Stray

by Rachel Vincent

  Marc had all of that and more. He was decisive and evenhanded, but ruthless when he had to be. He’d been born to lead, and Daddy had guaranteed that his talents would never go unnoticed, especially by me. He’d made sure that the man closest to me—the only eligible man in the house during my formative years—was one he approved of and had, in fact, handpicked.

  Staring into those gold-flecked eyes, I realized that my father had steered me toward Marc not to make either of us happy, but for the good of the Pride. Because everything Daddy did was for the good of the Pride, even if it wasn’t good for any one individual. Including me.

  “You know he set us up,” I whispered, anger lending a bitter taste to my words. “You know neither of us ever really had a choice.”

  Marc frowned, never taking his eyes from mine. “I had a choice, Faythe, and I made it years ago. I told you I’d never change my mind, and I haven’t. You’re the one who left.”

  He had that right. I’d left, and spoiled all of my father’s careful planning. After all, even the best Alpha male was no good without a mate.

  Unable to hold his gaze anymore, I let my eyes wander. They fell on a framed photograph on my dresser: Marc and me at my senior prom. My mother must have put it there, because I certainly hadn’t. That was the night he’d asked me to marry him. It was also the night I’d run away for the first time, terrified not by anything that went bump in the night but of growing up to be just like my mother.

  Centuries ago, according to legend, our ancestors lived like true cats, with the biggest, strongest toms fighting for the right to mate the available tabbies. Unfortunately, there were very few tabbies. As I understood it, the problem lay not with the women but with the men. As with humans, the gender of our offspring is determined by the sex chromosome donated by the father. But in tomcats, the gametes carrying the Y chromosome are more motile than those containing the X chromosome. Simply put, the sperm cells that would produce male fetuses swim much faster than those that would produce females. This results in an average of five toms born for every one tabby.

  To say that the competition for mating rights was fierce and bloody would be like saying the universe is pretty big. There are no words to describe an understatement of such magnitude.

  Fortunately, in order to maintain the secret of our existence, most Prides were long ago forced to abandon instinct for the civilization of human society. In our modern Prides, each tabby chose her own husband. And almost invariably—whether through instinct, or deep-rooted social conditioning—she chose someone capable of leading her Pride.

  However, even with civilized customs in place and a support system of enforcers, the Alpha had to be a strong leader in order to keep the respect and loyalty of his Pride. A weak Alpha wasn’t Alpha for long, even in the modern world. By contrast, like my father, Marc would have been a great Alpha.

  Marc-in-the-picture looked so young, so happy. He was a triple threat: strong, charismatic and beautiful. Helen’s face may have launched a thousand ships, but Marc’s had sunk at least as many hearts, one of them mine.

  When I’d asked him to choose, he’d picked the Pride over me. He wouldn’t get a chance to do it twice.

  As he’d pointed out, I’d left, and just because he’d dragged me home didn’t mean I would stay there.

  I turned from the photograph to the live version, for the first time noticing tiny age lines in the outside corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry, Marc,” I said, suddenly compelled to apologize, in spite of refusing to do so earlier. “I’m sorry about the way I left. And I’m sorry about your leg. But nothing’s changed, so please don’t make this any harder by refusing to believe me.”

  He stared at me for almost a minute, as if waiting for me to break down and admit I was lying. Then, finally, he nodded, his face hardening with resolve. “Fine.” His eyes glazed over with the unreadable expression he wore at work, the one that reflected my own feelings but revealed none of his own. He’d cast me out and put up his defenses.

  It was about time.

  Marc pushed my chair back up to the desk. “You’ve always been stubborn, and I don’t know why I thought that might have changed.”

  I smiled, more comfortable on familiar terrain. “I don’t know either.”

  “Let’s just try to be civil to each other.”

  “I’ve never been less than civil to you, Marc.”

  He snorted, pulling his hands from his pockets in feigned exasperation. “What do you call slapping away my hand when I tried to comfort you?”

