When I looked up, I found Jace watching me, as if he knew what I was thinking. Or as if he wanted to. But he knew better than to ask in front of anyone else.
“Okay, let’s go.” I slid the lid back onto the box and shoved the tracker into my front pocket, then marched for the door, confident that at least two of the toms would follow me. “It’s not getting any earlier out there. Or any warmer.”
Twenty-Five
Jace, Dan, and I parted ways with Feldman at the playground where we’d parked, and as we turned left coming out of the lot, I glanced back at Feldman to see him gripping his steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, his face twisted into one of the fiercest scowls I’d ever seen. He reminded me of Marc in that moment, because of both the stress he clearly took out on his vehicle, and his fierce determination to see justice done. I couldn’t help but respect his motives, even if his actions would oppose mine in the end.
“Hey, Dan?” I twisted in my seat as Jace swerved smoothly onto the on-ramp. “Could you turn around and make sure we have everything we need? I’m hoping this thing will shorten the length of our hike—” I held up the tracker “—but we need to be prepared for the worst.”
“Sure.” Dan unbuckled and stood on his knees to peer over his seat back into the cargo area of Jace’s Pathfinder, then reached up and pressed a light panel in the ceiling to illuminate the area. “Looks like we have a first-aid kit, four bottles of water, a shovel, some tools, and a couple of flashlights. And Marc’s coat.” Which he lifted from the backseat to show me.
“Good. Thanks.” While Dan turned the light off and re-buckled, I watched Jace’s profile lighten and darken as shadows cast by a series of highway lights passed over him. “We have to stop by Marc’s house,” I said, a supply list running through my head. “We need more water, something quick to eat, and some more caffeine. And a restroom. And we need to cover all that very quickly.”
Jace nodded, and flicked on his blinker when our exit approached. Six minutes later he pulled into Marc’s driveway, and we all raced into the house. The guys gathered supplies and filled Dr. Carver in on what he’d missed while I used the restroom, all in under eight minutes.
But that still felt like too long. I felt like we’d been looking for Marc forever, and that even though we finally knew where he was—in theory—every second was still crucial.
I was zipping up my coat on the way to the front door, a newly loaded backpack over one shoulder, when my phone began to ring. I didn’t recognize the number, and only vaguely noticed that the area code was the same as Marc’s, so I didn’t expect to know the caller. But he definitely knew me.
“Faythe?”
My insides went cold, and I spun to face the guys, one finger pressed to my lips, warning them to be silent. Kevin Mitchell, I mouthed.
Jace scowled and Dan’s eyebrows arched in surprise, while the doctor simply nodded his acknowledgment.
“Yes?” I said into the receiver. “Who is this?”
“You know damn well who this is,” Kevin snapped, and I wondered if he already knew about our little B and E. “And I can tell you have company by the sudden silence in the background. Do you have them holding their breath?” I rolled my eyes but made no reply, so he continued, unflustered. “Are you still in Mississippi?”
“Are you?” I only realized I was pacing when I reached the kitchen table and had to turn around. He knew we were at Marc’s house earlier because Yarnell had found our scents when he’d come to clean up the bodies we’d already disposed of. But did Kevin know we’d made a trip to the ranch? And did he know why?
“Where else could I be?” he huffed in irritation. “You may recall that I’m restricted to the free zone now.”
“That does sound familiar….” I couldn’t keep anger from bleeding into my voice. I was desperate to find Marc, but couldn’t afford to hang up on Kevin. We needed him in custody, in order to bring him before the council.
“The real question is what are you doing here? Other than making a bonfire out of Adam Eckard’s car?”
“There was a fire? Ohhh, too bad I missed that. I never pass up an opportunity to make s’mores.” I shrugged at Jace, wondering if it would be stupid of me to talk to Kevin from the car, on the way to find Marc.
“I missed it, too.” A soft suction sounded over the phone, then a low-pitched hum met my ears. Kevin had just opened a refrigerator. The bastard was having a snack while he taunted me!
