“Leland something. He was Ivy’s boyfriend.” Robyn frowned. “Except we don’t know whether she was cheating on Justus or on Leland. Either way, that would definitely be enough to set off a newly infected stray. Especially if your brother smelled the other guy on her.”
“So, what, we’re thinking that Justus followed them out here, maybe to confront them, maybe to confirm his suspicions? Then he got upset and lost control?”
Robyn shrugged. “That’s happened to me.”
“That’s happened to all of us. But most of us don’t kill.”
“I don’t think he meant to.” Robyn gestured to Ivy’s arm again. “Her gun didn’t work, yet he barely scratched her. If he was newly infected himself and didn’t have the benefit of the counseling and information you give your new strays, he probably had no idea that scratching her would kill her. He may even have been defending himself from a rifle used as a baseball bat.”
“Okay.” The temptation to cling to her interpretation of events was strong. I didn’t want to think that my little brother had become a murderer. But I couldn’t just dismiss the other possibilities because I loved Justus. “We’d know for sure if we could find him.”
“He’s not the only one missing. According to Corey Morris, Leland was with Ivy in the cabin when he was infected.”
“You think Justus infected him too?”
Robyn shrugged. “Chances of him leaving unscathed are slim, right?”
I nodded. Especially if he was sleeping with Justus’s girlfriend. Even in humans, that kind of betrayal often led to violence. To a newly infected shifter unable to control his instincts and urges…?
“This is why the Pride has to be recognized. New strays need structure and assistance. Education. Support. If Justus and whoever infected him knew what they were becoming, they wouldn’t have spread the infection.” I had to believe that.
“Agreed. So, what do we do with her?” Robyn braved another glance at the body. “I assume we can’t call the police.”
“You assume correctly. If she made it to the morgue, at the very least, they’d put out a warning about large cats, and hunters would flock to the area hoping to bag one.”
“So what are we supposed to do with her? We can’t leave her here.”
“We’ll bury her. We can do that, at least.”
“But this is her family’s property,” Robyn pointed out. “When they realize she’s missing, won’t this be the first place people look? They’d notice a fresh grave.”
“Yes, but we’re burying her out of respect and to delay the inevitability of discovery, not to hide anything,” I explained. “An autopsy would turn up no evidence of foul play, other than the burial itself, and if they test her blood, the lab will likely assume the sample was contaminated by the cat that scratched her.” I shrugged. “The cops will have a mystery, but no true crime to investigate.”
I glanced around, hoping for a throw blanket or something to cover her with, but there was nothing except the bedding she was already lying on. “Hopefully there’s a shovel in here somewhere.”
The cabin itself turned up nothing more useful than a few large spoons in a drawer beneath the microwave. But a small shed stood in the clearing out back, and inside we found an ax for chopping firewood and two shovels.
One of them was broken.
While I started digging the grave, among the trees well behind the shed, Robyn wrapped poor Ivy in the blanket she’d died on and brought her outside.
“She can’t have been dead for more than a day,” Robyn said as she carefully laid the body on the ground, near the still-shallow hole. If she weren’t a shifter, she never could have carried a woman nearly her own size down the stairs by herself, in a cradle hold. “How can she possibly smell so bad?”
“From the amount of ash in the fireplace, I suspect the fire burned for a while after she died. That would have kept the cabin warm, even with the door ajar, which accelerates the decomposition process.” I threw another shovelful of dirt onto the growing pile next to the grave. “Even so, we’re much more aware of the smell than any human would be.”
Robyn brushed her hands down the front of the black wool coat she’d borrowed from me. “I think you’re going to have to burn this. And not just to get rid of evidence.”
“Fortunately, Justus has a fireplace.”
For a while, I dug in silence, except for the thunk of the shovel into the soil and the chorus of crickets. Robyn stared at the blanket-wrapped bundle, and she was quiet for so long that I started to worry.
“You okay?” I finally asked, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my forehead, in spite of the cold.
