Stray

by Rachel Vincent

  My mother hadn’t mentioned her second son’s name in ten years. She could deal with his decision to leave the Pride, but only if she didn’t have to think about it. Or talk about it. Ryan was my mother’s kryptonite, her only weakness, at least that I knew of. He was the prodigal son who’d never returned. And his name was off-limits, even to my father.

  Ethan crossed the room quickly, but I couldn’t tell whether he was coming to my rescue or hers. Either way, he knew we’d had enough. “Hey, Mom,” he said, plopping down on her other side. “Do we have any more of those cookies you made yesterday?”

  Her fingers never paused. “Ethan, there’s no possible way you could still be hungry after three trips to the buffet. And no, you finished all the cookies this morning. After breakfast and before your midmorning snack.”

  He grinned, holding up one end of the bootie for my inspection. I flipped him off behind my mother’s head, but he only grinned harder, still watching my face as he spoke to her. “I don’t suppose you feel like making some more, do you?”

  She sighed and her hands settled into her lap. I saw the beginning of a frown on her profile just before she turned to face him. “It’s late, Ethan. Go make yourself a sandwich if you’re still hungry.”

  From my left, Parker tapped me on the shoulder and jerked his head toward the hall. I nodded, sliding carefully off the sofa as Ethan tried to convince our mother that he had no idea how to assemble a decent club sandwich.

  There are several advantages to being a cat that carry over to a lesser degree in human form, but stealth is the best by far. By the time my mother realized I was gone, I was racing across the backyard, with Jace and Parker on my heels.

  Seventeen

  “Wait.” I slowed to an abrupt stop, breathing heavily as I curled my toes in the cool, soft grass halfway between the main house and the guesthouse. Parker and Jace ran several steps behind me, their hair blown back by the persistent evening breeze.

  Parker sidestepped me seconds before his momentum would have knocked us both to the ground. “What?” he asked, smoothing salt-and-pepper hair with one hand.

  “Aren’t you guys supposed to stay with Kyle?”

  One corner of Parker’s mouth curled up in amusement. “He’s fine. We left him with Michael.”

  “He’ll pass out soon anyway,” Jace said, moonlight glinting blue-white in his eyes as he came to a stop on my other side. I’d been afraid of what I’d see on his face, but he wore his usual carefree grin, as if nothing had happened. “We’ve been giving him whiskey as fast as he’d drink it. The man’s a lightweight.”

  “He’s grieving, Jace,” Ethan said, slinking out of the thick shadows behind us. “And by the way, Faythe, you owe me.” His eyes were hard, his anger about far more than having to come between me and our mother. He was still mad about my involvement with Jace.

  “Bill me,” I snapped, wishing he’d mind his own business. Jace wasn’t mad, so why should he be?

  “You’re lucky I haven’t taken it out of your hide.” He wasn’t smiling, and his voice was almost a growl.

  I stepped away from the others, giving myself room to maneuver. “You’re welcome to try.” I could still take him down, and now that he was grown, he’d fall even harder.

  Ethan grinned, but not because he was happy. If he’d had real canines, he would have been flashing them at me. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Okay, boys and girls, that’s enough for now.” Parker put one heavy arm around my shoulders, and the other around Ethan’s, steering us toward the guesthouse at the edge of the tree line. Ethan and I would both be staying there, me on the couch and him on a pallet on the floor, because he’d given his bed to Michael for the night. My mother had fixed up Owen’s bed for Kyle.

  Ethan shrugged Parker’s arm off. “I need a drink,” he muttered, taking off ahead of us at a fast walk.

  “Me, too.” Jace jogged past me to catch up with Ethan, sparing only a short glance in my direction. Long shadows trailed behind them as they approached the light on the guesthouse porch.

  “Yeah, I could use a drink,” I said. “Or two, or three.”

  “Well, we can certainly oblige.” Parker squeezed my shoulder, and I glanced up at him gratefully. “I think a little binge drinking may be in order tonight. There’s no better way to deal with tension and grief.”

