Prey

by Rachel Vincent

  We can’t vocalize specific thoughts in cat form, but my mother would recognize distress in my voice, no matter what shape I took.

  “Okay,” she said finally, and I smiled to reassure them both as I closed the door.

  I unhooked my bra as I turned to face Kaci, and to my surprise, she already had her T-shirt halfway off, though it looked to be caught on her head. “Here, let me help.” I dropped my bra and took the hem of her shirt in both hands, lifting it gently until it cleared her skull, and her hands fell from the inside-out sleeves. Kaci was shivering when her face came back into view.

  “You okay?” I asked, hoping she was just cold, in spite of the sweat drying on her face and in her hair.

  “I should have done this before now,” she whispered, refusing to meet my eyes, as if she were ashamed. Or embarrassed. “A long time before. I think I’m going to throw up again.”

  Spinning, I grabbed the big metal mixing bowl from her nightstand and set it on her lap, just in case. But after a full minute of deep breathing and closed eyes, she nodded and I removed the bowl. The urge had passed.

  I finished stripping and helped her out of the rest of her clothes and onto the floor, where we knelt, side by side. I’d put her close to the bed, so she’d have something to hold on to in case she started to fall over, which looked to be a definite possibility.

  “This is just like the last time, right?” she asked, her teeth chattering.

  A jolt of surprise shot through me, tingling even after I remembered that she’d only voluntarily Shifted once before, and that was into human form. Her first—disastrous—Shift had been brought on by a merciless onslaught of hormones, during which her inner cat practically ripped its way free from her human body, with no regard for her physical or mental well-being.

  I was suddenly glad all over again that we hadn’t told her about Ethan. His death would not help convince Kaci that her own cat could be controlled.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my thoughts from showing on my face. “This is just like that, only in reverse. You need to visualize your cat-self. Your fur and the pads of your paws.” I intentionally avoided mentioning her claws and teeth to keep her from thinking of her cat-self as dangerous.

  Kaci nodded and lowered herself carefully so that her palms were flat against the floor.

  “Picture your wrists and ankles lengthening, and your tongue growing tiny barbs. That’s what makes it so rough.” I knelt with her, still talking as I watched her body tense, arching viciously.

  I was a little surprised that she seemed to be flowing into the Shift so quickly, if not exactly serenely. But it made sense. Her body craved the Shift as badly now as it had that first time, back in Canada with her family. She’d only been able to hold out so long this time because she knew she had that option. That first time, she’d had no idea what was happening to her, or that she could control the Shift, rather than letting it control her.

  But this time, she didn’t need to worry about control. I wanted her to let it come. To just let the cat take over, because she’d feel so much better once it had. And once she’d seen that she wasn’t dangerous.

  As I watched, still speaking to her softly, listing the body parts in the order they were most likely to change, her feet began to bulge, her ankles and wrists buckling. I felt a mirrored pain in my own legs as my Shift began, and still I spoke, almost crooning to her now.

  Kaci’s arms and legs started to twist, and a high-pitched keening leaked from between her almost closed lips. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and fresh sweat was beading on her forehead. But this sweat had a clean, healthy scent, and I knew then that she would be okay. That Doc Carver was right—Shifting would go a long way toward restoring her health.

  When my own Shift reached my head, speech became impossible. My teeth grew pointed and curved backward, my nose and jaw elongated into a muzzle, and whiskers sprouted on both sides of my nose, growing with the eerie speed of time-lapse photography.

  On my left, Kaci shuddered, and I watched as her spine stretched beyond the end of her back and became a tail clothed in pale, bare flesh. Next, fur began to ripple across her sides, and her brand-new claws dug into the carpet. She clenched her long jaws against the pain, then yelped when her canines lengthened in a sudden short-term growth spurt, forcing her teeth apart.

  My own ears traveled up the sides of my head—a decidedly odd feeling—and felt kind of pinched as they drew to points at the top.

  Two minutes later, it was all over. For both of us. Kaci lay curled up on the floor by the bed, her tail wrapped around her body, as if she were giving herself a hug. She blinked at me, tears standing in her eyes, which looked more green than hazel in cat form.

