Pride (33 page)

“Nothing,” Jace said. “We just need a chance to sniff around your backyard so Kaci can find her bearings.” He chuckled, and whispered beneath his breath, “No pun intended.”

“Kaci?” The bruin squinted into the dark. “Is that the kitten’s name? Come on up, child, and let me get a look at you.”

But Kaci wouldn’t go, and I couldn’t really blame her. She clearly remembered Keller—at least to some degree—and
I
would certainly hesitate to approach the giant who’d hit me on the back of the skull with a piece of firewood.

“It’s okay.” Jace put one arm around her shoulders and urged her forward. Kaci shrugged out from under his arm and clung to me, her wide eyes staring at me in desperation. I couldn’t help being pleased that she still thought of me as her protector, even though we were surrounded by large men.

“She’s a little shy,” I said, running one hand over the thick length of her hair.

Keller nodded. “I imagine she doesn’t hold any fondness for me, either.” His frank gaze shifted from me to Kaci as he thumped down from the steps and clomped across the yard toward us, staff in hand. “Sorry ’bout that bump on the head, Miss Kaci. I mistook you for some other girl cat rifling through my garbage.”

To my surprise, Kaci smiled just a bit, though I doubt Keller could see it in the deep shadows.

“Come on up and take a look around, and we’ll see if we can’t get you headed off in the right direction.” He stopped halfway across the wooded yard and motioned us forward with one heavy, flannel-clad arm. And this time when we went, Kaci came with us, albeit reluctantly.

“Does any of this look familiar?” He flung both arms wide,
the club hanging from his right fist like a broken branch dangling from a huge limb.

Kaci shook her head, staring at the tangle of forest shadows surrounding us. “I know I’ve been here, though. I’ve smelled…all this before.”

“I found her out back.” Keller took off toward the side of the cabin, moving so fast on his long, thick legs that we had to jog to keep up. He came to a stop in a surprisingly normal-looking backyard littered with thick tree stumps, the largest of which was three feet tall and nearly as wide. From its center ring protruded the blade of a single-sided ax with a three-foot handle. Keller’s monster of an ax made the one Marc kept in the back of his car look like dollhouse furniture, yet I knew the bruin’s hatchet would look small and delicate in his huge hands.

“Do you recognize any of this?” Jace asked, and Kaci nodded, moonlit hazel eyes wide as she scanned the yard. Her gaze settled on the woodpile between two twenty-foot oaks, then the large metal trash can by the farthest tree.

“I came in over there.” She pointed toward the tree line to the southwest. “I followed the stream, and it ended…back there a little way. I stopped for a drink and I smelled food. Meat.”

“Venison.” Keller scratched at the tangled mass of his thick brown beard. “There’s plenty more, if you’re hungry.”

I smiled in thanks, but shook my head regrettably. Kaci looked as if she hadn’t even heard him.

“So do you think you can take us from here?” Ethan asked, and Kaci’s gaze settled on him, her eyes seeming to clear. She nodded mutely. “Mr. Keller, do you know where this stream is?”

“Yup. S’where I get my water. I’ve stomped a pretty clear trail ’tween here and there, which is probably how the kitten found me.”

Keller was true to his word. The path between his cabin and the stream was narrow—at least for a bruin—but clear.
We walked mostly in silence now, and Kaci seemed to grow quieter and more withdrawn with each step. Ten minutes after we left Keller’s, a soft rippling sound met my eager ears. A quick sniff revealed the scent of mineral-rich water, and a couple of minutes later the stream itself came into view.

I knelt at the edge of the bank and cupped handfuls of the frigid, unpurified water into my mouth, mentally turning my nose up at the bottled springwater in Reid’s backpack. And to my amusement, Kaci dropped to her knees and joined me.

When we stood, the guys stared expectantly at Kaci. Water dripped from her chin, reminding me how cold my own face was, and I swiped one sleeve across my mouth. Kaci let hers drip in spite of the temperature, and I had no doubt that though she still walked upright and clenched tiny human fists beside slim, denim-clad thighs, she was thinking very much like a cat at the moment. Perhaps because she was intentionally trying to retrace her steps. Or maybe she was lost in memories of the last time she’d drunk from that stream.

