If I go back in now, my father will see, and they’ll all have to believe me.
But then I’d have to explain the emotional stress that had triggered the partial Shift, and as badly as I wanted to prove I could do it, I wanted to keep my secret even more. At least until I could tell Marc about Andrew in private. That was the least he deserved.
Gritting my teeth against the pain, I reversed the partial Shift. As soon as my vision was back to normal, I jogged across the yard to the guesthouse and through the door. Parker waved to me from the living-room computer as I headed straight for the kitchen. Then, six-pack of chilled Cokes in hand, I crossed the room again and onto the porch, just in time to hear the screen door to the main house squeal open.
I looked up as Marc stepped onto the back porch. “Faythe?” he called, the concern in his tone contrasting sharply with the bitter anger Andrew’s voice had held. “Where’d you go?”
I held up the sodas, trying desperately to regulate my pulse before he heard it racing. “Right here. I’m coming.” I took a deep breath, then jogged down the steps and across the soft green grass.
“Is something wrong? You smell…anxious.”
“Nope. Just thirsty. What’s up?” I asked as I crossed the yard toward him before he could question me further.
“Michael found a pattern with the strippers.” I knew from the grim look on his face as I climbed the steps that I wasn’t going to like whatever my brother had found.
We entered the office just in time to hear Ethan tell my father that he and Jace hadn’t been able to find my mother. “…but she can’t have gone far. Her car’s still out front.”
“She’s in the woods,” I said, settling onto the arm of the leather couch as I pulled a soda from the bunch and tossed it to him.
My father nodded, his expression worried but not surprised. He’d known about her solitary treks in the forest. I should have guessed. “She’ll be back when she’s ready,” he said, clearly dismissing the subject. “Faythe, is everything okay?”
“Fine.” I popped the top on my own can and downed a quarter of it in one swallow, to keep from having to answer any more questions. For the moment, anyway.
“Good. Michael, repeat what you said about the missing girls, for those who missed it.
“I didn’t find any pattern among their personal lives.” Michael pushed back the desk and stood, pulling several sheets from the printer tray as he passed it on his way to our Alpha’s side. “They range in age from twenty-one to thirty-three. All of them are single except Melissa Vassey, who’s married with one child. There’s a record of one domestic disturbance at her address, but at this point, I’m thinking that has nothing to do with her disappearance.
“Their educational backgrounds run the gamut, too. One college grad, one still studying, and two with only high school diplomas. As far as I can tell, they’ve never met one another. So I was at a complete loss for things in common until I did a search for their pictures.”
Michael met my gaze, and my throat tried to close when I saw the dark dread in his eyes, completely unfiltered by his spectacle lenses. He held up the first picture—a black-and-white pixilated image printed on twenty-pound paper—and I frowned, squinting to see it better. I shook my head and held my hand out for the page. Michael handed the first one to me, and another to Marc.
The image was poor quality, but more than adequate to make my brother’s point. Melissa Vassey—based on the caption—had long dark hair, just like mine. As did Amber Cleary, whose picture Marc held.
“You can’t tell from these, but they both have green eyes. And so does Pam Gilbert,” Michael said, holding up one of the two remaining pages.
“Wow,” Jace whispered, staring at me openly. “They look like you.”
Not quite. Two of the three women in question were quite a bit better endowed than I was—ridiculously so, in Melissa Vassey’s case—and no two of us had the same nose. But I knew what he meant. We all had straight, dark hair and green eyes. Not the most common combination of features.
He’s making a statement, I thought, stunned to the point of speechlessness. Unable to tear my eyes from Melissa Vassey’s face, I slid down from the arm of the couch onto one of the cushions. Though I’ll be damned if I know what he’s trying to say.
The Andrew I’d known could never have taken those strippers. But then, he could never have made those phone calls, either. He’s lost it, I thought, shaking my head before I realized what I was doing. Scratch-fever has completely fried his brain. Why else would he take Amber, and Kellie, and…
Wait. My head popped up and I frowned at Michael. “Kellie Tandy doesn’t fit the pattern. She’s blond.”
Michael nodded. “She has brown eyes, too.”
“So she’s not part of this?” I asked, my frown deepening. “But we know the tabby was in the Forbidden Fruit.”
“Show her,” my father said.
I glanced first at him, then at Michael, as he held up the last page from the printer. “Forbidden Fruit has a Web site, with a ‘cast list,’ complete with photographs of the dancers. In costume.” He handed me the page, and I took it, dreading what I’d see. “Third from the end.”
But I’d already found her. Second row. Kellie Tandy, from the waist up, her ample cleavage bursting from the top of a black leather cat suit, à la Halle Berry. However, the important part, the part that made her fit the pattern, was her hair. She wore a wig—a mass of straight black hair, with pointed cat ears sticking up from either side. She also wore white plastic whiskers glued to her face, on either side of a perfect little human nose. Beneath authentic-looking cat eyes.
They were theatrical contacts. They had to be. But they were eerily accurate, down to the striations in her irises that I was sure were various shades of green in real life, though they were gray in the photo.
