Rogue (Shifters #2)(59)

“I’m done talking to you,” Andrew growled, his eyes swimming in rage. His hand grasped my left bicep, forcing it to the floor, and I winced as another shard of glass bit into my arm.
“Well, I’m not done talking to you.” I met his eyes, only inches from mine. His anger permeated the room as surely as his scent did, and it was probably a bad time to insist on conversation. But I had to explain. He needed to know the truth.
“I never meant to infect you. It was an accident, and I’m trying to make it up to—”
His fist flew, and my cheek exploded. Tears formed in my eyes, and I sobbed out loud, not from pain—though it certainly hurt—but from heartbreak. The Andrew I’d known could never have hit anyone, much less me.
I closed my eyes and breathed through the throbbing. “Is this what you did to those women? The strippers?”
“Yes,” Andrew spat, and my eyes flew open. He stared down at me, his nostrils wide. “You want to hear about it?”
I shook my head, sucking blood from the new cut on the inside of my cheek. I did not want to hear about it.
“We picked them because they looked like you. I got them outside alone. It was easy—evidently I don’t look dangerous. How’s that for irony? But I’m not harmless anymore.” He punctuated the rhetorical question with another blow to my opposite cheek.
More pain, and this time lights flashed behind my eyes. But I didn’t fight back. Luiz had made Andrew into the monster he’d become, but I’d given him the opportunity. I was not going to hurt Andrew anymore.
“You killed them because they looked like me?” I swallowed thickly, and tasted my own blood. “That hardly seems fair.”
“We were trying to infect them. Death was an unfortunate side effect. And life isn’t fair. You taught me that. Luiz taught me lessons of a more practical nature.” His fist flew again, slamming into my left side this time. I gasped, then bit my lip to keep from screaming.
When I could breathe again, I met his eyes boldly, the first sparks of anger flashing among embers of guilt and grief. “He left you, Andrew. He’s gone, but I’m still here. What does that tell you?”
“That you’re not as smart as you think you are.” His eyes flashed in cruel satisfaction. “He wanted you alive. I don’t.” Andrew leaned to my left, and his hands curled around the old cash register. The damn thing had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. He’d never be able to lift it.
But he did. He yanked it from the floor, arms shaking with the effort as he lifted it over his head.
“No!” Panic dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream, and I felt the ground for something to use as a weapon. Broken glass bit into my palm. My fingers curled around something long and cold and hard.
Andrew snarled and his arms tensed. The cash register trembled in his grip, directly over my head.I swung my unseen weapon, trying to knock him off me before he crushed my skull. My makeshift mace thunked into flesh. Blood poured down on me, hot and wet. His whole body jerked. I shoved Andrew backward and lunged to one side. His hands opened. The cash register smashed into the ground where my head had been.
I scrambled across the floor, heedless as more glass sliced into my hands. Andrew sat against the wall, his eyes wide and empty. His hands clawed at his throat, now impaled by an iron railroad spike. I watched in mute horror as blood spurted.
It was over in seconds. His hands went slack and fell into his lap. His gore-stained chest stopped rising. And as his heart stopped beating, the flow of blood slowed to a dribble.
I sat still on the floor, in a hazy beam of light filtered through filthy windows, staring at a widening pool of the blood I’d first contaminated, then spilled.
Andrew was dead. I’d killed him.
And I couldn’t feel a fucking thing.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Marc was the one who found us, an eternity later, though he swore it couldn’t have been more than two minutes. He burst through the front door, eyes blazing, ready to tear into whichever of us had survived. In a single sweeping glance, he took in the entire room: scattered debris, bloody corpse, and me. He didn’t ask me what happened. He just pulled me to my feet and held me, heedless of the blood I smeared all over him.
I remember him asking if I was okay. And I remember not knowing the answer.
“Faythe, I need you to do something for me,” he said, wiping a smudge of blood from my chin. “I need you to save what you’re feeling now. Put it in a box in your mind, seal it up and stack it with all your other memories.” He took my hand and noticed the embedded splinters of glass, which he began to pull out as he spoke. “Later, you can open the box, and go through what’s inside. But for now, I need you to put it away. We have to get everything cleaned up, and get out of here before the police come. Do you understand?”
Still numb, I nodded. I understood. It was time to save the day. Again.
