The twin to my right nudged me. “They learn to love it, too.”
His brother roared with laughter and turned in his seat to give him a high five.
My stomach turned. There was no hope for the shifters anymore. Aiden might have been an arrogant fool, but as far as I knew, he wasn’t trapping females for breeding purposes. I dry-retched again. The shifters on either side of me moved away as best they could.
The car drive seemed to go on forever, and the nervous little shifter to my left grew more anxious by the second.
“We’re in trouble,” he said, his knee jerking up and down. “The cars belonged to those agents. The police. They’ll find those girls and—”
“This is our right,” the driver said harshly, silencing the boy. “This is what the shifters have a right to do to our women who run free.”
“So that’s all it is?” I said, wishing I could spit on him. “It’s not about being dangerous or untethered at all; it’s just plain old misogynistic crap. Well done, boys. You haven’t reinvented the wheel after all. So, what? Are you scared of women? Do you just hate them? Does it piss you off when they pass you by for humans?”
A low growl came from the driver.
“Stop,” the boy pleaded. “Please, stop.”
I looked at him. “Did they do this to your mother? To your sisters? Did you stand by and let them? Did you help? Sick little puppy, what kind of man are you at all?”
He whacked the side of my face. “Enough!”
“Because I’m a woman?” I blinked back the pain in my anger. “Am I not allowed to talk? Should I be tied to a cooker somewhere until I learn my place?”
He hit me again, and I tasted blood in my mouth. I spat it onto his leg. He recoiled in horror.
“I need to get sick,” he said. “I need air, or I’m going to shift.”
“You’re not going to shift,” the twin in the front passenger seat said scornfully. “Stop letting her bait you. She’s fucking well right. You’re no man.”
“And you’re any better?” I said.
He whipped around in his seat and punched me in the stomach. I coiled over, wanting to get sick if I could just manage to suck in one pesky breath.
“Oh, you’re a brave one,” I managed to wheeze out.
The driver slammed on the brake, jerking me forward so my shoulder knocked into his seat. The shifters on either side of me pulled me back into sitting position.
The skinhead kept driving, eyeing me in the rear-view mirror. “That’s enough out of you now. You’re a murderer, but that’s not surprising, given that you’re a tainted one. Now if you’re lucky, the Senate will judge you. And if I get my way, the shifters will judge you. And trust me, you don’t want to fall foul of our punishment. We’re holding on to our culture and heritage because we’re proud of it, because we know from generations of experience that it works. Aiden may have been about unity, but we must be about control, or we’ll descend into wild animals. This is the way we were made, and this is the way we’ll continue. The Senate let the werewolves be, let them do as they must. Their nature rules them, and that’s good enough for us, too.”
“And if my nature rules me?” I asked, glaring at him.
“Then you’ll be put down before any of us will,” he said simply. “That’s just the way it has to be.”
Chapter Seven
Realising we were travelling on a familiar route toward the old Council cells, I groaned. The shifters really were taking me back to that pit. As far as the world knew, the place had been deserted, but I had it on good authority that the worst kinds of criminals were still held captive there.
“Come on,” I said as the car screeched to a stop outside one of the secret entrances off the motorway. “Even you Neanderthals aren’t this stupid. It wasn’t me!”
Skinhead hauled me out of the car by my shirt collar. “That will be decided by someone other than you.”
I ducked out of his grasp and made a run for it. One of the twins growled then threw himself at my back, knocking us both to the ground. I scraped my cheek on the gravel and groaned. How heavy was the pig on top of me?
A car pulled up, and I thought I heard a familiar voice shout at us to stop. I managed to manoeuvre my head around and saw Shay approaching. Relieved, I took a deep breath, well, as deep as possible while a ridiculously heavy weight was grinding me into the ground beneath us.
“What the hell is going on?” Shay demanded.
“She killed Mac,” the boy said sullenly.
The shifter on top of me lifted, and I could finally breathe again, but I didn’t have the energy to get up.
“Any proof?” Shay asked, his gaze hard. He was surrounded by a number of his very own recruits, the pairs of supernaturals and humans who investigated supernatural threats.
“She was found with the body,” Skinhead shouted.
“Not good enough,” Shay said. “The body is at least a couple of days old. Are you trying to tell me that she hung around for days with a decaying body?”
“She’s tainted! Who knows what she’s into!”
Quinn called my name softly. “I’m going to remove the tag now. Try not to move.” She released me and rubbed my arms to help the blood return.
“Thanks,” I said when she and her human partner helped me to my feet. The tall, freckly man didn’t look at all intimidated by the raging shifters.
“You doing okay?” she asked.
“On top of the world.”
“Did you kill Mac?”
“Sadly not. I might have hidden the body before the stupid shifters showed up.”
She smiled. “You’ve dirt all over your face.”
“I had a nap on the ground. It was nice. You should try it sometime.”
Her partner looked at me as though I were a lunatic. I wasn’t exactly feeling sane, so that was fair enough. If Shay and his troops hadn’t been there to bear witness, I might have channelled some hellhound rage and smashed the shifters’ heads together.
