“Yeah, and my father has several more enforcers, including me, though I’m not really on duty at the moment.”
The tabby’s eyebrows rose comically and she swallowed a huge gulp of soda, still staring at me. “Girls can be enforcers?”
I couldn’t help the little tingle of pride that surfaced inside me, in spite of my anger at the establishment that employed me. I was proud of being the only female enforcer, even if I’d been suspended from duty almost as long as I’d actually served. “Not usually, but my father has…different ideas than most of the other Alphas.”
“So, can I be an enforcer when I grow up?”
I grinned as she shoved half of the next slice into her mouth at once. “I guess that’s up to your father.”
Kaci froze, her cheeks hollow beneath darkly circled eyes. Then she finished her bite in a hurry and frowned at me. “What does my dad have to do with it?”
Oh, shit. I’d forgotten about her father. “I just meant…you know…your Alpha.”
“Oh.” She took another bite and chewed in thoughtful silence while I did the same. “Who is my Alpha?”
I choked on my first gulp of Coke, and had to force it down while my nose burned from the little bit that had nearly gotten away. Once I’d recovered, I stared at her in amazement. “You really don’t know anything about us, do you?”
She shook her head solemnly, leaning over her plate.
In spite of what I’d told Jace, until that moment some part of me had been convinced that Kaci knew deep down what we were and how things worked. That she’d suffered some sort of memory loss that would clear up with enough reminders—and time. But one look at her face now, a smear of pizza sauce on her upper lip and incomprehension in the depths of her eyes, told me that she truly knew nothing beyond what she’d learned alone in the woods.
I dropped the uneaten portion of my third slice back onto the plate and sat up straight, meeting her gaze cautiously. “Kaci, I have to ask you some questions, and some of them might sound pretty strange.”
She cocked her head to one side, just as she’d done in cat form earlier. “Stranger than running around in the forest as a panther, then turning back into a human?”
I grinned wryly. “Okay, you’ve got me there. But you’re not a panther. There isn’t really any such species.”
“There isn’t?” she asked around another bite, and I shook my head, smiling in sympathy with her confusion. “Then what are those black cats at the zoo? And what are we, when we’re not human?”
Damn. I was going to have to start at the very beginning. “If you saw a black cat at the zoo, it was either a jaguar or a leopard with darker-than-normal pigmentation. That’s called melanism. But we’re neither jaguars nor leopards. We’re just…us. Our own species, both human and cat, according to Dr. Carver.” I paused, wondering how much she remembered. “The guy you scratched last night? Do you remember him?”
“Yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” She flushed with embarrassment.
“Don’t worry. He’s fine. Anyway, Dr. Carver knows this tom from the West Coast Territory who’s a geneticist, and he has these theories about—” I stopped when I realized that if she didn’t know what we were, she would never understand the technical specifics. Hell, I didn’t understand the technical specifics. “Never mind.”
Kaci smiled around the bite in her mouth, then washed it down with another swallow from her can. “So, what were you going to ask me?”
Oh, yeah. “I need to know about your parents. Your whole family, actually.”
As I’d expected, her entire body went stiff, her smile freezing into a parody of joy that looked more like a grimace. “Why?”
“Because you inherited everything you have from them. Genetically speaking.”Sudden comprehension gleamed in the green-brown of her eyes and her face relaxed. “You mean like how I got my dad’s hair and my mom’s fingers, right?” I nodded, and one corner of her mouth turned up in a sad little grin. “But I didn’t get this from them.” Her arms spread to define “this” as everything around her, and I understood that she meant her cat-self. “They didn’t have this.”
Breath burst from my throat, and only then did I realize I’d been holding it. “Are you sure?” I leaned forward in anticipation, fully aware of how ridiculous it was of me to ask the poor girl if she was certain of her parents’ species. “Your father wasn’t an Alpha, and your mother wasn’t a dam?”
“You asked me that before. What’s a dam?”
