Rogue

  “I’m done talking to you,” Andrew growled, his eyes swimming in rage. His hand grasped my left bicep, forcing it to the floor, and I winced as another shard of glass bit into my arm.

  “Well, I’m not done talking to you.” I met his eyes, only inches from mine. His anger permeated the room as surely as his scent did, and it was probably a bad time to insist on conversation. But I had to explain. He needed to know the truth. “I never meant to infect you. It was an accident, and I’m trying to make it up to—”

  His fist flew, and my cheek exploded. Tears formed in my eyes, and I sobbed out loud, not from pain—though it certainly hurt—but from heartbreak. The Andrew I’d known could never have hit anyone, much less me.

  I closed my eyes and breathed through the throbbing. “Is this what you did to those women? The strippers?”

  “Yes,” Andrew spat, and my eyes flew open. He stared down at me, his nostrils wide. “You want to hear about it?”

  I shook my head, sucking blood from the new cut on the inside of my cheek. I did not want to hear about it.

  “We picked them because they looked like you. I got them outside alone. It was easy—evidently I don’t look dangerous. How’s that for irony? But I’m not harmless anymore.” He punctuated the rhetorical question with another blow to my opposite cheek.

  More pain, and this time lights flashed behind my eyes. But I didn’t fight back. Luiz had made Andrew into the monster he’d become, but I’d given him the opportunity. I was not going to hurt Andrew anymore.

  “You killed them because they looked like me?” I swallowed thickly, and tasted my own blood. “That hardly seems fair.”

  “We were trying to infect them. Death was an unfortunate side effect. And life isn’t fair. You taught me that. Luiz taught me lessons of a more practical nature.” His fist flew again, slamming into my left side this time. I gasped, then bit my lip to keep from screaming.

  When I could breathe again, I met his eyes boldly, the first sparks of anger flashing among embers of guilt and grief. “He left you, Andrew. He’s gone, but I’m still here. What does that tell you?”

  “That you’re not as smart as you think you are.” His eyes flashed in cruel satisfaction. “He wanted you alive. I don’t.” Andrew leaned to my left, and his hands curled around the old cash register. The damn thing had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. He’d never be able to lift it.

  But he did. He yanked it from the floor, arms shaking with the effort as he lifted it over his head.

  “No!” Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream, and I felt the ground for something to use as a weapon. Broken glass bit into my palm. My fingers curled around something long and cold and hard.

  Andrew snarled and his arms tensed. The cash register trembled in his grip, directly over my head.

  I swung my unseen weapon, trying to knock him off me before he crushed my skull. My makeshift mace thunked into flesh. Blood poured down on me, hot and wet. His whole body jerked. I shoved Andrew backward and lunged to one side. His hands opened. The cash register smashed into the ground where my head had been.

  I scrambled across the floor, heedless as more glass sliced into my hands. Andrew sat against the wall, his eyes wide and empty. His hands clawed at his throat, now impaled by an iron railroad spike. I watched in mute horror as blood spurted.

  It was over in seconds. His hands went slack and fell into his lap. His gore-stained chest stopped rising. And as his heart stopped beating, the flow of blood slowed to a dribble.

  I sat still on the floor, in a hazy beam of light filtered through filthy windows, staring at a widening pool of the blood I’d first contaminated, then spilled.

  Andrew was dead. I’d killed him.

  And I couldn’t feel a fucking thing.

  Twenty-Nine

  Marc was the one who found us, an eternity later, though he swore it couldn’t have been more than two minutes. He burst through the front door, eyes blazing, ready to tear into whichever of us had survived. In a single sweeping glance, he took in the entire room: scattered debris, bloody corpse, and me. He didn’t ask me what happened. He just pulled me to my feet and held me, heedless of the blood I smeared all over him.

  I remember him asking if I was okay. And I remember not knowing the answer.

