Rogue (18 page)

Not listening was no longer an option. Maybe it never had been.

Holding my breath, I pressed a button and brought the phone up to my ear, my hand shaking. I focused on the tree line ahead, waiting for the message to play.

“I got your message, Faythe. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you—” Again his words were cut off by what sounded like gunfire and helicopter blades—the same sounds we’d heard on Painter’s message to my father. “—you don’t want to see me. But I’m looking forward to seeing you.” More explosions, and blades beating the air. “—take care of something tomorrow, but then I’m all yours. Won’t be long now.”

Another series of bangs, and this time the beating sound—obviously some kind of aircraft—faded off into the distance over the line. Whatever those sounds were, Andrew was much closer to the action than Painter had been.

“—can’t wait to show off my new look. I think you’re really going to like it. How could you not, right?”

The message ended with a short buzz of static, a muted click, then silence. Then a soft female voice came on the line, asking if I’d like to save the message. I pressed the yes key and flipped the phone closed, my hands still shaking.

My breath came in quick, panicked bursts, and I leaned against the wall to keep from falling. The fingers of my left hand traced the rough lines of mortar behind me. I focused
on the harsh, gritty feel, using it to assure myself that I was awake. That I wasn’t in the middle of some terrible nightmare. That I hadn’t dreamed the horrible voice mail.

And I hadn’t.

Somehow, though he’d been human when I left him, tucked safe and sound among his textbooks, tennis courts, and completely nonlethal lattes, Andrew was now a tomcat. An honest-to-goodness, motherfucking, scratch-fevered stray.

And he was headed my way.

N
o. I shook my head in denial, though no one was there to see it.
That’s not possible.
Yet it was true, nonetheless.

They don’t even know about me, do they? You never told them.
The words from my last conversation with Andrew played though my head, and they made so much more sense in retrospect. He wasn’t talking about our relationship. He was talking about his new
species.
He seemed to think I knew what he’d become, and had been keeping it from my family. But I hadn’t known. How the hell
could
I have known?

Chill bumps popped up all over my arms and legs, in spite of the hot Texas night. This couldn’t be happening. Andrew was
human
when I left campus. Absolutely, positively one hundred percent human. No fur. No claws. No canines.

So when had that changed? And who changed it?
I rubbed both my arms at once, trying to offset the chill spreading over me from the inside out.

Andrew’s family was from Tennessee, which belonged to the Midwest Pride, and he went to school in Texas, which was
in our territory. So unless he’d been to one of the free zones lately, he was pretty unlikely to have ever met a stray.

That left only one other possibility. As badly as I hated to admit it, he
could
have been scratched by a Pride cat. But the chances were slim. Creating a stray carried an automatic death sentence, and very few Pride cats were willing to take that kind of risk. Very,
very
few.

And it’s not like strays could be created by accident. An infectious scratch or bite could only be delivered in cat form, so casual physical contact with humans—such as a rough round of sex or even a fistfight—couldn’t possibly result in the creation of a stray.

So where could Andrew have come into contact with a werecat in cat form?
Any
werecat?

I refused to believe that my ex-boyfriend had been targeted by chance; that was like saying Lincoln was just in the wrong theater at the wrong time. Someone had
intentionally
dragged Andrew into werecat business, and whoever the bastard was, his fate would be sealed once we got one good whiff of Andrew. The infector’s base scent would be forever threaded through that of his victim—however lightly—just as Marc’s scent carried a permanent reminder of the stray who’d killed his mother and infected him.

It was a bitch of a double whammy, and the reason more than a few strays never came to terms with their new identity. But in this case, the scent trail would help us catch the slimy prick who’d put an end to Andrew’s human existence. At which point we’d end his own. An eye for an eye.

Tell Marc I’ll see him, too. I think he and I have a lot to talk about.

Shit.
The very thought of that conversation introduced me to all new levels of stress. And humiliation. And…

An ache began behind my eyes and quickly grew into a searing, throbbing pain and pressure. My right hand clenched my phone, and my left flew up to feel my eyes, which seemed unchanged. For several moments I was blind, dependent on the rustle of leaves in the wind to assure me I still stood in my own yard. Panic set in and I almost screamed, terrified by the claustrophobic sensation of the sudden, nearly complete darkness.

But then the pain subsided, and my vision improved dramatically. Light flowed back into existence rapidly, but gently. I eyed the trees beyond the guesthouse, and saw each leaf in eerily crisp focus, from the thin green veins to the spiked, serrated edges. Cracks in the tree bark seemed surreal in their rough, ragged detail. Every blade of grass at my feet stood out in vivid contrast to those around it, each rendered in a different shade of green as the available light struck them at slightly different angles.