Did that mean he was at home? Did he already know we’d been through his stuff and taken the tracker? Was he just stringing me along? I shot a desperate look at Jace, but he only shrugged. Either he didn’t know what I was thinking, or he didn’t have the answers to my unspoken questions.
Kevin continued, oblivious to my silent panic. “By the time I got there this afternoon, there was nothing left but a burnt patch of grass on the side of the road. But then I noticed a break in the tree line, like several people had stomped through the woods.”
“Weird.” My coat was too thick to be worn indoors, and I was starting to sweat, either from the warmth or from nerves.
“I know!” Kevin exclaimed too brightly, and suddenly I was tired of our role-playing, and ready for him to cut to the proverbial chase. But Kevin liked to hear himself talk. “And it gets weirder from there. I found blood on the ground near that break in the trees, from two different strays. I assume you know whose blood I found?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Kevin, this is stupid. Cut the shit and get to the point.”
Jace groaned and let his forehead fall into his hand; evidently he would have handled it differently.
“Who’s with you?” Kevin asked, and I glared at Jace for giving away their presence. “It’s Jace, right?” Kevin guessed, and I inhaled sharply in surprise. How the hell had he known that? “Obviously it’s not Ethan. I hear the youngest Sanders tom met with an unfortunate end this morning.”
This morning? Had it really been less than a day? It felt like forever since Ethan died, yet each second seemed to slip away from me faster than the last, time sliding rapidly through my fingers like a rope burning my palm. Hearing my dead brother’s name spoken in Kevin Mitchell’s irreverent voice made me want to reach through his stomach and pull his intestines out inch by excruciating inch.
A growl rumbled from my throat before I could stop it, and on the edge of my vision, Jace’s fist flew. An instant later, his travel mug hit the wall, leaving a cup-shaped dent in the Sheetrock and splattering still-steaming coffee over the wall and floor. Obviously furious and hurting, Jace suddenly seemed to take up more room than he should have, like a cat whose fur is standing on end. It was an angry-Alpha pose, and I would have been impressed if I weren’t just as pissed and wounded as he was.
Kevin laughed into my ear. “Tell Jace I said hi.”
“What do you want?” I demanded, and had to make myself loosen my grip on my phone before I crushed it.
“I just wanted to extend my sympathy for what happened to your brother—so sad—and to assure you that nothing so tragic has happened to Marc. Yet.”
What? Shock jolted through me, and my heart hammered against my sternum. “You’re bluffing.” But my voice came out weak with doubt, and we all heard it. I cleared my throat and tried again, pacing quickly now to burn off the fury racing through my veins with each beat of my heart. “You don’t have Marc. Pete Yarnell said he was dead.” And hopefully Kevin would think I believed that.
“And that’s what we truly thought at the time. Until I followed that trail of blood through the woods and discovered Adam’s lonely, unmarked grave. And I suspect the trail was even easier for us to follow than it was for you, thanks to the path you broke. What’d you do, march an elephant through there?”
No, just four werecats in sturdy boots.
“You disinterred your own…friend?” Or fellow henchman. Or evil sidekick. Or…whatever. Shivers of disgust raised chill bumps all over my arms and legs, in spite of the winter coat I still wore. T
he only task worse than burying a body was unburying one.
“You didn’t leave us much choice. We had to verify that it was really Adam in that hole. And it was, as you know, which means Marc was still out in the woods somewhere. Fortunately, finding him was easier than I expected. Remind me later, and I’ll explain to you just how we did that.”
My eyebrows shot up and a satisfied smile bloomed on my face. Kevin didn’t know we knew about the chips, much less that we could track them! Which meant he wasn’t at home. But he’d figure all of that out the minute he stepped into his own house. So we couldn’t let that happen.
“Why don’t you tell me now?” I asked, stalling for time as I pinned the phone between my shoulder and my ear, then dug the chip tracker from my pocket. I typed Eckard’s code into it again, this time from memory.
