Wild Card

  My pulse raced as I sped down the highway, chasing a car that might or might not have been a blue Honda Civic with my kidnapped bride trapped inside. I must have looked like a psycho, weaving in and out of the left lane, honking my horn at assholes already doing better than the speed limit on a straight, open stretch of highway, and if I’d been driving my Z4, they might have (somewhat correctly) concluded that I was a rich asshole who felt entitled to the whole road.

  Yet I’d never been farther from my Z4 or a carefree stretch of highway. I’d never in my life done anything as important as this. I’d never had anyone else depending on me, and the fact that it was Kaci—and that I’d gotten her into this—made me press the gas pedal harder than I should have. Harder than the poor little rental could probably take for very long.

  I swerved around a delivery van and finally had a clear view of…what turned out to be an aquamarine Ford Taurus. Not Jared’s car. And unless Kaci’s was one of the small, dark heads just peering above the rear seat, aimed at a cartoon playing on a screen strapped to the back of the front passenger’s seat headrest, I’d been following the wrong car for miles and miles.

  And Kaci was gone.

  Fuck!

  My fist flew, but I stopped it about an inch from slamming into the dash board. Hurting myself wouldn’t help anything, and further damage to the car would only run up a credit card bill Titus was probably already shaking his head over.

  I eased off the gas a little to keep from scaring the family in the Taurus, then I passed them like a normal asshole, rather than a psychotic street racer. And as I was pulling back into the righthand lane, using my blinker and everything, a sharp movement in the traffic up ahead caught my eye.

  I looked up just in time to see a car swerve to the right and plunge over the shoulder of the road into the desert, then flip. Then flip again.

  Oxygen deserted me. The sudden pressure in my chest was paralyzing. I couldn’t make out the color of the car from here, but I knew without even a flicker of a doubt that it was a blue Honda Accord. And that Kaci had somehow caused that crash.

  That she might not have survived it.

  The cars around me began to slow. The Ford Taurus dad was already on his phone, staring at the wreck as he—presumably—called 911.

  I had to get to Kaci. But when the first car stopped on the shoulder of the road to help, I realized my rescue attempt would have an audience.

  Shit.

  I pulled the rental to a stop on the shoulder, in the middle of a line of gawker/do-gooders, then I slammed the gearshift into park and practically vaulted out of my car, without bothering to close my door before I raced around the hood. I peered over the shoulder at the wreck, blending into the gathering crowd just long enough to verify that the car lying upside down at the base of a hill was, in fact, Jared Taylor’s.

  The front of the roof was crushed, the windshield shattered.

  Panic seized my lungs and squeezed. Kaci…

  I pushed my way to the front of the small crowd. “There’s a man! Someone help him!” A woman shouted, and sure enough, when I got to the edge of the embankment, I saw Jared Taylor trying to crawl out the passenger’s side of the inverted vehicle. Blood dripped from his temple and his hands looked scratched up, but none of that explained his trouble making it out of the car.

  But my heart leapt into my throat when I saw that the rear windshield was totally covered in smears of blood. If Jared was driving, Kaci would have been in the back.

  No.

  “I got it,” I shouted as I scrambled down the rocky embankment. “Everybody stand back. The car could blow.” I highly doubted that was true, but the last thing I needed was human interference. Unless there was a doctor or nurse in the crowd who could administer first aid to Kaci.

  Screw Jared.

  At the bottom of the embankment, I ran twenty feet to the overturned Honda Civic, now characterized as much by dust and dents as by the dated blue paint. “Justus,” Jared called, and though his voice was strong, my name came out slushy.

  His slurred speech and the bloody scalp told me he had a concussion, but I walked right past him and squatted to peer through the back window.

  The rear of the car was empty, but…weird. A thick sheet of plastic had been screwed to the backs of the front seats, like the barrier between cops and criminals in a police car, and the bloody fingerprints on one end told me Kaci had snapped the damn thing in half to get out of the wrecked car.

