Pride (Shifters #3)(68)

“Nooooo.” Michael sat up, suddenly alert. “Not Kaci?”
I nodded. “Yeah. She’s fucked up, Michael. Completely nonresponsive. I think she was okay as long as she didn’t have to think about it. But now she’s just…checked out. Nobody’s home.”
“She’ll come out of it.” Marc leaned against my bedroom door frame. “Dr. Carver will know what to do.”
“I hope so.” I circled the coffee table, headed toward him. But then I turned back to Michael when I remembered what I’d forgotten. “Oh, yeah. Zeke Radley is forming his own Pride out of a bunch of psychotic strays.”
Michael’s forehead crinkled and he replaced his glasses, leaning forward on the edge of the couch. “Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately. And they’ve evidently been chasing Kaci, trying to add a hen to their collection of roosters.”
“Huh.” He shrugged. “That kind of makes sense. They’re both from Canada. He could have been following her for quite a while.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but Michael was probably right. Which made Kaci’s survival all the more miraculous, in spite of the atrocities she’d had to commit to stay alive.
“Yeah, I guess.” I stepped backward into Marc’s embrace, surprised to realize he’d taken off his shirt. “Also, we found one of Radley’s toms. Ethan knocked him out and they’re beating some answers out of him now.” The last little bit came out as one long word, rushed in my eagerness to put a closed door between my brother and us.Michael frowned in confusion, then smiled when my rushed statement sank in. “Okay, thanks. Go…get some sleep.”
Smiling, I shut the door. A moment later the front door closed as Michael left for the lodge. He wasn’t supposed to go alone, but I appreciated the gesture. Privacy was the most valuable gift one werecat could give another.
Besides, Michael was a big boy. He could take care of himself.
I turned to find Marc watching me, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, T-shirt forgotten on the floor. He didn’t smile; this wasn’t a happy occasion. But he didn’t look entirely unhappy, either. My gaze trailed over the dark stubble strengthening an already well-defined chin, down his neck, then his chest, where four parallel claw-mark scars marred an otherwise perfect display of granite masculinity. My hands ached to travel the same path. So I let them.
The lovemaking that followed was slower and more deliberate than before, but no less urgent. Afterward, I fell asleep with Marc curled against my back, his scent surrounding me.
I hadn’t slept so well in months.
A sudden slice of light fell across my closed eyelids, rendering the darkness in a dull shade of red. I opened my eyes reluctantly, automatically searching out the alarm clock. Surely it wasn’t time for Marc to go yet.
It wasn’t. The glowing red numbers read 5:18. We’d slept less than four hours.
“Faythe!”
I sat up, shoving tangled hair away from my face. A man’s silhouette stood framed by the doorway, backlit by light from the living room. The wire-thin corner of an eyeglasses frame would have told me who was there, even if the voice and scent hadn’t. Michael.
“Is it Kaci?” My fingers found the warm expanse of Marc’s chest on the bed next to me. The steady rise and fall of his ribs said he was still sleeping, by some miracle.
“Yes, but she’s fine. Well, no worse, anyway.” Michael shrugged, leaning on the door frame. “She’s asleep. Jace stayed at the lodge to watch her.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Just…weird. Dr. Carver called, and Dad told him to hop on the next flight back up here because we’ll probably need him after a raid on the strays.”
Wow. He’d only been gone fourteen hours. Still… “You woke me up to tell me Carver’s coming back?” I grouched in a whisper. “Couldn’t that have waited until morning?”
He shook off my complaint in barely restrained excitement. “That’s not the good part. He and Dr. Eames worked all night on Kaci’s blood, and they have the preliminary results.”
“Already? How is that possible?” I climbed out of bed carefully to keep from jarring Marc, because I had a feeling I was done sleeping for the time being. 
“Well, it wouldn’t have been if they had to wait for a commercial lab to open and assign someone to it. But they did the work themselves, and they knew exactly what they were looking for.”
