I shrugged. “This whole damn thing’s a long shot.”
Marc frowned and turned from me to Jace. “Can you find it?”
“If it’s still there, I can find it.”
An hour and a half later, I stood beside the Pathfinder, staring up at the tree-covered hill in front of me. It wasn’t as high or as sharp an incline as the Montana mountain where the Territorial Council had held my trial, but it would certainly be a workout compared to the relatively flat woodlands behind our ranch.
There was no sign of the sun at three-thirty in the morning, but dawn would come fast—I had no doubt of that—and we needed to be long gone before then.
“You ready?” Jace shut the driver’s side door behind me, and I nodded as Marc tossed his backpack over one shoulder. We’d stopped about an hour away from Malone’s property for bottled water and snack bars, and had no choice but to risk leaving our scents in the all-night gas station, hoping none of the local cats would stumble in at that hour.
“I still think you should Shift,” I said, frowning at Marc. “I won’t be much good like this if we run into a fight.” I held up my casted arm, still pissed that I couldn’t Shift. Heading up the side of a mountain in cat form sounded practically sporty. Half exercise, half game. But hiking up on two legs sounded like a huge pain in the ass.
“I’d rather keep you company.” Marc stepped closer, and the heat from his body felt wonderful in contrast to the bitter February chill, even more pronounced at the higher elevation. His head dipped and his lips found my neck just below the right side of my jaw.
I shivered from pleasure, rather than the early morning cold, and my arms wound around his back as his mouth trailed lower.
Then Jace’s footsteps crunched loudly on the loose gravel, and I sighed, pulling away from Marc reluctantly as he stiffened in irritation. “Besides,” he said, as Jace’s shirt hit the ground at his back. “You might need help. You can’t afford to fall on this.” He ran his fingers down the top of my cast, and for the millionth time, I wished I could feel his touch there.
Damn Kevin Mitchell for breaking my arm! But Kevin was already damned. Or dead, at least. Marc had made sure of that.
“Maybe I should just stay here. You guys could get there faster in cat form. I’ll just slow you down.”
“You can’t stay by yourself.…” Marc began, and when I frowned, Jace interrupted.
“You won’t slow us down.” He grinned and dropped his pants. And he wasn’t wearing underwear. “And I think we’d both enjoy your company.”
My face flamed, in both anger and embarrassment. What the hell was he doing?
Marc turned on Jace, already pissed over the innuendo. His hands bunched into fists, and his jaw worked as if he was either going to yell or break every one of his own teeth. But he didn’t make a sound. And I understood in that moment that there was very little he could say without directing more attention toward Jace, which was the last thing he wanted to do.
Technically, Jace had done nothing wrong. He had to undress to Shift, and on the surface, he’d paid me a compliment on both of their behalf. But Marc wasn’t stupid. He may not know how far things had gone between me and Jace, but he knew Jace was openly flirting and inviting me to look. And that bold of an invitation could not be blamed on any of our recent tragedies.
“Watch it.…” Marc growled at last. Jace only grinned harder and tossed his clothes onto the backseat, heedless of my silent, wide-eyed pleading over Marc’s shoulder.
Pissed now, I slammed the door, and Jace had to jerk his hand away to keep from getting it caught. I tugged Marc toward the trees as he resettled his backpack on his shoulder. “We’re heading south, right?” I asked Jace as he scowled after us. He nodded and dropped to his knees. I led the way into the woods with Marc at my side, the sounds of Jace’s Shift almost inaudible over my own footsteps. “Catch up with us when you’ve Shifted.”
Twenty
Jace caught up with us eight minutes later, and his posture said “anger” just as clearly as his claws and canines said “approach at your own risk.”
“What the hell is his problem?” Marc grumbled as Jace sprinted past, leaving us to follow the sounds of his progress.
“Just ignore him.” I considered explaining that Jace’s post-Ethan transformation went beyond a die-hard determination to see Malone pay. But that skirted too close to the truth, and I wasn’t willing to flat out lie to Marc. I was only lying by omission because I had yet to find an appropriate moment to tell him what I’d done. A moment when Jace was several hundred miles away—to keep Marc from killing him—and when no one else’s life depended on our ability to focus on the job at hand.