“A tabby who’s given birth. A mother cat.” I shook my head, as if to clear it of what was to me an irrelevant question. “What about your brothers? You never saw them Shift, either? Any of them?”
Kaci frowned, her last slice of pizza forgotten on her plate for the moment. “I never had any brothers. Just one big sister.”
My cheeks went cold as blood drained from my face. “You have a sister?” The concept was too foreign to wrap my brain around. Sure, my brothers had a sister—me, of course. And most other Pride-born toms had a single sister. But I’d never in my life met a tabby with a sister, because it typically took a dam so many tries to deliver a tabby that the precious baby girl was her last. Which is why we were all the youngest of several children.
Kaci nodded in answer to my question, her eyes as wide as mine no doubt were. She was plainly amazed by my reaction to what was, for her, a lifelong fact.
“Okay, let me make sure I understand.” I took a deep breath, rubbing the goose bumps that had popped up on my arms at the knowledge that I was this close to proving the existence of a female stray. “Your parents were not werecats, and you have no brothers. Your mother actually gave birth to no boys. Right?”
She nodded again, clearly astonished by the depth of my incredulity.
“And you have an older sister.”
Pain flashed across her face, deepening the lines around her eyes. “I used to.” Kaci dropped her head, staring at her plate as she poked listlessly at her remaining slice of pizza. “Her name was Charity. She…died.”
Along with their parents—her pain made that obvious. In fact, they’d probably died in the attack that infected the tabby now sitting in front of me. The tabby who had, by some miracle, survived not only that attack, but the intervening weeks on her own, stuck in cat form and untold miles away from home.
“I’m so sorry, Kaci.”
“Me, too.”
We were both quiet for a while after that, as she stared at the busy floral bedsheet, aimlessly tracing a cotton calla lily. Then she picked up her last piece of pizza and bit into it, which I took as a signal that she was ready to continue.
“Kaci, when your family was attacked…were you scratched? Or bitten?”
“Wha?” she asked, still chewing. She swallowed thickly then looked at me in question. “Scratched or bitten by what?”
I set my plate—still half-full of pizza—on top of hers and pushed them both closer to her, gesturing for her to take the rest. She nodded in thanks and picked up another slice. “By one of us. In cat form. Were you scratched or bitten by the cat that killed your family?”
Blatant shock wiped her face clear of any other expression, like wiping chalk from a blackboard, and in her eyes I saw the truth and knew my guess had been a good one. Her family had been killed by a werecat.
Yet still she shook her head in denial. “No. No scratches. No bites.”
I frowned. It was not unusual for a stray to have no memory of the attack that infected him, because the scratch fever that followed typically left him very sick for quite a while. That Kaci had survived scratch fever with no one to care for her was a miracle. Remembering her attack—or her attacker—was too much to ask of the poor girl.
But before I’d covered her with the blanket I’d glimpsed most of her body. I’d seen neither scratch-mark scars, nor any healed bites.
That didn’t necessarily mean anything, though. I, of all people, knew that for a fact. I’d infected Andrew with nothing more than a nibble of his ear. The wound hadn’t been visible at all, and I’d had no idea he’d been infected until months later. Theoretically, the same was possible with Kaci. Except that to my knowledge, no one else had mastered the partial Shift necessary to infect someone while in human form.
And then there was the fact that she was far too young to have such intimate contact with anyone, much less a partially Shifted werecat she hadn’t even known existed.
“Kaci, think very carefully.” I rolled my empty Coke can between my palms, the aluminum now warm from my body heat. “Are you sure you weren’t bitten or scratched? In the shower, did you see any scars or marks you don’t remember getting? Anything you can’t account for?”
“No.” She didn’t even hesitate. “My hips are kind of pointy now, and I could see my ribs. And I have this sore on my hand, which is super-gross.” She held her injured palm out for my inspection. “But that’s it. Everything else is the same, except that my fingernails and toenails are really long.”
I nodded absently, half convinced she had a small set of claw marks on her back, somewhere she couldn’t see or feel. There was just no other explanation for how she could be one of us, if no one else in her family was.