But then my father had to go and ruin what might have been an unprecedented father-daughter bonding moment. He met Marc’s eyes, a smile claiming the lightly wrinkled corners of his mouth. “I want grandchildren.”
Of course. I rolled my eyes in frustration. Just because I’d lost sight of the big picture didn’t mean he had. Or that he ever would.
Marc took one look at the exasperation on my face and slid onto the mat on my right side, between me and my father. The gesture, though clearly unconscious, was more than appropriate. Marc was always coming between us, though it was hard to tell which of us he was trying to protect.
“Grandchildren, huh?” I said, sitting up in a single jerky motion. My father’s joke wasn’t funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. It was yet another reminder that no matter how good an enforcer I became, I couldn’t escape my primary duty, and no amount of sugarcoating could make that pill go down easily.
I gained my feet, and Marc took a step back. Ethan’s smile vanished, his hands dropping to hang loose at his sides. On my left, Ryan’s shoes shuffled away from me on the floor of his cell, and I could almost feel the tension in the room spike. They thought I was going to start yelling; I could see it in their faces.
I met my father’s eyes and forced a laugh. “You don’t even know what to do with Ryan. What on earth would you do with a bunch of grandchildren running underfoot?”
Our Alpha smiled, and Marc exhaled in relief. He was a big fan of my new effort to be agreeable, because as my father’s right-hand man and my potential other half, he was usually caught in the middle of our fights and forced into the role of moderator. And Marc was a rotten moderator, which was just as well. Alphas typically got their own way, and thus had little need for lessons in compromise.
“What would I do with grandchildren?” My father adjusted his glasses again, probably to hide the relief in his eyes. Or maybe that was amusement. “I’d do exactly what I did when you and your brothers were little—let you crawl all over your mother until you were toilet-trained.” He paused for a beat, his eyes sparkling. “And for Ethan, that was quite some time. Nearly five years, if memory serves.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Ethan snatched a towel from the old bench-press machine and used it to wipe sweat from his face and chest.
Ryan snorted, and Ethan glared at him. In spite of very close family ties, and the fact that all but one of my siblings still lived with me in our childhood home, none of us had much sympathy for Ryan’s extended stint in the cage. Not even me, though until Ryan took up residence in the basement, I’d held the Pride record for consecutive days spent behind bars. I hadn’t seen daylight for two straight weeks once.
Ryan was nearing the end of his ninety-first day, with no end in sight, and he deserved every single second of his punishment. Actually, he deserved worse, but our father consistently refused my request to have him neutered. It must have been a guy thing.
“Watch it, jailbird, before I forget to empty your coffee can,” Ethan snarled.
Ryan opened his mouth to reply, then closed it with a click of teeth against teeth. His gaze traveled to the corner of the cage, where his makeshift toilet sat, empty—for the moment.
“That’s what I thought.” Ethan dropped the towel on the bench press and stepped back onto the mat. Ryan glowered at him but kept his mouth shut. He’d been pathetically well behaved over the past thirteen weeks, apparently hoping to get time off for good behavior. But our father was no state prison warden. He wouldn’t let Ryan out until he knew what to do with him. Unfortunately, short of skinning him alive, we had yet to come up with a single more appropriate punishment for the part Ryan played in the hell Miguel put us all through. Except for the kitchen shears I kept sterilized and ready to go.
“Okay, let’s try it again.” My father backed slowly away from the mat. “Marc, would you care to join them?”
“Love to.” Turning his back to the Alpha, Marc favored me with a teasing smile, emboldened by the heat in his eyes. “It would be my pleasure to take her to the mat. Again.”
I pushed past Marc to glower at my father. “Two against one? That’s hardly fair.”
Ethan snickered, but I ignored him, already wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.
