Prey

“We can’t just leave them,” I insisted, as Manx crouched over Des in the car seat behind me.

Ethan sighed, eyes on the rearview mirror. “They’re moving bodies, not storming the Bastille. They’ll be on the road in a couple of minutes.”

“We should have helped,” I snapped, turning to stare through the rear window as Marc went back for another corpse. How many had we killed? “And what the hell do you know about the Bastille?”

He shrugged, squinting into the patch of road illuminated by the headlights. “Angela wrote a paper on the French Revolution.”

“And you read it?” My tone conveyed more than adequate skepticism. Angela, his girlfriend, was a college senior. It was an odd pairing, to say the least, but their “relationship” had outlasted my most conservative estimate by nearly three months.

No one had won the office pool.

“I am literate. And no, we should not have helped Marc and Painter. We should get Manx and the baby to safety.” Ethan wiped a dark smear from his forehead with the back of one palm. “Not to mention Vic. He’s bleeding pretty badly.”

Oh yeah.

The crinkle of plastic drew my eyes to the third row, where Vic was spreading black plastic sheeting across the seat, to catch his own blood. Even injured, he was trying to protect his upholstery. Must have been a guy thing.

But my brother was right—a decidedly odd turn of events. So I took one last look at Marc and Painter and made my way to the back of the vehicle to see what I could do for Vic. Then we did what I couldn’t remember any Pride cat ever doing before: we ran from the strays.

We’d been driving for about ten minutes when Marc called my cell phone.

“You guys okay?” I asked by way of a greeting, as I fiddled with the vent above the rear bench seat. I’d bandaged Vic as well as I could, then stayed in the back to keep an eye on him.

Over the line, Painter’s crappy old engine protested as he accelerated. They were on the road, too. “All scratched up, but I’ve been worse,” Marc said.

“Me, too,” Painter spoke up, his voice slightly muffled from distance to the phone.

“What happened?” Des started to fuss behind me, and I looked up to see Manx dig a capped pacifier from a pale blue diaper bag.

Marc exhaled deeply over the phone. “After you guys left, their motivation faded. We dragged the dead ones into the trees. Same with the unconscious ones.”

“What about the rest?”

“The strays who could walk hobbled off on their own. We knocked the rest of them out and moved them into the trees with the others.”

“How many bodies?” Vic called from behind me, his excitement obvious, even through the pain in his voice. I’d never heard of Pride cats facing foes in such great numbers before, and we’d more than held our own. The news would travel fast, and surely even my father’s opponents would be impressed. How could they not be?

“Six dead,” Marc said. “Five unconscious. Seven more injured, but awake until we fixed that oversight. At least three got away.”

Ethan whistled as he changed lanes, and I did the math in my head, gasping at the total. “Twenty-one strays, all working together?”

My brother huffed. “Plus however many would have been in the second wave.” The very thought of which made me shudder.

“What do you think they wanted?” I said into the phone, staring out the window at the passing darkness. After the ambush, my imagination was working overtime, and I kept thinking I saw eyes staring out at me from the woods.

“Well, they weren’t dressed for conversation,” Marc said. In fact, they weren’t dressed for anything, which was his point. It was impossible to negotiate—or even make demands—without human vocal cords.

The strays had come to kill. But why?

“We need to call Dad.” Ethan flicked off the high beams when headlights appeared on the road in front of us.

“Already have.” Soda fizzed and Marc gulped in my ear, and I pictured him drinking directly from Painter’s two-liter of Coke. “He’s sending a crew to take care of the bodies.” He paused for another drink. “There’s a Holiday Inn just off the Meadville exit. Check in and get several adjoining rooms. Preferably on the back side. We’ll be there in half an hour.”

Adjoining rooms would make it easier to keep an eye on Manx and the baby, and parking in the back would help hide our vehicles, in case the second wave of strays came looking for us.

“Got it. See you in a few.” I hung up the phone and immediately wished I’d told him I loved him, especially considering how close we’d all just come to dying. “How you holding up, Vic?” I twisted again to look at him in the constant ebb and flow of the highway lights, now that we were on an actual highway, instead of some dark, two-lane back road.

“The bleeding’s slowed,” he said, accompanied by the crinkle of plastic. “But my arm stings like a bitch.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you all fixed up.”

