasn’t a stray. She was a rare genetic anomaly—a werecat born to two human parents.

And so far, she was the only one of her kind we’d ever found.

We’d only known for about six months that, in spite of generations of belief to the contrary, it was indeed possible—if unlikely—for a werecat and a human to procreate. The children of such rare unions were humans whose DNA contained certain recessive werecat genes. Those genes would have no effect on the child unless they were one day “activated” by a bite or scratch from a werecat in cat form.

Normal humans can’t survive a werecat attack. Their bodies fight the “virus” and eventually they die of the infection. So all strays were once humans who already had the necessary werecat genes before they were attacked.

Kaci’s parents both carried those recessive genes, though they never knew it. Their unlikely pairing resulted in one daughter who didn’t inherit any werecat genes. And in Kaci, who got them from both sides. She was a full-blooded werecat, born of two humans, and she’d had no idea until puberty brought on her first Shift.

I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. So much unexplainable pain and an unfathomable transformation. In the height of her pain and terror, completely ignorant of what was happening to her, she accidentally killed her mother and sister. And in the process, she’d temporarily lost most of her sanity.

Kaci had wandered on her own for weeks, stuck in cat form because she had no idea she could Shift back, much less how to do it. She did what she had to do to survive, mostly out of instinct, but when we found her and showed her how to regain her human form—and with it, her sanity—she was horrified by what she’d done on four paws.

So horrified that she’d sworn never to assume her feline form again, convinced that if she did, she would hurt someone else.

But by refusing to Shift, she was only hurting herself.

Watching her sleep, I was shocked to realize Kaci was nearly as thin now as she’d been when I first saw her. She was slowly killing herself, and I had to do something to stop it. To help her help herself.

It was nearly four in the afternoon when we pulled through the gate onto the long gravel driveway leading onto my family’s property. The Lazy S ranch lay before us, winter-bare fields on both sides of the driveway. Deep tire ruts cut into the eastern field at an angle, leading to the big red barn, quaint with its gabled roof and chipped paint. And at the end of the driveway lay the house, long and low and simple in design, in contrast to the buildings my father designed in his professional life.

Jace parked behind Ethan’s car in the circular driveway, and the guys disappeared into the guesthouse, where my brother Owen was setting up a Rock Band tournament.

I grabbed my bag and headed for my room, not surprised when Kaci followed me. My mother had fixed up the bedroom Michael and Ryan once shared for her, but the tabby did little more than sleep there. She spent most of her time shadowing me, convinced that if she could learn to fight well enough in human form, she’d never have to Shift again. And no matter what I did or said, I couldn’t convince her otherwise.

In my room, I dropped my duffel on the bed, and Kaci plopped down next to it on her stomach, her legs bent at the knee, feet dangling over the backs of her thighs. “Hey, you wanna go see a movie tonight? Parker gave me twenty bucks to vacuum the guesthouse a couple of days ago, and I’ve barely been off the ranch all week.”

Groaning, I unzipped the bag and pulled my shampoo and conditioner from an inside pocket. “Kaci, don’t clean for the guys! They’re perfectly capable of picking up their own messes, but if you act like a maid, they’ll treat you like one.”

She frowned, her feelings hurt by my reproach, and I cursed myself silently. It should not be so hard for me to talk to one little girl. But then, I’d never expected to be someone’s mentor. Hell, I’d probably never even be anyone’s aunt.

I grinned to lighten the mood and took another shot. “Besides, if you feel like vacuuming, there are plenty of perfectly good floors in the main house. Like mine, for instance.” I made a sweeping gesture at my beige Berber carpet, which could certainly use the attention.

Kaci laughed, and all was well. “So, what about the movie? You buy the tickets, and I’ll buy the popcorn.”

I walked backward toward the bathroom, hair products in hand. “It’s a school night.”

She swirled one finger along the stitches in my comforter. “I don’t go to school.”