Marc took my hand in his, stroking the side of my palm with his thumb, as if to comfort me. If only he knew what an impossibly Herculean task that was at the moment. “We still don’t know who the tabby is, or why she’s following this psycho from club to club. But we should be able to figure out who he is now. Or at least narrow our list of suspects down from ‘every cat in the country’ to ‘someone Faythe knows.’”
“That can’t be too hard.” Smiling, Ethan dropped onto the love seat across from me and Marc. “She can’t know that many strays. She’s been at school for the past five years, and we’d have known if anyone was hanging around who shouldn’t have been.”
“What if it’s not someone she knows, but someone who knows her?” Jace asked, settling onto the arm of the couch on my other side. “Or thinks he does.”
“Same thing,” Ethan insisted. “Either way, if there was another werecat on campus, we’d have known about it.”
Ethan was right. I’d been under constant surveillance by my father’s enforcers at school, and if another werecat had shown up, they’d have taken him out before I had the chance to break so much as a nail on the poor bastard. But the joke was on them, because the werecat in question wasn’t a werecat at all when we’d been on campus. He was a normal, human math major.
“Enough,” my father said. “Faythe, I think Marc’s right. The tom in question seems to know you. Or at least know what you look like. Assuming it’s a tom at all, and I don’t think we should rule out anything at this point.”
Well, what do you know? It only took a female serial killer to bring my father into the gender-equal twenty-first century. I’d thought it would take full-scale war.
Closing my eyes, I pulled in a long, slow breath, trying to ignore my galloping heartbeat. When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me. “Let me save you all a lot of trouble. I know who’s taking the strippers.”
“What?” Marc shifted on the sofa to face me, but I couldn’t look at him. I watched my father instead, as I said the rest of what had to be said.
“It’s Andrew Wallace.”
Silence greeted my announcement. Complete and total silen
ce, except for the whispered breaths coming from around the room. And Marc’s might not even have been among them. I think he actually stopped breathing.
Michael was the first to speak, from his perch on the arm of the love seat, and I really should have seen that coming. “Andrew? That skinny guy you were sleeping with last spring?”
“Damn it, Michael!” I glared at him from across the rug as Marc tensed on the cushion next to me. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
He shrugged, crossing bulging arms over his spotless polo shirt. “I’m just getting my facts straight. So…you’re saying you were screwing a serial kidnapper for most of your last semester at school?” He turned then to face our father as my blood boiled. “I’d say that was tuition money well spent.”
“Michael…” my father said, his voice thick with warning.
“What? I’m not the problem here. She is.” He whirled back to face me, fury and frustration battling for control of his expression. “Where Faythe goes, trouble follows, and as usual, we’re left to clean up her mess.”
“You son of a bitch!” My hands curled into fists, and I felt myself leaning forward, ready and more than willing to take some of my stress and frustration out on his face. “Ethan’s drilled half the state of Texas, and you’ve never once thrown that in his face—”
“Hey!” Ethan shouted, eyes going wide as he sat up straight on the couch across from me. “Don’t bring me into this.”
“—but I have one ex-boyfriend, and you declare me the Jezebel of the county.” Blood pounded in my ears, and my fingers tingled in fury, itching for something to beat, or shred. I sprang from the couch, still-human fingers curled into claws. Michael jumped up from the love seat, hissing at me through bared teeth.
Marc caught me in midair, both arms wrapped around my waist. He spun me around in one smooth, fluid motion and dropped me none too gently in the middle of the couch. “Don’t move,” he ordered, watching me through the flood of confusion and suspicious anger shining in his eyes.
“Ethan, out.” My father was still standing, his arms stiff at his sides, his fists clenched.
“But—” Ethan turned to argue, but the Alpha shook his head.
“Go. And take Jace with you.”
Jace stood and shoved his best friend ahead of him. I cringed when the door clicked closed, and all remaining eyes turned on me.
“Is Michael right?” Marc demanded, still standing in the middle of the rug. “Are we talking about your Andrew?”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him my Andrew…”
“Faythe…” my father said, warning me again. He was making an obvious attempt to calm himself, and I was willing to do whatever it took to help.
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s him.”
Marc’s eyes closed, and his forehead wrinkled. “So we’re looking for a human? The tabby’s chasing a human?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t say it out loud.
“He’s a stray,” my father said, his voice gravelly and almost too low pitched to hear. The attempt to calm himself clearly wasn’t working; I’d never heard him any angrier.
“Yes.” I met his eyes, reminding myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Keeping the calls a secret didn’t count. I’d had no idea Andrew was involved with the strippers and the tabby.
Marc turned his back on me, heading toward the liquor cabinet on the far side of the room, opposite the desk. “How?” he asked, glass clinking as he pulled something I couldn’t see from the cabinet.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Faythe. You’re in too deep to lie about it now,” Michael said.
“Fuck you,” I snapped. “I’m telling the truth!”
“Marc, make mine a double,” my father said, and I glanced up to see Marc pouring himself a glass of whiskey. Straight up.
Marc nodded and got out another glass. “Michael?” he asked, and my brother shook his head. Marc didn’t offer me anything.
My father cracked the first knuckle of his right hand against his left palm. It was an overtly aggressive gesture, which made me very, very nervous. “How long have you known?”
