by Lora Leigh
of that mating shit.”
“It gives us the heebie-jeebies,” Rule drawled.
Jonas grunted at that. “At least someone is still sane.” The look he gave Jackal was mocking.
The other man stared back at him stoically, as always. Jackal didn’t talk a lot. He did his job and spoke when he had to.
“Coffee’s inside,” Cabal informed them. “I have caffeinated for the four of you.”
He’d stick to the decaf for now. He didn’t need any additional problems where the mating heat and Cassa were concerned. Caffeine tended to make the symptoms worse. If his current state of arousal was any indication, he didn’t need anything to hype them.
Jonas looked around the clearing, his jaw tense before he shook his head and moved for the porch. “Pack up. You can head back to Sanctuary with your mate,” he stated as he reached the steps.
Cabal chuckled at the thought. “Forget it, Jonas. This will finish out here, and we both know it.”
“Not with that mate of yours tracking every move you make,” Jonas said coolly. “This investigation is too serious, Cabal. We can’t risk her.”
Cabal shook his head at that. “She already knows just as much as we do. The killer sends it to her whether we want him to or not, Jonas. We can’t afford to ignore that.”
He hated it. There was nothing he hated more than the fact that a killer was drawing his mate into these murders, but he couldn’t stop it. In the early hours of the night he’d admitted that he couldn’t keep her out of this. As long as there was a Breed going rogue, as long as he was drawing Cassa into this, then there was no way to keep her out of it.
“Hell, just what we need, a damned journalist involved in my business,” Jonas cursed.
“Come on in, Jonas,” Cabal sighed. “We don’t have a lot of time before she wakes up.”
Not much time at all. The mating heat was a fever that couldn’t be ignored for long, and Cabal knew it. Already the need to touch his mate, to taste her, to possess her was rising again within him.
The hormonal treatments she had been taking over the past years had helped those first few days. Adjustments were always required as time went on though, and Cassa hadn’t had an adjustment to counter the rise in hormones that mating heat was causing.
It wasn’t as hard on the male as it was on the female mate. At least Cassa had had the foresight to start the hormonal treatments ahead of time. That would ease it for her, delay conception, sometimes, and lighten the stress on the body from the need for sex.
It didn’t take away the need. There was no way to eliminate it, or to allow for the separation of mates for long periods of time. Jonas was stuck with Cassa in Cabal’s life for the moment.
“We don’t need this, Cabal,” Jonas growled as they entered the cabin and headed for the kitchen. “This situation is too damned delicate. We have to find this Breed, and when we do, we can’t risk a journalist being aware of the fact that I have no damned intentions of turning him over to Breed Law.”
Yeah, that was pretty much what Cabal had suspected. The rogue Breed had managed what no one else had. He killed without leaving a scent or a trace of his identity. There was no way to track him, no way to identify him.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to hide the fact that the bad guy doesn’t die in the end,” Cabal muttered. He knew Jonas. The man had the ability to make things work out in his favor.
“You’re going to completely fuck this assignment up, Cabal,”
Jonas bit out as Cabal moved to the coffeepot. “He’s going to kill again, and soon. We both know he will. Do you really want your mate in the middle of that?”
Hell no he didn’t, but he knew there was no way to get her out of it now. Not without making her hate him, making her run. He wasn’t about to force her again, he’d already tried that once. It hadn’t worked then, it wasn’t going to work now.
Cabal prepared the coffee before saying anything more. He didn’t have an argument for Jonas and he knew it. There was no damned way to explain to the other man that Cassa would hate them all if she was pulled out of this.
He’d wrestled with it most of the night. He’d come up with a thousand different ways to pull her out, and he knew that not a damned one of them was going to work.
“Cabal has a point, Boss.” Lawe spoke up as Cabal poured the coffee. “The killer contacts her when he doesn’t contact us. We could use that.”
“You don’t use my mate.” Cabal turned back to him with a snarl.
Jonas’s bark of laughter echoed through the room as Cabal jerked around to meet the other man’s mocking gaze.
