Prey

PREY

Someone was blinking and, whoever it was, he wasn’t alone. Several more sets of eyes appeared in the trees, each pair at least ten feet from the next.

We hadn’t just been sabotaged. We’d been ambushed.

Straightening slowly, I sniffed, wincing when the frigid air pierced my nose, throat and lungs with a thousand microscopic shards of ice. Fortunately, one good whiff was enough.

Strays.

“Three strays at your six o’clock, Faythe,” Vic said, anger threading a cord of danger through his voice as he stared over my shoulder. “No, make that four.” At my back, too? Damn it! “Five more straight ahead.”

I arched one eyebrow at him in question, and he gave me a grim smile. “We don’t stand a chance unarmed.” And there was clearly no time to Shift.

Two serpentine puffs of air floated from one of the stray’s nostrils with each breath. Moonlight shone on his glossy fur. Rage glinted in the reflective surface of his eyes.

Marc stepped closer to the hood and tossed his head, telling me to scoot towards the rear door. “Keep your backs to the vehicle and make them come to you.”

And that’s when the first cat pounced.

Find out more about Rachel Vincent

by visiting mirabooks.co.uk/rachelvincent and read Rachel’s blog at urbanfantasy.blogspot.com

Prey

Rachel Vincent

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Matrice, my editor, without whose amazing suggestion this story would not exist in its current form. Thanks for your patience, and for nudging my creative compass back to true north.

Acknowledgements

Thanks first of all to No.1, who handled almost every single detail of our recent move, so I could finish the rough draft I was working on, as well as the line edits for Prey. Without you to keep track of the details, I would live in utter chaos.

Thanks to Elizabeth Mazer for all her hard work behind the scenes, to the MIRA art department for the amazing cover (my favourite so far!) and to the entire production staff, for turning my little story into an actual book.

Thanks to Miriam Kriss, who handles all the business so I can bury myself in other worlds. To Vicki Pettersson, who kept me accountable during the revisions. And to Jocelynn Drake, who lets me complain.

And thanks most of all to my critique partner, Rinda Elliot, for all the hours spent helping me sort this one out. You keep me working. You keep me writing. You keep me sane.

One

“You planning to get there sometime this century, Vic?” I glanced at my watch, my foot tapping an anxious beat on the floorboard.

Victor Di Carlo shot me a long-suffering smile, then turned back to the road. “Speed limit’s seventy-five, Faythe. I’m doing eighty. But if you think you can get there faster on foot, be my guest.”

But of course, I couldn’t. Not even on four paws. A cheetah can run sixty-five miles an hour, but can’t sustain that speed for long. And I’m no cheetah. So I was stuck drumming my stubby nails on the passenger-seat armrest in Vic’s Suburban as it stubbornly maintained a speed I considered unacceptable.

“Relax.” Vic flicked on the left blinker, then moved the SUV smoothly out of the right lane to pass a lumbering semi. “We’ll get there on schedule, and Marc will be waiting.”

I nodded, locking and unlocking the passenger-side door until he glared at me. “Sorry.”

“Jeez, Faythe, you act like you haven’t seen him in weeks,” Ethan said, and I twisted in my seat to see him roll his eyes from the back row, his usual good-humored grin firmly in place. He was the youngest of my four brothers—only two years my elder—and the one most likely to beat me up in training, then bring ice for my bruises. “How long has it been?”

I stared out my window at empty fields and winter-bare trees growing dim in the late-afternoon light. “Nine weeks, tomorrow.” A lot had happened since Marc had been exiled, and the most notable example lay sleeping in the seat behind me.

Manx’s baby. Des. The two-week-old was fastened into a reclined, backward-facing car seat on the bench next to his mother. Who somehow managed to look disarmingly beautiful, even with drool trailing from her open mouth. Since the baby came, she caught her z’s when she could. Whenever he was quiet. As did the rest of us.

It turns out sensitive cat hearing comes with a serious downside.

In the past two months, Manx had given birth, and Kaci—the wild teenage tabby we’d taken in—had mostly settled into life at the ranch, though so far she’d refused to Shift. November had blown leaves from the trees, December had brought a rare Texas snowstorm, and the eighth day of January had crowned it all with an even less common and more beautiful layer of thick ice, which had yet to fully melt.

