But the worst by far was my face. In fact, if my recent Shift had helped heal my cheek as well as my shoulder, I couldn’t imagine how bad I must have looked before. Now the entire left side of my face was swollen and bruised, an ugly bluish-purple, darkest on my cheekbone. Damn Miguel.
My eyes watered, and I squeezed them shut, trying to deny the tears an outlet, as if they didn’t really exist if I could keep them from falling. Being manhandled by Miguel hadn’t made me cry. Hearing that Marc had nearly beaten Jace to death hadn’t made me cry. Killing Eric hadn’t made me cry. But staring into the mirror at the love child of Smurfette and Rocky Balboa was more than enough to bring me to tears.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to make you cry for more than twenty years,” Ethan said. I opened my eyes and met his in the mirror. He stood behind me, a half-full garbage bag in one hand.
“All you had to do was aim for my face.”
“Makes sense, but Mom would have killed me.” He dropped the bag and turned me around by my shoulders. I put my head on his shoulder and let him hold me while I cried. I felt like an idiot, crying over a few bruises, but I couldn’t help it.“How many times have you seen me with a black eye or a broken nose?” Ethan asked, stroking my hair.
Several times, but that was one area where women’s lib dared not tread. A mutilated face was always different for a woman than for a man, no matter how highly she valued her equality and asserted her independence. “Besides,” he said, “compared to Jace, you look great.”
I groaned. How could I not have asked about Jace? “How’s he doing?” I pulled away from Ethan, wiping my face on a mostly clean bath rag.
“He’s fine. It’s nothing a few months in traction won’t fix.”
“Traction? Shit.” I frowned up at him. “No one said anything about traction.”
Ethan smiled grimly, dropping a grimy razor from the countertop into the bag. “It was a joke, Faythe. His arms and legs are fine. And by some miracle, he didn’t lose any teeth.”
That was the best news I’d heard yet, because while a dentist could replace a broken or missing human tooth, the artificial parts would have to come out before Shifting. There was nothing that could be done about broken teeth in cat form. At least, not for a cat that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“I feel terrible. I shouldn’t have taken his keys.”
Ethan shrugged. “I told him I’d hold you down once he’s back on his feet, so he can get in a good swing or two.”
“Just not my face. Please.” I ran my fingers through damp hair, arranging and rearranging it, looking for a way to cover the left side of my face without compromising my vision. No luck. I could either satisfy my vanity or preserve my depth perception, but I couldn’t do both at once.
“Okay, you’ve primped enough. Now go bug someone else,” Ethan said, shooing me out the door. “I have to clean the bathroom.”
“That should be interesting,” I quipped. “Maybe I should stay and watch.”
“Maybe you should stay and help.”
Cupping one hand behind my ear, I grinned, pretending to listen. “I think I hear Marc calling.”
Ethan grunted and opened his trash bag, and I left him to his work.
I’d had serious doubts about the guys’ ability to clean, in spite of Marc’s reassurance, but never in my life had I been happier to be wrong. I’d spent less than half an hour in the bathroom, but when I came out, there wasn’t a soda can or pizza crust in sight. The floors and furniture were still dusty, downright filthy in places, since there wasn’t so much as a bottle of Windex in the entire house. Still, the transformation was unbelievable.
Eight large black trash bags sat piled against one wall of the dining room, each bulging with irregular shapes and closed with a white wire tie. Against the opposite wall, three more bags stood, half-full and still open.
“Those are for the burn pile,” Marc said from behind me, nodding at the row of open bags. “The rest we’ll drop into the nearest public Dumpster.”
“What’s in the open ones?”
“Anything that could expose us or identify them. Eric’s ID, his bloody clothes and shoes, all his personal possessions.”
Nausea stirred the contents of my stomach. “Please tell me you didn’t put him in a bag, too.”
Marc chuckled. “You’ve seen too many movies.”
“You’ve buried too many bodies.”
“I won’t argue with that.” He put one arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Eric’s still in the basement. We don’t have time to deal with that kind of cleanup. We’re just playing Merry Maids.” He paused, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. “Haven’t you seen Pulp Fiction?”
