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And, if not, I could procrastinate with the best of them.
“You’re throwing an awful lot of questions at me all at once, Kaci. And asking for a lot of very personal information.”
Her face fell, and she tugged aimlessly at the frayed cuff of her jeans. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”
I sighed. Answering her questions—at least some of them—might go a long way toward getting her to truly trust me. Which might help me convince her to Shift. But no true compromise was one-sided. “I tell you what. I will answer three of your questions—any three you want…”
Her eyes lit up in expectation.
“…after you Shift.”
Kaci scowled. Then she stood, more color draining from her already pale face, and stomped across my room and through the open doorway.
“I take it that’s a no?” I called after her.
She slammed her bedroom door in reply, and I flinched.
Well, that went well…
Seven
“Again!” Ethan wrapped both bare arms around the heavy punching bag to steady it, and I shot him a look meant to scorch him from the inside out. Or at least to shut him up. “Harder this time. And a little higher. Hit his knee from the side, and he’ll go down. Then it’s all over but the beatin’.”
“He doesn’t have knees,” I snapped, wiping sweat from my forehead with an equally sweaty forearm. There was a clean, dry towel hanging over a folding chair near the bathroom, but I was too tired to cross the basement for it. “He doesn’t even have legs.”
“Oh, you got jokes?” Ethan grinned amiably, his green eyes flashing in challenge. He dropped his arms, then stepped around the bag, his sneakers sinking into the thick blue mat with each step. “If you’ve got energy to be funny, we’re not working you hard enough. Right, Kaci?”
“Right.” The young tabby tucked her legs up onto her folding metal chair and sipped from a covered mug filled with hot chocolate. Then she grinned at me and set her drink back on the bench press serving as an end table. The night before, she’d officially forgiven me for pushing the Shifting issue so hard. Still, she didn’t seem to mind watching Ethan kick my ass….
Little traitor.
Our basement was unheated, but was naturally insulated by the earth surrounding it, so the slight chill seeping in from the high windows was no problem for me or Ethan. After only half an hour of moderate lifting, he and I were both covered in sweat, even wearing only light workout clothes. In fact, he’d shed his shirt several minutes earlier.
But Kaci shivered beneath long sleeves, jeans, and a light blanket. She didn’t have enough energy to exercise with us, and she lacked the body fat to keep herself warm, but no amount of begging, coercing, or threatening on our part could convince her to go back upstairs, where my mother waited with more cocoa and an algebra textbook.
I could probably have made her go up, but I’d decided not to push the issue because she was still mad at me over the unanswered sex questions. Besides, we’d be heading up for lunch soon anyway.
“You’re not working me at all.” I reached up to catch the towel Ethan tossed me. “You’re practicing with me, not on me. Or do you need another reminder?”
“What I need is an actual challenge, smart-ass.” Ethan winked at Kaci, who grinned, enjoying our banter. “Think you can manage that?”
“Oh, you’re asking for it n—” Before I could finish the sentence, Ethan charged.
I lunged to the right, but I was too slow. His shoulder clipped my arm, knocking me off balance. I hit the thick pad on my hip and rolled out of the way. He slammed into the mat where I’d been, but I was already on my feet.
I dropped onto his back and planted my knee in his spine. Ethan howled and bucked. I straddled him for stability. My hand closed around his flailing right arm and I dug in the pocket of my workout pants for my cuffs.
Ethan’s left hand brushed my leg, then closed around the back of my knee. He tugged me forward. I leaned back to counter and snapped one cuff over his right wrist. He pulled harder, and I slid onto the mat with my left leg folded beneath me.
My brother tossed his weight over me, and we rolled. His elbow hit my ribs. His skull slammed into my right cheekbone, but I held on to my cuffs. Dizzy now, I stuck one knee out to halt our roll. We stopped with him facedown, me straddling his back again, and this time I didn’t hesitate. I pulled his left arm back and snapped the other cuff closed over his wrist.
