“Yeah.” Nate wiped his palms on his jeans, in either nervousness or excitement. “Looked just like that, only he was half under a clump of brush, like he’d crawled in there to die.”
“I see no obvious signs of trauma,” my father said. “Danny, what do you think?”
Dr. Carver knelt between the body and several pairs of dusty hiking boots, and began a quick examination of poor Bob Tindale. “Well, he still has complete rigor stiffness, and as cold as it’s been the last few days, I’m gonna say he’s been dead no more than twenty-four hours. This seems to be the source of the infection.” He parted a section of fur over the stray’s belly to expose a set of long gashes so inflamed and festered I couldn’t tell whether they numbered two or three. Or four. “And based on the state of the wounds and the lack of other obvious trauma, my best guess is that he died of scratch fever.”
“So, natural causes?” Jace said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.
“In a manner of speaking.” Carver frowned up at him, then at me, which made me nervous. “He wasn’t technically murdered, but in instances like this, I find it hard not to blame the infector. In most cases, anyway.” The doc raised both brows at me, then tossed his head toward the corpse, telling me silently to take a whiff of the transmitter’s scent, which would be forever laced through the hiker’s personal new-stray smell.
Uh-oh. This can’t be good.
I squatted next to Carver and sniffed Mr. Tindale’s wounds from about a foot away. But that was close enough for me to understand what he’d been getting at.
Kaci.
The truth thundered through me, and I fell onto my rear on the cold ground. My eyelids slammed shut and refused to open, sparing me from sensory overload as I tried to make sense of evidence I didn’t want to believe. If I’d had fur, it would have been standing on end.
No. She couldn’t have. But no matter how badly I wanted to deny the truth, I knew better. Kaci’s scent was layered through the handicapped stray’s smell, forever binding her existence with his. And there was no other way it could have gotten there.
I rubbed my arms through my shirt, trying to fight off a numbness that came from inside me, rather than from the November chill. My nose ran from the cold and I dug a tissue from my pocket to wipe it.
“Faythe…” my father began, but I stood and backed away from the body before he could finish.
“No.” My head shook in denial. Marc reached out for me, but I dodged his hand. “No,” I repeated more firmly, turning to shove my way through the small crowd as I stuffed the tissue back into my pocket. “It’s a mistake. She wouldn’t do this.”
“Not on purpose,” my father admitted, and I felt the group’s focus shift from the dead hiker to me. “She’s been through a lot and probably had no idea what she was doing.”
“She didn’t.” I whirled to face them again and my eyes went wide as I stared at my Alpha. “Kaci didn’t even know she could Shift back. She had no idea what was happening to her, and she wasn’t in her right mind. You can’t possibly hold her responsible for this.”
Silence closed in on me, but for the trilling of what few birds hadn’t yet flown south for the winter. The weight of my father’s gaze was suffocating, and those few seconds seemed to last forever. When he finally spoke, his solemn words did nothing to set my mind at ease. “Go talk to her. Find out what happened, and we’ll go from there.”
Fair enough. I’d ask Kaci, and she’d tell me it was a horrible accident. I’d report back to the council and they’d bury the body, clean up the mess, and forgive Kaci, who no doubt knew not what she’d done. I felt horrible for the poor hiker and his still-missing wife, but he was dead, and she probably was, too. There was nothing I could do for them. But the tabby was alive and in need of my help. And my protection. What kind of enforcer would I be if I didn’t help her?
“One hour.” Uncle Rick glanced at his fellow Alphas to confirm, and they each nodded silently. “We have decisions to make and work to do.”“Fine.” I blinked to clear the fog of shock and confusion cushioning my shiny optimism from the sharp edges of reality.
On the way upstairs, dread slowed my feet as if I were wading through knee-deep water, rather than fear for the poor, lost kitten upstairs. And really, fear is just as hard to negotiate as water—and in this case, it was a damn sight colder and more numbing.
At the end of the hall, I ignored the guard and knocked on Kaci’s door.
