He wasn’t there. I already knew that. But I couldn’t stop myself from racing alongside that grisly trail, careful not to actually touch it, and up one side of the steps to the porch. I turned the knob and pushed, but the door gave less than an inch before bumping against something heavy.
Dan Painter had barricaded himself inside, just as I’d instructed. In fact, through the small gap I’d created, I could see him, standing completely still but for his nose, which twitched even as a warning rumble leaked from his throat.
“Dan, it’s me. Faythe,” I said, as Parker’s steps clomped up the steps behind me. There wasn’t room for us both to stand comfortably on the tiny stoop, so he stopped on the third step, balanced precariously to avoid stepping in Marc’s blood. “Parker and I are coming in now. We need you to go ahead and Shift back, okay?”
For a moment, Dan only blinked at me and sniffed some more, and I had to remind myself that he couldn’t see as much of me through the crack as I could see of him, and that his cat brain—especially under such stressful circumstances—probably wasn’t thinking very clearly. But then his nose verified what I’d told him and he stood down, his growl fading into silence as he sank onto his haunches near an ancient kitchen table with spindly aluminum legs.
Taking that as permission to enter, I made room for Parker on the stoop and we pushed the door open, forcing back the heavy bureau and chest of drawers Dan had braced it with. Obviously, if we could get in, so could the bad guys, but the furniture was only intended to give Dan a chance to get out before they broke through, not to keep them out entirely.
Dan didn’t begin Shifting back until we’d forced our way in, and I couldn’t really blame him, so while he writhed on the floor in the grip of his transformation, we knelt to examine the bodies growing cold and stiff on Marc’s floor.
Both were strays, and both were dead. But that’s where the similarities ended.
The first was tall and thin, with a mop of unmanageably wavy pale brown hair. He’d probably enjoyed strength and power as a werecat that he’d never had in his human life. Not that it mattered now. Death was the great equalizer.
The skinny stray’d had the side of his head bashed in, likely by the bloodstained chair leg lying two feet from his body. Across the room lay the rest of the chair, splintered where its missing limb had been detached.
The other stray was shorter and thicker, bigger than his buddy in every respect but height. He’d likely proved more of a challenge to Marc than his gangly friend, but evidently that old saying was true: the bigger they were, the harder they fell.
This particular big bastard had fallen—probably in response to a blow from Marc—and hit his head on the coffee table now smashed to bits half under him. The gash in the back of his skull was wide enough for me to put my middle finger into. Not that I tried. There were splinters of bone in the wound, and probably even more lodged in his brain.
The entire house reeked of blood. The carpet was soaked with it, and it squished beneath my boot when I stepped in part of a puddle. And, though it horrified me no end, all I could think as I stared at the dead strays was, At least he took two of them with him.
No, I decided, before the first thought was even fully formed. Marc’s not dead. He sent these assholes on ahead….
Motion to my left drew my eye as Dan Painter stood, finally human and fully nude. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I rose from my crouch next to the second body. “No trouble since we spoke?”
He shook his head, pulling a pair of boxers from the seat of an ancient, wobbly kitchen chair. “It’s been quieter ’n a graveyard.” I didn’t much like his analogy, but I had to admit it was apt. “So…what’s the plan?”
I wiped my hands on my jeans, though I hadn’t gotten any blood on them. They just felt dirty. “We find Marc.”
“What can I do?” He stepped into the shorts, then into a pair of jeans. “I want to help.”
I nodded, accepting his offer, touched by the simple honesty in his statement. “Obviously we can’t track him physically. So we’ll have to track him by other means.” Even if we’d had a scent to follow—which we didn’t, thanks to the bad guy’s car—we were back to that whole cats-don’t-hunt-or-track-with-their-noses thing, like dogs do. We have the biology but lack the instinct. Fortunately, our particular breed of cat was gifted with human logic. Most of us, anyway. “We have to ID the one who got away. When we find him, we’ll find Marc.”