Then I stood and backed away, waiting for the sparks. Waiting to gloat as he ranted and raged, demanding to be let loose.
Instead he shook with laughter.
I stared at Ethan for a moment, a little disappointed, then turned when I heard Kaci giggling behind me. “That was awesome!” she yelled, on her feet now, the cocoa forgotten.
“I agree.” Ethan’s words were muffled with half of his face pressed into the mat, and I turned to find him watching me, now lying on his right shoulder. “That was damned impressive.” He smiled, looking almost as pleased as he would have been had our positions been reversed. “But let’s not tell anyone, ‘kay? We’ll keep this a private victory, just between the three of us.”
“No way!” Kaci shouted, grinning so hard her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Or maybe with the cold. “Faythe owns you! I wish I had a camera. Wait till Jace—”
Ethan’s phone rang, Puddle of Mudd singing “She Hates Me.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Whose ring is that?”
He let his head hit the mat. “Angela’s.”
Kaci glanced at the bench press, where two cell phones lay, alongside her hot chocolate and two bottles of water. She picked up his phone and glanced at the display, her eyes shining in mischief. “You want me to tell her you’re all tied up?”
“No!” Ethan shouted, scooting awkwardly across the mat on his side. “Don’t answer it. She wants to ‘talk about our relationship.’ I’ve been dodging her calls all week.”
I rolled my eyes and dug my handcuff key from one side of my sneaker. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell her you’re no longer into white rice? Or that you’re moving to Yemen? Or whatever you tell those poor girls when your attention span turns out to be smaller than your—” I hesitated, censoring myself on Kaci’s behalf “—IQ, and you get bored with them?”
“No.” Ethan went still as I freed his hands, then he sat up, rubbing his wrists as Puddle of Mudd played on. “It’s easier to avoid her calls until she gets the picture on her own. That way, no one gets dumped. Really, I’m doing her a favor.”
“You’re an ass.” I was seriously considering answering his phone myself. But then the ringing stopped, and Kaci dropped the phone onto the padded bench next to mine. “And just for that, I’m not letting you up next time.”
Ethan had barely regained his feet when I rushed him. My shoulder slammed into his chest. I drove him backward onto the mat again, and his breath exploded from his chest in a massive “oof.”
“Yeah!” Kaci shouted, and I twisted to see her standing again, her smile almost as big as mine.
But I shouldn’t have looked.
Ethan grabbed my left shoulder and rolled me over, sitting on my thighs. “So much for a challenge,” he taunted.
I retorted with my fist.
My first blow landed on his ribs, and I shoved him off me. But before I could flip him onto his stomach and go for my cuffs again, more music rang out from the bench next to Kaci.
Papa Roach, singing “Scars.” That was my phone. Marc’s ring.
I was halfway to the bale of hay when something hit my back, fast and hard. I fell face-first onto the mat, Ethan’s weight pinning me.
“You’re too easily distracted,” he scolded. “Are you going to ask the bad guys to stop beating on you for a minute so you can answer your phone?”
I twisted beneath him but couldn’t get any leverage; he’d pinned my arms to my sides. “Get up!” I shouted, as loud as I could with his weight constricting my lungs. “That’s Marc!”
Ethan slid off me reluctantly. “You don’t see me going all starry-eyed when my girlfriend’s on the line,” he huffed.
“You’re not even taking her calls.” I glanced at Kaci and held my right hand up, palm cupped. “Toss it here, please.”
Her aim was good, but mine wasn’t. The phone flew past my hand and landed on the mat behind me. Ethan dove for it, an impish grin lighting his whole face. But I was faster. My fingers closed around the plastic just as his closed around my arm, and I put the phone in my other hand, flipping it open as Ethan groaned in defeat.
The look on his face was so comical that I was laughing when I spoke into the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Faythe? Is that you?” At first I didn’t recognize the voice, either because I was expecting Marc’s, or because the speaker sounded so panicked. But understanding didn’t take long. “This is Daniel Painter.” He huffed into the phone like he’d just run a marathon.