  And that she’d been bleeding when she’d done it.

  She was hurt.

  He would pay for that.

  I squatted next to Jared, hyper aware that the crowd was still watching us, and that if I didn’t at least appear to be helping him, someone else might step in. And that we were probably already being filmed on someone’s cell phone.

  “Where is she, you psychotic bastard?” I whispered as I peered past him to see that his legs were tangled in his seatbelt, one pinned between the steering wheel and the edge of his seat, which had been compressed during the wreck.

  “She ran.” Jared flinched, as if it hurt to speak, and I hoped to hell it did. “I think she’s okay.”

  “You better hope she is, because if there’s a scratch on her, I’m coming back to rip your arms off.”

  “Big talk from a trust fund brat,” he growled, and his words sounded clearer, as if anger were giving him focus. “Your bitchy little bride caused this wreck, so any ‘scratches’ are her own fault.”

  “Is he okay?” someone shouted from behind us.

  I turned to look up at the crowd, shielding my face from the sun—and any cameras—with one hand. “Yeah. His leg’s caught, but I got it.”

  “An ambulance is on the way!” another voice yelled.

  “Great, thanks!” Damn it. I turned back to Jared. “I’m going to get you out of here, and I hope it breaks your fucking leg.”

  “Do it,” he growled. “I can’t get in a human ambulance.”

  But I was more motivated by his potential pain than by keeping him out of the hospital. “You know you didn’t make it, right?” I said as I grabbed him beneath both arms. “You’re several miles shy of the border. She’s still in the free zone.”

  I pulled, and he shouted in pain. Then he clenched his jaw and spoke through gritted teeth. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you to take her. She’s not worth this. Man-eating little bitch.”

  I pulled harder, and something popped. Jared screamed, and I peered into the car to see that his kneecap looked…odd. Even through his jeans.

  It was dislocated. Or maybe I’d torn the damn thing off.

  “She’s worth everything, and you’ll never get near her again.”

  “It’s not her we want, you idiot,” he growled as I hauled him onto the dirt several feet from the car. “It’s you.”

  “Well, you’re not getting either of us.” Before he could argue, I turned to the crowd still gathered up the hill. “Hey, could I get some help here? I think the car’s pretty stable, but this guy’s heavy.”

  “I’m fine!” Jared called out. Then he muttered obscenities at me under his breath. But when he tried to stand, his dislocated knee folded beneath him and he crashed into the dirt with a less-than-masculine screech of pain. I might have laughed, if I weren’t hyperaware that Kaci was still out there somewhere by herself. Hurt and bleeding.

  As two men scrambled down from the road, I glanced around, trying to figure out where Kaci might have gone. There was nothing but desert and a few rocky hilltops on this side of the highway, but—

  My gaze caught on a small trail of dark droplets in the dirt, stretching from the car up the embankment to the road, about fifteen feet from where the crowd had gathered.

  Shit. She crossed the highway.

  One of the men who’d come to help saw me staring at the blood trail. “There was someone else in the car. A girl,” he said. “We called out to her, but she just ran off. Must have been in shock.”

  “Thanks, guys,” I sai
d as he and the other newcomer helped Jared to his feet. “I’ll see if I can find her.” While the injured enforcer glared at me, I followed the trail of blood up the embankment toward the highway.

  At the road again. I waited for a couple of cars to pass, then I confirmed that the trail led across both oncoming lanes and onto the median. I couldn’t see any farther than that, but by then Kaci’s destination was obvious. In the distance was a small grove of trees, an oasis likely fed by a stream or small river, and—

  Movement in that direction caught my eye, and I squinted.

  Kaci. My chest ached, and renewed urgency spurred me into action. It was hard to tell across the distance, but she seemed to be limping. Or stumbling.

  I hurried back to the rental, relieved to see that oncoming cars hadn’t yet ripped the open driver’s side door off, then I started the car and swung onto the road again as fast as I could. I took the first available turnaround, then sped back toward the wreck from the opposite side of the highway. When the trees came into view, I slowed and veered carefully onto the dirt, fully aware that the rental car was a sedan, not an SUV.

