Pride (Shifters #3)(64)

Frustrated, I turned to look at Ethan, and a warm, wet drop hit my forehead. Rain? But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, as evidenced by generous pools of moonlight aiding the flashlights.
I wiped the drop from my face and my finger came away smeared with something dark and sticky. And fragrant.
Blood.
Dread tightening my stomach, I looked up slowly, and my fists clenched around air, my nails cutting into my palms. My breath caught in my throat and made a soft strangling sound. Ethan followed my gaze, and Reid followed his. I couldn’t see Jace, but when Kaci gasped, I knew that they’d seen it too.
Our mystery stray was enjoying a leisurely, treetop dinner—but neither predator nor prey had fur.
Twenty-Eight

“Oh, fuck…” Jace whispered, and I could not have agreed more. In my entire twenty-three years, I’d never seen anything as gruesome or completely fucked up as the tom staring down at us from his elevated perch, possessive instinct clear in his posture, insanity shining in his eyes.
On a broad, bare branch about eight feet off the ground, a stray perched in the sturdy nook where the limb met the trunk. He was nude and in human form, his face and hands so completely coated in blood that at first glance I thought he wore a pair of skintight formal gloves—until I noticed them glistening dark and wet in the soft glow from above.
Wedged into a fork in the thick branch he sat on was another tomcat—based on his smell—also naked and covered in blood. But this tom stared at the moonlit trees with unblinking eyes, his arms hanging limply, his stomach ripped wide open. As I watched, frozen in shock and desperate denial, a thick, blood-slick loop of intestines slid from his gaping abdomen to dangle at least a foot below his body.
My hand slid slowly into my pocket and wrapped around Michael’s knife.
Behind me Kaci gagged, then staggered into sight on my left to vomit at the base of another tree. Jace was at her side immediately, holding her hair up and rubbing her back. But his eyes never left the sight that had made her sick.
Overhead, the stray hissed, and my eyes found him again. His lips parted, blunt, human teeth gleamed wetly in the available moonlight, and a thin line of blood-tinted drool dripped from his stained chin, disappearing into the shadows long before it hit the ground. But I staggered back just in case, scrubbing the smear of blood from my forehead with the palm of my free hand. I had to forcibly swallow back bile as it rose to burn deep in my throat.
“Faythe, you okay?” Ethan whispered. He hadn’t moved since discovering the grisly stray, and neither had Reid, though the fingers gripping his knife were now white with tension. 
“Fine,” I whispered back, though that was far from the truth.
Wood creaked overhead, and the startled stray leaned forward. The limb bobbed beneath his shifting weight. He thumped to the ground in front of us, knees bent, gory arms out for balance.
Reid jumped back and Ethan did the same, tugging me with him. I stood with my feet spread and pulled the knife from my pocket, pressing a button to release the blade. Ethan mirrored me in the ready-stance our father had taught us back in junior high. The stray was alone and unarmed, but he was also nude, covered in blood, and apparently full of his fellow tom’s organ meat—a definite no-no in every werecat society I’d ever heard of.
“Mine.” The stray sprayed bloody spittle across the dead leaves at our feet, and to my utter humiliation, I jerked in response. But no one was watching me. We were all watching Hannibal Lecter, whose eyes darted among us like a junkie fighting off paranoia. It took me a moment to realize what he meant, but his next words made it clear. “Go find your own.”
On my left, Kaci stood from her crouch and swiped one forearm slowly across her mouth. The stray’s agitated gaze flicked past me to land on her. “You smell good,” he purred, his expression taking on a new hunger without losing the eerie wrongness setting off every inner alarm I had.
Kaci whimpered, and both Reid and Jace moved forward to block her from view.
He’s sick. Understanding settled into place in my mind. The stray was recently infected and likely still raging with scratch fever. In daylight, we’d see the flush on his skin, though in the dark, with him covered in blood, it was hard to tell at a glance.
“He’s mad,” Ethan said, confirming my own thoughts. I nodded, and Jace murmured his assent, but Reid only motioned us back with a subtle wave of his left hand.
“We don’t want your kill,” he said, drawing the stray’s gaze from what little he could see of Kaci. “We’re looking for something else entirely.”
The stray’s fever-glazed eyes brightened, seeming to glow with their own light in the darkness. “I can help! I know where everything is. This is my territory!”
