Stray (Shifters #1)(19)

“I wasn’t sneaking up.”
“The hell you weren’t,” I snapped, swinging my feet onto the floor. My right foot came down on a chess piece, and I bent to pick it up. It was a jade rook, shaped like a traditional castle turret. And it was whole, thank goodness. I had no idea how to go about replacing one-of-a-kind chess pieces carved especially for my father by an associate in China. The artisan whose handiwork I’d sent crashing to the floor had died a decade before I was born.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Not now, Marc.” My voice was sleep-gruff and groggy. “I can’t deal with you anymore tonight.”
“It’s not about us.”
“Good, because there is no us.” The rook still nestled in my palm, I slid off the love seat and onto the floor to pick up the other pieces. Marc knelt across from me with the scattering of jade and marble figures between us, like slain soldiers on a miniature battlefield.
“I was supposed to go to Oklahoma tomorrow.”
“I know. Jace told me.” I set the rook on a corner square of the chessboard, next to a jade knight, a horse frozen in the act of tossing its mane.
“What did he say?”
“Just that you were supposed to check out a report about another stray.” I held a white marble bishop up to the light, looking for cracks. “Why?”
“Did he tell you who called it in?”
I shook my head slowly, suspiciously, my focus shifting from the bishop to Marc. Why should it matter who made the report?
“Danny Carver.”
I froze, my hand clenching around the cold marble, and met his eyes in dread. Dr. Carver. Shit. That means there’s a body.
Dr. Danny Carver was a tom born into one of the western Prides. When I was a kid, he worked as a part-time enforcer for my father as part of an agreement allowing him to complete his fellowship in forensic pathology at a school in our territory. He’d been a kind of last-minute backup, just for emergencies. After his fellowship, he’d taken a job as an assistant medical examiner in Oklahoma and my father had gladly accepted him as an adopted member of our Pride, just as he would later accept Jace, Vic, Parker, and several other toms now scattered across the territory.
After nearly ten years in the same office, Dr. Carver was promoted to senior assistant to the state medical examiner, which gave us a conveniently placed set of eyes and ears. We’d hoped never to have to use his position, and we’d been lucky for the most part. Until now. 
“What happened?” I asked, my hand hovering over the prone form of a white pawn. I desperately didn’t want to know the answer, but I’d long since learned that ignorance was not really bliss. Not ever.
“They brought in a partially dismembered body yesterday morning,” Marc said.
I groaned, and let my hand fall into my lap, empty. I was supposed to be at school studying the classics, not at home hearing about abductions and dead bodies. This was the worst summer vacation ever.
When I realized he’d stopped talking, I glanced at Marc. He hooked one eyebrow at me like a facial question mark, and I nodded for him to continue as I picked up the pawn and set it on an empty square in the second row.
“The cops can’t figure out what happened to her, but their best guess so far is that she was attacked by some psychopath and left to die, then actually killed by a large wildcat. But it won’t take them long to measure the claw and bite marks and realize there shouldn’t be cats that big roaming wild in suburban Oklahoma. Or anywhere else in the U.S.”
My eyes were glued to his face as I waited for the rest, but nothing more came. “What happened to her?” I asked again, my hands tangled together in my lap. He was avoiding the details of the crime, probably hoping to spare me from the specifics. Far from finding that considerate, I found it annoying. If I needed to know, I’d rather get it all over with at once.
“There were finger-size bruises on her thighs and more mixed in with claw marks on her neck. Danny thinks he raped her, then Shifted to tear out her throat.” Marc glanced away, but I caught a glimpse of raw fear and outrage in his eyes before he could lower them. “Then he ripped into her stomach.”
My breath caught in my throat as I choked on my own horror. A jade pawn slipped from my fingers. Marc’s hand shot out, almost too fast to see, and the pawn fell into his palm before it could hit the floor.
That poor girl, I thought, watching as he carefully placed the piece on the chessboard in line with its comrades. I cleared my throat, drawing his eyes back to mine. “How old?”
“Faythe, you don’t need—”
One sharp glance stopped him cold, and I was glad to see that at least one of my old tricks still worked. “How old, Marc?”
