At the bottom of the screen was a virtual button reading Map View. I pressed it, and a satellite image map appeared, showing a densely packed forest surrounding a glowing green dot—presumably Marc, carrying Eckard’s chip.
“There he is!” I shot up from my chair with the tracker in hand, and was already halfway to the hall—eager to get going now that we had a target to shoot for—when Jace called me back, his voice oddly strained, as if his throat wanted to close around the words as he spoke them.
“Faythe, look at the last name on the list.”
Irritated by the delay, I pulled my folded copy of the list from my back pocket, where I’d hurriedly shoved it, and skipped to the bottom of the page. The final entry read: Marc Ramos—tracking code 44839.
Shock raced through me so fast I got light-headed, and the edges of my vision darkened. “Marc’s been implanted? When? If they could track him, why would they try to kill him?”
Feldman shoved an empty duffel bag back into Kevin’s closet with his foot, then closed the door and leaned against it. “Maybe something went wrong. Marc woke up in the middle of the procedure, or he remembered too much afterward and figured out what they were doing, or something like that.” He pointed at a name on his list, and I glanced at my copy to follow along. “Look at the third entry. It’s been crossed out.” Using a strike-through font effect. “And he’s the first of the toms to go missing. There are three more entries like that, and I haven’t seen any of those toms in a while, either.”
I nodded slowly as understanding surfaced. “So the toms who made trouble were killed and buried. Only Marc didn’t die as planned—he killed Eckard instead. But if Marc knew he’d been implanted, why bother to take Eckard’s chip?”
“I don’t know.” Feldman shrugged, and gestured toward the display I still clutched in my right hand. “Where does that thing say Marc is?”
“Just a second.” I typed Marc’s code into a box at the top right corner of the screen, expecting the device to show his little green glowing circle overlaid with Eckard’s. But instead, the map disappeared and new coordinates appeared, along with another button promising me a map view. I pressed the button, and a new map appeared, this one displaying the satellite view of a small, neatly laid-out neighborhood, with the streets labeled.
Weird. The green dot on the new map was on the south side of a street called Magnolia Drive. “Guys, aren’t we on Magnolia Drive?” I asked, glancing around the room at the other faces, my eyes narrowed in uncertainty.
“Yeah, why?” Feldman said.
“Because according to this, Marc’s here.” But that couldn’t be right. If Marc were in Kevin’s house—even if he were no longer breathing—we’d have smelled him the moment we’d come in.
“Here, where?” Jace stepped close enough to view the screen over my shoulder again, and his chest brushed my back, sending warmth and ill-timed tingles through me. “In this house?”
“I think so.” I stepped subtly away from him, disguising the motion as I turned to face the rest of the room. And when I moved, though the dot on the screen stayed still, the map rotated with me. “Wait…” I pressed the plus-shaped zoom button three times, and the image on-screen tightened until it would go no further, showing a thirty-yard span which included a black-and-white view of the roof of Kevin’s house, as well as the edges of those to each side.
“Yeah, in this house….” I mumbled. Then I started walking slowly toward the dot on screen, carrying the display with me as I moved into the hall and toward the tiny eat-in kitchen. As I passed the hall closet, the dot on-screen stopped moving, then appeared behind me. I backed up and stopped in front of the closet, and the dot appeared dead center of the screen.
Marc’s microchip was in Kevin Mitchell’s front closet.
My heart thumped so hard I could hear nothing but the rush of my own blood through my ears, and my throat constricted painfully, cutting off my breathing until I thought to open my mouth and gasp for air.
“Faythe?” Jace’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I knew the moment he understood, because I heard his pulse speed up to match mine.
I sniffed the air, just to be sure I hadn’t missed something crucial. But I caught no whiff of Marc, or any other biological smell from the closet. Still, my hand shook when it closed over the knob. What if I was wrong? What if my stuffy nose—from too many hours spent out at night—was preventing me from smelling something I should have?
