Rogue (10 page)

In that moment, I was absolutely sure I’d done the right thing by keeping my mother’s secret. They should look like
that forever, and her secret, while it probably wouldn’t end their marriage, would end the possibility of any more embraces like that.

“Where are you two going all dressed up like movie stars?” Vic asked.

My mother shot us a tight, suffer-in-silence smile. “We’re meeting with the head of the Dallas City Planning Commission.”

“You’ll never be back by nine-thirty,” Marc said, vocalizing almost my exact thought. “We can always meet in the morning, instead.”

“No.” My father didn’t even hesitate. “We are not going to leave a corpse to rot in the barn because of a business dinner.
Any
business dinner.”

I smiled at my father’s resolve, wiping pizza grease from my chin with a paper towel. His career depended upon him making and keeping the right connections, but he would let nothing get in the way of Pride business.

“Your mother will develop a migraine around eight, and we’ll have to excuse ourselves to take care of her. So don’t risk being late because you think I won’t make it. I will.”

None of us doubted it. My father didn’t make plans he couldn’t keep. Nor did he bluff. He was a horrible poker player, but one of the best Alphas in the entire world. I should know. I’d been on the receiving end of his wisdom and guidance more often than anyone else in the Pride. He was hoping some of it would rub off.

I wasn’t holding my breath.

T
hree and a half hours later, the pizza was gone, the kitchen was clean, and Parker was back from New Orleans, having stashed the van in the barn without bothering to remove the body first. Not that I could blame him.

The guys and I sat in the guesthouse in the dark, passing around two huge bowls of popcorn as
The Howling
played on their obscenely large flat-screen television. The movie was a house favorite, and the basis for a time-honored south-central territory drinking game—a shot for every howl in the film. Hollywood couldn’t resist a good werewolf flick, and neither could we.

Marc, Parker, Owen, and I had piled together on the old brown-and-yellow plaid couch, me on Marc’s lap, facing the television, with my legs stretched across the others’ laps. Ethan sat on the floor at our feet, his legs splayed across the scarred hardwood floor, his head resting against the side of my thigh.

Across the room Vic lay stretched out in his recliner, and Jace was folded into a lumpy, overstuffed armchair all by
himself. He wasn’t obviously pouting, but neither was he happy or relaxed, in spite of the fact that he and Ethan had returned from their double date half an hour earlier in very good spirits, both reeking of fruit-scented lotion and recent sex.

“There she goes.” Parker shook his prematurely gray head in disgust as the on-screen heroine pulled on her robe in preparation to leave her bungalow. Alone. In the middle of the night. “Off to check out strange sounds coming from the woods, armed with nothing more than a flashlight and a pretty smile.”

“A flashlight’s better than nothing,” I mumbled, remembering a night three months earlier when
I’d
left the guesthouse alone in the middle of the night, completely unarmed. Of course, I hadn’t been following some ominous howl, thus had no idea there were bad guys waiting for me in the woods. I’d just been looking for a little privacy in which to think.

“There she goes, the moron!” Vic said, leaning forward in his recliner, full shot glass pinched between his thumb and first two fingers.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Bagging on the film was part of the tradition. The best part, in my opinion. Someone would make fun of the outdated effects, and someone else would scoff at the heroine’s startling naiveté and conveniently repressed memory. And inevitably, during one of several low-budget Shifting scenes, one of the guys would yell at the victim du jour to
attack,
for fuck’s sake—after all, shape-shifters are most vulnerable in mid-Shift. No werecat worth the cost of his own upkeep would ever Shift in front of an enemy. There was no faster way to die.

Well, there was
one
faster way to die, though the movie industry got that part all wrong, too.

Silver bullets. Ha.
Still, you gotta love Hollywood for con
vincing the world that shape-shifters are damn hard to kill. How disappointed they’d probably all be to find out any ordinary lead slug would do the job just fine.

I leaned back against Marc’s chest and relaxed into the arm he wrapped around me. But then we both tensed as a long, piercing howl erupted from surround-sound speakers mounted all over the room. Marc’s eyes lit up and Ethan stiffened against my leg, going completely still as he sucked in a huge breath. Then, all at once the guys joined in, throwing their heads back in sync and baying at the moon. Or rather, at the screen. They were pretty good, too, considering that cats don’t howl. At least not like dogs howl, as a primal cry of victory. Or of warning.

Looking around at them, I couldn’t help but laugh. They were all dorks. Big, muscle-bound, furry dorks. But they were
my
dorks.

