Prey

by Rachel Vincent

  But there on the desk, in front of the flat-screen monitor and to the left of the optical mouse, sat a palm-size device with a short, thick antenna and a two-and-a-half-inch display. My heart began to gallop as I sank into Kevin’s desk chair, and it bobbed briefly beneath my weight. Could we really be so close to locating Marc?

  “Think this is it?” I picked up the device and turned it over while the guys gathered around me. It was thicker and broader than my phone, but weighed about the same, and would easily slip into a good-size pocket. There were three buttons on the sides and top edge of the machine, but none on the face. It was a touch screen.

  “It has to be.” Jace reached around me, and his arm brushed mine as he pressed a flush-set button on the side of the device. The tracker beeped, then the screen blinked to life, showing a logo I didn’t recognize. A couple of seconds later, the logo dissolved and a start screen appeared, in full color, asking for a five-digit tracking code. “We need a code,” Jace said, reading over my shoulder. “It looks like each chip has its own tracking number. What’s the dead guy’s name again?”

  “Adam Eckard.” I turned to see Dan already heading for the filing cabinet. “Look for a code associated with Adam Eckard.” On second thought…“Pull anything with the name Calvin Malone, too.” Just in case. Because we’d have to be able to prove the connection to make it stick.

  Feldman stood completely still in the center of the room, his face frozen in an angry scowl. “May I see that?”

  I spun in the chair and handed him the tracker, watching his reaction closely. He examined the device, turning it over in his huge hands and finally pressing a couple of on-screen buttons. Then he handed it back and met my eyes. “You were right. I apologize for not believing you.”

  “Don’t.” I hoped he could see the sincerity in my eyes. “You had no reason to believe us, and I’d have done the same thing in your position.”

  He shrugged broad shoulders. “Still, I’m sorry. And when I find Kevin Mitchell, I’ll kill him.”

  “Um. We kind of need to take him alive,” Jace said, laying one hand on the back of the chair I sat in. “Especially if we don’t find proof that any of the other Alphas are involved. We’ll need his testimony. And we don’t have permission to execute.”

  Feldman’s frown deepened and he started to reply, but Dan spoke up from a squat beside the bottom file drawer. “Speakin’ of proof, there’s nothin’ here.”

  “You sure?” Jace crossed the room toward him as Dan stood.

  “Nothin’ but a bunch of old receipts and check duplicates.” While they went through all the papers again, I turned back to Kevin’s desk and searched the cubbies in the hutch over the computer monitor. I found staples, rewritable CDs, a box of business envelopes, a stack of printer paper, some empty manila envelopes, and an unopened printer cartridge. The drawers held various computer cables and wires. But I found nothing with any kind of five-digit number on it, much less a convenient list of strays’ names and corresponding codes.

  “Maybe he took it with him,” Feldman suggested, turning from the small closet he’d been searching when I threw my arms up in frustration.

  “Why would he take the list, but not the tracker? What good would the numbers do without it?”

  Dan shrugged and dropped an old check register into the top file-cabinet drawer. “Maybe this one’s an extra.”

  “An extra eight-thousand-dollar piece of equipment?” I held the tracker up for emphasis. “Kevin works in retail. At least, he did last I heard. There’s no way his pockets are deep enough for redundant systems.”

  Jace shoved the bottom drawer closed and pushed himself to his feet. “His pockets aren’t even deep enough for primary systems. But we’re not talking about his pockets. We’re talking about his father’s bankroll. Because even if Cal is involved, his money probably isn’t. Stingy bastard.”

  Jace’s stepfather was not exactly rolling in cash, even though he required the highest Pride dues of any Alpha in the country—a full quarter of each of his Pride cats’ earnings. My dad only took ten percent, all of which went to pay the enforcers and to cover the expenses we incurred in the line of duty. I had no proof that Calvin Malone was misappropriating funds, but I would not have been surprised to learn that was true.

  Milo Mitchell, however, had no reason to bother—he was high up in the executive ranks of a medical sales company in Washington State. He wasn’t fabulously rich, but his mid-six-figure annual salary no doubt generated enough cash to cover the cost of a few extra state-of-the-art GPS tracking devices with which to subvert the civil rights of an entire population of strays.