I smiled. That was one of my favorite movies, and he knew it. “Let me guess, the Wolf is coming to tidy up my mess?”
“More like the Pink Panther. Your dad’s sending Michael over tonight with another crew to deal with the big stuff. The body, the mattresses, dismantling and disposing of the cages.” Marc ticked off the details on his fingers like he might name items on a grocery list. A bag of sugar, a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, the corpse in the basement…
He grinned. “Rule number one for closing the site of an incident—never dispose of a body in broad daylight.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said. “What about the furniture?”
“They’ll burn all the mattresses, including the ones up here, and leave the rest of the furniture, what little there is. The landlord can do whatever he wants with it.”
“So, you guys are almost done?”
“Just about. But we’re still waiting on Parker and…” Listening, he turned toward the kitchen window, which I noticed they’d covered with a rough square of cardboard. “They’re back.”
“Good. I need some clothes.”
“Really? I heard terry cloth was in this year.” He grinned, hooking a finger beneath the top edge of my towel. I slapped his hand away, trying to maintain a stern face. It didn’t work. “Come on, you look good in Egyptian cotton.”
“I look better out of it,” I teased.
His mouth dropped open, and his moan followed me through the dining room and into the entryway, where I peeked out through the glass in the front door. Abby tripped going up the front steps, smiling at something Parker had said, and I opened the door in time to catch her before she flattened the bulging Wal-Mart bags dangling from each hand.
“Thanks.” She brushed past me into the house, seemingly almost…normal. I glanced at Parker, one eyebrow raised.
He shrugged. “She just needed to get out.”
“I guess so.” But I credited her improvement to the houseful of familiar cats, rather than the fresh air. Smiling, I took the bag he offered. Clothes. Finally.
Abby followed me to the bathroom, where Ethan was still busy. She dropped a bag of cleaning supplies on the counter and I led her to Sean’s room to change, on the assumption that his scent would bother her less than either Eric’s or Miguel’s.
My cousin had decent taste. Either that, or she knew me better than I’d realized. For me, she’d picked out a pair of low-rise jeans and a dark red tank, with wide shoulder straps. Black hair looks good against red, so I was pretty happy. Until I looked in the mirror. I should have known better than to look in the damn mirror.Abby smiled sympathetically at me in the glass, and I immediately felt guilty for my self-pity, when she’d been through so much worse. “Here,” she said, handing me a shoe box. “We had to guess your size, but I thought you’d like the style.”
I lifted the lid to find a pair of white Reeboks with red-and-black accents. “You guessed well.” They were only half a size too big. “Thanks. It’ll be good to wear shoes again.”
“No problem.”
We laced up our new shoes together. Hers had pink-and-purple accents.
In the hall, whistling accompanied a set of heavy footsteps. “If you’re all dressed, make yourselves useful,” Lucas said, leaning against the door frame. “Catch.” He tossed a can of dust spray to Abby and a bottle of no-wax floor cleaner at me. I say at me because Abby caught hers with the ease of nine years as a softball catcher, but mine slipped right through my congenital butterfingers and burst open on the floor.
Lucas laughed. “Well, that’s one way to do it. There’s a mop in the kitchen, by the fridge.”
Abby and I got to work, and half an hour later Marc officially declared the house clean. “They’d even get their security deposit back, if not for the dent Faythe put in the wall,” he said.
“Like you’re one to throw stones,” I retorted.
Parker and Owen stuffed the trash bags into the back of Daddy’s twelve-passenger van, while Ethan gathered up the cleaning supplies and made a last-minute check to be sure we hadn’t overlooked anything.
While everyone else piled into the van out front, Marc and I stood in the basement, watching Lucas prepare the prisoner for transfer. Ryan’s perpetual frown deepened as he stared at the transport restraints: solid steel wrist and ankle cuffs, each attached with little slack to a waist chain of the same material. The restraint system was one of a pair kept in the back of the van, for emergencies. I’d never seen them used before; we rarely had the opportunity to bring anyone back alive. Ryan didn’t seem particularly grateful to be the first.