The phone buzzed as I pulled my socks on, then again while I dug Olsen’s pack from the pile. He had a hunting knife. I’d seen it. And in human form, I would need it.
I slid the knife into a loop on the right leg of my pants, then crossed the clearing and grabbed the insulated jacket they must have made Robyn take off before they’d tied her up. Her small, folding knife was in the right pocket, and the material was still warm from her body heat. I couldn’t believe how fast everything had happened.
Armed, dressed, and now fairly warm, I knelt next to Dani, trying to avoid looking at the guys. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, as I unlaced her hiking boots. Mine were a quarter mile away, in the wrong direction. “I hate to leave you like this, but I have to help Robyn. I swear they’ll pay for what they did to you.”
Fortunately, she had small feet, so the boots were only half a size too big, and since I wore an extra pair of socks, I could hardly tell.
As ready as I was gonna get, I put on my hiking pack and stepped into the woods with only a single glance back. I felt a fleeting bolt of sympathy for whatever forensics team would soon show up at the scene of the crime. The analysts would be confused over Dani’s bare feet, the paw prints in the dirt, and the drops of blood from the cut on my arm, which would seem to be contaminated with feline DNA.
I headed in the direction from which I’d last heard Steve, Billy, and Robyn’s footsteps, mentally crossing my fingers that they would stick to that heading. My human form kept weight off my injured arm, but for that advantage—that necessity—I’d sacrificed most of my enhanced feline senses. My nose and ears were still more sensitive than a human’s, but they were nowhere near the advantage they would have been in cat form, and the flashlight I carried was no substitute for feline vision, a huge benefit in the dark.
After a quarter mile, I was freezing, exhausted from Shifting without eating, and reeling from the trauma of what I’d seen. Reality had finally hit me, and shock was like a cold blanket wrapped so tightly around me that I could hardly breathe, let alone think.
My arm throbbed with each beat of my heart, and by the time I’d gone half a mile, blood had soaked through both my shirt and Robyn’s jacket. That one Shift hadn’t been enough to completely close the wound, and moving my arm had kept the blood flowing. Frustrated, I turned the flashlight off and shoved it into the side pocket of my pack, then used my free hand to apply pressure to my cut. But then I couldn’t see.
Damn it! How was I supposed to save Robyn when I couldn’t even find her?
You’re not cut out for this, Abby. Jace was right. You should just sit down and wait to be rescued. Again.
But if I did that, Robyn would die scared, alone, and in pain. Just like Dani. And I’d be the coward who’d given up on her.
You’re not using your resources… a new voice in my head said, and I recognized it as Faythe’s. You’re not human, and you’re not helpless.
I closed my eyes, and the memory came back in full. We’d been training in the barn, at night, with the lights off. I could hear her when she spoke, but the others had gone silent, and I couldn’t see any of them. Because then, like now, I hadn’t been using my resources. My senses.
The partial Shift. It was standard procedure now, for all enforcers patrolling in human form, and it was one of the first things Faythe had taught me.
I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and forced everything else from my mind. The cold, the dark, the pain in my arm. None of that mattered. Robyn mattered. Finding her. Saving her.
Avenging the others.
Pain shot through my right eye, followed by an answering spear through my left. The pressure was enormous, as if my eyeballs would pop right out of my head. But when the pain faded and I opened my eyes, I could see. The colors were muted, of course, as they always were when I took on my cat form, but the woods were clear, each tree crisply outlined by the little available moonlight.
I grinned over the small victory. This is going to work.
My ears were next, and they were a real bitch. Shifting them was more complicated, and the pain was like needles being jabbed through my eardrums and into my brain. But the difference was unbelievable. I hadn’t realized how much I was missing in human form until I could suddenly hear like a cat.
Rodent heartbeats. Wind rustling branches far over my head and half a mile away. An owl, halfway across the damn forest, swooping in on its prey with a rush of air unique to that particular wing formation and dive pattern.
And beneath all that, the steady, low-pitched hum of machinery. My pulse spiked. A generator.
