Along Came a Tiger (Tiger Shifters) (6 page)

“We can get around that if you want to go. For the closure.”

“It won’t help,” she stated.

“Probably not, but I’ll still take you.”

She rolled her head to stare into the cold fireplace. Did she want to go to the funeral? No. Honestly, she didn’t. She should. What kind of person didn’t want to attend her best friend’s funeral? She’d look like an unfeeling, cold asshole if she didn’t attend. For appearances sake, she should go. It was the
right
thing to do. But she really, really didn’t want to.

“I’m not ready to say goodbye. If anyone asks, I’ll just say I was too edgy because of my approaching estrous,” she finally said. “That I didn’t think I could handle the funeral.”

“An honest enough excuse.”

He was right. She still felt like a terrible person. Not going to her best friend’s funeral had to rank up there as one of the worst things you could do. But if she killed Williams
…Would she feel better?

Or worse?

“Go to sleep, Sarah,” Daniel said quietly.

“I can’t sleep. I’m too wound up.”

“Try. I can’t stand seeing you so tired.”

She looked at him again, really looked, and noticed the signs of stress and exhaustion lining his handsome face. A bittersweet ache filled her. She wanted to crawl into his lap and let him stroke her back until they both fell asleep.

“You’re tired, too.” She sat forward and set her hands on her knees to stand. “Come to bed—,” she said without thinking. Her skin heated. “I mean, you need sleep, too.” Because he did.

“I’ll stay here on the couch.” He held her gaze for a long minute. “It’s better if I’m not too close to you right now.”

The admission quickened her pulse, and her body was suddenly alive again. She swallowed hard. Being around Daniel overrode her common sense. She desperately wanted to recapture the way they were during the Run, the feeling of the world falling away until only she and Daniel existed.

All she’d have to do was climb onto his lap and kiss him. A kiss, to remind herself there was something good in the world, something hot and important, and freeing. She knew he wouldn’t refuse her, as the delicious flavor of his desire spicing his citrus scent filled her nostrils.

After her last cycle, Sarah admitted to Su-jin that she was in love with Daniel. Her friend was so thrilled she’d squealed and lifted Sarah off her feet in a huge hug. The enthusiastic embrace surprised them both. They’d spent the rest of the night laughing, drinking wine, and discussing when and how Sarah should tell Daniel about her feelings.

She’d intended to tell him this estrous—after making him catch her, of course. And maybe after they made love, because after running she usually couldn’t wait to have him inside her.

Being around Daniel, letting his musky male scent fill her head and heart…it helped. On a very basic level, having him close soothed her even as it excited her.

As they stared at each other, she could imagine a life with him—children, noise, laughter, sex, fights, and triumphs. A partnership that supported them both through the years.

But to have that life, to see that vision come to be, she’d have to let go of her need for revenge. There was no way to kill Williams and not lose Daniel, not in the time she had to get to Williams before Joseph did.

Su-jin wouldn’t want that for her. Her friend would want her to marry Daniel, have children, live a long time, and love thoroughly.

Yet Su-jin would never have any of those things for herself. She would never know what it was like to fall in love, to have children…She’d never even gotten to Run and experience the thrill of leading all those males on a chase, letting the one she wanted catch her. The release and joy and satisfaction of three days with that man.

Williams had robbed Su-jin of everything. Could Sarah face herself in the mirror if she let that go?

No. No, she couldn’t.

Where did that leave her and Daniel?

“I won’t try going anywhere,” she said. “Not tonight. You’ll be able to relax.”

He nodded without comment or any change of expression. There was heat in his gaze, but also a kind of unease. He didn’t trust her to do as she’d just promised.

A new hurt took another chunk out of her heart. He didn’t trust her.

Because she’d given him cause not to.

CHAPTER SIX

Daniel stared at the ceiling until he was sure Sarah was asleep. Even at a distance, he heard when her breathing evened and slowed. He finally relaxed.

With only a few hours until sunrise, he knew he should sleep. He’d hear her if she got up, but the rest would do him good.

He didn’t trust her in her current state of mind. That was hard to accept. Until this disaster, he thought he trusted Sarah implicitly. But at the moment, with her still under the weight and pressure of grief, he just couldn’t believe she wouldn’t try to get away from him.

He scrubbed his hands over his face.

What a mess.

Even if he succeeded in talking sense into her, he still wasn’t sure they could recover. He might lose her no matter what happened.

Three nights from now, he had to let her Run. For the first time, he worried she might let another male catch her.

When she’d said she didn’t care about a lifetime confinement, she might as well have plunged her hand into his chest and pulled out his beating heart. She couldn’t have hurt him more if she tried. He was in love with her, not that he’d ever said as much, but she obviously didn’t feel the same or she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to throw away what they had.

He understood her need for revenge. On a fundamental level, he agreed with her. That was the worst part. If he thought they could get away with it, he’d
help
her kill Williams.

They didn’t have that option, though, and he just couldn’t see a way to give her want she wanted—what she
needed
. Frustration was a living thing in his gut.

Because he couldn’t sleep, he launched up from the couch and went to the kitchen to use the phone.

To his surprise, Alexis answered after two rings.

“How’s Joseph doing?” he asked without preamble.

“Bad. I’m not sure this is going to work. He and Victor are signing so furiously at each other, I lost track of the conversation.”

Daniel heard a tiger roar in the background.

“Damn it, he’s shifted. Again. I’d better go.”

