I needed to stay in the Appalachian Territory for reasons I couldn’t explain to him. But I wanted to stay for reasons he already damn well knew.
He scowled, but my victory was reflected in the set of his jaw. “You learned more from Faythe than just fighting.”
“You’re just now figuring that out?” I tried to smile, but my effort faltered with one more glance at the Abby-board.
“Fine, I’ll talk to your dad.” He dug his phone from his pocket. “Go upstairs and look around for anything we can use, but do not take your gloves off.”
I gave him a halfhearted mock salute, then headed up to the main floor.
“There’s mouthwash in the bathroom,” he called after me, and I panicked until I realized that wasn’t a comment about my breath. It was a way to cover his scent on my mouth. But it was a very obvious way, so after I rinsed my mouth, I took a soda from the fridge and drank half of it.
A minute later, Jace did the same thing.
While he called Teo and told him to put together a cleanup crew, I rifled through drawers and closets upstairs, wearing those absurdly large gloves. When he called my dad, I shifted the internal parts of my ears so I wouldn’t miss anything.
“Yes, we found the scene of the mauling, but it’s more complicated than we thought.” Then Jace listened while my father asked the inevitable question. “The victim was part of the group of hunters who attacked Abby and her friends in October. Based on the tools and chemicals we found here in the cellar, I’m guessing he was actually their taxidermist. It looks like the last stray he tried to kill and stuff killed him instead, but without having seen the other crime scenes, I can’t say how closely they’re related. It could all be the work of one stray bent on revenge. Or it could be that the hunters got sloppy and several of their victims got smart. Which makes sense if the strays knew they were being targeted. I’ll call my contact in the Lion’s Den.”
Still listening, I sank into the living room desk chair and began sorting through the crap piled on the dusty desktop.
“Yeah, it’s pretty gruesome,” Jace continued. “She’s holding up really well, considering. But, Rick, there’s one more thing.”
I froze, staring at a drawer full of old bills.
“These bastards were watching Abby. For months, it looks like. There are a bunch of pictures of her pinned up on a corkboard above the taxidermy table.”
“But the hunters are all dead now?” my father said over the phone, and I only understood the words because I knew what he was most likely to ask.
“We think there’s still at least one out there. Someone must have put the pictures up after the cops left.”
“Send her home,” my dad said, and that time I understood him, loud and clear.
“I actually considered that.” Jace’s tone straddled the line between respectful and assertive—Alpha politics at work. Technically, he didn’t need my father’s permission to keep me. I belonged to the Appalachian Pride. But my father was the council chair, and Jace had butted heads with him less than twenty-four hours before. “But the fact is that she’s safer here. My enforcers are younger than yours by a decade, on average, and they’re strong and fast.”
They’d had to be, to help Jace hold onto territory that had been hostile for nearly the first two years of his tenure as Alpha.
“Hell, two of them are your own boys, Rick. Between me, Teo, Isaac, and Lucas, we’re better able to protect her than anyone else on the planet.”
There was another pause, and my father’s silence over the line told me he was thinking. Hard. I couldn’t understand what he said next, but Jace’s reply filled in the blanks.
“I swear on my life, Rick. I won’t let her out of my sight.”
The guys arrived thirty-five minutes later, which told me they’d broken every speed limit between Jace’s lodge, which functioned as the capital of the Appalachian Territory, and the dead taxidermist’s house.
“Holy fuuuuuck,” Chase Taylor breathed, glancing around the gruesome cellar. He ran one hand through his dark curls and for a second, he looked just like his brother Brian. Only older.
“Those sick bastards!” my brother Lucas said from the bottom tread.
A heartbeat later, Isaac pushed him out of the way and clomped down the last three steps. He followed Lucas’s gaze to the Abby-board, and after a second spent processing, Isaac pulled me into a hug designed to block my view of the pictures. As if I hadn’t already seen them. “You okay?” he said into the top of my head.
“No. You’re smothering me.”
Isaac finally let me go, and a second later, Lucas, my second-oldest brother, pulled me into an identical embrace. At six foot six, Luke was a full half foot taller than our father, and as I had, he’d inherited our mother’s pale skin and red curls, though he kept his pretty closely cropped.
Isaac was the youngest of my brothers, yet still two years older than I. He had our dad’s straight brown hair and no freckles at all, and at six foot two, he was practically dwarfed by Lucas.
“What is all this shit?” Chase ran one finger over the nose of one of the mannequins, which resembled a skinned cat about his size, in feline form.
“They’re forms used for stuffing taxidermied animals,” I explained. “As near as I can tell from an internet search, cat-shaped forms are kind of hard to come by. My guess is that they were custom-ordered from a company that specializes in safari hunting supplies.”
“That is so fucked up,” Mateo murmured.
Jace had left the cellar untouched so that his enforcers could grasp the full scope of what we were facing. He and I had spent the past half hour upstairs, combing through the information we’d gathered about the house’s owner. His name was Gene Hargrove, and based on current pay stubs from a gun-and-archery range, taxidermy was just his hobby.
A very expensive, dangerous, time-consuming hobby.