Parker nodded silently, and his look of confidence in me meant more than I could have imagined. He’d been enforcing much longer than I had, and if he’d had a better place to start, he would have said so. His silence said I was getting it right. So far.
Dan clenched his cotton T-shirt in both fists and continued to watch me, waiting for his orders.
“Is the doorknob the best scent source for the guy who took Marc?” I asked him, glancing around at the ruined carpet and broken furniture. “I don’t suppose you’ve found any of his blood in this mess?”
Dan put his arms through the sleeves of his tee and paused with the material gathered in both hands, ready to go over his head. “It’s mixed with Marc’s in several places, but there’s one spot over by the window that’s just his.” He nodded his head toward the north-facing window, then pulled the shirt over his skull. “There ain’t much of it, but it might help.”
“Thanks.” I bent to get a good whiff of the doorknob, then stepped carefully toward the window, where I knelt to compare the scent of the vaguely hand-shaped carpet stain to that on the knob. They were from the same tom. “Okay, Dan, I need a box cutter, or a sharp serrated knife and a plastic sandwich bag.” Dan headed into the kitchen and I turned to Parker, who’d begun to stack pieces of the broken furniture in a pile near the door. “I’m gonna call in a report, then I’ll help with the cleanup.”
He nodded and continued cleaning as I dug my phone from my pocket and autodialed my dad.
“Faythe?” my father said into my ear.
“Yeah, it’s me. We’re here and we’re safe, at least for the moment.” His sigh of relief was brief but real; I’d put to rest his fear that we’d been ambushed again, or that we’d walked into a trap. “We’re going to clean up the worst of the mess then go talk to a few strays and see if we can identify the one who got away with Marc.”
“Faythe—”
“Dad, I know what I’m doing. We’ll be careful. I’m not going to sit here licking my fur while Marc’s out there suffering who knows what.” At least, I hope he’s still out there, some soft, traitorous voice whispered from deep in my mind.
But not from my heart. My heart knew he was still alive, no matter how much blood he’d lost.
Springs creaked as my dad leaned forward in his chair, two hundred fifty miles away. “Faythe, you don’t have enough experience interrogating—”
“We won’t be interrogating, we’ll be interviewing…” That’s like interrogating without throwing punches.
“And Dan Painter doesn’t have any.”
“But we have Parker, and he’s been with you for years. We’ll be fine.” I squatted next to the wall and dug my fingertips beneath the baseboard, heedless of the grime that lodged beneath my nails.
“No. I’m bringing Brian home on the next flight from Atlanta—”
“Brian has no more experience than I do!” Irritation fueled me as I jerked the board away from the wall. Wood splintered, and a two-foot length of trim broke off in my hands.
Technically Brian Taylor been enforcing for his father for a couple of years before coming to work for mine. But I was on the fast track toward Alphadom, and he hadn’t yet moved beyond working with his fists. “He’s never even seen an interrogation!”
“Which is why he’s coming home,” my father continued, and I cursed myself silently for interrupting. My dad was upset, too, but he never let grief or worry impede his logic. “I’m sending you one of the wonder twins. Do you want Jace or Ethan?”
I had to think about that
for a moment. They were both great fighters, and I’d trust either with my life. But Ethan had more experience with interrogation—despite what I’d told my father, I had a feeling it might come down to a few thrown punches—and while I knew Jace would do everything he could to help us find Marc, his presence in Marc’s house would be uncomfortable for both of us. For all three of us, once Marc was back.
“Ethan. But, Dad, it’ll take him hours to get here. We can’t wait that long.” Especially considering that Marc had already been missing—and bleeding—for five hours.
“You can, and you will.”
Fear washed over me, disguised as anger, and my arm shot out before I could stop it. The detached strip of wood flew across the room and lodged in the Sheetrock over Marc’s couch.
Oops.
My father sighed again. “Do I even want to know what that was?”
