ROGUE

“Miss me?” The man’s voice was sharp with hostility, obvious even in just those two words.

The unexpected voice—and the angry question—surprised me.

“Should I miss you?” I asked finally, pressing the phone against my ear.

“I guess that’s a matter of opinion, Faythe. My idea of what you should do obviously has little in common with your own.”

Irritation flared in my chest like heartburn. “Who the hell is this?” I demanded, half convinced that my judgemental caller had the wrong number, even though he knew my name.

Deep Throat clucked his tongue in my ear, and I gritted my teeth against the intimate sound and feel of his disapproval.

“How soon they forget,” he whispered, and the enmity in his tone chilled me.

And suddenly I knew. Andrew.

I’d never heard my human ex speak a word in anger before, and the rage in his voice rendered it completely unrecognisable.

Find out more about Rachel Vincent by visiting mirabooks.co.uk/rachelvincent and read Rachel’s blog at ubanfantasy.blogspot.com

Shifters series

STRAY

ROGUE

PRIDE

Rogue
Rachel Vincent

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This is for Number One, who puts up with me on

a daily basis. Who is patient when the line between

fiction and reality blurs. Who remembers when I

forget. And who does hundreds of little things to

keep me healthy and happy, because we both know

I’d rather be working than sleeping or eating. I’m

still up and running because you take care of me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe more than I could ever express to my critique partner, Rinda Elliott, for the use of her eagle eyes and for her willingness to tell me when I’m not living up to my potential. I only hope I’m half as much help to her as she is to me.

Thanks to my Dad, for the native Texan’s perspective.

Thanks to Livia Rosa, for double-checking my Portuguese, and for making suggestions. To Elizabeth Mazer, for more work on my behalf than I can begin to list. And to D. P. Lyle, M.D., whose medical expertise kept my corpses realistic. Any medical mistakes in this book are mine, not his.

Thanks to my agent, Miriam Kriss, for late-night, last-minute reads, and for all those times you must wish the Easy Button really worked.

And finally, thanks to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for patience, guidance, wisdom and encouragement. Your enthusiasm is contagious, and I’m so happy to have caught it.

One

“Catch and release, my ass!” Grunting, I shoved the stray facedown over the trunk of Marc’s car, snatching back my free hand just in time to avoid his teeth as they snapped together. The bastard was half again my size, and thrashing like a…well, like a scared cat, determined to shred anything he could get his hands on—including me.

Several feet behind me, Marc watched, no doubt mentally noting every aspect of my performance so he could recreate it later for my father. So far, I hadn’t given him much good to report.

Beating prowlers senseless to teach them a lesson was one thing; I’d easily mastered most of the common scare tactics. But this whole chase-them-down-and-haul-them-out approach? That was bullshit. Complete and total idiocy. What was my father thinking?

The only stroke of luck I’d had all evening was that the stray had fled to a deserted make-out spot on the outskirts of Dumas, Arkansas. If he’d headed toward the town lights instead of away from them, I’d never have caught him. I wouldn’t even have tried. We couldn’t risk human passersby seeing an average-size young woman like me haul around a man who outweighed me by at least forty pounds. And the truth was that if the stray had known how to fight, I probably couldn’t have caught him.

Not that the capture had gone smoothly, even so. Marc had made no effort to help.

“Can you give me a hand, here?” I snapped at him over my shoulder, slamming the stray’s head back down on the trunk as he twisted, trying to break free of my grasp.

Masculine laughter rang out from behind me, unaccompanied by footsteps. “You’re doing just fine, querida.”

“Don’t…fucking…call…me…that,” I growled through clenched jaws. With my free hand, I seized one of the tres-passer’s flailing arms and pinned it to the small of his back. His other hand escaped me, clawing grooves into the paint. Not that it made any difference on Marc’s oft-abused car.

Marc laughed, unmoved by my threat.

Leaning forward, I draped myself across the intruder’s back to hold him still. His heart pounded fiercely against the thin, shiny material of a red blouse I’d had no plans to fight in.

His free hand flailed, still out of reach. I squeezed the wrist I’d captured. His bones ground together. Howling in pain, he bucked beneath me. I held on, determined not to screw up my first solo capture. Not with Marc watching. He’d never let me live it down.

“Let me go, bitch,” the stray growled, his words distorted with his face pressed into the car.

Behind me, Marc chuckled again. “I think he likes you, Faythe.”

“Either help or shut up.” With my free hand, I dug into my back pocket for my new handcuffs, fresh out of the package and still shiny. It was time to break them in.

Metal clinked against metal as I opened the first cuff, and the stray’s thrashing intensified. He threw his head back and tossed his free arm up at an awkward angle. His hand smashed into mine. My fist opened.

For one agonizing moment, the open half circle of metal dangled from my index finger, the other end swinging like a pendulum. Then the cuff slipped from my grasp and landed across the toe of my prisoner’s left shoe. Tightening my grip on his wrist, I bent to grab it, hauling him backward in the process. He kicked out. The cuff sailed beneath the car, skidding across the gravel.

“Damn it!” So much for shiny and new. I jerked us both upright and slapped the back of the stray’s head. He growled. Marc laughed. I barely held back a scream of frustration. This was not how my first catch-and-release was supposed to go.

Shoving aside my irritation, I slammed the stray back down on the trunk, but it was too late to regain the upper hand. I’d screwed up, and he’d rediscovered his balls.

Grunting, the stray threw his elbow back, into my left side. Pain tore through my chest and abdomen. My breath escaped in a single, harsh puff. His arm slid through my fist, and I nearly lost my grip.

Screw this. He’d blown his shot at nice-and-easy, which only left quick-and-brutal—my favorite way to play.

I sucked in a deep breath. Fire raced up my newly bruised side. I shifted my weight onto my left leg and slammed my right knee into his groin.

The stray made a single, pain-filled gulping sound, as if he were swallowing his own tongue. For a moment, I heard only Marc’s steady breathing at my back and the crickets chirruping all around us. Then my prisoner screamed. He hit notes that would have made Steven Tyler wince.

Satisfied that he couldn’t stand, much less run, I let him go. He crumpled to the ground at my feet, shrieking like a little girl.

“Well, that’s certainly one way to do it.” Marc stepped up to my side. He looked a little pale, and not just from the moonlight.

I smoothed more hair back from my face, eyeing the pathetic form on the gravel. “Give me your damn cuffs,” I snapped at Marc, not the least bit ashamed of myself for dropping my opponent with a knee to the groin.

Marc pulled his own handcuffs from his back pocket. “Remind me not to piss you off,” he said, dropping them into my open palm.

“You still need to be reminded?” Kneeling, I pulled the stray’s arms behind his back and cuffed them. He was still whimpering when I hauled him up by his elbow and half dragged him to the passenger side of the car. At the door, I spun him around to face me. “What’s your name?”

Instead of answering, he leered at the low neckline of my blouse. It wasn’t the smartest or most original response, but it was a definite improvement over the guy who’d tried to take a taste. Still, I was in no mood to be ogled. At least, not by him.

I let my fist fly, and my knuckles smashed into his rib cage. His eyes went wide, and he clenched his jaw on an oof of pain.

“This is the last time I’ll ask,” I warned, focusing on his closed eyelids. “Then I’ll just knock you out and call you Tom Doe. Your choice. Now, what’s your fucking name?”

His eyes popped opened, staring into mine as if to determine how serious my threat was. Whatever he saw must have convinced him. “Dan Painter,” he said, the end of his own name clipped short in anger.

“Mr. Painter.” I nodded, satisfied that he was telling the truth, based on his expression and the steady, if quick, beat of his pulse. “To what do we owe the displeasure of your visit?”

His eyebrows rose in confusion.

I rolled my eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?”

The wrinkles in his forehead smoothed out as comprehension spread across his face. “Just doin’ my civic duty,” he insisted. “Chasing a piece of ass, not that it matters now. Bitch gave me the slip.”

Marc stepped forward. “That must have been some piece of ass, to tempt you into south-central territory.”

Groaning inwardly, I held my tongue. It would have been poor form to yell at my partner in front of the prisoner. Again.

“You got no idea.” The stray looked at Marc over my shoulder. “Or maybe you do.” His eyes slid back to me, and I ground my teeth as his gaze traveled down my blouse and snug black slacks. “This one’s kind of plain in the face, but she’s got it where it counts, huh?”

I felt Marc tense just behind me, and heard his knuckles pop. He was forming a fist. But he was too late.

“Consider this your only warning to stay out of our territory.” My fist flew in a beautiful right hook. My knuckles slammed into the stray’s left cheek. His head snapped back and to the side. And for the second time in four minutes, he collapsed—this time unconscious.

Already flexing my bruised hand, I let him fall. What did I care if he scraped his face on the gravel? He was lucky I hadn’t broken his cheekbone. At least, I didn’t think I’d broken anything. Except possibly my own knuckles.

Behind me, Marc made a soft whistling sound, clearly impressed. “That’s not standard procedure,” he said, his tone entirely too reasonable as he leaned over the stray’s body to open the back passenger-side door.

“Yeah, well, I’m not your standard enforcer.” The rest of my father’s employees had more respect for the rules than I had. They also had much more testosterone and two fewer ovaries. None of them really knew what to do with me.

Marc grinned, pulling my injured hand into the light from the car’s interior bulb. “I won’t argue with that.” He tilted my wrist for a better view, and I winced. “It’s not broken. We’ll stop for some ice on the way to the free zone.”

“And some coffee,” I insisted, already dreading the hourlong drive east to the Arkansas-Mississippi border, where we would release Dan Painter in the free zone on the other side of the Mississippi River. “I need coffee.”

“Of course.” Bending, Marc grabbed the stray’s shirt in his left hand and the waist of his jeans in the other. He picked up the unconscious werecat and tossed him headfirst onto the backseat. “That was one hell of a right hook.” Marc produced a roll of duct tape, apparently from thin air. He tore off a long strip and wound it around Mr. Painter’s ankles, then bent the stray’s legs at the knees to get his feet into the car. “I don’t remember your father teaching you that.”

“He didn’t.”

Marc slammed the door and arched one eyebrow at me in question.

Smiling, I knelt to look beneath the car. “Ultimate Fighting Championship.”

He nodded. “Impressive.”

“I thought so.” On my hands and knees in the gravel, I felt around beneath the car, searching for my handcuffs. I’d lost my first pair diving into the Red River in pursuit of a harmless but repeat offender a month earlier. If I came back without the new set, my father would have my hide. Or dock my paycheck.

My fingers scraped a clump of coarse grass growing through the rocks and skimmed over the rounded end of a broken bottle.

“Need some help?” Marc reached down to run one hand slowly over my hip.

I grinned at him over my shoulder. “You’re not going to find anything there.”

“That’s what you think.” His hand slid up my side as my fingers brushed a smooth arc of metal. I grabbed the cuff and backed out from under the car, and Marc pulled me to my feet. He turned me around to face him as I slid the cuff into my back pocket, then he pressed me against the side of the car. “Let’s take a break,” he whispered, leaning in to brush my neck with his lips.

“Like you’ve been working,” I said, but my hand reached automatically for his arm. My fingers brushed the lines of his triceps, my nails skimming the surface of his skin, raising goose bumps. I loved drawing a reaction from him. It gave me a sense of power, of control. And yet the feeling was mutual; I couldn’t say no to him, and he knew it.

“So why don’t you put me to work?” he purred against my ear, pressing closer to me. His fingers edged between me and the car, moving slowly to cup my rear, his grip firm and strong.

I leaned forward to give him better access. “Do we have time?”

“All the time in the world. Unless you have a curfew I don’t know about.”

“I’m grown, remember?”

“Oh, I remember.” His tongue trailed lightly down the side of my neck, hesitating slightly at the four crescent-shaped scars, leaving a wet trail to be caressed by the warm September breeze. “You’re very, very grown.” His tongue resumed its course, flicking over my collarbone before diving into my cleavage. The sweet spot, he called it. With good reason.

“What about our unwilling guest?” My fingers trailed over his chest, feeling the hard planes through his T-shirt.

“He can find his own date.” Marc’s words were muffled against my skin, his breath hot on the upper curve of my breast.

“I’m serious.” I pulled him back up to eye level. “What if he wakes up?”

“He’ll be jealous.” Marc leaned in to kiss me, but I put a hand on his chest. Breathing an impatient sigh, he glanced through the car window over my shoulder, then back up to meet my eyes. “He’s out cold. Besides, we never have any privacy at the ranch, anyway, so what does it matter?”

Privacy. It had become our most precious commodity, and the supply was never enough to meet the demand in a house full of propriety-challenged werecats—noisy, overgrown children with supernatural hearing and no lives of their own. Marc was right: middle-of-nowhere Arkansas was about as private as we were going to get. Ever. For the rest of what passed for our lives.

I nodded, sliding my hands slowly beneath the front of his shirt. “Okay, but you’d better have a blanket in there.” I tossed my head toward the trunk. “’Cause I’m not lying down on this gravel.”

He frowned, and his nose met mine as he bent down for one more kiss. “Who said anything about lying—” his cell phone rang out from his hip pocket, just as his lips brushed mine “—down.”

I smiled, not a bit surprised. Timing was everything, and in that regard, my father was a force to be reckoned with.

Marc stepped back, pulling the phone from his pocket, and my hands fell from his chest to rest on my hips. “Damn it, Greg,” he muttered, glancing at the backlit screen.

“Tell him what we were about to do, and he’ll probably leave us alone,” I said, pulling open the front passenger-side door. Unlike most fathers, mine was…enthusiastic about my relationship with my boyfriend. So was my mother. They loved Marc as if he were a son, and would have done anything to make an honest couple of us, including gluing the ring to my finger. It was kind of creepy, if I stopped to think about it for too long.

“That’s not a conversation I particularly enjoy having with your father.” Marc scowled as the phone continued to ring. “And if I get one more tip from Michael, I’m going to throw him right through the living-room window, even if he is your brother.”

I flinched. “He didn’t.”

Marc raised his eyebrows.

Damn. He did. Marc wouldn’t have to kill Michael; I’d do it myself. I just could not make people understand that my private life was exactly that: private.

Smiling now, Marc pressed the on button and held his phone to his ear. “Hi, Greg. What’s wrong?”

My father’s reply came through loud and clear. “I just checked my messages and found something interesting. An anonymous call about a dead cat. I hope you have your shovel.”

Of course Marc had his shovel. Because what better way was there to end a date than by burying a corpse in the middle of the night?

It’s official. My job sucks.

Two

“An anonymous call?” Marc said, his brow furrowed. “That’s…unusual. What time did it come in?”

“Shortly after seven.” Thanks to my werecat’s enhanced hearing, my father’s voice was easily audible, even though I was several feet from the phone.

I pressed the button on the side of my watch, illuminating the face. It was just after ten. The message was three hours old.

“Where did the call come from?” Marc asked.

Over the phone, my father cleared his throat. “A phone booth in southern Arkansas. You and Faythe are closest, so keep your eyes open, because whoever made the call could still be around.” Silence settled in over the line for a moment. “I need you to identify the corpse and take care of the body.”

Marc glanced at me, and I shook my head. Hell no. We’d already detoured from a much-anticipated weekend road trip to take care of some random trespasser, and were just about to take care of each other. That was enough for one night. The body could rot, for all I cared.

Except that we couldn’t really let it rot. At least, not where a human could find it. Humans tended to get uptight and curious around corpses, and were generally adamant about pinning down the source of the problem. Which, of course, was us. Well, not my Pride specifically, but likely a member of our species. So, Marc and I would take care of the body, whether we wanted to or not. For the good of the Pride. Because that was our job.

