Pride

  Okaaaay, this is awkward. I couldn’t remember ever before being told by a child that I smelled like sex, which was basically what she’d just said.

  “I’m sorry, Kaci.”

  She slid down the wall to sit with her knees up and her head in her hands.

  I squatted next to her and stroked her hair, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I’d never been very good at comforting people. “I’m sorry this happened to you—more sorry than you can possibly imagine. But I can’t fix it. No one can. The best we can do is to show you how to be one of us. How to deal with what you’re hearing and seeing now.”

  “What if I don’t want to deal with it?”

  “You’re gonna have to eventually.” I sighed. I had no idea how to help a stray through her transition. But I might just know how to help a teenager relax… “But in the meantime…how about a video game? And maybe some junk food?”

  Her head rose slowly, her brows arched halfway up her forehead in surprise. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? The guys have two different PlayStations set up downstairs. You ever play?”

  She grinned. An honest-to-goodness, carefree-teenager grin. With teeth and all. “Yeah. Only every day of my life…until recently.”

  I smiled back; I couldn’t help it. “I’m sure all their games are violent and bloody…”

  Her smile faltered for a minute, then it was back in full force, her expression fortified with a healthy dose of resolve, like she was determination to have fun, even if it killed her. “The bloodier the better.”

  I had to admire the kid’s grit.

  “Good.” I eyed the loose skirt and fitted blouse, then glanced at the pile of more casual clothes on the nearest bed. “Pick out something appropriate for video-game carnage and junk food. We have a selection of chips and dip downstairs that puts a supermarket to shame.”

  Five minutes later I pulled the bedroom door open and held it for a jeans-and-T-shirt-clad tabby who smiled in spite of the tense way her arms hung at her sides. She was nervous about meeting everyone, and I couldn’t really blame her. I liked only about half of the people I’d be introducing her to, mostly because the other half wanted me dead. Or whored out to one of their sons.

  “Where are you going?” the new guard asked, glancing from her to me, then down the hall toward the staircase, as if hoping someone would come to his rescue before he had to use the biggest muscle found above his neck.

  “Downstairs. Kaci’s ready to make some new friends. Would you like to be the first, or are you going to be a pain in our collective ass?”

  “I have to clear it with an Alpha,” the guard said, glancing uncertainly from me to Kaci, then back to me.

  I shrugged. “So, go. Clear.”

  The guard jogged off in search of an Alpha, but I saw no reason to wait, so I led the tabby down the hall after him.

  Kaci hung behind me on the stairs, so that I stepped into the living room first, and when she peeked out from behind me, all conversation stopped. The lodge became so quiet I could hear the individual heartbeats of everyone in the room—only a few toms recently back from the search, thankfully.

  Marc sat in the armchair closest to the sickroom, from which he could see the entire room at once, including the front door. Jace sat on the end of the couch nearest him.

  Dr. Carver was gone, a fact I verified with a quick glance out the front window at the empty spot his rental car had occupied. Blackwell and Malone were in the dining room at the rear of the lodge, their presence betrayed by the indistinct buzz of quiet conversation.

  Presumably everyone else was still out searching for the missing female hiker. Except for my father, who stepped into the living room from the kitchen at that moment, the guard on his heels, frozen in mid-question.

  He raised one brow at me in question, and when I only smiled in response, he nodded, then ducked back into the kitchen, as if the tabby coming out of her shell for the first time was no big deal. A rush of gratitude brought heat to my cheeks, and I would have thanked him if Kaci hadn’t been practically clinging to my arm.

  “Kaci, you remember Marc and Jace, right?” I tugged her gently into sight.

  “Hi.” She stepped warily around me, into the fringe of the room.

  “Hey, kiddo!” Leaning forward on the couch, Jace favored her with his typical grin, all straight white teeth and cherubic lips. “’Bout time you joined the party.”

  I snorted, mildly amused by his description of my murder trial as a party. “I told Kaci we might be able to scrounge up something to eat and a game of…whatever pointlessly bloody exercise in time-wasting you guys have in there.”

  “Grand Theft Auto IV! You wanna play?” He was off the couch and across the room in an instant, pulling open the door to the empty first-floor bedroom.

  Kaci glanced at me hesitantly, as if asking for permission. Or maybe looking for the all clear. I nodded, more pleased than I wanted to admit by her willingness to trust Jace—and by his apparently effortless ability to put her at ease.

  She followed him into the bedroom and a moment later the game unit whirred to life softly, beeping a moment after that.

  “You hungry?” I asked Marc, backing toward the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to take my eyes from him any sooner than necessary.

  “Always. I think I saw a can of Ro*Tel in the cabinet, and there’s a block of Velveeta in the fridge.”

  “That’ll work.” I rounded the corner into the kitchen to find my father waiting for me. “Hey, did Jace talk to you about…” Malone preparing to pull a Julius Caesar?

  “Yes, but we’ll talk about that later, after the current mess is settled.”

  “But that’ll be too la—”

  Dad frowned at me in warning, and put one finger over my lips. Then he nodded toward the living room, where Marc’s steady steps approached us. His message was clear, even unspoken. I would have to say goodbye to Marc eventually, and this was just as good a time as any.