I ignored his question and twisted to put my back to Dan and Parker, who were watching me in a mixture of surprise and worry. “Do you want Marc to die?” I demanded, forgetting to think before I spoke as fear and frustration crested inside me.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” My father’s voice had gone hard, but it was a brittle hardness, as if one more word from me might shatter his composure. That rare glimpse into my Alpha’s psyche scared me, as if I were seeing something I shouldn’t. A weakness.
I made myself take a deep breath. A long one. My dad was just as worried about Marc as I was. But he had to think about the rest of us, too.
“Faythe, if he can’t hold on for a few more hours, there’s nothing we can do for him.” The weariness in his voice told me exactly what it cost him to admit that. “Clean up the mess and bury the bodies.” Because our incinerator was a couple hundred miles away and we couldn’t spare anyone to pick up the corpses. “Get me a list of the strays you want to talk to, and I’ll get you any information we have about them. By then, Ethan will be there.”
“Dad…”
“That’s final, Faythe,” he said. My hands curled into fists, but I resisted throwing anything that time.
“Fine.” The concession tasted bitter on my tongue, and I couldn’t spit it out fast enough.
The chair springs squealed again, slowly, and I knew my dad was leaning back in his chair now, probably with his free hand over his eyes. “We’ll get him back.”
“I know.” But I didn’t know that. Not for sure. Nor did I know how to handle the next few hours of not searching for Marc.
I said goodbye to my father and Alpha, closed my phone and slid it into my pocket. Then I looked up to take the steak knife Dan offered me, handle first. “What’s it for?” he asked, and it took me a moment to realize he meant the knife. It takes a brave man to hand an angry werecat a knife. Especially when he doesn’t know what she plans to do with it.
“It’s for the scent sample.” I dug at the edge of the carpet, now exposed by the missing section of baseboard, and pulled it up from the floor. At first, I only got slack, but another tug pulled a large section of carpet out from under the remaining boards, so that I could roll it back like a tortilla.
I plunged the serrated blade into the raised bit of carpet and began to saw, perversely satisfied when the thick, matted weave resisted me, because that meant I could saw harder, pretending my blade sank into my enemy’s flesh with each vicious stroke.
Several minutes later I’d removed an uneven square of carpet, containing most of the hand-shaped bloodstain. Parker held the plastic bag open for me, and I dropped the sample in, then pressed the seal to close it.
“Is that for your lab?” Dan asked, vague excitement edging the fear in his eye as he stared at the morbid package balanced on my palm.
“Lab?” I stood and set the carpet sample on top of the bureau once again blocking the front door.
Dan picked up the knife and crossed the living room into the tiny, galley-style kitchen to drop it in the sink. “Marc said you guys have your own lab up in Washington State, where this doctor’s trying to figure out why you don’t have more girls.”
“Ohhh.” I knelt to pull a photo of myself from a ruined frame and dropped the mangled wood and glass into the trash bag Painter held out. The picture was from my senior year in high school. It was definitely time to have some new ones taken. “You mean Dr. Eames.”
John Eames was a geneticist belonging to one of the northwestern Prides. For the past few years, he’d used his resources and his spare time to try to bridge the gap between the number of male and female babies born into the American Prides. But in the process, he’d discovered everything we now knew about werecat genetics and the ability of a werecat to procreate with humans. So I could see why Dan might be confused.
“Unfortunately, the lab isn’t actually ours. Dr. Eames just uses it for his own purposes—our purposes—after hours. And I don’t think his skills would do us much good without another, identified sample to compare this one to.” I tossed my head toward the square of carpet. “Fortunately, we have all the equipment we need right here.” I tapped my nose and smiled grimly at Dan.
He raised one eyebrow. “We’re going to…sniff it?”
I frowned, until I realized he was joking. “You’re going to make a list of every stray you know and we’re going to take the sample around and let them sniff it, until someone can give us a name to go with the scent.”
“What if no one recognizes it?”
