Rogue

Lucky bastard.

“It’s research.” I dragged my gaze from the corpse to Marc’s face. His gold-flecked brown eyes glittered in the moonlight.

“Whatever.” Marc shrugged, and the flashlight’s beam swung off into the grass. “My point is that he wasn’t bitten or clawed. I don’t smell blood.”

Pushing damp strands of hair from my face, I sniffed the air, flushing in annoyance when I realized he was right; if there had been any blood present, fresh or old, we would have smelled it. And if there was no blood, there had been no fight. No werecat—even one in human form—would fail to draw blood with a bite or scratch.

How was I sure the murderer was a werecat? Simple. No human had the strength to break a man’s neck one-handed, and judging from the bruises on the back of the dead guy’s neck, that was exactly what had happened to him. Sure, in theory it could have been a bruin, or one of the other shape-shifter species, but the chances of that were almost nil. What few other breeds existed weren’t interested in us, and the feeling was mutual.

“Oh,” I said, glancing again at the trees as I conceded his point. What else could I say? Marc was the expert on dead bodies, and in spite of having…um…made one a few months earlier, I knew almost nothing about murder victims. And I liked it that way.

Marc sighed. “Fine. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll check for other wounds.” With an Oscar-worthy grunt of effort, he tugged up on the dead guy’s T-shirt, exposing a tangle of old scars reaching toward his spine from both sides of his chest.

I frowned at the long-healed marks. “You’re right. I admit it. There’s no reason to undress him.”

Marc shot me a cocky smile and lowered the poor man’s shirt.

Biting my lip in frustration, I glanced at my watch, pressing the button on the side to illuminate the face with a soft green glow. Almost one in the morning. Great. I should have been curled up next to Marc in bed, exhausted but satisfied. Instead, I was digging unmarked graves by moonlight, exhausted but creeped-the-fuck-out.

We’d dropped off the unconscious Dan Painter in a thick stand of trees just east of the Mississippi River and north of Arkansas City, still bound and now gagged, to teach him a lesson. Then we’d backtracked two hours northwest, on a predominantly two-lane highway. Or rather, Marc had backtracked. I’d recited the prologue to Canterbury Tales in my head. In Middle English. Backward. Marc had his special skills, and I had mine. Of course, his came in far handier than mine in our line of work. Bad guys were hardly ever intimidated by a stirring recitation from Hamlet.

Gritting my teeth, I clung to the last of my dwindling supply of willpower and gave up all hope of seeing my bed before dawn. If I was going to be awake all night, I might as well get something done.

“Okay, a broken neck, but no other obvious wounds,” I said, tugging on the hem of my snug white T-shirt.

Of course, if I’d known I would be handling a corpse, I would have worn something…darker. Or disposable. As it was, I considered myself fortunate to be wearing jeans and a T. If not for the bag I’d packed for our weekend getaway, I’d be digging in expensive black slacks and a red silk blouse.

“So, we’re probably looking for another stray,” I continued, brushing imaginary grave dirt from my shirt. “Maybe one with a grudge, or a history of violent behavior?” I could feel the fine layer of grit all over me, like a ghostly dusting of death, somehow itching and burning beneath my skin.

Or maybe I was overreacting.

Marc shrugged, oblivious to my discomfort as his face smoothed into an unreadable expression. “That describes nearly every stray I’ve ever met. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause we’re not looking for anyone. We’re here to dispose of the body, not investigate the murder.”

I nodded and glanced away. I’d known better. The Territorial Council, nominally led by my father, would never tie up its resources investigating the murder of a single stray. They would almost certainly view the dead cat as one less flea in their collective fur.

“It doesn’t matter what he was doing here, or who killed him,” Marc whispered, kneeling next to the body. “No one gives a damn.”

He would never have voiced such a concern to anyone else, and my heart ached for him, knowing what it had probably cost him to say it in front of me. I knew he cared not because he’d known the stray, but because he hadn’t. Because no one had. And because, like the dead cat we’d come to bury, Marc was a stray. He was facing what I knew to be one of his worst fears: a quick burial in the middle of the night, without a single friend to remember him kindly.