Kevin chuckled. “How ’bout I show you instead? Meet me at my house in an hour, and—”
“No!” I shouted, as the screen in front of me disappeared, only to be replaced a moment later with a progress bar and the word Loading…
Damn it! I hadn’t meant to be so obviously opposed to the meeting place. The gears in my brain whirred to life louder than the rush of my own pulse, scrambling for a good cover. “Someplace public. There’s no way we’re giving you home-field advantage.”
The loading screen dissolved, and new coordinates appeared, but I could tell nothing from the longitude and latitude, so I pressed the Map View button, and the progress bar appeared again as the new page loaded.
“You’re right.” Kevin chuckled again, and I was starting to truly hate the sound of his laughter. “Because you’re coming alone. If you don’t, Marc’s dead.”
Nooooo! I could not come so close to getting him back—alive—only to have him snatched away from me again!
My heart tried to claw its way up my throat, and speech was suddenly impossible. Instead, a choking sound erupted from my mouth as I dropped the gadget on the table and struggled to draw a fresh breath. Only my hand gripping the back of a folding chair kept me upright.
Jace was behind me in an instant, taking the phone from my hand. Breathe… he mouthed, rubbing my back with his free hand.
“Faythe?” Kevin said over the line. Jace put the phone up to his ear, but I snatched it back before he could speak, finally sucking in a deep breath.
“I’m here.” I took a longer, calmer breath that time, and nodded to Jace that I was okay, just as Dr. Carver put a glass of ice water on the table in front of me. “But I want proof that you have Marc. That he’s still alive.”
“Hmm…” Footsteps sounded over the line, and a rough, scratching sound told me Kevin was covering the mouthpiece. Then he was back. “That’s gonna be hard to come by for the moment. He’s unconscious.”
Damn it. “Is he snoring?” I avoided Jace’s wounded gaze. “Or even just breathing loudly? I’ll recognize it, if it’s him.”
“You’re serious?” Kevin scoffed.
“As a neutered tom.”
Dan flinched at my phrasing, and Dr. Carver grinned—perhaps considering performing such a procedure on the wildcat. But Kevin got my point. “Fine. Just a second.” There was more rustling against the phone, then a soft sound met my ears: a strong, smooth inhalation, with just a hint of a rattle.
Tears formed in my eyes, flowing over when I blinked. I’d recognize that sleep-breathing anywhere. One long inhale through his nose, with a slight whistle on the front end, and a little puh sound at the end, where he exhaled through mostly closed lips. It sounded like he had a chest cold—hopefully not pneumonia—but Marc was very much alive.
For the moment, anyway.
I choked off a sob of relief as something brushed Kevin’s receiver again, then he was back. “Satisfied?”
“Not in the least.” I’d just tasted a scrap from the table, when what I really wanted—what I needed—was the whole damn feast. “So how’s this going to work?”
“A simple trade.” I could practically hear the satisfied smile in Kevin’s voice. “You for Marc. You show up alone, or we kill him. You show up without fur, or we kill him. You show up ready to play nice, or we kill him. Got it?”
Yeah, yeah. Standard hostage conditions, and about as sincere as a politician’s promise. “I got it. Who’s we?”
“Just me and a friend. I’m serious, Faythe,” Kevin warned, and all humor had drained from his voice, leaving it cold and empty. “I have no reason to keep Marc alive, except to exchange him for you. If that trade doesn’t work out, he’s no use to me.”
Kevin had been human once. Half-human, anyway. Had exile changed him so much? Or was this desperation to earn his way back into his birth Pride?
“I know.” I sipped from the water Dr. Carver had brought me, then turned my back on the toms and closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know, but…“What do you want from me, Kevin?”
Someone else—someone not Kevin—laughed lasciviously in the background, until an angry noise from Kevin shut him up. “Information. We just want to talk to you.”
Well, that would certainly be a first…not that I believed it. No one had ever expended so much effort before just to get me to talk; usually people worked to get me to shut up.
“So, what? I show up and you let Marc go? How’s he supposed to leave if he’s unconscious?”
“We knocked him out, and we can wake him up just as easily.”