  I drove past the thin length of woods and parked at the end, facing the direction we’d need to head to put more distance between us and the Southwestern territory boundary. Then I got out of the car and took off through the foliage.

  Kaci only had a few minutes’ head start on me. I was determined to find her and make up for putting her in danger in the first place.

  This was my chance to do the right thing—even if that meant risking execution to take her home.

  Thirteen

  Kaci

  Desperate, I glanced around as I stumbled through the underbrush. The woods looked thicker to the west, so I headed that way, and when I found as dense a patch of underbrush as I was likely to, I squatted in it to rest while I examined my wounds.

  My head was tender, but there was a lump in my brow, rather than a dent, so I decided to call myself lucky on that front. I had to use the filthy tail of my shirt to wipe the blood from my arms. Most of my scratches were minor and shallow, but the laceration in my left forearm was long and deep, and it welled with more blood every time I tried to clean it.

  The cut needed stitches, at the very least. But my only options were to try to tie the wound closed with a strip of cloth from my shirt or try to heal it by shifting into cat form. As my body reassembled itself, it would naturally begin to heal my wounds. At the very least, that would slow the bleeding in my arms and accelerate the scabbing process.

  Unfortunately walking around as a big black cat would be dangerously conspicuous in the middle of the desert, especially in broad daylight, because in nature, most large cats are crepuscular; they’re mostly active at dusk and dawn. I did have this handy—if shallow—patch of woods, which should shield me from human notice. However, I wouldn’t be hard for Jared to find while I was leaking fragrant blood all over the place, even if he couldn’t actually track me by scent.

  But maybe he wouldn’t bother looking for me. His car was trashed, and he’d have to explain that to both the police and to Paul Blackwell. And he was hurt. If the cops got to him before he got to me, they might make him go to the hospital, which would open a whole new can of worms for him, considering the risk of medical care exposing our species to the public.

  Maybe if I hurried, I could shift to accelerate the healing of my arm, then climb one of the trees and hunker down out of sight for a while. Maybe Jared would walk right past me, if he came looking at all.

  That felt like my best bet, so I knelt in the underbrush and took off my clothes, shaking from exhaustion and stress. I spread my shirt and jeans out on the ground and lay down on top of them. Then I closed my eyes and focused on breathing deeply. On blocking out the pain in my head and my arm, as well as the feline sense of urgency demanding that I run until I dropped dead, rather than get caught, though my human mind knew there was a better, if riskier, solution.

  When my breathing was even and my hands had stopped shaking, I began to visualize what I wanted to happen. Speed was critical, but if I freaked myself out, the process would actually take longer.

  My first shift had been five years ago. It was traumatic, violent, and completely unexpected. I’d long-since learned to control the process and had never once, since the day Faythe found me in the woods, lost control of myself in cat form. But that old fear was still there. Still very real. It was still my worst nightmare.

  In cat form, I still felt like a monster.

  Tears filled my eyes as my jaw began to pop. That sound cascaded down my spine, then echoed through the rest of my joints, and more tears fell, not from the pain, though there was plenty of that, but from the memories.

  I had never loved shifting like the others did, and I probably never would. I would never love to race through the woods and hunt and eat raw game, because where they saw sport and exercise—tapping into a primal nature that was as much a part of us as were our human selves—I saw violence and death. And this time was no different.

  As my legs began to thin out and reform, shooting pain through both muscle and bone, I remembered my mother and my sister. I remembered screaming in agony in my backyard as my body tore itself apart, out of nowhere. As my fingernails grew into claws, I remembered those very claws swiping and slashing at the mother who’d given me life and raised me, because I hadn’t known how to handle my own terror and confusion. Because in her terror, she had become a threat. Because my newly-feline self had lashed out through untempered instinct.