Forty-five minutes later, I sat in the center of the left-hand bed in the hotel room Vic and Ethan would share. Their room was connected by a currently open set of back-to-back doors to another room, where Manx sat in a wheeled desk chair, nursing Des. Again.

Marc and I had our own room, next to Manx’s, but not connecting. A little privacy was all we’d be able to salvage from the botched transport/reunion. That, and dinner together, if Ethan and Painter ever returned with food.

“Okay, let’s take a look at the damage,” Marc said from the end of the other bed. He clenched the shoulder of Vic’s T-shirt and pulled. Seams split with a rapid-fire popping sound, and the detached material slid fromVic’s arm to the floor. We’d learned through experience that the torn-sleeve approach was much easier than making the patient pull his shirt over his head with an injured arm.

I sucked in a deep breath at the sight of Vic’s gored arm, and my fist clenched around the hideous orange-and-yellow-print comforter. But Marc didn’t even blink. He’d seen worse. Hell, he’d been through worse.

So had I, come to think of it. I fingered the healed slash marks on the left side of my abdomen as I stared at Vic’s arm. My scars were ten weeks old, and still pink, a permanent reminder of Zeke Radley and his Montana band of loyal/crazy strays—which had just been dwarfed by the gang we’d faced an hour earlier.

“What do you want for the pain?” Marc asked, angling Vic’s arm into the glow from the lamp on the bedside table. Why don’t hotel rooms ever have overhead lights?

Vic grimaced. “Whiskey.”

“You’re in luck.” Marc smiled as he lifted a white plastic sack from the floor; he and Painter had made a supply run on the way. He pulled two bottles from the bag. One was Jack Daniel’s, the other hydrogen peroxide. But the clink from the sack as he set it down told me Marc was prepared for Vic’s second and third choices, too.

For the next twenty minutes, I watched Marc clean and stitch Vic’s wounds, grateful that they were shallow, if long and ugly.

I was next. We’d decided the bite marks on my arm could simply be bandaged, since they hadn’t torn. But my leg needed stitches, and apparently that fact was nonnegotiable.

Marc held my arm to stabilize me as I hobbled across the dingy carpet to the cheap dinette, wearing only the tank top and snug boy-shorts I usually slept in. My pants had gone the way of Vic’s shirt and the remains were now draped over the unused chair on the other side of the table.

Marc knelt next to me and ran one hand up my bare leg, ostensibly inspecting the gashes above my right knee, and neither of us even pretended I was shivering from cold, or from shock. He hadn’t touched me in months, and the pain of my injuries couldn’t trump the feel of his hand on my skin. Squeezing. Stroking. Lingering…

I clamped my jaws shut on a moan of both pain and pleasure, unwilling to embarrass either of us with my lack of control.

“You ready?” Marc asked, and I nodded hesitantly. In spite of many past injuries, I’d never had homemade sutures, and had certainly never surrendered to them with nothing more than Tylenol for pain. Well, Tylenol and whiskey—not my drink of choice, but apparently sitting for stitches wasn’t a margarita-sippin’ kind of event.

He smiled sympathetically and lifted my leg to slide a clean white towel from the bathroom beneath my thigh. “Take a couple of drinks while I get you cleaned up.”

For once, he didn’t have to tell me twice. On the table sat two glasses. One Manx had half filled with whiskey, the other with Coke and ice from the vending machine in the lobby. I picked up the first glass and made myself gulp twice before chasing the contents with half the cup of Coke. I barely felt the sting of peroxide on my thigh because of the flames of whiskey in my throat.

Marc laughed and poured more soda. Then he picked up the thin, curved suture needle.

The hardest part was holding still. The needle didn’t hurt much more than the gashes themselves. So as long as I didn’t look, I was mostly okay. Even so, within minutes I’d finished both glasses, and Vic crossed the room to refill them for me with his good arm.

We were both half-drunk, and probably looked pretty damn pathetic. The alcohol would wear off quickly, thanks to our enhanced metabolism, but I had a feeling the pathetic part would last a while. And leave scars.

Like I didn’t have enough of those already…

By the time Marc had sewed up my thigh, and cleaned and bandaged both my ankle and my arm, Ethan and Painter were back with dinner: five large pizzas, three more two-liters, and two dozen doughnuts.