  But he was wrong. There was no good time to say goodbye to Marc, so I wasn’t even going to try. I wasn’t going to think about it until I had to, and that moment hadn’t come yet.

  Marc came in through one doorway as my father went out the other, and he headed straight for the fridge while I searched out the can of Ro*Tel he’d mentioned. We stood together at the counter, cutting the processed-cheese mush into much smaller blocks than necessary, just to have an excuse to be near each other.

  My arm brushed his, and after a few minutes, he hooked his foot around my ankle, standing half behind me, my left foot sandwiched by both of his. His chest pressed into my back, and his breath brushed my bare neck, exposed by my high ponytail.

  We worked in silence, content for the moment simply to be together. But cheese dip was a no-brainer, and try though we might, we couldn’t drag the process out more than twenty minutes, even with the crappy, dented double boiler he found in the pots-and-pans cabinet.

  He carried two bowls of dip into the bedroom, and I grabbed two unopened bags of corn chips on my way out of the kitchen. Marc and I lounged together on one of the twin beds, munching contentedly while Jace and Kaci sat on the floor, beating the crap out of digital drivers and grabbing drippy bites between rounds.

  Over the next hour, other toms came and went as the search-party shifts changed. Kaci barely greeted each one with an absent nod and a wave, one hand still deftly working her video-game controller. Though she never gave any of the new arrivals much of an acknowledgment, neither was she upset by their presence.

  By the time the sun sank below the horizon, Kaci and Jace had gone through several levels in their game and seemed to be the best of friends. Or even brother and sister.

  Marc and I lay quietly, rarely speaking, but constantly touching. Our hands were intertwined and my leg thrown over his when the dining-room door squealed open and the voices from the back of the house rose in volume.

  I tensed instantly, knowing damn well what they wanted. The sun was down and Amanda
Tindale had not been found. Time was up. Kaci would have to start talking, whether she wanted to or not.

  Twenty-Seven

  Marc’s hand clenched around mine, silently asking me what was wrong, even as he sat up next to me on the bed. I nodded in the direction of the as-yet-unseen parade of Alphas, then toward Kaci, though I had no idea whether or not he could understand my makeshift sign language.

  A long shadow fell through the open doorway, and to my surprise, the person casting it was not Calvin Malone, but my father—who had obviously beaten him to the proverbial punch. Daddy’s eyes flicked from me to Kaci, then back to me, and his brows rose in question. His meaning was clear: playtime was over.

  I nodded, and he retreated into the living room, herding the other Alphas along with him.

  “Kaci?” I crawled forward to perch on the end of the bed, more relieved than I would have admitted when the warm curve of Marc’s body settled in behind mine, his arm winding around my waist.

  “Yeah?” Kaci hit a button with an eerily nimble thumb and the game on-screen froze as she twisted to look up at me. If she’d noticed my father’s arrival and quick retreat, she showed no sign. “What’s wrong?”

  I inhaled deeply, unsure how best to prevent her from clamming up or freaking out when I explained what we needed from her. “I’ve put this off as long as I can, and now the council needs some information from you. We need some information from you,” I corrected myself, hoping that she’d be more willing to help me and the guys than a bunch of old men, most of whom she’d never met.

  She stiffened, and plastic creaked as her hand clenched around the video-game controller. “I told you I don’t want to talk about my family.”

  “I know. This isn’t about them.” I pressed myself close to Marc, indulging my need to touch him as much as possible before he left.

  “What then?” Kaci’s forehead wrinkled, her youth-pouty lips tensing. On her left, Jace put down his controller and watched, ready and willing to help in any way he could.

  “You told me earlier that you remembered seeing some human hikers in the woods. Do you remember seeing a man and a woman a few days ago? Somewhere near here?”

  Kaci nodded slowly, her gaze drifting toward her lap. “I don’t know how long ago that was, though. I lost count of the days a long, long time ago.”

  “That’s okay.” Jace scooted to lean with his back against the bed behind him. “Just tell us what you remember.”

  “I don’t…” The controller fell from Kaci’s hands to land in the ring created by her crisscrossed legs.

  I waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, I shot a warning glance at Jace, telling him silently to let me do the talking. If I was good at anything, it was talking. “Do you remember the man, Kaci? Can you tell us anything about him?” To make sure we were all on the same page. Her expression was completely blank, so I nudged a little harder. “Do you remember anything about his legs?”

  Recognition sparked in her eyes and she nodded. “He had a fake leg. It looked like a metal stick. A pros…something or other.”

  I smiled. “A prosthesis. Yes, he had a prosthetic leg.”

  “Right,” Kaci said, and a chill numbed my insides at the sight of her detached expression, as if she were reciting something she’d read somewhere once upon a time, rather than what she’d personally seen the day she’d infected the man in question. “It made him walk funny. Kind of hobbly.”

  That was exactly the kind of detail a werecat would notice, because a “hobbly” walk would make it difficult for the prey to run. Yet we knew for a fact that Bob Tindale had survived his encounter with Kaci, because he’d shown up later in cat form, bearing her signature scent in his bloodstream. What we didn’t know about was his wife.