Marc frowned at me, and I nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, we’ll take care of it as soon as we get rid of the stray in the backseat,” he said.

“Did she do it on her own?” my father asked, and I ground my teeth together. I couldn’t help it. I’d called to report the intruder like a good girl, and was rewarded with an order to take him unassisted. It was my father’s idea of a test.

Most aspects of my training didn’t agree with me. There wasn’t as much bossing around as I’d hoped for, and there was way too much following orders. Fortunately, there was also ample opportunity to vent my frustration in the guise of protecting and defending our property boundaries. That part wasn’t too bad.

“Let’s just say your daughter has one heck of a right hook,” Marc said, laughter bubbling up behind his words.

“I’m not surprised.” Our esteemed Alpha gave Marc directions to the exposed corpse as we settled into the car, and by the time we turned left out of the empty lot, he’d hung up the phone.

“So, what are we supposed to do with the body?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“Bury it. Unless you’d rather take it to school for show-and-tell?”

“Smart-ass,” I snapped. Burial was what I’d expected. Unfortunately, we hadn’t come prepared with a backhoe. Or a coffin. All we had was an emergency kit and a couple of shovels Marc kept in the trunk, for just such an occasion.

Huffing in irritation, I glanced at my clothes, selected with our weekend getaway in mind. But our trip had been canceled. There would be no quiet dinner in a nice restaurant with cloth napkins. No popcorn in the dark theater. No private hotel room, far from the inescapable eyes and ears of our fellow werecats.

Instead, we’d be working. All night. For no overtime.

Most of my friends had returned to school the week before and had probably spent their night gathered around textbooks and boxes of pizza. I, on the other hand, had chased down a trespasser, in three-inch heels, and would soon be digging a grave by hand in the middle of the night.

I felt my mood darken just thinking of school, and of not being there. Of not completing my master’s degree, or even using my brand new BA in the foreseeable future. But I’d bargained with my father for the next two years and three months of my life, to be spent serving the Pride and training for a future I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

“Definitely a broken neck.”

“Hmm?” I murmured, staring hard at the line of trees twenty feet to the east. If I focused on them, on the way the moon cast ever-shifting shadows of the branches as they swayed in the early-morning breeze, I wouldn’t have to look at the corpse. And I really didn’t want to look at the corpse.

We’d found him just where the informant had said we would, in an empty field about half an hour south of Little Rock, near a tiny rural town called White Hall, which boasted some six thousand residents. From what little I could see of it in the dark, White Hall seemed like a decent place to grow up. A place that did not deserve a middle-of-the-night visit from us.

Marc turned his flashlight to my face, and I winced, squeezing my eyes shut against the sudden glare. “Pay attention, Faythe,” he snapped, his earlier playfulness gone. He was all business now, kneeling next to the dead man who lay facedown in the grass. “I said it’s definitely a broken neck. Come feel this.”

“No thanks.” I shoved his flashlight aside and blinked impatiently, waiting for the floating circles of light to fade from my vision. “I can see it fine from here.”

“Yes, but you can’t feel it.”

I glanced down to see Marc’s fist around a handful of the corpse’s hair, using it to rotate the poor man’s head, which obviously provided no resistance. “The bones kind of…crunch, when you turn his neck. That means his vertebrae are fractured.”

“Fascinating. Really.” I swallowed thickly, and Marc continued to twist the man’s neck, his ear aimed at the ground. Maybe he could actually hear the bones grinding together. Ewwwww. “Could you stop that, please? Leave the poor man alone.”

“Sorry.” He dropped the head, and it hit the grass with a nauseatingly solid thunk. “It’s weird, though. Not a bite or fresh claw mark anywhere.”

“How do you know? You’ve only seen his neck.” With a resigned sigh, I stared down at the body, scenes from the latest CSI rerun flashing through my mind. “Shouldn’t we turn him over, or check for wounds beneath his clothes, or something like that? What if he was killed somewhere else, then moved here to keep us from finding the real crime scene?”

“Crime scene?” Marc laughed, and I gritted my teeth, uneasy with the fact that he was so comfortable around corpses. “You watch too much TV,” he said, refocusing the light on the werecat’s neck.

Only it wasn’t just any werecat. It was a stray—a human initiated into our secret existence by violence rather than by birth. At least he had been a stray. Now he was dead, and his social standing no longer mattered.

Lucky bastard.

“It’s research.” I dragged my gaze from the corpse to Marc’s face. His gold-flecked brown eyes glittered in the moonlight.

“Whatever.” Marc shrugged, and the flashlight’s beam swung off into the grass. “My point is that he wasn’t bitten or clawed. I don’t smell blood.”

Pushing damp strands of hair from my face, I sniffed the air, flushing in annoyance when I realized he was right; if there had been any blood present, fresh or old, we would have smelled it. And if there was no blood, there had been no fight. No werecat—even one in human form—would fail to draw blood with a bite or scratch.

How was I sure the murderer was a werecat? Simple. No human had the strength to break a man’s neck one-handed, and judging from the bruises on the back of the dead guy’s neck, that was exactly what had happened to him. Sure, in theory it could have been a bruin, or one of the other shape-shifter species, but the chances of that were almost nil. What few other breeds existed weren’t interested in us, and the feeling was mutual.

“Oh,” I said, glancing again at the trees as I conceded his point. What else could I say? Marc was the expert on dead bodies, and in spite of having…um…made one a few months earlier, I knew almost nothing about murder victims. And I liked it that way.

Marc sighed. “Fine. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll check for other wounds.” With an Oscar-worthy grunt of effort, he tugged up on the dead guy’s T-shirt, exposing a tangle of old scars reaching toward his spine from both sides of his chest.

I frowned at the long-healed marks. “You’re right. I admit it. There’s no reason to undress him.”

Marc shot me a cocky smile and lowered the poor man’s shirt.

Biting my lip in frustration, I glanced at my watch, pressing the button on the side to illuminate the face with a soft green glow. Almost one in the morning. Great. I should have been curled up next to Marc in bed, exhausted but satisfied. Instead, I was digging unmarked graves by moonlight, exhausted but creeped-the-fuck-out.

We’d dropped off the unconscious Dan Painter in a thick stand of trees just east of the Mississippi River and north of Arkansas City, still bound and now gagged, to teach him a lesson. Then we’d backtracked two hours northwest, on a predominantly two-lane highway. Or rather, Marc had backtracked. I’d recited the prologue to Canterbury Tales in my head. In Middle English. Backward. Marc had his special skills, and I had mine. Of course, his came in far handier than mine in our line of work. Bad guys were hardly ever intimidated by a stirring recitation from Hamlet.

Gritting my teeth, I clung to the last of my dwindling supply of willpower and gave up all hope of seeing my bed before dawn. If I was going to be awake all night, I might as well get something done.

“Okay, a broken neck, but no other obvious wounds,” I said, tugging on the hem of my snug white T-shirt.

Of course, if I’d known I would be handling a corpse, I would have worn something…darker. Or disposable. As it was, I considered myself fortunate to be wearing jeans and a T. If not for the bag I’d packed for our weekend getaway, I’d be digging in expensive black slacks and a red silk blouse.

“So, we’re probably looking for another stray,” I continued, brushing imaginary grave dirt from my shirt. “Maybe one with a grudge, or a history of violent behavior?” I could feel the fine layer of grit all over me, like a ghostly dusting of death, somehow itching and burning beneath my skin.

Or maybe I was overreacting.

Marc shrugged, oblivious to my discomfort as his face smoothed into an unreadable expression. “That describes nearly every stray I’ve ever met. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause we’re not looking for anyone. We’re here to dispose of the body, not investigate the murder.”

I nodded and glanced away. I’d known better. The Territorial Council, nominally led by my father, would never tie up its resources investigating the murder of a single stray. They would almost certainly view the dead cat as one less flea in their collective fur.

“It doesn’t matter what he was doing here, or who killed him,” Marc whispered, kneeling next to the body. “No one gives a damn.”

He would never have voiced such a concern to anyone else, and my heart ached for him, knowing what it had probably cost him to say it in front of me. I knew he cared not because he’d known the stray, but because he hadn’t. Because no one had. And because, like the dead cat we’d come to bury, Marc was a stray. He was facing what I knew to be one of his worst fears: a quick burial in the middle of the night, without a single friend to remember him kindly.

As long as I was alive, that would never happen to Marc. He had me, my whole family, and our entire Pride to miss and remember him. Yet the injustice of a secret burial for the anonymous cat still bothered him. Righteous anger burned bright in his eyes when he looked up at me, and there was nothing I could do to put out the flames.

Marc glanced away from my sympathetic look, but before he turned back to the body, his expression hardened into its usual business face, cold and unreadable. It was a defense mechanism I had yet to master.

He pulled a brown leather wallet from the stray’s back pocket and thumbed through the contents: two credit cards, a few folded receipts, a single wrinkled twenty, and at least two dozen crisp new one-dollar bills. Marc slid a driver’s license from its plastic cover and passed it up to me without even glancing at it.

I looked at the photo, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Until I saw his face, Bradley Moore had just been a body, a nameless corpse to be disposed of quickly, so I could get on with my night.

But now that I’d seen his license, I knew that Moore lived in Cleveland, Mississippi, and was licensed to drive a motorcycle. He’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday, was six foot two and a half, and weighed two hundred and twelve pounds. And he had the most beautiful, hypnotic bluish-gray eyes I’d ever seen.

“Do you smell that?” Marc asked.

“Smell what?” I slipped the license into my front pocket and knelt beside him, eager to forget Mr. Moore’s haunting eyes.

“The killer, I assume. I smell another cat on him. On his clothes, and here, on his neck.” He bent to sniff where he’d indicated, and my stomach churned. I understood his sympathy for the unknown stray; I really did. And after seeing Moore’s face, I couldn’t help but share it. But three months earlier, I’d had to rip out a tomcat’s throat in order to free myself and Abby, my kidnapped cousin. And impractical as it might sound, considering my line of work, I’d had no plans to ever again share such intimate contact with a corpse.

I could handle wrapping the cadaver in plastic and dumping it in a hole in the ground, though that might have been easier if I’d never learned the victim’s name. But sniffing a corpse’s neck went way past my definition of decorous behavior. It was macabre, and disturbing.

“I can smell it from here,” I said. Marc hadn’t asked me to come closer, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

“Does it smell like a stray to you?”

I inhaled deeply, mentally sorting through the smells I already knew. The strongest was Marc. Musky and masculine, his scent was as familiar as my own. It was also blended with mine, the result of every kiss and embrace we’d shared since my last shower. Which we’d also shared, come to think of it.

Next, I filtered out the scents from the field around us, so pervasive I barely noticed them without conscious effort. I identified trees, grass, dirt, fresh dew, and several small rodents, mostly rabbits and mice.

On the body itself were several more scents, including Mr. Moore’s cologne, the oppressive stench of cigarette smoke, and a strong, minty breath spray. What was left after I’d sorted out all of those smells was the one Marc meant. It came from the stray, but was not his personal scent. It was something else. Something definitely feline, and rich, and pungent. Almost spicy…

Shock jolted up my spine, cold and numbing. Terror ripped through my chest. For one long moment, my heart refused to beat, and I could do nothing but stare at the corpse. I knew that scent. One aspect of it, anyway.

“Well?” Marc asked, staring at me as I stared at the body, my eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Foreign cat.” I stood and stumbled back a step, too horrified to form a complete sentence.

“What?” Marc glanced up at me sharply, then back down at Moore. “No. It can’t be. Luiz is long gone. We would have heard about him by now if he were still around.”

Luiz was one of a pair of jungle strays who’d invaded our territory three months earlier, kidnapping and raping at will. I’d fought him once, and won, but he got away and we hadn’t heard from him since, a fact that scared me more than I was willing to admit out loud. And fucking pissed me off.

“It’s not Luiz.” I was certain of that much. The scent was very faint—meaning the murderer had only briefly touched the victim—but I knew two things without a doubt. The scent was not from a native cat, and it did not belong to Luiz.

“There’s barely a trace of a scent.” Marc shook his head slowly, but his stare never left Moore’s neck. “I don’t see how you can tell a damn thing about it.”

“I can tell.” I’d only met Luiz once, but that was plenty. If I lived to be two hundred, I’d still remember his scent on my deathbed. It was permanently imprinted on my brain, alongside such innocent memories as the taste of my first kiss—Marc—and the flavor of my first snow cone—blue raspberry.

“Fine.” Marc nodded, glancing up at me. “It isn’t Luiz. But is it a stray?”

Against my better judgment—and in spite of an irrational urge to run, or at least find a weapon—I knelt for a stronger whiff of the scent. It didn’t help. “I don’t think so. There’s something…weird about the smell. It’s a foreign scent, but it’s also…more. If that makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t,” Marc said as I stood and backed away from Moore’s corpse. “But you’re right.” He still knelt by the body, looking at it rather than at me as a light breeze ruffled tall blades of grass against his jeans. “There’s an element to it that I can’t quite place.” He leaned back on his heels, frowning in frustration. “What’s his name?”

“Bradley Moore.” I slipped my hand into my pocket, feeling the slick surface of the plastic card, now warm from my own body heat. “He’s from Mississippi.”

Marc nodded, as if he’d already known that last part. It wouldn’t be too hard to guess. Mississippi was the nearest free territory, unclaimed by any Pride. And because it had the mildest climate of any of the free territories, it was home to the largest concentration of strays in the country, mingling with the human population like the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing.

We were less than forty miles from the Mississippi border, where interstate travelers were welcomed across the state line by a seedy-looking strip club, at which Moore had no doubt planned to spend the bundle of ones in his wallet. At least that much of his plan for the evening was clear. Unfortunately, a stack of one-dollar bills did nothing to answer the other questions pinging around my brain like the little silver balls in a pinball machine.

“Well, let’s get going.” Marc stood and brushed his palms against his legs, as if he could wipe the feel of dead flesh from his hands like road dust. I knew exactly how he felt. “It’s a shame the son of a bitch didn’t have the courtesy to give him a decent burial,” he said. “We do that much even for trespassers, and this asshole couldn’t be bothered to bury a friend.”

I blinked at Marc’s tone, so low and gravelly. And angry. Then his meaning sank in. “You think Moore knew whoever killed him?”

“How else could the killer have gotten so close to him?”

I thought about that for a moment, still rubbing the license in my pocket as I stared at the ground near poor Mr. Moore’s head. “No defensive wounds,” I said finally. I took another deep breath, again searching with my sensitive nose for any sign of blood. I still found none. “No blood beneath his nails or in his mouth. He didn’t fight back.” Marc was right. They’d probably known each other. But how was that even possible? How could an American stray have become friends with a foreign cat who had no business in the United States, much less in the southcentral territory? And what were they both doing on our land?

Marc nodded again, interrupting my silent confusion. A hint of a smile showed me he was pleased that I understood what he was getting at.

I wasn’t pleased. I didn’t want to understand death and murderers. Unfortunately, what I wanted mattered no more then than it ever had. Alphas aren’t big fans of free will. In fact, our social and political structure is more of a monarchical system, in which the monarch is invariably the strongest male in the territory. Power passes not to one of the Alpha’s several sons, but to the tomcat who marries his only daughter. This son-in-law and future Alpha must be strong enough to lead, protect, and ultimately control the entire Pride, or the entire system falls apart. And the system—along with the continuation of the species itself—must be protected at all costs.

My father was a bit of a rebel among the other Territorial Council members, Alphas of each of the nine other territories. Rather than passing the south-central Pride on to my future husband—Marc, if my parents have any say in the matter—he wanted to hand the reins over to me. That very concept was sending shock waves of anger and impropriety throughout certain elements of the Council. If my father’s scandalous scheme ever came to fruition, I would someday have an opportunity to change the system from the inside.