But I had not seen Marc. Not even once, in all those weeks.

Vic grinned at me for a moment before turning back to the traffic. “And I suppose it’s the stimulating conversation you miss, right?”

“La-la-la!” Ethan sang. He slouched in his seat and stuffed earbuds into his ears to block out the response he might not want to hear from his sister.

“Right now, I’d listen to anything he has to say, so long as I get to hear it in person.” Sighing, I snatched a paper cup from the drink holder and downed the last of my 7-Eleven coffee. It was cold. As I dropped the cup into the trash can wedged between the seats, Vic’s cell phone rang. He leaned to the right and dug it from his left hip pocket, then flipped it open without swerving an inch. I probably would have put us in the ditch.

“Hello?”

“Vic.” It was my dad. We could all hear him perfectly well, except for Manx, who was now snoring delicately, if such a thing was possible. “Your father came through for me. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

Vic’s sigh was audible, and his face suddenly drained of tension I hadn’t even realized it held. He smiled as the Suburban soared past another eighteen-wheeler. “I never doubted it.” But the relief in his eyes said otherwise. He’d been worried. We all had.

Springs squealed over the line—Greg Sanders leaning back in his desk chair. He’d probably called as soon as he got the news. “Remind Faythe to deliver my message to your family, please,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.

“I know, Daddy.”

My father chuckled. “Drive carefully, and let me know when you get there.”

“Will do.” Vic was still grinning like a clown when he hung up, and I doubted he’d even heard what he was agreeing to. Fortunately, I had.

“So, that’s three now, right?” I twisted in my seat to look at Ethan, who’d turned off the music and was no longer feigning sleep.

The backseat groaned as he searched for a more comfortable position. “Yeah. Uncle Rick and Ed Taylor.” Whose daughters both owed their lives to our Pride. I’d freed my cousin Abby after we were both kidnapped by a jungle stray intending to sell us as breeders, then we’d caught and killed that same stray before he could snatch Carissa Taylor. Their fathers were understandably loyal to mine. “And now Bert.”

Umberto Di Carlo—Vic’s dad—was one of my father’s oldest friends. We’d been counting on his support, but were far from sure we’d get it. After all, politics could uproot entire family trees, to say nothing of friendships.

Nine weeks ago I’d been acquitted—barely—of infecting my college boyfriend and then killing him in self-defense. On the last day of my trial—the day after Marc was exiled—Calvin Malone had made a formal challenge to my father’s leadership, petitioning to have him removed as head of the Territorial Council. Though he remained our Alpha, my dad had been temporarily suspended from his position of authority over the other council members, pending an official vote by all ten Alphas. That vote was scheduled for the first of February—two weeks away.

Since his suspension, my father and Malone had been fighting—figuratively—for a commitment of support from each of their peers.

My uncle had thrown his weight behind us immediately, and Edward Taylor had followed suit a week later. But our Pride’s other allies had asked for time to consider. To weigh their options. Their hesitance stung, but it made sense. However they voted, their decisions would have an irreversible effect on the council, and on the werecat community at large. After all, most of them had sons serving in Prides on both sides of the conflict. Brothers living in territories loyal to Malone. Daughters or sisters married to toms participating in the coup. I was lucky that three of my brothers—Michael, Owen, and Ethan—had no loyalties to anyone else. As for my brother Ryan, well, the less said about him the better.

The waiting was hard on Vic, but it was nothing compared to the effect the whole thing was having on our fellow enforcer Jace, whose stepfather had organized the attempt to unseat my dad. Jace felt personally responsible for Calvin Malone’s betrayal, though he could have done nothing to stop it.

“What about Malone?” I asked, doing a mental tally of the other Alphas.

Ethan pulled his earphones from his ears and wound them around one hand. “Last I heard, he has three votes, too. Milo Mitchell, Wes Gardner, and Paul Blackwell.”

