“Any news?”
“Not yet.” He slid his phone into his jacket pocket. “Isaac said the lodge is on lockdown but they’ve seen nothing suspicious. No intruders. No threats. Not even a prank call. But just to be safe, they’ve called in backup from the Pride at large.”
The most capable non-enforcer members.
“And Titus is coming with three men of his own. They were near the border, hunting the remaining hunters, so they may actually beat us to the lodge.”
“Good.” That was unprecedented—a group of strays coming to the aid of a US Alpha. Titus knew what was at stake and he knew that his assistance, with adherence to the council’s standard rules of engagement, would help his chances in the vote.
Unfortunately, thanks to Abby’s crime, my backing would be less help to the cause than I’d hoped.
Mateo shrugged. “Honestly, though, I don’t think we’re going to need them. It doesn’t make any sense for Darren to strike us at the lodge. That’s the best-defended spot in the whole territory. It doesn’t fit his MO.”
“No, it doesn’t.” The hunters had only taken stragglers before. Lone strays. Our enforcer Leo on vacation, when he’d had no backup or partner. The most daring thing they’d tried so far was the attempt to catch Abby in the woods. They’d been willing to dispense with her human friends in the process, but they’d brought three armed hunters in order to kill one small tabby.
It made no sense that Darren would be willing to charge into the Appalachian Pride capital—a property crawling with large, angry enforcers—by himself.
“Did Hargrove actually say Darren is going after Melody?” Teo asked, his focus skipping from photo to photo taped up on the wall.
“He said they were going after ‘the other tabby.’ That has to be Melody. There are no other tabbies in the Appalachian Territory. Or within driving distance in any of the other territories.” I frowned, going over what he’d said word by word. “But that doesn’t make any sense either, because he said we’d left her undefended. Actually, he said we’d left ‘them’ undefended, but Abby’s the only tabby who hasn’t had round-the-clock protection in years.” And if I could go back and change that, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
“So, Darren’s going after a tabby he thinks is undefended, but we don’t know for sure that Melody’s the one he’s after?”
I nodded, though that made little sense.
“Wait.” I spun to face the rest of the underground room. “He said they’d taken pictures of both of the tabbies, and that they’d never seen a single tomcat in all that time.”
“But these pictures are all of Abby.”
“I know. There must be more somewhere.” I crossed the room pulled open the top filing cabinet drawer, then started thumbing through the three hanging folders. They held nothing but receipts for equipment and hunting gear.
“We’ve been through all of that,” Teo said. “There were no pictures.”
“I know. But we’ve missed something.” Something Abby hadn’t missed. Something that had upset her badly enough to make her kill.
I slammed the first drawer and squatted to sort through the middle drawer. “They know that most tabbies would be easy prey, if they can catch one unguarded, and they seemed to think they’d done that. But Melody’s never been unguarded, and Hargrove never actually said her name. He just said they were going after the ‘other’ tabby. Then Abby killed him, and I couldn’t ask—”
I dropped onto my knees as the obvious conclusion fell into place. “She killed him to keep him quiet.”
“Jace…” Teo sounded doubtful, and I could understand that. It was hard to think of Abby killing anyone out of anything other than self-defense or PTSD, but it was becoming increasingly clear that she’d thought this out, evidently on the fly. “To keep him quiet about what?”
“The other tabby’s identity. It has to be.” She’d figured out what we hadn’t.
“But why would Abby do that? The more of us who know who they’re after, the better protected she’ll be. Who’s the closest of the other tabbies?”
I had to think about that. The East Coast Territory bordered ours, but Abby was their only tabby. The Southeast Pride—Mateo’s home territory—also shared a border, but they’d lost their tabby, his sister Sara, to the same monsters who’d kidnapped Faythe and Abby almost five years ago. That left the New England and Great Lakes Prides, but their capitals were both more than a day’s drive away. If he’d headed to either of those territories, Darren would never make it back by nightfall, which had been his plan, according to Hargrove.