It was the “inside” part that bothered me.

A chill went through me at the very thought of ever being in my father’s position, and Marc mistook my shiver for one of sympathy for the dead stray.

“He probably never saw it coming.” Marc shook his head in disgust. “The bastard just reached over and snapped his neck from behind.”

My phone rang into the silence following his words, rescuing me from the fact that I had no idea what to say next. I fumbled in my right front pocket, digging for the phone. Squinting at the tiny display screen, I was relieved to recognize the number for my father’s private line. “It’s my dad.”

Marc nodded and bent to pick up the roll of black plastic in the grass at his feet.

I pressed the yes button as he spread the plastic out on the ground beside Moore’s body. “You rang?” I said into the phone, turning away from Marc as he prepared to flip the corpse over.

“Did you find it?” my father asked.

“Yeah.” I grimaced at the heavy thunk and the crinkling of thick plastic at my back. “I think we need to look into this one.” Marc went silent behind me, and I knew he’d frozen in surprise. He would never have voiced such a request.

“Faythe…” A chair creaked in the background as my father leaned back. “You know we don’t have the resources to investigate every stray who dies in a brawl. We’d just be chasing our own tails. Bury him and come on home.”

I exhaled slowly, wondering whether I was trying to satisfy Marc or set my own mind at ease. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

“There’s a scent on the body. It’s very faint, and it’s only on his neck, so we’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s the killer.” I hesitated when the next words seemed to catch in my throat, threatening to choke me. Then, finally, I spat them out, grimacing at the bitter taste. “It’s a foreign cat.”

A sharp, near-silent inhalation was my father’s only reaction. He was as worried and pissed off as I was at the news of an outsider in our territory. Thank goodness.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice frightfully calm as Marc went still again behind me.

“Completely.”

Silence stretched out over the line, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I’d come to recognize that particular pause over the past three months; everyone close to me lapsed into it often enough. He was thinking about Miguel, debating whether or not to ask me if I was okay. Like the rest of my family, my father was afraid of upsetting me with reminders of the bastard who’d kidnapped, caged, and beat the living shit out of me. Apparently he thought I was sturdy enough to chase down intruders and bury dead bodies, but too delicate to withstand the assault of my own memory. Go figure.

What my father didn’t realize, what none of them seemed to realize, was that just reporting for work every morning reminded me of Miguel, the jungle stray whose disregard for personal liberty and a woman’s right to say “no” had changed my life forever. I’d agreed to work for my father in exchange for the opportunity to go after Miguel. To take my pound of flesh from the sadistic bastard who’d murdered one of my childhood friends and raped my teenage cousin. And who’d tried to sell all three of us as personal property to a jungle Alpha somewhere in Brazil.

Though no one seemed willing to believe it, thinking about Miguel didn’t so much upset me as inspire me. It reminded me of my new purpose, of why I was willing to forgo a weekend with my boyfriend to kick the shit out of one stray and bury another. And every now and then I really needed that reminder, so I wished my father would quit stalling and just spit it out. And finally he did.

“Miguel’s dead, Faythe. He’s not coming back.”

“Damn right.” But I shivered in spite of the balmy breeze. Marc laid a warm, heavy hand on my shoulder, clearly having heard both sides of the conversation.

“Are you okay?” My father’s voice was hollow-sounding, the way it got when he cradled his head in one hand, in spite of the telephone.

In the distance, a whip-poor-will sang, unconcerned by our presence. “Yeah. I’m fine.” And if I’m not now, I will be soon. “Really,” I added, before he had a chance to ask if I was sure. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Good.” Over the line, he cleared his throat and tapped a pen against his desk blotter, and I couldn’t stop a smile. My father was gone; the Alpha had arrived. “Okay, so you’re pretty sure the killer is foreign. Is it a jungle cat?”

I inhaled again, but was rewarded only with frustration. “I don’t know. It’s too faint to tell for sure, but that’s a definite possibility. And there’s something weird about the scent. It’s definitely foreign, but it’s also…more. If that makes any sense.”

“Not much sense, I’m afraid,” he said. “Would you recognize it if you smelled it again?”

“Absolutely.” I nodded, though he couldn’t see me.

“Me, too.” Marc bent to pick up a shovel mostly hidden by tall grass. I didn’t bother passing his answer along; my father could hear him just fine.

“Good. That’s a start.”

“Any word yet on who called it in?” I asked, shuffling my feet in the long grass.

“We’re still working on it, without much luck.” Metal springs squealed and I pictured my father leaning forward again in his desk chair. “The only thing we know for sure is that the caller was male.”

That was pretty much a given. Female cats—tabbies—were few and far between, and we were never unattended for long enough to stumble across a dead body in an empty field.

“And that he isn’t one of ours,” my father continued. “He sounded young, but that isn’t specific enough to be of any help. Owen’s compiling a list of strays living closest to the Arkansas border.”

“Did Bradley Moore come up on your list?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder to see Marc sliding a pair of scissors through the plastic, on which Moore now lay faceup.

“Just a minute…” Papers shuffled and my father cleared his throat as my gaze slid back toward the trees. “Yes. Bradley Moore. You have reason to suspect him?”

“Nope.” From behind me came a dull ripping sound as Marc tore strips from a thick roll of duct tape. “I have a reason to cross him off your list. He’s dead.”

“We usually have to work much harder to identify corpses not of our own making.”

By which, of course, he meant Marc’s making. Marc was my father’s de facto executioner—the enforcer charged with carrying out death sentences for any werecat guilty of one of the three capital crimes: murder, infection, or disclosure of our existence to a human.

“Well, this one was easy. He still had his wallet.” I curled my left hand into a fist to keep it from sneaking back into my pocket to feel Moore’s license.

“That’s unusual. They’re typically stripped of their ID and anything valuable.”

“Yeah, well, it gets even weirder.” I brushed my hair back from my face, making a mental note to wear a bun or a ponytail on my next burial run. “His neck is broken, but he wasn’t bitten or scratched at all, and he has no defensive wounds. Marc thinks he knew his attacker.”

“Does he have any lumps on his skull? Do you smell any strange chemicals?”

I shook my head before I realized he couldn’t see me. “No, no bumps that I’ve seen. Um…hang on.” I turned to Marc with an upraised eyebrow. He frowned and handed me his flashlight, then squatted to rip a strip of duct tape from one end of the long black bundle. Sheet plastic fell away to reveal Bradley Moore’s face, his beautiful eyes staring up into nothing.

Marc lifted Moore’s head gently, and I grimaced at the ease with which it rolled on his broken neck. Mouth set in a grim, hard line, Marc moved his fingers quickly but thoroughly over the stray’s skull, examining every inch of it as I watched, fending off nausea by sheer will. Finally, he lowered the head back onto the plastic and looked at me, eyes glittering in the beam of the flashlight. “No bumps. And that odd element to the scent is biological, not chemical.”

“Okay.” My father sighed in frustration. “Just get him buried and come home.” He paused, and I could feel the lecture coming, even as I heard the tired smile in his voice. “And if you make Marc do all the digging, I’ll give him all of your paycheck.”

Hmm, there’s an idea. What was I supposed to do with my meager income, anyway? I lived with my parents, owned no car, and had no bills. And I hated shopping. Marc could have my check, especially if he’d dig the damned hole himself.

I grinned, glancing at Marc from the corner of my eye as I spoke into the phone. “Thanks for the warning. I gotta go bury a body.”

“Make it at least five feet deep,” my father said, and very few other people would have heard the exhaustion in his voice. Then he hung up. No “Thanks for giving up your weekend to do my grunt work, Faythe.” No “Have a safe drive home.” Not even a goodbye. The Alpha was all business.

A little miffed, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and met Marc’s eyes. He frowned sternly at me, but his lips held a hint of a smile. “Don’t even say it,” he warned. “I’m not digging this grave by myself. Not even for your annual salary. So quit looking at the dirt like it’s going to stain your soul, princess, and get to work.” Openly smiling now, he tossed me the shovel one-handed.

I caught it, though I’d literally never held a shovel before. Cats have great reflexes, which isn’t always a good thing.

He grinned, gold-flecked eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “First one to hit five feet wins.”

“Wins what?”

“A nap on the way home.”

I groaned, my good humor beginning to fade. Nothing good could come from such a wager. If I lost, I’d have to drive for the entire five-and-a-half-hour trip home. But if I won, Marc would drive, which was much, much worse. With him in the driver’s seat, I’d be afraid to blink, much less sleep. Marc’s favorite travel game was highway tag, which he played by getting just close enough to passing semi trucks to reach out his window and touch their rear bumpers. Seriously. The man thought the inevitability of death didn’t apply to him, simply because it hadn’t happened yet.

Marc laughed at my horrified expression and sank his shovel into the earth at the end of the black plastic cocoon. With a sigh, I joined him, trying to decide whether I’d rather risk falling asleep at the wheel, or falling asleep with Marc at the wheel.

It was a tough call. Thankfully, I had three solid hours of digging during which to decide. Lucky me.

Three

Marc hit five feet first, naturally, and as he grinned in triumph, completely covered in grave dirt, I dropped my shovel in defeat. I was done, and not a single threat from him could pry my tired, grimy ass off the ground. My formerly white T-shirt forgotten, I lay sweating on dew-damp grass as Marc rolled Bradley Moore into the hole, then shoveled dirt in on top of him. Then I took the keys Marc held out to me and snatched my shovel from the ground, my mood growing more foul with each step I took toward the car, in spite of my relief to be leaving the unmarked grave behind. This was not how I’d planned to spend my time off.

I stopped for coffee five times on the way home, and had to use the restroom at each stop. Marc slept the whole way, and his obnoxious snoring did more to keep me awake than the caffeine did during the drive from White Hall, Arkansas, to the Lazy S Ranch. My family’s property—devoid of domestic animals in spite of the title ranch—sat on the outskirts of Lufkin, Texas, sixty miles from the Louisiana border.

Yes, at twenty-three years old, I still lived with my parents. But so did three of my older brothers, and four of my fellow enforcers, though they technically lived in a guesthouse on the back of the property. The concept of a group dynamic is different for werecats than it is for humans. Pride members are very close, both emotionally and physically, especially the core group, consisting of the Alpha, his family, and the enforcers. We’ve always lived in large, mostly informal groups for protection, comfort, and social interaction. And because one of the primary duties of an enforcer is to protect and assist the Alpha, which we couldn’t do if we weren’t with him most of the time.

Fortunately, the advantages balanced out the drawbacks of being forever under my father’s watchful eye. Most of the time. And the number one benefit—other than free food and freshly folded laundry—was the fact that my family’s mostly wooded property backed up to the Davy Crockett National Forest and its 160,000 acres of woodland. Which made one hell of a big—and convenient—playground for a houseful of werecats.

It was nearly 10:00 a.m. when I turned Marc’s car onto the quarter-mile-long gravel driveway. I parked in the circle drive, as close to the front door as I could get, and heat hit me like a blast of steam from a furnace as I opened the car door. The 102-degree-heat index was our own personal inferno, a September-in-Texas specialty, guaranteed to melt tourists where they stood. But I was a native, and all the searing, blacktop-melting blaze drew from me was a weary sigh.

My boot heels sank into the gravel as I stood, and I glanced at Marc, where he still sat snoring against the passenger-side window. I should wake him up, I thought. But then, he should have offered to split the drive with me.

I was too tired to go to war with my conscience, and more than a little irritated with Marc. So, I cranked down the driver’s-side window to keep him from baking and closed the door gently, smiling to myself as Marc shifted in his seat, then resumed snoring, still out cold in spite of the heat.

My boots clomped as I trudged up onto the porch, and when I opened the front door, cool air rushed out to meet me. I sagged in the doorway for a moment, one hand on each side of the frame, letting the artificial breeze dry my sweat and chase away the heat that had been slowly draining my vitality.

In my room near the end of the long central hallway, I stripped completely, tossing my dirty clothes into a pile by the door. I considered putting them in the hamper, but since I had no plans to ever wear them again, going through that much effort seemed pointless.

I glanced around the room, happy to find everything just as I’d left it. My books—hundreds of them—were crammed two rows deep into my only bookshelf, the extras stacked horizontally wherever they would fit. My bed was unmade, because I hadn’t made it, and because I’d refused to let my mother into my room to clean since my first week home, when I’d realized she was using housework as an excuse to spy on me. That could not continue. Besides, I was damn well old enough to clean my own room. Or to not clean it in peace. So I’d told her to stay the hell out. She’d frowned at my language, but complied.

At my dresser, I paused to take off my watch and caught sight of my own reflection. I looked like shit. Dirty, sweaty, tangled, and…still wearing the diamond stud earrings I’d put on in concession to my original plans for the night before. It was a miracle I hadn’t lost them both—along with half my earlobe—to Dan Painter’s temper and desperate, flailing fists. Or his teeth.

As much as I hated to admit it, even to myself, I’d been completely unprepared for my run-in with Painter. After we dropped off the stray, Marc had laughed at my bewildered expression as he’d pulled item after item from a trunk emergency kit, the likes of which I’d never seen because I’d never had reason to use one. The kit included two shovels, a roll of 3 mm black plastic, duct tape, black jeans and a black T-shirt, a pair of old sneakers, and an ax.

I didn’t ask what the ax was for, because I doubted its uses involved fallen tree branches and cozy campfires. Regardless, Marc was nothing if not prepared. He was like an overgrown Boy Scout. A Boy Scout with gorgeous gold-flecked brown eyes and glossy black curls crowning a physique solid enough to stop a fucking freight train. A Boy Scout who could bring a girl screaming with a single lingering glance…

Okay, he really had little in common with the Boy Scouts, other than the whole overpreparedness thing. And his damned emergency kit hadn’t kept me from letting him bake in his own car, now, had it?

Thoroughly satisfied with my revenge, I dug out a change of underwear and a nightshirt and tossed them onto my bed, then plodded into my private bathroom and straight into the shower. Ten minutes later, I stepped out into the suddenly frigid bathroom, soaked but smelling of lavender-scented soap, rather than sweat and dirt. To a cat’s sensitive nose, smelling good is very, very important, especially in human form, where body odor, unlike personal scent, isn’t socially acceptable.

I was reaching for my robe when the first few grunts of Pink’s “U + Ur Hand” rang out from my cell phone. I pulled my robe from its hook and shoved my arms through the sleeves on my way out of the bathroom. In the middle of my bedroom floor I glanced around for my phone, my focus sliding over my dresser, bed, nightstand, and wall shelf before finally landing on my desk. There. Only lower.

My gaze dropped to the clothing I’d kicked off to the right of my door. Squatting in front of the pile, I searched my jeans pockets frantically, wondering who the hell would be calling me at 10:00 a.m. on a Thursday. Unfortunately, I no longer had much contact with the world outside of the Lazy S, and my fellow enforcers wouldn’t bother knocking on my door before barging in, much less calling first.

Maybe it was Abby. She’d spent most of the summer on the ranch, recovering from her ordeal at Miguel’s hands with a fellow survivor—me. And she’d called me at least a dozen times in the three weeks she’d been home, with little to say except that she was fine. She seemed content to hear that I was fine, too, and to listen to me prattle on about my endless, exhaustive training.

But Abby should be back in school by now, so who…

Sammi. A smile formed on my face in spite of my fatigue as I thought of my college roommate, and how long it had been since I’d spoken to her.

My fingers closed around the phone and I flipped it open without bothering to look at the caller ID. “Hello?” I said, fully expecting to hear Sammi’s perky, full-speed chatter from the other end of the line.