“Is this what would have happened to me, if I hadn’t survived scratch fever?” Her voice sounded strained. “Would Jace and Abby have buried me in an unmarked grave in the woods where I died?”
“You didn’t die.”
“But if I had?”
She was going to make me say it. “If you’d died, then yes. They would have done the best they could by you, which probably would have meant digging two feet deeper than the six-foot hole I’m digging for Ivy.” I’d never had to dig an entire grave on my own. In the past, I’d had enforcers with shovels of their own to help. The work wasn’t difficult, with a shifter’s strength. But it was tedious.
“What about her family?” Robyn asked. But what she really wanted to know about was her own family, in the event of that hypothetical death. “They’ll never know what happened to her, will they? She’ll just be…gone.”
“With any luck, yes.” I pushed the shovel into another clump of packed earth and wrenched more dirt loose. “At least this way, they can hope she’s still alive somewhere. Isn’t that better than knowing how she died?”
“No.” Robyn didn’t hesitate. “False hope is never better.” She stood and brushed dirt from her pants and the back of my coat. “Here, let me dig for a while.”
“No need. I’m nearly done.”
“I’m bored.” She took the shovel from me, and after five minutes of watching, I was ready to pull clods of dirt from the earth by hand, just to have something to do.
“Why don’t you see if there’s anything to drink in the cabin?” she said when she noticed me fidgeting.
“Thirst-quenching or recreational?”
“Thirst-quenching.” She pushed hair from her face and left a smear of dirt across her forehead. “You know. Because of all the shoveling.”
“I’m on it.” I circled to the front of the cabin and was pleased, when I stepped inside, to find that the smell of decay had faded significantly with the removal of Ivy’s body.
The refrigerator held nothing but an out-of-date box of baking soda, and the cabinets were empty, so I grabbed the empty water bottle from my backpack and refilled it from the sink. I was halfway to the door again when I heard a scream and a thud from outside.
Alarm raised every hair on my body. Pulse pounding, I raced down the front steps and around the small cabin, then past the shed, where a growl clawed its way up my throat from my gut.
Robyn lay pinned to the ground by a large shifter with his front paws on her shoulders, his muzzle inches from her neck.
His head snapped up when he heard me, and his gaze met mine. A low growl rumbled from his throat.
I skidded to a stop in the dirt, my hands up to show him I meant no harm, still holding the water bottle. I knew with one look at him that this cat wasn’t Justus. There was no recognition in his gaze.
Shoving down the fury raging inside me at the sight of Robyn in danger, I spoke in a low, even voice to keep him calm. “Hey. It’s okay. We’re not here to hurt you, and we don’t want anything.”
He continued to growl, but softer than before.
“My name is Titus Alexander. The lady you have pinned down is Robyn Sheffield. We’re shifters. Like you.”
The cat’s head cocked in an oddly human look of confusion, and I took that as confirmation that he was listening and that he could understand me. Though something in m
y statement had clearly puzzled him.
“Smell her,” I said, but the cat only blinked at me. “Seriously, smell her.”
Robyn gasped when he lowered his muzzle to her neck, and for a moment I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake. If he bit her throat instead of smelling it, she was as good as dead.
If that happened, nothing would keep me from ripping him apart with my bare hands.
But the cat only sniffed her skin, then turned to me.
“Smells familiar, right? That’s because she’s a shifter, just like you. Just like me. You seem a little confused about what’s happened to you, so I’m going to take a guess, and you nod if I’m right. Okay?” I said, but he only stared at me, still standing on Robyn’s shoulders while she took even, measured breaths, obviously trying to lie very still. “I’m guessing you were attacked by a cat who looked like you do now, a couple of days ago.”
I wasn’t close enough to get a good whiff of his scent with my human-form nose, but unless we’d stumbled upon a scratch fever epidemic, there was only one logical conclusion for me to draw, having concluded that this shifter was not my brother. “Is your name Leland?”