Mitchell’s son, Kevin, had been kicked out of our Pride four months earlier for repeatedly helping a stray sneak into the south-central territory. Gardner was irate over our “failure” to avenge his brother Jamey’s death at Manx’s hands. And as far as we could tell, Paul Blackwell was siding against us because he legitimately objected to my father’s equal-opportunity approach to leadership. Apparently the saying about an old dog’s inability to learn new tricks held true for old cats, as well, and though Blackwell—unlike Malone—didn’t seem to hate women and strays, neither did he envision a place for them among the community’s leaders.

That left only two undecided Alphas: Nick Davidson and Jerald Pierce—another fellow enforcer’s father. And with both sides now scrambling to claim those votes, one thing was clear: the fight was about to get ugly.

“Parker’s dad will come through.” Vic sounded much more confident than I felt. “That’ll give us four.” But we needed Davidson’s vote, too. Four votes would only lock the proceedings in a tie, and we needed a clear victory. Otherwise, even if my father managed to hold on to his position, the peace would never last.

“How much longer?” I asked, my hand clenched around the car door handle.

“Our exit’s up next.” Vic nodded at the sign ahead, advertising food and gas in one mile.

About time! After hours on the road and too many cups of coffee to count…

I turned in my seat to see Ethan sitting up straight now and shrugging into his jacket. Manx was still asleep, her long black ringlets draping the back of the seat and the front of her blouse. She was the very picture of peace and happiness, of maternal bliss, in spite of very little rest and the unpleasant reason for our trip.

Des was born on the last day of 2008, which would have given Manx an extra tax deduction for the year—if she were a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant. But she was neither, which also meant she couldn’t board a plane. Which is how Vic, Ethan, and I wound up driving her from our ranch in eastern Texas to the outskirts of Atlanta, where Vic’s dad—and my father’s newest ally—was hosting Manx’s hearing.

I’d volunteered for the transport—normally a very dull assignment—because we had to drive through the free territory to get to Atlanta. Marc was in the free territory.

And in minutes, he’d be in my arms.

“Manx, wake up!” Leaning over the armrest, I shoved the bottom of the center bench seat hard enough to jostle the tabby, but careful not to brush her leg. She didn’t like to be touched. Considering the abuse she’d suffered, I couldn’t blame her.

Her eyes fluttered open, and in a single blink she banished the sleep stupor from her expression, replacing it with an instant alertness I envied. Followed by an initial, panicked search for her child, as if someone had stolen him while she slept. And that’s exactly what she was afraid of.

When she was still pregnant, we’d all heard her scream at night, crying in her sleep. The first few times, my mother had tried to wake her, but my father insisted she stop before she got a broken nose for her efforts. Fortunately, the dreams had ended when the baby came, and Manx insisted he stay in the bed with her. She said he slept better like that, but I couldn’t help thinking she was the one who really benefited. As did the rest of us, from the peaceful silence.

Manx relaxed when her eyes found Des, still asleep in his car seat. She pushed hair back from her face and looked up. “This is Mississippi?”

“Yup.” Vic flicked the right blinker on and veered onto the off-ramp as I settled back into my seat. I ignored the restaurants we passed, focusing on the Conoco station at the end of a strip of convenience stores.

By all accounts, Marc had settled into his new life as well as could be expected. He’d found a job and an isolated rental house, and was slowly carving out an existence for himself in the human world—a world that no longer included me. At least in person. But we spoke on the phone almost daily, and I’d even talked him through a partial Shift a month earlier. Though I’d only been ordered to teach my fellow Pride cats the partial shift, I was proud to say that Marc Ramos, my favorite stray, was the first tom to accomplish it.

Evidently he held more than enough suppressed anger to trigger the facial transformation. Not a surprise.

My eyes scanned the crowded lot. We’d scheduled a rest stop at Natchez, just beyond the Mississippi border, where Marc was supposed to join us and escort us across the entire free territory, including an overnight stay in the middle of Mississippi. But I didn’t see his car. Disappointed, I clenched my hands in my lap until my fingers ached.

Vic turned right into the parking lot, then pulled into an empty space at the rear. I started to get out and look for Marc inside the store, but Vic laid one hand on my arm as soon as I got the door open. “Can you stay with them for a minute? I have to pee.”