“Hell, Cabal, it was no more than you were suggesting yourself,” Jonas informed him angrily. “Get off your mating high horse and settle the fuck down. If we’re going to figure out how to handle this situation from here on out, then I need your head clear, not filled with the need to fight or fuck.”
That was Jonas, blunt to the bitter end.
Pushing his fingers roughly through his hair, Cabal paced to the other side of the room as Jonas moved to the coffeepot. Cocking his head, he listened for any signs of movement from the bedroom and prayed Cassa would sleep just a while longer.
“Have you found anything out?” Jonas finally asked.
Cabal shook his head at the question. “Not enough. David Banks had a meeting in Charleston the day before he disappeared. He met with Brandenmore and Engalls, but we already knew that. The afternoon he disappeared he was supposed to meet with a reporter here in town, Myron James. He never showed up for that meeting.”
Jonas rubbed at his jaw thoughtfully. “We weren’t aware of that before.”
“Sheriff Lacey mentioned that Banks asked her for Myron’s phone number. When I questioned Myron about it, he admitted Banks called and requested a meeting. Said he had some information Myron might be interested in.”
“Any idea what the information was?”
Cabal shook his head. “He didn’t tell Myron, or Myron wasn’t telling me. I couldn’t sense any deceit though. There are secrets in this town, Jonas, plenty of them, but Banks didn’t seem to be privy to many of them.”
“He was a former mayor,” Lawe pointed out. “Mayors get all the gossip.”
“Not all of it,” Cabal said. “The movement that began here about thirty years ago to hide escaped Breeds wasn’t well known. There was only a small group of men and women involved in that. Banks wasn’t one of them.”
“We know all that,” Jonas pointed out.
“What we didn’t know was that Banks was originally part of that group,” Cabal told him. “Myron remembered his father mentioning that Banks was part of the group until they began to suspect that he had betrayed one of the Breeds early on.”
“There weren’t a lot that came through here,” Rule stated. “A few dozen.”
“But compared to those created, that’s a high number,” Cabal pointed out. “A few dozen escaped Breeds during that time would have been a problem for the Council.”
“And the Council would have made it a problem for the Deadly Dozen,” Lawe stated. “They were the trackers when everyone else failed.”
“Because they had connections where they were needed to track escaped Breeds,” Cabal agreed. “Banks was one of the Dozen, there’s no doubt of that. But why wait this long to strike back at the group? And how many of them were located in this area?”
“Most of the escaped Breeds were hiding in this area,” Jonas stated.
That was true. For some reason, the West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky mountains had been the preferred haven for Breeds escaping across the world.
One here, a few there—somehow most of them had made it to the States, and into the few groups within a three-state radius willing to hide them. Few of the groups knew about one another. Many of the Breeds were unaware of other individual groups. It was a matter of safety. If others didn’t know where they were located, or the Breeds in each group, then they couldn’t be betrayed under torture.
“What I’d like to know is how Brandenmore and Engalls managed to capture Breeds in this area and experiment on them without the Council or the groups aiding the Breeds knowing about it,” Lawe growled. “You’d think someone would have put a stop to it long ago.”
“The Deadly Dozen worked not just for the Council, but also for Brandenmore and Engalls,” Jonas pointed out. “They bought captured Breeds off the Dozen. When they returned to the Council with a dead Breed, they were paid again. It didn’t matter how they died, all they needed was their heads. Brandenmore and Engalls didn’t mind in the least removing a head.”
It was sickening. The horrors the Breeds had faced in their attempts to be free had sometimes been as harsh as the horrors they had faced within the labs.
“What I’d like to know is how the hell the killer is creating this carnage without leaving so much as a scent of himself on the victim. He rips their throats out with his teeth. There should be DNA, something.”
There should be, but there wasn’t, not so much as a trace.
“We were trained not to leave anything to identify ourselves,” Jonas stated. “That means scent, saliva, whatever. There are ways to hide it.”
