Pride (Shifters #3)(66)

When we stood, the guys stared expectantly at Kaci. Water dripped from her chin, reminding me how cold my own face was, and I swiped one sleeve across my mouth. Kaci let hers drip in spite of the temperature, and I had no doubt that though she still walked upright and clenched tiny human fists beside slim, denim-clad thighs, she was thinking very much like a cat at the moment. Perhaps because she was intentionally trying to retrace her steps. Or maybe she was lost in memories of the last time she’d drunk from that stream.Either way, she turned away from us without a word and started down the stream bank, stopping every now and then to sniff the air and look around. Kaci made eye contact with no one and walked with her shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped around herself as if for comfort. She was clearly reluctant to revisit this portion of her past and was obviously trying to detach herself from both the emotional ordeal and from us. Or rather, any comfort we might offer. And I chose to let her, at least until something changed.
After about twenty minutes and countless pauses to sniff the air or stare into the dark, Kaci stopped. She wandered off to the right, obviously looking for something, then headed straight for a narrow, immature oak with a distinctive sharp curve in its trunk. Her hand trailed over the bark and she sniffed the steep crook, then plucked a tiny tuft of black fur from the surface. Her eyes went unfocused briefly and the clump of fur fell from her hand. Then her focus sharpened and she took off into the woods, breaking away from the stream without hesitation now that she’d found whatever she was looking for.
Jace hurried after her, and Reid followed him. I bent to pluck the tuft of fur from the nest of thorns it had snagged on and brought it to my nose. A single sniff told me it was Kaci’s. She was following her own trail, and based on the rapid, almost desperate pace she’d set, we were getting close.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to get there after all.
Ethan and I jogged after the others, and in a few minutes Kaci adopted an all-out trot, stepping over exposed roots and trampling tangles of thorns and bunches of ivy. Her head whipped back and forth as she scanned the trees around her, and my blood raced in anticipation. Could we be that close already? We were only half an hour’s hike from Elias Keller’s backyard. Could the body have been so close to his cabin the whole time without us knowing?
Simply put, yes, it could. We hadn’t searched very close to Keller’s property, assuming that if she was there, he’d know it. But if Keller hadn’t been looking—and really, why should he?—there was no reason for him to have found her.
Several minutes later Kaci came to another stop, this time in the center of a tight clump of four or five trees, each no more than a couple of feet apart. Most of them were young and relatively thin; they probably didn’t get much sunlight in the shade of the other trees. However, two of the bur oaks were older and larger, their branches sprawling in every direction, crisscrossing each other in multiple places, creating a loosely woven canopy of limbs above, from which the thick bed of crunchy leaves beneath our feet no doubt fell.
I glanced around anxiously, carefully scanning a thick undergrowth of brush and several deep drifts of dead leaves. I saw no human body, nor any hole or pile of leaves big enough to conceal one. 
“Kaci?” Twigs cracked beneath my boots as I crossed the three feet of ground between us, yet when I put one hand on her shoulder, she jumped, as if she hadn’t heard me coming. “Kaci?” I repeated, lowering my voice to an intimate pitch I hoped she’d find comforting. “Where is she, hon?”
Instead of answering, Kaci let her head fall back until she was staring at the sky overhead. Or rather, at the branches between us and the heavens.
My gaze followed Kaci’s, trailing over the broad, twisted oak trunk and scanning the branches as they dipped and curved, weaving in and out of the arms from the other trees. At first, I saw nothing but the usual bare branches intertwined with heavily laden red-cedar bows, all of which was virtually impenetrable by the moonlight we’d grown accustomed to. But then something clicked, and jarring artificial light sliced through the night.
And there she was—a single pale hand dangling from the spiky foliage of the red cedar.
Shit, no wonder we hadn’t found her yet. She was very well concealed in her perch, and the human searchers would never have thought to look for her over their own heads until the body began to smell, which wouldn’t be anytime soon, considering the ambient temperature.
Hell, most werecats wouldn’t have thought to look up either, because murderers typically bury their kills to cover their own crimes. In fact, the only bodies I’d seen werecats drag into trees were those of their prey, which they intended to…
Eat.