I glanced at Vic, then back at Ethan. Normally, my youngest brother would have been enough security for one postpartum tabby and an infant. But the free zone was unregulated, and Manx was skittish at best, even when she wasn’t about to be tried for murder, so we were trying to give her double coverage at all times. “Yeah, I’ll stay. But hurry up.” He smiled in thanks as I closed my door, then shut his own and made his way to the front of the building.

Des made a mewling noise behind me, and I twisted in my seat to see Manx bring the baby up to one exposed breast, where he latched on eagerly. The mewling became a soft sucking sound as he began to nurse. Again. Did that kid ever do anything but eat? Even with his androgynous baby face, I could tell the little monster was a boy by his appetite alone.

Still, I couldn’t help but smile as I turned to scan the parking lot out the driver-side window. The little guy was a true survivor. Just like his mother.

“Looking for me?” Something tapped on the glass behind me, and I jumped, then whirled fast enough to hit my head on the sun visor. Marc stood outside the window, looking warm and welcoming in a worn brown leather jacket and an old pair of jeans. His smile widened as I fumbled for the door handle. But in my excitement I couldn’t find it, so he opened it for me, nearly ripping the door from its hinges.

My feet never hit the ground. One moment I was in the front seat, the next I was in his arms, my legs wrapped around his waist, his mouth soft but insistent beneath mine. People stared—I saw them over Marc’s shoulder— but then they smiled and went about their business, except for a few kids, who giggled at our display.

Evidently reunions look much the same in any species.

“Your hair grew,” Marc whispered, and the warmth of his breath against my ear gave me chills that had nothing to do with the ice half coating the parking lot.

“You cut yours.” I ran my hand through cold, short curls.

He put me down, but still held me close. “Yeah, I figured with the new life, why not try a new look? What do you think?”

Grinning, I stepped back for a better look. “Not bad.” Marc would look good in an orange clown wig, if he decided to wear one. Still, though he’d only lost two inches, I couldn’t help missing the rest of his hair. But nowhere near as badly as I’d missed him.

I was threading my arm through his when a familiar scent caught my attention. A stray scent, and—oddly enough—one I knew.

Daniel Painter.

I froze, and my grip tightened around Marc’s arm as my pulse raced. I scanned the parking lot for the stray who’d ratted Manx out in exchange for a chance to join our Pride. If he could keep his nose clean in the free zone for a year.

Keeping his nose clean did not include picking a fight with a delegation of Pride cats as soon as we crossed the border. And there was no way in hell that his presence in that particular parking lot was a coincidence…

Two

“What’s wrong?” Marc’s gold-flecked brown eyes darkened as he frowned, glancing around in search of whatever had set me on edge.

“Dan Painter’s here.” My fingers brushed his leather-clad arm as I turned, trying to glance around the parking lot inconspicuously.

A flicker of annoyance flashed across Marc’s expression. “I know. I can’t shake him.”

I felt my eyes go wide and gave up the search for Painter to stare at Marc. “He’s tailing you?”

“Sort of.” Marc flushed, and I knew there was more to the story than he wanted to tell me.

“And you’re just…letting him?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “He’s not actually causing any trouble, so I don’t feel justified pounding on him. He just hangs around and asks questions about the Pride, and the way we—you guys—do things. Where we come from, how we control bloodlust, why there are so few tabbies, why there aren’t any strays in the Pride. Well, not anymore, anyway.”

Marc was a stray—a werecat born human, and later infected through a bite or scratch from a werecat in feline form—and he remained the only stray ever admitted into a Pride. Even if he was no longer officially a part of that Pride.

“The guy never shuts up. Seriously, he talks all day long.”

I smiled. Kaci had a very similar habit, and as much as I liked her, I’d started to value long-distance assignments simply for the peace and quiet. Surely his job provided the same relief. “At least he can’t bug you at work, right?”

Marc’s flush deepened. “He joined my crew last month. We frame houses together now. Every day.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s so cute! You have a sidekick. A little mini-me.” Though if memory served, Painter wasn’t much smaller than Marc.

