Pride (Shifters #3)(26)

“All right!” Radley shouted, wincing back from the blow before Marc could release it. “Vancouver! I’m from Vancouver, but I moved closer to the mountains several years ago.”
Most strays eventually wound up living near large forested regions of land, where they could roam in cat form without too much risk of being spotted.
Marc nodded and relaxed his stance. “Better.” He glanced over his shoulder at my father, brows raised in question. Daddy nodded for him to continue, his satisfaction with the progress evidenced only in the relaxed line of his forehead.
Marc turned back to the job at hand. “Canada, huh? You wandered a good way from home, Radley. What the hell are you doing here? Other than searching for aliens among us.”
“I needed a change of scenery.”
“Why?” Lucas jerked back on the stray’s wrists, so that he almost lost his balance. “Things get too hot for you up there?”Radley opened his mouth to answer, but Marc cut him off. “Think carefully before you speak. It’ll only take one phone call to verify whatever you tell us.” With the Canadian Territorial Council, of course. If he’d ever caused trouble in his homeland, they’d have a record of it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Radley glanced from face to face in apparent confusion. “I just needed a change. How many times can you sniff the same trees and hills before dropping dead of boredom?”
Either he was telling the truth, or he was a really good liar. And it irked me that I couldn’t tell which it was.
“So, what, you wanted to sniff different trees and hills?” Marc sighed and shook his head. “Never mind. How long have you been here?”
Radley shrugged. “In the U.S.? Or on this mountain?”
“Both.”
“I crossed the border a few weeks ago. Why? What’s all this about, anyway? You guys set me up, knock me out, drag me up here, and I wake up with my hands and feet taped together in human form. How the hell did I even get hands, anyway? I have no memory of Shifting. And what the hell do you people want?” Radley sat on his heels and stared up at Marc defiantly. “I’m not answering any more of your questions until you’ve answered a few of mine.”
“If you like your face intact, you’ll do whatever you’re told,” Lucas said.
My father studied Radley with his eyes narrowed in thought. “We forced your Shift,” he said finally. “The process was overseen by my personal physician. You were perfectly safe, I assure you.”
I frowned at my father, confounded by his sudden—and much more thorough than necessary—explanation. But he was still watching the stray, his face now deliberately blank.
Radley’s eyes grew wide, his expression eager. “How? How did you force my Shift? Some kind of drug?”
“Yes.” Daddy nodded once, adopting a stronger-than-usual appearance of authority. “But that’s all you need to know about it.”
Radley frowned. “Why?” He ignored Marc now in favor of the Alpha, whom he’d finally identified as the one in charge. “What do you want with me?”
“You’re being held by our Territorial Council, headed by me, on the charge of attempted murder. Of my daughter.”
Surprise tingled up my spine. That was news to me, and based on Lucas’s expression, he hadn’t known, either. Evidently that’s what the Alphas were talking to Marc and Jace about for so long.
Yet in spite of my obvious surprise, the stray showed no fear. He showed nothing but confusion, balanced by a hint of righteous anger. He clearly had no idea how serious his predicament had just become. 
My father continued, without even glancing my way. “Officially, you’re facing a probable death sentence, Mr. Radley. Unofficially, however, we want information from you. If we get it, and if you can convince us that what you did to my daughter was an accident, the charge will be amended to assault, which carries a much lighter sentence.”
Radley’s brow furrowed, and his shoulders tensed. “Sentence? Wait, you’re serious?”
“Perfectly,” Michael said from my right.
Radley glanced from him to our father, then briefly at me. “What the hell does that mean? You guys are like…what? Werecat law enforcement?”
Jace chuckled. “We can’t be the first Pride cats you’ve ever run across.”
“No. I know what a Pride is. Elitist pricks won’t let anyone else play their reindeer games.” Though a flicker of doubt crossed his face as he glanced at Marc, who was clearly a stray and yet a Pride cat. “What I don’t understand is where you get off bringing me up on some kind of bullshit charge. You’re not the police. The police don’t even know you fuckers exist.”
