“So, wait. What do you mean, you knew what you were doing with Hargrove?” Lucas gave me a skeptical glance as he mentally replayed my outburst. “You’re saying you intended to be covered in blood, on your way to the airport to comply with your own exile?”
“Well, no.” I sank back against my seat with a frown. “I only meant to get fired. I had no idea Jace would try to get rid of me entirely.”
“It’s not like you gave him any choice.” Lucas glanced at me with his copper-colored brows furrowed. “Please tell me you didn’t kill Hargrove just to get out of being an enforcer?”
“No! I killed him because he was a bad guy. He was part of the sick hunting club that mounted Leo’s head, slaughtered three of my friends, and would have killed my roommate if I hadn’t gotten to her in time. My only regret about Hargrove’s death is that it was quicker and easier than he deserved.”
“It was also completely unauthorized, but you could have played the PTSD card to keep your job. Or at least keep Jace in your corner. Why did you get yourself fired?”
“Because unlike some of my larger, more brutish coworkers, a girl my size has to be able to think on her feet.” To get herself hired, when having a job will get her where she needs to go, then get herself fired, when losing that job will free her up to go where she’s truly needed.
Only that last part hadn’t worked out so well.
“I don’t even know what that means. What’s going on, Abby?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Then you’ll just have to respect my intent.” I twisted on the bench seat to face him, tugging at the shoulder strap of my seatbelt. “Lucas, I need a favor.”
“No.” His grip on the steering wheel tightened, and the plastic creaked beneath the added stress.
“You don’t even know what I—”
“I know you want to stay here, but Jace is right. You need to go home and let Dad work on your defense. They’re going to bring you up on charges, Abby. Do you even know how serious that is?”
“Of course I know!” The only thing keeping that understanding from reducing me to a puddle of tears and panic was the more urgent terror Hargrove had driven deep into me right before he’d died.
The charges that would be leveled against me were inevitable, but the Darren problem…that couldn’t wait.
“I’ll do or say whatever Dad says I should.” The scent of Hargrove’s drying blood was a constant reminder of how soon I’d have to face the consequences of a crime I’d had no choice but to commit. “I’m not trying to make this worse. I just… I need to be here right now.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lucas’s foot got heavier, and I wondered if accelerator aggression was a trait all toms shared. “I feel like my little sister went to college and a hellcat came back in her place.”
He was very nearly right. Only, college hadn’t been the trigger.
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Because I couldn’t explain it to him. “But I really am trying to do the right thing.”
“Good.” Lucas put his right blinker on and swerved onto the off ramp, where a sign advertised food, fuel, and an outlet mall full of discount stores.
I recognized the mall. We were only a few miles from campus and less than half an hour from the airport. My time was running out, and the sun wasn’t sinking fast enough.
Lucas pulled into a parking spot near the back of the outlet mall’s parking lot. This close to Christmas, most of the lot was full, even with storm clouds rolling in. “Now you’re going to stay in the car, and I’m going to get you some clean clothes.” Because he could take off his blood-smeared jacket to look presentable, but I was splattered all the way down to my white boots. Which, Lucas had informed me, was why enforcers typically wore all black. “You still wear the same sizes?” he asked, and I nodded. In spite of summers spent training with Faythe, I hadn’t put on much muscle, and I hadn’t gained even an inch in height since high school. “Any requests?”
“No pink. It clashes with my hair.” Which wasn’t an issue my redheaded brother had to deal with.
“Got it.” Lucas got out of the car, then bent to peer in at me. “I won’t be gone long enough for it to get cold in here. Stay put.”
I watched him walk toward the entrance to the mall, and where it shone through the clouds, the sinking sun seemed to set his hair on fire. I had maybe half an hour of daylight left, but that was half an hour too much.
A glance around the lot showed me more cars than shoppers, and the few people I saw were all headed toward the mall, focused on getting out of the cold before the rain started. They didn’t look back once they’d left their cars. No one was watching me.
I wasn’t going to get a better shot.
Still watching the parking lot for any unwanted attention, I stripped out of Robyn’s jacket, careful not to get my hands any bloodier than they already were. My green sweater was clean, except for a spot of blood at the hem, which had been exposed when I’d…taken care of the Hargrove problem.
I’d known from the moment Jace started questioning him that I would have to kill Hargrove to keep him from talking, and I would not let myself feel too bad about that. Hargrove had tortured and killed many of my fellow shifters, and he’d have done the same—or worse—to me if he’d gotten the chance. And to Jace. And to all of his men, including my brothers. But I’d hoped for a more obviously justified homicide; I’d been prepared to bait him into attacking me.
What I hadn’t counted on was Hargrove’s cowardly nature. As soon as he’d been disarmed, he’d considered himself helpless. I’d had to act with no obvious provocation, and the only part I regretted was how that would make Jace look. I desperately didn’t want my actions to reflect badly upon him, but in that moment, I’d had no other choice.
In this one, you don’t either.
I shoved Robyn’s jacket onto the floorboard and glanced briefly at my ruined phone, wishing for the millionth time that it hadn’t gone for a dive in a pot of greasy water. Or that Lucas had left his accessible. But like Faythe had once told me, wishes are for victims. Survivors make their own luck.