As the last sharp, baying tones faded from my ears, Marc twisted to grab two full shot glasses from the scratched and tilted end table on his left. He pressed one of them into my hand and lifted the other to his lips. All around me, the guys did the same, tossing back shots as they had each time one of the TV werewolves howled. If they were human, they’d all be seeing double by then. But thanks to their carefully maintained tolerance to alcohol and their werecat’s metabolism, the guys were nowhere near drunk. At least, not yet.

“Throw it back, Faythe!” Parker ordered, refilling the shot glass Ethan handed him.

I hesitated, staring at the tiny glass in my hand. We were supposed to meet my father in the barn in twenty minutes to inspect the body of a murdered stray. To me, drinking seemed to be a very poor way to start such a meeting. But the guys saw the New Orleans corpse as a reason to indulge, rather than
a reason
not
to. It was one of the ways they coped with the less-pleasant aspects of their job. A strict regimen of alcohol, anonymous sex—excluding Marc—and denial. They were keeping themselves sane.

Or maybe they were creating their very own brand of crazy.

Either way, they were determined to make me one of them, and I was less and less inclined to resist….

“Drink it!” Parker said, refilling Owen’s glass.

I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised. He shrugged, so I opened my mouth and drained the shot glass—my first of the night. Tequila burned like hell going down, but it was better than whiskey. Marginally.

Smiling, I handed my glass to Parker. He traded the whiskey bottle for tequila and refilled my glass. It was official. I was one of the guys, for better or for worse.

“Now, see, that’s why werewolves didn’t make it in the real world.” Vic leaned down to set a half-empty bottle of Jägermeister on the floor to one side of his recliner. “They were too damn fond of the sound of their own voices.”

“What?” I gulped from Marc’s can of Coke, trying to squelch the flames scorching my throat. “Werewolves are just stories. Hollywood cash cows. They were never real.”

“The hell they weren’t.” Vic was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. “They were as real as we are, and a damn sight more prolific than the fucking bruins.”

“He’s messin’ with you, Faythe,” Owen said, laughter shining bright in his dark eyes as he shifted on the couch beneath my calves.

Vic shook his head, brown waves flying. “I’m dead serious.”

“So where are they now?” Parker drained his new shot, apparently for the hell of it.

Vic shrugged. “‘Survival of the fittest’ turned out
not
to refer to them. Werewolves had no stealth, and little common sense. The damn fools started howling every time they got excited, like a pup pissing himself over table scraps. Got themselves mistaken for real wolves and hunted to extinction more than a hundred years ago, before humans ever had a chance to figure out that some of their bedtime stories were true.”

On screen, Karen White had abandoned bravery for a brief bout of common sense, locking herself into the relative safety of her bungalow. In the guesthouse, skeptical silence descended.

“Yeah, right!” Ethan scoffed, as usual, the first to voice an opinion.

“I’m not kidding,” Vic said. “Ask your dad.”

“Speak of the devil…” Owen said, twisting to glance at the front window. Light flashed across his face, bathing the room in the glow of my father’s headlights as his car pulled into its customary parking spot, alongside the main house.

“Last one to the barn unloads the body!” Ethan cried, and the guys leapt into action. Ethan turned off the TV, and Parker began screwing caps on bottles at random. Vic vaulted from his recliner, kicking the footrest into place. Owen gathered a handful of shot glasses and dumped them on the kitchen island, unwilling to leave a mess in a house he didn’t actually occupy.

I stood as the guys scurried around the living room, but Marc pulled me back onto the couch next to him. The gold specks in his irises sparkled with mischief. His hand slid up my rib cage, thumb brushing the low swell of my breast.

Ethan thumped across the floor toward the door without sparing us a glance. Parker was at his heels.

Marc leaned in, his gaze focused on my neck. I tilted my head back to oblige him. His lips trailed from just below my
ear to the base of my throat. My hands reached for him automatically, finding their way beneath his shirt, playing across the ridges and valleys of his stomach.

“I’m not unloading that body,” I whispered as his teeth grazed my collarbone.

“You won’t have to.” He leaned in for a kiss, and my lips parted, welcoming him. He pulled me back onto his lap so that I straddled him, my mouth still on his. My fingers trailed up his arm to his neck. I pulled him closer, tilting his head to better accommodate my tongue.

Marc groaned into my mouth. His thumb brushed my nipple and I gasped.

Glass shattered behind me, and the sharp scent of whiskey rolled across the room. Pulling away from Marc, I twisted on his lap to see Jace standing in a puddle, the broken bottle at his feet. His eyes were fixed on me. On
us.