“There’s no one else close enough.” I stood and shoved the middle file drawer closed. “This doesn’t make any sense. It’s someone Abby knows”—though all the tabbies knew one another—“and someone within a day’s drive. And someone the hunters found undefended long enough to camera-stalk.” My focus strayed to the stalker wall again, searching for a photo we’d missed. One that wasn’t of Abby.
But they were all pictures of Abby. The only other girl in any of those photos was her roommate Robyn, and Robyn was…
Human.
“Oh, shit, Mateo, we’ve messed up.” I was across the room in an instant, gloved hands pressed to the grisly surface of the taxidermy table as I stared at the wall above it. “I’ve messed up.”
“What? How?”
“It was here the whole time.” I pulled a picture down from the wall and held it out to him. The image was taken through the window of Abby’s dorm room, and it showed her sitting on the edge of her bed, with one arm around her roommate. Her crying roommate. Her crying roommate who had smudges of dirt on her hands and…was that blood on her mouth?
The focus wasn’t sharp enough for me to tell for sure, but suddenly, every move Abby’d made—every lie she’d told—came through in perfect clarity.
“Robyn’s a shifter.”
Teo shook his head. “She’s human. We both saw her in that cabin, after Abby killed those hunters.”
“She must have been infected after that, because she’s a shifter now, Mateo.” I stared at the photo as the ramifications of what we’d just discovered—and the implications of Abby’s cover-up—pelted my brain like hail against a window.
Abby knew Robyn had been infected, and she’d hidden that from the council.
She’d hidden that from me.
“Wait.” Mateo’s eyes widened, and he looked like his late sister, the tabby we hadn’t been able to save. “You’re saying Robyn’s a stray? A female stray? That’s not possible.”
“According to Manx, it is.” From the beginning, she’d insisted that the warlord shifter bastards who’d used her as a broodmare had also succeeded in creating a female stray, but because we’d never seen one, in the entire history of the US Prides, we’d dismissed her stories as the misrememberings of a tabby traumatized enough to kill multiple men, in the grips of post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Manx had been right all along.
“Okay, but even if that’s true—and I’m not going to believe it until I see it,” Teo said, “what does that have to do with Abby killing Hargrove? How would she even know he’d known about Robyn, if she didn’t know they were being stalked until she saw his board yesterday?”
And I was sure that was the case. Abby had been as shocked and horrified to find her pictures on his wall as I was. So, what had she been trying to hide when she’d insisted on going to Hargrove’s house—the scene of a murder—if she hadn’t known the rogue stray we were after had actually been taking out the hunters? Or that the hunters had been stalking her and Robyn?
What had we gotten from that first crime scene other than the stalker-board?
We’d gotten Darren’s name and the names of two other remaining hunters, but she couldn’t have anticipated that, because we hadn’t known the mauling victims were the hunters. All we’d hoped for, going in, was to identify the scent of whoever’d murdered someone in Hargrove’s house, and in the end, we hadn’t even been able to
isolate that scent. Thanks in no small part to Abby, who’d managed to get her own scent—and Robyn’s—all over the place, because of that stupid borrowed…
A groan slid up from my throat.
“What?”
“She did it on purpose. Abby bumped into and rubbed up against everything she could in Hargrove’s house so there’d be a legitimate reason for me to smell her there once she let me in. She was planting her own scent to cover up the fact that it was there already.”
“Well, you’d think that would have been easier to do if she’d been wearing her own clothes. Thanks to Robyn’s jacket, she got her roommate’s scent—” Mateo and I came to the same conclusion at virtually the same moment. “She wore that jacket for a reason,” he whispered, and I nodded.
“Nothing she’s done or said has been an accident. She’s not clumsy, or forgetful, or unprofessional. She’s been playing us this whole time.” I slammed the picture down on the taxidermy table, as the intricacies of Abby’s deception finally fell into place. “She wore her roommate’s jacket to confuse us with the scent. We smelled Robyn, whom we knew to be human, so we assumed the shifter scent was coming from Abby herself.” Which was true, in large part. “And we smelled that scent combination so much, so often, that we mentally began to dismiss it, just like we dismiss our own scents.”
