The convenience store was only a one-story building, so I hopped off the roof without difficulty and loped down the hill, staying near the road but not near enough to be seen from passing cars. At last the trees thinned out, and strip malls and scattered houses started to take over. From here I’d need to be a lot more careful.
It was a cold pre-dawn, with faint apricot-gray only starting to stain the eastern horizon, and my breath steamed in front of me. I slunk through a small suburban neighborhood, seen only by a chihuahua that lost its mind barking through a window. I bared my teeth at it and went on. Too bad it wasn’t outside; I could’ve eaten it for breakfast.
At last I trotted through an alley and came out at the edge of a small shopping plaza’s parking lot. The place reeked of stale bread and grease, the garbage in the nearby dumpster, and asphalt, with an undertone of cigarette smoke and the much more pleasant scent of mice.
Mmm. Mice. My nose twitched and my stomach growled.
Maybe later. The dumpster and its little residents weren’t going anywhere, and I might be able to get some human food along the way and skip having to hunt.
The plaza contained a chain pizza joint, a liquor store, a nail salon, and — bingo. One of those work uniform stores that specialized in Dockers. Perfect. A quick trip around the back of the plaza, a tiny application of magic to the lock on the back door and another to the security system to fritz it, and I nosed my way inside.
When I stepped out again, I was fully equipped in sturdy pants and a t-shirt and jacket, with a few changes of clothes in a backpack and a pair of steel-toed boots on my feet. They’d even had cheap sunglasses. I changed my appearance too, using magic to make me look shorter and broader than I was, with shoulder-length brown hair.
The sun wasn’t peeking over the hills yet, but it was fully light, the alley washed gray and dingy by the unforgiving purity of sunrise.
I took a deep breath, holding it in until my lungs burned, and then let it out slowly. I couldn’t smell the mice in this form, luckily, because they weren’t delicious at all to my human taste buds, but the garbage and old pizza remained.
What was Matthew doing right at that moment? I’d been gone for more than two full days, now. Was he looking for me? Did he regret what we’d done? Almost certainly. My belly clenched. Just because I was hungry and tired, dammit. I could still smell Matthew on me, or imagined I could. I wasn’t going to try to catch that scent. I’d take another shower as soon as I could.
Had they written me off as a bad job, called Parker and told him he could look for me elsewhere? Were the Kimballs circling, looking for another opening to take revenge for Sam and Adam’s deaths, the deaths of their pack members in the fight, and their overall resounding defeat?
Not that I cared about the Armitage pack. Fuck them. I only cared about myself, and I needed to know what Parker was doing in order to kill him. That was all.
I needed a car. I needed herbs, salt, chalk, and candles, and possibly a few other oddball items. First I needed food and a place to sleep until night fell, when I’d be free to move.
I slipped down the alley again, just another scruffy drifter wandering the streets at dawn.
***
The Kimball pack had a much larger territory than the Armitages did, and it was a lot closer to civilization, such as civilization was in this part of the country. The northeastern edge of it was only nine miles or so outside of Lancaster.
A little over a mile before the border, there was an abandoned campground. I’d seen it a few times when coming and going from the Kimball territory. Since it was closed, park rangers never went there, and that close to pack land the county sheriffs wouldn’t bother with it either.
It was right after midnight when I crept my stolen Honda sedan down the rutted dirt road, after a quick stop to remove the barrier across the road and then replace it in my wake. I used a little bit of magic to hide the tire tracks. I wasn’t using headlights, relying on my enhanced night vision, and after a while I lost patience, pulled the car in between some trees, and killed the engine. This was far enough from the road to be discreet, but close enough that I’d be able to circle back to the car if I needed more than a bobcat could carry.
Because I had to do my first approach fully shifted, there was no doubt in my mind about that, for all the same reasons fully shifting had been better for escaping from the Armitages. I wouldn’t trigger the wards, my smell wouldn’t attract that much attention, and I was so much quicker and quieter.
