Michael leaned across the love seat and turned on a table lamp, to see me better. And finally the pain began to ebb, fading from deeply penetrating bolts of agony into a dull ache, with the occasional twinge. When it was over, my partial Shift complete, I let my hands fall away from my face.
I didn’t need to see my reflection to know I was monstrous. My father’s sharp inhalation said more about my appearance than words could ever have managed, and for a single, completely uncharacteristic instant, his unguarded expression left nothing to my imagination. Michael’s choking sound only underlined the point.
Then my father’s horror was simply gone, replaced by a professionally empty look, which was especially irritating in that moment, when I would have appreciated a little wonder and amazement in reward for my efforts. Or at least some professional curiosity.
But until he felt like he’d made up for his deplorable loss of control, I would get none of that. At least not from my father. Michael, however, was undeniably impressed. Or maybe disturbed. Either way, he’d taken off his useless glasses and was squinting at me with his bare eyes. But he made no move to come closer. In fact, he might have actually scooted a little farther away. Which was oddly satisfying. Unlike my father’s reaction.
“Well? Say something,” I demanded. Or rather, I tried to demand. What actually came out was a mutilated string of vowels and sibilant consonants too strange for even me to comprehend, so my father shouldn’t have had a clue. But he seemed to understand, anyway.
He squinted at me for a better look. “I’ll…be…damned!”
Nineteen
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d heard my father use profanity, and now he’d done it twice in the same half hour. And to my satisfaction, his voice reflected the amazement I’d hoped to see on his face. Yet no regret for scaring the crap out of me.
I wasn’t embarrassed to have been afraid of my father. Fear was a perfectly reasonable response to an Alpha’s rage. Expected, even. Better cats than I had pissed themselves in terror when an Alpha lost his temper. Fear was normal. And this time, it had also been productive.
He stood and seemed to float toward me, sinking to his knees with an ease and grace he hadn’t displayed in years. He took my chin in his hand, gently this time, and turned my face toward the light. His thumb pulled down my bottom lip for a better look at my teeth, which seemed blatantly unnecessary considering that my mouth wouldn’t close, anyway.
Or maybe I just resented being examined like a horse on an auction block. Especially after being forced to perform like a circus freak on display.
“Satisfied?” I asked, nearly nicking one of his fingers.
“That is without a doubt the most…amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Um…yes,” Michael stuttered. “It’s…really something.”
I rolled my eyes at him, wishing he’d been shocked speechless. Yes, I was no doubt hideous compared to his classically beautiful model-wife. But I’d like to see Holly rip someone’s throat out with those practically worthless blunt porcelain caps.
“So you believe me now?” I asked, turning back to my father.
“Turn a little more to the left.” He ignored my question, aiming my head without waiting for me to comply. Maybe he hadn’t understood me. Not that it would have mattered if he had.
He squeezed my cheeks until I had to either open my mouth wider or risk cutting myself on my own teeth. “Your jaws are longer, and your teeth are definitely feline,” he said, as if making a diagnosis. “Your tongue is rough, too, but your lips are still human, and I see no sign of fur.”
“Thanks for the rundown,” I mumbled, pulling free of his grasp. I stood and started to brush past my father, desperate for a little personal space after the invasion of my mouth. But before I’d taken even one step, a movement-blurred glimpse of myself in the silver-framed wall mirror stopped me cold. I sank back onto the couch, curling my hands into fists to keep them from shaking.
That one brief, out-of-focus image was more than enough. I didn’t want to know what I looked like. Feeling my teeth with my tongue gave me more information than I could deal with as it was. A partial Shift was great when I needed to rip apart a captor, or see in the dark. But proving my father wrong had lost its novelty, and my self-satisfaction was quickly fading into self-loathing. I hated looking like a monster. Not as badly as I hated looking like a little girl, but almost.
“If you’re satisfied, I’m going to Shift back now,” I lisped, as my father settled onto the couch next to me. And he finally looked impressed.
Good for him. I was Shifting back. But not with them watching me.
Over his sharp protest, I stood again, careful to avoid looking in the mirror as I stepped around the fallen armchair. Turning my back on my father and brother, I reversed the process, which was inevitably easier than the initial change, in the same way that the drive home from any given trip always seems to take less time than the torturously slow trip there.
When everything felt normal and I could speak plainly again, I leaned against the desk with my arms crossed beneath my breasts. “Are you satisfied now?”
He chuckled. “I’m much more than satisfied. I’m elated. I’m astonished. I’m relieved.” He stopped speaking, and I kept waiting. Surely there was more. But there wasn’t. He was done.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
My father frowned in concentration, clearly searching his memory for the omission. “What?”
Michael wiped his glasses with a white cloth from his pocket. “I believe she’s asking for an apology.”
“Of course I am. I deserve an apology!” I insisted. My father’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and my own eyes widened in disbelief. “You’re not sorry for not believing me?”
“Certainly, I’m sorry you had trouble demonstrating your extraordinary new skill, but it would have been foolish of me to believe something so fantastic without proof.”