Shay looked at me and pressed his lips into a tight line. He pointed at the shifters. “You hurt her.”
“We arrested her,” one of the twins said. “You can’t hurt what’s already half-dead.”
“I am not half-dead,” I protested. My heart beat, I felt, I empathised, I cared, I loved—I was more alive than the shifters glaring at me were.
“Ava, get in my car,” Shay said. “I’ll take you home. Peter and Val are helping the rest of the recruits with the removal of those captives back at the farm.” He eyed the shifters. “And my colleagues with me will be taking every one of you in for questioning.”
“What about Mac?” Skinhead demanded. “Does nobody care about him? Or are you all too busy protecting the true threats?”
“I’ll find out what happened to Mac,” Shay said. “And I’m sure the perpetrator will get what they deserve, but if Mac was responsible for those women back there, then I’m just surprised it took them this long to take care of him.” He hesitated as the shifters protested noisily. “If I were you, I’d be more worried about how justice will treat you.”
I heard a scuffle behind me as I reached Shay’s car.
“Get in,” he told me. “We saw the car leave and decided to break away to follow. Didn’t realise you were tagging along until I got a panicked call from Peter, saying they couldn’t find you back at the farm. There’s been some miscommunication.”
“I turned my phone off,” I said with a groan. “I probably missed his warning to get out of the shifters’ way.”
I waited until we had driven away from the scene before quizzing him. “Did you see the body?”
“One of the recruits sent me a picture.” He winced. “Nasty stuff. You don’t know anything about it, right?”
I whipped around to shoot a death stare his way. “We haven’t turned into a bunch of torturing psychos since the last time we spoke, no.”
“I just needed to check. As far as I’m aware, Mac’s had it in for you lately. There
’s a lot of motivation to commit a crime against him—put it that way.”
“If you seriously think I’m capable of that, then you might as well let me out of this car right now. Vampires tortured me, Shay, and healed me just enough to torture me some more. I’m not that fucking depraved.”
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, “but it’s my job to ask.”
“Well, then, no, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Are you okay? You’ve seen a lot of evil today. That has to affect you.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll have a few nightmares.” I blew out a breath. “Mac held those women underground for who knows how long. He was a sick man, and he suffered a painful death. Maybe it’s a kind of justice. After seeing those women…” I looked at him. “The only reason we found them was because the shifters were trying to set up Val for the same fate. How can things like this happen?”
“The shifters have been trouble under Mac for a while now,” he said. “People vanishing, old traditions being restored. Neither of us were part of this world when it was normal for people like Mac to be in charge.”
“It’s just crazy in this day and age. I don’t understand how anyone can have so much hatred for another person based on something genetic. We’re supposed to improve and evolve, not end up like this.”
“Quinn tells me that Aiden radically changed the way shifters worked together, even the way the pack dealt with things. That’s why they put up with so much from Aiden, by the way. Most shifters were happy under his direction, despite his shadiness. But there were small groups talking on Internet forums about how amazing the good old days were when everyone knew their place, egging on each other’s rage and frustration.”
Will my stomach ever stop turning? “And this is what they do about it?”
He shrugged. “When the truth came out, and Aiden was revealed to have been a fraud, too many of those keyboard warriors became gung-ho isolationists. They want shifters to breed with shifters, that kind of thing. They’ve been segregating themselves, pushing the pack toward a more-restricted future. It’s hard for the Senate to get a handle on something like that.”
“But not you.”
“I’m free,” he admitted. “I can see a lot of things clearly now.” He patted my arm. “I’m sorry you got hurt. The shifters are unstable, and they were led by an unstable man. Mac wasn’t an alpha, as far as I’ve learned about what an alpha actually is.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I think the alpha is supposed to be the one who protects the pack and the young, not the one who punishes them. A true alpha wouldn’t force them into something like this.”
“Phoenix once told me something eerily similar,” he said. “He told me he cared about the werewolves because they protected their own to the point of detriment to themselves. I think he was sort of in awe of them.”
“They are kind of awesome,” I said dreamily.
Shay cleared his throat. “Have you heard from Phoenix lately?”
“Nope. Nor Lorcan and Lucia, except for a postcard. Why?”
“Just curious. I’m starting to worry that he’s not coming back.”
“Yeah.” I stared out the car window. “There’s a lot of that going around.”
“What do you think really happened to Mac?”
“If I hadn’t seen the body and you’d asked me that question, I’d say it was an alpha challenge gone wrong. But he was tortured, which makes it seem a lot more personal.” I turned in my seat to look at him. “The thing is, Mac has a huge number of enemies. Pretty much everyone I know hates him, and I mean really hates him. He’s been bribing some Senate members and not bringing his issues to others in order to get votes, and then we find out he’s kidnapping shifters. The Senate is going to have to admit that one of their own did this. Mac’s fucked everything up.”
“Do you think it could have been Esther?” he asked frankly.