I stripped, leaving my clothes in the front seat, and I set the small backpack I’d rigged up with something like a harness on the ground, carefully arranging the straps. It already held the spell components I’d liberated from their captivity in a superstore and in the back of a small herbalist shop earlier that night — and a pair of track pants and a t-shirt, because like fuck was I doing magic in the Kimball territory in human form completely naked. I shifted, melting into my lynx form, contorted myself into a variety of stupid-looking poses to get the backpack situated on my back, and set out into the night.
A small creek divided the old campground from the Kimball territory, and I picked my way across it after a twenty-minute trot. I opened up all of my senses, magical and cat, collecting as much information as I could.
They had boundary wards, and at first glance they looked much fancier than the ones Nate had constructed for the Armitages. Impressive, even, with a lot of the magical equivalent of flashing neon lights and whizzing alarms. Like some cheap, desperate, off-brand Las Vegas casino — and I seriously was not going to miss being able to visit Nevada.
I wrinkled my nose and huffed. Ugh. The wards were so like Adam — all form over function.
The wards also weren’t hard to bypass; all I had to do was strengthen the spells that kept me looking like a normal old wildcat.
Wearing a backpack, but hey. That didn’t matter to the wards. I made a mental note to suggest to Nate that he modify the Armitage wards to pick up on spell components that weren’t commonly used in other contexts, in order to set off alarms for shamans who might make it through otherwise.
And I stopped dead, one paw suspended in the air.
I wasn’t going to see Nate again, not even to kill him with a water bottle. I wasn’t going to see — any of the Armitages. I shivered. What the fuck was wrong with me?
I went on, forcing myself to put one paw in front of the other and focus. Parker. Kill Parker. Leave. Never see Matthew again.
My chest ached. I must have gotten a stitch in my side from running.
One paw in front of the other.
The Kimballs had a larger central compound than the Armitages did, too. The Armitage pack house was basically it, plus a large garage and a couple of outbuildings holding tools and gardening stuff. The pack, such as they were, lived either in the main house or in a bunch of dilapidated cottages out back.
But the Kimball pack house was more of a mansion, much added-to over the years, three-storied and sprawling. They had more outbuildings, several garages, and then a few three- and four-bedroom houses not too far away, each holding large families. There were a lot of buildings to avoid as I approached.
But I made it all the way there without being seen and without, as far as I could tell, drawing any other kind of attention, magical or otherwise. Where the fuck was everyone?
I got my answer once I made it a little closer to the center of the territory. I started to hear shouts and movement, like a lot of people were very busy. It got louder, and then I smelled what seemed like half the Kimball pack, all assembled. From the shelter of a large pine’s drooping branches, I finally got a good view of the wide expanse of gravel in front of the pack house.
The house itself was lit up in every window, and the floodlights on the outside of the building illuminated a few dozen weres at least, all loading things into vehicles parked all around the driveway, and talking in small clumps. There was a boisterous energy to the crowd, the kind of bouncing, boasting arrogance
men got before they went to war.
They were going to war. Tonight.
I needed to know what the plan was. I needed to warn Matthew…but why would I? If I’d been in human form I’d have slumped to the ground and covered my face with my hands, but in this one all I could do was pant for breath.
Either way, I had to know more.
I gave the milling crowd a wide berth, padding silently a few feet inside the trees, which grew in scraggly clumps all around the main compound.
My destination was one of the smaller buildings out back, basically just a lounge with a small bathroom and kitchenette, that Sam Kimball had always used as his private office and a place for his closest cronies to drink and smoke and carry on. I was betting that his brother Bill, now almost certainly the pack leader, would’ve taken it over for the same purposes. I hadn’t seen or smelled him out front, so that was likely where he’d be, along with everyone else in charge of this circus.
I was right. I froze, my heartbeat ratcheting up painfully, as I caught Parker’s scent. It was unmistakable, and so strong through my lynx’s nose that it made me glad I hadn’t eaten any mice to vomit up. His sweat, pungent and musky and faintly sour, his whiskey-tinged breath…I swallowed down bile.
This was good news. It was good news, because it meant he was still here to kill. I had to focus on the goal.