“You could….” I left that possibility dangling and turned into my private bathroom, the only real advantage to being the sole daughter out of five children. Kaci pouted at me through the open doorway as I set the shampoo and conditioner on the edge of the tub. “You know how to make that happen.”

The original plan had been for Kaci to start eighth grade in Lufkin, at the beginning of the second semester. My father had acquired the necessary documentation—birth certificate and shot records under the name Karli Sanders—and she would be his niece, recently orphaned and left to our care. She’d picked out a new haircut and color—long, dark layers—and we were relatively sure that with those precautions taken, no one would ever connect Karli Sanders with Kaci Dillon, who’d disappeared from her home in southern British Columbia during an attack by a pack of wild animals.

Of course, it helped that Kaci’s family was no longer looking for her. She was presumed dead in the same attack that had killed her mother and sister. Her father had erected a memorial headstone for her months earlier, and by all accounts seemed to be trying to come to terms with his loss and grief.

But in the end, none of that mattered because by the time the spring semester had started a week earlier, Kaci was too weak to go. She got winded just walking to the barn, and took several naps a day. Her skin was pale and sometimes clammy, and she got constant migraines and occasional bouts of nausea.

She couldn’t go to school until she’d Shifted and regained her strength. Until then, my mother was homeschooling her in the core subjects.

Neither of them was enjoying it.

“I can’t do it.” Kaci’s frown deepened as she rolled onto her back to stare at my ceiling, rubbing her forehead to fend off another headache.

“Yes, you can. I can help.” I went back to the bag for my toiletry pouch and hair dryer, still talking as I set them on the bathroom counter. “Dr. Carver says that once you’re Shifting regularly, you’ll get better very quickly. Then you can go to school like a normal kid.”

“Normal!” She huffed and rolled her head to the side to meet my gaze. “What the hell is that?”

I groaned at her language. How the hell had she managed to pick up all of my bad habits and none of my good ones? “You know you can’t talk like that in front of the Alpha, right?”

Kaci rolled both big hazel eyes at me. “You do.”

Damn it!

From somewhere near the front of the house, my mother laughed out loud, having obviously heard the entire exchange. She’d always said she hoped I had a kid just like me, but neither of us had expected that to happen quite so soon.

But Kaci was right, of course. I sank onto the bed with a frustrated sigh, and she rolled onto her side to look at me, her face in one hand, her elbow spearing the comforter. “Kaci, you do not want to model your life in this Pride after mine. A smart girl would learn from a few of my mistakes, instead of choosing to repeat them all just for the experience.”

She frowned and stared down at the comfortor. “My dad didn’t let me cuss, either.”

My heart jumped into my throat. Kaci hardly ever mentioned her father, or anything else from her previous existence, as if it were easier not to talk or even think about them. Though I understood that, I also knew that ignoring her problems wasn’t the healthiest way to deal with them.

But before I could encourage her to go on, she changed the subject with a sudden shake of her head. “Besides, you look like you’re doin’ okay to me.”

“But you could do better. You could do anything you want. Starting with public school.”

Kaci sighed and flopped back over to stare at the ceiling, her hands folded across her stomach. But I could see wistfulness in her eyes. She wanted to go to school, no matter what she said to the contrary. I’d been in her position—aside from the whole refusing-to-Shift thing—and knew exactly how badly it sucked to be stuck in one place, under constant, nagging supervision.

At the end of the bed again, I dug in the duffel and pulled out my bloody, ruined jeans, tied up in a white plastic Wal-Mart sack.

“What’s that smell?” Kaci rolled onto her stomach and sniffed the air with a spark of interest as I dropped the bundle on the floor. That night I would have to fire up the industrial incinerator behind the barn and toss the whole mess inside.

Hmm. I wonder if it’s still hot from the recent mass cremation….

“You’re probably smelling the stray who slashed through my jeans,” I said, glancing at the bag in irritation. “That was my favorite pair.”