“Luiz?” I asked as Marc lifted my arms and pulled my blouse over my head.
“Got away.” He turned me gently by my shoulders and began plucking shards of glass from my back. I thought it would hurt, but I didn’t feel a thing. “The park butts up to a swatch of pine forest, and he took off through the trees. I couldn’t catch him on two feet, and I couldn’t leave the rest of you like this. Don’t worry, though. We’ll get him.”
Sure we would. Just like I’d gotten Andrew.
Vic turned out to be mostly okay. Luiz had clawed the shit out of him, but the scratches, though long, were mostly superficial. He was even able to help with the cleanup, so while Marc got me fixed up and changed into his shirt, Parker and Vic dealt with Manx, who had to be cuffed, in spite of a very swollen wrist, and carried carefully to the van. She was alive but unconscious, and we had no idea how badly she was hurt. Or how the baby was doing. 
Jace was shot in the shoulder. He’d lost a lot of blood and was drifting in and out of consciousness, but Parker said it didn’t look fatal. He’d already called my father and Dr. Carver, who’d promised to leave for the ranch immediately.
We threw the bloody two-by-four and the iron pipe into the van, then Parker and Marc wrapped Andrew in plastic, held closed with duct tape. I soaked up his blood from the floor with a roll of shop towels, which we then tied in a plastic bag, along with my ruined blouse. The guys poured bleach over the stain, from a half-full bottle found in one of the abandoned bathrooms. We did the best we could with what we had. Hopefully it would be good enough.
Marc drove to the Lazy S, with Andrew’s body in the van. Manx lay next to him, bound and still out cold, and the one glimpse I got of her reminded me jarringly of my own recent trip in the back of a strange van, also bound and mostly unconscious. I tucked that thought away in one of Marc’s mental boxes. Someday I was going to have to clean out my memory-attic, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
As per our Alpha’s instructions, Parker took Andrew’s car into an empty field an hour and a half west of Henderson, where Owen picked him up.
In spite of his injuries, Vic insisted on driving his Jeep to the ranch, so I sat in back with Jace, doing my best to keep him comfortable. He lay with his head in my lap. We all three winced over every bump in the road.
At home, my mother disinfected my cuts, clucked her tongue over my bruises, and stitched up Vic’s chest, after numbing it with a topical cream. She made Jace as comfortable as possible on the living-room couch, lined in plastic to avoid bloodstains. He woke up shortly after we got home, and I sat with him for nearly an hour. He said he’d thought Manx was aiming at me. Then he joked about how he should have pushed me out of the way, instead of jumping in front of the bullet.
I thanked him for being an idiot. Then I kissed him on the forehead and left him with a bowl of sympathy ice cream.
Manx wound up in the guest room, where my mother spent most of the first few hours after our return waiting for the mystery tabby to open her eyes. She’d been first surprised, then pleased to hear that Manx was pregnant, and she confirmed my amateur diagnosis with one quick sniff. But she grew more worried with each hour that passed without Manx waking up.
I didn’t know how I should feel about the tabby who’d caused so much trouble. She’d killed at least three tomcats in the past week, and shot Jace, though as near as I could tell, she’d actually been aiming for Andrew, who’d snuck in behind me. Still, I had trouble feeling any real sympathy. But the baby couldn’t be held responsible for its mother’s actions. Even I had to admit that.
While my mother split her nursing duties between Manx and Jace, I spent hours in the office with my father, helping the guys re-create every microscopic detail of our day in Henderson. The box I’d stacked in my mind remained neatly sealed as I filled them in on Luiz’s failed efforts to create a female stray and Andrew’s involvement in the project. I told them I thought the college students Luiz killed over the summer were part of the same plan. And I told them how I’d killed Andrew in self-defense.
My father was not happy. Andrew’s death would be one more strike against me, in the collective eye of the council. I’d still have to stand trial, and now there was no witness to testify that the infection was indeed an accident. Apparently killing the human I’d infected didn’t get me off the hook for infecting him in the first place. Weird, huh?His reaction to the tabby wasn’t much better. “She shot Jace?” No one spoke. None of us knew what to say as my father paced in front of his desk, rubbing his chin furiously. “She was hunting Luiz in human form? With a gun? What kind of tabby is this?”