Rogue (Shifters #2)(20)

The Alpha opened his mouth to make his grand revelation, but I beat him to the punch. I just couldn’t resist.
“We’re looking for a tabby.”
I’d whispered, but they all heard me clearly in the eager silence created by our Alpha’s theatrical pause. At the edge of my vision, Marc gaped at me, but my eyes were on my father, whose face registered first surprise, then annoyance. Then pride. He was proud of me for figuring it out on my own.
I grinned, relishing what felt like a rare moment of competence. But my father kept watching me, as if waiting for more. My smile faded as I wondered what I was missing. Was he irritated at me for one-upping him on purpose? Instead of answering my unspoken question, he smiled and glanced from me to the rest of the guys. Whatever was on his mind, he didn’t want to talk about it in front of everyone else. At least, not yet.
“How did you know?” he asked at last, moving on as if he’d never paused.
“Deductive reasoning.” Beaming openly now, I glanced from face to astonished face, unbothered by the knowledge that they were reacting to my news, not my skill in deducing it. “There’s no way the average stray would let someone else get close enough to hurt him without going on the defensive. Unless that someone was a girl. Specifically, a tabby—the tomcat’s Achilles’ heel.”
Ethan frowned, skepticism etched into every line on his face at the thought that a girl could ever be his downfall. I was more than happy to burst his sexist bubble.
“Tell him, Dad. Harper and Moore got their tickets punched by a girl. And it could just as easily have happened to you, Ethan.” Self-defense would have been the last thing on my youngest brother’s mind if he’d met a strange tabby on the street. He’d have been more concerned with getting his hands on her than with keeping hers off him.
“No way.” He shook his head, short black hair falling across his forehead.
I sighed. Tomcats aren’t threatened by tabbies. I’m proud to consider myself the exception to that rule, but generally speaking, male werecats see nothing to fear in the female of the species. Even as a member of the not-so-gentler sex, I’d made the same mistake. The truth was that we’d all been trained from birth to underestimate women. Some of us, to underestimate ourselves.
While human society had made wonderful progress in the struggle for gender equality, the werecat community was still decades behind the times. Irritating though that fact was, I understood the reason. Tabbies are very rare, averaging only one out of every six or seven Pride births. Once you add in the strays, who are all male, the ratio of tabbies to toms becomes even smaller.Since technology has yet to eliminate the necessity of a womb in the process of procreation, female werecats are not only rare, but very valuable.
How do people treat rare and valuable treasures? With great care and respect. And with a single-minded determination to eliminate all possible dangers. For that reason, most tabbies grow up to be full-time moms, like my mother. As such, they can remain under the watchful eyes and protective arms of their husbands and teams of enforcers, who would gladly give their own lives to protect the woman who will someday bear the next generation of werecats.
Frustrating, and frighteningly archaic, but true.
And when I thought about it that way, it wasn’t really much of a surprise that none of us had considered that the killer could be a woman. Or that Harper and Moore had let her slip through their personal defenses. Fear for his life was probably the last thing on either man’s mind when he saw the mystery tabby. The first was no doubt lust. On second thought, that might have been the only thing on either of their minds.
“Think about it,” I said, enjoying my moment in the limelight. “You guys have been falling for that one since the beginning of time. Remember Adam and Eve? Samson and Delilah? Need I go on?”
Apparently not, judging by the less-than-friendly looks on their faces. And I had serious doubts they’d recognize references to Calypso, Circe, or Scheherazade. Maybe Lorena Bobbitt…
“Whatever.” Ethan glanced from me to Marc, then back to me. “If you’re so sure it’s a tabby now, why didn’t either of you recognize the scent in the first place?”
Shrugging, I crossed my arms over my chest. “The smell is very faint, and just like the rest of you, we went into this expecting to find a tom’s scent. So that’s exactly what we found. Or what we thought we found. Besides, I can’t speak for Marc, but I was blindsided by the foreign aspect of the scent. That surprised me—” and scared me “—so much that I didn’t think to analyze any further.”