“No, that’s not it.” She stuck her nose into my duffel and sniffed dramatically, and when she rose, the zipper pulled several strands of thick brown hair free from her ponytail to hang over her cheeks. “It’s Marc.” She shoved the loose strands back from her face. “Your underwear smells like Marc!”

I flushed and pulled my bag off the bed. When I was thirteen, there was no older woman around for me to ask about guys, other than my mother. And I wouldn’t have asked her about sex if the future of the species depended upon my understanding of the process.

Which, according to my mother, it did.

Caught off guard by the questions I could practically feel her forming, I crossed the room to upend the rest of the duffel into my regular hamper, a purple ribbon-trimmed wicker thing my mother had put in my room when I was twelve.

I stared at the hamper critically, suddenly perplexed by its presence. What kind of enforcer’s hamper has ribbons threaded through it? I needed something else. Something utilitarian. Something big and sturdy, and not at odds with the blood- and sweat-stained clothes it would be holding.

Like, a big metal trash can. Or a barrel.

I turned toward Kaci, intending to ask her if she wanted the girlie hamper, but she was already talking before I could get the question out. “So, how long have you been with Marc?”

“Um…we were together for my last two years of high school, then we broke up for about five years. And we got back together last summer.”

“Why did you break up?”

Because I’m an idiot. I tossed my empty duffel into my closet and kicked the door shut. “It’s complicated, Kaci. Things get weird when you grow up. Enjoy being a kid while you can.”

“Whatever.” She rolled onto her back again. “Being a kid sucks. People tell you when to get up, when to go to bed, when to eat, what not to wear…”

I glanced up from my dresser, onto which I’d been emptying my jeans pockets, to see her watching me in obvious—and incredibly misplaced—envy. “Have you met my parents? In case you haven’t noticed, they still tell me what to do. All the time.”

“Yeah, well, at least you get paid for it.”

“Not this year.” Enforcers drew a small salary, in addition to free room and board. But as part of the “community service” sentence handed down to me from the tribunal in November, in addition to teaching my fellow enforcers to do the partial Shift, I had to forgo my salary for an entire year. All I had now was what little money I’d saved since college and the business credit card all my father’s enforcers had. And that could only be used for official enforcer business. Which apparently did not include a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk. Or a trip to Starbucks.

Oops.

“You love Marc, don’t you?” In the mirror, Kaci’s reflection stared at me, one cheek pressed into the comforter.

Surprised, I turned from the dresser to find her watching me in undisguised curiosity, as if my life served no other purpose than to entertain her. Yet I wasn’t irritated, as I would no doubt have been if my mother were the one interrogating me, because Kaci had no ulterior motive. She wasn’t trying to talk me into anything, or manipulate me. She just wanted to know… everything.

Sighing, I crossed my bedroom and sat facing her on the bed, my legs folded beneath me, yoga style. “Do I love Marc?” I repeated, and she nodded, sitting up with her back against my headboard. I pulled my fluffy pink punching pillow into my lap—if I was going to voluntarily engage in girl talk, I might as well be properly armed.

“Yes, I love Marc.” So much that it hurts not to see and touch him every day.

“What about Jace?”

My chest tightened, and my heart seemed to be trying to beat its way free. “What about him?”

“He likes you. Like Marc likes you.”

“What makes you think that?” I gave her my best blank face.

“He watches you. All the time. If you need something, he brings it to you. And when he looks at you, his heart beats really hard. I can hear it.” She smiled slyly, and her big hazel eyes glinted. “Like yours is doing right now.”

Damn it. I resisted the urge to close my eyes, or otherwise betray my frustration, which she would probably notice, like she had my heartbeat. “Kaci, that’s really… complicated.”

“Because you don’t like him like that?” Bald hope flooded Kaci’s features, and suddenly I understood. This wasn’t about me and Marc. It was about Jace.

Kaci had a crush on Jace.