  Which only supported my opinion that money is most often wasted on the wealthy.

  “Okay, so he might have an extra tracking device. But only the one list he took with him?” I sighed and let my hands fall onto the arms of the swivel chair. Had we wasted twenty minutes of Marc’s life searching for a list that wasn’t even there?

  “Surely he’s not the only one with a copy of the codes,” Feldman said, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed over his chest. “If Kevin’s really working for his father, wouldn’t this father have a list, too?”

  “Probably.” I spun slowly in the chair, my eyes closed, thinking. “Unfortunately, Milo Mitchell lives in a suburb of Seattle, so our access to his filing cabinet is kind of limited.”

  Feldman cleared his throat pointedly, and I opened my eyes to see him smiling, one brow raised. “Kevin’s access would be just as limited, right?”

  I nodded slowly. Then more eagerly, as his point sank in. “So Kevin would have e-mailed the list…” I spun the chair around and caught the corner of the desk with one outstretched palm to halt my turn, then punched the power button on Kevin’s CPU. His computer was newer than Marc’s and his Internet connection was much faster, so in under a minute and a half, I had Kevin’s browser up and running.

  And that’s when we caught a couple of big breaks in a row. First of all, Kevin’s in-box was set up as his homepage, so we found his e-mail account with no problem. Beyond that, the computer was set to “remember” him, so we didn’t have to mess around with guessing his password. If I’d known he was that careless, I’d have checked the computer first.

  Unfortunately, his in-box was empty, except for four messages that had come in that morning. Two were spam—porn, based on the subject lines—and the other two were advertisements from Popular Mechanics, which made Kevin sound smarter than he was, and a video-game site. He clearly kept his in-box cleaned out pretty well.

  Not so with his Sent folder and his virtual trash can. Among the messages Kevin had recently deleted, I found one from his father, dated three days earlier. I opened it and scanned the contents, while all three of the toms read over my shoulder. It was in response to an e-mail Kevin had sent his father several hours before—along with a Word attachment titled “Updated tracker codes.”

  Jackpot.

  I opened the attachment while Jace turned on the printer and checked the paper tray. I printed four copies—one for each of us—then forwarded the message to myself, my father, and Michael, just to make sure that the evidence of Milo Mitchell’s involvement was well disseminated, in case something went horribly wrong and none of us came out of the hunt for Marc alive.

  “Shit, Dan!” I glanced at him with both eyebrows raised, the paper still warm in my hand from the printer. “Your name’s top on the list. They implanted you first.”

  Dan frowned and started to say something. But then Jace cut him off. “Eckard’s fifth from the top,” he said, and I skipped down five entries on the list. And there it was. Adam Eckard—tracking code 44827. I rolled forward in the chair and reactivated the tracker, which had gone into power-save mode, then typed in the five-digit code. Within seconds, information flooded the screen, including the current longitude and latitude of Adam Eckard’s GPS microchip.

  At the bottom of the screen was a virtual button reading Map View. I pressed it, and a satell
ite image map appeared, showing a densely packed forest surrounding a glowing green dot—presumably Marc, carrying Eckard’s chip.

  “There he is!” I shot up from my chair with the tracker in hand, and was already halfway to the hall—eager to get going now that we had a target to shoot for—when Jace called me back, his voice oddly strained, as if his throat wanted to close around the words as he spoke them.

  “Faythe, look at the last name on the list.”

  Irritated by the delay, I pulled my folded copy of the list from my back pocket, where I’d hurriedly shoved it, and skipped to the bottom of the page. The final entry read: Marc Ramos—tracking code 44839.

  Shock raced through me so fast I got light-headed, and the edges of my vision darkened. “Marc’s been implanted? When? If they could track him, why would they try to kill him?”

