“Yeah. Just a minute.” I didn’t bother to shout, because I knew he could hear me. Like the guard in the hall, he’d probably heard everything we’d said for the last several minutes. Hopefully. That way I wouldn’t have to repeat it.
“Who’s that?” Kaci asked, grinning at me around the last slice of pizza as she bit the point from it.
“Marc Ramos.”
“Does he work for your dad, too?”
My eyes closed, denying the tears that threatened to come. “He did.”
“You like him.” Her statement held an odd innocence, like she pictured me and Marc exchanging notes in the hall between homeroom and gym, clearly the extent of her own experience with boys. Kaci’s shy smile and the tone of her voice set me at ease regarding her refusal to deal with the tomcats. If she’d had a recent bad experience with a man, she wouldn’t blush so sweetly as she teased me.
She’d shied away from Dr. Carver and Malone because she didn’t know them. Not because of anything tragic. Thank goodness.
“Yeah. I like him a lot.” I smiled, seeing no reason to ruin the girl-to-girl moment with the bleak facts, even if she’d overheard some of them earlier. “Marc and I are going into town to get some stuff for you. Clothes, shoes and other essentials. What size shoes do you wear?” I was sure I could guess her other sizes.
“Five.”
“Thanks. We’ll be back soon. I’ll tell everyone to leave you alone, if you want. But if Dr. Carver comes back in, please be nice to him. He’s the one who treated your hand while you were sleeping, and he may want to check on you, to make sure you’re feeling good. Okay?”
She nodded slowly, and I relaxed a little more. “He’s nice,” I said. “I promise he won’t hurt you.”
“Okay.” Kaci hugged her knees to her chest as I stood and piled the empty soda cans on the stacked plates.
“Thanks for talking to me. When I get back, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d love for you to come down and have dinner with the rest of us.”
“Maybe…” Her gaze followed me as I backed toward the door. “But not that guy who yelled at you. The one who came in while you were gone. I don’t want to eat with him.”
Malone. “I don’t want to eat with him, either,” I said, and she grinned. I had my free hand on the doorknob by the time I remembered the question I’d forgotten to ask her. “Kaci, where are you from?”
“Cranbrook.” I must have looked confused, because she elaborated to oblige my geographical ignorance. “It’s about an hour from the U.S. border. In southeastern British Columbia.”
Huh. That was two Canadian strays in as many days. What are the chances?
But then I realized the chances were far greater in Montana than they would have been back on the ranch. The cabin complex was less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border.
Kaci’s nose wrinkled in concern. “I think I crossed the border illegally. Am I going to be in trouble for that?”
I smiled, amused that she was worried about being deported, with everything else she had on her plate at the moment. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”
Marc’s eyes burned into mine as I shut the bedroom door behind me. “They called in backup a couple of hours ago,” he whispered, taking the plates from me as we headed down the hall. “Ethan and Parker, and two more of Malone’s men. Plus, whoever Blackwell’s bringing in to replace Colin.”
“Peachy.” We were running low on uninjured enforcers and had yet to find the band of strays, so we could certainly use some extra claws on hand. But I didn’t relish having a bigger audience when my verdict was finally read.
Downstairs, I dropped the empty cans in the trash and set our plates in the sink, then followed Marc out the front door, ignoring Malone and Blackwell entirely. Jace and Malone’s enforcer were waiting for us on the porch, and from Jace’s index finger dangled a set of keys attached to a bauble reading Hertz.
I had one foot on the floorboard when Michael called my name. I looked up to see him jogging toward us from the direction of our cabin. “What’s wrong?” I asked, watching him over the roof of the car.
“I’ve spent the last three hours on the Internet, looking for your tabby. There is no girl by her name, fitting her age and physical description, anywhere in the western half of the country. Is there any chance she lied about her name?”
“No.” I slid in next to Marc and pulled the car door shut, then rolled down my window as Jace started the engine. There were many things about Kaci I found hard to believe, but her name wasn’t one of them. “She’s Canadian. From Cranbrook, British Columbia. And you’re probably spelling her name wrong.”