Oh, shit.

An interest in boys was a nice, normal development for a girl her age, and might go a long way toward convincing her to Shift, so she’d be healthy enough to start dating—with several huge, protective chaperones. But Jace was nearly twenty-five, and Kaci was only thirteen. She needed a boy her own age to crush on.

Yet another reason to get her enrolled in school.

But as for her actual question… “Kaci, I’m with Marc.”

“So, Jace is single, right?”

Kaci frowned again and glanced at my open bedroom door. Then she turned back to me, and when she spoke, her voice was a barely audible whisper. “How old were you when you and Marc first…”

Mayday, mayday!

Alarms went off in my head, and my eyes snapped shut in denial. I was not ready to have this conversation with Kaci. And somehow we were back to her looking at my life as a blueprint for her own. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility! I wanted the freedom to mess up and know that my mistakes wouldn’t screw up anyone’s life but my own.

Unfortunately, I’d kind of given up that privilege when I became an enforcer.

“Whoa, Kaci, back up a bit.” I shook my head and made myself meet her frank gaze. “You’re waaaay too young to be thinking about sex.”

She rolled her eyes, and the gesture was eerily familiar from my own adolescence. Okay, also from what little of my adulthood I’d survived so far.

“I was talking about kissing,” Kaci said, in that exasperated tone she usually saved for my mother, during homeschooling. “I just meant, how old were you when you first kissed Marc? But since you brought up sex…” Her eyes glinted with a spark of mischief. “Same question.”

Damn it! “Way older than you are.” My head was throbbing and pain was shooting through my chest. I was having a panic attack. The little whelp was giving me an aneurism!

I was a firm believer in telling the truth, but some of my truths weren’t suitable for such young ears, and I did not want to screw up someone else’s kid!

I had to redirect. Change the subject. Turn the conversation back onto her before my mother decided to step in. But Kaci was still talking…

“Was it your idea, or his?”

Oh, shit. But she wasn’t done yet.

“Does it hurt? ‘Cause I heard…”

Okay, this has to stop.

I threw up one hand, palm facing her, in the universal sign for halt! Then I took a deep breath and glanced at the open door again, this time thinking of escape, rather than of being overheard. But that was the coward’s way out. If I could stand against multiple strays in cat form, wielding only a shovel, surely I could face a single thirteen-year-old and her birds-and-bees inquisition.

And, if not, I could procrastinate with the best of them.

“You’re throwing an awful lot of questions at me all at once, Kaci. And asking for a lot of very personal information.”

Her face fell, and she tugged aimlessly at the frayed cuff of her jeans. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

I sighed. Answering her questions—at least some of them—might go a long way toward getting her to truly trust me. Which might help me convince her to Shift. But no true compromise was one-sided. “I tell you what. I will answer three of your questions—any three you want…”

Her eyes lit up in expectation.

“…after you Shift.”

Kaci scowled. Then she stood, more color draining from her already pale face, and stomped across my room and through the open doorway.

“I take it that’s a no?” I called after her.

She slammed her bedroom door in reply, and I flinched.

Well, that went well…

Seven

“Again!” Ethan wrapped both bare arms around the heavy punching bag to steady it, and I shot him a look meant to scorch him from the inside out. Or at least to shut him up. “Harder this time. And a little higher. Hit his knee from the side, and he’ll go down. Then it’s all over but the beatin’.”

“He doesn’t have knees,” I snapped, wiping sweat from my forehead with an equally sweaty forearm. There was a clean, dry towel hanging over a folding chair near the bathroom, but I was too tired to cross the basement for it. “He doesn’t even have legs.”

“Oh, you got jokes?” Ethan grinned amiably, his green eyes flashing in challenge. He dropped his arms, then stepped around the bag, his sneakers sinking into the thick blue mat with each step. “If you’ve got energy to be funny, we’re not working you hard enough. Right, Kaci?”