“Miss me?” The man’s voice was sharp with hostility, obvious even in just those two words.

The unexpected voice—and the angry question—surprised me so much that I fell on my tailbone, smacking the back of my skull against the edge of my desktop. Confused, and still rubbing the new bump on my head, I held the phone at arm’s length to read the number on the screen. I didn’t recognize it.

“Should I miss you?” I asked finally, pressing the phone against my ear.

“I guess that’s a matter of opinion, Faythe. My idea of what you should do obviously has little in common with your own.”

Irritation flared in my chest like heartburn. “Who the hell is this?” I demanded, half convinced that my judgmental caller had the wrong number, even though he knew my name.

Deep Throat clucked his tongue in my ear, and I gritted my teeth against the intimate sound and feel of his disapproval. “How soon they forget,” he whispered, and the enmity in his tone chilled me.

Bewildered, and now truly pissed off, I glanced at the phone again, hoping to identify the number on second glance. I couldn’t, yet the caller obviously knew me. In fact, he spoke as if I should have been expecting his call. As if we were picking up an old, unfinished conversation…

And suddenly I knew. Andrew.

Shock knocked the breath from my lungs. The phone slipped from my hand and landed in my lap, then cartwheeled to the floor with a carpet-muffled thud. Miraculously, it remained open.

I’d never heard my human ex speak a word in anger before, and the rage in his voice rendered it completely unrecognizable.

For a moment, I simply stared at the phone, too astounded to move. I hadn’t spoken to Andrew in three months, since before I’d quit school and agreed to work for my father. Hearing from him now was odd and uncomfortable, especially considering how mad he obviously was.

But then, that last part was at least partially my fault.

After surviving a beating from Miguel, taking a life in defense of my own, and becoming the country’s first and only female enforcer, I was no longer the same girl Andrew once knew. The entire college experience—including the exotic-because-he’s-normal human boyfriend—seemed really tame, and much less relevant to my new life. Which was actually my precollege life on steroids.

I’d tried to tell Andrew I was leaving school, and that Marc and I had gotten back together, but Andrew hadn’t answered his cell phone, and his roommate didn’t know where he was. And honestly, I thought it would be easier for all concerned if I let my efforts rest there, so we could all move on in peace.

Clearly I was wrong.

“What, all of a sudden you have nothing to say?” Andrew said, breaking into my thoughts. “That’s certainly new.”

So is your attitude. I picked up the phone and held it to my ear, unsure what I was going to say until the words came out of their own accord. “Andrew?” I asked, the gears in my brain grinding almost audibly as I tried to reconcile this bitter, sharp-tongued man with my Andrew, who was sweet, and funny, and…nice. I couldn’t do it.

“So you do remember me?” His sarcasm was every bit as sharp as my own claws.

“Of course I do.”

“I haven’t forgotten you, either.” He didn’t sound very pleased by that fact, and at the moment, the feeling was mutual.

Before I could reply, a harsh rustling sounded in my ear, as if he’d covered up the phone on his end of the line. Then I heard indecipherable angry words, and the line went silent. No static, and no breathing. He’d hung up.

The words end call, printed across the screen on my phone, confirmed it.

At least a minute later, my bedroom door swung open to smack against my knees, and Marc stuck his head around the edge to see what he’d hit. He found me still staring at my phone, my robe gaping open across one thigh. “You have to push the buttons to make that work,” he said, his expression completely serious.

“Thanks, smart-ass.” I shook my head to wake myself up. Fatigue and the shock of hearing from Andrew had pulled me past the end of my energy reserve.

Marc offered me his hand as he stepped into the room. I took it, and he hauled me up. He would have pulled me into an embrace, but I aimed a pointed glance at his grime-covered clothes and stepped back, banging my hip on the corner of my desk. “Something wrong with your phone?”

“Nope. I was just checking the charge.” I trudged over to my dresser and dropped the phone next to my watch, going for nonchalance as I opened the top drawer and grabbed underwear at random. But my faux casual gesture was pretty much ruined when I realized I already had a clean pair waiting on the bed.

I couldn’t tell Marc about the phone call, because he’d assumed from the beginning that I’d ended things with Andrew properly. I hadn’t lied, exactly. I just hadn’t corrected his assumption. And really, was it my fault he’d made an ass out of us both?

“Oh.” Marc pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on top of my pile of clothes.

“You have your own shower.” I crossed my arms over the front of my robe to hold it closed. I couldn’t concentrate on being irritated while he was half-naked, and he damn well knew it.

Marc gave me a sly grin and kicked the door closed with his foot. “I’m borrowing yours. It’s the least you owe me after leaving me to sweat to death in that crematorium of a car.”

I shoved the extra pair of underwear back into the drawer. “Serves you right for sleeping through the entire trip.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” His jeans fell to the floor, and my eyes trailed after them helplessly, hypnotized by the goldenbrown color of his skin. No fair tempting me while I was too weak to resist.

Fortunately, I knew how to play that game, too. I let my robe fall open, framing my body with lavender terry cloth. Marc came forward with his arms outstretched, lust in his eyes and impatience in his step.

I held him at arm’s length. “Not while you smell like an enforcer.”

He groaned and backed toward the bathroom, his eyes holding mine captive. “I’ll be back in two minutes. Time me. Two minutes.”

I laughed. “Two minutes, or you’re out of luck.” I let the material slide off slowly. The shower was running by the time my robe hit the floor, but I was too tired to chuckle as I pulled a nightshirt over my head and stepped into my underwear. I slid beneath my covers with thoughts of Marc in the shower, slick with soap and water, and scented by my shampoo.

I’d already forgotten about Andrew’s phone call by the time I fell asleep, and the last thing I heard before surrendering to exhaustion was Marc’s groan of frustration when he opened the bathroom door to find me already curled up. Without him.

Four

“Faythe, watch out!”

I whirled instinctively toward the sound of Ryan’s voice the instant I heard it. I should have known better. In the far corner of the basement, my second-born brother stood gripping the steel bars of the cage, staring over my shoulder with his eyes wide in warning.

Shadows shifted on the wall in front of me. Clothing whispered behind me. A foreign heartbeat echoed in my ear. Hot breath stirred hairs on the back of my neck. I spun to face my foe. I was too late.

My eyes found his as his foot hit my ankle. He swept my feet out from under me. My ass hit the thick blue mat with a muted thud. My teeth clicked together, one side of my cheek between them. Sucking on the wound, I glared up at my opponent.

Ethan grinned down at me, peering through green eyes a shade brighter than my own, and my frown melted. I’d never been able to stay mad at the youngest of my brothers; he was too damn cheerful. But such was not the case with the black sheep of the family.

“Damn it, Ryan,” I snapped, twisting to glare at him over one shoulder. “Your stupid warnings do me more harm than good. Quit trying to distract me and keep your worthless mouth shut next time.”

“Fine.” Ryan’s hands fell from the bars, and he slid them into his pockets, where they usually stayed hidden. “Keep practicing in total silence. So long as the bad guy’s mute, you’ll be prepared.” He seemed inclined to say more, no doubt with a healthy dose of sarcasm, but a single look from our father silenced him. Thin lips pressed firmly together, Ryan shuffled across bare concrete to the cot in one corner of the cage.

My father turned from his prodigal son to face his life’s true challenge—me. “I’ll admit I’ve considered muzzling Ryan, but this time his interruption raises a good point.” He strolled across the floor toward me, smoothing down the front of a pressed white dress shirt as he walked. In spite of the heat and the grimy, unairconditioned basement, my father looked unruffled and flawlessly well pressed, as usual.

“And that point would be…?” I left my question hanging as I accepted the hand Ethan offered. He hauled me up with no visible effort, then smacked me on the back. I glared at him, irritated to realize that though I was soaked with perspiration, he had yet to break a sweat. It didn’t seem fair that he was both older and stronger. Okay, he wasn’t really that much stronger than I was, but he definitely had more endurance, in spite of our father’s best efforts to stretch mine to its limits.

My father stopped with the tips of his polished dress shoes touching the edge of the mat. “Yes, Ryan is arguably worth less to the Pride than the money it costs to feed him—”

At that, my incarcerated brother growled deep in his throat, but another glance from the Alpha shut him up. Ryan might have been vocal in his dissatisfaction over his meager accommodations, but he wasn’t about to make his situation any worse. He was wise in matters of self-preservation, if in nothing else.

“—however, his interruption is typical of the kinds of distractions you’ll face in a real fight.” My father adjusted his silver wire-rimmed glasses and stared hard at me through the lenses. A lecture was coming. I could feel it. “You can hardly expect a confused, out-of-control werecat to oblige you with silence just so you can concentrate on putting him out of his misery, can you?”

I frowned, unhappy to hear that we’d dropped any pretense of these lessons being about self-defense. I was hired muscle for now, whether I liked it or not. Sighing, I repositioned the wide shoulder straps of a black sports bra I no longer completely filled out. “No, but—”

He held up one thick, worn hand to silence me. “You have to practice as if every fight is real, as if the danger is not only to you, but to those under your protection. You owe it to the rest of the Pride to give everything you have. All the time. You can’t win a real fight if you’re easily distracted.”

Grinding my teeth together, I fought the urge to remind my father that I’d been out in the real world, that for the past three months, I’d been chasing down interlopers, handdelivering warnings, and patrolling the territory boundaries. I’d been supervised, of course, but not two days earlier, I’d apprehended Dan Painter on my own. I wanted to say that and more, but I didn’t, because I knew how he’d answer. He’d ask why, if I was capable of more, was I not showing it now. I didn’t have an answer for him. So I kept my mouth shut.

That was one lesson I’d learned well over the summer. And since it was apparently the only thing I’d learned, I nodded curtly, sending my ponytail into a harsh bob behind me.

“Try it again.” With that, my father backed into a dark corner of the basement, his clothes fading into the shadows as the darkness seemed to consume him, but for the shine in his bright green eyes.

I took a deep, calming breath, ready for round four. Or was it round five? I couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter, because Ethan was already coming at me again.

This time I was prepared.

I squatted, feet and knees spread, so that my center of balance was closer to the ground and my stance more stable. Ethan loped toward me, impossibly nimble. He lunged the last few feet. I bounded to my left and out of his path. He skidded past me. I whirled around to keep him in sight.

Ethan spun in midstep, showing off a lithe feline grace and flexibility. He landed on his knees facing me. His hand shot toward my leg. I darted out of reach and kicked out with my right foot. My sneaker connected with his jaw. His head snapped back.

He growled as I backpedaled, and both his depth and volume put Ryan’s puny attempt to shame.

Ethan rubbed his jaw. I smiled sweetly. Fresh sweat glistened on his back in the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. He dropped to all fours, fingers splayed on the mat. His back arched. My smile vanished. He was going to pounce.

I barely saw him move. Beads of perspiration hit the mat. Ethan’s sweatpants were a black blur as he flew toward me. I dropped to the pad, rolling onto my back. I tucked my elbows in at my sides and pressed my knees into my chest. Feet flexed, I pointed the soles of my shoes at the ceiling. Ethan landed exactly where he’d aimed: on me. His weight crushed my legs into my torso. Air burst from my lungs. Fingers scrambled for a handful of my hair. Grunting, I shoved my legs away from my body.

Ethan flew backward across the basement, still several feet off the floor when he passed the edge of the mat. He twisted in midair, like a house cat falling from a fence post. His scuffed sneakers hit the ground. His hands followed almost instantly. Ethan hissed in pain as his momentum drove him forward, skinning his palms on the rough concrete. He jumped gracefully to his feet, his back to me, shoulders hunched. When he turned to face me he was smiling.

“Damn, Faythe!” he cried, rubbing two angry red shoeprints on his bare chest. “Where’d you learn that?”

Standing, I opened my mouth to answer, but my first syllable ended in a string of vowels as something crashed into my left shoulder, driving me to the mat. I landed on my right side, pinned by something hard and heavy. Air whooshed from my lungs for the second time in as many minutes. With the first of my recovered breaths, I took in the scent of my new attacker, even as I recognized his laugh.

My temper flared. I hadn’t even heard him come downstairs. Why couldn’t our basement steps creak like everyone else’s? Stupid high-quality construction. That’s what comes of being born to an architect.

“Get—” I paused, shoving at the form draped over me as I twisted onto my back “—off. Get the hell off me.”

Marc smiled down at me, propping himself up on his palms as his knees moved to straddle my hips. “Give me one good reason.”

Frowning, I stopped struggling to glare up at him. “What I’ll give you is five seconds to get up before I end what little possibility you have of ever siring children—with me or anyone else.”

Instead of heeding my threat, he laughed again and leaned down to steal a kiss. I hissed and lunged off the floor with an ugly grunt of effort, my palms shoving on the front of his dark T-shirt. I didn’t make it to my feet—in fact, I barely moved Marc at all—but anger must have been obvious in my eyes, because my father cleared his throat, and we both stopped to look up at him. “Marc, get up.”

My mouth opened in surprise and my hands fell to rest on my stomach. The Alpha was backing me up? Instead of Marc? Were the roads of hell slick with ice? Had pigs taken to the skies? I smiled at my father, pleased by his support, even though I didn’t need it. I could throw Marc off on my own. I’d certainly done it before.

But then my father had to go and ruin what might have been an unprecedented father-daughter bonding moment. He met Marc’s eyes, a smile claiming the lightly wrinkled corners of his mouth. “I want grandchildren.”

Of course. I rolled my eyes in frustration. Just because I’d lost sight of the big picture didn’t mean he had. Or that he ever would.

Marc took one look at the exasperation on my face and slid onto the mat on my right side, between me and my father. The gesture, though clearly unconscious, was more than appropriate. Marc was always coming between us, though it was hard to tell which of us he was trying to protect.

“Grandchildren, huh?” I said, sitting up in a single jerky motion. My father’s joke wasn’t funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. It was yet another reminder that no matter how good an enforcer I became, I couldn’t escape my primary duty, and no amount of sugarcoating could make that pill go down easily.

I gained my feet, and Marc took a step back. Ethan’s smile vanished, his hands dropping to hang loose at his sides. On my left, Ryan’s shoes shuffled away from me on the floor of his cell, and I could almost feel the tension in the room spike. They thought I was going to start yelling; I could see it in their faces.

I met my father’s eyes and forced a laugh. “You don’t even know what to do with Ryan. What on earth would you do with a bunch of grandchildren running underfoot?”

Our Alpha smiled, and Marc exhaled in relief. He was a big fan of my new effort to be agreeable, because as my father’s right-hand man and my potential other half, he was usually caught in the middle of our fights and forced into the role of moderator. And Marc was a rotten moderator, which was just as well. Alphas typically got their own way, and thus had little need for lessons in compromise.

“What would I do with grandchildren?” My father adjusted his glasses again, probably to hide the relief in his eyes. Or maybe that was amusement. “I’d do exactly what I did when you and your brothers were little—let you crawl all over your mother until you were toilet-trained.” He paused for a beat, his eyes sparkling. “And for Ethan, that was quite some time. Nearly five years, if memory serves.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Ethan snatched a towel from the old benchpress machine and used it to wipe sweat from his face and chest.

Ryan snorted, and Ethan glared at him. In spite of very close family ties, and the fact that all but one of my siblings still lived with me in our childhood home, none of us had much sympathy for Ryan’s extended stint in the cage. Not even me, though until Ryan took up residence in the basement, I’d held the Pride record for consecutive days spent behind bars. I hadn’t seen daylight for two straight weeks once.

Ryan was nearing the end of his ninety-first day, with no end in sight, and he deserved every single second of his punishment. Actually, he deserved worse, but our father consistently refused my request to have him neutered. It must have been a guy thing.