“Only children speak of life in terms of fairness, Faythe.” My father’s face was expressionless, his mouth a firm, straight line. But his eyes reflected the ghosts of more painful memories than I could possibly guess at. “Life is neither fair nor unfair. It is what it is, and our responsibility is to deal with whatever comes our way. Including opponents who don’t fight honorably. You have to be completely aware of your surroundings. Be prepared to deal with the unexpected, such as Marc jumping you from behind.” He came a step closer to the mat, driving his point home by his very presence.
A lump formed in my throat as I realized he was right. If I’d been paying more attention to my surroundings three months earlier, I would never have been kidnapped.
I nodded, feeling like the kindergartner I’d once been, accepting a well-deserved scolding for coloring on the leather upholstery in his office. “So, you’re saying two against one is fair?”
“No, I’m saying that fair doesn’t matter. You do whatever you have to do to survive. We all do. Now, give us your best.” With that, his gaze flicked pointedly over my shoulder.
I turned to face Marc, preparing to go again, whether I was ready or not. But Marc was gone. I spun to my right, and Ethan was gone, too. Damn it, I thought, comprehension sinking in a moment too late.
I whirled toward the whisper of a soft sole on concrete. Marc was on me before I could react. He shoved me backward with one hand. His foot swept my legs out from under me. Air exploded from my lungs as I hit the mat on my back. Again. Marc straddled my hips, his hands pinning my shoulders to the mat. My hands encircled his wrists trying to push him away, but he didn’t budge.
Adrenaline scalded my veins, prompting me into action. I struck out. My right fist slammed into the left side of his head, just above his ear.
His eyes widened in surprise, and his smile vanished in a grimace of pain. Before he could react, I shoved him in the chest with both hands. He fell onto the mat on his left hip, one hand pressed to his head. I leapt to my feet, pleased with my performance.
Marc stood, rubbing his skull.
“Damn, Faythe.” Ethan whistled. “Dad, I don’t think we need to see her best during practice anymore. We all know what she’s capable of.”
From the corner of my eye, my father nodded, his expression caught between surprise and pride.
Hinges creaked overhead, and we all looked up. “Greg, you have a phone call.”
Blinking, I made out Victor Di Carlo standing on the top step, his bulky form dark against the background of afternoon sunlight shining from the kitchen behind him.
“Take a message,” the Alpha said, without a moment’s hesitation.
Vic frowned. “Um, you should probably take this one. It’s Parker. They found another body.”
Five
My father paced back and forth in front of the sturdy oak desk in one corner of his office, the telephone pressed to his right ear. His stride was characteristically long, smooth, and confident, in contrast to the tension clear in the lines of his face. From the telephone receiver came the steady cadence of Parker’s voice, calmly explaining what he’d found.
I sat on the leather love seat with Marc, listening in on my father’s phone call.
We weren’t just being nosy, though; it was expected. If my father hadn’t wanted us to hear, he would have kicked us out of his concrete-walled, and thus virtually soundproof, sanctuary. Most humans would have used the speaker phone, but we didn’t bother.
Ethan and Vic sat opposite us, on the matching leather love seat. Covering the hardwood at the center of the seating arrangement was an Oriental rug in rich shades of silver, jade, and black, across which my father paced as he listened to Parker’s report.
What I’d gleaned from the conver
sation so far was that Parker and Holden, his youngest brother, had found the body of a stray in an alley behind a restaurant in New Orleans—in broad daylight. Parker had left the Lazy S the day before to drive Holden back to campus for his senior year at Loyola, after a month-long visit to the ranch. Holden had talked him into staying for a late lunch at his favorite Cajun restaurant in nearby Metairie. After their meal, and probably a couple of drinks, if I knew Parker, the Pierce brothers had gone outside to catch a cab back to campus. Instead they’d caught the scent of an unknown stray.
New Orleans and the surrounding communities were on the edge of the south-central territory. Our territory. As one of my father’s enforcers, Parker was honor bound to find the trespasser and escort him across the border into Mississippi, as Marc and I had done with Dan Painter two days earlier. But as the search for the stray in New Orleans led them to the alley behind the restaurant, the scent grew stronger rather than weaker. The stray wasn’t running from them, which meant that he was either looking for a fight, or he’d already found one. And lost.