  I took issue with his concept of therapy, but I kept my mouth shut because I couldn’t think of any better way to cope, especially considering the outcome of my hunt that morning. Besides, Parker was the world’s all-time best drinking buddy. He’d had lots of practice.

  Ahead of us, Jace and Ethan jogged up the porch steps and through the front door, clearly determined to claim a couple of bottles before Parker got near the kitchen island, which doubled as a fully stocked bar. The guys did quite a bit of drinking on their nights off, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It’s really hard to get a cat drunk, possibly because of our accelerated metabolism, which also makes it difficult to sustain a buzz.

  Out of habit, I paused with my hand on the old iron porch rail, looking up at the second floor. The light was on in Marc’s room; he was still up. I’d never been able to pass the guesthouse without looking up at his window. Not once. It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?

  Parker, true gentleman that he was, opened the front door for me, then followed me into the living room. The guesthouse was small but much warmer and more comfortable than the main house. And though the occupants sometimes changed—as older enforcers moved on, and younger ones came to replace them—the ambience stayed the same. The guys kept the fridge stocked with soda, squirt cheese, and frozen burritos, food my mother never served, and to my knowledge had never tasted. Ever since we were old enough to walk, my brothers and I had been welcome to make ourselves at home anytime we needed a junk-food fix.

  A couple of years ago, the guys went in together on an obscenely large wide-screen television, which they kept tuned to sitcom reruns, action movies or ESPN. There were always empty glasses on every flat surface and discarded clothing on the floor. It was like going away to summer camp every time I walked through the door—until Marc and I broke up. I hadn’t been in the guesthouse since, in almost five years.

  But one glance at the living room told me nothing had changed. The floors were still scarred hardwood, because the guys couldn’t keep carpet in decent shape. The walls were dingy white and almost completely bare, because they didn’t know what to hang up. Cheap miniblinds covered the windows, and the only plates in the cabinet were made of paper. Video-game controllers and DVD boxes littered the living-room floor. And the entire place smelled like sweat and old pizza, scents I associated with some of the best times of my life.

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  Parker waved a hand at the couch against one wall. “Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.”

  “You guys could use some new furniture,” I said, brushing off a crumb-crusted cushion before I sat. The couch was upholstered in 1980s brown-and-yellow plaid, the cushions flattened to half their original thickness. When I sat, I sank deep enough to place my navel several inches lower than my knees.

  “Nah,” Jace said from behind the makeshift bar, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a shot glass in the other. “It would take us years to break in anything new.”

  I laughed. “That would sure be a shame.”

  “What’s your pleasure?” Parker asked, lining up a series of bottles on the faded Formica countertop. If Marc or Jace had asked the same question, I might have raised an eyebrow at the choice of words, but not with Parker. His only vice was alcohol, and even under the influence he was the most polite man I knew. And the gentlest, other than Owen.

  Before I could reply, wood groaned behind me, and my words died on my lips. But someone else answered for me. “Margarita on the rocks, heavy on the salt.”

  I whirled around and felt my hair swing out in an arc behind me. Marc stood at the
bottom of the stairs, wearing only a snug pair of jeans with both knees worn through. Light from the bare bulb in the stairwell played on muscles I’d watched him develop years ago. He had one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around the neck of an empty beer bottle.

  Sensitive parts of me tightened as my eyes lingered on the lines of his chest, drawn to the four long, parallel scars that had brought him into my life. It was all I could do to keep from squirming on the couch. I hated that just seeing him like that could affect me so strongly, and I hated it even worse that he knew it. And he wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the room heard my raspy intake of breath, and they’d have to be blind to miss the flush scalding my cheeks as I took in Marc’s scent from across the room. At the edge of my vision, Jace downed his first shot, following it with a slice of the lime he’d just cut. Then he snatched the shot Ethan had poured for himself and tossed it back too, ignoring my brother’s grumbling protest. I saw it, but it barely registered. I couldn’t drag my focus from Marc.