“I just figured it out. Maybe ten minutes ago. Outside.”
“How?”
“The message from Painter.”
Marc crossed the room again, this time carrying two short glasses of whiskey. Full of whiskey.
My father accepted his glass and sipped from it, watching me over the rim. “What about the message?”
My hands clenched together in my lap, I watched Marc lower himself onto the love seat across from me, instead of resuming his place at my side. He was mad. And it was about to get worse.
“Andrew’s been calling me.”
“What?” Marc sat up straight, almost sloshing whiskey into his lap. “Why the hell didn’t you—”
“Let her finish,” my father ordered, cutting Marc off with one raised palm. He nodded for me to continue.
I inhaled deeply. Then I exhaled slowly. “Those pops, and that sound like a helicopter’s propeller at the end of Painter’s call? They were in my last message from Andrew, too. He and Painter are in the same place.”
Marc tossed his glass back and got up for more.
“He knows what you are?” Michael asked, just as my father said, “He told you he was infected?”
“Yes. And no.” I glanced down at my hands, wishing they were wrapped around a drink, but I knew better than to ask Marc to bring me one. “He definitely knows about me. About all of us. But I have no idea how he found out. And no, he never actually told me he was infected, which is why it took me so long to figure out that he was. And I swear I have no idea how it happened.”
My father nodded, as if to say he believed me. But I couldn’t help noticing he didn’t say it out loud.
“How long?” Marc asked from the wet bar, sipping from his second glass of whiskey. “How long has he been calling you?”
I met his eyes, expecting to see pain and deep, deep anger. I wasn’t disappointed. “Once a day since Friday afternoon.”
“Three days?” Marc slammed his glass down on the bar and stomped toward me, stopping at the edge of the rug to tower over me. Michael stood, ready to intercede even though he was clearly just as mad as Marc, but a small shake of my father’s head held him back. “He’s been calling you for three days and you didn’t tell me? Why not?”
“Because I knew this would happen.” I made myself stay seated, knowing that if I stood, a fight would be inevitable. If I stayed calm—and seated—he might calm down, too. “I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew that his calling would upset you, and you’d want to go ‘take care’ of it. I don’t want you to take care of my problems. I can handle them myself.”
“Clearly.” Marc rubbed his forehead with one hand, as if staving off a headache. “You’ve done such a marvelous job of handling it that he’s now waltzing all over our territory, kidnapping strippers who bear a passing resemblance to you. Great job!”
“I didn’t know he had anything to do with any of that! I was just trying to avoid…well, this! You always do this. You take something small, something that’s really none of your business, and you twist it around to make it look like I did something wrong. But this time I didn’t. I was under no obligation to tell you anything.”
His brows arched high over eyes sparkling in fury. “You think this is small?”
“Well, obviously not the kidnapping part,” I conceded, shrugging. “But the phone calls were nothing, at least as far as I knew. And until I knew Andrew was involved in the rest of this, he was none of your business.”
A growl rumbled through the room, extraordinarily low and gravelly. His mouth never moved, but I knew it was Marc. I’d hurt his feelings, and his pride. And I’d pissed him off.
Sighing in defeat, I glanced down at my hands, where they lay in my lap.
“Well, you won’t have to worry about my nose in your business anymore.”
Mo
vement blurred on the right edge of my vision. I turned toward it instinctively. Marc was gone. I whirled in my seat to see him disappear into the hall, his shirt a black smear passing out of sight beyond the door frame.
I was on my feet in an instant, running after him. My father appeared in front of the door out of nowhere, blocking my path. I ducked to dodge him. One iron-hard arm slid around my waist. He held me back. I kicked and fought, my legs flailing in midair. “I have to tell him I’m—”
“Let him go, Faythe. He didn’t mean it. Give him some time and he’ll get over it.”
“No!”
“Yes.” And that was that. My father tucked me under one arm, in the most undignified position I could imagine. He kicked the door shut hard enough to make it rattle in the frame, then hauled me back to the small grouping of furniture, where Michael waited, his eyes wide with astonishment.
My father set me on my feet on the rug and gestured for me to sit on the couch.
I sat. What else could I do?
For a moment, he sipped from his whiskey, while my brother watched me in silence. Then, finally, my father opened his mouth…only to take another drink from his glass. Not a sip this time—a drink. More like a gulp. When he met my eyes again, determination was carved into the firm line of his mouth. “I know you’re upset, but we have to go on with this. I have to ask you some questions. Are you ready?”
I nodded. Of course I was ready. I was an adult who’d had a fight with her boyfriend, not a traumatized child.
“Did you ever Shift in front of Andrew, or have any contact with him at all in cat form?”
My jaw dropped. Literally. My mouth hung open, and I stared at my father like a drooling idiot, stunned into silence by a question so serious and insulting it bruised not just my pride, but my heart. I’d expected a real bitch of a question, but not that. Never that.
My father was practically accusing me of infecting Andrew. Of committing a capital crime—one of the most serious we recognized. If I admitted guilt, the council’s law required him to have me put to death. Not locked up. Not declawed. Not put on display in front of my fellow werecats with a scarlet A on my chest.
Rogue Page 18