Michael shook his head insistently, rounding the front of the car as Jace began to back out of the gravel driveway. “I tried K-A-S-E-Y and C-A-S-E-Y.”
“It’s K-A-C-I. And I think Dillon is with two L’s. Try it again.” With that, I rolled the window up and scooted closer to Marc, watching my brother in the rearview mirror until Jace turned out of the driveway.
In town, we found a small shopping center that held both a moderately priced department store and a general store. In less than an hour, we bought a week’s worth of clothing, shoes and toiletries for Kaci. And though the outing was a short one, the normalcy of a trip to the store—even a chaperoned trip—did wonders for my morale, simply because there were no Alphas around to remind me that each breath I took might be my last.
In addition to that perk, it was absolutely blissful to be surrounded by so many humans, who didn’t give a shit who I was or what I’d done. I hadn’t felt such freedom or anonymity since my last day of school, and wasn’t likely to feel it again anytime soon.
Back at the lodge, Marc helped me haul the bags up to Kaci’s room, then backed out after giving her a friendly smile. She returned his smile, and I couldn’t help a flash of frustration that she was apparently warming up to the one tom she might never see again.
When Marc left the room, Kaci dug into the shopping bags with enough enthusiasm to rival her appetite. She was laying the outfits out on the spare bed, mixing and rematching tops and bottoms, when a shout from outside drew me to the window over her bed.
“Grandpa! We found him!”
I peered down at the lawn, where Paul Blackwell’s grandson Nate marched across the dead grass alongside another enforcer I didn’t know, who carried an oddly stiff, furry black form in both arms.
That’s a corpse, if I ever saw one.
Twenty-Four
Kaci sat on the bed next to me and twisted to peer out the window, but I blocked her view with my body. “Hey, why don’t you try on some of these clothes, and I’ll be right back to see how they look.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” She frowned, standing to look over my shoulder. Fortunately, Nate and his partner had already taken their discovery around back, out of sight from Kaci’s room.
“I’m not sure. Hopefully nothing.” I couldn’t lie to her, not when she’d just started to trust me. But neither could I tell her the whole truth. Not that I actually knew the whole truth yet. “I’ll be right back. Okay?”
She nodded reluctantly, and I slipped into the hall without a word to the guard on duty, in spite of his obvious curiosity.
When I got downstairs, the living room was deserted, so I jogged through the kitchen and out the back door, where a group of toms—including all four Alphas—was gathered in a heavily shaded corner formed by the back porch and the rear wall of the lodge. Chill bumps formed instantly beneath my clothes, and my breath puffed from my mouth in thin white clouds.
“Oh, shit!” someone whispered, and no one admonished the guilty tom for his language in front of the Alphas. That couldn’t be good. I tried to elbow my way through the huddle, but was shoved back like a runt at its mother’s teat.
“Do you smell that?” Jace asked, and Marc nodded.
“Move!” I ordered, and when that got no response, I pinched Jace through his shirt.
“Ow!” he snapped, but shoved the guy
on his left, then moved to make room for me.
I stepped into the narrow gap before it could close, and my gaze fell instantly to the cat on the ground at my feet. Something was wrong with it—other than the fact that it was dead—and it took me a minute to figure it out. The stray was missing his left rear leg. Not just the paw, but everything south of his knee.
Son of a bitch! Nate and his partner had found the missing honeymoon hiker, and not only was he dead, he was a werecat. He hadn’t just been attacked by the strays in the forest. He’d been infected.
“I assume he was dead when you found him?” my uncle asked, and all eyes turned to Nate and his partner, who stood opposite me in the huddle.
“Yeah.” Nate wiped his palms on his jeans, in either nervousness or excitement. “Looked just like that, only he was half under a clump of brush, like he’d crawled in there to die.”
“I see no obvious signs of trauma,” my father said. “Danny, what do you think?”