The cat cocked his head to the side again, silently asking me a question.
“It was an educated guess. We met a friend of yours yesterday,” I explained. “Corey Morris. He told us that you and he had come out to the cabin the other night with Ivy, and that a cat had attacked him. He didn’t know that cat was a shifter until we explained it to him, and I’m guessing you didn’t either.” I gave him a second to respond, but he didn’t seem to know how. “If I’m right, you can nod your head.”
Leland’s muzzle bobbed up and down, hesitantly at first, and I could practically see the lightbulb flare in the air over his head. With that one gesture, he’d bridged the gap between his feline and human halves. Understanding that he was capable of human thought and communication even in cat form was the first step toward the harmonious co-existence of both parts of himself.
“Good. Now, if you’ll let Robyn up, she and I can finish giving Ivy a proper burial, and if you want, we can talk you through shifting back into human form. Have you done that yet?”
Leland slowly shook his muzzle back and forth.
“Well, we’d be happy to help.”
“If you’ll get off me,” Robyn reiterated, her words strained by the weight on her chest.
And finally, Leland backed carefully off her.
“Thanks.” Robyn sat up slowly, careful not to spook him with any sudden movements. When he seemed calm, she stood, just as slowly, and began brushing dirt and leaves from the back of her—my—wool coat.
It took all my restraint to keep from pulling her into my arms, away from him, and kissing her. From telling her how stupid I’d been to push her away. She could have died. I could have lost her.
But I couldn’t tell her any of that with him listening. A new stray should not know how much power he’d wielded. Or how close I’d been to killing him.
“Is it okay with you if we finish burying Ivy?” Robyn asked, impressively composed, after what she’d been through.
After a long moment of hesitation, Leland nodded.
“Why don’t I do that while you talk him through a shift?” I picked up the shovel where it had obviously landed when he’d pounced on her, prepared to use it as a weapon, if I had to. The sooner we got Leland in human form, the sooner we could question him about Justus. And disarm him of his claws.
Robyn shrugged with a glance at Leland. “I’m game if you are.”
FIFTEEN
Robyn
Still spooked from my near-death experience, I walked Leland away from the grave, hyper-conscious that if I startled him, I could wind up right back in the dirt, with him on my chest. Leland’s infection and transition had obviously been even more traumatic than mine, and until then, he’d never even met another shifter. He would be taking his very first behavioral cues from us, and I understood that if he didn’t trust us, rather than helping a stray, we’d be creating a rogue. A true wildcat.
While Titus finished digging the hole, I gave Leland softly-voiced, patient instructions for how to take his shift into his own hands. “You aren’t at the mercy of it,” I told him. “I know you didn’t have any choice that first time, but you do now. And the same goes for all your new feline instincts and urges. No matter which form you’re in, you are in charge of your body, not the other way around. But sometimes the easiest way to exercise that control is to relinquish a little bit of it. Your body knows what to do. All you have to do is get out of your own way.”
By the time the hole was deep enough, Leland was nearly finished with his shift. As Titus lifted Ivy’s lifeless body and lowered her into the grave, Leland carefully rose from the leaf-strewn dirt—finally human and naked—to watch.
“She deserved better.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I didn’t mean to… I was just so hungry.” Chill bumps stood out on his arms, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold.
Titus hesitated with the first shovelful of dirt. “Do you want to say anything to her?”
Leland nodded, and light from the waning moon shined on his dark hair. He stepped forward until he could see into the hole, wincing when his heel snapped through a twig. “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he whispered. “If I could take it back, I would.” Then he stepped away with a somber nod, and Titus began shoveling dirt into the grave. After a few minutes, I grabbed the bottom half of the broken shovel from the shed and began to help. Then Leland pitched in with his bare hands.
By the time Ivy was properly buried, we were all three covered in dirt and sweat.
Titus took the broken shovel from me and set both of them inside the shed. “Come on, Leland…what’s your last name?”