Either way, she turned away from us without a word and started down the stream bank, stopping every now and then to sniff the air and look around. Kaci made eye contact with no one and walked with her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped around herself as if for comfort. She was clearly reluctant to revisit this portion of her past and was obviously trying to detach herself from both the emotional ordeal and from us. Or rather, any comfort we might offer. And I chose to let her, at least until something changed.

After about twenty minutes and countless pauses to sniff the air or stare into the dark, Kaci stopped. She wandered off to the right, obviously looking for something, then headed straight for a narrow, immature oak with a distinctive sharp curve in its trunk. Her hand trailed over the bark and she sniffed the steep crook, then plucked a tiny tuft of black fur from the surface. Her eyes went unfocused briefly and the
clump of fur fell from her hand. Then her focus sharpened and she took off into the woods, breaking away from the stream without hesitation now that she’d found whatever she was looking for.

Jace hurried after her, and Reid followed him. I bent to pluck the tuft of fur from the nest of thorns it had snagged on and brought it to my nose. A single sniff told me it was Kaci’s. She was following her own trail, and based on the rapid, almost desperate pace she’d set, we were getting close.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to get there after all.

Ethan and I jogged after the others, and in a few minutes Kaci adopted an all-out trot, stepping over exposed roots and trampling tangles of thorns and bunches of ivy. Her head whipped back and forth as she scanned the trees around her, and my blood raced in anticipation. Could we be that close already? We were only half an hour’s hike from Elias Keller’s backyard. Could the body have been so close to his cabin the whole time without us knowing?

Simply put, yes, it could. We hadn’t searched very close to Keller’s property, assuming that if she was there, he’d know it. But if Keller hadn’t been looking—and really, why should he?—there was no reason for him to have found her.

Several minutes later Kaci came to another stop, this time in the center of a tight clump of four or five trees, each no more than a couple of feet apart. Most of them were young and relatively thin; they probably didn’t get much sunlight in the shade of the other trees. However, two of the bur oaks were older and larger, their branches sprawling in every direction, crisscrossing each other in multiple places, creating a loosely woven canopy of limbs above, from which the thick bed of crunchy leaves beneath our feet no doubt fell.

I glanced around anxiously, carefully scanning a thick undergrowth of brush and several deep drifts of dead leaves. I saw no human body, nor any hole or pile of leaves big enough to conceal one.

“Kaci?” Twigs cracked beneath my boots as I crossed the three feet of ground between us, yet when I put one hand on her shoulder, she jumped, as if she hadn’t heard me coming. “Kaci?” I repeated, lowering my voice to an intimate pitch I hoped she’d find comforting. “Where is she, hon?”

Instead of answering, Kaci let her head fall back until she was staring at the sky overhead. Or rather, at the branches between us and the heavens.

My gaze followed Kaci’s, trailing over the broad, twisted oak trunk and scanning the branches as they dipped and curved, weaving in and out of the arms from the other trees. At first, I saw nothing but the usual bare branches intertwined with heavily laden red-cedar bows, all of which was virtually impenetrable by the moonlight we’d grown accustomed to. But then something clicked, and jarring artificial light sliced through the night.

And there she was—a single pale hand dangling from the spiky foliage of the red cedar.

Shit, no wonder we hadn’t found her yet.
She was very well concealed in her perch, and the human searchers would never have thought to look for her over their own heads until the body began to smell, which wouldn’t be anytime soon, considering the ambient temperature.

Hell, most
werecats
wouldn’t have thought to look up either, because murderers typically bury their kills to cover their own crimes. In fact, the only bodies I’d seen werecats drag into trees were those of their prey, which they intended to…

Eat.

Oh, shit.
I glanced at Kaci and found tears sliding down her cheeks as she stared into the branches, and somehow I knew without asking that I was right. There was more to our little lost tabby than any of us had expected.

Kaci Dillon was a man-eater.

“H
ow the hell are we going to get her out of there?” Ethan demanded, and Kaci flinched at the edge of anger in his voice.