“Watch your mouth,” Marc said, the warning rumbling from his chest like a growl. “Or I’ll watch it for you.”
Radley barely glanced at him, having obviously decided there were bigger things to worry about than Marc. But what he didn’t realize was that if the council sentenced him to death, that death would come in the form of a certain six-foot-two, tall-dark-and-scary enforcer who had absolutely no incentive so far to administer a merciful demise.
Michael stepped up to our father’s side. “Werecat business doesn’t fall under any police department’s jurisdiction, Radley. State and local law enforcement aren’t even in the same galaxy as the Territorial Council, and right now you’re in our world. Until we decide to either let you go or put you in the ground, you live, breathe and speak on our collective whim. At the moment, you exist only to please the Territorial Council, and if you cease to please them, you’ll cease to be. Period. You get it now?”
Aaaand here comes the panic…
Okay, Radley didn’t exactly panic. But he did look like he was about to spew his guts all over the floor, which was already splattered with his blood.
I could totally sympathize.
“What do you want?” he demanded, bolstering his floundering courage with a heavy dose of anger. “You bastards are crazy, and I just want to get—”
Marc exploded into motion, moving almost too fast to see. His fist slammed into the stray’s cheek. Radley’s words ended in a surprised oof of pain, and his head rocked to one side. For a moment, his eyes fluttered as if he might lose consciousness, and only Lucas’s grip on his shoulders kept him upright.
My father made a harsh, disapproving sound in the back of his throat, and Marc stepped back, accepting his wordless rebuke with his hands still clenched into tension-white fists. He’d forgotten the cardinal rule of interrogation: an unconscious cat can’t answer questions.
Daddy did not look pleased. But then, neither did Marc. He lost his temper fairly regularly in his personal life, but I’d never heard of him losing it at work before. Something else had to be wrong with him. Something unrelated to Radley. Or at least unrelated to Radley’s foul language.
For several seconds no one breathed, waiting to see whether or not Radley would pass out. But then he blinked to clear his vision, and his eyes focused slowly on Marc, whose penitent expression was now gone.
“I told you to watch your mouth. Consider that your last warning.”
Radley cleared his throat and spat more blood on the floor. This time when he looked up, his eyes were filled with a cold, detached fury. “What do you want?”Marc crossed his arms over his chest, hiding his fists. He stood several feet back from Radley, removing himself from the temptation to strike out again. “What do you know about the two human hikers who went missing on the mountain several days ago?”
“Nothing.” That was it. No further explanation or questions. Radley was going to give us exactly what we asked for, and no more. Marc’s temper had just erased any progress my father had made toward convincing our informant to cooperate by choice.
“What about the human cop mauled yesterday afternoon? Know anything about that?”
“No.” Radley glared at Michael now, pointedly ignoring Marc completely. So, at my father’s silent signal, Michael took over, stepping forward as Marc slunk back to lean against the wall by the door, the fury in his expression rivaling Radley’s.
Michael slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks, still sharply creased even in the middle of the night. “Have you seen any other strays on the mountain in the last week?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
Radley thought for a moment, ducking his head to wipe blood from his face onto his bare shoulder. “Three. Maybe four?” he said finally, shuffling backward to lean with his left arm against the front of the couch. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be counting.”
Michael pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, peering down at Radley through lenses he didn’t even need. He wore them because he thought they made him look more like a lawyer. He was right, especially in that moment. “Do you know their names and current whereabouts?”
“No.”
“Do you have any knowledge of their activities on the mountain?”
“No.”
Sighing dramatically, Michael dropped into a limber squat in front of Zeke Radley, looking into the stray’s eyes from an equal height. His tone became friendly, confidential, as if they were the only two people in the room. “Mr. Radley, I want to help you. I believe you didn’t mean to hurt my sister. I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I have to be honest with you—that was a very wrong place to be at that particular wrong time. We’re looking for murderers, Mr. Radley, and we came across you instead. Can you see how that looks? You being all alone on the mountain, less than a mile from where a police officer was slaughtered only hours earlier?”