Pride (17 page)

“Hey.” Tucking a strand of shower-damp hair behind my
ear, I settled into the chair by his bed, which still smelled like Danny Carver. “Doc said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yeah. I just wanted to—” He broke off and one hand went to the blankets over his stomach as his face twisted in pain, and I was reminded how much worse his injuries were than mine. How much blood he’d lost, much of it covering me as I’d tried to stop his bleeding without further injuring him.

Composed again, Brett turned his head on the pillow to face me more directly, springs creaking beneath him. “I wanted to thank you. Jace told me what happened. What
really
happened.”

He’d spoken to Jace? Curious, I fiddled with the watch on my left wrist. “What did he say?”

“That I owe you my life.”

I glanced at my hands in my lap, surprised to feel my cheeks flush. “Anyone else would have done the same thing.”

Brett shook his head. “Colin would have let me die. Blackwell let him go. He called home for a replacement, and they’re taking Colin to the airport in the morning. Shipping him straight back to Canada.”

I didn’t bother to hide the satisfied smile blossoming across my face. Vindication felt every bit as good as I’d hoped it would. Petty, but true.

“I want to make it up to you.”

I shook my head. “I’m an enforcer, too—we look out for each other. That’s the way things work.”

“No.” His voice was firm, his lips drawn into a thin line. “You went out there with no claws and no backup. That’s not the way things work, and you didn’t have to do it. I owe you. Let me owe you.”

Before I could think up a new argument, much less voice it, a loud banging from the front room cut through the cooking noises and background chatter coming from the rest of the lodge. “Hey, Pride cats!” Elias Keller’s voice was typically
loud but muffled, and I realized the banging was his fist on the front door.

Around us, the lodge went silent.

“Open up!” Keller called, pounding again, this time hard enough to shake the walls. “I found something of yours and thought you might want it back.”

Several sets of footsteps clomped toward the front door, and I recognized my father’s distinctive tread among them, as well as the squeak of Malone’s shiny new loafers. I glanced at Brett to find his eyes wide and curious, as my own no doubt were. Then the squeal of hinges drew my gaze to the living room, where Marc, Jace, Nate, and Michael stood clustered in the kitchen threshold, staring at the front door, which I couldn’t see. Jace held a serrated bread knife, Nate a carrot peeler.

“There y’are!” Keller bellowed as heavy boot soles clomped on the hardwood. “Got somethin’ for ya.”

“Holy shit!” Jace whispered, and I was on my feet in an instant, desperate to know what had stunned an entire roomful of werecats. What could make Jace cuss in front of at least four different Alphas? Better yet, what could keep them all from noticing?

I rushed to the bedroom door, but hesitated there when Marc shook his head at me and showed me his open palm—a clear signal to stop.

My gaze followed Marc’s to the center of the living room, where Keller towered over the Alphas gathered around him, staring at the limp black bundle tossed over his shoulder.
What the hell?
As I watched, the bundle seemed to swell, then shrink. Then it swelled and shrank again. Then again. It was breathing. The bundle was
alive.

And suddenly I understood. Keller had brought us a cat. One of the strays? Radley, maybe?

One sniff in the bruin’s direction put that theory to rest. The cat was definitely
not
Zeke Radley.

“I found her rootin’ through my trash and thought you might want her back.” Keller heaved the bundle from his shoulder and dropped it nonchalantly onto the empty coffee table, where the long black tail dangled to the floor. “She smells a bit diff’rent with fur. But seein’ as how you don’t have many girl cats—right?—I’d think you’d wanna keep a better eye on this’ un.”

Keller had brought us an unconscious cat.
A tabby.
And he thought it was me.

S
urprise still tingling in the tips of my fingers, I stepped into the living room and felt all eyes turn my way. Including Keller’s. A frown took over his broad forehead as confusion filled his face. He looked from me to the near-still form on the coffee table. Then back to me.

Keller blinked, then his eyes sought out my father’s. “No wonder she smells different. If that one’s yours—” the bruin nodded in my direction “—who’s this?” He bent to stroke the fur atop the unconscious cat’s head, as if to comfort her.