Manx refused to leave Des, even with him asleep in the middle of the bed in the next room, with the connecting doors open. So she took a paper plate full of pizza back to her room. The rest of us spread out on the floor of Vic and Ethan’s room, pizza boxes open, plastic cups filled with one combination or another of soda, ice and alcohol. I had more Coke, with Absolut Vanilia, which Dan had picked up because he thought it might go down easier for me. He was right. If I held my nose while I swallowed, it tasted like Vanilla Coke.

Sort of.

“So, how is the kid?” Dan asked, a slice of pizza poised to enter his mouth, point first. “She any closer to Shifting?”

I shook my head. “She won’t even talk about it. And when you try to make her, she puts on her earphones and turns her music up loud enough to damage her own hearing.”

Vic grinned at Ethan, and spoke with his mouth full. “Michael says you should never have given her that damn thing.”

“Whatever.” Ethan tossed his crust into a half-empty pizza box and grabbed another slice. “She’s not turning up her music because she doesn’t want to Shift, or because she doesn’t want to talk about Shifting. She’s turning up her music ‘cause she’s a teenager. And because she doesn’t want to hear any more of that psychobabble bullshit you all spout at her 24/7.”

“We’re not spouting psychobabble, we’re trying to keep her healthy,” I insisted, sipping from my cup. “But you’re right. Michael’s full of shit.” My brother grinned, so I continued. “Listening to that MP3 player is the closest she’s ever going to get to a normal teenage activity. Well, that and ignoring the advice of her elders.”

“You’d know.”

“Bite me,” I snapped. But Ethan was right, of course. I’d recently begun seeing things from the far side of the generation gap, and the view from the adult side sucks.

“How long’s it been since she Shifted?” Dan asked, reaching for another piece of pizza.

“More than two months.”

He frowned. “Has anyone ever gone that long without Shifting?”

I searched my memory, but came up blank as Marc shook his head. “No one I can think of.”

“I wouldn’t know.” Ethan grinned. “I’m not one to deny my animalistic urges.”

I’d probably never heard a more truthful statement.

“Speaking of which, any idea what that whole ambush was about?” I asked, around a mouthful of Meat Lover’s. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Not even from Zeke Radley and his Pride.” I raised the cup again and drank deeply that time. I was more relaxed now that the alcohol had kicked in, and was determined to enjoy my buzz while it lasted. “I thought strays were mostly loners.”

Painter sat straighter as all eyes turned his way for verification from our resident expert. “Yeah, for the most part. But strays’ll come together if they have a good reason to, just like anybody else.”

“Like a common enemy?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. How had we become that common enemy?

“Yeah. Or somethin’ they wanna know.” His cheeks flushed. “Like how to fight. To take care of themselves, you know? Like Marc’s been teaching me.”

And Marc was a fine instructor, if his protégé’s performance that night was any indication. Painter was damn talented with a hammer.

“So, did you know any of those toms we fought?” Vic asked, and I heard a thin thread of tension in his voice, though his expression seemed amiable enough.

“Not friendly-like.” Dan took another bite, but then his chewing slowed to a stop as the reasoning behind the question sank in. He swallowed thickly. “I had nothin’ to do with that. I fought with you guys.”

So he had, greatly strengthening our odds. And he could easily have been killed.

But Marc’s eyes had gone hard, and his expression sent a chill up my arms, in spite of the hotel heater and my alcohol-induced flush. “Dan, did you tell anyone we were coming through tonight?” His voice had gone deep and scary, and no one was chewing anymore.

Painter shook his head, eyes wide. “Just Ben. He’s interested in Pride politics and wanted to meet you guys. I told him I’d introduce him. But he never showed up.”

“Damn it, Dan!” Marc stood in a lightning-fast, fluid motion and kicked an unopened bottle of soda across the room. It crashed into the door and rolled away. “You may as well have handed us over bound and gagged. The whole damn ambush was your fault!”