  “How did you know that?” I whispered, knowing he could hear me. I’d been barely eighteen when we broke up, and too young to drink. So there was no way he could know my drink of choice. At least, there was no way he should have known.

  “Vic told me a couple of years ago.” His face was completely blank, impossible to read. “He watched you at Hudson’s on your twenty-first birthday.”

  My blush deepened. If Vic had witnessed my birthday binge, he’d know I hadn’t left the bar alone. And Marc would know, too. I’d been an idiot to think my life at school and my life on the ranch were unconnected. They were hopelessly intertwined around me, like two different vines fighting to strangle the same poor tree, and only my desperation for privacy had kept me from seeing it.

  Marc looked away first, and my eyes followed him into the kitchen. He took a juice glass out of the dish drainer and half filled it with whiskey, then finished off the glass with Coke from a can. Without even a glance in my direction, he sat at the island on a bar stool, his back to me.

  “Sorry, Faythe,” Parker said, waving a clear plastic carton with less than a single swig of bright green liquid at the bottom. “We’re out of margarita mix. What’s your second choice?”

  “I don’t know.” I’d only had a couple of drinks since that night at Hudson’s. I’d never been much of a drinker, in part because I didn’t know how to achieve a buzz without looking like a lush in front of my friends. But the guys did, Parker in particular.

  Parker was the oldest of six boys, each no more than eighteen months apart. As teenagers, the Pierce brothers were infamous for putting their mother through hell. On one notorious occasion, Mrs. Pierce came home to find all six of her boys, the youngest of whom was then fourteen, passed out drunk in what remained of her formal living room. Her husband was at the Lazy S at the time, attending a yearly council meeting. He took the call from his wife in my father’s office, surrounded by his fellow Alphas. And me, of course, though at the time I had no idea why Daddy kept including me.

  As luck would have it, Mr. Pierce accidentally pushed the speakerphone button at exactly the wrong moment, and the entire room heard his wife turn over responsibility for all six boys to him. In one long, near-hysterical sentence, she said that grooming Caroline, their ten-year-old daughter, was all she could handle at the moment, and he could do what he wanted with his sons, so long as he kept them away from her.

  Mr. Pierce’s first act as de facto warden was to get rid of the three boys who had already come of age. He negotiated right then with the leaders of three other territories, making arrangements for his sons to serve as enforcers, to teach them discipline and responsibility. Parker had been at the ranch ever since, for the better part of ten years.

  “The trick is to drink it quickly, then start on another one,” Parker said, crossing the room to hand me a tall glass filled with a dubious-looking brown liquid.

  I held the glass up to the light, looking for a justifiable reason to hand it back. Maybe spots on the glass, or a hair floating on the surface? No such luck. To be polite, I’d have to try it. “What is this?”

  “Long Island Iced Tea.”

  Oh. I could handle tea.

  But, if I’d watched him mix my drink instead of watching Marc’s tanned shoulders tense and relax, I would have known that the only thing a Long Island Iced Tea had in common with its namesake was color. I took a drink and made a face but managed to swallow it. For a moment, I considered asking Parker for a plain soda instead, but then my eyes settled on Vic’s empty recliner, and I remembered why I was there in the first place instead of asleep in my own bed. Sara. Raped and murdered. And put on display.

  I took another sip, and then another after that, trying to drown out my thoughts and wipe the gory images from my mind. But no matter where I looked, I saw her body as Michael had described it. Every time I closed my eyes, even just to blink, Sara’s eyes stared back at me, brilliant blue and framed by lashes that had never needed mascara. So I kept drinking, desperate to forget the way she died, to hold back tears I still hadn’t shed. I drank to numb an ache so acute that my heart throbbed painfully with each beat, and my head pulsed with a near-paralyzing pressure, like it might burst and end my misery once and for all.

  And finally, after thirty minutes and three Long Island Iced Teas, my liquid anesthesia began to take effect, though the taste failed to grow on me.