My grip on the back of the chair tightened until the metal groaned. “Damn it, Kevin, I swear, if you hurt him, I’ll rip your arms out of their sockets and beat your friend to death with them while you bleed out.”
“Oh, I believe you,” he said, though the amusement in his voice said that he did not. “But Marc was hurt long before we got to him.”
“Thanks to another one of your goons. Yet you expect me to just hand myself over and trust you to let him go?”
Footsteps clomped over the line, and that soft refrigerator hum was back, this time followed by running water. “I don’t give a shit what you trust. He goes out the back door the minute you come in the front. Or not at all. We do this my way, or you can take Marc home wrapped in plastic, and have a double service on Saturday.”
Fury shot through me like fire in my veins, and all three toms tensed at the rage and adrenaline I was dumping into the air. “You son of a bitch—”
“Save the drama,” Kevin snapped. “I’ve heard it all before. One hour,” he said, and this time his voice had the sound of finality. “At my house.” He rattled off an address I didn’t bother to write down—we knew damn well where he lived. “My watch says 11:07 p.m. If you’re not there at 12:07, Marc dies at 12:08.”
With that, the line went dead, and I was left staring at my phone. As I shoved it into my front right pocket, already bending for the backpack I’d dropped at some point during the phone call, my gaze caught on the tracker still lying on the table. I’d almost forgotten about it in the excitement of hearing Marc breathe.
“You do know they’re not going to let him go?” Jace said, as I picked up the palm-size gadget.
“Of course they won’t. They’ll kill him the moment I walk through the door.” I pressed a button on the side to “wake” the tracker, and a map appeared on-screen. “Which is why you and Dan have to go in through the back and get him out while I make a fuss in the front.”
Jace crossed his arms over his chest while Dan and Carver watched us both closely. “Don’t you think they’ll be expecting that?”
“Yes.” I looked up and met Jace’s eyes, showing him the steady determination in mine. “They’ll be expecting it in an hour, at Kevin’s house. Which is why we’re going to hit them twenty minutes from now. At Peter Yarnell’s.”
“What? Why Pete’s?” Dan’s eyebrows drew together in a deep frown. Dread, if I had my guess. If he and Pete had ever been friends in the past, they never would be again, after our little chat with Yarnell the day before.
“Because that’s where they are now.” I held up the trac
ker for them all to squint at. “And they won’t be expecting Dan, because his microchip is still at the ranch.” The guys looked surprised at that little reminder, and Dan even looked a little relieved.
But then Jace frowned and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “That’s assuming Kevin has Eckard’s microchip with him.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” I set my bag on the folding chair and dug through it, mentally inventorying the supplies. We wouldn’t need most of them, now that we wouldn’t be hiking through the woods, but it never hurt to be overprepared. “Kevin has no idea we know about the chips, and he won’t until he gets home.”
“What if he’s on the way there now?” Dr. Carver asked, a can of Coke halfway to his mouth.
“He isn’t.” I showed him the electronic map again, where Eckard’s blip was still sitting pretty at Yarnell’s house. “And if he leaves while we’re en route, we’ll follow them. At the very least, we’ll still catch them half an hour early, and hopefully off guard.” I zipped the bag and threw it over my shoulder. “But we have to move now. Let’s go!”
“Wait.” Jace grabbed my arm, and I would have pulled away from him if not for the naked fear in his eyes. Fear for me. “You can’t just walk in there. Especially at Yarnell’s house. He’s out for your blood.”
Shit. Ethan must have told him I’d lost control with Yarnell, because I hadn’t told anyone. I tugged my arm gently from his grip, trying to soften the gesture with direct eye contact. “Kevin won’t let him kill me.”
“That’s assuming Kevin can stop him. And even if he can, they’re probably both eager to take you down a peg or two.”
“Jace, I can handle myself, and I can take a punch, if necessary. And as soon as you guys get away with Marc, I’ll make a run for it, and you can double back and pick me up.” I shrugged and smiled, trying to convince him that my plan was brilliant and foolproof. When it was really just desperate. But I saw no other choice. I was not going to gamble with Marc’s life.