With that in mind, I climbed into the back of the truck cab, where I found several plastic bags wadded up on the floor. Lucas couldn’t drive for more than half an hour without a soda and a stick of beef jerky, and he always threw the grocery bags over his shoulder, onto the backseat of the king cab.
I wadded the bag up in my fist, then got out of the truck and closed the door softly, stuffing my hands and the bag into my pockets. The blood splattered across my dark jeans could easily have been water, and no human nose would be able to tell otherwise. There was nothing I could do about the blood on my white boots, although the drier it got, the more it looked like tar and the less it looked like blood.
Shivering from the cold, I walked away from the mall, headed for a gas station across the street. It had recently been upgraded with new credit-card-accepting pumps and a digital sign, but the building itself was old and still had a bathroom built onto the outside, with its own entrance/exit.
The restroom wasn’t an ideal place to shed my human disguise, but that was better than stripping down to a blue leotard in a phone booth.
The overgrown field stretching behind the gas station was just a bonus.
I kept my head down as I crossed the street, passing two customers and the large front window, but I already knew that everyone who saw me would remember me. I was the height of a young teenager with enough hair for three girls my size, and I had no coat. They probably all thought I was a runaway.
That wasn’t far from the truth.
The restroom had no gender sign, and the door stood open to reveal a small, filthy space. I closed the door from the inside and considered locking it, but I wouldn’t be able to unlock it without human hands, so I settled for the desperate hope that no one would try to come in while the door was closed.
A glance at myself in the mirror show
ed a streak of blood I’d missed on my left cheek, but the hair hanging in my face would have covered that. My eyes looked glazed with exhaustion—or the remnants of shock?—yet I recognized determination in the set of my jaw. I was out of options and out of time, and the only hope I had for my own future was the possibility that taking out Darren myself, before he could capture or kill his next victim, would be enough to redeem me for killing Hargrove.
Shivering from both the cold and my own nerves, I pulled my sweater over my head and stuffed it into the plastic grocery bag. My boots came off next, followed by my pants, then underwear. Only once I stood naked in a frigid, filthy public restroom did the absurd, dangerous reality of my situation truly sink in.
Would leaving the restroom as a giant cat really be any safer than walking around covered in blood? The police were apt to get involved either way, considering they’d lost three citizens in the past month to a feral wildcat. And that at least one semi-local officer knew about shifters in general, and about me in particular.
Fear and haste fueled my shift, and my bones lengthened and popped, rearranging my skeleton out of some primordial instinct I would never truly understand. My eyes ached with pressure and my jaw crackled as a new structure of bone and teeth was imposed. My limbs popped in and out of joint, burning as if I were made of fuel and flame rather than flesh and bone. An itch washed over my skin in a brutally slow wave as fur grew from my follicles. My nails hardened into claws, lengthening, thickening, and when I tried to grip the floor, they dug into the concrete, chipping away tiny particles of grit.
My tail swished behind me, stirring dirt from the ground. I sniffed, and my nose twitched, my whiskers bobbing on the lower edge of my vision. And as my senses sharpened, the stew of old scents became a foul backdrop for my cruel transformation, but I could only breathe it in, waiting for the pain to fade.
When it finally did, after minutes that felt like hours, I stood tall on four legs, welcoming a configuration of bones and muscle I hadn’t taken on in weeks. My ears rotated on top of my head, instinctively listening for danger, but I heard only ordinary sounds. Water running inside the convenience store. Gasoline rushing from thick hoses into rapidly filling tanks. Customers chatting as they pumped gas, lamenting the encroaching clouds and the frigid gusts.
Fighting skittishness—werecats do not belong in unlocked public restrooms—I made myself wait until the two cars closest to the restroom drove away. Every moment that passed drew the cloud cover closer and pulled the sun nearer to the horizon, but once I left the restroom, I would be exposed for the entire eighty-foot sprint into the empty field. Anyone who saw me would call the cops, which was why I couldn’t leave my blood-covered clothes in the restroom.
Even humans would start to believe in the “impossible” if we kept leaving it around for them to find.
When the convenience store was as quiet as it was going to get during business hours, I took the handles of the plastic bag in my mouth and pressed down on the door lever with one paw. The latch clicked, and the door swung open several inches. I froze, listening again, and when no one started screaming, I dared a peek through the crack.
A woman was getting gas at the pump closest to the road and farthest from the restroom, and I could hear an engine running from a parked car in front of the store. Other than that, the coast was clear.
I burst from the restroom in a flat-out sprint. The white plastic bag swung from my jaw like a pendulum, and the scent of Hargrove’s blood was thick in my nostrils as I ran. That scent reminded me of what was at stake. Of why I’d torpedoed my own career—and possibly Jace’s—and why this desperate effort had to make those sacrifices worth it.
“Holy shit!” A woman cried behind me, as my paws pounded from concrete onto bare earth. My heart pumped blood so quickly, my head began to feel light. “Did you see that? Was that a dog?”
I put another burst of energy into my sprint and shot forward into the field. Tall grass slapped my face, snagged in my fur, and caught on the plastic bag, but I kept running until I’d almost forgotten what I was running from.
