Stray (Shifters #1)(34)

“You okay?”
I glanced at Michael, almost surprised to realize he was still there. “No. Are you?”He shook his head. “I guess no one’s okay right now.”
Squeezing my eyes shut against tears, I turned the lotion over my palm and squeezed, but nothing came out. I shook it and squeezed again with the same result. Irritated, I turned the bottle right side up and glanced at the lid. Damn. Forgot to open it. “Do her parents know?”
“Dad told them in private.” Michael shuffled his feet on the carpet, head bent to watch them. “Mom’s helping with Donna. They had to sedate her.”
“What about Kyle?” I set the lotion back on my dresser, still unopened. I was moisturized enough.
“Not yet. His flight lands in about half an hour, and Dad doesn’t want him to know until he gets here.”
That was probably wise. Kyle would need privacy to voice his grief, and an airport was hardly private.
“How…?” I closed my eyes, and tried again. “What did they do to her?”
“No, Faythe,” Michael said, and I opened my eyes to see him frowning firmly. “You don’t need to hear the specifics. It won’t help.”
“She was my friend, and I need to know.”
He shook his head, slowly, and not unsympathetically. But he didn’t speak.
“Please, Michael.” That worked. Or maybe he just finally understood that her death wouldn’t really sink in until I heard it out loud.
“I don’t have many details,” he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of yet another dark suit.
“Just tell me what you know.”
He nodded, shuffling back to lean against the wall by the door, as if he needed support. “They beat the shit out of her. Hit her in the head with something hard. The whole back of her skull was smashed in.”
My fists clenched around air, and his face blurred as tears distorted my vision. “You said ‘bastards.’ Plural. How do they know there was more than one?”
Michael dropped his eyes and felt around for the doorknob, as if he’d rather leave than say anything more.
“Please, Michael. I need to know.”
Frown lines appeared around his mouth. “Vic said he could smell them on her. Three of them. All over her, Faythe. One was a stray, but the only scent he recognized was Sean’s.”
Sean. I’d been right, for once. At least in part. But being right didn’t feel good. It felt like shit.
“Her clothes,” I whispered, fingering the hem of my own green halter top. “Vic smelled them on her clothes, right?”
He shook his head slowly, and this time his hand found the doorknob. “They didn’t find any clothes.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. Air was there, but it wouldn’t fill my lungs. I opened my mouth, and that solved the problem. I’d forgotten to breathe. 
They’d raped her and beaten in the back of her skull. Then they’d taken her home for her brothers to find. It was just like the human girls, only worse. They’d gone through special efforts for Sara because she was one of them. One of us. She was one of ours, and they’d killed her. Then put her on display.
Nausea gripped my stomach with an iron fist. My knees buckled. The room lurched, walls flying past my eyes. As I fell, Michael lunged for me. He got one arm beneath my shoulders before I hit the ground and gently eased me the rest of the way to the floor.
My vision grayed, and I fought to remain conscious. Somehow I won. I was on the floor, but not by choice, and all I could see was my ceiling. Michael was right; I should have sat down.
“Is she okay?” Marc asked from somewhere outside my field of vision. I hadn’t even heard him come in.
“Stay with her,” Michael said, and his arms were gone. My door latch clicked softly and his footsteps faded as Marc’s face appeared over mine, eyebrows furrowed in concern.
“Can you sit up?”
I nodded and shoved away the hand he offered, pushing myself up to lean against the dresser. I hadn’t passed out, but I might as well have. Falling on the floor still made me look the part of the delicate woman they were always trying to protect. Why don’t you just buy a corset and a parasol while you’re at it, Faythe?
“You heard about Sara?” I asked, rubbing the sore spot on the back of my head.
“Yeah. Your dad told me.” He swiveled to join me against the dresser, scooting several inches away to avoid the handle poking into his back. “We’ll get them,” he said. “I promise you we’ll get Abby back.” His jaw tensed, the muscles clenching and releasing rhythmically.
I trailed my finger along the pattern in the carpet, avoiding looking at him. “We may not have to. It looks like they’ll bring her home in a couple of days.”