  “Faythe, I need you to do something for me,” he said, wiping a smudge of blood from my chin. “I need you to save what you’re feeling now. Put it in a box in your mind, Seal it up and stack it with all your other memories.” He took my hand and noticed the embedded splinters of glass, which he began to pull out as he spoke. “Later, you can open the box, and go through what’s inside. But for now, I need you to put it away. We have to get everything cleaned up, and get out of here before the police come. Do you understand?”

  Still numb, I nodded. I understood. It was time to save the day. Again.

  “Luiz?” I asked as Marc lifted my arms and pulled my blouse over my head.

  “Got away.” He turned me gently by my shoulders and began plucking shards of glass from my back. I thought it would hurt, but I didn’t feel a thing. “The park butts up to a swatch of pine forest, and he took off through the trees. I couldn’t catch him on two feet, and I couldn’t leave the rest of you like this. Don’t worry, though. We’ll get him.”

  Sure we would. Just like I’d gotten Andrew.

  Vic turned out to be mostly okay. Luiz had clawed the shit out of him, but the scratches, though long, were mostly superficial. He was even able to help with the cleanup, so while Marc got me fixed up and changed into his shirt, Parker and Vic dealt with Manx, who had to be cuffed, in spite of a very swollen wrist, and carried carefully to the van. She was alive but unconscious, and we had no idea how badly she was hurt. Or how the baby was doing.

  Jace was shot in the shoulder. He’d lost a lot of blood and was drifting in and out of consciousness, but Parker said it didn’t look fatal. He’d already called my father and Dr. Carver, who’d promised to leave for the ranch immediately.

  We threw the bloody two-by-four and the iron pipe into the van, then Parker and Marc wrapped Andrew in plastic, held closed with duct tape. I soaked up his blood from the floor with a roll of shop towels, which we then tied in a plastic bag, along with my ruined blouse. The guys poured bleach over the stain, from a half-full bottle found in one of the abandoned bathrooms. We did the best we could with what we had. Hopefully it would be good enough.

  Marc drove to the Lazy S, with Andrew’s body in the van. Manx lay next to him, bound and still out cold, and the one glimpse I got of her reminded me jarringly of my own recent trip in the back of a strange van, also bound and mostly unconscious. I tucked that thought away in one of Marc’s mental boxes. Someday I was going to have to clean out my memory-attic, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  As per our Alpha’s instructions, Parker took Andrew’s car into an empty field an hour and a half west of Henderson, where Owen picked him up.

  In spite of his injuries, Vic insisted on driving his Jeep to the ranch, so I sat in back with Jace, doing my best to keep him comfortable. He lay with his head in my lap. We all three winced over every bump in the road.

  At home, my mother disinfected my cuts, clucked her tongue over my bruises, and stitched up Vic’s chest, after numbing it with a topical cream. She made Jace as comfortable as possible on the living-room couch, lined in plastic to avoid bloodstains. He woke up shortly after we got home, and I sat with him for nearly an hour. He said he’d thought Manx was aiming at me. Then he joked about how he should have pushed me out of the way, instead of jumping in front of the bullet.

  I thanked him for being an idiot. Then I kissed him on the forehead and left him with a bowl of sympathy ice cream.

  Manx wound up in the guest room, where my mother spent most of the first few hours after our return waiting for the mystery tabby to open her eyes. She’d been first surprised, then pleased to hear that Manx was pregnant, and she confirmed my amateur diagnosis with one quick sniff. But she g
rew more worried with each hour that passed without Manx waking up.

  I didn’t know how I should feel about the tabby who’d caused so much trouble. She’d killed at least three tomcats in the past week, and shot Jace, though as near as I could tell, she’d actually been aiming for Andrew, who’d snuck in behind me. Still, I had trouble feeling any real sympathy. But the baby couldn’t be held responsible for its mother’s actions. Even I had to admit that.

  While my mother split her nursing duties between Manx and Jace, I spent hours in the office with my father, helping the guys re-create every microscopic detail of our day in Henderson. The box I’d stacked in my mind remained neatly sealed as I filled them in on Luiz’s failed efforts to create a female stray and Andrew’s involvement in the project. I told them I thought the college students Luiz killed over the summer were part of the same plan. And I told them how I’d killed Andrew in self-defense.