“That won’t happen.” Parker stood on the couch and braced one hand against the wall while he pulled the baseboard I’d thrown from the Sheetrock it had lodged in. Then he turned, gesturing with the oak strip as he spoke. “You guys may not be as community oriented out here in the free zone as we are in Pride territory, but you wouldn’t have survived so long on your own without keeping an eye on your rivals. There will be someone out here who can tell us exactly who this blood belongs to.” At his last word, he dropped the wooden board into a heavy-duty trash bag and tied it off.
Dan bent to haul the busted coffee table from beneath the heavier of the dead strays. “What if they won’t talk to us?”
I met his eyes boldly, to leave no doubt about my meaning. “They won’t have that option.”
Dan nodded without a word and sat down at the table to start his list, and while he was writing, Parker and I got started on the living room.
I’d never seen a bigger or bloodier mess than the disaster in Marc’s living room, and with any luck, I never would. I memorized the names and addresses of the dead strays before wrapping their wallets—including all their money, credit cards and ID—up in plastic with the corpses. We stacked them in the kitchen, where they took up easily half of the available floor space.
By then Dan was done writing. He waved me over to the table and slid a sheet of notebook paper toward me, and I frowned down at it. “This is it?” There were five full names on the paper and four more last names.
We’d been attacked by more than twenty strays in the ambush, and there were even more we’d heard but hadn’t seen. How could he know so few of them?
He must have seen the suspicion on my face, because he rushed to explain. “These are the only ones I’ve got names for. I know a bunch more by scent, though.”
“So do we,” I snapped, thinking of all the scents I’d smelled during the ambush. Parker frowned at me, and I nodded, huffing in frustration. I knew Dan was doing his best. But his best wasn’t good enough for Marc. Still…I shrugged. “It’s a place to start.” I sank into a chair and pulled my phone from my pocket to report the names to my father.
When I hung up, we went back to cleaning. All the living room furniture was broken, except for the couch, and since the sun had truly set by then, we tossed piece after piece into the backyard to be disposed of later.
The living room carpet was ruined. It took all three of us to pull it free from the carpet tacks running along the walls and roll it up, then haul it through the kitchen and out the back door. Fortunately, beneath the blood-soaked padding was the or
iginal floor: tough, lacquered hardwood, which looked better than ever after we’d ruined two sponge mop heads cleaning it.
When the house was in fairly good order—if mostly bare—we hauled the plastic-wrapped bodies into the woods behind Marc’s house and buried them in a single grave, a task I hated only marginally less than wrestling with rank, blood-soaked carpet.
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time we finished the late-night burial. Marc only had one bathroom, and the guys were nice enough to let me shower first. When I was dry but for my hair, I put two frozen pizzas into the oven, and when Dan emerged from the bathroom, he sat down with his list and tried to think of any names he might have forgotten. Without much luck.
As I was bending to take the first pizza out of the oven, headlights flashed in the front window and my cell phone rang out from my pocket. I set the pizza on the counter and answered my phone.
“It’s me,” Ethan said into my ear. “Let me in.”
The guys pulled the furniture away from the front door while I removed the second pizza, and when I kicked the oven door shut and turned around, Ethan was there, his arms already open for a hug.
In my brother’s arms, I could no longer resist the tears I’d held back. I cried on his shoulder, trying not to drip snot on his shirt while he rubbed my back. “We’ll find him, Faythe.”
I nodded and pulled from his grasp, wiping my face with a rough paper towel from the counter. “Damn right.”
Ethan cut the pizza and tossed uneven slices onto four paper plates while I dug several cans of Coke from the fridge. “Eat fast.”
While the guys chewed, I called my dad to tell him Ethan had arrived safely and to give him a report. “The house is clean. We had to pull up the carpet, but the floor beneath it is in pretty good shape. Marc’s landlord should thank us. The bodies are buried, but we’ll need to dispose of the broken furniture, as well as the carpet and padding.”
“Take the furniture to the town dump. You can bring the rest of the mess with you when you come home, and we’ll burn it. Fortunately,” my father continued, as I popped open my can and drank from it, “with the temperature so low, it shouldn’t start to smell for at least a couple of days.”
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