  “Bad judgment?” I admitted, flushing with embarrassment.

  “Damn right.” He didn’t smile, but the line of his jaw softened just a little; it wasn’t often I admitted to being wrong. “Let’s go eat.” He opened the door and gestured for me to go in front of him.

  “You go ahead.” I picked at the edge of my comforter. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Yes, you are. Stop pouting. You’re hungry, so go eat.”

  “You gonna make me?” I asked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

  “If I have to.” Marc limped toward me with a determined edge to his lopsided gait. He reached for my arm again, but this time I dodged his grip. I was learning too.

  “Okay, okay. I’m going.”

  I smiled as I marched down the hall, convinced I was going of my own volition, in spite of the large tomcat walking at my back. Like I said, I find comfort in the familiar.

  Eight

  I polished off two burgers in spite of the tension. It takes a lot to get in the way of a cat’s appetite, and even Jace couldn’t screw up a hamburger. When the food was gone, we flipped a quarter to see who had to clean up. Owen lost a coin toss to Jace and got stuck doing the dishes. Ethan lost to Parker and wound up wiping down the cabinets and cleaning the stove. Marc was excused because of his injury.

  No one asked me to lift a finger. I think they were afraid of losing a foot to my temper. It was kind of nice to be feared for once. Almost as nice as being respected. From what I can imagine, anyway.

  I left the guys in the kitchen and wandered into my father’s office. In spite of our strained relationship, I was more comfortable in his sanctuary than anywhere else on the ranch. It was dark and kept just a little cooler than the rest of the house, and always made me think of evenings spent playing Candy Land or reading the Sunday-morning funny pages from my father’s lap.

  As a little girl, I’d known of no more comfortable place to sleep than on Daddy’s love seat, and that was where I found myself, curled up with my knees touching my chest and my head resting against the cool leather cushion. The scent of leather conditioner brought to mind countless times I’d sat there in years past, listening in as my father conducted council business over the phone. I’d dripped jelly from my biscuit onto the cushion once when I was seven, and he hung up on the Alpha of the midplains territory to help me clean it up. I remember being awed by how important he’d made me feel.

  But that was years ago, and a lot had changed since then.

  I was almost asleep when the soft click of the door latch brought me instantly alert. My eyes flew open, frantically searching the dark room as my heart raced. Still lying on my side, I arched one arm over my head, fumbling on the glass end table for the lamp switch. My fingertips brushed over a notepad and a small, heavy statuette of a cat reared to pounce. But I couldn’t find the lamp.

  Wood creaked beneath someone’s bare feet, but my human eyes couldn’t make out more than a man’s vague silhouette against the dim moonlight spilling in from the foyer.

  Still feeling around on the table, I twisted silently onto my stomach, hoping for a better reach. Instead of the lamp, my fingers swept a path across my father’s marble-and-jade chess set, knocking off most of the hand-carved playing pieces.

  “Shit,” I muttered, still stretching for the lamp as the last figures clattered to the floor. I held my breath, trying to determine from the sound whether any of them had broken. I couldn’t tell.

 
Another footstep whispered across the floor as the silhouette approached. I froze, sniffing the air. I identified his scent even as he spoke.

  “Relax, it’s just me.”

  Marc. Of course. “I’m not sure that’s any reason to relax,” I said, sagging with relief anyway. I let my head fall to rest against the arm of the love seat, my hand dangling above the chessboard. In two long steps, Marc was there, turning on the lamp.

  I squinted against the sudden glare. “Why the hell were you sneaking up on me like that?” I demanded, frowning up at him. I pushed myself into a sitting position and glanced at the clock over the door. It was nearly three in the morning, and I couldn’t clearly remember why I’d come to Daddy’s office instead of just going to bed.

  “I wasn’t sneaking up.”