“There’s no way.” I hope. Esther was changing, and her headaches made her angry, but I still couldn’t imagine her being capable of torture, not the girl who had cried on my shoulder after failing to reunite a baby with her mother.
“I just can’t believe so many shifters would willingly let this happen,” he said.
“Who says they were willing?”
He made a face. “Shifters can fight. I mean, really fight. There are plenty of women in Mac’s pack who weren’t trapped in those barns. How could a shifter possibly be afraid of anyone enough to keep quiet about that?”
“They would have had to betray their whole pack, if they even knew about it. Maybe they were taught to be afraid.”
“What do you mean?”
I shifted uncomfortably as memories I kept hidden resurfaced. “I know they’re strong, and that seems like maybe they could have stopped what was happening to them, but sometimes, being physically strong isn’t enough.”
He waited patiently for me to finish, and I knew I had to, if only to make him see that there were different types of victims, but that didn’t mean they were to blame for what had happened to them.
“In my case, when I was growing up, I knew I was strong. But I had to act normal, or so I was told, because if I didn’t, all kinds of horrendous creatures would come for me and take me away. My grandmother literally put the fear of God into me. She made me understand that men were supposed to be stronger than me, so that I wouldn’t fight back even if I got the chance. Revealing myself was worse than anything anyone could do to me. She made me afraid. She made me cower. And even though I was strong, I wasn’t strong enough to stop her or any of the…”
“You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
I sucked in a shaky breath. “I’m just saying that people can get into your head and make you think a certain way. And if it goes on long enough, it’s hard to break. Maybe Aiden changed things, but he was around for only a few years. This is an entire species’ go-to response to life. Thousands of years of a certain mind-set. This is hard to break, and the ones who did escape, the ones who did break the mould, they were the ones trapped in those barns. They were punished for having the strength to leave, and who knows what they’ve been through since, because the women in the second barn didn’t even seem human anymore. They lost themselves completely.”
“How do you even deal with that?” he asked. “Your grandmother and… all of that.”
“I made her forget me.”
“That’s not dealing with it.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Maybe not, but it freed me from her anyway.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t mean to drag up bad memories. I wasn’t blaming the victims. I just meant… if this can happen to a powerful group of shifters, then what hope is there for the rest of us?”
Sometimes I had the exact same thoughts myself. I glanced at Shay. I’d met him while I was looking for answers, and little about him had changed since then. He had a few more lines around his dark-brown eyes, and the lack of March sunshine had kept his sallow skin too pale to look healthy. But despite his worries, our world hadn’t ruined him. It hadn’t made him bitter or twisted. He still had an easy smile for anyone. He still worked tirelessly to reach those who needed help.
“I think I get it now,” I said. “Why you suddenly left the Senate.”
“Ah.” He smiled, completely relaxing. I hadn’t even noticed how tense the conversation had made him. “The big question.”
“Some people think it had something to do with Phoenix. He left shortly after you… resigned.”
“He did, but that was just a coincidence. I was glad he left. It didn’t give him a chance to talk me around.” Grinning, he glanced at me. “I can do more where I am now. I’m out of the public eye, and I don’t have to waste my time on niceties and press conferences.”
“You’re always nice to people.”
“Yes, but now I don’t have to be.”
I smiled. “You’re full of shit. Still helping out at the boxing club?”
&nbs
p; “More regularly than when I worked on the Senate. A couple of the young ’uns from the children’s home come out once a week. Alanii brings them. It’s good. They’re mixing with other kids, and they seem to be enjoying it.”
“I’d love to run a kind of halfway house for the older ones,” I said. “Help them get out of the children’s home. A few of them have jobs now. They need to feel more independent. I have an empty building that would be perfect, actually.”
“Quite the little entrepreneur of late, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have expected it from you.”
“What did you think I was going to do? Hunt bad things forever?”
“Sort of, actually. But I agree on the halfway house. Maybe if Phoenix ever returns, we can both hijack him and persuade him it’s a good idea.”
“It’s a deal,” I said. “And even if—”
Shay’s phone rang before I could finish the sentence. His face drained of colour as he listened. The speaker on the other end of the call mentioned a dead body, and I immediately went into high alert. Another death?
He hung up and looked at me. “I take it you heard that.”
“Dead body. Check. Sounds like your people are suspicious.”
“Yeah, I got that, too. I don’t have time to drop you home. Will you stay in the car if I go take a look?”
“Hell no.”
“Ava.”
“Would you rather I lie? Seriously, I can help. Mac’s body was dead too long for me to pick up on anything about his killer. And I might not be as good as a hellhound, but I can pick up a scent from a fresh body.” I winced. “And now that I’ve actually admitted something so awful, you have to let me come with you.”
He had an inner argument with himself before sighing. “Do not touch anything. Do not say anything to anyone. Do not do a thing unless I tell you to. Are we agreed?”
“No.”
“Ava!”
“I’m not going to screw up anything, Shay. Calm down.”
“If you can scent the killer, you will not go after the killer.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“If you’re not going to take this seriously—”