A second crash of splintering wood came a second later, and the front door swung open. Lucas and Teo stepped into the living room, which was separated from the kitchen and small dining area only by an arch of stained wood.
A suitcase sat open on the floor next to the taxidermied tom Warner had found a picture of in Hargrove’s email. Mateo knelt next to the suitcase and inhaled deeply. “It’s Hargrove’s,” he said. “Matches the most pervasive scent in his house.”
I nodded and sniffed the air for myself. The only strong scents in the cabin belonged to Hargrove and another human man, whom we were assuming to be Darren.
At my right, Abby exhaled deeply. “I smell a few unfamiliar strays, but those scents are older and pretty weak. Other than a faint trace of the same chemicals we found in Hargrove’s basement, I don’t smell anything unexpected.” Tension melted from her frame with the discovery—until her gaze found what hadn’t been visible from outside. The top of the living room wall was lined with the stuffed, mounted heads of dead shifters. And not just cats. There were also a bruin and the bizarrely posed heads and long slender necks of two thunderbirds.
“Please tell me that’s not Elias Keller,” she whispered, nodding toward the mounted bear’s head.
“It’s not. But he’ll need to know about it.” Bruins were largely solitary creatures, but if anyone knew how to warn the other bear shifters about the hunters, it would be Keller.
I studied the kitchen, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but other than a vertical gun rack on the floor next to the refrigerator, the kitchen looked normal. If dim and dirty.
A hallway to the left led to three more rooms that I could see, and a single door on the other side of the kitchen was open to show a small pantry.
At my signal, the guys headed for the hallway, but Warner stopped on the way to pull a ratty blanket from the back of the couch and drape it over our fallen, gruesomely stuffed brother.
While they searched the back rooms, I kept Abby in the front of the house with me, and I could practically feel her revving up for another argument about her own usefulness as an enforcer. But then her focus snagged on a framed photo sitting on an end table next to what at first appeared to be a bronze sculpture of a giant talon, but was, in fact, an actual thunderbird talon dipped in bronze.
She picked up the frame while I was rifling through kitchen drawers. “Hey, Jace, come look at this.”
I joined her in the living room, where she held the photo up for me to see. Two other men were in the picture with Hargrove, and it took all three of them to hold up the body of a well-muscled black cat, at least six feet in length, not including his tail.
I took the picture from her and my hand clenched around the frame. “That’s Leo.”
Leo had been Mateo’s roommate in the east cabin until he’d gone missing several months before. We’d found no sign of him until Abby’d discovered his head hanging on the wall of the hunter’s cabin she’d been lured to back in October.
“And that’s Steve.” She pointed to the hunter on Hargrove’s left in the photo, as if I could possibly have forgotten the man who’d tried to kill her. The man whose throat she’d ripped out, putting her on my radar as an adult for the first time. “This other guy has to be Darren, don’t you think?” She tapped the third man in the photo.
“I don’t want to rule anything out this early, but that’s a good possibility.”
“Check this out.” Abby turned to a set of built-in shelves to the left of the fireplace, where a dozen more photos had been lined up and pushed to the back of the shelf, not like a woman would display them, with artful angles and pretty frames, but like I would. That was a bachelor’s work if I’d ever seen it.
“Hargrove’s only in a few of these,” she pointed out. “But every single one of them shows this guy.” She tapped on the face of the unidentified man holding Leo’s front half in that first picture. “This has to be his cabin, right?” I nodded, but she was already pulling another frame from the shelf. “Look. In nearly half of these, he’s wearing a police jacket.”
Sure enough, the picture she shoved at me showed the unidentified man in a navy nylon jacket with the word police written on one side.
“Well, that would explain how he knew to remove those photos of you before the rest of the cops showed up. Especially if he was the one who took them.” The implications were startling. A human cop knew about us, but rather than alert the government—or even the internet—he’d decided to hunt us into extinction for his own psychotic pleasure. Which confirmed my longstanding suspicion that most of the world’s true monsters were human.