Unfortunately, according to all the news stations, the name of victim who’d died in Gene Hargrove’s house was Joe Mathews. Which meant that the gun-toting, shifter-stuffing Hargrove was still out there. Still hunting.
Teo whistled as he glanced over the taxidermy tools and a small supply of unfamiliar chemicals. “How did we not see this coming?”
Jace shrugged, but his grim expression and the tight line of his jaw belied the casual gesture. “They’ve been targeting strays. Wildcats.”
“Titus didn’t say anything about wildcats going missing? I smell at least…what?” Teo glanced at the rest of us. “Six? More?”
“At least,” Jace agreed. “I’m waiting for a call back from him, so we’ll know something soon.” Titus Alexander was Jace’s contact in the Lion’s Den—a stray who’d been infected several years before. I hadn’t met him, but both Jace and Faythe spoke very highly of him.
“But I think if he knew about it, he’d have told me,” Jace continued. “The most likely breakdown of information is between the other wildcats and the Lion’s Den itself. As hard as Faythe and I have worked to open a solid line of communication with Titus, he’s working even harder to get the other strays to trust him. Some of them see him as a traitor for working with us.”
I couldn’t blame the wildcats for their distrust of us, and I knew Jace didn’t either. Though most of the other Alphas saw the need for and inevitability of a Pride comprised of strays in the free zone, few were as eager as Jace, Faythe, and Marc were to actually take that step, and the wildcats could no doubt feel that reluctance to accept them.
“Have Faythe and Marc heard anything?” Lucas asked, and Jace hesitated before answering.
“I don’t know. Rick offered to call them and the rest of the council so we could concentrate on cleaning this mess up and finding the sick bastard who’s been stalking his daughter.”
Every gaze in the room found me again. “She shouldn’t be down here,” Isaac said.
Jace turned to me with the first hint of a smile I’d seen from him since we’d stomped all over that line we’d both known better than to cross. Ag
ain. “You wanna tell them?”
I sucked in a deep breath. “You’re looking at your newest coworker. I was sworn in this morning with six Alphas in attendance.” I shrugged. “The ceremony broke some kind of record.”
For a moment, there was only stunned silence.
“Why would you—” Lucas asked, but Isaac interrupted him.
“Why would Dad let you do that?”
“It wasn’t up to him.” I gave them another shrug, and all four turned to Jace.
“She’s right,” Luke growled. “Why would you let her do that?”
Jace bristled as if even in human form, his fur was standing on end. “I make the decisions for this Pride, and I don’t owe anyone an explanation.” He cleared his throat, and my brothers shuffled their feet on the grimy concrete, obviously unaccustomed to being reprimanded by their Alpha. At least, in front of an audience. “You four bring in the cleaning supplies and get to work. Teo, I want every photo and scrap of paper filed and catalogued.”
Mateo nodded, then gestured for the others to proceed him up the stairs.
“Abby,” Jace said, loud enough for them all to hear, “you’re on intel duty. Go through every file on Hargrove’s computer. And all his emails. We need to know who the rest of the hunters are and how many of them are left. And where they live, because that may tell us where Hargrove is hiding.”
And if he were smart, he would be hiding.
I nodded, already jogging up the steps after the guys. I would also go through Hargrove’s search history and any online bank statements—we hadn’t found any hard copies. But most of what I was actually looking for, I could never reveal to the others.
Not even to my Alpha, even though it killed me to be lying to Jace.
By the time the sun set three hours later, the guys had cleaned the entire house top to bottom—a skill most toms learned on the job yet rarely used at home. They’d made two trips to the county dump with trunks full of garbage, then had catalogued and packed up everything we would need to keep. Or have to bury. They’d found the desiccated remains of two headless shifters wrapped in tarps behind the shed.
When they came to pack up Hargrove’s computer for further investigation at the lodge, I’d already uncovered the names of ten more members of the sick hunting club.
Six were already dead: Joe Mathews, who’d been killed in Hargrove’s house, the three hunters I’d killed over fall break, and two more who’d been mauled to death in previous attacks, just like Mathews.
“Well?” Jace said as Teo and Isaac packed the cumbersome desktop and its accessories in one of the boxes they’d brought from the lodge.
I swiveled in the rolling chair to face him. “From what I can tell, the other maulings each took place in the victim’s home, which suggests that the killer actually intended to hit Hargrove here, in his own house. Either Hargrove’s guest—Mathews—was here alone when the stray broke in, or Hargrove survived the attack and escaped.”
“One of the blood scents in the basement matches the owner’s scent all over the rest of the house, but we can’t tell how fresh it is, with so many other overlying scents.” Teo shrugged. “He could have been injured in the attack, or he could have cut himself on one of his own tools months ago.”
I blinked, sorting through both information and procedures that were new to me. “Whether he was hurt or not, you think he escaped, right?”
“Or the stray abducted him,” Isaac said. “Maybe Hargrove missed the attack, and he’s the one who hung the pictures afterward. Maybe he killed the stray. Or maybe he was taken and killed by the stray, and another member of their weird-ass safari club hung your pictures up as a threat. Or a warning.”
“Okay.” Jace nodded, obviously thinking it all through. “So, how many hunters are still out there?”
