How was it possible that seventeen looked so much younger on her than it had felt on me? I’d thought I was ready to conquer the world, one human girl’s bed at a time. But the thought of little Kaci…
“My point stands.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want reported to your Alphas.”
She clucked her tongue in mock disgust. “You’ve gone over to the dark side.”
“Join me. I hear we have cookies.”
Kaci pushed a flattened couch pillow onto the floor and patted the cushion next to her. “Don’t worry. I won’t bite.” Her bitter undertone hinted that she didn’t find her own joke funny.
Unlike most tabbies, my sister included, Kaci wasn’t overwhelmed with attention from toms, because of her reputation as a man-eater, of the literal variety. A genetic anomaly, Kaci was born to two human parents who carried recessive shifter genes. During her completely unexpected first shift, traumatized and in shock, she’d killed her human mother and sister. In spite of four peaceful years, she still hadn’t managed to shake the label.
“Ha! I’m more worried about your bark than your bite, kid.”
“I hate it when you call me that. So does Abby.”
“She told you that?” I sank onto the left-hand couch cushion, facing her.
Kaci snorted. “She hasn’t told anyone a damn thing since she got here. But you don’t always need words to say something.” Her brows rose, daring me to argue. “For instance, I can smell Abby on you. Which would explain why she came straight in and brushed her teeth.”
I groaned. “It’s not what it looks like.”
Kaci’s brows rose. “Oh, I’m sure you just slipped and fell, and your tongue landed in her mouth. Right? Happens to the best of us.”
“It better not happen.” I ran both hands over my face, then through my hair. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“That’s your problem, Jace.” She stood, her pillow tucked under one arm. “You still see children where none exist. I grew up when you weren’t looking. So did Abby.”
“She’s marrying Brian.”
Kaci snorted. “She will if you let her.”
If I let her? When was the last time anyone let Abby do anything? And if I even thought about coming between her and Brian Taylor, the consequences wouldn’t just be personal—they’d be political. Ed Taylor and Rick Wade would want my head. Alliances had been severed for less, and if I was voted out of the council, someone else would have to take over the Appalachian Territory until Melody got married and her husband was ready to protect and defend it.
Goodness knows, Melody couldn’t protect and defend her own opinion.
“It’s complicated, Kace.” I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, trying to figure out how I wound up taking advice from a seventeen-year-old.
“No, it isn’t. Abby knows what she wants.”
“No, Abby has wedding jitters, manifesting as a crush on both me and my job. But if I let her act on those, she’ll regret it later and hate me for the rest of her life. Because I derailed her future.”
“That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.” She hit me square in the face with a couch pillow.
I snatched the pillow and smacked her in the shoulder with it. “I’m an Alpha, you know!”
Kaci shrugged with an evil little smile. “If you treat me like a child, I’ll act like one. So will Abby.”
“When are you going to put this thing out to pasture?” Abby slid into the passenger seat of my Pathfinder, wearing another skirt evidently chosen entirely because of how inappropriate it was, both for the season and for a drive alone with her Alpha. And possibly because of how incredibly hard it was to look away from her bare, smooth thighs displayed against my dark leather upholstery.
Had she packed nothing else?
I twisted my key in the ignition and made myself focus on the gas gauge as the engine rumbled to life. “What are you talking about? This vehicle is in its prime.”
“You’re living in the sad, sad past,” she said, and the previous night’s conversation with Kaci came back to haunt me. “It’s time to join the rest of us in the here and now, and you better hurry up, because in six months, I’ll be good and mired in my inevitable future.”
The flat note running through her typically upbeat chatter betrayed the cheerful facade she’d been putting forth all day. As if nothing had happened between us in the woods. But every time I met her gaze, I found it a little harder to look away. We might not be talking about what had happened, but neither of us had forgotten.
“So, how far are we from the murder house?” Abby flipped the visor down and used the mirror to apply pink-tinted lip balm while I backed out of the airport short term parking spot. With the scent of strawberries came a twelve-hour-old memory of what that lip balm tasted like smeared across my own mouth.
My hands clenched around the steering wheel. Focus, Jace.
“It doesn’t matter how far we are from the scene of the crime.” I was not going to call it “the murder house.” “Because you’re not going. I’m dropping you at the lodge when I pick up Teo and Chase.”
Abby dropped the lip balm into her purse and flipped the visor back up. “I can help. You should take me.”
“FYI, becoming an enforcer makes you even more obliged to follow orders, not less.” Especially since she’d been sworn in that very morning, in the presence of five other Alphas. Everything was official.
I was stuck with her, and that was like staring at a bag of candy I would never, ever be allowed to taste.
“I’m just trying to help. Why hire me, if you’re not going to use me?”
Take me. Use me.
She had to be doing that on purpose.
“You know damn well why I hired you.” I’d had no choice. “And you can’t go to the crime scene, because you haven’t even started training yet. You, rookie enforcer, are going to spend most of your holiday break sweating through drills with Lucas and Isaac at the lodge.”