Steve’s cabin. It had to be.
I let go of my injured arm and took off through the woods, easily avoiding fallen logs and jutting branches now that I could see them. Cold air burned my lungs, but I barely felt it. I was buoyed by the hope blooming in my chest. I could save her. I could make up for failing to save Dani. And maybe in doing that, I could prove to myself for good that the cowering, helpless Abby of days past was gone. The men in the cage had killed her, but from her ashes, this new phoenix had been born, and she was ready to unleash justice on their brothers in crime.
Justice and pain.
Lots of pain.
Half a mile later, the cabin came into view, its generator growling now. The motor drowned out any sounds I might have been able to hear from inside the building, and the sound was almost too much for my pounding head to take, so I Shifted my ears back, squatting behind a shelter of tall, thick ferns. But I kept my cat eyes. Feline pupils would adjust to the light inside the cabin, once I got in.
The cabin was small—so why did they need such a big generator?—and I couldn’t see any movement through the windows. After several minutes of watching and listening, I eased my pack off my shoulders and onto the ground, then ran hunched over to crouch beneath the uncovered front window, which painted a square of untamed forest floor with light from within.
When no one charged out of the cabin wielding a knife, I dared a careful glimpse through the glass—and nearly melted with relief.
Robyn lay on the floor against the back wall of what appeared to be a hunter’s private retreat. She was bound with duct tape now, but still fully clothed. And she was completely alone, except for the half-dozen disembodied deer heads staring down at her from the rustic, paneled walls.
The trophies were grotesque, a horror only humans would find tasteful. Werecats didn’t kill for sport. We hunted for food, and we didn’t display the corpses of our prey like gruesome prizes.
Robyn didn’t see me—her eyes were closed—and I couldn’t hear anything over the growl of the generator, but there was only one door leading off the main room, and it was closed. Surely if Steve and Billy were still there, they’d have been watching their prisoner—or worse.
Maybe they’d already gone back to the campsite looking for me. They would never expect me to find them—or even to know who they were—and they’d know Robyn couldn’t escape on her own.
I pulled Olsen’s knife from the loop on my jeans, then crouch-walked to the front door. The knob didn’t turn, but it was only secured with a twist lock. I turned it hard to the right, and the lock snapped, then the door creaked open several inches. I froze. The door was louder than I’d expected, even with the generator’s constant grumbling. But when Robyn didn’t wake up and no one stormed into the room, I took a deep breath and stepped into the cabin, then closed the door softly at my back so I could listen.
The noise from the generator was muted from inside the cabin, but it still drowned out both my heartbeat and Robyn’s. My cat’s pupils narrowed, adjusting quickly to the influx of light, but I still smelled her blood before my eyes pulled her into focus. She lay on the floor fifteen feet away, blood slowly oozing through a tear in her jeans from a small wound on her calf. She was unconscious, but with any luck, I could haul her out of human hearing range before she woke up, in case she started screaming. Werecat strength was the only advantage that translated fully into human form. Thank g
oodness.
Aware of each fleeting moment as it slipped into the past, I raced across the room toward Robyn—then landed hard on my rump when my feet slid out from under me.
What the hell?
Stunned, I sat on the floor, still gripping the knife in one hand. I was too surprised to think, my mouth open, trying to drag in the breath I’d lost. My empty hand curled in the carpet, and I froze.
The cabin wasn’t carpeted; I’d slipped on a rug. A very familiar feeling rug, which had slid out from under my feet as I ran.
No…
I closed my mouth and drew in a deep breath through my nose.
Nonononono! The rug was fur. Smooth, soft, sold black fur.
Werecat fur.
I scrambled away from the gruesome accent piece until my back hit the wall. My hands shook, my knife clattering against the floor over and over again.
I didn’t recognize the individual scent from the rug. If I had—if I’d known the tom who’d died to make that carpet—I might have lost it right then. I was still shaking in Dani’s boots when the front door opened a second later, and Steve walked in carrying my hiking pack.