Such moments were rare lately. And hiding the truth made me feel like I’d swallowed a slow-working poison that was gradually rotting away my insides. Beginning with my heart.
Jace let us catch up with him a quarter mile later, and after that, the hike was blissfully uneventful, if tedious. Even though Marc and I had both Shifted our eyes, it was rough going. I tripped several times—my human body is much less graceful and coordinated than my cat form—and each time Marc caught me before I could even throw out an arm to catch myself. And I was too tired, cold, and worried about further injuring my arm to be anything other than grateful for his help.
To his credit, Jace never looked unsure of where he was going, though he hadn’t been back to his birthplace once in the seven years since my dad had hired him. To me, that said the deer stand was a much more important part of his childhood than he’d let on, and if the same was true for Brett…we might just get lucky.
My pulse spiked at the thought of serving justice to Malone using evidence his own son had given us. The son he’d murdered. Malone’s downfall was imminent. I could feel it.
After an hour and a half of hiking through the woods, Jace stopped and swished his tail to catch our attention. His bearing held no tension and no warning; he was simply telling us we had arrived.A minute later, the forest gave way to a small clearing with irregular, undefined edges, as if someone had chopped down a few trees to gain just a bit of work-space. And there was the deer stand.
It was built into the branches of a large, sturdy tree on the opposite side of the clearing, maybe twenty-five feet off the ground. The wood was weathered and rough, and looked grayed even in the muted colors of my cat vision. A homemade ladder led from the ground to the edge of the platform overhead, its plank steps made from mismatched lengths of two-by-fours, several of which swung loose on one end.
“Well, at least it’s still standing.” Marc’s voice sounded odd after an hour of hearing nothing but twigs snapping beneath our feet and the occasional rustle of some small creature through the winter-crisp underbrush. “But there’s no telling if it’ll hold our weight.”
“I’ll go. I’m the lightest.”
“No.” Marc grabbed my arm when I started forward, but let go when I winced from the pain in my talon-shaped bruises and turned on him with an angry scowl. “What if it collapses?”
I shrugged. “You’ll catch me.”
“And if I miss, you’ll break your other arm, or a leg, and you won’t be able to fight when we go in for real.”
“Marc, in all the times I’ve fallen, you’ve never failed to catch me.” I tugged my arm from his grip gently and stood on my toes to kiss him, acutely, uncomfortably aware that Jace was watching. Then I turned my back on them both and faced the deer stand.
I tested the first step with one foot before putting my full weight on it. When it held, I started up. The fourth step was hanging from one nail, and the fifth was missing completely, and with the grip of my right hand compromised by my cast, I was afraid to depend too heavily on it. I glanced back at Marc. “Can I get a hand?”
He was behind me before I’d even seen him move, and suddenly I was sitting in his cupped hands. He lifted me easily past the fifth and sixth planks, and I stepped onto the seventh, a good eight feet off the ground. “Thanks,” I murmured, and continued climbing. Marc stayed at the base of the ladder, just in case.
The tenth step creaked beneath my foot, sending an adrenaline-spiked bolt of alarm through me, and the thirteenth was rotten under my hand. The seventeenth lodged a huge splinter in my left palm. But two steps after that, my head rose above the floor of the stand, and my cat’s eyes focused easily on the small chest in one corner, thanks to the last rays of starlight now peeking from behind a cloud.
The first bit of daylight would shine shortly after 7:00 a.m., which gave us under two hours to get what we came for, get back to the car, and get the hell out of Dodge. No pressure…
I hauled myself up carefully, wincing when my cast scraped the floor, though it didn’t hurt. I wondered if I would have smelled Brett’s residual scent on the wood, if I were in cat form. Assuming he’d actually been where I now sat, a couple of days earlier.
Jace whined, and Marc asked the question for them both. “Do you see it?”
“Yeah. We are a go for an old wooden chest.”
They both exhaled in relief from twenty feet below.
Several patches of the floor looked suspiciously soft and dark, so I crawled around them on my knees and elbows, staying close to the right-hand railing. Crawling distributed my weight over a broader area, and my elbows kept pressure off my broken wrist.