“Watch it, jailbird, before I forget to empty your coffee can,” Ethan snarled.

Ryan opened his mouth to reply, then closed it with a click of teeth against teeth. His gaze traveled to the corner of the cage, where his makeshift toilet sat, empty—for the moment.

“That’s what I thought.” Ethan dropped the towel on the bench press and stepped back onto the mat. Ryan glowered at him but kept his mouth shut. He’d been pathetically well behaved over the past thirteen weeks, apparently hoping to get time off for good behavior. But our father was no state prison warden. He wouldn’t let Ryan out until he knew what to do with him. Unfortunately, short of skinning him alive, we had yet to come up with a single more appropriate punishment for the part Ryan played in the hell Miguel put us all through. Except for the kitchen shears I kept sterilized and ready to go.

“Okay, let’s try it again.” My father backed slowly away from the mat. “Marc, would you care to join them?”

“Love to.” Turning his back to the Alpha, Marc favored me with a teasing smile, emboldened by the heat in his eyes. “It would be my pleasure to take her to the mat. Again.”

I pushed past Marc to glower at my father. “Two against one? That’s hardly fair.”

Ethan snickered, but I ignored him, already wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.

“Only children speak of life in terms of fairness, Faythe.” My father’s face was expressionless, his mouth a firm, straight line. But his eyes reflected the ghosts of more painful memories than I could possibly guess at. “Life is neither fair nor unfair. It is what it is, and our responsibility is to deal with whatever comes our way. Including opponents who don’t fight honorably. You have to be completely aware of your surroundings. Be prepared to deal with the unexpected, such as Marc jumping you from behind.” He came a step closer to the mat, driving his point home by his very presence.

A lump formed in my throat as I realized he was right. If I’d been paying more attention to my surroundings three months earlier, I would never have been kidnapped.

I nodded, feeling like the kindergartner I’d once been, accepting a well-deserved scolding for coloring on the leather upholstery in his office. “So, you’re saying two against one is fair?”

“No, I’m saying that fair doesn’t matter. You do whatever you have to do to survive. We all do. Now, give us your best.” With that, his gaze flicked pointedly over my shoulder.

I turned to face Marc, preparing to go again, whether I was ready or not. But Marc was gone. I spun to my right, and Ethan was gone, too. Damn it, I thought, comprehension sinking in a moment too late.

I whirled toward the whisper of a soft sole on concrete. Marc was on me before I could react. He shoved me backward with one hand. His foot swept my legs out from under me. Air exploded from my lungs as I hit the mat on my back. Again. Marc straddled my hips, his hands pinning my shoulders to the mat. My hands encircled his wrists trying to push him away, but he didn’t budge.

Adrenaline scalded my veins, prompting me into action. I struck out. My right fist slammed into the left side of his head, just above his ear.

His eyes widened in surprise, and his smile vanished in a grimace of pain. Before he could react, I shoved him in the chest with both hands. He fell onto the mat on his left hip, one hand pressed to his head. I leapt to my feet, pleased with my performance.

Marc stood, rubbing his skull.

“Damn, Faythe.” Ethan whistled. “Dad, I don’t think we need to see her best during practice anymore. We all know what she’s capable of.”

From the corner of my eye, my father nodded, his expression caught between surprise and pride.

Hinges creaked overhead, and we all looked up. “Greg, you have a phone call.”

Blinking, I made out Victor Di Carlo standing on the top step, his bulky form dark against the background of afternoon sunlight shining from the kitchen behind him.

“Take a message,” the Alpha said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Vic frowned. “Um, you should probably take this one. It’s Parker. They found another body.”

Five

My father paced back and forth in front of the sturdy oak desk in one corner of his office, the telephone pressed to his right ear. His stride was characteristically long, smooth, and confident, in contrast to the tension clear in the lines of his face. From the telephone receiver came the steady cadence of Parker’s voice, calmly explaining what he’d found.

I sat on the leather love seat with Marc, listening in on my father’s phone call.

We weren’t just being nosy, though; it was expected. If my father hadn’t wanted us to hear, he would have kicked us out of his concrete-walled, and thus virtually soundproof, sanctuary. Most humans would have used the speaker phone, but we didn’t bother.

Ethan and Vic sat opposite us, on the matching leather love seat. Covering the hardwood at the center of the seating arrangement was an Oriental rug in rich shades of silver, jade, and black, across which my father paced as he listened to Parker’s report.

What I’d gleaned from the conversation so far was that Parker and Holden, his youngest brother, had found the body of a stray in an alley behind a restaurant in New Orleans—in broad daylight. Parker had left the Lazy S the day before to drive Holden back to campus for his senior year at Loyola, after a month-long visit to the ranch. Holden had talked him into staying for a late lunch at his favorite Cajun restaurant in nearby Metairie. After their meal, and probably a couple of drinks, if I knew Parker, the Pierce brothers had gone outside to catch a cab back to campus. Instead they’d caught the scent of an unknown stray.

New Orleans and the surrounding communities were on the edge of the south-central territory. Our territory. As one of my father’s enforcers, Parker was honor bound to find the trespasser and escort him across the border into Mississippi, as Marc and I had done with Dan Painter two days earlier. But as the search for the stray in New Orleans led them to the alley behind the restaurant, the scent grew stronger rather than weaker. The stray wasn’t running from them, which meant that he was either looking for a fight, or he’d already found one. And lost.

After a few minutes, Holden spotted a foot sticking out from beneath a pile of trash, and they knew why the stray hadn’t run. Shoving aside several garbage bags, most already torn open by neighborhood dogs, they uncovered the corpse of a Caucasian male in his midtwenties. He was definitely a stray, and he was definitely murdered. Unless your definition of natural causes includes a snapped neck. Mine doesn’t.

“Please tell me you didn’t leave the body exposed,” my father said, one thick hand massaging his temples as he paced. His glasses lay on his desk blotter, looking abandoned and useless.

Parker’s voice carried over the line, surprisingly clear. “Don’t worry. We covered it back up with garbage, and we’re still in the alley. It’s not like we can walk around Metairie smelling like day-old crawfish. What do you want us to do?”

My father’s silence caught my ear, and I looked up to find him standing still, his eyes closed in concentration. While we didn’t bury bodies on a daily basis, disposing of a corpse was nothing new for an enforcer, and generally required little more than a phone call to the Alpha to report the situation.

Unfortunately, this case couldn’t be handled quite so simply; the body was found in the middle of the day, in a very wellpopulated place. That hardly ever happened, because even most strays had the sense to take care of werecat business in the dark, and in complete isolation from human society. To do otherwise was to risk revealing our existence to the human world. It was an issue of self-preservation, which—unlike humans—most members of our species seem to understand instinctively.

Still, every now and then we came across a werecat—be he stray, wild, or Pride—who showed no interest in hiding his activities, and thus our very existence, from the rest of the world. While public exposure would be most threatening to strays, who had no network of protection, ultimately we all stood to lose everything we had. And we weren’t about to stand back and let that happen.

Disclosure—the Council’s term for the failure of a werecat to keep his existence secret—was a capital crime, and leaving a body unburied fell well within the definition of disclosure. The Territorial Council’s policy on capital criminals—called rogues—was to eliminate them as soon as possible, using any means necessary. Enter my father, Alpha of the southcentral Pride and head of the Territorial Council.

The fate of the rogue who’d killed the Metairie stray was already sealed. My father was his judge, and Marc his executioner. And there would be no appeal.

However, before we could worry about catching and eliminating the murderer, we had to figure out what to do with his victim, a rather interesting dilemma. How do you dispose of a murdered werecat in the middle of the day, in the outskirts of New Orleans?

Ethan shifted on the couch, and his movement drew my attention. He scratched one bare shoulder absently as he stared at our father, clearly as intent on listening in as I was.

Finally, my father stopped pacing. He stood in front of his desk with his back to the room, the phone still pressed to his ear. “What other businesses open into the alley?”

“Um…hang on,” Parker said. Holden’s slightly higherpitched voice came through, muffled and indistinct, then Parker was back on the line. “It looks like…a florist, another restaurant, a print shop, an antique store, a hardware store, and…I think that’s a dry cleaner. Why? What do you have in mind?”

“Where did you leave the van?” the Alpha asked in lieu of an answer. Parker had taken our old twelve-passenger van, loaded with Holden’s luggage.

“On campus, about four miles away.”

“Have you already unloaded it?”

“Yeah, last night,” Parker said.

“Okay, listen carefully,” my father began, and an attentive silence descended in the office, as well as over the line. “Send Holden into the hardware store for two pairs of painter’s coveralls and two pairs of work gloves. When he gets back, you put on one set of coveralls and gloves, then give him the keys to the van and some cash. Tell him to take a cab back to campus, empty several of his moving boxes and throw them in the back of the van, to give you both a reason to be in the alley. While he’s gone, you stay with the body, just in case.

“When Holden returns, back the van as far into the alley as you can without drawing attention, while he puts his gear on. Then, get the plastic sheeting and a roll of duct tape from the emergency kit in the van. Lay some plastic in the bottom of my van. Use a double layer. If you get rotten food in the carpet, you’ll spend all night scrubbing it out.”

I frowned, disturbed by the realization that my father was more worried about the carpet of his fourteen-year-old van than about the body whose disposal he was planning. But that was one of the things that made him a good Alpha. He did what had to be done. And he thought of everything. Everything.

My father plucked his glasses from his desktop, wiping the lenses on a handkerchief from his pocket, the phone propped on his shoulder. “I assume you’re alone in the alley?”

“At the moment,” Parker said. “A guy came to dump trash from the restaurant a minute or two ago, but he went back in. He didn’t even notice us.”

“Good.” My father balanced the glasses carefully on his nose and began pacing across the hardwood floor again, from the front of his desk to the back of the couch where Vic and Ethan sat. “Put the body in the van, close the doors, wrap him in more of the plastic, and tape it up. Do it quickly, and do it in that order. Then take off the coveralls and wrap them up separately. Drive Holden back to school. Obey the speed limits and draw no attention to yourself.” That was standard practice, the reminder of which Parker didn’t need, but Marc couldn’t hear often enough. “After you drop him off, come home, and we’ll handle the disposal from here.”

I turned to face Marc, my eyebrows arched at him in question. “Why?” I mouthed silently, hoping he understood an Alpha’s thought process better than I did. After all, he’d been an enforcer for more than a decade.

Marc held up his index finger, motioning that he’d explain it to me in a minute. Or maybe that I could ask the question aloud in a minute. Regardless, I’d have to wait. I hate waiting.

My father made Parker repeat his instructions word for word, which was also unnecessary. But our fearless leader was not a risk-taker, which was why I didn’t understand his order to bring the body home.

Never shit where you sleep. That was rule number two for disposing of a corpse. Of course, my father’s phrasing was a bit different, but the point remained; corpses were always disposed of far from the Lazy S, and I knew of at least two burial sites between New Orleans and East Texas, neither of which had been used recently. So why would he want the body brought home? Unless he wanted to see it. Or maybe smell it. But why?

The answer hit me almost as soon as I’d thought the question. We’d found two bodies in three days, which was unusual, but not that big of a deal. Violence, like everything else in life, seemed to come and go in cycles. Sometimes we’d go a year without a problem, then deal with several bodies not of our own making in a single month.

What had obviously piqued the Alpha’s interest in this case was the fact that both of the victims had died of a broken neck, which meant the killers had acted in human form. That was almost unheard of. Most homicidal strays killed in cat form, by biting through the back of the victim’s skull, ripping out his throat, or—my least favorite—by eviscerating the poor fool.

But these victims had both been killed in the same, very rare manner. They were related. They had to be. Which meant the foreign cat we’d smelled on Moore was still roaming free in the south-central territory, apparently exercising his own brand of population control—and in the process, breaking more of the council’s laws than I could even begin to list.

Not that this particular rogue gave a damn about our council’s laws. Especially if it was a jungle cat. Jungle cats are to Pride cats what wolves are to the domestic dog. They’re feral. Brutal. Governed by instinct, instead of logic or law. Rather than convening to debate the best course of action, jungle cats converge to fight, and what the victor says, goes.

Such behavior has only escaped notice by humanity because—unlike Pride cats the world over—jungle cats live in…well, the jungle. They’re native to the Amazon, the deepest, darkest, least-explored wilderness on the face of the planet, where people go missing without explanation on a regular basis. Where humanity is, for the most part, still afraid to build its concrete roads and cell towers, the universal security blankets of the modern era.

But this jungle cat—if the worst-case scenario was accurate—had stepped out of the jungle, and here, his uncivilized behavior would not go unnoticed by the human authorities. Not without our help, at least. And we would help him, all right. We’d help him right out of this life and into the next one.

I swallowed thickly, still watching my father. Fear chilled my blood at the thought of confronting another jungle cat, even as anger curled my hands into fists in my lap. Sweaty, nervous fists.

When he was satisfied with Parker’s recitation, my father said goodbye and dropped the cordless receiver back into its cradle. For a moment, he stood with his back to us, his still form framed by the sides of the glass-shelved display cabinet behind his desk, where his plaques and trophies gleamed beneath recessed lights my mother had positioned strategically.

The Alpha turned, releasing a weary-sounding sigh, then made his way across the room. When he sank into his armchair facing us all, I noticed for the first time how stiff he seemed, as if the action hurt, and I realized with a jolt of shock that my father was growing old. Too old, possibly, to deal with another jungle cat leaving his mark—and his corpses—all over our territory.

When he continued to stare at the rug beneath his feet instead of speaking, I glanced at Ethan, who shrugged at me. Marc was first to break the silence. “Did you want me and Faythe to get a whiff of the body, Greg?”

My father nodded, his green-eyed gaze flitting from Marc to me. “We need to connect the murders, if possible,” he said, confirming my suspicion. He cracked one knuckle, an old habit that sometimes meant he was angry, but in this case indicated deep thought. “But you might not find anything. This latest body may simply be the result of a careless new stray who hasn’t learned to control himself, or to cover his kills.”

Ethan frowned. “How do we know that’s not the case with Moore?”

Vic shifted in his seat, and leather creaked beneath him. “From what Marc told me last night, Moore’s attacker wasn’t new. Nowhere near.”

I whirled on Marc, wondering what he’d caught that I’d missed. “How do you figure that?” I hadn’t known there was a difference between the scent of an old stray and that of a new one.

“Moore’s scars. Most of them were old and faded.”

My eyes were drawn to Marc’s chest, where I knew similar marks lay hidden beneath a vintage Van Halen concert T-shirt. His scars were old and faded, too. Marc had been scratched—and thus infected—fifteen years earlier, when he was barely fourteen. “So, Moore wasn’t new.” I shrugged, still staring at his chest. “What does that matter? We’re talking about the killer being new, not the victim, right?”

Marc crossed his arms over his pecs, as if he knew what I was thinking. “Moore had dozens of healed wounds. He’d obviously been in several brawls, and I’m guessing he won most of them, since they didn’t kill him. There’s no way a new stray could take out someone with as much experience as Bradley Moore clearly had.”

Oh. That made sense. “Okay, but that’s sort of a moot point,” I said, my hand hanging over the end table to my right, my fingers brushing the back of a pewter cat reared to pounce. “Whether the killer is newly infected or not—whether he’s even a stray—doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Moore may have been killed by a jungle cat. And this new one probably was, too.”

“Jungle cat? We’re looking for a jungle cat?” Ethan glanced back and forth between me and Marc. “When were you guys going to enlighten the rest of us?”

“We aren’t sure about it yet.” My father frowned, displeased by my loose tongue. “And you’re on a need-to-know basis. I saw no need to alarm everyone without further proof of a problem.”