“Hello, Abby.” He dropped my pack at his feet and closed the door, his knife glinting in the overhead light. His blade was much bigger than mine. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Waiting for me? Hadn’t they been searching for me?
My fist clenched around the handle of my own knife, but I was no longer sure it would do any good. The truth tapped at the back of my mind like soft knock on a thick door, but I couldn’t let it in. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t possible.
The door on my left creaked open, and Billy stepped out of a dark stairwell leading beneath the cabin. With him came the scents of fresh blood, fur, and some harsh, acrid chemical. What the hell were they doing in that basement? Slaughtering more innocent college students? Or skinning animals to make macabre décor?
Had they personally killed and skinned the cat whose fur I’d slipped on?
Humans didn’t know about shifters, and natural jaguars had never been native to Kentucky, so what did they think they’d caught? An escapee from an animal preserve?
“What do you want?” I asked, trying to keep them both in sight at once.
“For now? Just your company,” Steve said, but his words had an oddly upbeat ring to them. His voice sounded…eager. Saturated with some dark, dangerous desire. “But soon, we’re gonna need you to shift. That’s what you call it, right?”
I stared at him, stunned. Surely I’d misunderstood. He couldn’t know what I was.
Steve raised his knife, still stained with Dani’s blood, and pointed to the far end of the room. My gaze tracked the motion reluctantly, and that’s when I saw what hadn’t been visible through the small front window.
I gasped, then choked on my next breath. I blinked, but the gruesome images didn’t go away. They wouldn’t even blur mercifully, as Mitch’s body had beneath my traumatized gaze. Instead, they stared down at me through eyes too much like my own.
Four werecat heads were mounted in a row on the far wall, on identical wooden plaques. Their mouths were open, lips curled back as if they were hissing, but the pose was artificial. Arranged post mortem. I could see that, even Steve and Billy couldn’t.
Three of the cats were strangers. Strays, most likely—Jace would have told me if several Pride cats had gone missing. But the fourth, the last one on the right, was Leo Brown, one of Jace’s enforcers. He’d disappeared during his vacation a couple of months before, and no one had found a single sign of him. Until now.
“I…” I closed my eyes, then forced my gaze back to Steve. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Denial. It was instinct, if not exactly flawless logic.
“Oh?” Steve raised one brow, glancing at my blood-soaked sleeve, then back to my face. “How’s your arm? Or would that be your front paw?”
That’s when the truth became too much to deny. They knew what I was. They’d known all along. They’d followed me into the woods, hunting me, and my friends had become collateral damage.
Wood creaked on my left as Billy squatted next to me, unfazed by my knife. Or maybe he couldn’t see it, held so close to my opposite thigh. “You’re the first girl shifter we’ve ever found. Been watching you for weeks now.”
“Psyc. 204?” I whispered, glancing up at Steve, who now leaned against the front door, blocking the exit.
He nodded. “A stroke of genius, right? That’s also how I met your girl Robyn, and good ol’ Mitch. When he mentioned you all were going camping, I was happy to suggest a good, private campsite. Not many people know about this place.”
Which was why it had seemed perfect for my solitary run.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t push beyond the fact that they knew. That they’d lured me to their cabin to be butchered, stuffed, and mounted. And I’d fallen for it. “You’re hunters?”
“Technically, yes, but that’s like describing a world-renowned chef as a short-order cook. We hunt the most dangerous species on the planet.” One side of Steve’s mouth turned up into a creepy grin. “You didn’t really think no one knew your little secret, did you?”
Actually, I had. I’d always assumed that if anyone in the human world knew about us, everyone would know. But exposing our existence would have put an end to their private safari, and they were obviously unwilling to risk that.
Sick bastards.
“Damn, Steve, look at this!” Billy grabbed my chin, and I gasped as he turned my face toward the light. My fist tightened around the knife handle, but I was biding my time. I couldn’t afford to miss. “She’s got cat eyes. Never seen that before. Maybe we should just cut her head off and mount it like this.”