  Feldman shoved an empty duffel bag back into Kevin’s closet with his foot, then closed the door and leaned against it. “Maybe something went wrong. Marc woke up in the middle of the procedure, or he remembered too much afterward and figured out what they were doing, or something like that.” He pointed at a name on his list, and I glanced at my copy to follow along. “Look at the third entry. It’s been crossed out.” Using a strike-through font effect. “And he’s the first of the toms to go missing. There are three more entries like that, and I haven’t seen any of those toms in a while, either.”

  I nodded slowly as understanding surfaced. “So the toms who made trouble were killed and buried. Only Marc didn’t die as planned—he killed Eckard instead. But if Marc knew he’d been implanted, why bother to take Eckard’s chip?”

  “I don’t know.” Feldman shrugged, and gestured toward the display I still clutched in my right hand. “Where does that thing say Marc is?”

  “Just a second.” I typed Marc’s code into a box at the top right corner of the screen, expecting the device to show his little green glowing circle overlaid with Eckard’s. But instead, the map disappeared and new coordinates appeared, along with another button promising me a map view. I pressed the button, and a new map appeared, this one displaying the satellite view of a small, neatly laid-out neighborhood, with the streets labeled.

  Weird. The green dot on the new map was on the south side of a street called Magnolia Drive. “Guys, aren’t we on Magnolia Drive?” I asked, glancing around the room at the other faces, my eyes narrowed in uncertainty.

  “Yeah, why?” Feldman said.

  “Because according to this, Marc’s here.” But that couldn’t be right. If Marc were in Kevin’s house—even if he were no longer breathing—we’d have smelled him the moment we’d come in.

  “Here, where?” Jace stepped close enough to view the screen over my shoulder again, and his chest brushed my back, sending warmth and ill-timed tingles through me. “In this house?”

  “I think so.” I stepped subtly away from him, disguising the motion as I turned to face the rest of the room. And when I moved, though the dot on the screen stayed still, the map rotated with me. “Wait…” I pressed the plus-shaped zoom button three times, and the image on-screen tightened until it would go no further, showing a thirty-yard span which included a black-and-white view of the roof of Kevin’s house, as well as the edges of those to each side.

  “Yeah, in this house….” I mumbled. Then I started walking slowly toward the dot on screen, carrying the display with me as I moved into the hall and toward the tiny eat-in kitchen. As I passed the hall closet, the dot on-screen stopped moving, then appeared behind me. I backed up and stopped in front of the closet, and the dot appeared dead center of the screen.

  Marc’s microchip was in Kevin Mitchell’s front closet.

  My heart thumped so hard I could hear nothing but the rush of my own blood through my ears, and my throat constricted painfully, cutting off my breathing until I thought to open my mouth and gasp for air.

  “Faythe?” Jace’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I knew the moment he understood, because I heard his pulse speed up to match mine.

  I sniffed the air, just to be sure I hadn’t missed something crucial. But I caught no whiff of Marc, or any other biological smell from the closet. Still, my hand shook when it closed over the knob. What if I was wrong? What if my stuffy nose—from too many hours spent out at night—was preventing me from smelling something I should have?

  Finally, I sucked in another deep breath and twisted the knob in one harsh motion, then tugged the door open, bracing myself mentally for the worst-case scenario.

  But Marc’s body did not fall out of the closet onto me. There was no body. In fact, there was nothing, that I could see, but a couple of winter coats and a vacuum cleaner that hadn’t seen much action.

  “I don’t get it,” Dan said, finally breaking the tension, and I could have kissed him. “There’s nothing in there.”

  “Thank goodness,” I mumbled, reaching up to pull the chain dangling from a naked bulb in the closet ceiling. Dim light flooded the closet, illuminating the only thing I hadn’t been able to see before. On the floor, in the back right corner, sat a white cardboard box, like the kind medical supplies are often shipped in. At one point, it was taped shut, but the seal had already been broken, so I knelt and lifted the lid.

  Inside the box were row after row of small, clear plastic tubes, like test tubes except they had flat bottoms and were closed with plain white plastic caps rather than rubber stoppers. The tubes were separated by a grid of cardboard spacers, like repeating tic-tac-toe boards, the first three rows of which were empty.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Feldman asked, peering at me over Jace’s shoulder.

