Pride (Shifters #3)(55)

From the hall came a knock on the door, and I nearly jumped off the bed, startled half out of my wits. I’d been so absorbed by my questions and Kaci’s answers that I hadn’t heard anyone approach.
“Faythe?”
Marc. My pulse spiked, and I flushed, trying to ignore the curious arc of Kaci’s eyebrows as she watched me.
Marc knocked again. “You ready to go?” He sounded tense, and I glanced at the door in concern. Of course, he’s worried. He’s just been kicked out by the only family he’s known for the past fifteen years.
“Yeah. Just a minute.” I didn’t bother to shout, because I knew he could hear me. Like the guard in the hall, he’d probably heard everything we’d said for the last several minutes. Hopefully. That way I wouldn’t have to repeat it.“Who’s that?” Kaci asked, grinning at me around the last slice of pizza as she bit the point from it.
“Marc Ramos.”
“Does he work for your dad, too?”
My eyes closed, denying the tears that threatened to come. “He did.”
“You like him.” Her statement held an odd innocence, like she pictured me and Marc exchanging notes in the hall between homeroom and gym, clearly the extent of her own experience with boys. Kaci’s shy smile and the tone of her voice set me at ease regarding her refusal to deal with the tomcats. If she’d had a recent bad experience with a man, she wouldn’t blush so sweetly as she teased me.
She’d shied away from Dr. Carver and Malone because she didn’t know them. Not because of anything tragic. Thank goodness.
“Yeah. I like him a lot.” I smiled, seeing no reason to ruin the girl-to-girl moment with the bleak facts, even if she’d overheard some of them earlier. “Marc and I are going into town to get some stuff for you. Clothes, shoes and other essentials. What size shoes do you wear?” I was sure I could guess her other sizes.
“Five.”
“Thanks. We’ll be back soon. I’ll tell everyone to leave you alone, if you want. But if Dr. Carver comes back in, please be nice to him. He’s the one who treated your hand while you were sleeping, and he may want to check on you, to make sure you’re feeling good. Okay?”
She nodded slowly, and I relaxed a little more. “He’s nice,” I said. “I promise he won’t hurt you.”
“Okay.” Kaci hugged her knees to her chest as I stood and piled the empty soda cans on the stacked plates.
“Thanks for talking to me. When I get back, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d love for you to come down and have dinner with the rest of us.”
“Maybe…” Her gaze followed me as I backed toward the door. “But not that guy who yelled at you. The one who came in while you were gone. I don’t want to eat with him.”
Malone. “I don’t want to eat with him, either,” I said, and she grinned. I had my free hand on the doorknob by the time I remembered the question I’d forgotten to ask her. “Kaci, where are you from?”
“Cranbrook.” I must have looked confused, because she elaborated to oblige my geographical ignorance. “It’s about an hour from the U.S. border. In southeastern British Columbia.”
Huh. That was two Canadian strays in as many days. What are the chances?
But then I realized the chances were far greater in Montana than they would have been back on the ranch. The cabin complex was less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border. 
Kaci’s nose wrinkled in concern. “I think I crossed the border illegally. Am I going to be in trouble for that?”
I smiled, amused that she was worried about being deported, with everything else she had on her plate at the moment. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”
Marc’s eyes burned into mine as I shut the bedroom door behind me. “They called in backup a couple of hours ago,” he whispered, taking the plates from me as we headed down the hall. “Ethan and Parker, and two more of Malone’s men. Plus, whoever Blackwell’s bringing in to replace Colin.”
“Peachy.” We were running low on uninjured enforcers and had yet to find the band of strays, so we could certainly use some extra claws on hand. But I didn’t relish having a bigger audience when my verdict was finally read.
Downstairs, I dropped the empty cans in the trash and set our plates in the sink, then followed Marc out the front door, ignoring Malone and Blackwell entirely. Jace and Malone’s enforcer were waiting for us on the porch, and from Jace’s index finger dangled a set of keys attached to a bauble reading Hertz.
I had one foot on the floorboard when Michael called my name. I looked up to see him jogging toward us from the direction of our cabin. “What’s wrong?” I asked, watching him over the roof of the car.