My heart stopped beating for a moment, even as my pulse tripped so fast the surge of adrenaline actually hurt. “What’s wrong?” I shoved Ethan when he tried to snatch the phone from me, still playing around. But my tone froze him in place, and the smile drained from his expression. He glanced at my phone, and I knew he was listening in.
“Marc’s gone, and there are two dead toms in his living room.” Painter’s words all ran together and at first I thought I’d misunderstood him. I must have misunderstood him. “Some of the blood is theirs, but lots of it is his, too….”
There was blood?
My heart seemed to burst within my chest, flooding me with more pain and confusion than I could sort through at once. I fell off my knees onto my rump and could barely feel the mat I sat on. My hands tingled as if they were on hold, waiting to receive signals from my brain, and I was afraid I’d drop the phone.
Painter was still talking in my ear, babbling words I couldn’t understand. Phrases that wouldn’t sink in. Bastards. Dead. Blood. Missing. I could barely hear him over the static in my head, the ambient noise of my own denial.
“Faythe!” Ethan muttered. I blinked and shook my head, then forced my eyes to make sense of his face. “Slow him down. Make him give you the facts.”
Right. The facts.
And just like that, the world hurled itself back into focus around me, the entire barn tilting wildly for a moment before everything seemed to settle with an eerily crisp clarity. I met my brother’s eyes, thanking him wordlessly for the mental face-slap. “Take Kaci upstairs and get Dad. I think he’s in the barn.”
By the time I’d gotten a deep breath, Ethan was on the bottom step, one hand beckoning Kaci to follow him, the other flipping open his own phone, because he could call the barn much faster than he could get there, even with a werecat’s speed.
“Faythe?” Dan was shouting now and I took a moment to be grateful that I got a strong signal in our basement. “Are you there?”
“I’m here. Calm down and explain it to me slowly.” I stood, and almost lost my balance when one foot hit the concrete floor and the other sank into the thick mat. “Marc is gone, but you smell his blood. Is that right?”
“It’s everywhere,” Painter said, with no hesitation, and I pictured him nodding, though I couldn’t see the gesture over the line. “There’s a thick trail of it leading across the carpet to the front door. Like someone dragged him off.”
Oh, shit. Oh, noooo!
Stop it, Faythe. He’s lost a lot of blood, but that doesn’t mean he’s dead. Marc would be fine. We just had to find him.
“Where does the trail go?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice calm and even. If I panicked, Dan might panic, and we’d lose valuable time that would be better spent looking for Marc. “Does it continue out the front door?”
“Yeah. Across the front stoop, down the steps and over the grass. That’s how I knew something was wrong when I got here.”
“So, it ends in the grass?”
“On the edge of the driveway.” Painter paused, and I heard a metallic groan, as a screen door creaked open. “It looks like they put him in a car and took off with him. There’re big ruts in the gravel from where they peeled off too fast.” He hesitated again, then asked the question I hadn’t even posed to myself yet. “Do you think he’s dead?”
My eyes closed, and I inhaled deeply. Then exhaled slowly. “I don’t know.” I sucked in another breath and forced my concentration back to the work at hand, and away from thoughts I couldn’t bear to entertain. “Did they take his car?”
“No. It’s up next to the house. Along the south side, where he always parks it.” The screen door slammed shut with a horrid tinny screech, and Painter’s voice echoed slightly, now that it had four walls to bounce off again.
“Should I go look for Marc, or start cleaning up the mess?” Painter inhaled deeply, obviously trying to calm himself. “And the bodies…?”
I wanted to tell him to forget about the bodies and start driving around town on the lookout for Marc. Or into the forest, keeping an eye out for fresh tire tracks. But the truth was that if there were enough of them to take Marc down, there would be too many for Painter to handle on his own. Assuming he found them.