“Okay, we’re clear.” Mateo stepped into the living room. “No one’s here, and there’s nothing incriminating in either of the bedrooms or in the bathroom. Nothing at all that I can see, except that.” He pointed to the blanket-covered taxidermied stray.
“And this.” Abby showed him the picture of the hunters posing with his roommate’s body.
Teo’s hands curled into fists. “I’m going to rip them into tiny pieces.”
“The council will want to talk to them first, but I’ll do my best to see that we get to carry out the sentence, when the time comes.” But my assurance obviously did little to assuage his rage. “Okay, let’s go through everything and see if we can confirm that the cop is Darren and find a last name for him. Or an address, or something.”
Abby and I took the first bedroom, while Lucas and Teo tore apart the second. Warner started in the kitchen, then moved into the bathroom.
“This sucks,” Abby said hours later, as she sorted the junk in the top nightstand drawer into the “keep” and “trash” piles. So far, “keep” was nearly empty. “What we need is an internet connection. If Darren’s a cop, he can’t be that hard to track down.”
But Darren’s email had been right about the spotty connection, and none of us had managed to get a decent signal. Not that that would matter, without Warner’s equipment.
“As soon as we’re done here, we’ll head back to the lodge and let Warner get started.” But we had to go through everything first. A single receipt or bill could make all the difference in our hunt for the hunters. Unfortunately, we hadn’t found any of those, because their lake cottage obviously wasn’t a primary residence.
I was sorting through a closet full of hunting camo when a hinge squealed from the kitchen. I spun around to find Abby frozen, staring at the open bedroom door. I was sniffing the air, tense and on alert, when something crashed.
Abby lunged for the door, but I pulled her back and stepped in front of her. Teo and Lucas were already there when we got to the kitchen, and Warner was on our heels, coming from the bathroom. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
Teo pointed to the overturned kitchen table, which was propping the busted door open. “Someone just ran out the back door.”
“From where?” Abby frowned as she glanced around the kitchen, looking for some nook or alcove we’d missed. But we’d checked everywhere. There’d been no one in the house to run out the back door, and there was no one in the backyard.
“Could a human make it to the tree line that fast?” Lucas asked, staring out the window over the kitchen sink.
“Only one way to find out.” I shoved the table aside, clearing a path to the back door. “You and Warner go, but stay within earshot of each other. Teo, you shift, then join them.” In cat form, he would be faster, quieter, and have access to much better-developed senses.
The guys left to follow orders, and I righted the table, studying the kitchen for any explanation that made sense.
“There was no one here,” Abby mumbled. “We went through the whole house.” And that had only taken minutes. “Did anyone look in the pantry?” she asked, and I turned to see what she’d already discovered.
The light was on.
“I did, and Warner rechecked,” I assured her. “There’s nothing suspicious in there except the thought of an existence sustained by that much peanut butte
r, pork rinds, and domestic beer.” One end of the pantry was lined in pine boards stacked on concrete blocks. Shelf after homemade shelf was stacked with canned soup, generic brand sandwich cookies, puffed pork skins, and Miller Genuine Draft.
“Backwoods haute cuisine.” Abby stepped into the small space and pulled the string to turn off the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. As she was pulling the pantry door closed, she froze, staring at the floor. “Jace,” she whispered, backing slowly away from the pantry.
I followed her focus to the thin line of light showing beneath the cheaply paneled wall directly opposite the door.
“That’s not a wall.” I felt around the edges of the paneled section, then finally pressed in the right place to trigger a crudely fashioned yet well-hidden door. The panel swung backward to reveal a narrow, dimly lit staircase running down and to the left, along what could only be the exterior wall of the house. A wall that had no windows.
“A secret basement?” Abby said, and I nodded. Our backwoods hunters were also amateur craftsmen. “Well, now we know where he was hiding, whoever he is. And it has to be either Hargrove or Darren, right?”