“Right.” The young tabby tucked her legs up onto her folding metal chair and sipped from a covered mug filled with hot chocolate. Then she grinned at me and set her drink back on the bench press serving as an end table. The night before, she’d officially forgiven me for pushing the Shifting issue so hard. Still, she didn’t seem to mind watching Ethan kick my ass….

Little traitor.

Our basement was unheated, but was naturally insulated by the earth surrounding it, so the slight chill seeping in from the high windows was no problem for me or Ethan. After only half an hour of moderate lifting, he and I were both covered in sweat, even wearing only light workout clothes. In fact, he’d shed his shirt several minutes earlier.

But Kaci shivered beneath long sleeves, jeans, and a light blanket. She didn’t have enough energy to exercise with us, and she lacked the body fat to keep herself warm, but no amount of begging, coercing, or threatening on our part could convince her to go back upstairs, where my mother waited with more cocoa and an algebra textbook.

I could probably have made her go up, but I’d decided not to push the issue because she was still mad at me over the unanswered sex questions. Besides, we’d be heading up for lunch soon anyway.

“You’re not working me at all.” I reached up to catch the towel Ethan tossed me. “You’re practicing with me, not on me. Or do you need another reminder?”

“What I need is an actual challenge, smart-ass.” Ethan winked at Kaci, who grinned, enjoying our banter. “Think you can manage that?”

“Oh, you’re asking for it n—” Before I could finish the sentence, Ethan charged.

I lunged to the right, but I was too slow. His shoulder clipped my arm, knocking me off balance. I hit the thick pad on my hip and rolled out of the way. He slammed into the mat where I’d been, but I was already on my feet.

I dropped onto his back and planted my knee in his spine. Ethan howled and bucked. I straddled him for stability. My hand closed around his flailing right arm and I dug in the pocket of my workout pants for my cuffs.

Ethan’s left hand brushed my leg, then closed around the back of my knee. He tugged me forward. I leaned back to counter and snapped one cuff over his right wrist. He pulled harder, and I slid onto the mat with my left leg folded beneath me.

My brother tossed his weight over me, and we rolled. His elbow hit my ribs. His skull slammed into my right cheekbone, but I held on to my cuffs. Dizzy now, I stuck one knee out to halt our roll. We stopped with him facedown, me straddling his back again, and this time I didn’t hesitate. I pulled his left arm back and snapped the other cuff closed over his wrist.

Then I stood and backed away, waiting for the sparks. Waiting to gloat as he ranted and raged, demanding to be let loose.

Instead he shook with laughter.

I stared at Ethan for a moment, a little disappointed, then turned when I heard Kaci giggling behind me. “That was awesome!” she yelled, on her feet now, the cocoa forgotten.

“I agree.” Ethan’s words were muffled with half of his face pressed into the mat, and I turned to find him watching me, now lying on his right shoulder. “That was damned impressive.” He smiled, looking almost as pleased as he would have been had our positions been reversed. “But let’s not tell anyone, ‘kay? We’ll keep this a private victory, just between the three of us.”

“No way!” Kaci shouted, grinning so hard her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Or maybe with the cold. “Faythe owns you! I wish I had a camera. Wait till Jace—”

Ethan’s phone rang, Puddle of Mudd singing “She Hates Me.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Whose ring is that?”

He let his head hit the mat. “Angela’s.”

Kaci glanced at the bench press, where two cell phones lay, alongside her hot chocolate and two bottles of water. She picked up his phone and glanced at the display, her eyes shining in mischief. “You want me to tell her you’re all tied up?”

“No!” Ethan shouted, scooting awkwardly across the mat on his side. “Don’t answer it. She wants to ‘talk about our relationship.’ I’ve been dodging her calls all week.”

I rolled my eyes and dug my handcuff key from one side of my sneaker. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell her you’re no longer into white rice? Or that you’re moving to Yemen? Or whatever you tell those poor girls when your attention span turns out to be smaller than your—” I hesitated, censoring myself on Kaci’s behalf “—IQ, and you get bored with them?”

