Pride (Shifters #3)(32)

As I made my way down the hall toward the bathroom, tying my robe around my waist, Dr. Carver called after me from the living room, where the guys were sprawled across the furniture watching a DVD they’d borrowed from Lucas and passing around two bags of Doritos in lieu of a real dinner. “Brett’s been asking to talk to you. If you want, I’ll take you over after your shower.”
“We’ll all go.” My father stepped into the hall from the kitchen. “We need to report to the tribunal anyway. And get something more substantial to eat than corn chips.”
While I showered, Daddy sent Jace ahead to tell everyone we were coming, and to put four frozen lasagnas in the oven. Dr. Carver went with him because after what happened to Brett, no one was allowed out alone until the strays were found and dealt with. We’d always worked in pairs, and now that we were officially on alert, we’d do everything in groups of two or more.
Twenty minutes later, freshly showered and dressed in jeans and a snug, long-sleeved green T-shirt, I knocked on Brett’s bedroom door. Behind me, the aromas of cheese, garlic and tomato sauce were just starting to flood the spacious living room from the kitchen, where Nate Blackwell and Jace were chopping vegetables for a huge salad.
“Yeah?” Brett called from inside his room, and I pushed the door open, stomping down a thread of anxiety winding its way up my spine. Dr. Carver had said Brett wanted to thank me, not threaten me. Even if he was Malone’s son, Brett shared a mother with Jace, so he couldn’t be all bad. Right?
“Faythe.” Brett lay on the right-hand bed, blankets pulled up to his chest. Blue eyes almost as bright as Jace’s met mine. His voice held pain and relief, and I could empathize with both.
“Hey.” Tucking a strand of shower-damp hair behind my ear, I settled into the chair by his bed, which still smelled like Danny Carver. “Doc said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah. I just wanted to—” He broke off and one hand went to the blankets over his stomach as his face twisted in pain, and I was reminded how much worse his injuries were than mine. How much blood he’d lost, much of it covering me as I’d tried to stop his bleeding without further injuring him.
Composed again, Brett turned his head on the pillow to face me more directly, springs creaking beneath him. “I wanted to thank you. Jace told me what happened. What really happened.”
He’d spoken to Jace? Curious, I fiddled with the watch on my left wrist. “What did he say?”
“That I owe you my life.”
I glanced at my hands in my lap, surprised to feel my cheeks flush. “Anyone else would have done the same thing.”
Brett shook his head. “Colin would have let me die. Blackwell let him go. He called home for a replacement, and they’re taking Colin to the airport in the morning. Shipping him straight back to Canada.”I didn’t bother to hide the satisfied smile blossoming across my face. Vindication felt every bit as good as I’d hoped it would. Petty, but true.
“I want to make it up to you.”
I shook my head. “I’m an enforcer, too—we look out for each other. That’s the way things work.”
“No.” His voice was firm, his lips drawn into a thin line. “You went out there with no claws and no backup. That’s not the way things work, and you didn’t have to do it. I owe you. Let me owe you.”
Before I could think up a new argument, much less voice it, a loud banging from the front room cut through the cooking noises and background chatter coming from the rest of the lodge. “Hey, Pride cats!” Elias Keller’s voice was typically loud but muffled, and I realized the banging was his fist on the front door.
Around us, the lodge went silent.
“Open up!” Keller called, pounding again, this time hard enough to shake the walls. “I found something of yours and thought you might want it back.”
Several sets of footsteps clomped toward the front door, and I recognized my father’s distinctive tread among them, as well as the squeak of Malone’s shiny new loafers. I glanced at Brett to find his eyes wide and curious, as my own no doubt were. Then the squeal of hinges drew my gaze to the living room, where Marc, Jace, Nate, and Michael stood clustered in the kitchen threshold, staring at the front door, which I couldn’t see. Jace held a serrated bread knife, Nate a carrot peeler.
“There y’are!” Keller bellowed as heavy boot soles clomped on the hardwood. “Got somethin’ for ya.”