“But there was only a very small group of Breeds with that advanced training,” Rule pointed out. “It wasn’t general knowledge.”
“Coyotes weren’t trained in the more advanced covert areas,” Jonas mused. “Jaguars were, Lions were.”
“Wolves were also left out of that training for the most part,” Cabal stated as he remembered the lists of training areas and the Breeds considered the strongest in each of them. “Jaguars and Lions were considered their best killers.”
“Yeah, we rock.” Lawe snorted at that statement.
“At least we were considered good at something,” Rule stated mockingly. “It kept us alive.”
“Six deaths and not a single clue, none of us were that good,” Jonas said coldly. “Even I’m not that good. Scent is something you can’t hide. You can mask it, but there’s not even a sign of masking. It’s as though a ghost is attacking and killing these men. And, gentlemen, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Did any of them? Hell, ghosts, fairies, happily ever afters—they were all lumped into the same category. Fairy tales.
“So where does that leave us?” Lawe asked. “Six dead men and no clue to the killer. You know he’s going to strike again, and soon. Banks and H. R. Alonzo were just the beginning. He’s not sticking to the no-names anymore. He’s going after the big guns.”
They hadn’t even been aware that Alonzo was part of the Deadly Dozen. Only after his death had they found proof that he had been a part of the hunting group.
“High-profile names,” Jonas growled. “Just what the hell we need.”
“And a reporter on our ass,” Lawe grunted as he glanced at Cabal with a mocking grin. “We’re going to have fun hiding this one.”
“You won’t hide much from that woman,” Jonas informed them all.
Cabal felt a burst of pride at the disgust in Jonas’s voice. Cassa was known for her ability to ferret out information despite Jonas’s wishes otherwise. She wrote the stories he hated and published them whether he liked it or not. Not that she ever published anything damning, but she didn’t mind a bit to tell the truth about what she did publish.
For a long time they had been able to keep her from learning anything that could hurt them. Those days were over. She already had information that could destroy the Breed community, but she had held back.
“So what are we going to do?” Lawe asked. “Let her in, or what?”
“Or what,” Jonas snapped. “Yeah, let’s let her in. Let’s just tell her how we’ve been protecting a rogue Breed and allowing him to kill our enemies for us rather than sending out teams to protect those we suspect of dying next.”
Cabal almost grinned at the thought of that.
“Do we even know who might be next?” he asked the director. He had no doubt that Jonas had a clue somewhere. The man usually did.
“Not yet,” Jonas snapped. “That’s not the point. Hell, if I did know, I’d still stand aside and let him finish it. He’s better at it than I am.”
“Sooner or later someone is going to accuse the Breeds of these murders,” Cabal warned him. “The Dozen know they’re being hunted now. One of them will start squealing in fear sooner or later.”
Jonas’s smile was tight and hard. “That’s what I’m waiting on. We get one of them, then we get them all.”
Cabal had already figured that plan out. Jonas ran from murder scene to murder scene cleaning up the mess. He searched for clues; he was looking for the killer, but even more, he was waiting on one of the members of the hunted group to raise his ugly little head.
“How much longer do you think it will take?” Cabal questioned the other man.
Jonas shrugged. “Alonzo is the most high-profile of the six dead. We’ll let him remain missing. Tanner has a handle on public relations, and we’ve managed to get a few rumors started that the Council itself was fed up with him, but his buddies will know differently. I’m hoping his death will force one of them out.”
“Six left to go.” Lawe shook his head. “Do you think they’re all still alive?”
“That kind of evil rarely dies young,” Jonas stated as he poured himself another cup of coffee and paced to the window of the kitchen.
Cabal watched as the director frowned out the window, staring into the snow-laden dawn.
“Evil rarely dies young, period,” he finally said as he turned back to them. “And what we’re dealing with here is a Breed that’s trying to change that. I want him caught, but I’ll be damned if I’ll force a human’s justice on him.”
“Murder is murder, Jonas,” Cabal reminded him. It was something Jonas had preached at them often enough when it came to a Breed’s death.