“No.” Ethan went still as I freed his hands, then he sat up, rubbing his wrists as Puddle of Mudd played on. “It’s easier to avoid her calls until she gets the picture on her own. That way, no one gets dumped. Really, I’m doing her a favor.”

“You’re an ass.” I was seriously considering answering his phone myself. But then the ringing stopped, and Kaci dropped the phone onto the padded bench next to mine. “And just for that, I’m not letting you up next time.”

Ethan had barely regained his feet when I rushed him. My shoulder slammed into his chest. I drove him backward onto the mat again, and his breath exploded from his chest in a massive “oof.”

“Yeah!” Kaci shouted, and I twisted to see her standing again, her smile almost as big as mine.

But I shouldn’t have looked.

Ethan grabbed my left shoulder and rolled me over, sitting on my thighs. “So much for a challenge,” he taunted.

I retorted with my fist.

My first blow landed on his ribs, and I shoved him off me. But before I could flip him onto his stomach and go for my cuffs again, more music rang out from the bench next to Kaci.

Papa Roach, singing “Scars.” That was my phone. Marc’s ring.

I was halfway to the bale of hay when something hit my back, fast and hard. I fell face-first onto the mat, Ethan’s weight pinning me.

“You’re too easily distracted,” he scolded. “Are you going to ask the bad guys to stop beating on you for a minute so you can answer your phone?”

I twisted beneath him but couldn’t get any leverage; he’d pinned my arms to my sides. “Get up!” I shouted, as loud as I could with his weight constricting my lungs. “That’s Marc!”

Ethan slid off me reluctantly. “You don’t see me going all starry-eyed when my girlfriend’s on the line,” he huffed.

“You’re not even taking her calls.” I glanced at Kaci and held my right hand up, palm cupped. “Toss it here, please.”

Her aim was good, but mine wasn’t. The phone flew past my hand and landed on the mat behind me. Ethan dove for it, an impish grin lighting his whole face. But I was faster. My fingers closed around the plastic just as his closed around my arm, and I put the phone in my other hand, flipping it open as Ethan groaned in defeat.

The look on his face was so comical that I was laughing when I spoke into the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Faythe? Is that you?” At first I didn’t recognize the voice, either because I was expecting Marc’s, or because the speaker sounded so panicked. But understanding didn’t take long. “This is Daniel Painter.” He huffed into the phone like he’d just run a marathon.

My heart stopped beating for a moment, even as my pulse tripped so fast the surge of adrenaline actually hurt. “What’s wrong?” I shoved Ethan when he tried to snatch the phone from me, still playing around. But my tone froze him in place, and the smile drained from his expression. He glanced at my phone, and I knew he was listening in.

“Marc’s gone, and there are two dead toms in his living room.” Painter’s words all ran together and at first I thought I’d misunderstood him. I must have misunderstood him. “Some of the blood is theirs, but lots of it is his, too….”

There was blood?

My heart seemed to burst within my chest, flooding me with more pain and confusion than I could sort through at once. I fell off my knees onto my rump and could barely feel the mat I sat on. My hands tingled as if they were on hold, waiting to receive signals from my brain, and I was afraid I’d drop the phone.

Painter was still talking in my ear, babbling words I couldn’t understand. Phrases that wouldn’t sink in. Bastards. Dead. Blood. Missing. I could barely hear him over the static in my head, the ambient noise of my own denial.

“Faythe!” Ethan muttered. I blinked and shook my head, then forced my eyes to make sense of his face. “Slow him down. Make him give you the facts.”

Right. The facts.

And just like that, the world hurled itself back into focus around me, the entire barn tilting wildly for a moment before everything seemed to settle with an eerily crisp clarity. I met my brother’s eyes, thanking him wordlessly for the mental face-slap. “Take Kaci upstairs and get Dad. I think he’s in the barn.”