Reid’s shoulders tensed. “You own this property?”
“Yeah!” His gaze flicked back and forth between us, clearly searching for approval or acceptance. “Well, my Pride does. The Rocky Mountain Pride.” Hannibal straightened as he spoke, squaring his shoulders in obvious satisfaction.
Ethan snorted. “There is no Rocky Mountain Pride.”
Reid gestured angrily to silence my brother with the hand behind his back. “We’re here on behalf of the Territorial Council…”
On a diplomatic mission to Alderan… I thought half hysterically.
“…to greet your Alpha formally. The council would like to meet him. Can you tell us who he is, and where we can find him?”
“Zeke?” The stray’s eyes widened. “You want to talk to Zeke?”
I’ll be damned! Zeke Radley. A little thrill of discovery tingled up my spine, raising tiny hairs all over my body, and suddenly I had a great deal of respect for Reid. Whom I silently vowed to stop calling Cue Ball.
“Where can we find your Alpha?” I asked, following Reid’s lead.
“That’s a secret,” the stray said in a stage whisper, one hand cupped to the side of his mouth. “I can’t tell you, because Zeke doesn’t want any more men. Calls us toms. But we don’t really have anyone named Tom.”
Zeke obviously understood Pride social structure and politics to some degree, which surely indicated that he’d had contact with Pride cats before. But I was betting he had just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
But Hannibal wasn’t finished. “You and her—” his gaze flicked from me to Kaci, as his index finger swirled a pattern in the blood on his chest “—can come with me. Whoever brings her in gets to be second in command.”What? “Wait, you know her?” I asked, unbothered when Reid shot me a shut-the-hell-up look.
The stray nodded, smearing the blood across his cheek now. “Mission impossible. Top priority.”
Oh, that’s just fucking fantastic. If I understood correctly—and that was a big if—Zeke Radley had caught a whiff of Kaci at some point and decided he needed her to complete his little farce of a Pride.
Reid shifted his weight from one foot to the other, subtly drawing attention his way. “How many toms do you have?”
The stray started to answer, then hesitated with his mouth already open. Suddenly unsure, he let his gaze travel over us all, as if he was considering his next words carefully. “Enough. Zeke says we have enough.”
“Where does your Pride live?” Reid asked, repeating my earlier question.
The stray frowned and glanced up at his kill, then back at us in silence. He grinned broadly, again flashing bloody teeth, and licked his lips.
A shudder of revulsion slithered through me.
Reid turned to raise his eyebrows at Ethan in question, keeping the stray in one corner of his vision. Ethan nodded silently. They’d agreed on something, and though I hadn’t caught the question, I knew better than to ask aloud.
Ethan blurred into motion at my side, and an instant later, he’d pinned the stray to the trunk of the tree he’d dropped out of. My brother had one forearm pressed into Hannibal’s bloody throat, the rest of his body held carefully away from the blood-covered werecat. “Last chance. Where…is…your…Alpha?”
But obviously Radley had managed to impart loyalty to his troops, if not sanity. Instead of answering, the stray snarled and snapped his teeth at Ethan, in spite of the pressure on his neck. Ethan’s fist flew, and a muted crack fractured the air. It was over in less than a second. Ethan stepped back and the stray slid to the ground, his head lolling limply to one side.
For a moment I thought Ethan had killed him with one shot, and while that would have been impressive, it also would have been disturbing.
But then Hannibal’s chest rose. And it fell. Then it rose again. He was breathing.
Velcro ripped behind me, and I turned to find Reid pulling a roll of duct tape from his backpack. “Here.” He tossed it to me and pointed at the stray slumped against the tree. “Get his mouth.”
I ripped a section of tape from the roll, then knelt beside the unconscious tom and pulled his head back with a handful of sticky hair. Covering his mouth without actually touching his flesh was tricky, but it was worth the effort, because I didn’t want any more blood on me than necessary. Not with the majority of our hike still ahead of us.
Reid knelt at my side and I held the tape out to him, but he shook his head. “Tear me off a long piece for his hands. Two feet, at least.” 
As I stood to keep the length of tape off the ground, something electronic beeped on my left. Jace was dialing on his cell phone. While I ripped off the tape and helped Reid bind the cat’s wrists at his back, Jace called the lodge to have a cleanup team sent to dispose of the corpse and pick up the prisoner—immediately, since they were both in human form.