  “The hell you weren’t,” I snapped, swinging my feet onto the floor. My right foot came down on a chess piece, and I bent to pick it up. It was a jade rook, shaped like a traditional castle turret. And it was whole, thank goodness. I had no idea how to go about replacing one-of-a-kind chess pieces carved especially for my father by an associate in China. The artisan whose handiwork I’d sent crashing to the floor had died a decade before I was born.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Not now, Marc.” My voice was sleep-gruff and groggy. “I can’t deal with you anymore tonight.”

  “It’s not about us.”

  “Good, because there is no us.” The rook still nestled in my palm, I slid off the love seat and onto the floor to pick up the other pieces. Marc knelt across from me with the scattering of jade and marble figures between us, like slain soldiers on a miniature battlefield.

  “I was supposed to go to Oklahoma tomorrow.”

  “I know. Jace told me.” I set the rook on a corner square of the chessboard, next to a jade knight, a horse frozen in the act of tossing its mane.

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that you were supposed to check out a report about another stray.” I held a white marble bishop up to the light, looking for cracks. “Why?”

  “Did he tell you who called it in?”

  I shook my head slowly, suspiciously, my focus shifting from the bishop to Marc. Why should it matter who made the report?

  “Danny Carver.”

  I froze, my hand clenching around the cold marble, and met his eyes in dread. Dr. Carver. Shit. That means there’s a body.

  Dr. Danny Carver was a tom born into one of the western Prides. When I was a kid, he worked as a part-time enforcer for my father as part of an agreement allowing him to complete his fellowship in forensic pathology at a school in our territory. He’d been a kind of last-minute backup, just for emergencies. After his fellowship, he’d taken a job as an assistant medical examiner in Oklahoma and my father had gladly accepted him as an adopted member of our Pride, just as he would later accept Jace, Vic, Parker, and several other toms now scattered across the territory.

  After nearly ten years in the same office, Dr. Carver was promoted to senior assistant to the state medical examiner, which gave us a conveniently placed set of eyes and ears. We’d hoped never to have to use his position, and we’d been lucky for the most part. Until now.

  “What happened?” I asked, my hand hovering over the prone form of a white pawn. I desperately didn’t want to know the answer, but I’d long since learned that ignorance was not really bliss. Not ever.

  “They brought in a partially dismembered body yesterday morning,” Marc said.

  I groaned, and let my hand fall into my lap, empty. I was supposed to be at school studying the classics, not at home hearing about abductions and dead bodies. This was the worst summer vacation ever.

  When I realized he’d stopped talking, I glanced at Marc. He hooked one eyebrow at me like a facial question mark, and I nodded for him to continue as I picked up the pawn and set it on an empty square in the second row.

  “The cops can’t figure out what happened to her, but their best guess so far is that she was attacked by some psychopath and left to die, then actually killed by a large wildcat. But it won’t take them long to measure the claw and bite marks and realize there shouldn’t be cats that big roaming wild in suburban Oklahoma. Or anywhere else in the U.S.”

  My eyes were glued to his face as I waited for the rest, but nothing more came. “What happened to her?” I asked again, my hands tangled together in my lap. He was avoiding the details of the crime, probably hoping to spare me from the specifics. Far from finding that considerate, I found it annoying. If I needed to know, I’d rather get it all over with at once.

  “There were finger-size bruises on her thighs and more mixed in with claw marks on her neck. Danny thinks he raped her, then Shifted to tear out her throat.” Marc glanced away, but I caught a glimpse of raw fear and outrage in his eyes before he could lower them. “Then he ripped into her stomach.”

  My breath caught in my throat as I choked on my own horror. A jade pawn slipped from my fingers. Marc’s hand shot out, almost too fast to see, and the pawn fell into his palm before it could hit the floor.

  That poor girl, I thought, watching as he carefully placed the piece on the chessboard in line with its comrades. I cleared my throat, drawing his eyes back to mine. “How old?”

  “Faythe, you don’t need—”

  One sharp glance stopped him cold, and I was glad to see that at least one of my old tricks still worked. “How old, Marc?”

  “Nineteen.”