Fuck, but I wanted to turn stubby tail and run for it, run and run and run all the way to…Matthew, his dark head bent over me, his tongue turning me molten…fuck, I had nowhere to run to, especially if the Kimballs and Parker were planning an attack on the Armitages. Nowhere to go but — somewhere Parker wasn’t, and I couldn’t live like that.
I forced my jittery nerves to calm and drew deep breaths until my tangled thoughts drew back together into something like order.
Parker’s scent was only one of several, and I parsed through them as I crept forward, keeping to the shadows and slinking on my belly through taller tufts of grass and bits of undergrowth. Bill Kimball was there. So was his younger son, Jackson. There were two other scents I vaguely recognized but couldn’t put names to: one Kimball, and one from Parker’s pack.
Since Adam was dead, and Parker didn’t have a shaman of his own, there wouldn’t be any magical interference in my eavesdropping.
As I snuck around the corner of the building, looking for an open window, I caught another familiar scent: Colin Kimball. He wasn’t inside. His smell was coming from down the hill behind the meeting room.
Curious. He might be on guard, but with his father as the de facto pack leader, he’d be able to delegate that to someone else, right?
I detoured down the hill a little, picking my way around the small concrete patio littered with cigarette butts onto which the back door of the office opened. A few bushes ringed it, and I kept to their shadows. I was downwind from Colin, so I felt fairly confident.
As I got closer I could hear him, and I could finally catch his silhouette. One of his arms was bent, holding something to his head.
On the phone, then. I slunk closer.
“…not listening,” Colin hissed. “He’s convinced Taft and his pack are going to be enough to give him an edge. But they don’t give a fuck about us. Taft’s out to get his shaman, and once he does that, he’ll fuck off back to Nevada and leave us holding the bag. My dad thinks Jonah — yeah, the shaman — is going to end up staying with us and joining the pack, or something. He’s nuts.”
My ears pricked up. Dissent in the ranks? Someone who recognized Parker for the solipsistic, sadistic son-of-a-bitch he was?
I didn’t know Colin very well; he wasn’t someone I’d gone out of my way to talk to. He was lazy, and he didn’t take anything seriously, and I didn’t have time for people who didn’t care enough to have a purpose. And of course he was an alpha, so I despised him on principle — and my overall opinion of the Kimballs was somewhere down below what I thought of the parasitic worms you could catch from eating rodents. But maybe he wasn’t a total idiot.
More to the point, maybe he’d be a useful tool.
Colin was shaking his head, listening to whoever he was talking to. Who was he talking to? It couldn’t be someone in the Kimball pack. He’d have talked to them in person.
“Yeah, well, I tried that,” Colin snapped. “I’m telling you, he’s not listening. He’s so pissed about my uncle Sam he can’t fucking think straight. They want to go after Jonah early this morning, a full-on assault. The Armitages have their own pack, and no one in their right mind wants to fucking fight Ian Armitage, right?” Colin paused and then laughed, a humorless bark. “Right. And they have a warlock now, plus the vamp and his psychotic bodyguard to call in, since they hate us right now too after that bullshit with kidnapping those other vamps, plus whatever Jonah does. He could’ve been an ally in the Armitage territory if it was just us, but now with Taft coming after — no, he’s not Taft’s fucking mate, I told you. No. And even if he was, he’s too smart to want to — dude, I’m not going to go into it, but the shit Taft’s saying about what he wants to do to the guy —” Another pause. “Fine. Fuck. Call me back.”
Colin poked at his phone like he wished it was an old-fashioned landline he could slam back down into its cradle, cursed, and stuck the phone in his pocket.
My mind whirred through what Colin had said, trying to process it all at once. The hardest part for me to wrap my brain around was that the Kimballs, and Parker, still thought I was on Armitage territory.
The Armitages knew I was gone, obviously. Or at the very least, Matthew did.
Had Matthew somehow hidden my escape from the rest of his pack? No. That was absurd.