I rubbed her back as she crossed both arms over her chest and hunched into herself. There was one obvious solution, but somehow I didn’t think anyone would be willing to simply shove poor Amanda Tindale out of the tree, no matter how much easier that would have made things for us.

Reid dropped his backpack on a thick clump of ivy. “Take her over there.” He pointed to a fallen log several feet from the tree cluster we stood in. “Hopefully this won’t take long.”

As I ushered the frighteningly unresponsive tabby toward the makeshift bench, Reid pulled a roll of black sheet plastic from his bag, and Jace helped him spread it to cover most of the available ground space within the cluster of trees. They would wrap the dead woman in the plastic, tape up the human burrito, then carry it back to the lodge by hand, a prospect I couldn’t even bear to contemplate at the moment.

By the time Jace and Reid finished with the plastic, a straight razor, and a half-used roll of duct tape, Ethan had scaled the red cedar and was completely hidden from view
among its branches. “Oh, shit.” A branch creaked and swayed, as if he’d sat down too hard on it, and several thin, oblong cones thunked onto the plastic.

“You okay?” Jace paused with one hand around the smooth, bare branch of a cottonwood grown several inches thick against all odds in its current environment.

“No. She’s been…um…eaten.”

Vomit rose in the back of my throat and I clenched my jaws to keep it down. Having my hunch confirmed was not a triumph this time. It was a tragedy.

At my side, Kaci showed no reaction at all. She merely stared across the clearing at nothing, tears dried—or frozen—on her cheeks, eyes glazed in what could only be the onset of shock. And suddenly I understood why she had reacted so violently to the state and placement of Hannibal and his victim. They were a terrifying, distorted reflection of the very sight she had to show us. She probably thought that once Reid saw that, he’d want to tape her up and knock her out, too.

But that wouldn’t happen. What Kaci had done wasn’t the same, and anyone with half a brain would have to see that.

Hannibal—in all his lunatic glory—had killed and eaten one of his own while in human form. He wasn’t noticeably thin, which meant he had plenty to eat. He’d committed murder and cannibalism, and his only defense—insanity—was the very thing that would render him useless to the werecat community at large.

But Kaci had been attacked by the woman she’d killed. She’d been alone, terrified, exhausted, and literally starving. She’d killed the woman in self-defense, and probably had no idea that eating her human kill wasn’t acceptable.

I’d never seen a more clear-cut case of temporary insanity. Kaci hadn’t even known what she was. One day she was a human teenager, the next she was a big black cat, and she had
no reason to even suspect that she might ever see two feet again. She was starving and suddenly confronted with what looked and smelled like food. She would have been crazy not to eat.

Right?

Reid didn’t look anywhere near as sure as I was. He stood with one palm spread on the trunk of the red cedar, staring at Kaci as if she’d just grown an extra head. Murder was a capital offense, and cannibalism an abomination. A taboo with such strong associations with damnation that even speaking of such things gave most werecats the creeps. Man-eaters were not tolerated. And I’d never even
heard of
a man-eating tabby cat. Much less a man-eating teenage tabby stray.

The council would have no idea what to do with Kaci now. Hell,
I
had no idea what to do with her.

It took Jace, Ethan, and Reid nearly half an hour to get the dead woman out of the tree without dropping her or pulling her limbs from their sockets. Kaci had somehow managed to drag her kill onto a branch more than twelve feet off the ground, and I couldn’t imagine the hunger and desperation that would drive such a small, weak cat to such lengths to protect her meal.

Hell, I was rarely motivated to put leftovers into the fridge for later, rather than scraping them into the garbage disposal.

Another wave of nausea crashed over me at that thought, and at the realization that I’d just compared a half-devoured human corpse to a tuna casserole.

Once Ms. Tindale was on the ground, the guys got her wrapped and taped with little trouble, thanks in part to the fact that she was past the point of rigor mortis, but had not yet started to rot because of the near-freezing temperature.

When they were done, I left the nearly catatonic tabby long enough to pass out bottles of water and protein bars to refuel everyone before we started back, though Kaci refused both.