After a few minutes, Holden spotted a foot sticking out from beneath a pile of trash, and they knew why the stray hadn’t run. Shoving aside several garbage bags, most already torn open by neighborhood dogs, they uncovered the corpse of a Caucasian male in his midtwenties. He was definitely a stray, and he was definitely murdered. Unless your definition of natural causes includes a snapped neck. Mine doesn’t.
“Please tell me you didn’t leave the body exposed,” my father said, one thick hand massaging his temples as he paced. His glasses lay on his desk blotter, looking abandoned and useless.
Parker’s voice carried over the line, surprisingly clear. “Don’t worry. We covered it back up with garbage, and we’re still in the alley. It’s not like we can walk around Metairie smelling like day-old crawfish. What do you want us to do?”
My father’s silence caught my ear, and I looked up to find him standing still, his eyes closed in concentration. While we didn’t bury bodies on a daily basis, disposing of a corpse was nothing new for an enforcer, and generally required little more than a phone call to the Alpha to report the situation.
Unfortunately, this case couldn’t be handled quite so simply; the body was found in the middle of the day, in a very well-populated place. That hardly ever happened, because even most strays had the sense to take care of werecat business in the dark, and in complete isolation from human society. To do otherwise was to risk revealing our existence to the human world. It was an issue of self-preservation, which—unlike humans—most members of our species seem to understand instinctively.
Still, every now and then we came across a werecat—be he stray, wild, or Pride—who showed no interest in hiding his activities, and thus our very existence, from the rest of the world. While public exposure would be most threatening to strays, who had no network of protection, ultimately we all stood to lose everything we had. And we weren’t about to stand back and let that happen.
Disclosure—the council’s term for the failure of a werecat to keep his existence secret—was a capital crime, and leaving a body unburied fell well within the definition of disclosure. The Territorial Council’s policy on capital criminals—called rogues—was to eliminate them as soon as possible, using any means necessary. Enter my father, Alpha of the south-central Pride and head of the Territorial Council.
The fate of the rogue who’d killed the Metairie stray was already sealed. My father was his judge, and Marc his executioner. And there would be no appeal.
However, before we could worry about catching and eliminating the murderer, we had to figure out what to do with his victim, a rather interesting dilemma. How do you dispose of a murdered werecat in the middle of the day, in the outskirts of New Orleans?
Ethan shifted on the couch, and his movement drew my attention. He scratched one bare shoulder absently as he stared at our father, clearly as intent on listening in as I was.
Finally, my father stopped pacing. He stood in front of his desk with his back to the room, the phone still pressed to his ear. “What other businesses open into the alley?”
“Um…hang on,” Parker said. Holden’s slightly higher-pitched voice came through, muffled and indistinct, then Parker was back on the line. “It looks like…a florist, another restaurant, a print shop, an antique store, a hardware store, and…I think that’s a dry cleaner. Why? What do you have in mind?”
“Where did you leave the van?” the Alpha asked in lieu of an answer. Parker had taken our old twelve-passenger van, loaded with Holden’s luggage.
“On campus, about four miles away.”
“Have you already unloaded it?”
“Yeah, last night,” Parker said.
“Okay, listen carefully,” my father began, and an attentive silence descended in the office, as well as over the line. “Send Holden into the hardware store for two pairs of painter’s coveralls and two pairs of work gloves. When he gets back, you put on one set of coveralls and gloves, then give him the keys to the van and some cash. Tell him to take a cab back to campus, empty several of his moving boxes and throw them in the back of the van, to give you both a reason to be in the alley. While he’s gone, you stay with the body, just in case.
“When Holden returns, back the van as far into the alley as you can without drawing attention, while he puts his gear on. Then, get the plastic sheeting and a roll of duct tape from the emergency kit in the van. Lay some plastic in the bottom of my van. Use a double layer. If you get rotten food in the carpet, you’ll spend all night scrubbing it out.”