“There’s a difference between murder and survival,” Jonas snapped back at him. “We’ve managed to cover up these deaths to this point, and I’d like to keep it that way.” His eerie silver eyes flickered in anger. “And need I remind you the hell these men visited on Breeds in the past? They didn’t just capture a few and return them to the labs. They sold them for research. Research that if our information is correct was more horrendous than anything the Council did. They deserved their deaths.”
Cabal couldn’t argue that point. The information they were slowly amassing against Brandenmore and Engalls was enough to give even a Breed more nightmares. If they could manage to acquire proof, or a single witness to those horrors whom they could force to talk, then the two men that headed one of America’s largest pharmaceutical and research facilities would be subject to Breed Law. And Cabal had no doubt in his mind that Jonas would push for the limits of punishment where the two men were involved.
“Now figure out how to catch our Breed,” Jonas ordered him. “And while you’re at it, see if you can’t figure out why the hell the bastard doesn’t have a scent.”
“Possibly because he’s hiding it.”
They all turned to the door. Weapons cleared their holsters and aimed at the nosy little reporter poised at the entrance to the room, as Cabal jumped in front of her, his heart racing in horror at the threat those weapons posed.
She didn’t flinch; she didn’t back away. Her long hair lay in tangled waves against the material of one of his shirts as her bare toes peeked out of the hem of her jeans.
She looked like a little girl playing grown-up games. Games that could get her killed.
As he shielded her body, several things registered at once. She had managed to slip up on them, something that should have been impossible. Unless she had no scent. His nostrils flared as he tried to draw in the essence of her, just as he knew the others were doing.
There was nothing there. No mating scent, no arousal, no smell of his lust on her body. It was as though Cassa were a ghost, with no substance, with no scent.
He turned, gripped her arms and stared down a
t her in shock as he fought to smell the woman he had just spent the night spilling his seed into. There should be some trace of a scent. Any scent.
“What the fuck,” Lawe muttered to his side. “Jonas?”
Behind him, he felt Jonas shift, move. He knew the other Breed was doing exactly what Cabal was doing, trying to find a scent so elusive it didn’t exist.
Cabal narrowed his eyes on her, searched her face and realized the implications in a single heartbeat.
“Gentlemen, here’s your killer’s secret.” She lifted her hand and in the middle of her silken palm was a small white pill. “A scent blocker. Sent to me by the killer, reportedly created by Brandenmore Research. This is how your rogue Breed is getting by you.”
◆ CHAPTER 15 ◆
Cassa watched Cabal’s profile several hours later as they made the trek back down the mountain in the all-terrain Raider he was driving.
He was still angry. His profile was hard, his expression cool, and she’d noticed that the amber glitter in his eyes seemed duller. That was rage, because the dark green was more brilliant and seemed alive with the anger surging through him.
Panic had threatened to overwhelm her ever since morning, when she had given Jonas one of the small pills that had been sent to her, and explained just how well they worked. Jonas hadn’t been happy that she had eavesdropped on his conversation with Cabal the night of the Coyote alpha’s wedding reception. Cabal seemed even less pleased with her.
She remembered her first, ill-fated marriage. Whenever Douglas had become angry, she had carried the bruises, sometimes for weeks at a time.
Now, more than a decade later, she was sitting in a vehicle with a lover whose anger swirled in the air around her. There was an edge of fear, uncertainty. She hadn’t allowed herself to ever be placed in a position again where she had to worry about a lover striking her. She was beginning to wonder if perhaps she had bit off more than she could chew with Cabal. If she thought Douglas was dangerous, then her Breed lover was a hundred times more so.
He was angry with her, and what made the situation even more precarious for her was that she wasn’t certain why he was so furious.
Her interruption of his meeting that morning could be the cause, she thought. It had been a rather dramatic entrance. She had taken the pill when she had heard the Raiders advancing up the driveway, not long after Cabal had left the bed.
