Prey

by Rachel Vincent

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

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

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

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

  She nodded.

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

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

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

  And that’s when the first cat pounced.

  Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Well, except for that time in the Montana mountains…

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

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

  Meow, meow, motherfucker.

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

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

  Finally stable, I kicked the cat’s sku
ll with my free foot. Then I smacked him with the shovel. The stray released my leg, and I scrambled to my feet using the shovel as a crutch. I kicked him again, this time in the jaw, already caked with my blood. Then I settled my weight onto my good leg and resumed fighting, ignoring the pain as best I could.

  On my left, Ethan dropped to one knee, swinging his ax up. The blade caught a stray beneath his jaw, and almost cleaved the cat’s head from his neck. The body hit the ground with a nauseating two-part thud—first the torso, then the nearly detached skull—and Ethan was in motion again. I would have been impressed, if I’d had time to think about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No one had won the office pool.

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

  Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What about the rest?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The strays had come to kill. But why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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