The overgrown field ended in a steep ditch, then another road, and across that road was a strip mall that had been abandoned, except for a payday loan service. There were two cars in the lot, and not a person in sight.
I looked both ways, then sprinted across the street and through the parking lot into the deep shadows on one side of the building. There I dropped my bag on the ground and rested, shielded from the street by an industrial trash bin speckled with rust and peeling paint. I couldn’t stay put for long—when Lucas found me missing, he’d see the same potential escape route I had—but cats aren’t long-distance runners, and I needed to think.
Jace is going to kill me. Yet even knowing that, I wished he was right there with me. I could handle the yelling, if that meant I’d get to see him again, and…
But Jace wasn’t what I needed to be thinking about.
Which way is north? Thanks to the cloud cover, I couldn’t tell by the stars, but there was still a bit more light on one side of the sky than the other. That way must be west.
The first frigid drop of rain fell as I turned to the north, and within four steps, I was drenched and freezing. But minutes later, the sunlight had disappeared and the rain had driven people inside. As long as I stuck to alleyways and deep shadows, I realized, I could move through Lexington like a dark streak in the night. Unseen. Unheard. Unbothered. Which was good, because with a wild cat on the loose, if the police saw me, they’d probably shoot on sight.
I have no idea how long it took me to work my way across town, sticking to shadows and back roads, jumping backyard fences and skirting lighted parking lots. At first, nothing was familiar. I’d never really ventured far from school on my own, and I didn’t have a car.
I was starving by the time I got to campus, having shifted and walked several miles without stopping to hunt and eat. In fact, I hadn’t eaten since Patricia Malone had put a plate of bacon and biscuits in front of me at seven that morning. Back when I’d been her son’s girlfriend, and her daughter’s maid of honor, and the aunt of her forthcoming grandson. Back before I’d been a murderer and a dishonored enforcer, on the run from her Alpha and heading straight into danger.
You know better, Abby.
I also knew I had no choice.
I entered campus from the south side, avoiding the student center and the apartments, and any other building with lit windows. To my relief, the rest of campus seemed to be deserted, which was no surprise on the first Saturday night of the winter break. Anyone with family had gone home. Anyone who’d stayed at school was either working or partying.
Minutes after I stepped on campus, my dorm came into sight. All the rooms on the front side were dark, but I circled to the back, avoiding flood- and porch lights. From the edge of the parking lot, I counted up three floors and over four windows to find my room. My heart tried to claw its way up through my throat.
My bedside lamp was on, but the form silhouetted in the light did not belong to Robyn.
FIFTEEN
Jace
“These are some sick fuckers.” Mateo stepped from the bottom tread onto the basement floor, and his gaze immediately found Hargrove’s taxidermy table. He shrugged, and I knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth. “Can’t really blame Abby for reacting the way she did. Hargrove was part of the group that killed her friends, and she’d just seen her picture all over the second stalker board in two days.”
“She took the same oath you did.” I stared up at the photo-covered section of wall. We’d packed up everything but the table, the cage, the filing cabinet, and the pictures, but I hadn’t thought of a thing since Abby and Lucas left except how empty my bed was going to feel without her next to me. How empty my arms already felt.
Why had she worked so hard to make that happen?
“But the real mistake was mine,” I said. “She obviously isn’t ready to separate personal grudges from her duty as an
enforcer. I should never have hired her.”
Not that she’d given me any choice in that, or in firing her either. Abby had an infuriating way of getting exactly what she wanted, consequences be damned, and in retrospect, it was clear that she’d been calling the shots the whole time.
Hell, maybe I should have promoted her. Maybe anyone who could manipulate an Alpha that well shouldn’t have been taking orders in the first place.
But that wasn’t how our system worked. We didn’t just hand out Alpha patches like badges for selling Girl Scout cookies. And we didn’t just kill people—even bad guys—against orders.
“Hargrove’s group killed one of our men too,” I said, thinking aloud. “And lots of Titus’s, from the looks of it. What Abby did was about more than those pictures. More than her dead friends.” We were missing something.
No, Abby was hiding something. She’d practically admitted that much.
Teo frowned. “What else could there be?”
“I don’t know. But she was desperate to get into this basement.” I ran one gloved hand over the edge of Hargrove’s work surface. “In fact, she was hell-bent on coming with us in the first place. I thought that was because she didn’t want to be left out, or…” Or because she didn’t want to be separated from me. In retrospect, I could see that my ego had gotten in the way of my duty. “…something. But what if it was more than that?”
“It was her idea to stop at Hargrove’s house on the way home from the airport yesterday, right?” Teo said. “Because she knew if you went to the lodge first, you’d leave her there?”
I nodded. He saw it too. Whatever Abby was up to was more important to her than her own career. More important than her own welfare, even. She’d killed Hargrove with full knowledge of the possible consequences. Hell, she’d seen Manx’s amputated fingertips up close—Manx had been declawed after the council found her guilty of murder—but Abby hadn’t even hesitated.
Teo held up his phone to recapture my attention, reminding me of the call I’d asked him to make.