“Nineteen.”
My eyes squeezed shut as I gave in to my need to wallow in denial. That kind of thing didn’t happen in our territory. In South America, yes. But not in the States, and definitely not in the south-central territory. At least, not since it happened to Marc’s mother.
I ran my thumb over the cold, smooth chess piece in my hand, noticing absently that it was the marble queen, stately in her white robes and pointed crown. She lay on my palm, the features only hinted at on her polished stone face. But the expression I saw on her was one I’d seen in a photograph once, before Marc snatched it from my hand to shove it back beneath the socks in his top drawer.
Sonora Ramos. He never spoke about her, so I knew nothing but her name, and I only knew that because I’d overheard a private conversation between my parents.
The territorial council recognized only three capital crimes. The first was murder, the second was infection of a human, and the third was disclosure to a human. The wildcat who’d invaded our territory fifteen years earlier was guilty of all three.
We never discovered his real name, but there was a note in his back pocket made out to “Jose,” so that’s what we called him, when we called him anything at all. Jose snuck into our territory after being run out of a Pride somewhere in Central America for crimes I couldn’t stand to even think about. From what we could tell, his presence in southern Texas was reported the very day he arrived. It was an incredible stroke of luck. Pure chance. And if it hadn’t happened, Marc would have died that night.As soon as he got the call, Daddy dispatched his three best enforcers with instructions to find the intruder and escort him back to the border with as much force as necessary. Unfortunately, a simple escort proved to be much too little and far too late.
The enforcers found Jose, in cat form, in the home of a widowed Mexican immigrant. He killed two of them while the third Shifted. The remaining enforcer took out the now-wounded Jose with little more than a scratch to show for his trouble, but it was too late for Sonora Ramos.
Jose had broken into Marc’s house and attacked his mother while she slept. The details of the assault were eerily similar to what happened to the girl in Oklahoma, including the fact that Jose used his victim to satisfy more than one kind of appetite. He’d had his muzzle buried in what remained of her stomach when Daddy’s enforcers found him.
Marc woke up at some point during the attack and tried to defend his mother, but Jose swatted him away with a single paw full of unsheathed claws. With Jose dead, the enforcer found Marc between his mother’s bed and the wall, bleeding and unconscious. The claw marks on his chest were already swollen at the edges and festering—sure signs that he would soon be one of us.
He was only fourteen years old.
Marc waved a chess piece in front of my nose, drawing my attention back to him. “Are you okay?”
I tried to smile, but my effort felt more like a grimace. “Yeah. You?”
He nodded. “I’m fine.” But I found that hard to believe. How could he be fine, faced with such a graphic reminder of what had happened to his mother?
I studied Marc’s face, conscious suddenly of how much he’d changed since the day we met, the morning after his mother died. He’d looked so scared, lying alone in the guest bed, a wisp of a boy with dark curly hair and deep dimples. He’d arrived at the Lazy S with nothing but a threadbare suitcase and a sad scowl. But he was a fighter. Even as an eight-year-old, I’d recognized the will to survive in the quiet defiance in his eyes and hard line of his mouth, both of which said that he’d seen the worst the world had to offer, and that nothing I put him through could possibly compare.
He was right.
Sitting on the floor across from him fifteen years later, I thought back to his first year with us. His adjustment period was long and hard, and his first Shift sent his body into severe shock. He wouldn’t let anyone near him at first, and didn’t say a single word until he’d been on the ranch for nearly two months. But in the end, he not only survived, he thrived, against the predictions of the entire council.
Except for having watched his mother die, Marc was probably the most fortunate stray in history. Because he was so young when he was scratched, and because his attack happened on our territory, my parents felt responsible for him. They took him in and nursed him through the initial sickness—the scratch-fever—when most other Alphas would have let him die, not out of callous disregard, but out of practicality. Survival of the fittest. In the wild, when a mother dies, her cubs die too. But my parents couldn’t let Marc die. They saw in him the opportunity to try to make up for the solitude and tragedy that define the lives of most strays.