I glanced up, expecting to see the moon breaking free from its cloud cover. But it hadn’t. If anything, the clouds had thickened, as forecast by the local weatherman, who’d predicted an unseasonably strong storm overnight. Yet I could see almost as if the sun were up, though my vision was tinted in shades of blue and green.

My eyes had Shifted. I was sure of it, though I couldn’t tell any difference in my face without a mirror to stare into.

Though several of our oldest legends hinted at the possibility, there were no other partial Shifts on record, and as far as I knew, I was the only werecat to ever experience one. I’d done it twice before, both during times of extreme stress, yet in spite of several concentrated efforts since that last time, I’d been unable to repeat the feat.

Because of that, the Territorial Council had refused to believe my partial Shift was anything more than the delusion of a desperate tabby in a desperate situation, even with both Abby and Marc vouching for me.

If I go back in now, my father will see, and they’ll all have to believe me.

But then I’d have to explain the emotional stress that had triggered the partial Shift, and as badly as I wanted to prove I could do it, I wanted to keep my secret even more. At least until I could tell Marc about Andrew in private. That was the least he deserved.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I reversed the partial Shift. As soon as my vision was back to normal, I jogged across the yard to the guesthouse and through the door. Parker waved to me from the living-room computer as I headed straight for the kitchen. Then, six-pack of chilled Cokes in hand, I crossed the room again and onto the porch, just in time to hear the screen door to the main house squeal open.

I looked up as Marc stepped onto the back porch. “Faythe?” he called, the concern in his tone contrasting sharply with the bitter anger Andrew’s voice had held. “Where’d you go?”

I held up the sodas, trying desperately to regulate my pulse before he heard it racing. “Right here. I’m coming.” I took a deep breath, then jogged down the steps and across the soft green grass.

“Is something wrong? You smell…anxious.”

“Nope. Just thirsty. What’s up?” I asked as I crossed the yard toward him before he could question me further.

“Michael found a pattern with the strippers.” I knew from
the grim look on his face as I climbed the steps that I wasn’t going to like whatever my brother had found.

We entered the office just in time to hear Ethan tell my father that he and Jace hadn’t been able to find my mother. “…but she can’t have gone far. Her car’s still out front.”

“She’s in the woods,” I said, settling onto the arm of the leather couch as I pulled a soda from the bunch and tossed it to him.

My father nodded, his expression worried but not surprised. He’d known about her solitary treks in the forest. I should have guessed. “She’ll be back when she’s ready,” he said, clearly dismissing the subject. “Faythe, is everything okay?”

“Fine.” I popped the top on my own can and downed a quarter of it in one swallow, to keep from having to answer any more questions. For the moment, anyway.

“Good. Michael, repeat what you said about the missing girls, for those who missed it.

“I didn’t find any pattern among their personal lives.” Michael pushed back the desk and stood, pulling several sheets from the printer tray as he passed it on his way to our Alpha’s side. “They range in age from twenty-one to thirty-three. All of them are single except Melissa Vassey, who’s married with one child. There’s a record of one domestic disturbance at her address, but at this point, I’m thinking that has nothing to do with her disappearance.

“Their educational backgrounds run the gamut, too. One college grad, one still studying, and two with only high school diplomas. As far as I can tell, they’ve never met one another. So I was at a complete loss for things in common until I did a search for their pictures.”

Michael met my gaze, and my throat tried to close when I
saw the dark dread in his eyes, completely unfiltered by his spectacle lenses. He held up the first picture—a black-and-white pixilated image printed on twenty-pound paper—and I frowned, squinting to see it better. I shook my head and held my hand out for the page. Michael handed the first one to me, and another to Marc.

The image was poor quality, but more than adequate to make my brother’s point. Melissa Vassey—based on the caption—had long dark hair, just like mine. As did Amber Cleary, whose picture Marc held.

“You can’t tell from these, but they both have green eyes. And so does Pam Gilbert,” Michael said, holding up one of the two remaining pages.

“Wow,” Jace whispered, staring at me openly. “They look like you.”

Not quite. Two of the three women in question were quite a bit better endowed than I was—ridiculously so, in Melissa Vassey’s case—and no two of us had the same nose. But I knew what he meant. We all had straight, dark hair and green eyes. Not the most common combination of features.

