And Kaci had a mouth, and she was not afraid to use it. Which made certain elements of the council even more determined to get her out from under my questionable influence.
“Thanks.” I forced a smile, and met my mother’s gaze over Kaci’s head.“Be careful,” she said, and I nodded. Then Marc and I went out the front door after the others.
Several pairs of enforcers had gone into the woods, but Jace and Brian were headed for the west field, so Marc and I started out in the opposite direction, walking several feet apart, and breathing through our noses in spite of the February cold burning my nostrils. We didn’t want to miss a scent.
It was eerily quiet in the field, other than the whisper-crunch of our boots crushing dead grass. Though the temperature had risen dramatically from the ice storm a couple of weeks earlier, it was still hovering in the mid-thirties, and my fingers had gone stiff with the cold. I tried to shove them in my jacket pockets, but my cast stopped my right hand at the first knuckles. My nose was running, and I sniffled as we turned at the edge of the field, eyeing the periwinkle-colored sky in distrust.
Danger had never literally come out of the blue before. Out of tree branches, yes. Overhead beams, second stories, and even porch roofs. But never from the sky, and suddenly I felt unbearably vulnerable standing in a wide-open field, where before, such surroundings had always made me feel free and eager to run.
And my paranoia was not helped by the fact that, though no one had said it out loud, we were obviously looking for a body on our own land.
On our third pass through the field, I dug a tissue from my left pocket and held it awkwardly to blow my nose—yet another simple activity rendered nearly impossible thanks to my cast. Then I froze with the folded tissue halfway to my pocket. My first unobstructed breath had brought with it a familiar scent, and an all-too-familiar jolt of fear.
Blood. Werecat blood.
“Marc,” I said, veering from the path in search of the source of the scent. He followed me, sniffing dramatically, and his pace picked up as he found the scent. Cats can’t hunt using only their noses. Unlike dogs, we just aren’t equipped for that. But we could find the source of a strong scent if it stayed still.
And this scent was horribly, miserably, unmoving.
The scent grew stronger the farther north we went, and after race-walking for less than a minute, glancing around frantically for any sign of the missing tom, I froze in my boots when my gaze snagged on a smear of red on a stalk of grass, half hiding a pale hand lying limp on the ground, fingers half curled into a fist.
I made myself take that next step forward, in spite of the dread and fury pulsing inside me. And when the body came into full view, I gasped, horrified beyond words.
If the whole mess hadn’t been nearly frozen, we would have smelled it sooner.
Jake Taylor lay on his back, so covered in blood that at first I couldn’t make sense of the chaotic, violent images my eyes were sending my brain. There were too many gashes. Too much blood. Too little sense.
“Oh, hell,” Marc said, and I flinched, though he’d spoken in little more than a whisper. He flipped open his phone and autodialed my father with the hand not holding the wrench while he squatted next to the body, careful not to step in the blood.
But I still stared.
I’d seen a good bit of carnage in my seven months as an enforcer, but nothing like this. Nothing so utterly destructive. So senselessly violent. Not even the scratch-fevered stray I’d seen perched in a tree, consuming a human victim. Even that had made a certain mad, gruesome sense compared to Jake’s death. The stray had been hungry, and had only damaged his victim in the process of eating him.
But Jake was damaged beyond all reason. His face was a mass of shredded flesh, eyes ruined, his nostrils and lips almost torn from his face. His arms had fared no better; the sleeves of his jacket were ripped along with his skin, from wrist to elbow, probably in defense of his face.
But the worst was his stomach. Jake had been completely and thoroughly eviscerated from so many lacerations—any one of which would have been fatal—that it was impossible to identify individual wounds.
“East field, near the tree line.” Marc glanced up to see if anyone else was nearby, the phone still pressed to his ear. “But it’s…gruesome. Don’t let the Taylors over here. They shouldn’t have to see this.”
“Thanks. We’ll be right there,” my father said from the other end of the line.
Marc pocketed his phone, and I knelt before he could ask if I was okay. I was fine. An Alpha-in-training was always fine, right? There was no other choice.