  “Unused microchips.” I handed Jace the tracker and stood with the box in hand, then pulled the first remaining tube from its slot. “Somebody read me Marc’s tracking number.”

  Dan glanced at the paper he still clutched in his right fist. “Four-four-eight-three-nine,” he said, as I stared at the number printed on the side of the tube.

  “Bingo.” My smile was huge—I could feel it. “He was never implanted, though based on this list, I’d say that’s the reason they took him. Obviously something went wrong.”

  “Yeah.” Dan rolled his eyes, as if the problem should have been obvious. “They fucked with Marc. I could ’a told ’em that wouldn’t work out too good.”

  Though it hardly seemed possible, my smile grew when I met the stray’s eyes, pride for Marc practically bursting inside me. But that was followed quickly by fear, along with the realization that he was still out there somewhere, probably in the worst shape of his life.

  Rather than trusting the “locate previous code” option on the tracker, I typed Eckard’s number in manually, then glanced up to find all three toms watching me. “Okay, are we ready?” I headed toward the kitchen and the back door without bothering to return to the office and power down Kevin’s computer. He’d know we’d been there the moment he walked into his house, by the scents we’d left behind on everything we’d touched, so I saw no reason to waste time putting everything back where we found it.

  “You guys go ahead. Go find your boyfriend.” Feldman’s gaze met mine, his eyes shining in sympathy and regret. Then a flash of anger swallowed those weaker emotions. “I have some calls to make.”

  “What?” Jace’s eyebrows arched high onto his forehead, and suspicion edged his voice. “Who are you going to call?”

  Feldman held up his copy of the tracker code list for all of us to see. “Other than me, Marc, and Adam Eckard, there are eight other toms on this list, at least four of whom I assume are still breathing. They have a right to know they’re being illegally and maliciously monitored by the ‘Big Brother’ faction of your Territorial Council.”

  Oh, shit. Even if most strays living in the free zones hadn’t yet found reason to come together in opposition to council authority, they would once Milo Mitchell’s conspiracy came to light. And they were no more likely to recognize the distinction between good Pride cats and bad Pride cats than most of th
e council was between friendly strays and hostile strays.

  The ugly cycle of conflict would be perpetuated, all thanks to one or two Alphas’ arrogance and complete lack of ethics.

  “Ben, please don’t do that,” I begged, glancing at Jace to see if the repercussions had sunk in for him yet. They had. I could tell by the tension in the line of his jaw. “This—” I gestured with the box of microchips “—is the work of one or two of our worst examples of leadership. Please don’t let the entire council—the whole Pride-cat society—pay for the incredibly bad judgment of those few.”

  Feldman sighed, and for a moment he looked blessedly conflicted. But then his expression hardened. “I see what you’re saying, and I sympathize. And I’ll do my best to assure them that your family was not involved in any of this. But these toms have been violated, and they don’t even know it. They have a right to know what’s been done to them.”

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t even argue with that, no matter what the ramifications of full disclosure would be for my Pride. So I nodded, clutching the half-empty box to my chest like a life raft. “Okay. But please, as a gesture of goodwill between the affected toms and the south-central Pride, offer them our doctor’s services. Dr. Carver can quickly and safely remove the chips, and give them to you on the spot to be destroyed.”

  “Miss Sanders, I don’t know that they’d trust a Pride doctor to do that. Considering that it must have been a Pride doctor who implanted the chips in the first place.”

  “But not that Pride doctor,” Dan interjected. “He took my chip out with no problem. I trust him.”

  Feldman studied Dan for a moment, then nodded again, and met my eyes. “I’ll extend your offer. But I make no guarantees.”

  I forced a smile. “Thank you.” That was all we could ask of him. All we had any right to ask. And though I’d played no part in the microchip debacle—other than trying to sort it out—I felt guilty by association, for simply knowing Milo Mitchell and his hell-spawn son. I hated that feeling. And suddenly I understood how Jace felt about his stepfather being the driving force behind the effort to have my father removed from the council.