“Well, now we have proof,” Ethan muttered, drawing a stony frown from our father.

The Alpha folded his arms over his chest. “No, we don’t. And we won’t, until Parker gets back with the body.”

“Okay, that’ll tell us about the new body. But how sure are we that Moore was killed by a jungle cat?” Vic asked.

“Not completely,” Marc admitted, patting my leg. “But it’s certainly possible. The scent was definitely foreign.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t make sense, either.” I brushed his hand off, distracted by the thoughts swirling through my head like colors in a kaleidoscope. “Jungle strays usually rip their victims apart.” We knew that for a fact, after cleaning up the mess Luiz had made of a couple of college girls at the beginning of the summer. “Neck-snapping seems a little too neat and orderly.”

“And too easy,” Marc added. “Moore didn’t fight back, which means he probably never saw it coming. He must have known his murderer and trusted the bastard.” He paused, frowning at no one in particular. “Why would he trust another stray, especially a jungle cat?”

Vic arched his eyebrows. “Why would he even know a jungle cat? We executed the only one I’ve ever met.” Not for being a jungle cat. For kidnapping, rape, and murder—the unholy trinity of crimes.

My father cracked another knuckle and we all turned toward his chair, where he’d sat quietly for the past few minutes, content to let us discuss the situation on our own—no doubt another aspect of our training. When he had our full attention, the lines around his mouth deepened. “That seems to be the bottom line. With any luck, knowing how Moore and his killer are connected will tell us how to find the rogue.” He stood, signaling the end of the impromptu meeting. “We’ll know more when Parker gets back with his corpse.”

Ethan snickered, then swallowed his laughter at a stern look from my father. I hid my own smile against Marc’s shoulder. My dad had a weird way of referring to every dead body by the name of the person who found it. Or the person who rendered it dead in the first place. His habit was nothing short of macabre, and as a child, I’d flinched each time he’d made such a reference.

The guys thought it was hilarious. They kept a running total of all the corpses attributed to them by my father, as if it were a point of pride. I hadn’t been a bit surprised to find out a month earlier that Marc held the lead by a comfortable margin. I was disturbed by that fact, however, because I happened to know that he’d never actually discovered a single body. What that said about his kill count was enough to give me nightmares. And enough to make me seriously consider requesting a new field partner.

“Parker should be back by nine-thirty, so I want everyone in the barn at a quarter to ten. And I need a couple of volunteers to man the incinerator when we’re done with the body.” My father’s gaze settled on Marc automatically, and Marc in turn stared at Vic.

“No way.” Vic shook his head vehemently, short brown waves bouncing. “Owen and I just got back from patrolling.”

Marc blinked at him. “Faythe and I disposed of the last body.”

“Digging a hole’s one thing. Cremating a corpse, then grinding up the solid chunks, is something else entirely.” Vic closed his eyes briefly, no doubt remembering the one time he’d run the incinerator. “That smell stays with you.”

Ethan sighed, glancing from one to the other in irritation. “It’s not like the body’s going to sit up and yell boo, you big babies.” He turned to face our father with a contrived look of stoicism—his best shot at appearing serious. “Jace and I will do it.” No one bothered to ask if he wanted to consult his partner before volunteering them both. Jace Hammond would follow Ethan into hell and back, if he thought there’d be a decent per diem and a cold bottle of beer in it for him.

“Where is Pretty Boy?” Marc asked, his hand going stiff in mine. A quick glance at his face revealed a mask of tension stretched across the familiar strong, dark features, and I exhaled in frustration. I’d spent all summer waiting for the delicate truce between Marc and Jace to fail, and so far they’d both surprised me, but that fact had the fragile feel of transience.

“Jace went to the liquor store,” Ethan said, searching my eyes quickly before running a hand through his thick black hair. “It’s his turn to restock the supplies.”

“Okay,” my father said in his Alpha voice, bringing us back on topic as all eyes turned his way. “Spread the word. Nine-forty-five in the barn. Anyone more than a minute late takes a dock in pay. That means you, Ethan.” He headed for the hall with my brother right behind him, trying to talk his way out of his latest tardy fine.

“But, Dad, if you’d seen that waitress, you’d totally understand….”

My father rolled his eyes. “Don’t embarrass yourself with excuses.” He stopped and turned to face Ethan, his expression even more stern than usual. “And while we’re discussing your social life…are you properly prepared for your date this evening?”

I nearly choked trying to hold back laughter, and both Vic and Marc shook with their own efforts.

“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for asking.” Ethan slapped my father’s shoulder, as if he were talking to one of the other guys, rather than the Alpha. “I’m glad we could have this little talk.”

“I’m serious, Ethan.” My father’s expression darkened. “The world isn’t ready for your offspring. And neither am I.”

“I know, I know. I’ve got it covered.” With that, Ethan headed down the hall toward his room. My father followed, shaking his head silently. As soon as they were gone, Vic fell on the couch in laughter, holding his stomach as if it hurt. Marc and I collapsed onto the love seat, laughing until tears formed in our eyes.

Birth control was not a topic werecats discussed very often. Most tabbies wanted children, and until recently, we’d thought toms couldn’t impregnate human women.

We’d been wrong. Toms could, in fact, produce children with human women. Rarely. The proof was…well…strays. All strays.

According to Dr. John Eames, a geneticist from one of the northern Prides, every single stray he’d tested over the course of a ten-year study turned out to have a half-human, halfwerecat genome. Or something like that. The layman’s version was that strays, according to the good doctor, already had werecat genes before they were infected. Genes they’d inherited from an unknown werecat ancestor somewhere in the branches of their various family trees.

His conclusion was that normal humans—without these recessive werecat genes—cannot be “infected.” But that those with the genes can have their werecat halves “activated” by a simple scratch or bite.

I didn’t pretend to understand all the details, and neither did most of the toms I knew. Especially Ethan. All he cared about was that his social life had been disrupted by what he saw as a microscopic risk. The procreational equivalent of hitting a bull’s-eye with an arrow from a mile away. But my parents were taking no chances, and I found the irony as frustrating as Ethan did. From me, they wanted children. From my brothers, they wanted prevention.

Still grinning, Marc leaned back against the arm of the love seat. “We still have three hours until dinner,” he said, running one hand slowly up my thigh.

I smiled. “Oh yeah? Whatcha cookin’?”

My mother served a sit-down dinner five nights a week, because that’s what her mother had always done. But on Saturdays, it was fend for yourself or starve. And tonight—Mon-day—was my parents’ date night every week that my father was home, as it had been since before I could remember. When he was out of town, Michael “Atlas” Sanders, my oldest brother, took her out to dinner, eager as always to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, for all to see. The big suck-up.

Marc put his hands around my waist and twisted to lift me into his lap. I straddled him, my knees pressed against his hips while my fingers played along the hard lines of his chest. Leaning forward, he pushed aside my hair with his nose, purring into my ear. “If you cook, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“You’ll do dishes?” Grinning, I pushed him back gently, my fingertips trailing down to his stomach, to skim over each firm ripple through his shirt. With each bump, I felt his pulse spike, and mine responded in kind. He licked his lips and his eyes roamed down from my face, lingering several inches south of my collarbones.

Promising chills raced across my skin as his hands slid slowly up from my waist. His fingers brushed the sides of my breasts through my workout bra, and my breath caught in my throat. Marc smiled at my reaction, but the look in his eyes was more heat than humor.

One hand cupping the base of my skull, he pulled me toward him and his lips grazed my cheek. “I had something else in mind, though my idea did involve something hot and wet.”

Behind me, someone snorted, and I jumped. My head whipped around fast enough to make my neck pop. Vic sat on the couch across from us, his arms crossed over a chest only slightly less well defined than the one beneath my hands. I’d forgotten he was there, and judging by the look on Marc’s face, so had he. Embarrassed, I twisted around to sit on the couch, my leg pressed against Marc’s.

“You know, no one likes a voyeur,” Marc said, the hint of a smile ruining any attempt to sound serious.

“Not true,” Vic insisted. “Some people get their kicks from being watched. I know this chick in Atlanta…”

I rolled my eyes, and he laughed, then changed tactics. “Anyway, I’d only be a voyeur if I’d invaded your privacy.” He spread his arms wide to indicate the office around us. “If you didn’t want an audience, you should have taken your show off the stage and into the bedroom.”

I let my forehead fall to rest on Marc’s shoulder, my ponytail tumbling forward to hide my flaming cheeks. “I think he’s got us there.”

“So.” Vic grinned. “Who’s cooking?”

I did a mental inventory of the other members of our household, searching for someone else to saddle with the chore. Parker was still on the road, and Ryan was locked up, and thus less than worthless regarding household labor. “Where’s Owen?” I asked, my mouth already watering at the thought of our resident cowboy’s chicken-fried steak.

“He took the tractor to Livingston to be repaired and won’t be back for a couple of hours. And Jace and Ethan have a double date with a set of twins they met at Sonic.” Vic crossed his hands over his chest and tried to hide a smile. I frowned, sure he was kidding, but his expression said otherwise. “Seriously. And they can’t even tell the girls apart.”

I winced in sympathy for the twins I’d never met. “So, we’re back to Marc and his world-famous mac and cheese with hot dogs,” I said, rubbing Marc’s shoulder.

He shrugged out from under my hand. “I’ll race you for it. Loser cooks. And cleans,” he added as an afterthought.

“To the tree line?” The sparkle in my eyes reflected back at me in Marc’s pupils. He knew I loved to run.

He shook his head. “Too easy. Make it the stream.”

I nodded. “But you have to stop and Shift once you hit the trees.”

“Fine.” Marc turned to face Vic. “You in?”

“For a free meal?” Vic grinned, his blue eyes shining with more pure joy than I’d seen in them in the three months since his sister was murdered. “Hell yeah.”

“On the count of three.” I glanced from one to the other, and leather creaked as they prepared to jump to their feet. “One…”

“Two-three,” Marc finished for me. I frowned, but before I could cry “foul,” he hoisted me into the air by my waist and tossed me across the rug, without so much as a grunt. “Catch,” he shouted to Vic, who’d just bolted up from his seat on the couch.

Vic’s eyes went wide as I sailed toward him, unable to stop or even change my trajectory. My arms flailed in the air, and I landed on him with all the grace of a hippo dancing the Nutcracker. My momentum drove us both back onto the couch, where he plopped down sideways, and my knee nearly hit his groin. My forehead smacked the back of the couch over Vic’s shoulder, and my front teeth clicked together sharply. By the time I’d recovered enough balance to stand, fury no doubt glinting in my eyes, Marc was nowhere in sight.

Growling, I launched myself toward the hall as a screen door slammed on the other side of the house.

Damn it, Faythe, I thought, as mad at myself as I was at Marc. Will you never learn?

Six

Vic’s footsteps thumped rapidly behind me on the tiled hallway floor. I ran full-out, racing after Marc with my heart pounding in my ears and adrenaline pumping through my veins. A litany of colorful phrases chased one another in my head as I tried to decide which would best express my outrage at Marc. I’d crossed out “worthless scratch-fevered tomcat” and was leaning toward “future eunuch” when I reached the end of the hall.

I shoved the storm door open, and the heat hit me instantly, humidity and intensity giving it an almost solid presence. It was like trying to inhale damp cotton. Pushing through the initial obstruction of warmth, I jumped over the back step and took off, leaving the door to slam shut at my back. But instead of the rattle of glass and the metallic click I expected to hear, the door closed with a solid thunk and a nasal-sounding moan of pain and surprise.

Barely slowing, I glanced back over my shoulder. Vic stood behind me, holding the storm door open with one hand, while the other covered his nose. Blood ran down his right arm, dripping from his elbow to land in a spreading crimson puddle on the back step.

Damn. I’d slammed the door in his face.

“Sorry!” I yelled, already turning back to face what little I could see of Marc as he ducked beneath a low-hanging branch at the tree line. Vic mumbled something so low and muffled that even with a cat’s enhanced hearing I couldn’t make it out. But I could guess, and it wasn’t pretty.

My eye on the goal, I sprinted with a new surge of speed, powered by determination and irritation at Marc. Blood raced through my veins. My lungs expanded with each deep, exhilarating breath. My entire body was alive in spite of the heat, reveling in the thrill of exertion and the glory of the outdoors.

I pulled my sports bra over my head as I passed the guesthouse, where Marc and the guys lived. The warm wind tore the lightweight material from my fingers, and it snagged on a clump of holly bushes growing along the back porch of the guest house. As I ran, I worked the ponytail holder free from my hair and let it fall to the ground. At the tree line, I kicked off my shoes and stripped from the waist down.

In a small clearing just inside the forest, I dropped to allfours, pleased to see Marc in the same position several feet away. He was almost done Shifting, and I hadn’t even started, so I did an abbreviated version of my usual silent meditation routine. As I focused on the rhythm of each slow inhale and exhale, my Shift began on its own, a convenience which was the result of years of practice and a conscious effort to put my mind and body at ease.

In Shifting, one rule holds true: the more anxious you get, the more pain you experience. But I’d learned quickly, following my first Shift at the onset of puberty, to relax and go with the pain. And eventually I came to welcome it. My mind was never so clear as when pain forced me to concentrate and internalize my focus. Each searing, stabbing sensation sharpened my thoughts, and each agonizing ache lubricated the grinding gears in my brain. My learned ability to think through pain had come in handy on more than one occasion, and had saved my life at least twice. That made pain my friend. A very good, love-to-hate kind of friend.

As my back bowed and my joints popped in and out of their sockets, movement to my right caught my eyes through lids squeezed almost shut in concentration. Marc had finished his Shift. He stood before me on four powerful feline legs, long muscles bulging beneath a gorgeous coat of glossy, solidblack fur. He stared back at me through eyes the same goldflecked brown they were in human form, though the shape was entirely different.

Unlike lions, tigers, and the other breeds of large cat, which have round pupils similar to that of a human, in cat form, we have the distinctive oval pupils of a house cat—vertically oriented black slits. And because it was daytime, Marc’s pupils had narrowed almost completely out of existence to protect his sensitive feline retinas.

I blinked at him, and he licked his muzzle in return, flashing a mouthful of pointed, slightly curved teeth. He was mocking me. He could already have been halfway to the stream, but he’d stuck around to watch my Shift because he knew he could afford to. Marc was flaunting his anticipated victory, and in that moment, my new goal in life became making him pay for his arrogance with a mouthful of bitter dust raised by my paws as they flew past him.

Marc watched me carefully, waiting for the onset of the final phase of my Shift, which would be his signal to leave. If he hung around until I finished, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Fresh pain lanced through my face as it began to ripple over a sickening current of elongating bones and protruding teeth. Marc huffed through his nose and slunk gracefully toward the far edge of the clearing. Toe pads nestled on a soft bed of ivy, he turned back for one more glance, just as the first undulating wave of fur sprouted on my back, flowing down from my spine to cover my torso.

With a silent, powerful shove against the earth, Marc was gone, soaring over a three-foot-high clump of undergrowth to land soundlessly on the other side. By the time sharp, curved claws erupted from the ends of my new cat toes, I could no longer hear him running through the forest. But that didn’t mean much. Cats can be absolutely silent when they want to. And Marc wanted to.

His nose still dribbling blood, Vic shoved aside a low-hanging branch and ducked into the woods. I paused long enough to give him an apologetic glance, then followed Marc through the forest toward the stream.

Trees flew past as I ran, launching my newly lithe form over moss-covered logs and around bushes. My body resisted such strenuous exercise at first, because I hadn’t taken the time to properly stretch my new configuration of muscles. But soon the act of running eased my residual stiffness and alleviated that I-don’t-fit-into-my-own-skin feeling that followed a Shift. With those kinks worked out, I was free to enjoy the exhilaration of racing through the forest at a speed no human could possibly experience without the benefit of an engine and at least two tires.