Teo whistled. “Damn, that girl is smart. Too smart for you.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “And too smart for her own good.”
“But you don’t think Abby’s the rogue who killed Joe Mathews, in Hargrove’s house, do you? Or either of the other hunters? We’re thinking that was the roommate?”
I nodded slowly, still puzzling things out, while fear for Abby threatened to overcome all logic. She’d broken nearly every law we had. She was in much more trouble than I’d thought. Way more trouble than I could get her out of.
Maybe too much for even her father to get her out of.
“Jace?” Teo cleared his throat to recapture my attention. “You think Robyn’s the killer, right?”
“She has to be. Why else would Abby wear that jacket, if not to cover Robyn’s scent at the crime scenes? She’s protecting her roommate.” That was the only conclusion that made sense. Abby would definitely risk her own life to protect those she loved. Including the roommate who’d helped bring her out of her shell her freshman year, then had seen three of their friends killed for no reason other than their proximity to Abby.
“Why wouldn’t she tell us? Why wouldn’t she tell you? I mean, why hide a new tabby from the people best equipped to protect her?” Teo asked, and my head spun as I tried to pull all the facts, theories, and assumptions into line. I could only think of one reason Abby would keep her secret from me, even after we’d gotten together. After I’d told her I loved her and had threatened to kick her out of the Pride.
“Abby’s hiding Robyn because she’s the one who infected her.” Infection was a capital crime, punishable by execution, if the council convicted her.
My hands clenched into fists at just the thought of this new threat. If Abby had infected Robyn, she’d done it by accident, and I could not let her pay for that with her life.
Teo’s brows rose. “Wait, you think Abby bit her?”
“Abby bit who?” Warner called from the top of the steps, his head hidden by the empty boxes I’d asked him to bring down.
“Robyn,” Teo said. “But we don’t think that’s true, right?” He glanced at me as Warner dropped the empty boxes at his feet. “I mean, that’s just a theory.”
I shrugged, trying to look less apprehensive about that possibility than I really was. “They are roommates, and Abby’s been known to have nightmares. If she partially shifted in her sleep, and Robyn tried to wake her up…who knows? It happened to Faythe.”
“Yes, but that was a boyfriend bitten in the height of passion with teeth she didn’t realize had shifted. Total fluke,” Teo insisted, as he pulled open the bottom file cabinet drawer. “Although come to think of it, the stray she infected turned out to be a psychotic killer too.” He dropped the first file folder into the box. “Maybe it’s a good thing most tabbies don’t get out much, if they’re all gonna infect their friends…”
Warner made an amused noise at the back of his throat. “If it were that easy to infect a woman, Jace would have made enough tabbies by now to keep our numbers well out of the endangered range. Right?”
I answered with a growl.
“Regardless, we’re ninety-nine percent sure Robyn’s the stray who’s been killing the hunters, and that Abby was trying to cover that up,” I explained for Warner’s benefit. “That’s why she signed on as an enforcer and why she just had to come to both of the crime scenes.” Hargrove’s house and Darren’s lake cottage.
“So, then, why get herself fired, if being an enforcer helped her keep us in the dark?” Teo asked.
“Well, as an enforcer, she would have had to go back to the lodge with us, when what she probably wanted was to go check on Robyn, to make sure she’s not out killing more people,” Warner suggested as he began pulling the photos from the wall. He held up a picture of Robyn and Abby walking together on campus, and I took it from him.
“If she thought Robyn was going to kill again, Abby would have fought harder to stay on campus when I came to pick her up.” I studied the photo, where Abby had her arm around Robyn’s shoulders, even though she was the smaller of the pair. She was clearly comforting her roommate. Guiding her, even. Robyn didn’t look like a cold-blooded killer. She looked like a traumatized, confused young woman who didn’t know how to handle what was happening to her. Which was something Abby would understand.