Dr. Carver knelt between the body and several pairs of dusty hiking boots, and began a quick examination of poor Bob Tindale. “Well, he still has complete rigor stiffness, and as cold as it’s been the last few days, I’m gonna say he’s been dead no more than twenty-four hours. This seems to be the source of the infection.” He parted a section of fur over the stray’s belly to expose a set of long gashes so inflamed and festered I couldn’t tell whether they numbered two or three. Or four. “And based on the state of the wounds and the lack of other obvious trauma, my best guess is that he died of scratch fever.”
“So, natural causes?” Jace said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.
“In a manner of speaking.” Carver frowned up at him, then at me, which made me nervous. “He wasn’t technically murdered, but in instances like this, I find it hard not to blame the infector. In most cases, anyway.” The doc raised both brows at me, then tossed his head toward the corpse, telling me silently to take a whiff of the transmitter’s scent, which would be forever laced through the hiker’s personal new-stray smell.
Uh-oh. This can’t be good.
I squatted next to Carver and sniffed Mr. Tindale’s wounds from about a foot away. But that was close enough for me to understand what he’d been getting at.
Kaci.
The truth thundered through me, and I fell onto my rear on the cold ground. My eyelids slammed shut and refused to open, sparing me from sensory overload as I tried to make sense of evidence I didn’t want to believe. If I’d had fur, it would have been standing on end.
No. She couldn’t have. But no matter how badly I wanted to deny the truth, I knew better. Kaci’s scent was layered through the handicapped stray’s smell, forever binding her existence with his. And there was no other way it could have gotten there.
I rubbed my arms through my shirt, trying to fight off a numbness that came from inside me, rather than from the November chill. My nose ran from the cold and I dug a tissue from my pocket to wipe it.
“Faythe…” my father began, but I stood and backed away from the body before he could finish.
“No.” My head shook in denial. Marc reached out for me, but I dodged his hand. “No,” I repeated more firmly, turning to shove my way through the small crowd as I stuffed the tissue back into my pocket. “It’s a mistake. She wouldn’t do this.”
“Not on purpose,” my father admitted, and I felt the group’s focus shift from the dead hiker to me. “She’s been through a lot and probably had no idea what she was doing.”
“She didn’t.” I whirled to face them again and my eyes went wide as I stared at my Alpha. “Kaci didn’t even know she could Shift back. She had no idea what was happening to her, and she wasn’t in her right mind. You can’t possibly hold her responsible for this.”
Silence closed in on me, but for the trilling of what few birds hadn’t yet flown south for the winter. The weight of my father’s gaze was suffocating, and those few seconds seemed to last forever. When he finally spoke, his solemn words did nothing to set my mind at ease. “Go talk to her. Find out what happened, and we’ll go from there.”
Fair enough. I’d ask Kaci, and she’d tell me it was a horrible accident. I’d report back to the council and they’d bury the body, clean up the mess, and forgive Kaci, who no doubt knew not what she’d done. I felt horrible for the poor hiker and his still-missing wife, but he was dead, and she probably was, too. There was nothing I could do for them. But the tabby was alive and in need of my help. And my protection. What kind of enforcer would I be if I didn’t help her?
“One hour.” Uncle Rick glanced at his fellow Alphas to confirm, and they each nodded silently. “We have decisions to make and work to do.”
“Fine.” I blinked to clear the fog of shock and confusion cushioning my shiny optimism from the sharp edges of reality.
On the way upstairs, dread slowed my feet as if I were wading through knee-deep water, rather than fear for the poor, lost kitten upstairs. And really, fear is just as hard to negotiate as water—and in this case, it was a damn sight colder and more numbing.
At the end of the hall, I ignored the guard and knocked on Kaci’s door.
“Faythe?” she asked from the other side, and I smiled in spite of the purpose of my visit. Either she’d come to recognize my footsteps, or she’d discovered that a quick whiff of the air would tell her who was at the door.
“Yeah, it’s me. Can I come in?”