“Blum. Leland Blum,” the naked stray said.
“Come on, Leland Blum.” Titus gestured for him to come with us into the cabin. “Let’s get cleaned up and find you something to wear. I think I have some spare clothes in my backpack.”
“Do you always travel with extra clothes?” I asked as we rounded the side of the cabin, headed for the front door.
“I started carrying a spare set after I was infected, because I tended to lose track of where I’d left my clothes after I shifted.” He glanced at Leland, clearly eager to begin…mentoring. “That’s what we call the transformation from human to cat, and vice versa.”
Leland rolled his eyes. “Wow. That’s not cheesy at all.”
“Right?” I said, surprised by his sarcasm. Frankly. I was impressed that he wasn’t curled up in a corner, whimpering, considering what he’d been through.
Inside, I found rags in one of the kitchenette drawers, then wet them at the sink and passed them out. “This would be a lot easier if there were a bathroom,” I said as I scrubbed dirt from my forehead. “Or a mirror.”
Titus grunted as he brushed loose earth from the front of his jeans.
“This place pre-dates indoor plumbing.” Leland rinsed his dirty rag, then began scrubbing his left arm. “Ivy said her grandparents put the kitchenette in, but her grandfather refused to add a bathroom, when he could just pee out the back door.”
“I wonder what her grandmother thought of that?” I mused as I ran my rag over my throat and the grimy skin exposed above the collar of my shirt. For a couple of minutes, we worked in silence. Then Titus rinsed his rag again and turned to Leland.
“How long were you and Ivy together?” he asked, and though Leland probably didn’t pick up on it, I could tell how much the answer meant to him by the too-casual tone of his voice. By the tension in his shoulders.
“Nearly two years. Since our senior year in high school.”
Titus stiffened almost imperceptibly. Ivy was cheating on her boyfriend with Justus. Titus’s brother was the other man.
I rinsed my rag under the faucet, then draped it over the divide in the sink to dry. I was as clean as I was going to get without a shower. “Leland, can you tell us what happened
the other day? The night of the attack?”
The new stray frowned first at me, then at Titus. “I thought you already knew.”
“Corey Morris gave us the broad strokes, but he only knew what happened to him.” I sank to my knees next to the couch and began putting Ivy’s things into her purse. “He had no idea you and Ivy were infected. You’d be helping us out if you could give us the details.”
“What details do you want?”
“Did you know the shifter who…infected you?” Titus asked.
Blum’s bewildered expression said as much as his answer did. “I don’t know any shifters. I didn’t even know there were shifters, and I didn’t know that cat was one until you told me.” He dropped his rag into the sink without bothering to rinse it, then plucked the last clean one from the drawer. “All I know is that Ivy and I were on the couch, getting…intimate.” His gaze strayed to the couch while he ran hot water over the clean rag. “Then we heard Corey shouting from outside. I opened the door but before I could even step onto the porch, this cat was there. He was huge. Bigger than a bobcat—more like a mountain lion, but solid black.”
“Yes, we’re all black in cat form.” I set Ivy’s repacked purse on the scuffed up coffee table, and I wondered if we should have buried it with her.
“Well, he just pounced on me. He drove me to the floor, and his claws dug into my shoulders. See?” Blum wiped the dirt from his left shoulder, exposing four small puncture wounds, crusted with dried blood. “They’re deeper than they look. I thought he was going to eat my face off or something, but then Ivy screamed and ran up into the loft. The cat went after her, and I froze. She was terrified. Screaming. And all I could do was stand there.”
“She had a gun?” Titus prompted, when Leland seemed lost in the memory.
“Yeah. Her dad kept an old hunting rifle under the bed. But it wouldn’t fire, so she swung it at the cat. Hit him several times. Finally, he took off, right out the front door. I locked it behind him and went to check on Ivy.”
“She was scratched?” Titus said, when the new stray’s gaze lost focus in the direction of the loft.