By the time I’d gotten a deep breath, Ethan was on the bottom step, one hand beckoning Kaci to follow him, the other flipping open his own phone, because he could call the barn much faster than he could get there, even with a werecat’s speed.

“Faythe?” Dan was shouting now and I took a moment to be grateful that I got a strong signal in our basement. “Are you there?”

“I’m here. Calm down and explain it to me slowly.” I stood, and almost lost my balance when one foot hit the concrete floor and the other sank into the thick mat. “Marc is gone, but you smell his blood. Is that right?”

“It’s everywhere,” Painter said, with no hesitation, and I pictured him nodding, though I couldn’t see the gesture over the line. “There’s a thick trail of it leading across the carpet to the front door. Like someone dragged him off.”

Oh, shit. Oh, noooo!

Stop it, Faythe. He’s lost a lot of blood, but that doesn’t mean he’s dead. Marc would be fine. We just had to find him.

“Where does the trail go?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice calm and even. If I panicked, Dan might panic, and we’d lose valuable time that would be better spent looking for Marc. “Does it continue out the front door?”

“Yeah. Across the front stoop, down the steps and over the grass. That’s how I knew something was wrong when I got here.”

“So, it ends in the grass?”

“On the edge of the driveway.” Painter paused, and I heard a metallic groan, as a screen door creaked open. “It looks like they put him in a car and took off with him. There’re big ruts in the gravel from where they peeled off too fast.” He hesitated again, then asked the question I hadn’t even posed to myself yet. “Do you think he’s dead?”

My eyes closed, and I inhaled deeply. Then exhaled slowly. “I don’t know.” I sucked in another breath and forced my concentration back to the work at hand, and away from thoughts I couldn’t bear to entertain. “Did they take his car?”

“No. It’s up next to the house. Along the south side, where he always parks it.” The screen door slammed shut with a horrid tinny screech, and Painter’s voice echoed slightly, now that it had four walls to bounce off again.

“Should I go look for Marc, or start cleaning up the mess?” Painter inhaled deeply, obviously trying to calm himself. “And the bodies…?”

I wanted to tell him to forget about the bodies and start driving around town on the lookout for Marc. Or into the forest, keeping an eye out for fresh tire tracks. But the truth was that if there were enough of them to take Marc down, there would be too many for Painter to handle on his own. Assuming he found them.

My mind was flooded by the possibilities. Maybe they’d taken him alive. But if so, why? And where?

Maybe they’d killed him, and had left to dispose of the body. My eyes watered, and my fist clenched around the phone, the nails of my opposite hand biting into my flesh. No. That’s not what happened. If they’d killed him, why not dispose of all three bodies at once? Why leave the others?

Unless the killers drove a compact…

“Okay, let’s take it one thing at a time.” My feet moved as I spoke, and I found myself on the aisle formed by two rows of weight-lifting equipment. “The other bodies. Are they strays? Do you know them?” I thought about going upstairs, but didn’t want Kaci to overhear anything that might upset her.

“Yeah, they’re strays. I recognize the scents, but don’t know the names.”

“There are two of them, right?” I ran my hand over the leg press, cursing silently when a flake of paint slid beneath my fingernail. “And they bled on the carpet?”

“Yeah.” Floorboards creaked, and I pictured Painter leaning over the bodies. “The carpet, themselves, each other. The biggest one has a huge gash on the top of his skull. Near the back. And the coffee table’s broken and covered in his blood. Looks like he fell and hit it. Or else someone hit him with it.”

Yeah, that sounded like Marc. An odd pang of pride and pain rang through me, as I hoped fervently that he was still alive to repeat that performance someday.

“What about the other one?”

“Side of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone took a rung-back chair to ‘im.”