My mind was flooded by the possibilities. Maybe they’d taken him alive. But if so, why? And where?
Maybe they’d killed him, and had left to dispose of the body. My eyes watered, and my fist clenched around the phone, the nails of my opposite hand biting into my flesh. No. That’s not what happened. If they’d killed him, why not dispose of all three bodies at once? Why leave the others?
Unless the killers drove a compact…
“Okay, let’s take it one thing at a time.” My feet moved as I spoke, and I found myself on the aisle formed by two rows of weight-lifting equipment. “The other bodies. Are they strays? Do you know them?” I thought about going upstairs, but didn’t want Kaci to overhear anything that might upset her.
“Yeah, they’re strays. I recognize the scents, but don’t know the names.”
“There are two of them, right?” I ran my hand over the leg press, cursing silently when a flake of paint slid beneath my fingernail. “And they bled on the carpet?”
“Yeah.” Floorboards creaked, and I pictured Painter leaning over the bodies. “The carpet, themselves, each other. The biggest one has a huge gash on the top of his skull. Near the back. And the coffee table’s broken and covered in his blood. Looks like he fell and hit it. Or else someone hit him with it.”
Yeah, that sounded like Marc. An odd pang of pride and pain rang through me, as I hoped fervently that he was still alive to repeat that performance someday.
“What about the other one?”
“Side of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone took a rung-back chair to ‘im.”
“Okay, now I need you to sniff around. Concentrate. Do you smell any scents that don’t belong to either Marc or the dead strays? Did anyone else bleed in there recently? Or sweat? Or touch anything? Sniff the doorknobs first, then anything that might have been used as a weapon. Did you touch the doorknob?”
“Only from the outside of the door.” There was a pause on his end, and I thought I heard floorboards groan as he knelt. Or stood. “Yeah, there’s another scent on the front door. The wood and the knob. It’s another stray, but no one I know.”
“Good.” I was walking again, my feet whispering on concrete, my hand trailing over the long bar on the bench press. That scent belonged to the last person who’d touched the doorknob—presumably whoever had taken Marc. “Don’t touch the knob. We’ll need to smell that scent.”
I didn’t hear what he said next because of the footsteps thundering toward me from the kitchen. My dad jerked open the door and jogged down the steps, breathing deeply from exertion, his eyes wide with alarm. I’d rarely seen him so flustered, and it meant the world to me that Marc meant so much to him.
My father wore no coat other than his usual suit jacket, and only once I noticed that his cheeks were flushed from the cold did I realize that I was completely covered with chill bumps, and that I was actually shivering.
Now that I was done exercising, my sweat had dried to leave me cold in the basement chill.
“What happened?” Moving briskly, my father stepped over the corner of the mat and snatched the blanket from Kaci’s chair.
“Hang on a second, Dan,” I said into the mouthpiece, while my father draped the blanket over my shoulders. “Daniel Painter found two dead strays in Marc’s living room. Marc’s missing, and a trail of his blood leads out the house and to the driveway, where it looks like he was loaded into a car. At least one other stray was there, based on the scent on the doorknob.”
My Alpha’s expression grew bleaker with each word I spoke. “How much blood did he lose?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, just as Painter said, “A lot.” My heart thumped harder, aching within my chest at the thought of how much blood he’d lost, and my father motioned for me to sit in the chair Kaci had vacated.
“Are these dead strays in cat form or human form?” he asked, knowing Painter would hear him.
“Human form.” Painter sighed, and when springs squealed over the phone, I pictured him sinking wearily onto Marc’s couch. A couch I’d never sat on, or even seen.
My father frowned, and I shared his confusion. Why would werecats attack someone they obviously meant to kill, based on the earlier ambush, without the use of their best weapons—claws and canines? For that matter, why attack Marc at all? Weren’t Manx and I the original targets? Wasn’t the objective the usual: kidnap the women and kill the men? If so, why go after Marc when Manx and I weren’t even there?