Soft footsteps approached and the door swung open slowly to reveal a teenage girl I barely recognized. Kaci wore tan hiking boots, a pair of slim, faded jeans and a soft pink sweater I’d known at a glance she’d love. She’d found the brush and ponytail holders and had twisted her hair into a long, thick braid on one side of her head. It trailed nearly to her waist.
“What do you think?” she asked as I pulled the door shut behind me. “There’s no mirror in here. Can I go look at the one in the bathroom?”
“Sure. In just a few minutes.”
Her forehead furrowed in disappointment. Then her features smoothed and she took my hand—her first voluntary physical contact—and pulled me over to the bed, where she’d laid out all the clothes. “This one’s my favorite.” She ran one hand down the sleeve of the sweater she was wearing. “But I like this one too. And that purple top? I have one kind of like it at h…”
Her voice faded into strained silence, and her gaze found the floor. I was eager to hear more about her family, and what her homelife had been like with no enforcers and a big sister, but this was not the time for those questions. I had fifty-five minutes to find out how and why the girl who hadn’t even known she was a werecat until that morning had already managed to break one of our most serious laws.
She was the only girl I’d ever met who could get into trouble faster and more thoroughly than I could. Kaci fascinated me. And worried me more than a little.
“Kaci?”
“Hmm?” Denim rustled and plastic popped as she tore the tag from another pair of jeans, still avoiding my eyes.
I sat on the end of the bed and pulled her new leather jacket onto my lap. “We need to talk about something very…serious.”
She finally looked at me, holding the jeans up to her waist to test the fit. “Like, you-look-stupid-in-those-pants serious, or you-have-terminal-cancer serious?”
I smiled, impressed all over again with her fortitude. “More like, where-were-you-on-the-evening-of-November-eighth kind of serious…”
“What?” Kaci frowned in bewilderment, and the jeans slipped from her grip. Then her expression relaxed, and her arms fell to her sides. “Is this about that guy you killed?”
“What?” My hand clenched around the sleeve of her coat. “Where did you hear that?”
She shrugged, flushing lightly. “That’s all anyone talked about while you were shopping. I could hear them through the walls and the floors. And the vents.”
Curious in spite of myself, I arched my brows at her in question. “What did they say?”
“Just t
hat you killed a guy.” She hesitated, then met my eyes boldly, as if she’d suddenly decided she deserved answers. “Did you?”
Um, yeah. The problem was that I couldn’t say for sure which “guy” she meant. Eric, whose throat I’d ripped out over the summer? Or Luiz, whose skull I’d crushed with a dumbbell ten weeks ago? Or maybe the stray I’d tenderized forty-eight short hours before.
While that last one was a decent possibility, the most likely suspect was Andrew, the reason for our little vacation in the mountains.
“Yes.” My hand found my forehead, rubbing before I’d even realized I felt the beginning of a serious migraine. “But it was self-defense. I had no choice.”
Kaci sat on the opposite bed, facing me. “They don’t believe you.”
It wasn’t a question, so I nodded my acknowledgment. “They never believe a damn thing I say,” I mumbled.
“So…who did you kill?” Kaci stood with her back to me and pulled the pink sweater over her head, as if my answer didn’t matter enough to interrupt her private fashion show. But I knew better. Her thin back was tense, her motions too stiff to ever pass for relaxed. My answers meant as much to her as hers would mean to me. She needed to know she could trust me. That I wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer.
I sighed, and my hands found each other in my lap. “I killed a man I knew in college. If I hadn’t, he would have killed me, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.”
Kaci considered that as she slid her arms through the sleeves of a silky red blouse. Then she turned to face me. “Do you ever think about it?”
“About killing him?” I asked, and she nodded solemnly. “I try not to, but sometimes…” Sometimes I see his face when I close my eyes. His cheeks pale, blood spurting from the hole in his neck. His eyes accusing me of betraying him. Again. “Sometimes I can’t not think about it.”
Kaci nodded, just the slightest bob of her head, but it was enough to send a jolt of understanding tingling down my spine to settle in my toes like pins and needles. She wasn’t trying to decide whether to trust me with her life. She was trying to decide whether to trust me with her secret.