Abby twisted in her bucket seat to face me, her full lips pressed together. “Okay, I get that I have work to do and dues to pay, and putting me under the supervision of my own brothers is a great way to remind me that you’re still mad. So, bonus points for that. But isn’t this crime scene actually on the way to the lodge? I mean, we’re practically going to pass right by it.”
I glanced at her as I changed lanes and found her typing furiously on her phone, shielding the screen from the glare of the sun with her own body. “How did you know that?”
“I have the internet and a functional understanding of my map app.” She held her phone out to show me that she’d already plotted our route to the crime scene. And that it was, at a glance, almost directly on the way to the lodge.
“But where’d you get the address? They don’t release stuff like that.”
“The police and the news stations don’t, but sicko crime scene junkies who run voyeuristic blogs do.”
“Well, aren’t you…” Exhausting. “…resourceful.”
“Thanks. And since we’re in a hurry to get this thing shut down before the killer exposes the existence of shifters to all of humanity, can you really justify delaying the investigation just to take me back to the lodge?”
“Nice try.” Even if she had a valid point.
“Come on; you know I’m right. What’s the harm in stopping on the way home to scope things out? The killer isn’t there anymore, right? So, it’s not like I’d be in danger or anything. And you just admitted I’m resourceful. I might actually be useful if you give me a chance.”
“No.”
Abby scowled, and I caught the reckless gleam in her eyes too late to do anything about it. “This is because I kissed you, isn’t it?”
My fists clenched so hard around the steering wheel that it creaked. “No.” It was because she’d railroaded me into hiring her, which had started our working relationship off on the wrong foot. But I couldn’t admit that without sounding petty
and unprofessional. “Are you using humor as a self-defense mechanism, or do you have no verbal filter?”
“Why? You have a problem with me kicking the elephant in the car?”
“Kicking the… Are you speaking in riddles?”
She laughed, and the comfortable quality of that sound caught me off guard. “You know, the elephant in the room? Only we’re in a car.” She rolled her eyes at my blank look. “It means we’re both avoiding a subject that makes us uncomfortable.”
“I know what it means, but your rephrase was less than helpful.”
Her laughter said she didn’t believe me.
“And I’m not uncomfortable.”
“You are so uncomfortable. But I can’t decide if that’s because you didn’t like the kiss or because you did.”
“It’s not… I don’t…” I was uncomfortable because we’d made a big mistake, and officially, I wanted to forget it ever happened.
Unofficially, I wanted to replay the moment over, and over, and over.
“Why don’t we talk about something else,” I suggested. “Anything else.”
“No problem. Let’s revisit the issue of the murder house and how I’m going with you to investigate.”
“You’re not going.”
“Seriously, Jace, who would be better at training me than you?”
“Flattery? You’ve struck a new low.” But the daredevil look in her eyes told me that was only the beginning.
Abby laid one hand over her heart in mock horror. “This is because I kissed you!”
I swerved onto the shoulder of the road and stomped on the brake. When I turned to scowl at her, those big brown eyes were staring at me expectantly, but it was the anxious beating of her heart that convinced me. She wasn’t just being a pain in the ass—this really meant something to her.
I exhaled slowly. “If I let you come, will you please stop kicking that poor elephant?”
Her triumphant smile could have lit up the Dark Ages. “What elephant?”
“Are you sure this is the place?” Abby held her phone up to compare the image on her screen with the one visible through the windshield: the last house on a street that dead-ended in front of a small wooded patch of land. “This house is the wrong color. Either you or the sicko crime scene junkies have made a mistake.” She turned to me with a wicked smile. “My money’s on you.”
“O ye of no faith at all. That is the wrong house. The one we’re here for is on the other side of those woods.” I chuckled at her sheepish expression. “We can’t park in front of the scene of a vicious, mysterious mauling and not expect neighbors—or sicko crime scene junkies—to be curious, can we?” I lifted one brow at her, ridiculously pleased to have struck her speechless, even momentarily. “Guess you’re not quite ready to replace me as Alpha yet, huh?”
She pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail, avoiding my gaze. “I wasn’t trying to… I’m just trying to help.”
“I know. Grab that box behind your seat.” I got out of the Pathfinder and circled it to open the back hatch, then dug through the junk for a few specific items. When I returned to the front of the car, Abby was staring at the small box in her lap.
“This is an ammo box.” She held it up, and sunlight glared across the print.
“Yes.”
“It’s empty.”
“It’s just for show. Set it on the dashboard.”
Abby frowned, but complied, and when she got out of the car, I draped a used paper shooting target over the arm of her chair. I dropped a receipt for the ammo and a trip to a gun range on the center console, then wedged a rolled-up hunting magazine into the space where my windshield met the dashboard.
“We’re hunters?” Her brows rose.
“That’s the idea. We’re here to hunt for the beast who killed that poor man on the other side of the woods.” Which was close to the truth.
“Clever.”
“I have my moments.” I eyed her white down jacket, the only one she’d brought from the dorms. “Are you warm enough?”
“Yup.” Abby grinned. “I run hot.”
