“You know I’m not lying. How else would I know about your cottage, with the hidden basement staircase and the stuffed werecat standing guard in your living room? It’s over, Darren.”
“It won’t be over until we’ve hunted every one of you into extinction.”
I didn’t bother telling him that really wasn’t necessary. With so few tabbies, we were headed in that direction anyway.
“You don’t stand a chance.” I watched nervously as he started to pace the length of my bed. “There are only a few of you left, and we know all about the last couple of your hunting buddies.”
“Couple?” Darren laughed, and chill bumps popped up the length of my arms. “Do you actually think Gene Hargrove and I found out about you and your freak shifter species on our own? I wish I could take credit for that, but there are others. All over the world. You guys are a sport. Big game hunters pay serious money to learn how and where to hunt shifters, and the only rule is that they gotta die in cat form. Most of those rich bastards will pay thousands to have their trophies stuffed and shipped home.”
“No.” He had to be lying. “We would have known.”
“You probably should have known,” he agreed. “But as long as we only picked off the strays, the rest of you seemed to be trying not to notice.”
Strays. He knew about them, just like he knew about Alphas and tabbies. My blood felt like ice. I tried to move my hand again, but nothing happened.
Damn it!
“You probably never would have noticed if we’d stuck to the free zones. It’s like serial killers offing prostitutes—no one really cares. But Steve just had to go after a tabby. I told him that was like thumping a hornet’s nest, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought you’d be an easy kill.”
I’d never been happier in my life to prove someone wrong. “If you know better, why are you thumping the hornet’s nest?”
His grin made me shudder. “I like a challenge.”
“The council will find you.” I tried to move my right foot, and when my big toe twitched, I had to fight to hide my triumph. The paralytic was wearing off!
Darren huffed. “This ain’t my first safari, sweetheart. No cat ever born pounces faster than a bullet flies.” He patted the pistol strapped to his side for emphasis.
“Maybe not, but we’re faster than any human trigger finger. Hargrove had a gun too.”
“Hargrove wasn’t a hunter. He shot at paper targets and stuffed dead animals.”
I swallowed nausea at the thought. “They’ll catch you, and you can’t possibly understand the pain you’ll feel before you die.” I tried to shrug, but my shoulders wouldn’t move. “Maybe they’ll skin you and preserve your flesh. I bet my dad would love a human skin rug, right in front of his couch, so he can step on you every time he crosses the room.”
“Enough.” He held the knife up in front of my face. “Where’s Robyn?”
“You can’t kill me unless I have fur. You told me that yourself.”
“A shot of adrenaline will pull the cat right out of you.”
Fuck! He knew how to force a shift. The room started to slide out of focus and I fought to slow my respiration. I couldn’t afford to hyperventilate.
“Until then, I can hurt you all I like...” The tip of his knife traced the length of my throat and I took a long, slow breath to keep from panicking.
The only thing keeping me alive was the fact that he thought I knew where Robyn was. If I debunked that theory—or refused to talk—he’d be done with me. I’d have to string him along. Keep him talking.
“You’ll never find Robyn.” My left foot twitched, and when he turned to pace away from me, I tried to curl my right hand into a fist. My fingers jumped a bit on the blanket. That wasn’t really triumph, but it was a good start.
“I found her once. I’ll find her again.” Darren shrugged. “She’s a girl and a brand-new cat, right? Not exactly the most dangerous game.”
I laughed out loud; he still hadn’t figured it out! “There is no more dangerous game than a new stray!” Except for an Alpha. “Strays can’t control their instincts or their tempers. Robyn killed Joe Mathews and the ones before him. She tracked down Hargrove and went after him in his own home.”
“Bullshit.” Darren frowned. “That was you and your pack.”
“It’s a Pride, not a pack,” I snapped. “And that wasn’t us. Our people want Robyn just as badly as you do, because of the attention she’s attracted.”
Darren didn’t seem to believe me. “Tell me where she is, or I’m going to start cutting.” He placed the tip of his blade against my left breast. “Five seconds.” The metal point bit at my skin through the thin sports bra, and my pulse rushed fast enough to make me dizzy.
“I left her in a closet,” I said, trying not to move beneath his knife.
“I checked all the closets.” He pressed harder, and I gasped when the blade pierced my skin, just hard enough to draw blood.
“Room 304,” I said. I’d actually left her in 312, but all my toes were wiggling behind him by then, and I needed him to leave the room. “Maybe she crawled into the bathroom. Or under the bed. Maybe she got out before you checked that room. I swear she’s here somewhere.”
“I checked everywhere!” Darren shouted, and his blade bit deeper. I whimpered, my heart pounding. If he lost his temper, he might forget about the rules.
He might kill me without a second thought.
Someone hissed, and he stumbled backward, cursing. A form shot out from under my bed and knocked Darren over. I didn’t realize I could move my neck until my head turned to follow the hissing blur, and I found my roommate perched on his chest in human form, growling like a cat facing down a large rat.
“Robyn!” She’d been under my bed the whole time. Darren hadn’t looked, and I hadn’t realized I could smell her, because the entire room already smelled like Robyn.
