“You can’t tell from these, but they both have green eyes. And so does Pam Gilbert,” Michael said, holding up one of the two remaining pages.
“Wow,” Jace whispered, staring at me openly. “They look like you.”
Not quite. Two of the three women in question were quite a bit better endowed than I was—ridiculously so, in Melissa Vassey’s case—and no two of us had the same nose. But I knew what he meant. We all had straight, dark hair and green eyes. Not the most common combination of features.He’s making a statement, I thought, stunned to the point of speechlessness. Unable to tear my eyes from Melissa Vassey’s face, I slid down from the arm of the couch onto one of the cushions. Though I’ll be damned if I know what he’s trying to say.
The Andrew I’d known could never have taken those strippers. But then, he could never have made those phone calls, either. He’s lost it, I thought, shaking my head before I realized what I was doing. Scratch-fever has completely fried his brain. Why else would he take Amber, and Kellie, and…
Wait. My head popped up and I frowned at Michael. “Kellie Tandy doesn’t fit the pattern. She’s blond.”
Michael nodded. “She has brown eyes, too.”
“So she’s not part of this?” I asked, my frown deepening.
“But we know the tabby was in the Forbidden Fruit.”
“Show her,” my father said.
I glanced first at him, then at Michael, as he held up the last page from the printer. “Forbidden Fruit has a Web site, with a ‘cast list,’ complete with photographs of the dancers. In costume.” He handed me the page, and I took it, dreading what I’d see. “Third from the end.”
But I’d already found her. Second row. Kellie Tandy, from the waist up, her ample cleavage bursting from the top of a black leather cat suit, à la Halle Berry. However, the important part, the part that made her fit the pattern, was her hair. She wore a wig—a mass of straight black hair, with pointed cat ears sticking up from either side. She also wore white plastic whiskers glued to her face, on either side of a perfect little human nose. Beneath authentic-looking cat eyes.
They were theatrical contacts. They had to be. But they were eerily accurate, down to the striations in her irises that I was sure were various shades of green in real life, though they were gray in the photo.
Marc took my hand in his, stroking the side of my palm with his thumb, as if to comfort me. If only he knew what an impossibly Herculean task that was at the moment. “We still don’t know who the tabby is, or why she’s following this psycho from club to club. But we should be able to figure out who he is now. Or at least narrow our list of suspects down from ‘every cat in the country’ to ‘someone Faythe knows.’”
“That can’t be too hard.” Smiling, Ethan dropped onto the love seat across from me and Marc. “She can’t know that many strays. She’s been at school for the past five years, and we’d have known if anyone was hanging around who shouldn’t have been.”
“What if it’s not someone she knows, but someone who knows her?” Jace asked, settling onto the arm of the couch on my other side. “Or thinks he does.”
“Same thing,” Ethan insisted. “Either way, if there was another werecat on campus, we’d have known about it.”
Ethan was right. I’d been under constant surveillance by my father’s enforcers at school, and if another werecat had shown up, they’d have taken him out before I had the chance to break so much as a nail on the poor bastard. But the joke was on them, because the werecat in question wasn’t a werecat at all when we’d been on campus. He was a normal, human math major.
“Enough,” my father said. “Faythe, I think Marc’s right. The tom in question seems to know you. Or at least know what you look like. Assuming it’s a tom at all, and I don’t think we should rule out anything at this point.”
Well, what do you know? It only took a female serial killer to bring my father into the gender-equal twenty-first century. I’d thought it would take full-scale war.
Closing my eyes, I pulled in a long, slow breath, trying to ignore my galloping heartbeat. When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me. “Let me save you all a lot of trouble. I know who’s taking the strippers.”
“What?” Marc shifted on the sofa to face me, but I couldn’t look at him. I watched my father instead, as I said the rest of what had to be said.
“It’s Andrew Wallace.”
Silence greeted my announcement. Complete and total silence, except for the whispered breaths coming from around the room. And Marc’s might not even have been among them. I think he actually stopped breathing.
Michael was the first to speak, from his perch on the arm of the love seat, and I really should have seen that coming. “Andrew? That skinny guy you were sleeping with last spring?”
“Damn it, Michael!” I glared at him from across the rug as Marc tensed on the cushion next to me. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
He shrugged, crossing bulging arms over his spotless polo shirt. “I’m just getting my facts straight. So…you’re saying you were screwing a serial kidnapper for most of your last semester at school?” He turned then to face our father as my blood boiled. “I’d say that was tuition money well spent.”
“Michael…” my father said, his voice thick with warning.
“What? I’m not the problem here. She is.” He whirled back to face me, fury and frustration battling for control of his expression. “Where Faythe goes, trouble follows, and as usual, we’re left to clean up her mess.”
“You son of a bitch!” My hands curled into fists, and I felt myself leaning forward, ready and more than willing to take some of my stress and frustration out on his face. “Ethan’s drilled half the state of Texas, and you’ve never once thrown that in his face—”
“Hey!” Ethan shouted, eyes going wide as he sat up straight on the couch across from me. “Don’t bring me into this.”
“—but I have one ex-boyfriend, and you declare me the Jezebel of the county.” Blood pounded in my ears, and my fingers tingled in fury, itching for something to beat, or shred. I sprang from the couch, still-human fingers curled into claws. Michael jumped up from the love seat, hissing at me through bared teeth.
Marc caught me in midair, both arms wrapped around my waist. He spun me around in one smooth, fluid motion and dropped me none too gently in the middle of the couch. “Don’t move,” he ordered, watching me through the flood of confusion and suspicious anger shining in his eyes.
“Ethan, out.” My father was still standing, his arms stiff at his sides, his fists clenched.
“But—” Ethan turned to argue, but the Alpha shook his head.“Go. And take Jace with you.”
Jace stood and shoved his best friend ahead of him. I cringed when the door clicked closed, and all remaining eyes turned on me.
“Is Michael right?” Marc demanded, still standing in the middle of the rug. “Are we talking about your Andrew?”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call him my Andrew…”
“Faythe…” my father said, warning me again. He was making an obvious attempt to calm himself, and I was willing to do whatever it took to help.
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s him.”
Marc’s eyes closed, and his forehead wrinkled. “So we’re looking for a human? The tabby’s chasing a human?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t say it out loud.
“He’s a stray,” my father said, his voice gravelly and almost too low pitched to hear. The attempt to calm himself clearly wasn’t working; I’d never heard him any angrier.
“Yes.” I met his eyes, reminding myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Keeping the calls a secret didn’t count. I’d had no idea Andrew was involved with the strippers and the tabby.
Marc turned his back on me, heading toward the liquor cabinet on the far side of the room, opposite the desk. “How?” he asked, glass clinking as he pulled something I couldn’t see from the cabinet.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Faythe. You’re in too deep to lie about it now,” Michael said.
“Fuck you,” I snapped. “I’m telling the truth!”
“Marc, make mine a double,” my father said, and I glanced up to see Marc pouring himself a glass of whiskey. Straight up.
Marc nodded and got out another glass. “Michael?” he asked, and my brother shook his head. Marc didn’t offer me anything.
My father cracked the first knuckle of his right hand against his left palm. It was an overtly aggressive gesture, which made me very, very nervous. “How long have you known?”
“I just figured it out. Maybe ten minutes ago. Outside.”
“How?”
“The message from Painter.”
Marc crossed the room again, this time carrying two short glasses of whiskey. Full of whiskey.
My father accepted his glass and sipped from it, watching me over the rim. “What about the message?”
My hands clenched together in my lap, I watched Marc lower himself onto the love seat across from me, instead of resuming his place at my side. He was mad. And it was about to get worse.