“Stop it, Faythe,” he snapped. Then his voice softened. “We’ll find her, and she’ll be fine.” He seemed to need me to believe it, so I nodded. But I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe in anything at all at that moment, except my own need for revenge, convulsing through me like an emotional seizure.
“What are we going to do, Marc?”
“Greg wants you to stay in your room until things calm down a little.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I didn’t know how to explain it, and for the first time I viewed my lack of enforcer experience as a true drawback. I didn’t want to know what to do with my hands, or how to keep my mind occupied. I wanted to know what we were going to do. How were we going to find the monsters who killed Sara? And how were we going to make sure they didn’t kill Abby, too? I wanted practical information, a plan of action. I wanted him to tell me how I could make those sons of bitches pay for what they’d done. I wanted them to pay with their lives, but not before someone had a chance to slice them each open and—
My face throbbed, the sudden pain breaking into my thoughts. Something sharp pricked my lip, and I tasted blood.
Marc stiffened beside me, inhaling deeply. “Are you bleeding?”
I touched my mouth with one finger. It came away bloody. “I think I bit my lip,” I said, but the words didn’t come out right. I ran my tongue carefully over my upper teeth, gasping to feel sharp, not quite unfamiliar points. “What the hell?” My hands hovered around my mouth, shaking, as I tried to figure out what to do with them.
Marc sat up on his knees and took my chin in one hand, turning me to face him. I opened my mouth obligingly, in a grotesque imitation of a smile. His eyes widened, and he touched the point of one tooth gently.“Holy shit, Faythe. Your teeth Shifted. Just your teeth. No, wait.” He took my head in both hands and turned it toward the light. I winced, slamming my eyelids shut against the piercing glare, but he’d already seen what he wanted. “Your eyes Shifted, too.”
“That’s impossible.” My mouth butchered the words. “My teeth feel different, but my vision hasn’t changed. I still see like a human.” I could barely understand what I’d said, so I expected Marc to look confused, but he didn’t. He just gestured toward the mirror.
“See for yourself.”
I stood in front of the dresser, staring at my face in the mirror. My mouth looked strange. My jaw was elongated, but only slightly. It might not even have been noticeable if not for the full-size canines growing down from my upper jaw and up from my lower one. I couldn’t even close my mouth.
The effect was bizarre, and less than attractive. And pretty damn scary. I shivered, frightened by my own appearance.
I glanced at Marc in the mirror, bracing for the disgust I was sure I’d see on his face, but it wasn’t there. He looked fascinated. He leaned forward to see the changes up close. Again. “How the hell did you do that?”
“Don’t know.” Donno.
“Look at your eyes.”
I leaned toward the mirror until my nose almost touched the glass. He was right. They were different. But as with my jaw, the Shift was incomplete. The shape of my actual eyeballs hadn’t changed, but my pupils and irises had. Rather than the normal round shape of a human’s pupils, mine were vertically oriented ovals, with pointed edges at the top and bottom, instead of gentle curves. They were a cat’s pupils, and even as I watched, pulling back slightly from the mirror, they narrowed to slits, constricting the flow of light into my eyes.
But my pupils weren’t the most amazing part. My irises were extraordinary. I’d always thought the color remained the same in either form, but I’d been wrong. I’d only seen my cat eyes two or three times, since a cat had few reasons to look at its own reflection. As a cat, I hadn’t been able to see the tiny yellow specks, or the subtle color variances in every shade of green. And I had certainly never noticed the dizzying pattern of striations echoing the shape of my iris.
Yet for all that my eyes had changed, brightening the room almost unbearably, my vision stayed the same. I still saw the full spectrum of colors visible to the human eye, and objects were clear even at a distance. The odd combination of human and cat characteristics was disorienting, and brought to my mind images of the Egyptian goddess Bast, though I didn’t really resemble her with my human ears and nose. I had an urge to laugh at the absurdity of my own appearance. 
Marc didn’t find it the least bit funny. “Here. Try this.” He flipped the wall switch, and the light went out. It wasn’t a very good test of my night vision because the sun was still up, and light filtered into the room through the cracks in my blinds. But it was enough. In the pale evening shadows, I saw like a cat, in muted hues of blue and green, and a dozen shades of black, white and brown.