“That’s a wonderful question, Mr. Keller.”

Keller made a surprised noise in the back of his throat and sank onto the couch in front of the strange tabby. “You don’t know her?”

Paul Blackwell answered, gaze zipping between the tabby and the bruin. “No. If one of our tabbies was missing, we’d know it.”

My father nodded in agreement, but he had to ask, just in case. “Anyone recognize her?” He glanced around at the growing crowd of toms, who had begun to creep forward as one, for a better look. “Let’s give her space to breathe, shall we?”

The guys backed up, and I rolled my eyes as they sniffed the air dramatically. Still, their curiosity was understandable. It wasn’t every day we met a new tabby. In fact, that had only happened once in my lifetime—with Manx, who’d promptly discharged her nine millimeter into Jace’s shoulder.

But this tabby was unarmed. And obviously unconscious.

And completely unfamiliar.

There were only ten U.S. Prides, each of which had at most one dam and one tabby—all of whom I knew personally. But I didn’t know this tabby. Whoever she was, she wasn’t ours.

When none of the toms or other Alphas recognized her, my father’s frown deepened. “Danny, what can you tell us about her?”

Dr. Carver stepped forward, a forgotten bowl of Froot Loops in one hand. He set the bowl on the nearest end table and wiped his hands on his pants, then knelt next to the tabby.

The doc started his examination by running his hands over the unconscious cat, pausing several times to part her fur and look closer. “Well, she’s young,” he said, fingers working their way from her right flank to her shoulder. “Midteens, I’m guessing, though I can’t be sure without seeing her in human form.”

I’d had the same thought, based on her size; she was small, even for a tabby.

“What on earth is a teenage tabby doing alone in the woods?” Calvin Malone demanded, taking up a position at my father’s side, probably to place himself within the sphere of authority. “And in free territory, at that? Not to mention
bruin
territory. Where is her family?
Who
is her family?”

He’d said what we were surely all thinking. Tabby cats don’t grow on trees. Most dams wind up giving birth to several toms before finally conceiving the tabby necessary to continue her family line. No Pride in the world would let its tabby—the very key to its future—run around unsupervised in the free zone.

Trust me; I’ve tried.

“That, I don’t know,” the doc said in response to Malone’s likely rhetorical question. He peered up at Keller. “Where did you say you found her?”

“Out behind my place, sniffin’ through the trash.”

“And how did she get this?” Dr. Carver parted the fur on the back of the tabby’s head to reveal a large purple lump, actually throbbing with her heartbeat.

Keller flushed beneath the thick fuzz on his weathered cheeks. “She got all riled up when I tried to get hold of her. See?” He held up his right arm, which was bleeding through several long rips in his flannel shirt. “I had to whack her on the back of the head with a piece of firewood just to get a good grip on her.”

I wasn’t sure whether to scowl or laugh at his approach to taming the shrew. Nor was I quite sure what to think of Keller’s willingness to whack the shit out of a tabby he mistook for me.

“I think she was lookin’ for food. I wish she’d just knocked on the door. I’d gladly ’ave given her some fresh deer meat.”

Dr. Carver smiled, wordlessly reassuring the bruin that he’d done no harm. “I think she’ll be fine. I don’t think it’s fractured. She should wake up soon, but we’ll need to keep an eye on her until then.” He glanced up at my father, then over at Paul Blackwell. “Where do you want to put her?”

Daddy shrugged at Blackwell. “It’s your lodge.”

Blackwell nodded. “Colin, clean out your room. You’re sleeping on the couch tonight.” He glanced at my father. “He’s leaving tomorrow anyway.”

“Paul—” Colin started from the kitchen doorway, where he was standing with an ice pack pressed to his jaw over the lump I’d given him.

Blackwell frowned, and I was kind of impressed by how stern the old man looked, in spite of the frailness of age.
“Now.” Like the rest of us, he knew that if Colin had chickened out while defending his boss, the southwest territory would be looking for a new Alpha.