As long as I was alive, that would never happen to Marc. He had me, my whole family, and our entire Pride to miss and remember him. Yet the injustice of a secret burial for the anonymous cat still bothered him. Righteous anger burned bright in his eyes when he looked up at me, and there was nothing I could do to put out the flames.

Marc glanced away from my sympathetic look, but before he turned back to the body, his expression hardened into its usual business face, cold and unreadable. It was a defense mechanism I had yet to master.

He pulled a brown leather wallet from the stray’s back pocket and thumbed through the contents: two credit cards, a few folded receipts, a single wrinkled twenty, and at least two dozen crisp new one-dollar bills. Marc slid a driver’s license from its plastic cover and passed it up to me without even glancing at it.

I looked at the photo, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Until I saw his face, Bradley Moore had just been a body, a nameless corpse to be disposed of quickly, so I could get on with my night.

But now that I’d seen his license, I knew that Moore lived in Cleveland, Mississippi, and was licensed to drive a motorcycle. He’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday, was six foot two and a half, and weighed two hundred and twelve pounds. And he had the most beautiful, hypnotic bluish-gray eyes I’d ever seen.

“Do you smell that?” Marc asked.

“Smell what?” I slipped the license into my front pocket and knelt beside him, eager to forget Mr. Moore’s haunting eyes.

“The killer, I assume. I smell another cat on him. On his clothes, and here, on his neck.” He bent to sniff where he’d indicated, and my stomach churned. I understood his sympathy for the unknown stray; I really did. And after seeing Moore’s face, I couldn’t help but share it. But three months earlier, I’d had to rip out a tomcat’s throat in order to free myself and Abby, my kidnapped cousin. And impractical as it might sound, considering my line of work, I’d had no plans to ever again share such intimate contact with a corpse.

I could handle wrapping the cadaver in plastic and dumping it in a hole in the ground, though that might have been easier if I’d never learned the victim’s name. But sniffing a corpse’s neck went way past my definition of decorous behavior. It was macabre, and disturbing.

“I can smell it from here,” I said. Marc hadn’t asked me to come closer, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

“Does it smell like a stray to you?”

I inhaled deeply, mentally sorting through the smells I already knew. The strongest was Marc. Musky and masculine, his scent was as familiar as my own. It was also blended with mine, the result of every kiss and embrace we’d shared since my last shower. Which we’d also shared, come to think of it.

Next, I filtered out the scents from the field around us, so pervasive I barely noticed them without conscious effort. I identified trees, grass, dirt, fresh dew, and several small rodents, mostly rabbits and mice.

On the body itself were several more scents, including Mr. Moore’s cologne, the oppressive stench of cigarette smoke, and a strong, minty breath spray. What was left after I’d sorted out all of those smells was the one Marc meant. It came from the stray, but was not his personal scent. It was something else. Something definitely feline, and rich, and pungent. Almost spicy…

Shock jolted up my spine, cold and numbing. Terror ripped through my chest. For one long moment, my heart refused to beat, and I could do nothing but stare at the corpse. I knew that scent. One aspect of it, anyway.

“Well?” Marc asked, staring at me as I stared at the body, my eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Foreign cat.” I stood and stumbled back a step, too horrified to form a complete sentence.

“What?” Marc glanced up at me sharply, then back down at Moore. “No. It can’t be. Luiz is long gone. We would have heard about him by now if he were still around.”

Luiz was one of a pair of jungle strays who’d invaded our territory three months earlier, kidnapping and raping at will. I’d fought him once, and won, but he got away and we hadn’t heard from him since, a fact that scared me more than I was willing to admit out loud. And fucking pissed me off.

“It’s not Luiz.” I was certain of that much. The scent was very faint—meaning the murderer had only briefly touched the victim—but I knew two things without a doubt. The scent was not from a native cat, and it did not belong to Luiz.

“There’s barely a trace of a scent.” Marc shook his head slowly, but his stare never left Moore’s neck. “I don’t see how you can tell a damn thing about it.”

“I can tell.” I’d only met Luiz once, but that was plenty. If I lived to be two hundred, I’d still remember his scent on my deathbed. It was permanently imprinted on my brain, alongside such innocent memories as the taste of my first kiss—Marc—and the flavor of my first snow cone—blue raspberry.