  My father was not happy. Andrew’s death would be one more strike against me, in the collective eye of the council. I’d still have to stand trial, and now there was no witness to testify that the infection was indeed an accident. Apparently killing the human I’d infected didn’t get me off the hook for infecting him in the first place. Weird, huh?

  His reaction to the tabby wasn’t much better. “She shot Jace?” No one spoke. None of us knew what to say as my father paced in front of his desk, rubbing his chin furiously. “She was hunting Luiz in human form? With a gun? What kind of tabby is this?”

  “The pregnant kind.” Vic’s mouth twitched, trying to deny a full-blown smile.

  I watched my father’s reaction carefully, and was not disappointed. He wasn’t surprised in the least. “You knew!” I accused, jumping off the couch in spite of the pain in my ribs. “You knew the first time you smelled her scent. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I told you to treat her as if she were made of glass.” When his answer clearly didn’t mollify me, he went on. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want any of you to let her condition blind you to the threat she represents. So she’s pregnant. She still murdered three tomcats, and now she’s shot Jace. Speaking of which, where’s the damn gun?”

  In that moment, I realized how much I truly respected my father. He wasn’t willing to let her off the proverbial hook just because she was pregnant.

  “I locked it in your bottom drawer,” Marc said.

  My father nodded his approval and told us all to get something to eat.

  Just after 8:00 p.m. Dr. Carver finally arrived to take charge of the patients. All four of us. He declared my ribs unbroken and said I was fit to work, in spite of multiple cuts and bruises. He pronounced my mother’s stitches “beautiful,” and said that Vic would be fine, and that his recovery would be accelerated considerably if he would Shift as soon as he felt up to it.

  With the minor wounds out of the way, Dr. Carver moved on to the living room, where he did what he could for Jace. He sterilized the wound, removed the bullet, and bandaged the hole in his shoulder. Jace’s orders were much the same as Vic’s: Shift as soon as possible.

  Manx worried Dr. Carver the most, because she hadn’t regained consciousness. He removed her handcuffs and gave her a full exam, after which he told my mother that the tabby was approximately four months pregnant, and that the baby’s heartbeat was still strong. As was the mother’s.

  The tabby’s wrist was fractured from its meeting with Marc’s two-by-four, so the doc put her in a cast. Beyond that, he said, all we could do was make her comfortable and wait for her to wake up. Both of which my mother took an active interest in.

  And she wasn’t the only one. The guys were completely fascinated by Manx. They all knew she was officially a bad guy, but if anything, that made her even more intriguing.

  Parker and Vic stopped in her doorway at random intervals, just to stare at her. Jace would probably have done the same if he could walk. But what they didn’t seem to realize—what I was more than eager to tell them—was that based on her slaughter of three toms in almost as many days, it would seem that the jungle tabby didn’t have much use for men. Though one had obviously found use for her.

  My father and Marc questioned Dan Painter at length about Manx—in the barn, since Ryan occupied the cage—but didn’t come up with much of anything new. He’d had no idea she was pregnant and didn’t know her real name. He had no clue where she was from. He only knew that she’d been going from town to town in response to a series of very short cell phone calls from a man with a heavy accent. She did not kill at every stop, never touched a human, and only disposed of those toms who “messed” with her. Manx, it seems, did not like to be touched, a lesson Painter apparently learned early, and well. Which was a point in his favor, for me.

  After several hours and no new information, my father let Painter go, with the promise that if he could keep his nose clean in the free territory for a year, he could then officially apply for admission into the Pride—an offer I’d never heard him extend before. With that promise, Painter took off for Mississippi with his tail tucked between his legs and his phone number and address in my father’s files.