“Hmmm. Dramatic…” Steve ambled closer for a better look. I jerked my chin from Billy’s grasp, clenching . Waiting for the perfect moment. It would come.
Please let it come…
“Especially with all those pretty red curls,” he finished.
When Steve was close enough, I closed my eyes and sent up a silent prayer. Then I dropped from my heels onto my rump and shoved my left leg out, grunting as I swept both of his out from under him.
Steve shouted as he went down. Billy reached across me for Steve, trying to pull him out of the way. I swung my knife underhanded, as hard as I could. The blade slid into Billy’s stomach, pointed straight back toward his spine. Warm blood poured over my hand. I shoved the blade up, and the knife ripped through flesh toward his sternum.
Billy grunted, but never screamed. I pulled the knife free, and his eyes widened. He hunched over the gruesome gap I’d opened in his torso.
Steve scrambled backward and leapt to his feet as a spray of blood arced up his shirt and over his face.
Billy fell over. His skull smacked the floor and he blinked slowly, staring at nothing. His mouth opened and closed, and more blood leaked from the corner. Then his chest stopped moving.
Steve gripped his own knife tighter, his knuckles white from the pressure. And finally I stood, arms out at my sides, knife ready, feet planted for stability. Just like Faythe had taught me.
We faced off, circling slowly as my pulse raced and my heart pounded. I tried to draw him away from Robyn, who was still breathing shallowly. I could see the lump on the side of her head. She’d been bait for me, but now she was just a witness to his crimes, which meant Steve had no reason to keep her alive.
“You should probably know, guns are the most effective way to hunt a cat,” I said, wishing I could wipe blood from the slippery grip of my knife.
“Didn’t think we’d need them for a little girl. You’re more trophy than challenge.”
I circled toward the couch and a rickety-looking end table. “This ‘trophy’ is gonna spit on your corpse in about three minutes.”
“Yeah, I’m scared of a five-foot-nothin’ scrap of meat in borrowed boots.” He rolled his eyes, sidestepping me. “A couple of your fellow shifters t
alked our ears off before they died, hoping for a quick end to the pain, and they all agreed on one thing. Girl cats are rare, and they don’t fight.”
My gaze narrowed on him. “Your intel is outdated.”
“And your luck has run out. Billy practically fell on your knife, because he was still green. But this isn’t my first hunt. In a couple of days, your pretty little head’s gonna be mounted in a cabin in Mississippi, where the next shifter will get one fleeting glimpse of pointed pupils and red hair before we nail him up right next to you.”
Mississippi was free territory, crawling with strays, most of whom wouldn’t be missed. How many had Steve already killed? How many had talked before they died?
Edging to the right, I glared at him with all the force of my hatred and let my right foot snag the leg of the end table. I tripped and went down on my ass, hard, cursing to make it look real. My knife slid across the floor, just out of reach of my grasping fingers.
Steve dropped on top of me, blade ready. I shoved my right hand into my jacket pocket. He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled my head back, exposing my throat. I faked a terrified whine as I pulled Robyn’s folding knife from the pocket of my borrowed jacket. Steve’s eyes widened. I pressed the button, and the blade popped out as I shoved it forward.
The three inches of steel slid between his ribs. Steve grunted. I twisted the knife as hard as I could. He screamed and dropped his weapon to clutch at mine.
I shoved him off and stood, Robyn’s knife sticky in my hand. He lay on the floor, blood pouring from his chest. More bubbled up into his mouth, and I knew I’d hit his lung. He gasped, struggling to breathe, and his eyes were already glazing over. “But girl cats don’t fight,” he wheezed, as his hands fell limp at his sides.
I arched both brows and pulled my phone from my pocket as his last breath rattled from his throat. “Welcome to the new world order.”
Jace got there twenty minutes later, armed with three enforcers and everything necessary to clean up my mess. Before I could even try to explain what the hell I’d been thinking and why he shouldn’t ship me back to my father in handcuffs and a dunce cap, he shut me down entirely with an Alpha glare and a growl worthy of any tom who’d ever held the title.