Four

Painter’s face flushed, and he shook his head vehemently. “Ben wasn’t there tonight.” The stray stood uncertainly, backing away from Marc out of instinct even a human would have understood. “He wasn’t with the toms we fought.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t cut my hose, or tell someone else where we’d be,” Marc growled, advancing on him slowly as we watched. “You need to understand something, Dan. You will never be a Pride cat if you don’t learn when to keep your mouth shut!” With that, he grabbed Painter by the arm, ripped open the hotel door and tossed him out into the parking lot.

Before the door swung shut, I caught a glimpse of Dan as he stumbled across the sidewalk and reached out to steady himself on the hood of the Suburban. He looked shocked, and as disappointed as an orphan at Christmas, still clutching a half-eaten slice of Supreme in one hand as the door slammed in his face.

“Will he be okay out there?” I asked, as Marc threw the dead bolt and stomped across the carpet toward us.

“Who cares if he isn’t?” Marc folded his legs beneath himself as he dropped to the floor at my side. But his glance at the door gave away his conflict. Painter was a friend, and he clearly hadn’t betrayed us intentionally.

“Well, I guess that explains why the strays didn’t attack him until he took a swing.” Ethan wiped a smear of pizza sauce from the corner of his mouth with the back of one hand. “He’s their source.”

“Yeah, but he did take that swing, and he didn’t feed them information on purpose,” I insisted, glancing from one stony male face to another. “He fought alongside us, and even if the strays were inclined to spare him for further use, they won’t be now. And they’re probably still out there…” I let my sentence fade into silent censure, aimed pointedly at Marc.

“He’ll be fine.” Marc grabbed another slice of pizza and tore into it, speaking again only once he’d swallowed. “If getting rid of him were that easy, I’d have done it weeks ago. He’s probably in the front office right now, renting the room next to ours.”

The rest of the meal passed as Marc and the other guys got caught up after more than two months apart. After dinner, I checked on Manx to find her curled up asleep with the baby, both of them fully clothed, a paper plate scattered with pizza crusts on the floor beside the bed. I pulled a blanket from the empty bed to cover them, then closed the connecting door on my way out.

Ethan and Vic were already arguing over the remote control, so Marc helped me into my jacket and ripped pants, and we took one half-full box of pizza back to our room.

The door closed at my back, cutting off the biting January cold, and Marc’s hands were all over me, warming me everywhere my skin was exposed. Then exposing even more.

My hand opened, and the pizza box thumped to the table. His fingers slid beneath my jacket, pushing it gently down my arms and over the bandaged bite marks. The jacket hit the floor and I stepped over it, then winced and nearly went down when my full weight hit my injured leg.

Marc caught me, then lifted me. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled his ripped, bloodstained shirt off one arm at a time, while he supported my back with first one hand then the other. His shirt hit the floor. I nibbled on his collarbone. Four steps later he set me on the edge of the bed, and I let him pull my ruined pants off. His followed quickly as I pulled my tank top over my head and squirmed out of my underwear.

And finally, after months apart, we were alone, with nothing between us but memories and need…

Later, I lay next to Marc on the bed farthest from the door, propped up on my right elbow, my chin in my hand. I was bruised all over, and I ached from head to toe after the fight, but I pushed my discomfort aside, determined to focus on Marc for what little time we’d have together.

“You hate it, don’t you?” My left index finger traced the long-healed claw-mark scars that had brought him into my life fifteen years earlier, when he was infected by the werecat who’d killed his mother. My parents felt responsible for him because he was orphaned and infected in our territory, so my mother nursed him through scratch fever, then my father made him the first and only stray ever accepted into a Pride.

“Hate what?” His chest rose and sank beneath my hand with each breath, and our mingled scents surrounded me with an almost physical presence. It was intoxicating, just being near him, but the knowledge that his company was only temporary kept me from being truly content.

I ran my fingers over each hard ridge of his stomach. “Living here. Surrounded by humans.” Marc had lived with us for half of his life—for all of his life as a werecat—until my father had been forced to choose between us. Marc was exiled as part of the under-the-table deal that eliminated execution as a possible sentence at my hearing.

Marc went willingly. He would do nothing to endanger my life, even if it meant living without me. But that was proving every bit as hard as we’d known it would be. Marc hadn’t lived among humans since the day he was scratched, and had, in fact, ceased thinking like one around the same time. He no longer knew how to relate to humans, which probably frustrated him even more than it would a Pride cat, considering he’d been born among their ranks.