Marc nodded in agreement, threading his warm fingers through mine. I squeezed his hand in response, thanking him silently for backing me up. If we’d both missed the cat’s gender, I didn’t come off looking like such an idiot.
“Well, she’s not a jungle cat.” My father’s voice rang into a silence broken only by the crickets chirruping outside, and I felt a small measure of tension ease from the cramped muscles in my neck. “She lacks that distinctive Amazonian scent. But she’s definitely from somewhere south of the equator.”
“Holy…crap.” Vic glanced at our Alpha as he altered what he’d been about to say. “A South American tabby? We’re looking for a serial-killing foreign tabby cat? In our territory? How is that even possible?” 
In spite of the frustrated feminist in me who insisted that women were capable of anything men were—including murder—I had to admit to having similar questions. To my knowledge, I was the only other tabby who’d ever killed anyone, and I’d done it in self-defense. Mostly. But there were no signs that either Harper or Moore had tried to hurt the tabby in question.
And beyond all of that, there was an even bigger question…
“Who the hell is she?” I asked, my attention on my father even when someone grumbled softly over my language. No one else ever cussed around our Alpha; it was considered disrespectful. I didn’t do it to be rude; I did it to remind him that even though he had me where he wanted me—for the moment—I wasn’t completely malleable. And, honestly, sometimes it just slipped out. My mother was right: bad habits die hard.
“I don’t know,” my father said, surprising me with the honest bewilderment in his voice. Of course he didn’t know. There was no reason he should know. But I was kind of accustomed to his having all the answers…
“How on earth did she get here?” Parker wondered aloud. “And where are her enforcers? Why would her family let her come here alone? She has to be alone, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Marc nodded firmly. “We’d know it if there were an entire contingent of foreign cats in our territory. It’s one thing for a single cat to evade detection for a little while. But a whole party?” His tone went up in question on the end. “No way.”
Jace brushed a strand of short brown hair back from his face, and his cobalt eyes sparkled with sudden excitement. “Maybe she doesn’t have any family or enforcers. Maybe she’s a stray.”
Vic snickered, and even Parker smiled at the thought of a female stray. There weren’t any, and to my knowledge, there never had been. Not even in legend.
The theory generally accepted by the Council was that human women were too weak to survive either the initial infection, or the transition period itself. To my surprise, that theory had survived Dr. Carver’s recent revelation about the recessive werecat genes, by virtue of the fact that we’d never once found a female stray. But with no proof of the impossibility, I was no longer willing to accept the old theory as fact. Women really could do anything men could do, and our mysterious tabby was proof of that.
Still, while the possibility of a female stray did exist, at least in my mind, our murderer didn’t fit the bill.
“No.” Marc and I spoke in unison, and I gestured for him to continue. The spotlight was starting to make me sweat, and he was more than welcome to it. “She’s not a stray,” he said, and I nodded in agreement. This second whiff of her scent had verified that she was a natural-born cat. A natural-born South American cat, apparently.
“Then that brings us back to my questions,” Parker said. “If she belongs to one of the South American Prides, where are her fellow Pride members? Why on earth would they let her off on her own?”
“Maybe she killed them all,” Vic suggested, morbid humor shadowed behind his eyes.
Ethan crossed his arms. “Then they probably won’t mind if we keep her.” His cocky smile clearly showed his confidence that he could tame any tabby.
I frowned, un-amused. “Ethan, she’s a murderer, not a stray puppy. You can’t be serious.” But he only smiled, and most of the others suddenly found the straw at their feet fascinating. I looked to my father for help, but he simply gestured at my fellow enforcers, telling me to take my complaint to the general assembly. Frustration rumbled up my throat in the form of a mild growl. “Guys, come on!” I couldn’t believe them! We were talking about a cold-blooded killer, and they acted like she was a lost kitten they wanted to adopt.“What would you suggest, Faythe?” Owen asked gently, peering at me from beneath the brim of a stained and faded cowboy hat. “You want to execute a tabby?”