Finally, I sucked in another deep breath and twisted the knob in one harsh motion, then tugged the door open, bracing myself mentally for the worst-case scenario.
But Marc’s body did not fall out of the closet onto me. There was no body. In fact, there was nothing, that I could see, but a couple of winter coats and a vacuum cleaner that hadn’t seen much action.
“I don’t get it,” Dan said, finally breaking the tension, and I could have kissed him. “There’s nothing in there.”
“Thank goodness,” I mumbled, reaching up to pull the chain dangling from a naked bulb in the closet ceiling. Dim light flooded the closet, illuminating the only thing I hadn’t been able to see before. On the floor, in the back right corner, sat a white cardboard box, like the kind medical supplies are often shipped in. At one point, it was taped shut, but the seal had already been broken, so I knelt and lifted the lid.Inside the box were row after row of small, clear plastic tubes, like test tubes except they had flat bottoms and were closed with plain white plastic caps rather than rubber stoppers. The tubes were separated by a grid of cardboard spacers, like repeating tic-tac-toe boards, the first three rows of which were empty.
“Is that what I think it is?” Feldman asked, peering at me over Jace’s shoulder.
“Unused microchips.” I handed Jace the tracker and stood with the box in hand, then pulled the first remaining tube from its slot. “Somebody read me Marc’s tracking number.”
Dan glanced at the paper he still clutched in his right fist. “Four-four-eight-three-nine,” he said, as I stared at the number printed on the side of the tube.
“Bingo.” My smile was huge—I could feel it. “He was never implanted, though based on this list, I’d say that’s the reason they took him. Obviously something went wrong.”
“Yeah.” Dan rolled his eyes, as if the problem should have been obvious. “They fucked with Marc. I could ‘a told ‘em that wouldn’t work out too good.”
Though it hardly seemed possible, my smile grew when I met the stray’s eyes, pride for Marc practically bursting inside me. But that was followed quickly by fear, along with the realization that he was still out there somewhere, probably in the worst shape of his life.
Rather than trusting the “locate previous code” option on the tracker, I typed Eckard’s number in manually, then glanced up to find all three toms watching me. “Okay, are we ready?” I headed toward the kitchen and the back door without bothering to return to the office and power down Kevin’s computer. He’d know we’d been there the moment he walked into his house, by the scents we’d left behind on everything we’d touched, so I saw no reason to waste time putting everything back where we found it.
“You guys go ahead. Go find your boyfriend.” Feldman’s gaze met mine, his eyes shining in sympathy and regret. Then a flash of anger swallowed those weaker emotions. “I have some calls to make.”
“What?” Jace’s eyebrows arched high onto his forehead, and suspicion edged his voice. “Who are you going to call?”
Feldman held up his copy of the tracker code list for all of us to see. “Other than me, Marc, and Adam Eckard, there are eight other toms on this list, at least four of whom I assume are still breathing. They have a right to know they’re being illegally and maliciously monitored by the ‘Big Brother’ faction of your Territorial Council.”
Oh, shit. Even if most strays living in the free zones hadn’t yet found reason to come together in opposition to council authority, they would once Milo Mitchell’s conspiracy came to light. And they were no more likely to recognize the distinction between good Pride cats and bad Pride cats than most of the council was between friendly strays and hostile strays.
The ugly cycle of conflict would be perpetuated, all thanks to one or two Alphas’ arrogance and complete lack of ethics.
“Ben, please don’t do that,” I begged, glancing at Jace to see if the repercussions had sunk in for him yet. They had. I could tell by the tension in the line of his jaw. “This—” I gestured with the box of microchips “—is the work of one or two of our worst examples of leadership. Please don’t let the entire council—the whole Pride-cat society—pay for the incredibly bad judgment of those few.”
Feldman sighed, and for a moment he looked blessedly conflicted. But then his expression hardened. “I see what you’re saying, and I sympathize. And I’ll do my best to assure them that your family was not involved in any of this. But these toms have been violated, and they don’t even know it. They have a right to know what’s been done to them.”