  But her tears didn’t fall, and that was a very, very good sign.

  I stretched, raising my rump and waving my tail lazily, relishing those first few minutes in cat form, when everything felt new and different. All my senses were heightened, most noticeably my sense of smell, and I could now make out scents my human nose had been blissfully unaware of. Such as residual vomit in the metal bowl and the sick-sweat that had soaked into Kaci’s sheets.

  But Kaci herself smelled fine now. She was still breathing a little quickly, and her pulse was racing, but I was confident those would both even out soon. They might even have been caused by the stress of the Shift.

  I crossed the scant foot of carpet between us and Kaci raised her head. Our eyes met and she whined, asking me wordlessly if everything was all right. If it was okay to relax.

  I nodded and rubbed my cheek against hers, reassuring her. She rubbed back against me once, then stood and hopped onto the bed, only wobbling slightly. I jumped up beside her and curled up at her side, sniffing her to reassure myself that she was fine.

  And she was.

  So I groomed her until the fur on her head and shoulders lay flat. Then I fell asleep beside her.

  Twenty-Two

  I woke up some time later to find afternoon light streaming through the slats in Kaci’s blinds. I turned my head toward the clock on the nightstand and frustration sparked my temper. Two-oh-four. They had let me sleep for nearly two hours! I didn’t have time for a nap!

  But I’d certainly needed one.

  Shaking the bed as little as possible, I stepped onto the floor and gathered my shirt and underwear into a pile so I could pinch an edge of each piece between my teeth. Then I padded to the door, which someone had kindly left open for me. Probably my mother, when she’d checked on us.

  I Shifted in my own room to keep from waking Kaci, then put on my shirt and underwear and grabbed a fresh pair of jeans from my dresser, since I hadn’t been able to carry the other pair in my mouth.

  Dressed and as well rested as I was going to get, I headed straight for the kitchen in search of…anyone who could tell me what I’d missed during my nap. But the kitchen was empty. In fact, the house was quiet all around me, and only when I stood still and listened closely did I hear my mother’s calm, even sleep-breathing from my parents’ bedroom. But I heard nothing from the guys. They must have gone to the guesthouse—including Dan.

  But they’d left half a pizza on the countertop, still in its grease-stained box. Huh. My mother hadn’t made lunch. Not that I needed her to. However, it was unusual for her not to insist.

  I grabbed a slice and ate it cold while I brewed fresh coffee. The fifth pot of the day, by my count. And as my coffee brewed, soft music drifted into the kitchen from across the hall, and I realized my father was in his office. Alone.

  When there was enough coffee in the pot, I paused the production and filled two mugs, then carried them into the office. My father sat in his rolling chair with both elbows on his desk, his head in his hands. The stereo on the shelf behind him was broadcasting Mozart softly, several green bars tracking the pitch and tempo of the music as it played.

  I set one mug in front of my dad, then lowered myself onto the couch without a word.

  “Thank you,” he said, without looking
at me. His voice was rough and very deep, but not with anger.

  He’d been crying.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, relieved to hear my question come out with a gentle, empathetic tone. I sounded like I’d been crying, too, yet my throat was actually raw from holding tears back. The few I’d shed were nowhere near enough, and the rest would have to fall eventually, I knew. But not now.

  “Is there any other option?” My father raised his head to meet my eyes, and his were bloodshot, as if he’d been drinking heavily. An empty bottle of Scotch sat on one side of his desk, but he’d finished it long before I’d Shifted with Kaci, so alcohol wasn’t the cause.

  “You need some sleep, Daddy.” I wasn’t sure he’d been to bed at all the night before, and knew for a fact that he’d had no more rest than I had over the past few days.

  “Yes, I do.” He nodded matter-of-factly and picked up his mug. “But every time I close my eyes, I see Ethan. Or Calvin Malone. Neither of those thoughts seems to usher in sleep.”