My heart thumped as I followed him into the living room, my bare feet silent on the frigid hardwood. “So…she’s a stray, right?” She had to be. He wouldn’t be so excited if she were a Pride cat.
But Michael shook his head, his smile beaming at me waaaaay too brightly for five o’clock in the morning. “She’s not a stray. But she isn’t a Pride cat, either. You’re not going to believe this. I’m not sure I believe it yet…”
“Damn, Michael, get to the point!” I stomped past him into the kitchen, heading straight for the coffeemaker. I was too tired and anxious for his speechless disbelief. “What is she?”
“Carver’s calling her a ‘miracle of recessive genes.’”
“Which means what?” I set the pot beneath the faucet and flipped the cold water on. “Is she stray or Pride?”
“Neither. Or both. I’m not sure. Dr. Carver says her blood is like nothing he’s ever seen. He was so excited I could hardly understand a word he said.”
And it must have been catching, because I didn’t understand, either. Not a damn word coming from his mouth.
Thirty

“Double recessive… What does that even mean?” Malone shoved back the sleeves of his robe and crossed both arms on the long oak table. The dining room looked different with no sunlight shining through the wall of windows. It was oddly dim, in spite of the overhead light. But that sort of made sense. Most people didn’t serve meals at five-thirty in the morning.
“Okay, I’m a lawyer, not a geneticist, so you’ll have to bear with me on this.” Michael mirrored Malone’s posture from across the table. Somehow, he managed to look professional even in green plaid pajama bottoms.
Our father sat at the head of the table, taking up a position of authority since this discussion had nothing to do with my hearing. Uncle Rick sat on his left, followed by Paul Blackwell, then Malone. Michael and I sat opposite the Alphas.
I’d come to the emergency meeting because of my relationship with Kaci. No other enforcers had been included, ostensibly to make sure they got enough sleep. But we all knew the real reason. The Alphas didn’t understand the new information, and they didn’t want to look stupid in front of their subordinate Pride members.
I couldn’t really blame them. I didn’t understand, either.
“This is how Dr. Carver explained it to me, using mostly generalities and layman’s terms,” Michael said. “The reality is quite a bit more complicated, but for our purposes, I think the preschool version will suffice. Agreed?” He glanced around the table, receiving mostly nods.
Paul Blackwell harrumphed, gripping the curve of his cane between his knees. “So long as it’s the truth and it makes sense. I won’t listen to any of this theoretical nonsense.” Blackwell trusted science about as well as he trusted strays, and he understood it even less. He was like the first caveman presented with fire, frightened and angered by things he couldn’t comprehend.
Michael’s excitement faltered, but he recovered quickly. “No problem. Okay, now we all know about the recessive werecat gene, right? How a human has to have been born with that in order to be infected by a scratch or bite. Are we all on the same page?”
Everyone looked at Blackwell, who was most likely to answer in the negative. “Right, right.” The old man twisted his cane, and the rubber tip squeaked as it ground against the hardwood. “I remember the recessive gene. What I don’t understand is how it got into humans in the first place. I never was satisfied on that point…”As if the gene’s existence was debatable. The old turd was even grouchier without his beauty sleep.
“It’s not in all humans, Councilman Blackwell. Remember? The recessive gene is actually pretty rare. And we’re not entirely sure how it got there. The working theory at the moment is that we’ve actually been putting it there ourselves, by…well, breeding with humans.”
“Toms can’t breed with humans, boy!” Blackwell shouted, face flushing in anger, and I rolled my eyes before I could stop myself. “That’s the part of this whole thing that never made any sense.”
“I know that’s always been the assumption.” Michael folded his hands on the table and stared back at the old man with more patience than I could ever have summoned. “But Dr. Carver and Dr. Eames think we’ve been wrong about that one.”
Blackwell slapped his cane, and it fell over, smacking Malone’s knees. “Oh, balderdash!”
“Paul…” Daddy’s voice was stern, which no doubt irritated Blackwell even further, considering the two decades he had on my father. “We’ve been over all this before. Those genes got into the human DNA somehow, and who else could have put them there but us?”