“Damn, these bastards are brutal,” Marc said, and I nodded, plucking a brown-and-black chevroned feather from the grass where its tip had landed in blood, like the devil’s quill. It was easily twice the length of my hand.
“But this wasn’t either of the birds who took Kaci. Couldn’t have been. We’d have seen blood on them. Smelled it. We were only a few yards away when they landed.”
“The driver, then?” Marc asked.
“That’s my guess. I didn’t get very close to him, and he was dressed. So it’s certainly possible.” I hesitated, unsure I really wanted the answer. Then I pressed on, because I needed to know. “Have you ever seen damage like this?”
“Never.” And that was saying a lot, coming from my father’s most experienced enforcer. “Cats don’t do this. Not even the crazy ones.”
Footsteps crunched toward us from behind, and we turned to see my father headed across the field, Bert Di Carlo on his heels, both frowning in grim certainty.
My dad came to a stop at my side and his jaw tightened when his gaze found Jake Taylor. Di Carlo’s face went completely blank. Without a word, my father pulled his phone from the pocket of his one casual jacket and pressed and held a single button.
“Hello?” Jace said.
“Take Brian back to the office and pour him a drink.”
For a moment, there was only silence. Then, “I’m on it.”
My dad hung up, then scrolled through his contacts list as Di Carlo reached out for the feather I still held from the puffy, bloodless end. I gave it to him gladly, and he whistled, morbidly impressed with the size.
“Rick?” My father said into his phone when a muffled, scratchy voice answered.
“Yeah?” My uncle came in loud and clear that time.
“We found Jake, and we’re taking him to the barn. Take Ed back to the house, please.”
“Will do.”
The last call my dad made, while Marc rubbed my upper arms to warm me, went to Vic. His order was simple. “Grab a roll of plastic and come to the east field, near the tree line. You’ll see us.” He hung up without a word from Vic.“Well, Greg,” Di Carlo said, as my father slid his phone into his pocket. “I don’t know what they want, but it looks like they’ve got our number.”
“Kaci…” I whispered, horrified by the possibility of what might have been. But then merciful logic interceded. “But if they’d wanted to hurt her, they could have. They wouldn’t even have bothered with the car. Right?” I needed to hear that she hadn’t come close to a horrible death. A horrible kidnapping was quite enough.
The Alphas nodded, and Marc took my good hand in his. “So why kill Jake, then?”
My father sighed and finally looked up from the dead tom. “My guess is that he saw them coming. Didn’t you say they flew out in that direction?” He pointed toward the trees to the east.
“Yeah. So they killed him to keep him from warning us?” I glanced from face to face in disbelief, but the question was largely rhetorical. We all knew the answer. “Why didn’t he call?”
“Reception’s spotty in the woods, but it looks like he tried.” My father gestured to something in the grass behind me and I turned to see a cell phone lying on the ground, smeared with blood, already flipped open and ready for use.
“They couldn’t have gotten to him in the woods. Their wingspan has to be twelve feet or better. They’d have broken both arms trying to flap in there.”
Marc’s frown deepened. “They waited until he came into the open, then attacked.”
“And they must’ve done it fast to keep us from hearing.” Di Carlo shook his head. “This was planned. They want something.”
“What could thunderbirds want with us?” I wondered aloud, as Vic and Parker appeared from around the barn, one carrying a large black bundle.
“We’ll find out when Big Bird wakes up,” Marc said.
My father shook his head. “We’ll find out now. Wake him up and make him sing.”
Four
Marc and I headed for the house while Vic and Parker took Jake to the barn. On the way to the basement, we passed the silent office, where Ed and Brian Taylor were seated on the couch with their backs to us. Jace met my gaze briefly from the love seat, and I shook my head, confirming what he’d already guessed. What the Taylors surely already knew. That we’d found a body, not an injured tom.
I felt guilty walking by them without a word, but it wasn’t my place to tell an Alpha that his son was dead. Thank goodness.
The kitchen was empty, but I could hear Kaci talking with Manx and Owen in his room as I jogged down the concrete basement stairs after Marc, only pausing to flip the switch by the door.