“Fine.” Marc nodded, glancing up at me. “It isn’t Luiz. But is it a stray?”

Against my better judgment—and in spite of an irrational urge to run, or at least find a weapon—I knelt for a stronger whiff of the scent. It didn’t help. “I don’t think so. There’s something…weird about the smell. It’s a foreign scent, but it’s also…more. If that makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t,” Marc said as I stood and backed away from Moore’s corpse. “But you’re right.” He still knelt by the body, looking at it rather than at me as a light breeze ruffled tall blades of grass against his jeans. “There’s an element to it that I can’t quite place.” He leaned back on his heels, frowning in frustration. “What’s his name?”

“Bradley Moore.” I slipped my hand into my pocket, feeling the slick surface of the plastic card, now warm from my own body heat. “He’s from Mississippi.”

Marc nodded, as if he’d already known that last part. It wouldn’t be too hard to guess. Mississippi was the nearest free territory, unclaimed by any Pride. And because it had the mildest climate of any of the free territories, it was home to the largest concentration of strays in the country, mingling with the human population like the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing.

We were less than forty miles from the Mississippi border, where interstate travelers were welcomed across the state line by a seedy-looking strip club, at which Moore had no doubt planned to spend the bundle of ones in his wallet. At least that much of his plan for the evening was clear. Unfortunately, a stack of one-dollar bills did nothing to answer the other questions pinging around my brain like the little silver balls in a pinball machine.

“Well, let’s get going.” Marc stood and brushed his palms against his legs, as if he could wipe the feel of dead flesh from his hands like road dust. I knew exactly how he felt. “It’s a shame the son of a bitch didn’t have the courtesy to give him a decent burial,” he said. “We do that much even for trespassers, and this asshole couldn’t be bothered to bury a friend.”

I blinked at Marc’s tone, so low and gravelly. And angry. Then his meaning sank in. “You think Moore knew whoever killed him?”

“How else could the killer have gotten so close to him?”

I thought about that for a moment, still rubbing the license in my pocket as I stared at the ground near poor Mr. Moore’s head. “No defensive wounds,” I said finally. I took another deep breath, again searching with my sensitive nose for any sign of blood. I still found none. “No blood beneath his nails or in his mouth. He didn’t fight back.” Marc was right. They’d probably known each other. But how was that even possible? How could an American stray have become friends with a foreign cat who had no business in the United States, much less in the southcentral territory? And what were they both doing on our land?

Marc nodded again, interrupting my silent confusion. A hint of a smile showed me he was pleased that I understood what he was getting at.

I wasn’t pleased. I didn’t want to understand death and murderers. Unfortunately, what I wanted mattered no more then than it ever had. Alphas aren’t big fans of free will. In fact, our social and political structure is more of a monarchical system, in which the monarch is invariably the strongest male in the territory. Power passes not to one of the Alpha’s several sons, but to the tomcat who marries his only daughter. This son-in-law and future Alpha must be strong enough to lead, protect, and ultimately control the entire Pride, or the entire system falls apart. And the system—along with the continuation of the species itself—must be protected at all costs.

My father was a bit of a rebel among the other Territorial Council members, Alphas of each of the nine other territories. Rather than passing the south-central Pride on to my future husband—Marc, if my parents have any say in the matter—he wanted to hand the reins over to me. That very concept was sending shock waves of anger and impropriety throughout certain elements of the Council. If my father’s scandalous scheme ever came to fruition, I would someday have an opportunity to change the system from the inside.

It was the “inside” part that bothered me.

A chill went through me at the very thought of ever being in my father’s position, and Marc mistook my shiver for one of sympathy for the dead stray.

“He probably never saw it coming.” Marc shook his head in disgust. “The bastard just reached over and snapped his neck from behind.”

My phone rang into the silence following his words, rescuing me from the fact that I had no idea what to say next. I fumbled in my right front pocket, digging for the phone. Squinting at the tiny display screen, I was relieved to recognize the number for my father’s private line. “It’s my dad.”

Marc nodded and bent to pick up the roll of black plastic in the grass at his feet.

I pressed the yes button as he spread the plastic out on the ground beside Moore’s body. “You rang?” I said into the phone, turning away from Marc as he prepared to flip the corpse over.