“Faythe?” she asked from the other side, and I smiled in spite of the purpose of my visit. Either she’d come to recognize my footsteps, or she’d discovered that a quick whiff of the air would tell her who was at the door.
“Yeah, it’s me. Can I come in?”
Soft footsteps approached and the door swung open slowly to reveal a teenage girl I barely recognized. Kaci wore tan hiking boots, a pair of slim, faded jeans and a soft pink sweater I’d known at a glance she’d love. She’d found the brush and ponytail holders and had twisted her hair into a long, thick braid on one side of her head. It trailed nearly to her waist.
“What do you think?” she asked as I pulled the door shut behind me. “There’s no mirror in here. Can I go look at the one in the bathroom?”
“Sure. In just a few minutes.”
Her forehead furrowed in disappointment. Then her features smoothed and she took my hand—her first voluntary physical contact—and pulled me over to the bed, where she’d laid out all the clothes. “This one’s my favorite.” She ran one hand down the sleeve of the sweater she was wearing. “But I like this one too. And that purple top? I have one kind of like it at h…”
Her voice faded into strained silence, and her gaze found the floor. I was eager to hear more about her family, and what her homelife had been like with no enforcers and a big sister, but this was not the time for those questions. I had fifty-five minutes to find out how and why the girl who hadn’t even known she was a werecat until that morning had already managed to break one of our most serious laws.
She was the only girl I’d ever met who could get into trouble faster and more thoroughly than I could. Kaci fascinated me. And worried me more than a little.
“Kaci?”
“Hmm?” Denim rustled and plastic popped as she tore the tag from another pair of jeans, still avoiding my eyes.
I sat on the end of the bed and pulled her new leather jacket onto my lap. “We need to talk about something very…serious.”
She finally looked at me, holding the jeans up to her waist to test the fit. “Like, you-look-stupid-in-those-pants serious, or you-have-terminal-cancer serious?”
I smiled, impressed all over again with her fortitude. “More like, where-were-you-on-the-evening-of-November-eighth kind of serious…”
“What?” Kaci frowned in bewilderment, and the jeans slipped from her grip. Then her expression relaxed, and her arms fell to her sides. “Is this about that guy you killed?”
“What?” My hand clenched around the sleeve of her coat. “Where did you hear that?”
She shrugged, flushing lightly. “That’s all anyone talked about while you were shopping. I could hear them through the walls and the floors. And the vents.”
Curious in spite of myself, I arched my brows at her in question. “What did they say?”
“Just that you killed a guy.” She hesitated, then met my eyes boldly, as if she’d suddenly decided she deserved answers. “Did you?”
Um, yeah. The problem was that I couldn’t say for sure which “guy” she meant. Eric, whose throat I’d ripped out over the summer? Or Luiz, whose skull I’d crushed with a dumbbell ten weeks ago? Or maybe the stray I’d tenderized forty-eight short hours before.
While that last one was a decent possibility, the most likely suspect was Andrew, the reason for our little vacation in the mountains.
“Yes.” My hand found my forehead, rubbing before I’d even realized I felt the beginning of a serious migraine. “But it was self-defense. I had no choice.”
Kaci sat on the opposite bed, facing me. “They don’t believe you.”
It wasn’t a question, so I nodded my acknowledgment. “They never believe a damn thing I say,” I mumbled.
“So…who did you kill?” Kaci stood with her back to me and pulled the pink sweater over her head, as if my answer didn’t matter enough to interrupt her private fashion show. But I knew better. Her thin back was tense, her motions too stiff to ever pass for relaxed. My answers meant as much to her as hers would mean to me. She needed to know she could trust me. That I wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer.
I sighed, and my hands found each other in my lap. “I killed a man I knew in college. If I hadn’t, he would have killed me, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.”
Kaci considered that as she slid her arms through the sleeves of a silky red blouse. Then she turned to face me. “Do you ever think about it?”
“About killing him?” I asked, and she nodded solemnly. “I try not to, but sometimes…” Sometimes I see his face when I close my eyes. His cheeks pale, blood spurting from the hole in his neck. His eyes accusing me of betraying him. Again. “Sometimes I can’t not think about it.”