  By Tuesday night, twenty-four hours after our arrival at the ranch, Dr. Carver had made a second round of visits to Jace and Manx, and had gone back to his hotel, for which the Pride was paying. My father had made a detailed report to the Territorial Council, and had called Michael and Ethan to give them an update. Ethan didn’t take the news of Jace’s injury well at all, and was eager to come home, but my dad ordered him to stay for Jamey Gardner’s memorial, to properly represent our family.

  By dinnertime, Jace had stabilized enough to be moved to the guesthouse, into his own bed. Parker set up an extra DVD player in the room Vic and Jace shared, and rented him nearly two dozen action movies to help aid his recovery.

  After dinner, I sat in the far corner of the guest room, curled up in an overstuffed armchair with the latest Stephen King hardcover. But I couldn’t concentrate on the story. Not with Luiz still free and Andrew’s blood on my conscience. And the tabby’s motives still unknown.

  I’d taken to “reading” in what the guys were already calling “Manx’s room,” in part because I wanted to be there when she woke up. My curiosity built with every passing hour, until I was nearly desperate to find out who she was, and how she knew Luiz well enough to know he deserved to die. Because, frankly, she was right.

  But our mutual death wish for Luiz didn’t make his enemy my friend. After all, she’d killed three innocent toms, which a couple of my fellow enforcers refused to remember. I stayed in the guest room to make sure that when she woke, there would be at least one person in the room willing and ready to stop Manx if she tried to leave.

  At 8:13 p.m., while my mother watered a pot of begonias on the windowsill, Manx finally opened her eyes, after nearly thirty hours of unconsciousness. The very first thing she said, her voice creaky and her accent thick, was “Where is my gun?”

  I laughed out loud, and nearly dropped my book.

  My mother spun at the sound of the tabby’s voice, and set her watering can on a nearby bookcase. “It’s locked in my husband’s desk,” she said, crossing the room gracefully toward the bed. “We can’t let you walk around armed and loaded. That would be irresponsible.”

  “Where am I?” Manx asked, pushing herself into a sitting position with her good hand. I leaned sideways to get a look at her around my mother’s shoulder. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Karen Sanders, and you’re in my home. You have a broken wrist and you’ve been unconscious for a day and a half, but the doctor thinks you’re going to be fine. And so will your baby.”

  The tabby’s uninjured hand flew to her stomach, where no bump was yet visible.

  My mother settled into a chair by the bed. “You’re about four months along, right?”

  Manx nodded, dark curls bouncing around her shoulders.

  “Whose is it?” I asked from across the room, and regretted the question instantly when they
both tried to incinerate me with flames from their eyes.

  Manx clutched her stomach tighter. “He is mine.”

  My mother looked at me coldly. “What’s your name, dear?”

  I blinked in surprise, my hands clenching my book. Dear? As badly as the nickname had always bugged me, I was dear.

  “My name is Mercedes, but I have been Manx for…very long time.” The tabby stared at her hands, fiddling with the seam of her cast.

  “Which do you prefer?” My mother took a bundle of yarn and two knitting needles from the nightstand.

  Manx shrugged. “They are just names.”

  We sat in silence for several minutes, until I could no longer stomach all the unanswered questions. “Why were you chasing Luiz?”

  My mother twisted in her chair to glare at me, but I ignored her.

  To my surprise, the tabby answered, her voice hard with hatred and determination. “He is a monster. I will kill him.” She hesitated, and met my eyes, hers accusing. “When I find him again.”

  I huffed. “Join the club.”

  “You know Luiz?”

  “You might say that.” I couldn’t resist a smile. “I broke his nose.”

  Manx laughed, and the sudden joyful sound caught me off guard. “So did I.”

  A grin stole across my face. She could fight. Of course she could fight. She’d killed three toms with her bare hands. She probably only carried the gun because—according to my mother—Shifting after the first trimester could be dangerous for the baby.

  I eyed Manx carefully, curious in spite of my anger and caution. Who was this pregnant woman, this girl—because she couldn’t be older than twenty—who’d fought Luiz, then chased him all over three states for the honor of putting a bullet through his head? “When did you break his nose?” I asked, more fascinated by Manx with every word she spoke.