Was that a double entendre? Or was she just pointing out the obvious—that a shifter’s metabolism kept us both slim and warm?
She closed her door and I locked the car with my key fob, then caught up with her as she stepped into the woods. “So, what’s the plan?”
“First, we scout to make sure no one’s home. Unless there’s an app for that too.”
“Give it a couple of years, and there’ll be one that scans for human heat signatures.”
“Until then, we’ll have to use what nature gave us.” Our eyes and ears, of course. And our noses. Cats can’t track by scent, but we have very well-developed senses of smell, and we can identify nearly every odor we come into contact with. “When we’re sure the house is empty, I’ll find us a way in.”
“We’re breaking and entering?”
I shrugged. “With any luck, just entering.”
That’s when I realized Abby was wearing hiking boots rather than the party heels she’d worn the day before. She’d known from the moment she got out of bed that she would talk me into taking her to the crime scene one way or another.
I’d never even stood a chance.
We made our way through the woods quietly, on alert for any sign that another shifter had been there recently. But I saw no claw marks on bark, which would have indicated that a cat had climbed the tree. Both the undergrowth and bed of fallen leaves and pine needles were too thick to show any paw prints. And the only other cat I smelled was Abby.
She smelled like warm flesh, airport coffee, and good health. And strawberry lip balm. And a little like whoever she’d borrowed her jacket from. The residual scent was familiar.
“Is that Robyn’s?”
Abby glanced down at the jacket. “Yeah. I couldn’t find mine.”
I’d never formally met Robyn, and I’d only had the chance to smell her once. She’d been unconscious and bleeding by the time I’d arrived at the cabin where those sick hunter bastards had tried to lure Abby to her death, then hang her taxidermied head on their wall. But once was enough for any cat worth his claws, and I should have recognized Robyn’s scent earlier.
“How’s she doing?”
Abby rounded a clump of evergreens a few steps ahead of me. “Better. She was having nightmares for a while, but those have mostly stopped. Her parents call all the time now, and I know they just want to help, but she never wants to talk to them. I don’t think she knows what to say. I offered to take her to a counselor on campus, but she wouldn’t even discuss it.”
“It’s a good thing she has you to talk to.” Post-traumatic stress could be a real bitch, especially for humans, most of whom rarely witnessed any death, much less the violent slaughter of several close friends at once. “But I guess it could have been worse.” And no one knew that with more certainty than Abby.
She turned to give me a very grave look. “It was plenty bad.”
The sudden change in her demeanor worried me.
In college, Abby had made friends and gained both independence and confidence. By the beginning of her sophomore year, she’d regained her sense of humor and had become almost compulsively cheerful, as if putting her trauma behind her was a conscious decision and one that required relentless reinforcement.
Seeing her somber now was jarring, and it did not escape my notice that the change was in response to her friend’s recent trauma rather than her own. As far as I knew, Faythe was the only person she’d ever spoken to about her own ordeal, and that was because Faythe had been there for part of it.
“Hey, is that the house?” she whispered, and I followed her gaze to a low-pitched roof barely visible between the treetops.
“I think so.” I stepped in front of her to assume the point position, and she didn’t argue.
Listening carefully, I pushed my other senses to the back of my mind as we crept to the edge of the yard ahead, sticking to the cover of the woods for t
he moment. The house was small and one story, with a cellar. The exterior cellar entrance was secured with a padlock and chain, neither of which I could break through without bolt cutters.
We had several pairs back at the lodge, and I’d thought I’d have a chance to pick them up, along with a couple of experienced enforcers.
I glanced over the deserted, overgrown backyard and found a weatherworn shed in one corner, next to the obligatory old car on blocks. The only thing I could make out inside the doorless shed was an ancient and rusted riding lawnmower.
The back wall of the house boasted peeling paint, several grimy windows, and a metal door centered over a set of prefab concrete steps. I probably wouldn’t be able to hear any heartbeats or pulses coming from inside, but by all appearances, there wouldn’t be any to hear.
“Put these on.” I took a pair of leather gloves from my right pocket and handed them to Abby, then I pulled an identical pair from my opposite pocket.
“They’re too big,” she whispered, tugging the first one over her fingers.
“Make it work.”
A second later, she held up both hands hidden by a comically large pair of gloves, which hung limp over her fingertips by at least an inch. Her hands were tiny. But then, so was the rest of her. She shrugged. “If the police are gone, they’ve probably already tested for fingerprints.”
“Maybe.” I tugged her gloves down as far as they’d go. “But we don’t even know if they know it’s a crime scene yet. So, we take precaution.”
I stepped into the yard and she followed silently while I tried the back door—it was locked—then peered through three grimy windows. They were all locked too, and I saw no evidence from the rooms beyond that anyone was home. Or had been in several days.
The locks on the back door were substantial. I probably could have broken them, but if the police ever came back to the scene, they would see that the locks had been forced rather than picked—a feat beyond human strength. “We’ll have to break a window,” I whispered, peeking carefully around the corner of the house to make sure no one was out front within human hearing range.