“Okay, now I need you to sniff around. Concentrate. Do you smell any scents that don’t belong to either Marc or the dead strays? Did anyone else bleed in there recently? Or sweat? Or touch anything? Sniff the doorknobs first, then anything that might have been used as a weapon. Did you touch the doorknob?”

“Only from the outside of the door.” There was a pause on his end, and I thought I heard floorboards groan as he knelt. Or stood. “Yeah, there’s another scent on the front door. The wood and the knob. It’s another stray, but no one I know.”

“Good.” I was walking again, my feet whispering on concrete, my hand trailing over the long bar on the bench press. That scent belonged to the last person who’d touched the doorknob—presumably whoever had taken Marc. “Don’t touch the knob. We’ll need to smell that scent.”

I didn’t hear what he said next because of the footsteps thundering toward me from the kitchen. My dad jerked open the door and jogged down the steps, breathing deeply from exertion, his eyes wide with alarm. I’d rarely seen him so flustered, and it meant the world to me that Marc meant so much to him.

My father wore no coat other than his usual suit jacket, and only once I noticed that his cheeks were flushed from the cold did I realize that I was completely covered with chill bumps, and that I was actually shivering.

Now that I was done exercising, my sweat had dried to leave me cold in the basement chill.

“What happened?” Moving briskly, my father stepped over the corner of the mat and snatched the blanket from Kaci’s chair.

“Hang on a second, Dan,” I said into the mouthpiece, while my father draped the blanket over my shoulders. “Daniel Painter found two dead strays in Marc’s living room. Marc’s missing, and a trail of his blood leads out the house and to the driveway, where it looks like he was loaded into a car. At least one other stray was there, based on the scent on the doorknob.”

My Alpha’s expression grew bleaker with each word I spoke. “How much blood did he lose?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, just as Painter said, “A lot.” My heart thumped harder, aching within my chest at the thought of how much blood he’d lost, and my father motioned for me to sit in the chair Kaci had vacated.

“Are these dead strays in cat form or human form?” he asked, knowing Painter would hear him.

“Human form.” Painter sighed, and when springs squealed over the phone, I pictured him sinking wearily onto Marc’s couch. A couch I’d never sat on, or even seen.

My father frowned, and I shared his confusion. Why would werecats attack someone they obviously meant to kill, based on the earlier ambush, without the use of their best weapons—claws and canines? For that matter, why attack Marc at all? Weren’t Manx and I the original targets? Wasn’t the objective the usual: kidnap the women and kill the men? If so, why go after Marc when Manx and I weren’t even there?

My phone was getting hot, so I switched to my other ear.

“Are the dead men carrying anything?” My dad dug in his inside coat pocket and pulled out his own cell phone, scrolling through the menu as he spoke. “Wallets? Checkbooks? Phones? Anything that might identify them?”

“I don’t know.” More springs groaned as Painter stood again. “Want me to search ‘em?”

Instead of answering Painter, my father turned to me with his free hand outstretched. “Give me the phone.”

I hesitated, even though my father—not to mention my Alpha—had given me a direct order, because handing over my phone felt like giving up my link to Marc. Or at least to the man currently in the best position to help him. But after a second, I obeyed.

“Painter?” my father barked. His concern came through as gruffness. But then, that’s how most of his strong emotions sounded. “This is Greg Sanders, Alpha of the south-central Pride. Thank you for alerting us. Can you stay there until my team arrives?”

“Yeah, sure,” Painter said, and I pictured him nodding eagerly, pleased to be needed, in spite of the circumstances.

My concern for Painter paled in comparison to my fear for Marc, but I still didn’t want him to get hurt, especially trying to help us. “What if they come back to clean up the rest of their mess?”

My dad tilted my phone so that the mouthpiece slanted away from his lips. “Hopefully, he’ll get a good description.” To Painter, he said, “Lock the door and turn off the lights. Then Shift.” Because it would be easier to defend himself that way, should the need arise. “And if they come back, go right out the front door and call Faythe.”

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