He shook his head slowly, as if considering. “I don’t hate it. It does no good to hate something you can’t change.”

“How very Zen of you.” I smiled skeptically at his unusual display of composure, because we could change his location. As soon as my father’s position on the council was secure, I would do whatever it took to get Marc back into the south-central Pride.

But in the meantime… “Have you made any friends? Other than Dan Painter?”

“I don’t need friends,” he insisted, turning his head to grin up at me. “I just need you to visit more often.”

Unfortunately, we both knew that was impossible, especially now.

My father had hired Brian Taylor—Ed Taylor’s youngest son, and Carissa’s brother—to help pick up the slack when he’d been forced to exile Marc. Brian was a year my junior, which made him the youngest enforcer on the payroll. But he was also a quick learner, and eager to impress his new Alpha and earn the respect of his fellow toms. In short, the kid had real potential.

Still, he didn’t have anywhere near the experience Marc had, so while we weren’t technically shorthanded, neither were we truly running at max capacity. I’d been temporarily paired with Vic, my father’s right-hand man now that Marc was gone, and we were always working. Always. Patrolling the territorial boundaries, chasing down trespassers, teaching my fellow enforcers the partial Shift—after Marc mastered it, Jace and Vic picked it up quickly—and working with Kaci during every spare moment.

But this particular moment was mine. Ours.

“I’m here now.” I laid my palm flat on Marc’s chest, so I could feel as well as hear his heart beat in sync with my own.

“So you are…” He rose to kiss me, and I lay back on the pillow, sighing when his delicious weight pressed me into the mattress. I arched my neck and let my hands wander his torso as his mouth trailed over my chin and down my throat. Every hard plane on his body was as familiar to me as my own face. I knew how he’d gotten each scar, and at one time or another I’d tasted them all.

“Maybe we could take an extra day,” I murmured into his ear, rubbing his thigh with my knee as I wrapped my good leg around him. “Surely full-scale attack and a slashed radiator hose warrant a bit of a delay….”

“Somehow I doubt the council will see it that way.” His right hand slid up the back of my thigh, then cupped my rear, shifting me gently into position.

“Screw the council—” I whispered, not surprised to hear my voice go hoarse with all-new need. One romp wasn’t enough to alleviate the ache of a two-month absence. That would take many, many…

Three brisk knocks on the door drenched the moment like a dunk in an ice-cold pond.

Marc sighed, and collapsed on top of me for a moment before rolling off to search for his pants. “Hang on!” he growled, as the knocking started again.

“Don’t let me interrupt…” my brother called through the door. “I’ll just stand out here and freeze my balls off while you two get reacquainted. No hurry.”

“Damn it, Ethan!” I stepped into my underwear, one hand on the pressboard bedside table for balance as I favored my injured leg. Then I pulled my tank top over my head and tugged it into place, already hopping toward the entrance as Marc zipped his pants. He settled onto the end of the bed with a sigh, and motioned for me to go ahead.

I slid the chain free and twisted the dead bolt, then jerked open the door to find my youngest brother grinning at me, hands stuffed into the pockets of a jacket much too thin to ward off the biting January cold. “I swear, you two have no self-control. You’re like animals.”

“Asshole.” But I couldn’t summon real malice, knowing he wouldn’t have interrupted us without a good reason. I tried to step aside and let him in, but I wasn’t fast enough. Ethan brushed past me into the warmth of the bedroom, and I stumbled back. My weight hit my injured leg and I hissed, then fell on my ass with all the poise of a hippo en pointe.

Ethan just kicked the door shut and hauled me up by one arm, even as I heard Marc rise from the bed behind me. “Way to go, Grace.” Then my brother frowned as his gaze settled on the three parallel rows of stitches on my thigh, and the bandages still circling my ankle. “Why haven’t you Shifted? You should be half-healed by now.”

“I’m fine.” I hopped along as he led me toward a chair. “And I will Shift. I just…haven’t had a chance yet.” I snuck a glance at Marc and smiled. Shifting into cat form can accelerate healing by as much as several days, as the body tears itself apart, then puts itself back together in another form. But Shifting while injured is far from comfortable, and it wasn’t at the top of my to-do list, especially considering all the other, more pleasurable ways to amuse myself in Marc’s company.