“That’s my guess.” I inhaled deeply. “Do you smell that?”
“Old blood.” Abby sniffed the air. “Strays. And chemicals. Hargrove has another taxidermy studio—or whatever they’re called—down there.”
I’d drawn the same conclusion. Either he’d been teaching Darren his craft, or Hargrove spent a lot of time at his friend’s lake cottage.
“Okay, let’s get this over with.” She stepped past me toward the stairs, but I grabbed her arm.
“You’re not going. Not after what we found in the last basement.” And there could still be someone down there. The scent of old blood was strong enough to conceal nearly anything.
“I’m a big girl.” Abby tried to push past me again, her jaw set in a stubborn line, as if she needed to see whatever was at the bottom of those stairs.
“Stay here,” I growled. “That’s an order.”
Her feline eyes narrowed as she glared up at me. “If I stay here, you stay with me,” she said through clenched teeth, and her irritation caught me off guard. Why would seeing the basement be so important to her? “That’s the deal, remember?”
“Abby, your safety trumps our agreement.” Protecting her was the whole point of the deal we’d made. “I have to make sure no one’s hiding down there.”
She wanted to argue—I could see the impulse flashing in the green striations of her feline eyes. “Okay,” she said at last, but I recognized anxiety in the frantic cadence of her heartbeat.
Abby wasn’t mad; she was terrified of letting me go into that basement by myself.
TWELVE
Abby
Jace studied my gaze in the glow from the naked pantry bulb, obviously trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It killed me to let him think I was being pointlessly rebellious and disrespectful.
I felt bad about lying to him, even by omission. Really bad. Like, stains-collecting-on-my-soul bad. With every secret I kept and every order I resisted, I was risking our brand-new relationship—the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. But no matter how precarious his seat on the council was, with humans being slaughtered in his territory, he wasn’t the one with the most to lose on this mission.
Neither was I.
Jace gave me a kiss, then headed downstairs, and each tread creaked beneath his weight. I held my breath, certain that any second, he’d start shouting my name and demand an explanation. I needed to be the first person in that basement, even if I couldn’t explain that to him.
My pulse whooshed in my ears, counting the seconds as they ticked past. I needed to make a phone call, but he’d hear anything I said, and any conversation I initiated via text message ran the risk of being seen if an alert popped up on my screen at the wrong time.
When Jace’s creaky footsteps became solid thumps, I realized he’d stepped off the stairs and onto the basement floor. My heart pounded harder, beyond my control by then. As I reached for the door of the old, yellow refrigerator, hoping for a bottle of water to wet my miserably dry throat, my gaze snagged on the gun rack against the wall.
Hadn’t it held three rifles before? Now there were only two.
Shit! The guys needed to know that whoever’d run into the woods was armed.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened my mouth to shout for Jace—then froze when something hard poked my back through Robyn’s down jacket..
“Set your phone on the counter and shut your mouth, shifter bitch, or I’ll blow a hole right through you,” a hoarse voice whispered as fear tightened both my chest and my throat. Then I realized he was speaking softly on purpose. If we couldn’t hear Jace’s footsteps anymore, chances were good that he couldn’t hear the whispered threat.
I lifted my left hand into the air slowly, to show him it was empty, then I set my phone on the kitchen counter.
“Push it into the sink.” He pressed the rifle harder into my back.
Damn it. I gave my phone a little shove, and it slid down the grimy Formica countertop into the sink, where it landed with a plop. I groaned. My phone was ruined, and unlike the other enforcers, I hadn’t yet been issued a work phone.
“Now turn around. Slowly.”
I turned to find Gene Hargrove pointing the missing hunting rifle at my chest.
The broom closet behind him stood open, and with a mental kick to my own backside, I realized he’d opened the back door and knocked over the table to make us think he’d run into the woods, when he’d actually just hidden in the closet, probably expecting all of us to take off after him.
