“She’s a guest, not a prisoner!” I snapped, and my anger only grew when he told me to take the issue up with an Alpha. What made it even worse was that I couldn’t blame him. He was just following orders.
It took me five minutes to calm Kaci down and convince her that she was indeed free to go if she really wanted to, all the while knowing that if I let her run, I could kiss my own freedom—and maybe my life—goodbye.
Once Kaci was calm, I had to run back downstairs, this time in search of an Alpha who could grant the tabby clearance to take a shower.
My father was still at our cabin with Michael, who was doing an Internet search for information about Kaci Dillon. Calvin Malone was seated at the head of the dining-room table, ostensibly going over his notes from my trial, but I didn’t even bother asking him. Malone wouldn’t push me out of the path of a speeding train, and I knew better than to expect his help in a less-than-critical situation.
Fortunately, my uncle walked through the front door just as I settled into the armchair across from Paul Blackwell, preparing to swallow my pride and ask the sexist old coot for some help.
Though he was probably still mad at me from earlier, Uncle Rick told the toy soldier upstairs to let me take Kaci to the second-floor bathroom, where he was to wait outside without bothering us. Then, before he went downstairs, my uncle shot me a conspiratorial wink from the end of the hallway. Evidently we were friends again.
Kaci followed me across the hall into the bathroom. I’d expected her to hide behind her hair and clutch at my arm, but to my surprise, she walked with her spine straight and proud, her head held tall. The only sign of discomfort I saw was the way her eyes rolled from side to side, constantly watching for anyone who might be lying in wait to attack her.
That was survival instinct, well developed during her time alone, and I wasn’t going to discourage such impulses. They’d kept her alive, and they would continue to do so, which put her one step ahead of my brother Ryan in the game of survival. Ryan’s idea of self-preservation was to suck up to our mother in hopes of keeping her checkbook open. Not that she was financing him anymore. He’d been locked in a cage in our basement since June, and he wasn’t getting out anytime soon.
The upstairs bathroom was done in mountain-rustic decor, complete with framed black-and-white pictures of log cabins and shower-curtain hooks adorned with little brown plastic pinecones and moose antlers. I offered to wait outside with the guard, but Kaci asked me to come in. I think she was eager for company—not to mention security—after having been on her own for so long. So I stared at the fish-shaped coat hook on the back of the door while she stripped, then stepped into a separate cubicle to use the restroom.
I folded her—my—clothes, then set them on one side of the counter. She’d have to put them back on after her shower, since we had nothing else for her to wear at the moment, but at least she’d be clean.
The toilet flushed, then plastic rattled against metal as she opened the wilderness-themed shower curtain. A moment later, water burst from the tap to patter against the plastic-walled enclosure. Kaci squealed, then laughed at herself, and I smiled at the simple pleasure in her voice. “Okay, you can turn around.”I shoved aside an array of disposable razors, shaving cream, toothbrushes, and trial-size bottles of mouthwash littering the countertop, then hopped up to sit with my legs dangling. This is definitely a guy bathroom.
The cadence of the spray changed as Kaci moved beneath it, and after a moment she spoke, as if reading my mind. “I smell several…scents in here.” At first I thought she meant shampoo, soap, and toothpaste—and maybe urine from whoever had splashed the rim of the toilet—but her next words set me straight. “Who are they?”
Oh. Personal scents. She smelled the other toms. And just like that she’d opened the very conversation I’d been struggling to start.
“They’re enforcers. Several of the guys have been sharing this bathroom.” I held my breath in anticipation of her response, and I honestly had no idea what to expect.
Kaci stepped out from under the flow of water, probably reaching for something at the end of the tub. A moment later the splatter of water was muted against her flesh again, and the aroma of soap flooded my senses. Irish Spring.
“What’s an enforcer?” she asked, her tone as light as I’d ever heard it, giving the question no more significance than when she’d asked where we were.