Colin stomped up the stairs to pack his bags, looking for all the world like a spoiled preschooler. A very
large
preschooler. I’d have gladly given up a week of my freedom to see the look on his face when his sire found out why Blackwell was sending him home.

“Greg, could you send someone for my medical kit, please?” Dr. Carver said, circling the coffee table to examine the tabby’s underbelly. “I left it in your cabin.”

“Of course.” My father scanned the faces still staring rapt at the tabby. “Jace?”

Jace handed the bread knife to Nate and headed out the front door without a word, trailed by Michael, since they weren’t supposed to go out alone. Shortly after they left, a buzzer went off in the kitchen, and Nate scurried to take the lasagnas out of the oven before they burned.

After that, Keller excused himself, and as the other Alphas shooed their men from the crowded room, I made my way slowly toward the tabby, expecting someone to stop me any minute. When no one did, I sank to my knees next to Dr. Carver and reached out hesitantly to touch her fur. My curiosity was trumped only by my sympathy for the prone tabby, who was in pretty bad shape, above and beyond the fresh lump on her head.

Dr. Carver smiled as I stroked her side gently. “What do you think? Any guess as to her age?”

“Young.” I frowned as my fingers skimmed ribs far too delicate and pronounced. “
Too
young.” In cat form, she was about the same size as my cousin Abby, which worried me more than I wanted to admit. Abby was seventeen and a half, but very petite; at a glance, she could pass for twelve.

Surely the tabby wasn’t
that
young. What the hell was she doing alone in the Rockies?

I inched closer to the table, one hand hovering over my still-tender abdomen, and my jeans whispered across the worn carpet. “She’s so thin,” I said, carefully working a cocklebur free from the fur over her left flank. “Why is she so thin?”

Glass clinked against glass in the kitchen as someone pulled bottles from the refrigerator. Dinner was almost done, but for once I wasn’t thinking about my stomach. I was thinking about the tabby, who clearly needed food worse than I did.

Dr. Carver’s eyes found mine again. “She’s malnourished. Half-starved. And this kind of damage doesn’t happen quickly. Either whoever’s supposed to be watching out for her is guilty of long-term neglect, or she’s been on her own for quite a while.”

My fingers skimmed a patch of fur matted around a clump of something soft and sour smelling. “How long?”

“A few weeks at least. See here?” The doc ran his hand backward across her fur, revealing a patch of dry, scaly skin. “She’s peeling. And look how bloated her stomach is.”

Her belly
was
a little poochy, in contrast to her otherwise bony appearance. A devastating pang of sympathy rang through me, bringing tears to my eyes. But an instant later my pity was replaced by blazing anger. Whoever this tabby was, she hadn’t simply winked into existence. Some tom had sired her, and some dam had given birth to her.

Someone, somewhere was responsible for this poor girl, and someone was going to pay for the sorry state she was in.

I would see to that personally if I had to.

“What happened here?” My mood sank even further as I lifted her left front paw to show him an open wound oozing a thin, clear fluid.

“She cut it on something, probably glass from someone’s trash can, if that’s how she’s been feeding herself. It’s infected,
and since she’s malnourished, it won’t heal. Not until we can get some nutrients into her, anyway.” The doc stroked her side, petting her like he might a scared kitten. “Something tells me she won’t want much to do with us once she wakes up, so I’m going to do what I can for her now. Want to help?”

I nodded, mute, my head spinning as I tried to figure out what had happened to her. How the hell had a cat so small and young survived on her own long enough to become so malnourished?

Jace and Michael returned with the medical kit just as Nate yelled for everyone to grab a plate. While the toms formed a line behind the Alphas for dinner, I stayed on the floor with Dr. Carver, taking the supplies he handed me as he dug them one at a time from his bag.

Several minutes later, as I shone a flashlight at the tabby’s paw so the doc could see better, Marc sank onto the couch at my back and held a full plate of food toward me. “Here.” He nudged my shoulder with the plate rim. “I brought you some dinner. You should eat.”

“Thanks.” I glanced at him long enough to see the concern in his eyes, and to know it was for me, not for the tabby. “You go ahead. I’ll eat when we’re done here.”