From all around me came the sounds of the forest: nature’s residents, busy even in the midday heat. My practiced ears had little trouble weeding through the myriad croaks, squeaks, chirps, hisses, and the rhythmic rustle of leaves as I searched for any sign of Marc.

Marc had truly disappeared, but I’d only been running a few minutes when the gurgle of running water met my ears. Even if I hadn’t known the way by heart, I could have followed the sound to its source. Rather than tracking by smell like dogs, cats use their sensitive hearing to locate prey, one another, and anything else that makes noise.

I turned toward the sound, and a couple of minutes later I could smell the water. Or rather, I smelled the minerals, plants, and creatures in the water. And suddenly I could smell Marc. We may not use our noses to track, but we use them regularly to identify one another, and my nose was telling me Marc was somewhere just ahead.

The race wasn’t over yet.

Encouraged, I scrounged up a fresh burst of energy. Small animals darted out of my path. Thorns tugged at the fur on my legs and stomach. With each bounding step, my paws sank into a soft layer of ivy, moss, and last year’s leaves. I ran directly into the breeze, stirring the branches over my head, and only the occasional twig cracking beneath my paws betrayed my presence. And as I drew closer to the stream, I heard a faint huffing noise.

Marc. And he was close.

I sprinted around a thick patch of raspberry briars to find him directly in front of me, headed straight for the stream. He was almost there. But so was I.

A growl rumbled from deep in my throat. Instead of stopping at my warning, Marc sped up. I did the same, my muscles burning in protest. Cats are sprinters, not longdistance runners. But I was so close!

The distance between us narrowed. My claws gripped the earth as I ran, providing traction on a slick bed of moss that grew thicker the closer I got to the water. My lungs burned from exertion, demanding that I win, that I not put my body through such torment in the heat of the day for nothing.

But I couldn’t win. Marc’s tail was only inches from my nose, but I had no more speed to offer, no more energy to spend. Marc had cheated, and he was going to win.

Unless I cheated, too.

After an instant’s hesitation, I sank my teeth into the tip of Marc’s tail.

He yelped and tried to stop instantly. Instead of the graceful halt he’d no doubt intended, he tumbled forward, stumbling over his own front paws. His muzzle hit the ground, buried in a patch of moss, while his hind legs kept going, propelling the rest of him forward. He looked like a pig rooting in the mud.

I dropped his tail without slowing, and huffed in Marc’s ear as I passed him. It was the closest I could come to laughing in his face.

He recovered quickly. I glanced back to see him running after me, moss stuck in his front teeth. He was too late. I splashed into the stream up to my shoulders, snorting and tossing my head as I inhaled too much water.

Before I could clear my nasal passages, Marc bounded into the water after me. He hissed and slapped the surface with one front paw, spraying me with a backlash of water.

I’m sure you are pissed, you cheating son of a bitch, I thought. But all I could do was grunt at him. And splash him back.

For the most part, stories about cats hating water are exaggerated. About us, they’re an outright fabrication. Like most large cats, we love water. The guys and I had been known to waste entire summer afternoons splashing around in the stream, treading water at the deepest parts. We’d catch fish when we got hungry, and when we grew tired, we’d stretch out on the banks to dry in the sun before bounding off into the woods for more recreation. And with the national preserve bordering our land, we had plenty of forest in which to play.

While the woods were usually thick with humans during the tourist season, none of the backpacking trails or campgrounds were anywhere near our private wilderness. We’d seen very few hikers, and on those rare occasions when we had, the noise of their approach gave us plenty of time to hide in the trees before the two-legged wanderer came into view.

Marc and I played in the water for several minutes before Vic, now in cat form, padded to the edge of the stream, announcing his presence with a low-pitched yowl. His nose looked better, from what I could tell. It was swollen, but straight, and the bleeding had stopped.

Though it hurts like hell, Shifting shortly after receiving an injury can reduce healing time by as much as half. The best explanation I’d heard for the phenomenon was that since muscles, ligaments, and bones are torn apart and rearranged during a Shift anyway, injuries begin to heal automatically as our parts are reattached in new positions.

I’d experienced this personally twice, and had welcomed the accelerated recovery time in spite of the extra pain.

Vic growled at us from the bank, clearly chewing us both out. Though I couldn’t understand his exact phrasing, the gist was clear enough: we’d both cheated, and he had no intention of cooking either of us dinner. Ever.

That said, or growled, in this case, he jumped into the water between us, draping one heavy black paw over Marc’s shoulders and hauling him beneath the surface. They both came up sputtering, each batting playfully at the other’s muzzle as they tried to dunk each other.

I backed away to watch from the edge of the stream, and to slake the thirst I’d worked up during my long sprint. But even sloshing with water, my stomach wasn’t satisfied. Hunger gnawed at me, my belly demanding compensation for the calories burned during my Shift.

Shifting takes a lot of energy, which must be replaced quickly with both food and water. Water, I had plenty of. Food was another story.

My stomach growling, I turned to recruit Marc and Vic for the hunt I was already planning. But again, Marc was gone. Vic paddled alone in the middle of the stream, beckoning me forward with a playful splash and a toss of his head. Wondering vaguely where Marc had wandered off to, I pushed off from the bank and swam toward Vic, intending to dunk him as he’d dunked Marc. But as I extended one paw beneath the surface, my sheathed claws only inches from his head, something heavy dropped onto my back. I plunged to the bottom of the stream, my limbs flailing in the weak current.

For a long moment, I panicked, sucking water in through my nose in bewilderment. My paws scraped uselessly at loose, smooth stones, scrambling for purchase. My tail stirred the water fast enough to create a light foam. Then the weight was gone, and I floated to the surface, sputtering and hissing with my first gulp of air.

Marc bobbed in front of me, treading water. The gold specks in his eyes sparkled in delight. He seemed to be laughing at me around a muzzle full of sharp, pointed cat teeth. The bastard.

I growled at him in mock anger, swatting his ear with my paw, claws unsheathed. But I didn’t hit him hard enough to hurt him, or even to break his skin, because we were just playing. And because I’d get him back later, when the time was right. When I had the advantage of surprise. When he’d completely forgotten I still owed him…

After Marc’s champion pounce, we played in the stream, swimming and splashing each other, until my stomach renewed its demand for food with cramps instead of gurgling chatter. But by then I was too tired, from our play and from hunger, to even think about hunting. I jumped up onto the bank, signaling to the guys that I wanted to Shift back by tossing my head in the direction of the ranch.

Marc climbed the northern bank of the stream and took off through the woods with Vic trailing close behind. Evidently they still had far more energy left than I did. But then, they hadn’t spent all afternoon sparring with Ethan.

I trudged after them, not bothering to keep up. Surely by the time I made it home and Shifted back, someone would have started cooking. Or at least ordered a few pizzas. But as I made my way through the forest, plodding around tree stumps instead of leaping over them, something raced across the left edge of my vision. My head turned instinctively to follow the movement, ears arching forward as the rest of my body froze.

At first, I saw nothing but the great outdoors: trees, dead leaves, underbrush, and fallen twigs and branches. But then something moved again, and my focus shifted. And that’s when I saw the other cat.

My pulse spiked, and my jaws clenched. My paws flexed, claws digging into the dirt out of instinct. It was just a brief glimpse, a flash of slick black fur between two trees at least forty feet away. But it was enough to put me instantly on alert.

I’d made no effort to be quiet on my trek back from the stream, and neither had Marc or Vic, so any other cat in the woods would certainly know we were there. If he were one of ours—even my one nonresident brother, Michael, who came over a couple of times a month to make use of our excess of wilderness—he would have made his presence known out of courtesy. With the exception of Ryan, who wasn’t allowed out anyway, we were all very close, and none of us would have snubbed the others by walking by without a greeting.

The mystery cat wasn’t one of ours.

On alert now, I tensed, going completely still in a tangle of honeysuckle. I had to call for help. I had no delusions about my ability to take on a trespasser in cat form alone. Not with my energy reserve tapped by an afternoon of sparring and an un-fueled Shift.

But what if I was wrong? What if the cat was one of ours, just out for an odd solitary stroll? If I bellowed a roar of alarm and everyone came running to find me stalking one of our own cats, the guys would never let me live it down. I had to be sure.

I took off after the other cat, my steps silent and confident, my ears alert for any sound to tell me which way he’d gone. Unfortunately, the short glimpse I’d gotten of black fur did nothing to help me narrow down the list of possible suspects. All werecats are solid black in feline form, regardless of their hair color and skin tone on two legs. Black fur is part of our heritage, even for newly initiated strays. To identify the unknown cat, I’d need either a good whiff of him or a much closer look.

After less than a minute of careful stalking, keeping my eyes, ears, and nose on alert, I heard leaves crunch to the west and adjusted my direction accordingly. Minutes later, I heard the crack of wood splintering. The sound was much closer that time, and just to my left, on the other side of a thick clump of briars.

I padded silently to the edge of the brush and peeked around it. At first I saw nothing but more trees and bushes. But then I heard him breathing, slowly and evenly, and near the ground. The suspicious werecat lay stretched out peacefully beneath a cedar tree with his eyes closed, almost asleep. Except he wasn’t a he. He was a she.

It was my mother.

I huffed sharply in surprise and stepped back from the edge of the briar patch, hoping she hadn’t heard me. In my entire twenty-three years, I’d only seen my mother in cat form twice, because since she became a mother, she only Shifted when she was really upset. The first time I’d seen her with claws and a tail was the day her mother died, when I was ten years old. The second time was the night Ryan left the Pride to live as a wildcat, breaking her heart. That time, she’d stayed alone in the woods for three days, and my father had forbidden any of us to go after her. Brow creased in worry, he’d said she needed time to mourn her loss, and that we should be willing to give our mother whatever she needed. So we had.

Ryan, I thought, trying to jerk my left rear paw free from a tangle of ivy without making any noise. This is about Ryan. My mother had been spending large blocks of time alone all summer, even during Abby’s stay, which just wasn’t like her. Normally, she’d have used a fellow tabby’s visit as an opportunity to show me how I should be living my life. But this time, she’d turned my teenage cousin over to me several times a week, claiming Abby needed plenty of distractions to help her recover from her ordeal at Miguel’s hands.

I happened to agree, and since she let me teach Abby the basics of self-defense during her stay—after all, nothing puts repressed rage to better use than kicking the shit out of a big punching bag with a scary face drawn on it—I didn’t think to question what my mother was doing during our “therapy” sessions. I’d assumed she was in her room, knitting something for one charity auction or another. Evidently I’d been wrong.

It started the day we’d returned from Missouri with the body of Vic’s younger brother, Anthony, along with the remains of Miguel and Sean, his accomplice. I’d assumed my mother was trying to deal with what had happened, with the loss of one tabby and the near loss of two more, including me. After all, our very existence had been threatened, our collective vulnerability exposed. But I should have known better. My mother was stronger than that. She was the silent backbone of our family and a former power on the Territorial Council. As such, she could deal with threats and disasters on a large scale, because they weren’t aimed at her personally.

But she couldn’t deal with Ryan.

Ryan was her Achilles’ heel. He had wounded her twice now, the first time when he left us, and the second when he teamed up with Miguel to save his own fur. But there was more to my mother’s personal crisis, to the guilt that drove her into isolation in the woods, than everyone else knew. My mother had a secret, and it was eating her alive.

Seven

I snuck back through the woods as soon as I was sure my mother was asleep, and during the entire twenty-minute walk back to the ranch, I debated whether or not to tell her I knew her secret. And that I wasn’t the only one.

To my knowledge, only two others knew, and I was sure neither of them would ever tell. Ryan’s motivation for keeping his mouth shut was the same as always: to save his own hide. Our father had agreed to let him live against the wishes of most of the rest of the Territorial Council. In fact, our father was the only thing standing between Ryan and a very slow, very painful death. Ryan would never do anything to piss off the one man keeping him alive, and nothing would put his existence in greater peril than telling our father that he’d used our mother to spy on the Territorial Council.

The only other person who knew that my mother had unwittingly fed our abductors privileged information was Abby. She’d been locked up in the basement cell across from mine when we found out about Ryan betraying his family to save his own life, and she’d been just as disgusted with him as I was. But she’d promised me never to breathe a word about it to anyone. For my mother’s sake, not for Ryan’s.

In the clearing just inside the edge of the forest, I stopped to Shift back, my mind still on my mother.

I’d never really questioned my decision not to tell her what I knew. Technically, it was none of my business, but more important, I didn’t want to be the cause of problems between my parents. She had meant no harm. On the contrary, she’d been trying to mend the rift between Ryan and the rest of the family.

Shortly after Ryan left, when I was thirteen, my mother became secretly obsessed with tracking him down to talk him into rejoining the Pride. After two years of searching, she found him, and though he eagerly accepted her money, he steadily refused to come home. In retrospect, I think that was the closest he ever came to standing up for something he believed in.

When Ryan got tangled up in Miguel’s kidnapping scheme and began using her to spy on the council, my mother never had a clue. I could only assume she figured it out when Owen dragged Ryan home in shame, not to mention shackles. I couldn’t be sure, though, because I’d never asked either of them. But as far as I knew, she hadn’t spoken one word to Ryan since the night my father locked him up.

My Shift complete, I forced thoughts of my mother and brother from my mind as I stepped into the backyard to find my clothes.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered dressing until I’d showered. Werecats are accustomed to seeing one another in all variations of undress, as well as all stages of mid-Shift. But hopefully there would be a delivery boy on the property soon, for whom we’d have to make allowances. Walking around nude in front of humans was not a good way to keep a low profile with the local community. It was an excellent way to make new friends, though.

Unfortunately, Marc didn’t like new friends.

Dressed, except for my bare feet, I crossed the yard and stepped into the back hall, shoes dangling from the fingers of my left hand. Before I reached my room, Ethan stepped out of the kitchen with a stack of cheddar Pringles cradled in one hand. He smiled, extending his snack toward me. “Bite?”

I hesitated, then shrugged. “Actually, yeah. Thanks.” We met halfway, only a few feet from my open bedroom door, and I snatched the entire stack from his hand, grinning as I danced out of reach. I was still dodging my brother’s long-armed grasp when my father’s office door opened and he appeared in the threshold.

“Karen!” he bellowed to the house in general. “We’re supposed to be there in an hour.”

Clearly expecting an answer, he paused, glancing down the hall in our direction. But no response came.

“Karen?” he called again, stepping into the center of the foyer. Still no answer. My father’s eyes locked onto mine, and my heart started to pound. Surely he could hear it. He knew I knew something. I barely resisted the urge to hide behind Ethan. “Have either of you seen your mother?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said, and my heart actually skipped a beat.

He knew Mom was in the woods? If so, why hadn’t he mentioned it? He knew as well as I did that she only Shifted when she was upset about something.

But I should have known Ethan was joking. “Slim lady. Blue eyes and a gray pageboy,” he continued, his eyes glistening in appreciation of his own humor. “Answers to the name ‘Mom.’”

Our patriarch frowned, his eyes darkening. Fortunately, he thought Ethan was answering for us both, which was fine with me. I tossed another chip into my mouth and started to duck into my room before my father could question me separately. But my foot froze in midair when my mother’s voice rang out from my parents’ bedroom.

“Gracious, Gregory,” she called out. The door opened, and my mother stepped into the hall with a towel wrapped around her hair, tying the sash of a pale pink bathrobe. Her feet peeked out from beneath the robe. Two entirely human feet with neatly polished toenails.