“I’ve spent the last three hours on the Internet, looking for your tabby. There is no girl by her name, fitting her age and physical description, anywhere in the western half of the country. Is there any chance she lied about her name?”
“No.” I slid in next to Marc and pulled the car door shut, then rolled down my window as Jace started the engine. There were many things about Kaci I found hard to believe, but her name wasn’t one of them. “She’s Canadian. From Cranbrook, British Columbia. And you’re probably spelling her name wrong.”
Michael shook his head insistently, rounding the front of the car as Jace began to back out of the gravel driveway. “I tried K-A-S-E-Y and C-A-S-E-Y.”
“It’s K-A-C-I. And I think Dillon is with two L’s. Try it again.” With that, I rolled the window up and scooted closer to Marc, watching my brother in the rearview mirror until Jace turned out of the driveway.
In town, we found a small shopping center that held both a moderately priced department store and a general store. In less than an hour, we bought a week’s worth of clothing, shoes and toiletries for Kaci. And though the outing was a short one, the normalcy of a trip to the store—even a chaperoned trip—did wonders for my morale, simply because there were no Alphas around to remind me that each breath I took might be my last.
In addition to that perk, it was absolutely blissful to be surrounded by so many humans, who didn’t give a shit who I was or what I’d done. I hadn’t felt such freedom or anonymity since my last day of school, and wasn’t likely to feel it again anytime soon.
Back at the lodge, Marc helped me haul the bags up to Kaci’s room, then backed out after giving her a friendly smile. She returned his smile, and I couldn’t help a flash of frustration that she was apparently warming up to the one tom she might never see again.
When Marc left the room, Kaci dug into the shopping bags with enough enthusiasm to rival her appetite. She was laying the outfits out on the spare bed, mixing and rematching tops and bottoms, when a shout from outside drew me to the window over her bed.
“Grandpa! We found him!”
I peered down at the lawn, where Paul Blackwell’s grandson Nate marched across the dead grass alongside another enforcer I didn’t know, who carried an oddly stiff, furry black form in both arms.
That’s a corpse, if I ever saw one.Twenty-Four

Kaci sat on the bed next to me and twisted to peer out the window, but I blocked her view with my body. “Hey, why don’t you try on some of these clothes, and I’ll be right back to see how they look.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” She frowned, standing to look over my shoulder. Fortunately, Nate and his partner had already taken their discovery around back, out of sight from Kaci’s room.
“I’m not sure. Hopefully nothing.” I couldn’t lie to her, not when she’d just started to trust me. But neither could I tell her the whole truth. Not that I actually knew the whole truth yet. “I’ll be right back. Okay?”
She nodded reluctantly, and I slipped into the hall without a word to the guard on duty, in spite of his obvious curiosity.
When I got downstairs, the living room was deserted, so I jogged through the kitchen and out the back door, where a group of toms—including all four Alphas—was gathered in a heavily shaded corner formed by the back porch and the rear wall of the lodge. Chill bumps formed instantly beneath my clothes, and my breath puffed from my mouth in thin white clouds.
“Oh, shit!” someone whispered, and no one admonished the guilty tom for his language in front of the Alphas. That couldn’t be good. I tried to elbow my way through the huddle, but was shoved back like a runt at its mother’s teat.
“Do you smell that?” Jace asked, and Marc nodded.
“Move!” I ordered, and when that got no response, I pinched Jace through his shirt.
“Ow!” he snapped, but shoved the guy on his left, then moved to make room for me.
I stepped into the narrow gap before it could close, and my gaze fell instantly to the cat on the ground at my feet. Something was wrong with it—other than the fact that it was dead—and it took me a minute to figure it out. The stray was missing his left rear leg. Not just the paw, but everything south of his knee.
Son of a bitch! Nate and his partner had found the missing honeymoon hiker, and not only was he dead, he was a werecat. He hadn’t just been attacked by the strays in the forest. He’d been infected.
“I assume he was dead when you found him?” my uncle asked, and all eyes turned to Nate and his partner, who stood opposite me in the huddle.