She turned when I called her name, and Darren’s grip on his knife tightened.
“No!” I shouted, and my arm flopped, but I couldn’t pick myself up. I couldn’t defend her.
Robyn stood as he swung his knife. The blade sank into her thigh instead of her chest, and she hissed. Blood poured from her leg and she collapsed onto one hip. Darren turned back to me, knife high, but already arching toward me.
I screamed as his blade swung, still dripping Robyn’s blood.
A dark blur lunged through the open doorway, and a terrifying snarl filled the room. Jace’s front paws hit Darren square in the chest and drove him to the floor. Hard.
Jace’s snarl ended in a satisfied note, followed by the gurgle of blood I could smell but couldn’t see.
Darren’s blood.
I burst into tears of shock and relief as Jace dropped a bloody hunk of flesh onto the floor. I wanted to sit up and hug him, but my arms wouldn’t cooperate.
Robyn hissed again and pushed herself into one corner of the room, her hands pressed to the gash in her thigh. Before I could tell her not to worry or tell Jace not to kill her, Lucas and Mateo burst into the room in human form, having followed Jace up both flights of stairs in their inferior bipedal bodies.
They stared at the bloody scene in silence. Then my brother blinked, and his gaze found me. When he saw that I was still breathing and only barely cut, he exhaled and found a grin. Then he turned to offer my roommate a hand. “You must be the new girl. I’m Lucas, Abby’s brother.” She glanced at me, and when I nodded, she let him pull her up, while Teo pulled the case from the nearest pillow, to use as a tourniquet. “And you…” Lucas turned back to me. “You are soooo grounded.”
SEVENTEEN
Jace
I knocked on my open bedroom door, and Abby rolled over to face me. Seeing her in my bed—even though I’d hardly touched her all night—triggered a primal satisfaction, like that first deep breath after a long dive. As if having her scent on my sheets meant everything was exactly as it should be, when in reality, everything was falling apart.
She sat up in
bed as I crossed the room toward her.
“How’d you sleep?”
Abby shrugged and pushed a mass of red curls back from her face. “You could probably answer that better than I can. How many times did I wake up?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and she scooted closer, dragging the blankets along. “Seven.” The nightmares were back, triggered by Darren and his damn paralytic drug. “But I would have had to wake you up once an hour anyway because of the concussion.” From the looks of it, she’d hit her head when the drug knocked her out. “Doctor’s orders.”
As near as I could tell, her dreams were some fucked-up amalgamation of her abduction at age seventeen, the assault on her campsite during fall break, and what went down in her dorm room sixteen hours before. The recurring theme seemed to be helplessness and an inability to protect herself.
I would gladly have killed everyone who’d ever laid a finger on her, if they weren’t all already dead, but I couldn’t fight her demons. All I could do was rub her back and remind her of where she was when she woke up screaming, and that made me feel helpless.
It made me want to rip someone apart, then lick the blood from my claws while the body cooled.
But I’d already done that.
“Did you get any sleep?” Abby straightened her nightshirt, then pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band she’d left on my bedside table the night before.
“I got enough.” Wherein “enough” was defined as almost none. But there’d be time to sleep later, when the chaos had settled. When I was sure she was going to be okay.
My gaze fell to the bedside table again, where her ruined phone lay next to an extra ponytail holder—they were always snapping beneath the pressure of her hair—and a tube of scented lip balm. Strawberry. Seeing her things on my nightstand… That felt right. Normal. Completely at odds with the fact that her parents were on their way from South Carolina, an emergency meeting of the Territorial Council had been called, and two of my men had spent half the night moving the body of a cop whose death would definitely be both noticed and investigated.
Mateo and Lucas had left Darren’s body in a field behind his home. With any luck, his death would look like exactly what it was—a mauling by a large cat. But even if they’d gone unseen by the only neighbor within viewing distance, the lack of blood at the scene would tell even a bad forensic investigator that Darren had been killed elsewhere, then dumped in the field.
But there was nothing we could do about that.
“Where’s Robyn?” Abby glanced at the other side of the bed, where her roommate had slept. Robyn had refused to be separated from Abby, even while her leg was being sewn up, and only hunger had driven her out of bed alone in a house full of strange scents and faces.
“She’s having breakfast and probably developing a deep-seated reluctant tolerance for my sister.” Melody was fascinated by Robyn. Almost as fascinated as she was with herself, which was a miracle all on its own. “Dr. Carver got here early this morning. Melody was going to keep her secret, but when she saw all the attention Robyn was getting, she practically demanded a prenatal exam.”
Dr. Danny Carver had driven all night to get from Oklahoma to Kentucky. He was actually a medical examiner, but as the only shifter physician in the eastern half of the country, he was constantly on call for injuries beyond the scope of an enforcer’s ability to suture.
And for pregnancies.
“So, no problems?” Abby said.
“Well, he didn’t come packing stirrups, but he said that as far as he can tell without doing an ultrasound, all is well.”
Since we hadn’t previously announced Melody’s news and my mother had done a pretty good job on Robyn’s leg, I could only assume our new tabby herself was the reason for the doctor’s long drive. Carver wanted to examine the first confirmed female stray.