My jaw dropped open, and I was glad no one was watching me. How the hell did she get past me?

“What on earth are you shouting about?” my mother demanded, and for a moment, I thought she’d read my mind. But then she propped her hands on her hips and glared in irritation at my father. “Have I ever made us late?”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Daddy said. But as stern as his voice was, his eyes were gentle when he looked at my mother. His eyes were always gentle when he looked at her, as if something about her melted his heart, even when she was second-guessing him or slapping his hand for trying to sneak a bite of raw cookie dough. And that was probably a pretty good assessment. She thawed him out. It was a damn good thing someone could.

“Well, I’m still waiting for the first time you let me get ready in peace.” Her mouth twitched in an effort to keep from smiling. “Meet me in the car in twenty minutes.” She backed into her room and closed the door gently. I followed her example.

In my room, I stripped for the third time that day and headed straight to the bathroom for a quick shower.

Clean, dry, and lavender-scented, I pulled a brush through my still-damp hair and dressed in a pair of short denim shorts and my favorite green stretchy-T. I paused at my dresser to put my watch on, then glanced up at the mirror.

Not too bad, I thought, brushing clinging strands of hair from my neck. But with my throat exposed, my eyes caught on my first and only battle scars: four small white crescents running down the left side of my throat. No one else ever noticed. But I did. All the time. And each time my gaze focused on them, I remembered Miguel’s fingernails popping through the surface of my skin and sinking into my flesh.

Miguel had cut off my air for less than two seconds, but they were the most terrifying two seconds of my life. Even worse than the memory was the fact that he’d left his mark on me. Permanently. I couldn’t help but see that as a mark of shame, a daily reminder that I hadn’t been able to keep his hands off me.

“He’s dead.” I said it aloud to comfort myself, but it didn’t work. Miguel may be dead, but Luiz is still out there somewhere. Lying low. Waiting.

I was sure of it. He’d disappeared too easily. It was too good to be true. And if the new body gave us evidence of another jungle cat in the territory, the rest of the council would have to listen.

Shaken by thoughts of nightmares not yet over, I pulled my hair back over my shoulder, covering the scars. Then I brushed it back again, angry at myself for being so squeamish. The guys bore their scars with pride, as evidence of the work they’d done to keep the rest of us safe. Why shouldn’t I? Even if the sight of them did make my stomach churn…

“You get lost?”

I jumped, then whirled to find Marc leaning against my door frame, arms crossed over a deeply tanned, well-toned chest. “Quit sneaking up on me,” I said, mentally cursing a werecat’s stealth. But I couldn’t summon a sharp edge to my voice. He looked too damn good to scold.

Marc smiled and stepped over the threshold, pushing the door closed with his foot. He sauntered across the room to plop down on my unmade bed, the soles of his feet grazing my cream-colored Berber carpet. My pulse spiked just watching him. “Vic ordered pizza.”

I laughed as I came toward him; I’d guessed as much. “What did he get?”

Marc leaned forward to grab my wrist as soon as I was within reach. He pulled me into his lap, nuzzling my chin, just below my right ear, sending tingling sparks to smolder in very promising places. “A meat-lovers, a cheese-lovers, and a supreme. All large.”

“That’ll be enough for me,” I whispered, trailing my fingers down the side of his face. His chin was rough, and the stubble tickled my fingers, a delightfully masculine texture. I liked chin stubble. Especially on him. “But what are the two of you going to eat?”

Marc laughed, and I pushed him back on the bed, where he rolled us over until I lay looking up at him. Light from the fixture overhead made a halo around his head, but he was no angel. His next words confirmed it. “I have an idea,” he murmured, pinching my earlobe lightly between his front teeth. “But Vic’s out of luck.” His tongue trailed from my ear down my throat.

“Mmm,” I purred as my arms snaked around his waist, my fingers playing lightly over the muscles of his back as they bunched and rolled beneath my hands. “I might need a snack, too.”

“That can be arranged.” He hooked his right hand beneath my knee and wrapped my leg around his waist. His hand skimmed slowly up the length of my thigh to cup my rear beneath my shorts. He squeezed, and my breath hitched. He slid his hand beneath the hem of my shirt, and my pulse leapt. He ground his hips into me, and…

My phone rang, Pink singing “U + Ur Hand” from across the room.

Exhaling in frustration, I planted one hand against his chest and tried to push him up, but he only growled and refused to move. “Let it ring,” he moaned. Which I found ironic, considering the title of the song.

I let my head fall back against the rumpled covers and sighed, enjoying the feel of his weight pressing me into the bed. “What if it’s important?”

“What could be more important than this?” His hand trailed up my stomach, and I squirmed beneath him. But the song played on, and I wasn’t one of those people who can just let the phone ring. I’m too curious. And yes, I know what curiosity did to the cat.

“I have to get it, Marc,” I said, stroking the hair at the base of his skull. “It’ll only take a second.”

“Fine.” But he refused to move, so I squirmed out from under him, which gave me some very interesting ideas for later….

Smiling to myself over the naughty images in my head, I grabbed my cell phone from my desktop, glancing at the number on the display.

My smile withered instantly, leaving my expression hollow. It was the same number I’d seen a day and a half ago.

When Andrew called.

“What’s wrong?” Marc asked.

“Nothing.” My thumb hovered over the yes button as I tried to calm my pounding heart. If he heard it racing, he’d know I’d lied. Then I’d have to explain, and he’d know it wasn’t the first time. I hated lying to him. I really did. But if I told him an ex-boyfriend was bothering me, he’d insist on fixing the problem for me. And not only would that offend my pride—I was hardly your typical damsel in distress—it would probably involve an unpleasant road trip, an overdose of testosterone, and a major cleanup effort, which would only make things worse for everyone involved. Most of all, Marc himself. So really, I was lying to him for his own good.

Or so I told myself as my mouth opened, intent on digging me even deeper into my proverbial hole.

“It’s Sammi,” I said, cringing inside even as the lie came out smoothly. “Why don’t you go make a salad to go with the pizza? I’ll be right there, okay?”

Marc frowned. “Fine. But we’re not done here,” he said, gesturing toward the bed with an unmistakable spark of mischief in his eye. I nodded, and he left to make me a salad. Sometimes he was too sweet for his own good. And for mine.

I closed the door behind him and pressed the yes button, cutting Pink’s song short before the phone could switch over to my voice mail. But I didn’t speak, in part because I knew that since I could still hear Marc’s footsteps, he could hear anything I said. But the other reason, of at least equal importance, was that I had no clue what to say.

“Have you been thinking about me?” Andrew said into the empty static over the line.

Shit. Until he spoke, I’d clung to the sliver of hope that I’d been wrong. That it wasn’t his phone number on my screen. But that hope was now as real as the Easter Bunny. “I know you’re there, Faythe. I can hear you breathing, so answer the fucking question.”

I opened my mouth, yet I had no idea what I was going to say until the first word slipped from my lips.

Eight

“Yes.”

Frustrated with my own answer, I let my head fall to thump against the door, then held my breath until I was sure Marc wouldn’t turn back to investigate the sound. He didn’t. Instead, from across the house came the barely there sound of the magnetic seal breaking as he opened the refrigerator door.

“Really?” Andrew sounded suspicious, almost as surprised by my answer as I was. But it was the truth; I had been thinking about him. In fact, I’d had trouble blocking him from my thoughts. I felt guilty about the way I’d left things between us, and about how ugly the whole situation would get soon if he didn’t stop calling.

I sighed silently. Why did I feel compelled to be honest with Andrew, but not with Marc? Did I owe Marc any less than I owed Andrew?

No. The truth was that I owed them both an explanation. I’d left each of them—albeit five years apart—without saying goodbye. But Marc was like me. He was strong, and stubborn, and…one of us. Resilient. Andrew was human, and thus fragile in a way I could never really understand, and Marc could no longer remember. Honesty was the least I owed Andrew—up to a point.

“Yes, really,” I said at last. I snatched the remote from my desktop and aimed it at my stereo. Music blared to life from the speakers mounted in the corners of the room. The All-American Rejects, “Dirty Little Secret.” Frenetic, taunting tempo and all.

Figures.

Counting on the music to cover my voice, I turned my attention back to Andrew and exhaled slowly in anticipation of a very awkward conversation. “I was thinking that I should have tried harder to get in touch with you in June.”

“How right you are. Fortunately, you’re going to have the opportunity to make that up to me. Soon.”

What? My pulse spiked. No. He was coming to see me.

Andrew couldn’t come to the ranch. There was no possible way for a meeting between him and Marc to go well. Or even a meeting between him and my father, who also assumed my human indiscretion to be a thing of the past.

“What does that mean?” I asked, my voice soft with horror I couldn’t quite disguise, but he only laughed. “Andrew, how do you want me to make it up to you? You want to talk? We can talk. Let me explain what happened.” One version of it, anyway…

He snorted. He actually snorted into my ear. “Oh, let me guess. It’s not me, it’s you. I just don’t fit into your life anymore, right?” The bitterness in his voice stung.

“It’s not like that.” But it was. It was exactly like that—in no way he could possibly understand.

“Oh? What is it, then? Your parents? You’re scared to introduce me to your parents?” I started to answer, but he spoke over my protest. “They don’t even know about me, do they? You never told them.” His accusation was sharp and pointed. But this time he was wrong.

“Of course I did.” My words came out rushed; I was eager for something legitimate to deny. “They know.” Did he honestly think my parents thought I was a virgin? That I was afraid to tell them I’d gone off to college and had sex? Sure, my mother looked like she belonged in a fifties sitcom, but my parents were neither stupid nor naive. Which was no doubt one of the reasons they’d sent the guys to watch over me.

“You told them?” He didn’t believe me; that much was obvious. “And they’re okay with it?”

I shrugged, though he couldn’t see the motion. “Well, I doubt they’re thrilled by it.” They were no more pleased with my perceived promiscuity than any parents would be. But their real problem was not that I’d let a guy into my bed, but that I’d let a human guy into my bed. A guy I could have no future with, who could never marry me and give them grandchildren.

None of which I could tell Andrew, naturally.

“You’re lying,” Andrew shouted into the phone, and I could actually hear his teeth grinding together as he spoke through them. “You’re fucking lying, and we damn well know it.”

“We?” I frowned in confusion. “Who’s w—”

“You didn’t tell them about me. You didn’t tell your family any more than you told him.”

“Andrew…” On the radio, the All-American Rejects gave way to an announcer rambling on about the weather and the traffic, and I lowered my voice, hoping no one would walk by my room before the next song came on. “Andrew, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You owe me, Faythe. I know where you are, and I know who you’re with. And when the time comes, that won’t make one fucking bit of difference. He won’t be able to prote—”

Another voice barked in the background, pounding through Andrew’s fury like a hammer through a block of ice—quick and violent. And effective. I couldn’t make out what he said, and before I had a chance to think about it, Andrew was back. “I’ll see you soon, Faythe. Tell Marc I’ll see him, too. I think he and I have a lot to talk about.”

Oh, no. Oh hell no. Alarm shot through my limbs and I stood so fast my chair fell over on the carpet in front of me. “Andrew!” I whispered into the phone, glancing at my bedroom door, just to be safe. “You have no idea what you’re—”

But he was gone. He’d hung up on me. Again.

Furious, I snapped my phone shut and tossed it onto the desk behind me, then bent to pick up my chair. What the fuck is wrong with him? I slammed the chair on the floor, but that did nothing to help burn off my anger. Andrew and I had only dated for four months and we’d now been apart almost as long as we were together in the first place. So what the hell did he hope to gain by coming here and confronting Marc?

Oh, shit. Marc. I sank back into the chair, facing my desk this time.

Marc would never attack a human, and under most circumstances would make no offensive moves even if assaulted by one, so I wasn’t really worried about him hurting Andrew. But my father would never trust me again when he found out I’d kept the first call to myself. And neither would Marc.

I’d meant no harm by keeping my secret. But seriously, how was I supposed to know that one little human exboyfriend could be so much trouble? That not breaking it off with him in person would turn a calm, rational, nice individual into the bitter, angry man I’d just spoken to?

The thing I’d liked most about Andrew was how very normal he was. How incredibly even-tempered and predictable. He was almost boring, which I loved because of how well it contrasted with my claws-and-kicks home life.

The most daring thing I’d ever done with Andrew was, well…him, in broad daylight. In his apartment. Beneath the covers. With the door locked. Andrew wasn’t a daring sort of guy—at least not when we were a couple. Even during our one nooner, only hours before I’d left campus, he’d complained when I nibbled too hard on his earlobe. I’d barely broken the skin, but he jumped as if I’d tried to pierce his ear.

Instead of protesting, Marc would have upped the ante. He was always up for more. Faster. Harder. Anytime. Anywhere.

If Andrew came to the Lazy S, disaster would be hot on his heels.

How does he even know where I live? I wondered as I flipped my phone back open and navigated to the call history screen. I’d never told him, specifically so he couldn’t visit. But it wouldn’t be too hard to find out, even with nothing but my name and an Internet connection.

I pressed the call button and stood again as Andrew’s phone rang in my ear. It rang four times, and by the time his voice mail answered—in a woman’s mechanical voice—I was already pacing. When the beep sliced through my thoughts, I stopped, one hand propped on my hip.

“Andrew, it’s Faythe. Stop hanging up on me! And do not come here! I’m sorry about leaving like that, but it’s over now. You cannot come here. Please.”

I hung up and threw the phone at the wall this time, glad only in retrospect that it didn’t break. How did Andrew even know about Marc, anyway?

Sammi.

No one else from school knew about Marc, but Sammi had met him. She must have told Andrew. My heart pounding again, I snatched the phone from the floor and dialed my college roommate. But she wasn’t home, either, so I left a message on her machine asking her to call me back as soon as she could.

Then I sat on the end of my bed and forced my heartbeat to slow, my breath to come evenly. If I went out in my current state, Marc would know something was wrong the minute I entered the kitchen. I couldn’t keep doing this. It was unfair to Marc and bad for my own health. If Andrew called again, I would tell Marc the truth. I’d rather have him mad at me for a few days than taken by surprise when Andrew showed up at the gate.

At the front of the house, the doorbell rang, and I listened as Vic answered the door, exchanging pleasantries with the pizza guy as he paid for our dinner. When anger and frustration no longer pulsed through my veins, I pressed the power button on my stereo remote, shoved my phone in my pocket, and ran a brush through my ponytail, reminding myself one last time that I’d been talking to Sammi, just in case Marc asked. Then I prayed that he wouldn’t, and headed for the hallway.

In the kitchen, Marc and Vic stood guard around three open and steaming boxes of pizza, a slice in each of their hands. Marc saw me and swallowed his mouthful. “There’s your salad,” he said, barely pausing before stuffing the pointed end of another slice into his mouth.

“Thanks.” I looked where he’d pointed with a chunk of pizza crust and found a single cereal bowl full of limp wet lettuce. I laughed. I should have known. Even on two legs, Marc was a carnivore, with little use for the food groups unrelated to meat, fat, and dairy. He probably didn’t even know what else went into a garden salad. Luckily, like the rest of us, he had great metabolism.

I’d just popped open a chilled can of soda from the guesthouse when the clicking of heels on tile echoed from the foyer. My mother paused in the kitchen doorway wearing a simple but elegant calf-length black dress, accessorized only by the pearls at her throat and the matching clutch purse in her right hand. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.” Her voice was low for a woman’s and smooth. Like butterscotch, it was sweet and deceptively soothing, which was part of what made her nagging so annoying. It was terribly hard to tune out such a beautiful speaking voice, even when it was telling you what you should already have accomplished by this point in your life.

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