  Across the room, Marc had settled into a faded and lumpy armchair. In one hand he gripped the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and in the other he clenched its cap, as if he were afraid of what his hands might do if he left them unoccupied. My bet was that he would ruin more drywall, and maybe break a couple of his own fingers in the process. He didn’t deal well with anger or grief, both of which showed clearly in the lines of his face.

  Marc had abandoned his glass along with the Coke and was drinking whisky straight from the bottle, openly watching me between gulps. I’d never seen him drink like that, and the binge worried me until after my second refill. By then, I didn’t care. He was just as upset as I was, and we both seriously needed to relax.

  At some point, I switched over to screwdrivers. I’d tried straight vodka but just couldn’t swallow it. When I spit the first mouthful all over the floor, Parker sent Ethan to the main house for a carton of orange juice. The juice made all the difference.

  Jace stuck to tequila and lime slices, and for a while I watched him, waiting to see the familiar grin he usually wore. But he never smiled, only opening his mouth to take another drink. If he was drinking to forget about Sara, he was doing a very poor job of it; I’d never seen him look sadder. He tried to match Marc gulp for gulp but couldn’t do it. He passed out slumped over the bar, with the bottle still clenched in his right hand.

  I giggled, thinking it served Jace right for calling Kyle a lightweight. Then I laughed at myself for giggling, and that was when I realized I was drunk. There was no other logical explanation for why I might find that funny. But at least I was a happy drunk. Marc was just plain moody.

  Eventually, Parker and Ethan carried Jace up to his room to sleep off the tequila, but by then, very little of what I saw was actually sinking in. And even less of what I heard was.

  Alone in the living room with Marc, I became uncomfortably aware of his eyes on me. Intentionally ignoring him, I concentrated on what I could hear upstairs. Parker and Ethan were talking, but my concentration was shot, so I only picked up a phrase here and there.

  “…if we don’t get her back?” Ethan asked. Metal springs groaned as they lowered Jace onto his bed.

  “We will,” Parker said, his voice followed by two thunks, which I assumed to be Jace’s shoes hitting the floor. “And they’ll all pay…”

  A door closed somewhere overhead. “…we’re too late?”

  “…another drink?” That was Parker. Definitely Parker.

  “…on’t want another drink. I want to pound the shit out of someone.”

  “…have an idea…”

&nb
sp; I glanced away from the stairs when Parker’s feet came into view. He started to say something else to Ethan, then noticed that my glass was empty and veered in my direction instead. He refilled my drink—again—and by the time I had to use the restroom, I could no longer remember where it was. Or how to walk.

  Ethan grudgingly helped me to the bathroom door but said I was on my own from there. I made it, but barely. In front of the toilet, as I did the universally recognized “I have to pee” shuffle, I cursed Levi Strauss for his insanely complicated system of buttons and corresponding holes. What was wrong with a simple drawstring?

  When I got back to the living room, Ethan and Parker, who seemed least affected by the liberal flow of alcohol, were taking out their anger vicariously through a video boxing game on the huge television, their digital counterparts pixilated and nearly life-size. And very bloody.

  Averting my eyes from the simulated death match, I saw that Marc had taken my seat on the couch. I stopped in the middle of the room, trying to make the floor quit rolling while I waited for him to move. By the time I realized he wasn’t going to, I was past the point of caring where I sat.

  “I won’t bite,” he said, staring up at me through half-closed eyes. “This time.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes, which turned out to be a bad idea. When the room stopped pitching like the deck of a ship at sea, I relented. “Fine, scoot over.”

  “There’s plenty of room.” He patted the six inches of threadbare cushion between him and the arm of the couch.

  “Scoot, before I throw up on you.” That did it.

  Marc moved several inches to his right, and I dropped onto the vacated cushion. My empty glass sat on the floor by my foot, and I thought about asking Parker for a refill but decided that if I was too drunk to get it myself, I was too drunk for another. That turned out to be a really good decision. It was the only smart thing I’d done all day. If only I’d done it a little earlier.