  “I know.” When I closed my own eyes, images passed behind my eyelids so fast I could barely focus on them. I saw Marc, and Jace, and Ethan, and Manx, and Kevin Mitchell. A slide show of everything that had gone wrong in my life in the past week—my mind bursting with energy, while my body hovered on the edge of exhaustion and collapse no two-hour nap could avert. But there was no time for more sleep, or true rest. “Dad, Kaci’s Shifted, and I have to go back to Mississippi. I have to find Marc.”

  A weary sigh slipped past my father’s lips as he pushed his chair back. “I know. Michael and Manx should be back any minute. I want you to brief Michael, then when Dr. Carver has pronounced Kaci fit, you can go.”

  As he stood, I glanced at my watch. Two twenty-five. If we left by three-thirty, we could be there by nine. Just in time to take a freezing, after-dark shift searching the woods. “Any word yet from Vic and Parker?”

  My dad sank into the armchair at the head of the gathering of furniture, one hand cradling his coffee mug like a lifeline. His free hand curled automatically over the scrolled arm. “They haven’t found anything yet, Faythe.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, clutching my own mug. “We will.” I opened my eyes and stared at him, daring him to tell me the truth. “You believe that, don’t you, Dad?”

  “I…” But before he could finish—before he had to finish—an engine growled softly from the front of the property, and I recognized our old van’s labored rumble. “Michael…” My father smiled apologetically at me, then rushed past me into the hall and out the front door. I followed him across the porch and down the steps just as the van rolled to a stop.

  Michael was out in an instant, and he barely paused to meet my eyes, his own bloodshot and red rimmed behind the useless lenses of his glasses. Then he turned to slide open the side door and bent into the van to fiddle with something. When he faced me again, he clutched Des carefully to his chest, the baby wrapped in a tiny blue blanket my mother had knitted for him.

  For a moment, I stared at him in surprise; Manx never let anyone but my mother handle her son without permission. Michael shifted the baby into a careful, one-handed football hold, like he’d been juggling infants all his life. Then he reached back into the van to help the young mother from the vehicle, his hand supporting her elbow. And that’s when I understood: Manx couldn’t care for her own baby. She probably couldn’t even lift him safely, because her hands were wrapped in thick bandages, from fingertips to wrists.

  When she nodded in thanks, he let her go—she still didn’t like to be touched—and turned to hand me the baby. But suddenly my mother was there, carefully lifting Des from Michael’s arm and cradling him gently.

  “Come inside before we all freeze,” she said, her voice high and tense, as if she had to force the words out through an unwilling throat.

  I followed them all in, staring at Manx in shock. They’d really done it. They’d taken her claws. She’d never be able to fend for herself again, and until she’d fully healed, she wouldn’t be able to feed, clothe, or bathe herself, much less her child. She was at the mercy of people she hadn’t even known four months ago, and she would have to endure our touch just to survive.

  And the dull, hopeless glaze of her eyes said she damn well knew it.

  They had killed her spirit. And my inner Alpha-bitch wanted someone to pay for that.

  I pulled the front door closed behind me and followed everyone into the living room, where Manx sank carefully onto the couch, Michael’s hand on her elbow to steady her. My mom sat beside her, to keep the baby as close to his mother as possible. But Manx looked miserable, being so near her child yet unable to touch him. Her eyes never left the infant’s face, calm and relaxed in sleep.

  I paused in the doorway, watching Michael. I’d never considered his resemblance to our youngest brother before, mostly because while Ethan and I had our father’s green eyes and dark hair, our other three brothers had our mother’s blue eyes and the light brown waves she’d had in her youth. But now, watching my oldest brother hover over the injured tabby, waiting to see if she’d need any more help, I realized that though their coloring was different, behind the glasses and beneath the perfectly styled lawyer haircut, Michael’s face was shaped just like Ethan’s, from his strong jaw to his high, smooth forehead and faint, sparse sprinkling of freckles, lending them both the perpetual look of youth.