Abby seemed to be acting as the new shifter’s mentor or counselor. There was no way she would have participated in Robyn’s crimes, even knowing what the hunters had done, but she would help cover for Robyn, especially if it was her fault Robyn had become a shifter. And she would try to stop Robyn from killing again.
And she would damn sure try to protect Robyn from the hunter coming after her.
“That’s why she got herself fired!” My hand slammed into the taxidermy table hard enough to send a jolt of pain into my shoulder. “Because she knew Darren was going after Robyn, not Melody, but she couldn’t tell us that without admitting that Robyn was the rogue stray.” That she’d known who the murderer was all along and had been covering for her.
“Oh, shit.” Teo froze in the act of pulling another picture from the board. “That’s why she didn’t want to be sent home. There was nothing she could do for Robyn from South Carolina. Especially since her cell phone is ruined, and she doesn’t have any of the stored numbers memorized. She can’t even call to warn Robyn.”
And neither could we. “Damn it! We sent backup to the wrong tabby.” I turned to Teo, already pulling my phone from my pocket. “Call Titus and have him send his men to the Lexington campus instead of the lodge. Abby said Robyn was staying in the dorm over the holiday.” Which made sense now. A newly infected stray would have a hard time hiding his—or her—condition from her family in close quarters. “With any luck, the campus will be mostly deserted.”
“Should I call Abby’s dad?” Warner asked, already holding his own cell, but I shook my head.
“He’ll have to tell the rest of the council, and we’re not doing that to Abby until we’ve heard her side of the story.”
“But she’s probably already on her flight home.”
“Then we’ll bring her back. Book a return flight as fast as you can, and I’ll tell Lucas to stay at the airport and wait for her.” I shoved the picture of Abby and Robyn into my pocket on my way up the stairs.
I was halfway across the kitchen, about to call Lucas where the signal was stronger, when my phone rang and his name appeared on the screen. “Luke!” I said into the phone. “I need you to stay at the airport and wait for Abby. Warner’s going to—”
“We never made it there,” Lucas said, his voice even gruffer than usual with anger and fea
r.
“Why not?”
“Abby’s gone, Jace. I had to leave her in the truck while I bought clean clothes, and when I got back, she was gone. I found her scent in a gas station bathroom across the street and her clothes in a plastic bag behind a Dumpster a quarter mile away. That’s where I lost her trail.” Because unlike dogs, cats can’t track by scent.
“Where are you?” I demanded, my heart hammering against my sternum.
“About half an hour from the airport, west of highway 75.”
“So, she’s in cat form, in the middle of Lexington?” Damn it, Abby! “She’s headed for campus. I need you to follow the route she’s most likely to take on foot, and see if you can catch up with her. If you haven’t found her in an hour, go straight to campus. To her dorm.”
“Why would she go there?”
“Because her roommate, Robyn, is the rogue stray.”
“Wait, what? A female stray?” After a short pause, he exhaled heavily. “Jace, tell me you don’t think Abby infected her.”
“I don’t know.” But it worried me that he’d jumped to that same conclusion. “Abby’s been covering for her from the beginning, and now she’s headed back to campus to protect her from Darren. He wasn’t going after Melody; he was going after Robyn, which means the hunters knew she was a shifter before we did. The rest of the council is not going to like that.”
“That’s why she killed Hargrove. To keep him from telling you about Robyn,” Lucas said, and from over the line came the sound of flesh hitting flesh as he smacked his own forehead. “She just kept saying she’d had to do it, but that’s not like Abby.”
“I know. And the only reason I can think of that she’d try to protect Robyn by herself is to hide the fact that she infected her roommate.”
Lucas groaned. “What’s going to happen to her, Jace?”
“I don’t know. I’ll do everything I can to protect her from the council, but we have to find her first.”
“I’m on it.”
“Luke, no one else knows about this. Just you, me, Teo, and Warner. I’d like to keep it that way until we’ve had a chance to talk to Abby.”