I spoke through clenched teeth. “I trust every word you say. Why can’t you give me the same courtesy?”
He frowned. “I’ve earned your trust. I’ve never once lied to you.”
“When have I ever lied to you?” Alarm bells went off inside my head, but it was too late to take the question back.
“Half an hour ago, you lied by omission when you avoided mentioning the hunter who saw you in cat form.”
Michael chuckled, and I glared at him, my mind racing to figure out how to respond.
Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit. “That wasn’t technically a lie,” I muttered, already wishing I’d left well enough alone. Why couldn’t I stop digging my own grave just once before the hole got too deep to climb out of?
My father’s frown deepened, and I felt a lecture coming on. “It’s not the letter of the law that matters, Faythe. It’s the intent.”
Blah, blah, blah. I happened to think that if the letter of the law left room for creative interpretation, it ought to be rephrased, to avoid confusion. And loopholes. Attorneys and accountants were rewarded rather than punished for finding loopholes, so why shouldn’t I be?
Because I didn’t work for the government, or for Joe Q. Public. I worked for my father.
“How long have you known?” I asked, trying to determine the least incriminating way to find out how much he actually knew.
“Since an hour after it happened,” he said. I opened my mouth, but he cut me off before I could chomp down on my own foot. I should have thanked him. “Don’t worry, no one tattled on you. I overheard you and Marc arguing about it. You two aren’t exactly quiet, you know.”
Damn it. No matter how much trouble I went through to cover all my bases, it was always my own mouth that got me into trouble. Literally, in Andrew’s case.
“If you knew what happened, and you knew the guys were covering for me, why didn’t you say anything?”
My father rose gracefully from the couch, standing to face me. His mouth turned up into a conspiratorial smile, as if he were abou
t to let me in on a big secret. I was curious, in spite of my habitual feigned disinterest.
“I thought about it,” he said finally. “I thought about teaching you all a lesson in loyalty and obedience. But then I realized that Ethan, Jace, and Parker were not showing disloyalty to me so much as they were showing loyalty to you and Marc. Their willingness to protect you both, possibly at great cost, shows how devoted they are to the two of you, even though you don’t pay them and they haven’t pledged anything to you. I can’t teach devotion like that, and I’m certainly not going to punish it. Especially since nothing more damaging has come of it than a Yeti-esque article in the paper and some local news reports that make that poor hunter sound like a drunken fool.”
I stared at my father in disbelief. Not only was he not mad at us—not foaming at the mouth, like I’d expected—he was actually pleased by our conspiracy to withhold information.
Sometimes it scared me that I understood the bad guys better than I understood my own father.
“So you’re not mad?” It might be a good idea to get this in writing, while I’m at it.
“Not this time.” His face hardened and his gaze narrowed, giving me the impression that he saw nothing but my eyes. “But before you decide to keep anything important from me again, remember my willingness to have a second cage installed in the basement. Just for you.”
I grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind.” We were back on familiar territory now. He made threats, and I ignored them. That much I could handle. And now that I was more at ease, it was time to get down to business. “So, about Andrew…?”
“Well, obviously I’m not pleased to find out my daughter infected the stray who’s causing so much trouble. But at least now we have a starting point.”
Well, that was certainly one way of looking at it, and I wasn’t about to complain, considering how close I’d come to a possible death sentence.
“Michael, go find the rest of the guys.”
My brother nodded, already headed for the door. “Well, look what I found,” he said, and I turned to see him standing in the threshold, doorknob still in hand. In the hall beyond, Owen rose from the floor, where he’d apparently been waiting for the office door to open. And he wasn’t alone. Vic, Parker, and Jace filed in behind him, Ethan bringing up the rear. Marc wasn’t there.
My father chuckled from his armchair. “You’re all fine examples of what curiosity did to the proverbial cat, aren’t you?” Parker shrugged, and only Owen had the grace to look embarrassed. Our Alpha waved them all forward. “Come sit down. Now that we have a serious lead, we have a lot of work to do. Was there anything in the news?”
“Yeah. Here.” Vic handed him a thin, stapled stack of papers on his way to the love seat, where he settled in next to Parker.
“You want me to go get Marc?” Michael asked as I sank onto the couch.
My father looked up from the reports, and his eyes landed on me. “No, let’s give him a little more time.” He scanned the first page, then flipped it over and scanned the second. Then the third and final. “Is this it?” he asked, flipping back to the front of the stack.
“Yeah.” Parker ran one hand through a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. “There were variations of it on a couple of other news sites, but they all had the same information. Which isn’t much.”
“Okay.” Leaning forward, my father slid the packet of papers onto the table by my end of the couch, then leaned back in his chair to address us all. “As I expected, the Louisiana police have connected the missing-stripper cases in their state, and the national news has picked up the story. Fortunately, no one seems to realize yet that the Arkansas stripper is related. But that won’t take them long, especially if any others go missing. Unfortunately—” he twisted his arm to glance at the watch on his wrist “—if the pattern holds up, that may already have happened.”
Jace frowned. “So the only thing going in our favor is the fact that no one knows about the dead toms. Which is only because we’ve been burying them.”