“Whatever. Forget about Painter.” His gaze flicked behind me to the back passenger-side door, which my brother had just opened and stepped through. “Hey, Ethan, how’s monogamy treating you?”

For the first time in his life, the family Casanova had been dating the same girl for four straight months. Our mother was thrilled, and for once she was fantasizing about a wedding that wouldn’t involve me in a veil.

“It’s like eating white rice for every meal,” Ethan said, right on cue.

Marc grinned. “Hey, if you’re eating every day, I’d say you’re a lucky man.” His words were for Ethan, but his eyes were on me. Apparently he missed my…rice.

Ethan shrugged, unmoved. “I guess. How’s the construction business treating you?”

Marc scruffed one hand through his newly shorn curls. “It’s like swinging a hammer eight hours a day for minimum wage.” And just like that, they were all caught up.

Still in the SUV, the baby hiccuped, and I glanced over my brother’s shoulder to see Manx buttoning her blouse. Then she climbed out of the car and lifted Des from his seat, wrapping him gently in a blue knit blanket.

“How are you, Manx?” Marc stuffed his hands into his pockets to show the tabby he had no intention of touching her. We’d discovered that approach—especially coming from the toms—kept her fairly relaxed.

“Good, thank you.” Her exotic accent—she was Venezuelan by birth—made her statement sound striking, rather than common. She beamed a brilliant smile at him and held the baby slightly away from her body, wordlessly inviting him to peek.

“Wow.” Marc’s eyes went softer than I’d ever seen them as he stared at Des, and I wasn’t sure whether I should be amused or worried. “Do I get an introduction?” he finally asked.

Manx’s smile widened. “This is Desiderio. He is my heart’s desire.”

“We call him Des,” I added, ever helpful.

“He’s beautiful. May I?” Marc pulled one hand from his pocket and mimed stroking the baby’s cheek.

Manx hesitated, and her smile froze for an instant. Then she took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Of course.”

Marc ran the back of one rough finger down the child’s face. When he reached the corner of Des’s mouth, the baby turned toward his touch, lips pursed and ready to suckle. Marc laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“I see you’ve met our latest addition,” Vic said, and I looked up to see him walking toward us from the convenience store, a white plastic sack in one hand.

“He’s amazing,” Marc said, and on the edge of my vision, Manx’s posture relaxed a little more.

“Yeah, he is.” Vic set his bag on the front passenger seat and glanced at the baby with that gaga look most toms assumed when confronted with members of the next generation. Yet more proof that propagation of the species was indeed their biggest goal in life.

Vic shut the car door and embraced his former field partner in a masculine, back-thumping greeting. Then he stepped away and glanced from me to Marc as Ethan settled a long coat over Manx’s shoulders, careful not to touch her. “You’re not going to believe who I ran into inside.” He tossed his head toward the building.

“Dan Painter.” I grinned.

Vic huffed. “You smelled him?”

I nodded. “He and Marc have…bonded.”

Vic’s brow rose in amusement, but a dark look from Marc kept him from pressing for details. “This cold can’t be good for the baby,” he said instead, still grinning at Marc. “Let’s get done here and get on the road.”

Marc and I flanked Manx on the way into the building, where he waited outside the ladies’ room while she and I went inside. She changed the baby’s diaper on a fold-down table while I made use of one of the stalls. Then she asked if I could hold him while she relieved herself.

“Oh, I don’t know.” My heart thudded in panic. I’d literally never held a baby, and whatever idiot had said all women possessed some kind of maternal instinct was wrong. “Can’t you just…put him down for a couple of minutes?”

“On the ground?” Manx glared at me, and I shrugged helplessly. She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I will ask one of the men.”

I sighed heavily. “Give him here.” I could not let Marc know I was…hesitant to hold a baby. He’d never let me live it down. “What do I do with him?” I held my arms out football-style, as I’d seen my mother do often enough over the past two weeks.

Manx placed the baby gently in my arms, settling his little head securely into the crook of my elbow. “Nothing. He is sleeping. Hold him for just two minutes.”