The kid went still. Animal still.
“You’re the nature boy. Likes the great outdoors. Your brother Lew works in a funeral parlor. Knows all about tidying dead bodies. Now Hugh, he was the problem child. Quite a rap sheet there. Assault and battery, mostly against gay men. Three brothers. Identical triplets. Among shifters, that’s a litter. That’s a pack. You’re the wildlife expert, Drew. How does a pack hunt its prey? They work as a team. They take turns running the prey to exhaustion and then they move in for the kill. What are you, Drew? Wolf? Coyote? Dingo?” He narrowed his eyes at Drew’s dusky skin. “Dhole? African hunting dog?”
The kid backed off. His shin hit the coffee table and sent takeout boxes tumbling. So many boxes. More food than a single person, even a shifter, could eat.
Dillon went for his gun. “Where are your brothers, Drew?”
Coblentz laughed abruptly, a yodeling sound that sent chills skittering down Dillon’s spine. Beneath it, he caught a whisper of movement behind him. He whirled, straight into a blow from a blackjack. He caught a vague glimpse of a figure in a baseball cap, with a second, identical figure in the background.
“Right here, homo,” the closer one said, and hit him again. Dillon’s senses faded, to the sound of high-pitched, hooting laughter.
Chapter Seven
Two voices were speaking, and laughing, when Dillon came awake. He continued to feign unconsciousness while he took stock. The concrete-hard surface beneath him, coupled with the scrape of grit in uncomfortable places, told him he was lying on the desert floor, and naked. No phone, no gun. The sun teetered on the horizon, on the brink of going down.
No sign of Kaz, either. He must have been left behind, in town. Maybe even still watching the house. But safe. Dillon hoped he’d had the sense to call in Barrows.
Not that they’d have any idea where Dillon was. Dillon himself had no idea. Though he could hazard a guess of what was about to happen.
“Hey. You. Hunter.” Somebody kicked him in the ass, while another tittered. He knew what the laughter meant now, what he was up against. It wasn’t laughter. It was a hunting call.
He rolled over carefully. Drew Coblentz, in uniform, stepped back. Another kid, wearing a baseball cap, t-shirt, khaki shorts and a face identical to Drew’s, grinned down at him. “I’ll bet you’re Lew,” Dillon said. “The cleaner-upper. Drew picks out the hunting ground, and you sweep up afterwards.”
So where was—
A blast of hot air hit his face. Dillon looked up into a blunt gray-yellow muzzle. The hyena wrinkled its lips, showing off thick teeth. “And you must be Hugh,” Dillon finished.
The hyena reared up on its hind legs and shifted into a third Drew Coblentz. Unlike the other two versions, this one had hard, narrow eyes that belied the boyishly innocent features. “You’ll get what’s coming to you, homo,” Hugh promised him. To his brothers he said, “We need to make this quick. The cops could be on us any second.”
“Will not.” Drew was already stripping, as was Lew. “They don’t know the land out here like I do. No one’s finding us until we’re done.”
“Then it’s happy times ahead.” Hugh kicked Dillon in the side, perilously close to his kidneys. “Start running.”
The trio backed away from him, amid hooting hyena laughter. Dillon scrambled up and ran.
At least it wasn’t dark yet. Not that visibility helped. Nothing but emptiness dotted by cactus stretched before him. The “roads” out here were barely more than tracks. No speedy police rescue. Why the hell did Barrows live in a town too small to have a copter?
He glimpsed a flash of movement to his left. One of the hyenas dove into the brush. Getting into position. They’d run him ragged, herding him from one to the other, before they made their final charge and dragged his legs out from under him.
Dillon ground his teeth. That wasn’t going to happen.
He slowed to a jog, conserving his strength, scanning the ground for weapons. If fortune truly smiled on him, he might find a sharp, grippable sliver of stone, or a rock heavy enough to smash in thick hyena skulls.
Harsh panting that wasn’t his own sounded from behind him. Dillon pretended to stumble, then whirled and kicked. His heel hit the hyena in the shoulder. He followed up with a second kick with hopes of breaking a leg, but the beast scrambled away. Laughter yodeled out of the brush. The hyena hurled a snarl at him and circled.
Okay, then. Screw it. He’d make his stand right here. “Let’s go, you sons of bitches. I’m not running. You want your kill, you’ll have to work for it.”
He heard the second hyena charge and barely dodged in time. One he could hold off, maybe even overpower. Not three working in concert. Not without a miracle.
And the miracle arrived, in the form of a lean, spotted bullet that slammed into the midst of the Coblentz brothers like a guided missile. One of them actually tumbled end over end. The other two froze in confusion. So did Dillon.
Kaz?
In the speed-blurred flesh. He swerved past the hyenas toward Dillon, just long enough to dump something from his mouth at Dillon’s feet. Dillon’s gun. At the same time, the tumbling hyena regained its feet, let out a furious yodel, and charged them both. Dillon snatched up the gun, got a firm grip on the saliva-slicked handle, and put a silver bullet in its skull. The loping body stumbled and collapsed, its gaping jaws still yearning for the kill.
He aimed at the remaining two. “Who’s next?”