  Tears blurred my vision, and when I reached up to wipe them away, the movement caught Michael’s eyes. An instant later I was in his arms, surrounded and supported by his quiet strength, squeezed so tight I thought my ribs might snap. My head found his shoulder, and the tears came faster when I realized how well it fit there; he and Ethan had been the same height, and I’d never even noticed.

  “Shh…” he whispered into my ear. “Don’t upset Mom.”

  Nodding, I clenched my jaws and squeezed my eyes shut, denying my grief an outlet one more time. There would be time for tears later, when Marc was there to mourn with me. I could wait that long.

  I straightened, and Michael looked at me through his own damp eyes, wiping my tears with his bare fingers. “You did everything you could,” he whispered.

  But that wasn’t true. If I’d remembered the fourth tom sooner, I could have warned Ethan. And if I’d insisted on taking Kaci myself, Malone’s men would never have resorted to violence in the first place. They would have been more careful with the life of a tabby than they were with just one of the many toms we had to spare. Either way, Ethan might have lived.

  However, there wasn’t time to indulge my self-pity, so I nodded and squeezed his hand briefly before following him to the main grouping of furniture, where everyone else had gathered.

  “How do you feel?” my mother whispered to Manx, rocking side to side on the couch with a motion so natural it must have been a reawakened maternal habit. Had she rocked us like that when we were babies? Did we sleep so peacefully in her arms, secure in the inarticulate certainty that nothing could hurt us?

  “I feel like this will never be over,” Manx mumbled, her accent thickened with pain and grief as she watched her son comforted in another woman’s arms. She held up her heavily bandaged hands for all to see. “Des and I will never live peacefully on our own.”

  “Probably not.” My father settled into his armchair and met her tortured gaze. “But you are both welcome here for as long as you want to stay. Forever, if you like. You are under my protection.”

  For what little good it does, I thought, the fracture in my heart widening with the private admission that my father was no longer invincible, his protection no longer a venerated guarantee. After all, Kaci was under my father’s protection, too, and look what had almost happened to her. And the price Ethan had paid to protect her.

  My mother dared a small, comforting smile. “And you’re not without choices. Umberto Di Carlo called this afternoon to extend that same offer from the southeast Pride.”

  He had? I must have slept through that.

&
nbsp; “No strings attached,” Michael added, making it clear that he’d already known the offer was coming.

  Manx’s beautiful features twisted into a frown at his idiom. “Strings?”

  “It means he won’t expect anything from you in return,” I explained, impressed by Di Carlo’s generous offer. “You don’t have to marry one of his sons. Or even sleep with any of them.”

  Michael scowled at my coarse phrasing, but since Manx’s comprehension of English didn’t extend very far into colloquialism, I thought it best to speak plainly. And when she nodded in understanding, I shot my brother a mild look of triumph, the most I could muster in the face of so much tragedy.

  “I must thank him.” Manx placed her bandaged hands awkwardly in her lap and stared at them. “His Pride was very kind to me and to my son. We will accept his offer, after the service.” For Ethan.

  Sinking into an overstuffed armchair, my brother opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, the back door opened, and several sets of footsteps clomped into the central hallway. Moments later, Dr. Carver appeared in the living room doorway, with Owen, Jace, and Dan at his back.

  Owen and Carver greeted Michael with brief hugs and sympathetic thumps on the back—more masculine versions of the somber greeting I’d gotten, while Dan stood back awkwardly, not sure where he fit in.

  “Manx.” Dr. Carver’s gaze found the young dam immediately. “May I take a look at your hands?”

  The tabby nodded and stood, then looked to my mother when she rose, still holding the baby. “Would you put Des down for his nap?”

  “Of course.” She followed Manx into the hall, but I called out to the doctor before he disappeared around the corner.

  “Doc, when you’re done with Manx, could you give Kaci a once-over?”

  “I’d be glad to.” He smiled gently, and I knew he understood my hurry. “And, Dan, if you’ll come with me, I’ll take one more look at your back.”

  Dan followed the doctor reluctantly, and when they’d disappeared into Manx’s room, Michael glanced at those of us remaining. “Anyone else need a drink?”