“He took blood samples from Robyn this morning, and he wants to do an exam and a shift observation after lunch.”
Abby groaned. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid by keeping her a secret. She’s having enough trouble adjusting to the fact that she’s not fully human anymore. The last thing she needs is to be poked and prodded.”
“All strays have trouble with the adjustment. You should have told us—”
“This is different, Jace.” Abby pushed back the covers and folded her legs beneath herself. “Other strays don’t wake up one day and realize they’re responsible for propagating a species they didn’t even know existed.”
“So, you just decided not to tell her?” Robyn had been hysterical and nearly incoherent in the minutes after we’d met her. Some of that was because she’d just narrowly survived a home invasion by a psychotic shifter-hunting cop. Some of it was probably due to the fact that her first encounter with the local Alpha—yours truly—included seeing him rip that cop’s throat out. But it soon became clear that the bulk of her shock and confusion was because she’d had no idea my men and I existed.
Robyn knew what she had become and what she could do, and she knew there were other shifters in the world, somewhere. But she’d had no idea there was any governing body around to hold her responsible for her actions. Or to help her.
“No, I decided to delay telling her,” Abby insisted. “But I taught her about everything she needed to know immediately—shifting, and instinct, and enhanced senses. About keeping everything a secret. I just left off all the social and political stuff. Alphas, territories, Prides. Procreation. I was trying to give her time to adjust to all the physical stuff first before I threw everything else at her. I was trying to help her. She was having a lot of trouble with the transition.”
“That’s normal, Abby. That’s why we monitor strays during their first weeks, whenever possible.”
Unfortunately, that was rarely possible. Most strays are infected by other strays, who know little to nothing about their own species, including how transmission works, how to prevent it, and the fact that it’s forbidden by long-standing council decree. Most of them don’t realize that they have a responsibility to help their victims through the transitional period, because they weren’t helped by the shifters who infected them. It was a vicious, violent cycle, which we had no way to stop unless strays in the free zones were taken into the fold. Given authority, official standing, and organization.
They needed to be counted, educated, and kept in line to protect our secret. Faythe, Marc, Titus, and I were trying to make that happen through our proposed resolution, for the good of our entire species.
But there was resistance from the more conservative members, who believed most adult strays were a lost cause because they lacked the shifter upbringing that would have tempered and informed their feline instincts in the early stages. Certain council members, namely, Blackwell and his supporters, thought the best we could do for strays was to eliminate those who demonstrated uncontrollable violence and leave the rest to their lives. Unaffiliated with ours.
They were wrong, and Robyn was an extreme example of just how badly things could go when strays had a limited—even if well-meaning—support system.
“Abby, you should have told me. I could have helped you.” Then we’d only be dealing with the infection issue, instead of insubordination and murder. Not to mention hiding a stray from the council. I couldn’t think of an official rule forbidding that, but I was sure they’d be pissed.
“If I’d told you, you would have had to report her to the council, and they would have taken her.” Abby grabbed my hands. Her eyes were wide, her voice strained. “They would have pulled her out of school and put her through a bunch of tests, and they would have locked her up. I couldn’t let them lock her up, Jace. Nobody deserves that.”
That’s when I understood. Abby’d spent nearly a week in that cage when she was seventeen. She’d been raped and beaten, fed whatever and whenever her captors thought she should eat. She’d had a bucket for a toilet, and she’d lived in utter terror of dying the same w
ay Sara Di Carlo—Vic and Mateo’s sister—had. She couldn’t willingly put her best friend through that. Even part of it.
But her fear was unfounded. We were talking about the territorial council, not a band of warlords.
“They wouldn’t have had to lock her up if you’d brought her to us immediately, because she wouldn’t have killed anyone yet.”
“No, they would have locked her up to stop her from killing.” Abby shrugged, and the gesture carried doubt. “Maybe I should have let them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s not well, Jace. In human form, Robyn seems mostly okay, but in cat form, she’s practically feral. She’s at the mercy of instincts and urges she didn’t grow up expecting. She doesn’t yet know how to think like a human when her brain is structured like a cat’s. It’s like there’s a disconnect between the two halves of her.”
Uh-oh.
Abby studied my grim expression. “What? You know what’s wrong with Robyn? What is it?”
I took a deep breath, then squeezed her hand. “It’s a dissociative disorder that’s specific to the unique psychology of a shifter, and almost exclusively suffered by strays whose introduction to our world was particularly…devastating.”
“Dissociative disorder?” Abby’s brown eyes widened. “Like…multiple personalities?”
“Not exactly. Shifters literally have two forms, and sometimes, the trauma of that initial shift—or of the infection itself—leads a new shifter to disassociate his feline self from his human self. You actually put it pretty well. When Robyn’s a cat, she’s completely a cat. In those moments, she may not even remember or understand that she’s also human, which means she doesn’t have access to her human conscience and probably lacks the ability to think beyond her immediate needs.
“Kaci had the opposite problem when puberty brought on a shift she had no way to anticipate. She had no clear boundary between her human and feline halves.” Which was why we’d found her in the branches of a tree, munching on a fresh corpse—in human form. “But Kaci got better, and so can Robyn.”
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