He’s making a statement,
I thought, stunned to the point of speechlessness. Unable to tear my eyes from Melissa Vassey’s face, I slid down from the arm of the couch onto one of the cushions.
Though I’ll be damned if I know what he’s trying to say.

The Andrew I’d known could never have taken those strippers. But then, he could never have made those phone calls, either.
He’s lost it,
I thought, shaking my head before I realized what I was doing.
Scratch-fever has completely fried his brain.
Why else would he take Amber, and Kellie, and…

Wait.
My head popped up and I frowned at Michael. “Kellie Tandy doesn’t fit the pattern. She’s blond.”

Michael nodded. “She has brown eyes, too.”

“So she’s not part of this?” I asked, my frown deepening. “But we
know
the tabby was in the Forbidden Fruit.”

“Show her,” my father said.

I glanced first at him, then at Michael, as he held up the last page from the printer. “Forbidden Fruit has a Web site, with a ‘cast list,’ complete with photographs of the dancers. In costume.” He handed me the page, and I took it, dreading what I’d see. “Third from the end.”

But I’d already found her. Second row. Kellie Tandy, from the waist up, her ample cleavage bursting from the top of a black leather cat suit, à la Halle Berry. However, the important part, the part that made her fit the pattern, was her hair. She wore a wig—a mass of straight black hair, with pointed cat ears sticking up from either side. She also wore white plastic whiskers glued to her face, on either side of a perfect little human nose. Beneath authentic-looking cat eyes.

They were theatrical contacts. They had to be. But they were eerily accurate, down to the striations in her irises that I was sure were various shades of green in real life, though they were gray in the photo.

Marc took my hand in his, stroking the side of my palm with his thumb, as if to comfort me. If only he knew what an impossibly Herculean task that was at the moment. “We still don’t know who the tabby is, or why she’s following this psycho from club to club. But we should be able to figure out who
he
is now. Or at least narrow our list of suspects down from ‘every cat in the country’ to ‘someone Faythe knows.’”

“That can’t be too hard.” Smiling, Ethan dropped onto the
love seat across from me and Marc. “She can’t know that many strays. She’s been at school for the past five years, and we’d have known if anyone was hanging around who shouldn’t have been.”

“What if it’s not someone she knows, but someone who knows her?” Jace asked, settling onto the arm of the couch on my other side. “Or thinks he does.”

“Same thing,” Ethan insisted. “Either way, if there was another werecat on campus, we’d have known about it.”

Ethan was right. I’d been under constant surveillance by my father’s enforcers at school, and if another werecat had shown up, they’d have taken him out before I had the chance to break so much as a nail on the poor bastard. But the joke was on them, because the werecat in question wasn’t a werecat at all when we’d been on campus. He was a normal, human math major.

“Enough,” my father said. “Faythe, I think Marc’s right. The tom in question seems to know you. Or at least know what you look like. Assuming it’s a tom at all, and I don’t think we should rule out anything at this point.”

Well, what do you know? It only took a female serial killer to bring my father into the gender-equal twenty-first century. I’d thought it would take full-scale war.

Closing my eyes, I pulled in a long, slow breath, trying to ignore my galloping heartbeat. When I opened my eyes, everyone was staring at me. “Let me save you all a lot of trouble. I know who’s taking the strippers.”

“What?” Marc shifted on the sofa to face me, but I couldn’t look at him. I watched my father instead, as I said the rest of what had to be said.

“It’s Andrew Wallace.”

Silence greeted my announcement. Complete and total silence, except for the whispered breaths coming from around the room. And Marc’s might not even have been among them. I think he actually stopped breathing.

Michael was the first to speak, from his perch on the arm of the love seat, and I really should have seen that coming. “Andrew? That skinny guy you were sleeping with last spring?”

“Damn it, Michael!” I glared at him from across the rug as Marc tensed on the cushion next to me. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

He shrugged, crossing bulging arms over his spotless polo shirt. “I’m just getting my facts straight. So…you’re saying you were screwing a serial kidnapper for most of your last semester at school?” He turned then to face our father as my blood boiled. “I’d say that was tuition money well spent.”

“Michael…” my father said, his voice thick with warning.

“What?
I’m
not the problem here.
She
is.” He whirled back to face me, fury and frustration battling for control of his expression. “Where Faythe goes, trouble follows, and as usual, we’re left to clean up her mess.”

“You son of a bitch!” My hands curled into fists, and I felt myself leaning forward, ready and more than willing to take some of my stress and frustration out on his face. “Ethan’s drilled half the state of Texas, and you’ve never once thrown that in his face—”