But to me, her question spoke volumes. She hadn’t known how to Shift, or even what the word meant. And now she didn’t know what an enforcer was. Those concepts weren’t foreign to a Pride cat, and again my focus centered on the possibility, however slim, that she might be a stray. I could see no other explanation for her ignorance.
“Enforcers are…like policemen. Or maybe soldiers. They protect their Alphas and defend their Pride’s territory. And they protect their Pride’s tabby, too, at all costs.”
Wet sliding sounds told me Kaci was lathering soap in her bare hands, since I hadn’t thought to give her a rag.
“Tabby…” The word lingered on her tongue, as if she were tasting it, and by the sound of things, she didn’t find it unpleasant. “I heard you talking in the hall earlier. That’s what you called me, right?”
“Yes. You’re a tabby, and so am I.” I couldn’t see her through the curtain, but I felt her go still with some part of my mind that was more cat than human.
“You’re…like me?”
“Very much so.” I slid off the countertop, moved by the breakthrough I could sense coming. “Can’t you smell me? Can’t you detect the similarity in our scents?”
Silence settled beneath the harsh patter of water, and I pictured her inhaling deeply. “Yes. I can.” Amazement layered her voice the way steam coated the mirror. Then Kaci was quiet for at least a full minute, and I heard her feet slosh on the tub bottom as she washed herself. When she finally spoke, she’d gone still again, and the scent of soap faded as fresh water rinsed it down the drain. “What are we?”
My breath caught in my throat and silent vindication coursed through me. I was right. She was a stray. There was no other way she could not know what she was.
I found myself in front of the sink, leaning with my palms flat on the counter as I stared into the fogged-over mirror. “Kaci…we’re werecats.” It sounded ludicrous coming from my lips, and I’d known what I was all my life. I could only imagine how it must sound to her, not having been born into our culture. Because I was sure now that she hadn’t been.
But she took it better than I expected. “Werecats.” She paused while she thought it over, and I glanced at the curtain, as if the opaque vinyl would show me what she was thinking. “Like werewolves in movies, only cats, right?” I opened my mouth to answer, but she wasn’t finished. “That makes sense.” And she lathered up again for a second scrub.
“It does?” Surprised, I turned to lean against the countertop, my arms crossed over my chest, ignoring the sharp edge of Formica that bit into my hip through my clothes.
“Yeah.” Another pause as she moved out from under the water again. “Hey, can I use this shampoo?”
I shrugged, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Sure.” Though I had no idea who it belonged to.
“The bottle smells kind of like us. And kind of like a man.”
Yup, that sounds about right. “You’re smelling tomcat—one of the enforcers. They’re werecats like us, only male.” And messy, sometimes smelly, and often immature, just like human men.
Plastic clicked as she uncapped the bottle. “Like the guy in the hall?”
“Yeah.”
“And those…cats in the woods?”
My heart stopped as a painful jolt of surprise lanced my chest. Cats in the woods? Had she seen the strays? Or had she seen our guys out looking for the strays?
“What cats? You saw tomcats in the woods?” My pulse raced, and I hoped fervently that she hadn’t yet learned to listen for things like that.
“A few times.” A new scent permeated the room, clean like soap, but threaded with a much heavier, musky chemical signature. Definitely a man’s shampoo. “But I mostly smelled them and heard them.”
Hmmm. “Did they smell like the guy in the hall?” Who was a Pride cat. “Or did they smell a little…different?” I didn’t know how to vocalize the difference between the scent of a Pride cat and that of a stray, especially considering she probably didn’t know what either of those labels meant.
“I don’t know. They smelled like a man and like a cat. I tried not to get too close.”
Good girl.
“At first I thought it was all a dream, all that walking in the dark. All the running… And that you’d woken me up from some kind of nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream, was it?” Her voice quivered, even over the steady noise of the shower, and she took a moment to collect herself. “It’s all real, isn’t it?”
My hand tightened on the rim of Formica behind me. “’Fraid so.”
A second later, the water cut off, and the sudden silence felt heavy with her disappointment, though that seemed too mild a word to describe the despair she must have felt upon discovering that her nightmare was real.