“Your pictures don’t do you justice,” Hargrove whispered, studying me through grayish blue human eyes. “You would look stunning hanging on my wall.”
“And you’ll be a deconstructed masterpiece once the worms get ahold of you. But only one of those two things is going to happen.”
Hargrove actually laughed. “Ambitious for such a tiny little thing. Are you the one who gave Steve and his boys so much trouble?”
“Size means nothing to a shifter.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. I was nowhere near as strong as my brothers, or even as Faythe, but surely I could give a pudgy, middle-aged human a run for his money. “I could probably throw you across the room with one hand.”
“Too bad we’ll never find out. You’re going to step quietly out the back door and down the steps, then head toward the truck in the driveway. If you even look like you’re going to run, I’ll blow a hole right through you.”
“Wouldn’t that put a kink in your plan to mount my head on the wall?” If I died in human form, he’d have no cat to stuff.
Hargrove shrugged one shoulder, without compromising his aim. “We’ve already got an eye on the other little girl cat. What are you called? Tabbies?”
Rage tingled like needles poking me all over, and I silently refused to answer.
“Darren’s gonna bring her in tonight. Now march. And keep in mind that if you holler and bring Mr. Hammond or any of his men to your rescue, I have no problem shooting every last one of them.”
Chill bumps rose all over my skin, and they had nothing to do with the cold. Hargrove knew who Jace was. Not just his name, but that he was in charge. Before I’d killed Steve, he’d told me that several of the shifters they’d slaughtered and stuffed had given in to interrogation, hoping for a quicker death. Had Leo been one of those?
Hargrove gestured with his gun for me to get moving, and my hands shook. How many bullets did a rifle hold? I knew nothing about guns, except that he wouldn’t get a chance to reload.
But that wouldn’t help the first couple who got shot.
I backed carefully toward the ruined backdoor, afraid to look away from Hargrove even for a second. “Jace is going to rip your head right off your shoulders.”
Hargrove took a soft step forward, forcing me closer to the door. “Those old stairs squeak if you don’t
know exactly where to step. We’ll have plenty of warning if he heads back up. Though it’d be a shame to have to kill an Alpha in human form. No real point in hanging that head on the wall, is there?”
A man-shaped shadow fell on the floor behind him, and I had to fight not to look directly at it. Jace stepped silently out of the pantry and deliberately shoved the door open wider. The hinges squealed, and Hargrove turned.
The instant the gun barrel swung away from me, Jace pounced—a denim-clad blur streaking across the kitchen.
He ripped the rifle from the hunter’s grasp, then rammed the butt of it into his gut. Hargrove bent over with a breathless grunt. He never even got a chance to shout.
“You okay?” Jace set the rifle on the kitchen counter, and I nodded while he hauled Hargrove up by the back of his thick neck. He wrapped his free hand around the human’s throat, digging in lightly, then leaned forward to whisper into his ear. “You’re obviously used to dealing with strays. If I didn’t want you to see or hear me, you’d already be darkening the devil’s doorstep without any clue how you got there.”
Jace winked at me, and my heart thudded in my throat. The loss of his rifle didn’t make Hargrove any less of a threat to me.
But Jace couldn’t know that.
“You so much as twitch before Abby gets back, and I’ll rip your throat out,” he growled. “Understand?”
Hargrove nodded frantically, his eyes wide. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down the side of his face, in spite of the frigid draft blowing in through the open doorway.
“Where am I going?” I asked, silently scrambling for a solution to my newest problem—Jace and Hargrove face to face.
“To get a roll of duct tape from the tool bench downstairs. Make it fast, Abby.”
I raced into the pantry and down the creaky stairs, thrilled to have caught at least a little bit of a break. Either Jace hadn’t found anything he shouldn’t have in the basement, or he hadn’t had time to look before he heard Hargrove upstairs.
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