“Did you find it?” my father asked.

“Yeah.” I grimaced at the heavy thunk and the crinkling of thick plastic at my back. “I think we need to look into this one.” Marc went silent behind me, and I knew he’d frozen in surprise. He would never have voiced such a request.

“Faythe…” A chair creaked in the background as my father leaned back. “You know we don’t have the resources to investigate every stray who dies in a brawl. We’d just be chasing our own tails. Bury him and come on home.”

I exhaled slowly, wondering whether I was trying to satisfy Marc or set my own mind at ease. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

“There’s a scent on the body. It’s very faint, and it’s only on his neck, so we’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s the killer.” I hesitated when the next words seemed to catch in my throat, threatening to choke me. Then, finally, I spat them out, grimacing at the bitter taste. “It’s a foreign cat.”

A sharp, near-silent inhalation was my father’s only reaction. He was as worried and pissed off as I was at the news of an outsider in our territory. Thank goodness.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice frightfully calm as Marc went still again behind me.

“Completely.”

Silence stretched out over the line, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I’d come to recognize that particular pause over the past three months; everyone close to me lapsed into it often enough. He was thinking about Miguel, debating whether or not to ask me if I was okay. Like the rest of my family, my father was afraid of upsetting me with reminders of the bastard who’d kidnapped, caged, and beat the living shit out of me. Apparently he thought I was sturdy enough to chase down intruders and bury dead bodies, but too delicate to withstand the assault of my own memory. Go figure.

What my father didn’t realize, what none of them seemed to realize, was that just reporting for work every morning reminded me of Miguel, the jungle stray whose disregard for personal liberty and a woman’s right to say “no” had changed my life forever. I’d agreed to work for my father in exchange for the opportunity to go after Miguel. To take my pound of flesh from the sadistic bastard who’d murdered one of my childhood friends and raped my teenage cousin. And who’d tried to sell all three of us as personal property to a jungle Alpha somewhere in Brazil.

Though no one seemed willing to believe it, thinking about Miguel didn’t so much upset me as inspire me. It reminded me of my new purpose, of why I was willing to forgo a weekend with my boyfriend to kick the shit out of one stray and bury another. And every now and then I really needed that reminder, so I wished my father would quit stalling and just spit it out. And finally he did.

“Miguel’s dead, Faythe. He’s not coming back.”

“Damn right.” But I shivered in spite of the balmy breeze. Marc laid a warm, heavy hand on my shoulder, clearly having heard both sides of the conversation.

“Are you okay?” My father’s voice was hollow-sounding, the way it got when he cradled his head in one hand, in spite of the telephone.

In the distance, a whip-poor-will sang, unconcerned by our presence. “Yeah. I’m fine.” And if I’m not now, I will be soon. “Really,” I added, before he had a chance to ask if I was sure. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Good.” Over the line, he cleared his throat and tapped a pen against his desk blotter, and I couldn’t stop a smile. My father was gone; the Alpha had arrived. “Okay, so you’re pretty sure the killer is foreign. Is it a jungle cat?”

I inhaled again, but was rewarded only with frustration. “I don’t know. It’s too faint to tell for sure, but that’s a definite possibility. And there’s something weird about the scent. It’s definitely foreign, but it’s also…more. If that makes any sense.”

“Not much sense, I’m afraid,” he said. “Would you recognize it if you smelled it again?”

“Absolutely.” I nodded, though he couldn’t see me.

“Me, too.” Marc bent to pick up a shovel mostly hidden by tall grass. I didn’t bother passing his answer along; my father could hear him just fine.

“Good. That’s a start.”

“Any word yet on who called it in?” I asked, shuffling my feet in the long grass.

“We’re still working on it, without much luck.” Metal springs squealed and I pictured my father leaning forward again in his desk chair. “The only thing we know for sure is that the caller was male.”

That was pretty much a given. Female cats—tabbies—were few and far between, and we were never unattended for long enough to stumble across a dead body in an empty field.

“And that he isn’t one of ours,” my father continued. “He sounded young, but that isn’t specific enough to be of any help. Owen’s compiling a list of strays living closest to the Arkansas border.”