My father cracked one knuckle as his gaze skipped from Jace to me, then back to Jace. “That’s true, but it’s not the only thing we have going for us. Faythe, would you like to tell them in your own words?”
Um, no. My words had done enough damage for one night. I shrugged. “Be my guest.”
Every eye in the room shifted from me to my father. Though they’d been sitting right outside the office, they hadn’t heard a word said inside, thanks to the solid oak door and concrete-lined walls, which gave my father a measure of precious privacy I’d envied on more than one occasion.
“Well, it seems that Faythe’s human boyfriend—former in both respects—is somehow involved in the outbreak of stripper disappearances.”
I don’t know what kind of reaction I expected. Maybe gasps and startled exclamations. But the reality was rather anticlimactic.
“Uh, Ethan already told us that part,” Vic said, shooting a sympathetic glance my way.
“Wait,” Jace said, and I saw the light go on behind his eyes. He’d been the only one truly listening, because they’d all expected to hear old news. “Did you say ‘former in both respects’? Meaning he’s no longer human?”
I nodded silently.
And then came the anticipated drama….
“What the hel—?”
“How is that even poss—?”
“So he knows abo—?”
But it was Parker who hit the proverbial nail on the head. “That’s waaay too much of a coincidence. He was dating a werecat, then three months later he shows up as one?” The others stopped talking one by one, now listening to Parker. “Do we know who did it? It has to be someone connected to Faythe. She’s the only common denominator.”
I’d forgotten how smart the guys really were.
“Yes, we know who did it.” My father paused, watching me. “Faythe.”
Everyone turned to stare at me expectantly. They thought he was calling on me to answer the question, like a teacher in a third-grade classroom. But he wasn’t, and at first no one seemed to understand. And this time, Ethan was the first to catch on.
“Faythe?” He stared at me from his spot on the rug next to Jace, disbelief written all over his face. Then confusion settled in its place. “You infected him?”
“It’s complicated, and we don’t have time to explain right now,” my father began. “So let me just say it was an accident, and leave it at that.”
“An accident?” Ethan obviously had several more questions—as did everyone else—but the Alpha’s word was final, so he closed his mouth and frowned. I had no doubt he’d ask me for details later, in private.
One hand on the back of our father’s armchair, Michael took over the discussion, to bring the topic back on track. “We’re assuming Andrew’s actually responsible for the disappearances, rather than just involved in them. And while we’re outlining worst-case scenarios, I’ll venture to guess that the women are all dead.”
“Okay,” Vic said, jumping on the calm-and-professional bandwagon. “What’s the plan?”
“We find Andrew. We apprehend him, subdue him, and find out what he knows about the tabby, if anything. If he doesn’t know anything, we watch the last strip club he visited and wait for her to show up. Then we take her. Case closed.”
“I don’t suppose lover-boy happened to mention where he was headed?” Jace asked, tugging on one frayed tassel from the edge of the rug he sat on.
“As a matter of fact…” I smiled hesitantly, and every disbelieving eye in the room focused on me. “He’s coming here.”
“What on earth for?” Ethan asked, just as Parker cried, “Is he suicidal?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “He probably wants some kind of confrontation with me. Acknowledgment.” Which I understood, oddly enough. “Doesn’t matter, though. All we have to do is sit back and wait for him. Right?”
“Out of the question,” my father said, and the calm finality in his tone took me by surprise. “W
e are not going to let this mess land on our doorstep. We can’t afford that kind of attention, either from the human authorities or the rest of the council. We have to find him before he gets here.”
Damn. So much for the easy way.
Vic frowned. “Okay, so where do we start?”
“With the phone calls,” I said, and my father nodded, showing just a hint of a proud smile. “We know that Andrew and Dan Painter called from the same place this afternoon.”
“We do?” Ethan interrupted.
“Yes. Both messages contained what sounded like explosions and propeller noise.” I went on, heedless of the confused looks around me. “We also know that Andrew is headed this way from Leesville, Louisiana, where he took the last stripper. So he and Painter—and presumably the tabby—are probably somewhere between here and there, in a town with…a bunch of gunfire and helicopters?” I ended, my pitch rising in question. “Hospital choppers, maybe? Did you guys see anything on the news about explosions?”
Vic, Owen, and Parker all shook their heads.
Rapid-fire tapping broke the silence. “Give me just a minute here….” Michael said, and I glanced up to find him hunched over the computer keyboard again, his head barely visible behind my father’s seventeen-inch flat-screen monitor. “With any luck, I’ll have a location for you soon….” His words faded away as the clicking got louder.
While Michael worked his computer magic, my father turned back to face the rest of us. His gaze settled first on Ethan as he seemed to consider something. Then he shook his head and turned toward Owen, on my right. “You and Parker get ready. You leave as soon as we get a fix on Andrew’s last-known location, to scout it out and see if he’s still there.”
“We takin’ the van?” Owen asked, already halfway to the door, dusty cowboy hat in hand.
“Yes. And take the full emergency kit, not the trunk version.”