  My eyes squeezed shut as I gave in to my need to wallow in denial. That kind of thing didn’t happen in our territory. In South America, yes. But not in the States, and definitely not in the south-central territory. At least, not since it happened to Marc’s mother.

  I ran my thumb over the cold, smooth chess piece in my hand, noticing absently that it was the marble queen, stately in her white robes and pointed crown. She lay on my palm, the features only hinted at on her polished stone face. But the expression I saw on her was one I’d seen in a photograph once, before Marc snatched it from my hand to shove it back beneath the socks in his top drawer.

  Sonora Ramos. He never spoke about her, so I knew nothing but her name, and I only knew that because I’d overheard a private conversation between my parents.

  The territorial council recognized only three capital crimes. The first was murder, the second was infection of a human, and the third was disclosure to a human. The wildcat who’d invaded our territory fifteen years earlier was guilty of all three.

  We never discovered his real name, but there was a note in his back pocket made out to “Jose,” so that’s what we called him, when we called him anything at all. Jose snuck into our territory after being run out of a Pride somewhere in Central America for crimes I couldn’t stand to even think about. From what we could tell, his presence in southern Texas was reported the very day he arrived. It was an incredible stroke of luck. Pure chance. And if it hadn’t happened, Marc would have died that night.

  As soon as he got the call, Daddy dispatched his three best enforcers with instructions to find the intruder and escort him back to the border with as much force as necessary. Unfortunately, a simple escort proved to be much too little and far too late.

  The enforcers found Jose, in cat form, in the home of a widowed Mexican immigrant. He killed two of them while the third Shifted. The remaining enforcer took out the now-wounded Jose with little more than a scratch to show for his trouble, but it was too late for Sonora Ramos.

  Jose had broken into Marc’s house and attacked his mother while she slept. The details of the assault were eerily similar to what happened to the girl in Oklahoma, including the fact that Jose used his victim to satisfy more than one kind of appetite. He’d had his muzzle buried in what remained of her stomach when Daddy’s enforcers found him.

  Marc woke up at some point during the attack and tried to defend his mother, but Jose swatted him away with a single paw full of unsheathed claws. With Jose dead, the enforcer found Marc between his mother’s bed
and the wall, bleeding and unconscious. The claw marks on his chest were already swollen at the edges and festering—sure signs that he would soon be one of us.

  He was only fourteen years old.

  Marc waved a chess piece in front of my nose, drawing my attention back to him. “Are you okay?”

  I tried to smile, but my effort felt more like a grimace. “Yeah. You?”

  He nodded. “I’m fine.” But I found that hard to believe. How could he be fine, faced with such a graphic reminder of what had happened to his mother?

  I studied Marc’s face, conscious suddenly of how much he’d changed since the day we met, the morning after his mother died. He’d looked so scared, lying alone in the guest bed, a wisp of a boy with dark curly hair and deep dimples. He’d arrived at the Lazy S with nothing but a threadbare suitcase and a sad scowl. But he was a fighter. Even as an eight-year-old, I’d recognized the will to survive in the quiet defiance in his eyes and hard line of his mouth, both of which said that he’d seen the worst the world had to offer, and that nothing I put him through could possibly compare.

  He was right.

  Sitting on the floor across from him fifteen years later, I thought back to his first year with us. His adjustment period was long and hard, and his first Shift sent his body into severe shock. He wouldn’t let anyone near him at first, and didn’t say a single word until he’d been on the ranch for nearly two months. But in the end, he not only survived, he thrived, against the predictions of the entire council.

  Except for having watched his mother die, Marc was probably the most fortunate stray in history. Because he was so young when he was scratched, and because his attack happened on our territory, my parents felt responsible for him. They took him in and nursed him through the initial sickness—the scratch-fever—when most other Alphas would have let him die, not out of callous disregard, but out of practicality. Survival of the fittest. In the wild, when a mother dies, her cubs die too. But my parents couldn’t let Marc die. They saw in him the opportunity to try to make up for the solitude and tragedy that define the lives of most strays.