So the pack knew, but they were hiding it from the Kimballs. But why? Parker might want revenge for Tyler, but…I’d never gotten to do that exam on Tyler I’d wanted to perform. Whatever was on his claws had been deadly to Matthew, and it had to have been seeping into his bloodstream too. Parker would’ve known that; if he’d planted that booby-trap on Tyler, Parker probably wasn’t that broken up about his death. He must’ve finally gotten paranoid about Tyler and decided he was expendable.
If Parker didn’t want revenge, then he’d have no reason to go after the Armitage pack if I wasn’t there. Of course, they didn’t know Parker, and might not follow that chain of logic. They might think pretending to still have me gave them leverage, rather than simply making them a target.
In a few hours Matthew would be fighting for his life, fighting Parker, because Parker wanted me. I shivered, my fur ruffling, and my claws flexed involuntarily.
Matthew wouldn’t be fighting Parker for me. I’d ended any chance of that when I took the spell off of him. He’d be fighting Parker because of me, a subtle but significant difference. Why did that leave me so hollow? Defended not because I was worth defending, but because Matthew was embroiled in a pack war that he had no way out of other than through…I owed Matthew nothing. Nothing at all. Just as little as he owed me.
I didn’t care if the Kimballs killed him and Ian and Nate and all of them, as long as I killed Parker.
I could picture it as clearly as if it was a memory and not my imagination: picking my way through the battlefield, stepping around bloodied, torn-up bodies until I found Matthew’s. His blue eyes glassy, staring at nothing, his throat a bloody pulp, one arm thrown out at his side with the fingers curled as if waiting for someone to take his hand, just like when he’d slept beside me after taking me to bed…
Fuck. My stomach was in painful, twisting knots, and I couldn’t attribute it to the fast-food hamburger I’d scarfed down earlier in the evening.
The fact was, I couldn’t walk away, not knowing what was going to happen.
And I couldn’t kill Parker and escape, either, because the Kimballs wouldn’t stop. They didn’t give a fuck about me one way or the other. They were going to take this fight back to the Armitages no matter what; as worked up as they were, there was no stopping them now.
I certainly couldn’t stop them, n
ot on my own. All I could do was warn Matthew, hope he believed me, and maybe sabotage the Kimballs a little bit from behind the lines.
And then kill Parker. That was non-negotiable.
Fuck. I had to take a chance; I had to talk to Colin. He might be loyal enough to his father not to betray him, but he sure as fuck wasn’t loyal to Parker. And it didn’t sound like he believed stopping this fight would be betraying his father, either, necessarily. If I could convince him I wanted to help the Kimballs stay out of Parker’s bullshit and avoid a fight with the Armitages that would just result in more pointless deaths, Colin would be on my side.
But my window for that was closing, because Colin was heading back toward the meeting room.
I popped up out of the shadow of the bush I’d been crouching under and let out a soft meow. Colin froze, then turned and stared. I lifted one front paw and waved it in a clearly beckoning gesture.
Colin peered at me through the gloom. “What the ever-loving fuck?”
I meowed again, beckoned again, and trotted down the hill away from the meeting room.
“Either that’s a cat wearing a backpack, or someone drugged me,” Colin muttered, and set off after me.
I might’ve laughed if I hadn’t been, well, a cat. As it was, I led him away into the woods, counting on his curiosity to keep him following. He was an alpha werewolf, and those assholes were always overconfident. He was ten times my size. Hell, even if I’d been shifted into human form, he would’ve been twice my size.
Still, he extended his claws, and his eyes glowed faintly. At least he wasn’t a complete moron. That was reassuring, considering I meant to try to form at least a temporary alliance with the guy.
Once we reached the trees at the bottom of the hill, I slipped between the trunks, squirmed my way out of the backpack’s straps, and sat on my haunches to wait for him. A moment later he cautiously followed me into the woods.
I took a deep breath. I never let anyone see my animal form, and I hated having to do it now. Not to mention that he might try to kill me, he might howl for his pack to come running, and he might laugh. Either way, I had to take a chance.
Captive Mate (Mismatched Mates Book 2) Page 12