The threat was enough to cause one hyena to go human and throw himself to the ground with his hands clasped on his head. The other whirled and hightailed it for the horizon. Kaz spat out a growl and sprinted after him. Dillon didn’t dare take his eyes off his prisoner, but the high-pitched squeals and cheetah snarls that came out of the twilight told the story clearly enough. Moments later Kaz returned, now in his human form, dragging a thoroughly-cowed hyena by one hind leg. He dumped the beast beside his brother and continued on to Dillon, where he finally stopped and bent over, hands on his thighs, sides heaving.
“Never … ran distance … before,” he gasped out. “Don’t like it. Cheetahs … not marathoners.”
“Save it for later. Get your breath back.” He studied his prisoners. Neither Coblentz seemed inclined to move. The abrupt demise of their murderous brother had taken all the fight out of them. Dillon risked taking one hand off his gun so he could scrub his palm on his thigh.
Kaz noticed the movement. “Sorry. They left it in the house. Nowhere else to carry it.” He stuck out his tongue. “Awful taste.”
“I’ll buy you a bottle of wine to wash it out. Good wine. Did you notify Barrows?”
“No time.” Kaz wasn’t gasping as deeply now, and even straightened up a little. “I heard the laughter. Recognized it. Broke in through the front. They’d already taken you out the back. I saw the jeep pull out. I grabbed your gun and went after you. Couldn’t stay fast enough long enough.” He straightened all the way, his breathing now closer to normal. “There’s something to be said for pacing oneself.”
“But you found me.”
“I got lucky. The famed hyena arrogance. Once they left Bedloe they started stripping you. They threw your clothing out piece by piece. Probably thought they were being cute. Instead they left me a trail. Good thing you dress in layers.” He flashed his wide, toothy grin. “Once I found the jeep I could track them by scent. I was casting about when I heard the laughing. Sound carries well out here.” Kaz nodded at their prisoners. “I told you we’d make the perfect team. What now? Execution?”
Dillon looked at the pack—one hyena, one human, one dead. “We got the killer. The other two will go back to face justice. Those people in town need closure.” He scowled down at his nakedness.
“Not like this, though. Do me a favor? They left their stuff somewhere over there. Paw through Drew’s uniform, see if he had a cell on him. I’ll call Barrows, have him bring a van. And some clothes.”
Chapter Eight
The adult pronghorn buck r
aced across the desert, at speeds ordinary deer could only dream of. Kaz, a golden, spotted rocket, flashed in pursuit. Dillon thought he had good eyesight, but he needed binoculars to keep them in sight. Should have borrowed a jeep, he thought. At that rate, they’ll end up in Mexico.
He didn’t fight the thrill that coursed through him, watching Kaz run. Poetry in motion applied to cheetahs, though at that speed Kaz was more haiku than sonnet. Then he put on one final burst and became a couplet, only feet from his quarry. He leaped—
A primal cheer ripped out of Dillon when the buck went down. It struggled madly for escape while Kaz wrestled it to the ground. With body and paws Kaz pinned the buck for a three count, then slid off and backed away.
For a moment the buck lay still, probably in shock. Then it cautiously lifted its head to stare at Kaz, perhaps wondering in its dizzy herbivorous brain why it was still alive. It didn’t wonder long. It scrambled up and took off as if shot from a cannon, dwindling to a tawny speck in a matter of seconds.
Meanwhile Kaz all but danced back to Dillon, with his tail swinging and his sides heaving like a bellows. That didn’t stop him from shifting into his human form and flinging himself into Dillon’s arms. Dillon held him close while he got his breath back. Both of them grinned like teenagers.
“Did you see?” Kaz said. “Did you see me? I caught him! A young, healthy buck at the peak of his speed and I caught him! Tell me you saw, because I’m not doing it again. Not for several hours, at least.”
“I saw.” Dillon kissed Kaz on the forehead. “You’re the fastest land mammal in North America. Maybe in the world now. Gold medal. Why didn’t you kill him?”
“I only kill what I’m going to eat. Unless you wanted the liver as a courting gift?”
Dillon made a face. “No thanks. Tell you what—I’ll buy you breakfast, you buy me dinner, we’ll count that as the courting phase. How’s that?”
“I’ll do you better. Come back to New York with me. We’ll have dinner at my restaurant. And afterwards…”
“New York?”
“I have an apartment there, though I rarely stay in it for long. Unless you’ve something holding you here?”
At the moment, no. The hunt was done. As far as the human population knew, the killings had been animal attacks, perpetrated by Drew and Lew Coblentz “exercising” their illegally-obtained pet hyena. Siccing a dangerous wild animal on people equated to use of a deadly weapon, allowing Barrows to charge the remaining Coblentz brothers with murder. Justice was served, without humans panicking over the revelation of shapeshifters in their midst.
“New York sounds good to me,” he said. “I hunted a shifter there once. A crocodile moved into Central Park. He was—”
Kaz stopped his words with a kiss. “No talk of hunts while I celebrate my triumph. There’ll be time for that later. Right now, I want to show you how a cheetah cherishes his mate.”
“What, right here?”
Kaz arched his brows. “Do you see anyone around?”
Dillon grinned slowly. “Compromise. Let me introduce you to a time-honored human tradition involving the back seat of a car. We’ll have to be quick, though, before it gets too hot out here.” Although, to judge by the lift in his pants, it was plenty hot already.
Kaz’s teeth flashed. He scraped them along the side of Dillon’s neck. Dillon’s cock responded with an instant lurch. “I’m good at quick.”
“Perfect,” Dillon said, his own teeth bared. “I feel the need. The need for speed.”
The End
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