  “I’m sure it did.” I glanced at Jace, wishing I could see Marc well enough to judge his expression, but I couldn’t, with him pressed so close to my back. “What we really need to know about is the woman he was with. Do you remember her?”

  Kaci nodded again, staring at the floor now, but offered no further explanation.

  I kept my voice low and soothing, noting that her eyes were no longer merely distant, but actually vacant now. “What happened to her, Kaci?”

  “I don’t…” She shook her head in slow, anguished denial, eyes squeezing shut tightly. “I don’t remember.” But it was clear that what she really meant was I don’t want to remember. She wouldn’t have been so upset if she didn’t know what had happened to the female hiker.

  “I need you to try, honey.” I lay one hand on her shoulder, hoping physical contact would comfort her, rather than scare her. “We found the man this afternoon, but the woman is still out there, and we have to find her before the humans do. Do you understand why?”

  Kaci shook her head again, but her eyes opened, vague curiosity flowing in to dilute her fear and denial.

  “The police are looking for those hikers, and if they find the woman before we do, they’ll do an examination of her body, which might give them evidence of our existence.”

  Things like that did happen on occasion, and the labs inevitably attributed their odd findings to contaminated samples. But eventually someone would link multiple “contaminated” cases, and our private existence depended on them finding as little evidence of us as possible.

  “The woman is dead, isn’t she?” I asked gently, when I realized we’d all been laboring under that unspoken assumption.

  For a moment, Kaci only stared at me. Then her gaze dropped and she nodded.

  “We need to know what happened.” She started to shake her head again, but I continued, because if I couldn’t get her to talk, there was no telling what the council would try. “No one’s going to get mad, Kaci. We already know you infected the man. Your scent is woven with his. We’ve known that for several hours now, and no one’s even said a harsh word to you, right?”

  She nodded mutely, spinning the game remote on the floor.

  “I promise you it’s safe to tell me what happened. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  Kaci glanced at Jace, then at Marc over my shoulder. I was about to ask them for some privacy when her eyes settled on me again and her mouth opened. “I didn’t mean to do it. I was asleep, but something woke me up. Footsteps. Then smoke. I knew it was people and I got up to leave, but before I could get away, the woman…she just appeared in front of me. She had an armful of big sticks, but when she saw me she dropped them and just stood there staring at me. I tried to back away from her and she freaked out. She grabbed one of the sticks and ran at me. I…I didn’t know what to do.”

  She glanced from me to Jace, then to Marc and back to me, begging each of us with her huge hazel eyes to tell her it was okay. That she’d done the right thing—whatever that was.

  “She tried to hit me, and I got really scared, but sort of mad at the same time. I can’t explain it. I don’t feel like that now, but I wasn’t human then, and I couldn’t really think about it. She ran at me with that stick and I hissed, but she didn’t stop. When she got close enough, I just swung at her with one…um…paw.” She held her right hand up for emphasis, swiping it across the air with her fingers hooked like talons.

  “Were your claws retracted?” Marc asked, his chest rumbling against my back.

  “Tucked in, you mean?” she asked, and he nodded. “No. I didn’t even think about doing that.”

  Of course she hadn’t. She’d never been taught how to defend herself without hurting anyone. She’d never been taught anything about being a werecat, and had only her own instinct to go on. Unfortunately, a cat’s instinct didn’t include concern over its foe’s well-being.

  “It’s okay, Kaci,” I said, surprised to hear the calm, soothing quality of my own voice. I didn’t have much practice setting others at ease. In fact, I tended to piss people off more often than not, but Kaci reminded me a lot of myself, and even more of my cousin Abby, who brought out every protective instinct I had. “We can’t change what happened, but
we can help you deal with it. And I think the best place to start would be giving that woman a proper burial.” Or at least a secret, moonlight-in-the-forest burial. “Don’t you think? Can you do that for her?”

  Kaci nodded, and I thought I saw an edge of resolve leak into the tense lines of her face.

  “Good. Can you tell us where she is?”

  Her brows furrowed, and she shook her head, the first sign of tears glittering in her eyes. “I don’t know where I am. Or how I got here.”

  Of course she didn’t. Keller had knocked her out with a length of firewood, and she’d woken up in a strange room with no idea what had happened while she slept.

  Marc squeezed me from behind, and his stubbly cheek scratched against mine when he spoke. “Do you think you could show us, if we can get you back to someplace familiar?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t hesitate, and actually looked a little relieved.

  Thank goodness. I stood and pulled the rubber band from my hair, mentally composing an appeal to the council, but Jace was already halfway to the door. By the time I got to the kitchen, Kaci clinging to my hand and fastened to my side, Jace stood in front of the Alphas seated around the kitchen table, launching into a formal request for the werecat version of a search-and-seizure warrant.

  “You want to take both tabbies into the woods?” Blackwell asked, deep-set eyes wide in disbelief. Malone looked ready to spew lava from his ears, and even my father looked doubtful.

  “Absolutely not,” Malone thundered, shoving his chair back to stand with both palms flat on the table. “Faythe is still on trial here, and that child wears trouble like a snowman wears white.”