“Call when you have an update. You have this number on your phone now?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Before Daniel could hang up, though, Alexis said, “Wait. I do need to talk to you about something.” There was a crash in the background. “Shit. I’ll ring you back soon.”

The line went dead.

Daniel sighed and set the phone back in its cradle. He sat at the kitchen table and stared out a window into the dark back fields behind the house. Despite their best efforts, they might not be able to save either Joseph or Sarah.

Fuck.

Anxiety woke Daniel from a light doze. To his relief, the sound of Sarah’s steady breathing confirmed she was still upstairs and asleep.

Unable to rest more, he went outside into the early morning light and breathed in the clean scent of grass, soil, moisture from a fog hugging the hills, and the faint undertone of horse. He flexed his hands and stretched his arms over his head. He needed a run to burn off his anxiety, anger, and hurt. But he’d picked this location specifically so Sarah wouldn’t be able to run around in tiger form easily. It meant he couldn’t either.

He supposed he could jog on two legs, but he knew that wouldn’t give his tiger the release it needed.

With a sigh, he went back into the kitchen and started breakfast—pulling frozen bacon and sausage from the industrial-sized freezer Mary kept in the laundry room. He also found a sealed container of oats and decided oatmeal sounded good. No eggs, but he knew Sarah hated even the smell of them, and he could take or leave them.

He was halfway through cooking when the phone rang. He snatched it up quickly and then listened a moment to make sure it hadn’t woken Sarah.

When he was certain she was still asleep, he said, “Hello?”

“Daniel? Alexis.”

“Hey. How’s Joseph?”

“We had to drug the idiot. I hate using tiger tranqs, but he didn’t leave us any choice.”

“Damn. That’s bad.” The tranquilizers were a last resort for Trackers. They very rarely used them because occasionally a tiger had an allergic reaction, sometimes lethal. It was one thing to kill someone who needed killing. It was another thing entirely to kill them when you were just trying to subdue them. Most Trackers learned other ways to handle unruly offenders, and ways of knocking them out without the drug, though those ways tended to leave marks.

“Fortunately, he’s sleeping it off without any trouble,” she said. “But he’s going to be just as pissed when he wakes up as he was when he went down. Victor’s trying not to hurt him, which means Victor’s got a few serious wounds that need to heal now.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Though it’s hard to see it, Joseph does seem to have some sense left in his idiot head, so he’s avoided hurting me.” She grunted and said, “But since I’m the one who tranqed him, he might not be so hesitant when he wakes up.”

“You okay to handle him?”

“Of course.” She sounded so offended Daniel laughed.

“Hey, you’ve been out of the game for ten years now. Training other Trackers isn’t the same as practicing your own skills on dangerous prey.”

She snorted. “Not a single tiger I couldn’t still take.”

She spoke with such confidence; Daniel was inclined to believe her. Alexis was a living legend, the only female Tracker in centuries, and good enough at the job to put the fear of death into most reasonable thinking tigers. Those she trained went on to be the most successful, and the scariest, Trackers out hunting. He supposed she’d earned her confidence.

Still, Joseph was a friend. “How much of that tranquilizer do you have?”

“Enough. I hope. Anyway, I didn’t call to defend my skills. I wanted to tell you something Victor and I picked up in the woods behind Williams’ place.”

Daniel straightened, moving the phone to his other ear so he could flip bacon, but his full focus was on Alexis’ comment. “Go on.”

“When we were intercepting Joseph, I smelled something. Something dead and decaying close to the house. On public land inside the park, I think, but still very close.”

“An animal?”

“Human.”

“Human?” Daniel’s heart rate kicked up.

“I didn’t have time to locate it, and I only got a brief scent impression, but it definitely smelled like a rotting human body. Muted, though, like it was buried. And there was some strange, chemical tang, like a drug, but nothing I’ve ever smelled before. Not like lye to cover the stench.”

Daniel frowned and took the bacon off the stove before collapsing into a chair at the table. “Was it a little flowery with some overtones of medicinal cherry, and…well, something that doesn’t have human words, but…I don’t know, punchy?”

“Yes! That’s it.”

It was hard to discuss the way their sense of smell translated scents sometimes because there weren’t always human words for what they detected. But this scent, he’d caught it once before, and it wasn’t something he was likely to forget soon.

“Su-jin had that scent clinging to her when I recovered her body,” he said quietly. “The autopsy revealed she’d been drugged. Coroner said the drug is new. He suspects Williams created it.”

Alexis was silent for a few beats. Then, “You think we smelled the drug. You think maybe this is someone else Williams killed.” She wasn’t questioning.

“It’s possible, right? He created a drug strong enough he could torture and kill a tiger. What are the odds she was the very first person he used it on?”

“Pretty fucking low,” Alexis said. “But would he really have buried the body so close to one of his own houses?”

“Depends on how confident he felt about the body staying hidden.”

“He’s an arrogant asshole. Cocky his money will keep him safe.”

“And he’s completely crazy. It’s possible he feels invincible.”

“Or the body we smelled was his first and he panicked. Or whoever it is can be linked back to him in some way. He didn’t bother burying Su-jin after all.”

True. He’d left her body in the open, in a ditch beside the highway, nowhere near his own place. Like garbage.

Daniel heard the phone plastic crack and made an effort to relax his grip.

Joseph had already been out looking for his little sister when some human good Samaritan found the body and called the cops. It was a fluke the humans got to her before their people could.

Dumping her in the open hadn’t been an accident. It was like Williams was bragging, showing off the results of his handy work. A man who would do that wouldn’t stop either. There would be more dead women if the human authorities couldn’t prevent it.