“Did Bradley Moore come up on your list?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder to see Marc sliding a pair of scissors through the plastic, on which Moore now lay faceup.

“Just a minute…” Papers shuffled and my father cleared his throat as my gaze slid back toward the trees. “Yes. Bradley Moore. You have reason to suspect him?”

“Nope.” From behind me came a dull ripping sound as Marc tore strips from a thick roll of duct tape. “I have a reason to cross him off your list. He’s dead.”

“We usually have to work much harder to identify corpses not of our own making.”

By which, of course, he meant Marc’s making. Marc was my father’s de facto executioner—the enforcer charged with carrying out death sentences for any werecat guilty of one of the three capital crimes: murder, infection, or disclosure of our existence to a human.

“Well, this one was easy. He still had his wallet.” I curled my left hand into a fist to keep it from sneaking back into my pocket to feel Moore’s license.

“That’s unusual. They’re typically stripped of their ID and anything valuable.”

“Yeah, well, it gets even weirder.” I brushed my hair back from my face, making a mental note to wear a bun or a ponytail on my next burial run. “His neck is broken, but he wasn’t bitten or scratched at all, and he has no defensive wounds. Marc thinks he knew his attacker.”

“Does he have any lumps on his skull? Do you smell any strange chemicals?”

I shook my head before I realized he couldn’t see me. “No, no bumps that I’ve seen. Um…hang on.” I turned to Marc with an upraised eyebrow. He frowned and handed me his flashlight, then squatted to rip a strip of duct tape from one end of the long black bundle. Sheet plastic fell away to reveal Bradley Moore’s face, his beautiful eyes staring up into nothing.

Marc lifted Moore’s head gently, and I grimaced at the ease with which it rolled on his broken neck. Mouth set in a grim, hard line, Marc moved his fingers quickly but thoroughly over the stray’s skull, examining every inch of it as I watched, fending off nausea by sheer will. Finally, he lowered the head back onto the plastic and looked at me, eyes glittering in the beam of the flashlight. “No bumps. And that odd element to the scent is biological, not chemical.”

“Okay.” My father sighed in frustration. “Just get him buried and come home.” He paused, and I could feel the lecture coming, even as I heard the tired smile in his voice. “And if you make Marc do all the digging, I’ll give him all of your paycheck.”

Hmm, there’s an idea. What was I supposed to do with my meager income, anyway? I lived with my parents, owned no car, and had no bills. And I hated shopping. Marc could have my check, especially if he’d dig the damned hole himself.

I grinned, glancing at Marc from the corner of my eye as I spoke into the phone. “Thanks for the warning. I gotta go bury a body.”

“Make it at least five feet deep,” my father said, and very few other people would have heard the exhaustion in his voice. Then he hung up. No “Thanks for giving up your weekend to do my grunt work, Faythe.” No “Have a safe drive home.” Not even a goodbye. The Alpha was all business.

A little miffed, I shoved my phone back into my pocket and met Marc’s eyes. He frowned sternly at me, but his lips held a hint of a smile. “Don’t even say it,” he warned. “I’m not digging this grave by myself. Not even for your annual salary. So quit looking at the dirt like it’s going to stain your soul, princess, and get to work.” Openly smiling now, he tossed me the shovel one-handed.

I caught it, though I’d literally never held a shovel before. Cats have great reflexes, which isn’t always a good thing.

He grinned, gold-flecked eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “First one to hit five feet wins.”

“Wins what?”

“A nap on the way home.”

I groaned, my good humor beginning to fade. Nothing good could come from such a wager. If I lost, I’d have to drive for the entire five-and-a-half-hour trip home. But if I won, Marc would drive, which was much, much worse. With him in the driver’s seat, I’d be afraid to blink, much less sleep. Marc’s favorite travel game was highway tag, which he played by getting just close enough to passing semi trucks to reach out his window and touch their rear bumpers. Seriously. The man thought the inevitability of death didn’t apply to him, simply because it hadn’t happened yet.

Marc laughed at my horrified expression and sank his shovel into the earth at the end of the black plastic cocoon. With a sigh, I joined him, trying to decide whether I’d rather risk falling asleep at the wheel, or falling asleep with Marc at the wheel.