Oh, shit. I glanced at Kaci and found tears sliding down her cheeks as she stared into the branches, and somehow I knew without asking that I was right. There was more to our little lost tabby than any of us had expected.
Kaci Dillon was a man-eater.
Twenty-Nine

“How the hell are we going to get her out of there?” Ethan demanded, and Kaci flinched at the edge of anger in his voice.
I rubbed her back as she crossed both arms over her chest and hunched into herself. There was one obvious solution, but somehow I didn’t think anyone would be willing to simply shove poor Amanda Tindale out of the tree, no matter how much easier that would have made things for us.
Reid dropped his backpack on a thick clump of ivy. “Take her over there.” He pointed to a fallen log several feet from the tree cluster we stood in. “Hopefully this won’t take long.”
As I ushered the frighteningly unresponsive tabby toward the makeshift bench, Reid pulled a roll of black sheet plastic from his bag, and Jace helped him spread it to cover most of the available ground space within the cluster of trees. They would wrap the dead woman in the plastic, tape up the human burrito, then carry it back to the lodge by hand, a prospect I couldn’t even bear to contemplate at the moment.
By the time Jace and Reid finished with the plastic, a straight razor, and a half-used roll of duct tape, Ethan had scaled the red cedar and was completely hidden from view among its branches. “Oh, shit.” A branch creaked and swayed, as if he’d sat down too hard on it, and several thin, oblong cones thunked onto the plastic.
“You okay?” Jace paused with one hand around the smooth, bare branch of a cottonwood grown several inches thick against all odds in its current environment.
“No. She’s been…um…eaten.”
Vomit rose in the back of my throat and I clenched my jaws to keep it down. Having my hunch confirmed was not a triumph this time. It was a tragedy.
At my side, Kaci showed no reaction at all. She merely stared across the clearing at nothing, tears dried—or frozen—on her cheeks, eyes glazed in what could only be the onset of shock. And suddenly I understood why she had reacted so violently to the state and placement of Hannibal and his victim. They were a terrifying, distorted reflection of the very sight she had to show us. She probably thought that once Reid saw that, he’d want to tape her up and knock her out, too.But that wouldn’t happen. What Kaci had done wasn’t the same, and anyone with half a brain would have to see that.
Hannibal—in all his lunatic glory—had killed and eaten one of his own while in human form. He wasn’t noticeably thin, which meant he had plenty to eat. He’d committed murder and cannibalism, and his only defense—insanity—was the very thing that would render him useless to the werecat community at large.
But Kaci had been attacked by the woman she’d killed. She’d been alone, terrified, exhausted, and literally starving. She’d killed the woman in self-defense, and probably had no idea that eating her human kill wasn’t acceptable.
I’d never seen a more clear-cut case of temporary insanity. Kaci hadn’t even known what she was. One day she was a human teenager, the next she was a big black cat, and she had no reason to even suspect that she might ever see two feet again. She was starving and suddenly confronted with what looked and smelled like food. She would have been crazy not to eat.
Right?
Reid didn’t look anywhere near as sure as I was. He stood with one palm spread on the trunk of the red cedar, staring at Kaci as if she’d just grown an extra head. Murder was a capital offense, and cannibalism an abomination. A taboo with such strong associations with damnation that even speaking of such things gave most werecats the creeps. Man-eaters were not tolerated. And I’d never even heard of a man-eating tabby cat. Much less a man-eating teenage tabby stray.
The council would have no idea what to do with Kaci now. Hell, I had no idea what to do with her.
It took Jace, Ethan, and Reid nearly half an hour to get the dead woman out of the tree without dropping her or pulling her limbs from their sockets. Kaci had somehow managed to drag her kill onto a branch more than twelve feet off the ground, and I couldn’t imagine the hunger and desperation that would drive such a small, weak cat to such lengths to protect her meal.
Hell, I was rarely motivated to put leftovers into the fridge for later, rather than scraping them into the garbage disposal.
Another wave of nausea crashed over me at that thought, and at the realization that I’d just compared a half-devoured human corpse to a tuna casserole.