She’d had every intention of telling Cabal about the drug. It was too dangerous to hold secret for very long. If the Breeds’ enemies got their hands on it, then Sanctuary or Haven, either one, could be breached easily by the Council’s Coyotes and soldiers. No Breed mate would ever know a moment’s security, and every Breed child born would be at risk.
“Your attitude is starting to irk me.” Cassa forced herself to go on the offensive. “If you’re pissed off, then you could do me the courtesy of telling me why.”
He shot her an irate glance. An irate Breed was really rather commonplace, she assured herself.
“You could have warned me about that pill before Jonas arrived,” he pushed between gritted teeth. “And what the hell are you doing risking yourself by just taking some damned drug that an anonymous killer sent to you? Have you lost your mind?” There was the anger. His voice rose with it.
“Don’t yell at me, Cabal,” she ordered him with more bravado than she felt. What she felt was sheer panic. He was angrier than she had first thought. “I took a risk admittedly, but it was one that paid off.”
“It could have paid off with your life.” His hands clenched around the steering wheel as he navigated the mountainous path. “Son of a bitch, Cassa. Did you even think before you did it? Did you even consider the risks?”
She gave a little shrug. “I always consider the risks, Cabal. Whoever sent that drug and the proof of those killings doesn’t want me dead yet. He has something to prove. To the Breeds as well as to me. Killing me wouldn’t serve his purpose quite yet.”
Because the past hadn’t come full circle yet. Cassa knew that. The killer had other plans in store for her, the only question was whether or not she would survive them.
Was it foolhardy? Risky? No doubt. She had admitted that going in. But after more than a decade of doubts, recriminations and guilt, she knew she couldn’t do anything less than see this through now.
She had dropped the ball during the rescue of the German facility where Cabal had been imprisoned. Because of her husband, so many had died. Because she had trusted Douglas to care about the story even though her marriage was failing. And she had been wrong.
Now she had a chance to make certain that this rogue Breed didn’t destroy the Breed community as a whole. She refused to drop the ball on this one. She refused to back down.
“And all you thought of was yourself?” he asked, his voice lowering, darkening.
Cassa gave a bitter little laugh. “Who else should I consider?”
“Friends?” He snarled. “I know you have many of them, don’t deny it.”
She didn’t try to.
“Look, this is my job. It’s my life.” Cassa turned to him, her own anger mixing with her fear. “I weighed the consequences and took the risk. It was my choice to make.”
His lips thinned as he narrowed his gaze at the road. His hands didn’t relax on the steering wheel.
“You knew we were mates when you took it,” he accused. “Did you consider me?”
“Oh yeah, let me think about that one,” she bit out sarcastically. “No, I didn’t consider your opinion of it quite simply because I assumed you really didn’t give a damn. It’s not as though you gave the impression that you were ready for a mate, Cabal. A harem maybe.”
She hated that. The playboy of the Breeds. Or at least he’d been considered one half of a play team before his brother Tanner mated.
She watched as his jaw bunched, and she wondered if his molars were strong enough to stand the force of his teeth gritting together.
“I’ve never had a harem,” he stated angrily.
“Whatever.” Cassa blew out an irritated breath and flicked her fingers in his direction. “You were just fucking your way through the world. I understand.”
And she hated it. The thought of those women touching him, having him, touching those sexy-as-hell stripes while she still had yet to do so made her crazy. She curled her fingers at the thought of touching those oddly colored markings and tried to push past the image of her lips running over them.
A man shouldn’t be this sexy or so damned irritating.
“You don’t understand a damn thing,” he informed her. “If you weren’t constantly running scared, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like an animal chasing a rabbit. You ran from me every chance you had.”
“I simply stood aside to keep from being trampled by the hordes of lusting women,” she bit back acerbically.
But she had been frightened, and she knew it. Frightened of the strength of her desire as well as the past that she feared he would never forget or forgive her for.
“You were scared, just as you’re scared now.” There was a hint of censure in his tone. “When have I ever made you believe I would hurt you, Cassa?”