  While my jaw elongated and my teeth moved around in my mouth, sharpening into curved points, I thought of that woman in the woods in Montana. The hiker. I remembered dragging her body into a tree through some compulsion I’d had no way of understanding.

  All I’d known for sure that day, trapped in the body of a creature I still hardly understood, was that I was hungry. And that she’d smelled like food.

  Finally, fur sprouted all over my reshaped body in that tiny green patch in the middle of the desert, but my mind was still far away, trapped in past traumas. In old sins I could never forgive myself for. In violent acts I blamed on the very beast ripping its way into the world through my human flesh, because no matter how guilty I felt, I could not let myself bleed to death or get recaptured—not even to pay penance for what I’d done. The instinct to survive was stronger than anything else I’d ever experienced both now, as I lay vulnerable and exposed in the last seconds of my shift, and five years ago, when I’d killed my own mother and eaten human flesh to keep from starving.

  Ultimately, my body would win out over my mind. Even if I hated myself for it for the rest of my life.

  “Kaci!”

  Startled, I shot upright on four legs, backing instinctively away from the voice. Heart racing, I licked my front left leg, testing out my new wound. The taste of my own blood was familiar, and in cat form, it didn’t bother me. The pain was much less than before, and the gash had already started to close.

  If I climbed a tree before it was fully healed, it might re-open. But if I didn’t…

  I looked up and judged the distance in less than a second, my feline instincts doing mental physics my human brain could never have managed. Then I leapt, without conscious thought of how far I was going or where I would land.

  My claws grasped the bark of a tree about a foot in diameter, digging in with all four sets. Pain shot through my front left leg again as the laceration reopened, but I pushed that pain to the back of my mind. Then l leapt again. Straight up. Pushing off against the bark with all four legs. I caught the tree farther up, spared a moment for balance, then leapt again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Any higher, and the stunted desert tree would start to bow. So I took one more little leap up to a small fork in the branches thick enough to support the weight of my torso, to take some pressure off my legs. This would have to be high enough.

  I hunkered down to wait. To watch.

  Ev
ery bird that chirped sent alarm racing through me. Every creature that burrowed through the underbrush below made me flinch.

  “Kaci! I know you’re out here!” Footsteps crunched through twigs and leaves to my east. Movement in that direction caught my eye, but then it was gone.

  A low, soft growl rumbled up from my throat.

  “We have to go!”

  What? That didn’t sound like something Jared would say. In fact, that didn’t sound like Jared at all. But surely that was just my unreliable ears, currently overwhelmed by the thunderous rush of my own pulse.

  “Kaci! It’s me! Please come out! Are you— Shit!”

  The footsteps were right below me. I looked down and found someone holding the clothes I’d abandoned on the ground, almost directly beneath my tree. It was hard to tell from the angle, but he didn’t look big enough to be—

  The man looked around, then he walked several feet away, peering through the underbrush. Then he turned. And looked up, squinting at the trees to the east.

  Justus. Where the hell had he come from? How had he found me?

  A whine leaked from my throat. He looked up, still holding my bloody, filthy clothes. “Kaci?”

  The relief on his face was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  Fourteen

  Justus

  The sparse vegetation made my search easier than it would have been in Eastern Texas or even Mississippi, where the woods were thicker, the trees taller, the underbrush much denser. The scent of her blood was strong enough to tell me I was close, but unlike dogs, cats can’t track by scent.

  “Kaci!”

  Focus, Justus!

  Eyes closed, I mentally sorted through the myriad of sounds around me, tossing out the rodent squeaks and the frantic digging of something small burrowing into the earth. Finally, I made out a distinctly feline huffing inhalation, tinged with a soft, scared growl she probably didn’t even realize she was making.

  I headed toward her, and a few minutes later, I found Kaci’s clothes, laid out on the ground on a bed of leaves. I bent to pick them up and shook debris from them. They were stained with blood and dirt, and the sweat that had soaked into them smelled like fear.