I frowned, disturbed by the realization that my father was more worried about the carpet of his fourteen-year-old van than about the body whose disposal he was planning. But that was one of the things that made him a good Alpha. He did what had to be done. And he thought of everything. Everything.
My father plucked his glasses from his desktop, wiping the lenses on a handkerchief from his pocket, the phone propped on his shoulder. “I assume you’re alone in the alley?”
“At the moment,” Parker said. “A guy came to dump trash from the restaurant a minute or two ago, but he went back in. He didn’t even notice us.”
“Good.” My father balanced the glasses carefully on his nose and began pacing across the hardwood floor again, from the front of his desk to the back of the couch where Vic and Ethan sat. “Put the body in the van, close the doors, wrap him in more of the plastic, and tape it up. Do it quickly, and do it in that order. Then take off the coveralls and wrap them up separately. Drive Holden back to school. Obey the speed limits and draw no attention to yourself.” That was standard practice, the reminder of which Parker didn’t need, but Marc couldn’t hear often enough. “After you drop him off, come home, and we’ll handle the disposal from here.”
I turned to face Marc, my eyebrows arched at him in question. “Why?” I mouthed silently, hoping he understood an Alpha’s thought process better than I did. After all, he’d been an enforcer for more than a decade.
Marc held up his index finger, motioning that he’d explain it to me in a minute. Or maybe that I could ask the question aloud in a minute. Regardless, I’d have to wait. I hate waiting.
My father made Parker repeat his instructions word for word, which was also unnecessary. But our fearless leader was not a risk-taker, which was why I didn’t understand his order to bring the body home.
Never shit where you sleep. That was rule number two for disposing of a corpse. Of course, my father’s phrasing was a bit different, but the point remained; corpses were always disposed of far from the Lazy S, and I knew of at least two burial sites between New Orleans and East Texas, neither of which had been used recently. So why would he want the body brought home? Unless he wanted to see it. Or maybe smell it. But why?
The answer hit me almost as soon as I’d thought the question. We’d found two bodies in three days, which was unusual, but not that big of a deal. Violence, like everything else in life, seemed to come and go in c
ycles. Sometimes we’d go a year without a problem, then deal with several bodies not of our own making in a single month.
What had obviously piqued the Alpha’s interest in this case was the fact that both of the victims had died of a broken neck, which meant the killers had acted in human form. That was almost unheard of. Most homicidal strays killed in cat form, by biting through the back of the victim’s skull, ripping out his throat, or—my least favorite—by eviscerating the poor fool.
But these victims had both been killed in the same, very rare manner. They were related. They had to be. Which meant the foreign cat we’d smelled on Moore was still roaming free in the south-central territory, apparently exercising his own brand of population control—and in the process, breaking more of the council’s laws than I could even begin to list.
Not that this particular rogue gave a damn about our council’s laws. Especially if it was a jungle cat. Jungle cats are to Pride cats what wolves are to the domestic dog. They’re feral. Brutal. Governed by instinct, instead of logic or law. Rather than convening to debate the best course of action, jungle cats converge to fight, and what the victor says, goes.
Such behavior has only escaped notice by humanity because—unlike Pride cats the world over—jungle cats live in…well, the jungle. They’re native to the Amazon, the deepest, darkest, least-explored wilderness on the face of the planet, where people go missing without explanation on a regular basis. Where humanity is, for the most part, still afraid to build its concrete roads and cell towers, the universal security blankets of the modern era.
But this jungle cat—if the worst-case scenario was accurate—had stepped out of the jungle, and here, his uncivilized behavior would not go unnoticed by the human authorities. Not without our help, at least. And we would help him, all right. We’d help him right out of this life and into the next one.
I swallowed thickly, still watching my father. Fear chilled my blood at the thought of confronting another jungle cat, even as anger curled my hands into fists in my lap. Sweaty, nervous fists.