Shit.
I’d thought he was already gone. “Jace…?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, snatching a dish towel from the counter. He dropped it on the pool of Johnnie Walker and stomped across the kitchen for a broom.

I got up to help him, but Marc put a hand on my shoulder and shook his head, watching Jace in frustration and obvious sympathy. He was right. Offering to help Jace would only have further embarrassed him. So we left Jace to his mess and crossed the western field well behind the others, heading for the big, red, prairie-style barn dominating the landscape.

After a couple of minutes the guesthouse door slammed at our backs and we heard Jace walking behind us. He made no attempt to catch up, and we refrained from looking back out of common courtesy. Jace would be okay. He always was. And
I would make a more concerted effort not to flaunt our relationship in front of him.

We caught up with everyone else as they stood gathered in front of the barn, waiting, their collective mood sobered by the task at hand. When my father saw us, he nodded and stepped toward the entrance.

Old, rusty hinges squealed as he pulled open the huge double barn doors centered beneath the gable of the steeply pitched roof. A waft of air rushed out to meet us, oppressively hot, though the temperature outside had already begun to drop from melt-you-where-you-stand to almost-tolerable.

The interior of our picturesque old barn was just as quaint as the exterior. Empty stalls stretched down the left and right sides, leaving a wide, empty space in the center, running the entire length of the building. The dirt floor was scattered with loose, fragrant hay, as was the loft overhead. On either side of the doors, wooden ladders led to the loft, where several bales still sat, left over from the year before. In a couple of months, both levels of the barn would be stacked full of hay bales, until my father sold them to the neighboring ranches, which, unlike ours, kept animals.

My father’s van sat in the center aisle, looking out of place in a barn built nearly a century earlier. Dented, with peeling blue paint and spots of rust sprinkled like a scattering of red freckles, the van had seen lots of action in its fourteen years, and had carried more than its fair share of bodies.

Our Alpha herded everyone inside, then closed the doors, shutting us in with the heat. And with the dead stray. “Okay, Parker, let’s take a look.”

I glanced at my father as he spoke, and blinked in wry amusement. There he stood, sweating into a three-piece suit,
his dress shoes dusty from the dirty floor, asking to see a cadaver Parker had brought home from New Orleans. Life couldn’t get much weirder. Surely.

Parker opened the van’s rear doors and Vic came forward without being asked to help remove the black-wrapped bundle from the floor of the cargo area. The stench was strong and immediate, but it wasn’t the smell of rotting flesh. It was the smell of rotting food, from the garbage the body had been buried under.

Together, Vic and Parker lowered the bundle to the straw-strewn floor, then pulled strips of duct tape from the plastic, unwrapping the giant burrito and exposing the body beneath a smattering of putrefied lettuce, tomatoes, olives, and noodles.

Inhaling deeply through my mouth, I forced all traces of disgust from my expression and made myself look at the victim.

He was about my age, maybe a couple of years older, with freckles and nearly black eyes, which I could see because no one had bothered to close them. Or maybe the eyelids had simply refused to cooperate.

At a glance, I couldn’t tell that his neck was broken, but I was more than willing to take Parker’s word for it.

My father wasn’t. He knelt next to the man’s left shoulder and grabbed a handful of soiled brown hair, then gave the head a tug to the right. It moved with no visible resistance, and chills crept up my spine at the faint scraping of bones grinding together. His neck hadn’t just been broken. It had been broken in
two.
As in a completely severed spinal cord. He’d never stood a chance.

Our Alpha stood, brushing straw and dirt from his knee. “Ethan, check his ID.”

Ethan dug in the man’s back right pocket and came out
with a thin black leather wallet, folded into thirds, which he handed over without opening.

My father took the wallet and rifled through the contents. He didn’t pass it around, nor did he remove anything. “Robert Harper. Twenty-three. From Picayune.”

Mississippi.
He’d lived in the free territory, which was no surprise.

“So what was he doing in New Orleans?” Owen asked. I’d been wondering the same thing.

“He could have been doing anything,” Parker said. “Or
anyone.
But whatever he was doing, it must have been pretty important for him to risk trespassing on south-central territory.”

“Not necessarily.” All eyes turned to Marc, who stood leaning against the van, his arms crossed over his chest and one foot propped on a rear tire. “Picayune’s less than an hour from New Orleans, and we only have, what, two Pride cats living there other than Holden? What are the chances that either of them would get close enough to sniff him out? He’s probably made countless trips without us ever knowing. It wouldn’t be much of a risk for him.”

My father nodded in agreement. “Unfortunately, we can’t be everywhere all the time, and Harper obviously knew that.”