Even though there was very little smell coming from the
body, I knew without a doubt that carrying the plastic-wrapped bundle back to the lodge would be one of the hardest, most profoundly disturbing things I would ever have to do.

And I
would
help. I couldn’t refuse, especially after letting the guys do all the hard work. So after I stuffed our trash back into Reid’s bag—intentionally ignoring the fact that I’d voluntarily taken up the food-and-cleanup role—I picked up one end of the wrapped bundle without being asked. Fortunately, I got the woman’s feet. I couldn’t have handled carrying her head. Even so, Jace tried to take it from me.

I cut him off with a curt shake of my head and a determined look. I would pull my own weight, even if it meant shouldering some of Amanda Tindale’s.

Ethan took the other end and together we carried the poor woman through the woods, then back along the stream, following Jace, who led the way with one arm wrapped firmly around the young tabby’s shoulders.

Kaci stumbled once near the stream and almost fell into the water, and when Jace first picked her up, then physically turned her around to face us, I realized she wasn’t watching where she was going. At all. She stared off into space, even when he shone his flashlight into her eyes, as if she could see neither it nor us. She walked, but only when and where he led her. She wouldn’t answer any of our questions, or even meet our eyes.

After that, Reid and I switched places so we could move faster. We wanted to get Kaci back to the lodge as soon as possible. Jace and I walked on either side of her, each with an arm wrapped around her, and I called my father as we walked, more than relieved by the strong cell phone signal even in the middle of the woods.

I explained what we’d found, and about Kaci’s current nonresponsive state, and in return I got a worried “Hmm.” I could tell by the heated comments in the background that everyone else in the room had heard me, and that as usual, no
two Alphas could agree on how the situation ought to be handled. My father hushed them sharply. Then he told me to “Hurry back,” and hung up.

We followed the stream back to Keller’s place, marching through his yard, around the cabin, and weaving among the trees out front. He watched through the front window, the base of an old-fashioned oil lamp in one hand, and I waved as we passed, but didn’t stop. He nodded in return, his face deeply shadowed from the flickering flame beneath his chin.

Less than an hour later we stepped from the tree line fifty feet from the lodge. Reid and Ethan carried the body around back while Jace and I ushered Kaci through the front door, where Marc and my father were waiting for us, though everyone else had gone out to inspect the dead woman.

We put Kaci on the couch and my father sat next to her. He took her hand and asked several questions, including whether or not she knew her own name, the date, or where she was. She made no response. She didn’t look at him, or at any of the rest of us.

Daddy sighed, patting her hand. “Her skin is cold, and I don’t think she’s heard a word I’ve said.”

“She’s in catatonic shock,” Jace said. I was pretty sure there was no such state—medically speaking—but I kept my mouth shut because I knew what he meant.

When Jace and my father went out to join the other Alphas, Marc and I took Kaci upstairs and got her ready for bed. She neither protested nor helped when we dressed her in a nightgown, and once we got her in the bed, she only stared at the ceiling. She wasn’t even blinking often enough to suit me.

Kaci had checked out of her body for the time being, and I saw no sign that she’d be back anytime soon. And I couldn’t really blame her.

For several minutes, I sat on the extra bed watching her in
the light of the bedside lamp. Marc sat with me, and I let my head fall onto his shoulder, treasuring the whisper of each breath he took, even under such unfortunate circumstances.

We stayed like that until the back door squealed open downstairs, admitting a procession of heavy footsteps into the house below. Then I rose, pulling Marc with me.

He stayed in the upstairs hallway because if they saw him, the Alphas would send him back to our cabin. But I took the steps two at a time, eager to hear what—if anything—the council had decided.

As one, the Alphas converged on the living-room furniture, as I sank onto the bottom step. I’m not sure what I expected—arguments, maybe, or I-told-you-so’s. But I did
not
expect the parade of grim faces and hanging heads. The Alphas all looked…
tired
. Not like they’d given up, really, but like they’d
aged.
Drastically. And for Paul Blackwell, that hardly seemed possible; he was old as dirt
before
this whole mess started.