“The food’ll be gone by then.”

“Then I’ll grab something else. I want to help.” I couldn’t have said
why
I wanted to assist the doctor, but the urge was there, nonetheless. I couldn’t get up to stuff my face while this poor young tabby lay unconscious on the table, thin to the point of emaciation, with knots in her fur and unhealed wounds on her feet. It wouldn’t be right.

Still… “I’d love a Coke, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.” Marc set the plate of food on the middle couch cushion, to save his place, then marched into the kitchen like a man on a mission. I smiled as I watched him, amused by how happy he was with a task to perform, until my father crossed my field of vision. He carried his dinner to an
armchair against the far wall, where he sat and balanced his plate on his lap.

As an Alpha, my father could have demanded a seat at the kitchen table, where he could easily have kept an eye on me while eating in comfort. Yet he came into the living room, not to monitor me, but to
watch
me. To observe me and study my motives. And he looked pleased, which drew an odd blush of pride from me.

Though I’d never given his disapproval of my wardrobe, my big mouth, and my craving for independence much thought, his opinion of me as a person—as a possible
successor
—well, that meant the world.

The approval in his eyes was worth listening to my stomach growl for a few more minutes.

Marc returned with my soda and sat on the couch behind me. In the kitchen, Jace sat around the table with Lucas, Michael, and my uncle Rick, all of them watching as I helped Dr. Carver clean the tabby’s paw and treat it with some kind of goopy cream and a gauze wrap. Everyone else had filed into the dining room, where there was space at the long table for fourteen.

When Dr. Carver and I had done what we could for the tabby, he carried her upstairs to the bedroom Colin had vacated for her at the end of the hall, and I followed, carrying his supplies. When he had her settled on the bed, he thanked me for my help and sent me downstairs to grab some dinner.

I was loath to leave because I wanted to be there when the tabby opened her eyes. But I went because I didn’t want my growling stomach to be what woke her up.

However, I was only halfway through the hunk of lasagna Marc had set aside for me when a thump shook the ceiling over my head, followed by a roar and a vicious, frightened growl. Dr. Carver screamed, and every cat still in the lodge jumped to his feet, until my father called a halt and nodded for Marc to follow him and my uncle upstairs.

While they were gone, the rest of us listening in absolute silence, Blackwell and Malone emerged from the dining room demanding answers. Before anyone could tell them we had no idea what had happened, a door closed on the second floor and Dr. Carver appeared on the stairs, a bloodstained towel wrapped around one arm.

“What happened?” I asked when he settled into the kitchen chair next to me. The Alphas gathered around the table and I felt all eyes on us.

“She woken up, and I must have startled her, because she took a swipe at me. Cut my arm wide open.” Dr. Carver lifted the towel gingerly to expose three bloody claw marks bisecting the top of his forearm.

“Wow.” I inhaled sharply. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“If only there were a doctor in the house…” Carver laughed, his tone heavily ironic. He had a pretty good attitude for a man bleeding so heavily.

I shrugged. “Marc’s done his fair share of emergency stitching…” Lots of the guys had, actually, but other than my mother’s and Carver’s own, Marc’s stitches were the neatest I’d ever seen.

“Marc?” my father called, and Marc stepped forward with the doctor’s supply bag already in hand. I kicked a chair out for him and he sat, already pulling out disinfectant and a wicked-looking curved suture needle.

“I had to tranquilize her,” Dr. Carver explained, as if to distract himself as Marc poured peroxide over the cuts. Evidently doctors don’t make very good patients. “But it should wear off in a few hours. Let’s hope she’s in a better mood then, because I’m going to have to treat her sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t think you should go in there alone, if she’s dangerous,” Uncle Rick said.

“Surely she’s not
dangerous.
” I scowled. “She’s probably just scared, and Dr. Carver
said
he startled her.”

“I see no reason to take that chance,” Malone said.

My father nodded, turning to the doctor. “I agree. When she wakes up, we’ll send several toms in with you, in case she needs to be restrained or tranquilized again.”