“Holy shit!” Jace whispered, and I was on my feet in an instant, desperate to know what had stunned an entire roomful of werecats. What could make Jace cuss in front of at least four different Alphas? Better yet, what could keep them all from noticing?
I rushed to the bedroom door, but hesitated there when Marc shook his head at me and showed me his open palm—a clear signal to stop.
My gaze followed Marc’s to the center of the living room, where Keller towered over the Alphas gathered around him, staring at the limp black bundle tossed over his shoulder. What the hell? As I watched, the bundle seemed to swell, then shrink. Then it swelled and shrank again. Then again. It was breathing. The bundle was alive.
And suddenly I understood. Keller had brought us a cat. One of the strays? Radley, maybe?
One sniff in the bruin’s direction put that theory to rest. The cat was definitely not Zeke Radley.
“I found her rootin’ through my trash and thought you might want her back.” Keller heaved the bundle from his shoulder and dropped it nonchalantly onto the empty coffee table, where the long black tail dangled to the floor. “She smells a bit diff’rent with fur. But seein’ as how you don’t have many girl cats—right?—I’d think you’d wanna keep a better eye on this’ un.” 
Keller had brought us an unconscious cat. A tabby. And he thought it was me.
Thirteen

Surprise still tingling in the tips of my fingers, I stepped into the living room and felt all eyes turn my way. Including Keller’s. A frown took over his broad forehead as confusion filled his face. He looked from me to the near-still form on the coffee table. Then back to me.
Keller blinked, then his eyes sought out my father’s. “No wonder she smells different. If that one’s yours—” the bruin nodded in my direction “—who’s this?” He bent to stroke the fur atop the unconscious cat’s head, as if to comfort her.
“That’s a wonderful question, Mr. Keller.”
Keller made a surprised noise in the back of his throat and sank onto the couch in front of the strange tabby. “You don’t know her?”
Paul Blackwell answered, gaze zipping between the tabby and the bruin. “No. If one of our tabbies was missing, we’d know it.”
My father nodded in agreement, but he had to ask, just in case. “Anyone recognize her?” He glanced around at the growing crowd of toms, who had begun to creep forward as one, for a better look. “Let’s give her space to breathe, shall we?”
The guys backed up, and I rolled my eyes as they sniffed the air dramatically. Still, their curiosity was understandable. It wasn’t every day we met a new tabby. In fact, that had only happened once in my lifetime—with Manx, who’d promptly discharged her nine millimeter into Jace’s shoulder.
But this tabby was unarmed. And obviously unconscious.
And completely unfamiliar.
There were only ten U.S. Prides, each of which had at most one dam and one tabby—all of whom I knew personally. But I didn’t know this tabby. Whoever she was, she wasn’t ours.
When none of the toms or other Alphas recognized her, my father’s frown deepened. “Danny, what can you tell us about her?”
Dr. Carver stepped forward, a forgotten bowl of Froot Loops in one hand. He set the bowl on the nearest end table and wiped his hands on his pants, then knelt next to the tabby.
The doc started his examination by running his hands over the unconscious cat, pausing several times to part her fur and look closer. “Well, she’s young,” he said, fingers working their way from her right flank to her shoulder. “Midteens, I’m guessing, though I can’t be sure without seeing her in human form.”
I’d had the same thought, based on her size; she was small, even for a tabby.
“What on earth is a teenage tabby doing alone in the woods?” Calvin Malone demanded, taking up a position at my father’s side, probably to place himself within the sphere of authority. “And in free territory, at that? Not to mention bruin territory. Where is her family? Who is her family?”
He’d said what we were surely all thinking. Tabby cats don’t grow on trees. Most dams wind up giving birth to several toms before finally conceiving the tabby necessary to continue her family line. No Pride in the world would let its tabby—the very key to its future—run around unsupervised in the free zone.
Trust me; I’ve tried.
“That, I don’t know,” the doc said in response to Malone’s likely rhetorical question. He peered up at Keller. “Where did you say you found her?”
“Out behind my place, sniffin’ through the trash.”“And how did she get this?” Dr. Carver parted the fur on the back of the tabby’s head to reveal a large purple lump, actually throbbing with her heartbeat.