Daddy took the armchair against the wall, and Malone sat opposite him, but for once I had a feeling he wasn’t actually in
opposition
to my father. He just wanted somewhere to sit without crowding onto the couch with the commoners, who would be played in tonight’s production by my uncle Rick and Paul Blackwell. Jace retreated to sit with me on the steps, while Ethan, Reid, Parker, and Alex Malone lined up against the wall.

The best policy for enforcers in a council meeting was to try to blend into the background. Sometimes if you don’t give the Alphas reason to notice you, they won’t. It’s one of the best ways to glean otherwise privileged information, and we were all experienced eavesdroppers.

My father ran both hands across his face, as if trying to wake himself up. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and it was starting to show. “Call off the search for the strays.” He leaned back in his chair, templing his hands beneath his chin, for once heedless of the wrinkles in his suit jacket. “Radley is forming
a Pride out of homicidal, likely mentally unstable, strays, and we have to take him out with one strike. We need everybody rested to do that.”

One by one, the other Alphas nodded in agreement. Uncle Rick’s gaze settled on Parker. “There’s a list of cell-phone numbers on the fridge. Start at the top and work your way down. They’re out in pairs, so make sure you cross off the partners as you come to them to save time.”

Parker nodded and headed into the kitchen, digging his own phone from his pocket as he went.

“We still need a location,” Malone said, meeting my father’s eyes over the coffee table.

“Yes, we do. Normally I’d send Marc, but since he no longer works for me, I’m open to suggestions.”

Send Marc to do what?
I glanced up at Ethan and he slammed one fist into his opposite palm, miming a punch.
Oh
. They were sending someone to pound some answers out of Hannibal. Wherever the hell he was.

“Reid?” Malone twisted in his seat to make eye contact with the fastidious, bald enforcer.

“Ethan will go, too,” my father said, rubbing his jaw now. “He’s taped up in the shed. Don’t come back until you know where Radley’s housing his men and how many there are.”

Ethan and Reid nodded in unison, then headed for the back door.

My father sighed and glanced at the rest of us in turn. “Everyone else should get some rest.” He twisted to face the stairs, and I expected his eyes to meet mine, but his focus settled over my head instead. “Marc!”

“Yes?” Marc thumped into sight without hesitation, and I couldn’t help but smile. Our Alpha had known he was there the whole time.

“Escort Faythe back to the cabin.” My father’s gaze settled
on me with an emotional weight too heavy to quantify. “I’ll call you if anything changes with Kaci. For now, get some sleep.”

It was a truly wonderful gesture. He was trying to give us one final night together. For goodbye. I blinked back tears, both because of his gesture and because of its significance. According to the clock over the door, it was 11:00 p.m. In eight hours, Marc would be gone.

I stood, and Marc wrapped one arm around my waist. We walked back to the cabin slowly, trying to enjoy the evening stroll as if it were a routine event, rather than the last of such for six whole months. We were both grateful for my arrangement for semi-annual visits, but May seemed like a very long time away.

My feet dragged as I climbed the porch steps. As glad as I was to be spending the next few hours alone with Marc, I knew that a good portion of that would be spent sleeping—though not
all
of it, of course—and that when we woke, it would only be to say goodbye. I wanted to delay that moment as long as possible.

Michael sat on the couch in the living room, his laptop balanced on his knees, his head thrown back with his mouth hanging open. He was sound asleep, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d kept from dropping his computer. When I lifted it from his lap, he woke up. “What time is it?”

“Just after eleven.”

“Shit. What did I miss?” He removed his glasses to rub his eyes while I shut down his laptop.

“Kaci led us to the body.” The screen went black and I closed the computer with a soft click. “It was in a tree. Half consumed.”

“Nooooo.”
Michael sat up, suddenly alert. “Not Kaci?”

I nodded. “Yeah. She’s fucked up, Michael. Completely nonresponsive. I think she was okay as long as she didn’t have to think about it. But now she’s just…checked out. Nobody’s home.”

“She’ll come out of it.” Marc leaned against my bedroom door frame. “Dr. Carver will know what to do.”