“As far as I can tell, four, counting Hargrove.” I dropped the wireless mouse into the box Isaac held out for me, then spun in the rolling chair to face my Alpha again. “Two of them live down south, near the border of the free zone.” The distance could explain why they hadn’t been killed by the vigilante shifter yet, as well as how they were able to target so many strays, with their operation apparently centered firmly in the Appalachian Territory.
“And the third?”
“His name’s Darren, but that’s all I’ve found on him. They don’t use his last name in any of the emails, and I haven’t found any reference to where he lives or works, or even what he does for a living.”
“That’s not a lot to go on,” Chase said on his way through the living room with another box.
“I know, but we could find more information at the other crime scenes.”
He shrugged, brushing dark hair back from his forehead. “Or beat it out of those other two hunters when we find them.”
“Well, we better hurry if we’re going to get to them before Titus does. Or before they get to him.” I turned to look up at Jace from my chair. “Your friend Titus is mentioned by name in a few of the emails. They seemed to think taking down a leader in the stray community would be a particular coup.”
What I’d left unsaid was that they’d actually been arguing over who would get possession of his stuffed and mounted head.
Although, truth be told, that was only part of what I’d left unsaid…
Hot water ran over my head and down my face in scalding streams. I’d long since rinsed the shampoo from my hair, but the memory of my face on that creepy bulletin board refused to be washed down the drain.
Whoever the photographer was, he’d been watching me for months. He’d seen me eat, and study, and swim in the school’s indoor pool. There’d even been a shot taken through my dorm room window—with some kind of zoom lens?—which had caught me walking behind Robyn and toward my closet wearing nothing from the waist up but my bra.
How could that have been going on for so long without my knowledge? Weren’t cats supposed to have amazing instincts? What good were my super-sensitive sight and hearing without the instinct to know I was in danger?
Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be an enforcer after all.
Frustrated, I turned off the shower and grabbed the towel I’d set on the counter before I got in. It was coarse, because both the bathroom and the cabin around it belonged to the enforcers, and no guy in the history of testosterone had ever taken the time to add fabric softener to a load of laundry.
Most of them would probably still be satisfied with beating dried sweat from their clothes with sticks if Jace’s mother would let them get away with it. But the laundry room was located in the lodge—the main house—and what happened there happened according to her rules.
That was exactly why I’d kicked my brothers out of their own room in the west cabin rather than stay in the lodge. I had the strong suspicion that neither Jace’s mother nor his sister really cared for me, no matter how polite they were to my face, but most of that probably had to do with the fact that my father had fought against Jace’s stepfather, Calvin Malone, in the shifter civil war.
When Cal was Alpha, two rapidly disintegrating trailers had sat where the east and west cabins now stood. They’d been propped up on concrete blocks, which had been clearly visible between rusted panels of metal underpinning. One of Jace’s first acts as Alpha was having the trailers hauled off, because he couldn’t stand to see them.
He’d lived there with his stepfather’s enforcers from the time he was twelve, because Malone couldn’t look at him without seeing Jace’s biological father—his mother’s first husband, and her true love, by all accounts.
Because Malone hadn’t liked or respected Jace, his enforcers didn’t either, and twelve is way too young for a boy to be kicked out of his own house. I could only imagine that Jace’s life was truly hell before he’d turned eighteen and gone to work for my uncle Greg at the ranch.
I wrapped myself in the towel and wiped fog from the mirror with one hand, admiring the craftsmanship of the rustic frame holding it in place.
The cabins that now sat
behind the lodge were built by hand, by Jace’s men, under his supervision. When he’d moved back to Kentucky to run things, he’d taken a day job at a construction company and had risen through the ranks to become supervisor after just a year. Faythe told me that’s the way it usually went for Alphas—their instinctive leadership shines through in their daily lives, and most of them find success both at work and at home.
While they were building the cabins, Jace and all his enforcers had slept on the living room floor in the main lodge. Jace thought it would help them bond, which was crucial for men expected to put their lives on the line for one another on a daily basis.
He must have been right, because I’d never seen a staff of enforcers as close-knit as Jace’s were. Their unity and loyalty gave them formidable, noted strength.
Which, naturally, made me the outsider. And likely the only one who would chafe from using towels about as soft as dead grass.
I tightened the towel around my chest and had just grabbed my phone from the bathroom counter when it rang. Brian’s name and number popped up on the screen. I groaned out loud.
I’d told him I would answer his calls. He’d probably heard about my psycho stalker and was worried, but the last thing in the world I wanted to do after seeing my pictures tacked up all over a murderer’s bulletin board was talk to Brian. Though truthfully, the last thing I ever wanted to do was talk to Brian.
What did that say about the future of our relationship? How was I supposed to spend the rest of my life with him if I didn’t even want to talk to him?
With a sigh, I sank onto the edge of the tub and pressed the button to accept his call. “Hey.”
“Hey. Your dad just told me what you guys found today. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Really? Because I think anyone else would be pretty freaked out.” Brian sounded openly frustrated for maybe the third time in our entire engagement. Usually, he was careful to keep his tone so light and gentle that it just kind of floated over us both, never really dipping into the realm of true substance.
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