Prey (26 page)

Feldman shoved an empty duffel bag back into Kevin’s closet with his foot, then closed the door and leaned against it. “Maybe something went wrong. Marc woke up in the middle of the procedure, or he remembered too much afterward and figured out what they were doing, or something like that.” He pointed at a name on his list, and I glanced at my copy to follow along. “Look at the third entry. It’s been crossed out.” Using a strike-through font effect. “And he’s the first of the toms to go missing. There are three more entries like that, and I haven’t seen any of those toms in a while, either.”

I nodded slowly as understanding surfaced. “So the toms who made trouble were killed and buried. Only Marc didn’t die as planned—he killed Eckard instead. But if Marc knew he’d been implanted, why bother to take Eckard’s chip?”

“I don’t know.” Feldman shrugged, and gestured toward the display I still clutched in my right hand. “Where does that thing say Marc is?”

“Just a second.” I typed Marc’s code into a box at the top right corner of the screen, expecting the device to show his little green glowing circle overlaid with Eckard’s. But instead, the map disappeared and new coordinates
appeared, along with another button promising me a map view. I pressed the button, and a new map appeared, this one displaying the satellite view of a small, neatly laid-out neighborhood, with the streets labeled.

Weird.
The green dot on the new map was on the south side of a street called Magnolia Drive. “Guys, aren’t we on Magnolia Drive?” I asked, glancing around the room at the other faces, my eyes narrowed in uncertainty.

“Yeah, why?” Feldman said.

“Because according to this, Marc’s
here.
” But that couldn’t be right. If Marc were in Kevin’s house—even if he were no longer breathing—we’d have smelled him the moment we’d come in.

“Here,
where?
” Jace stepped close enough to view the screen over my shoulder again, and his chest brushed my back, sending warmth and ill-timed tingles through me. “In this house?”

“I think so.” I stepped subtly away from him, disguising the motion as I turned to face the rest of the room. And when I moved, though the dot on the screen stayed still, the map rotated with me. “Wait…” I pressed the plus-shaped zoom button three times, and the image on-screen tightened until it would go no further, showing a thirty-yard span which included a black-and-white view of the roof of Kevin’s house, as well as the edges of those to each side.

“Yeah, in this house….” I mumbled. Then I started walking slowly toward the dot on screen, carrying the
display with me as I moved into the hall and toward the tiny eat-in kitchen. As I passed the hall closet, the dot on-screen stopped moving, then appeared behind me. I backed up and stopped in front of the closet, and the dot appeared dead center of the screen.

Marc’s microchip was in Kevin Mitchell’s front closet.

My heart thumped so hard I could hear nothing but the rush of my own blood through my ears, and my throat constricted painfully, cutting off my breathing until I thought to open my mouth and gasp for air.

“Faythe?” Jace’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I knew the moment he understood, because I heard his pulse speed up to match mine.

I sniffed the air, just to be sure I hadn’t missed something crucial. But I caught no whiff of Marc, or any other biological smell from the closet. Still, my hand shook when it closed over the knob. What if I was wrong? What if my stuffy nose—from too many hours spent out at night—was preventing me from smelling something I should have?

Finally, I sucked in another deep breath and twisted the knob in one harsh motion, then tugged the door open, bracing myself mentally for the worst-case scenario.

But Marc’s body did not fall out of the closet onto me. There
was
no body. In fact, there was nothing, that I could see, but a couple of winter coats and a vacuum cleaner that hadn’t seen much action.

“I don’t get it,” Dan said, finally breaking the tension, and I could have kissed him. “There’s nothing in there.”

“Thank goodness,” I mumbled, reaching up to pull the chain dangling from a naked bulb in the closet ceiling. Dim light flooded the closet, illuminating the only thing I hadn’t been able to see before. On the floor, in the back right corner, sat a white cardboard box, like the kind medical supplies are often shipped in. At one point, it was taped shut, but the seal had already been broken, so I knelt and lifted the lid.

Inside the box were row after row of small, clear plastic tubes, like test tubes except they had flat bottoms and were closed with plain white plastic caps rather than rubber stoppers. The tubes were separated by a grid of cardboard spacers, like repeating tic-tac-toe boards, the first three rows of which were empty.

“Is that what I think it is?” Feldman asked, peering at me over Jace’s shoulder.

“Unused microchips.” I handed Jace the tracker and stood with the box in hand, then pulled the first remaining tube from its slot. “Somebody read me Marc’s tracking number.”

Dan glanced at the paper he still clutched in his right fist. “Four-four-eight-three-nine,” he said, as I stared at the number printed on the side of the tube.

“Bingo.” My smile was huge—I could feel it. “He was never implanted, though based on this list, I’d say that’s the reason they took him. Obviously something went wrong.”

“Yeah.” Dan rolled his eyes, as if the problem should have been obvious. “They fucked with
Marc.
I could ‘a told ‘em
that
wouldn’t work out too good.”

Though it hardly seemed possible, my smile grew when I met the stray’s eyes, pride for Marc practically bursting inside me. But that was followed quickly by fear, along with the realization that he was still out there somewhere, probably in the worst shape of his life.

Rather than trusting the “locate previous code” option on the tracker, I typed Eckard’s number in manually, then glanced up to find all three toms watching me. “Okay, are we ready?” I headed toward the kitchen and the back door without bothering to return to the office and power down Kevin’s computer. He’d know we’d been there the moment he walked into his house, by the scents we’d left behind on everything we’d touched, so I saw no reason to waste time putting everything back where we found it.

“You guys go ahead. Go find your boyfriend.” Feldman’s gaze met mine, his eyes shining in sympathy and regret. Then a flash of anger swallowed those weaker emotions. “I have some calls to make.”

“What?” Jace’s eyebrows arched high onto his forehead, and suspicion edged his voice. “Who are you going to call?”

Feldman held up his copy of the tracker code list for all of us to see. “Other than me, Marc, and Adam Eckard, there are eight other toms on this list, at least four of whom I assume are still breathing. They have a right to know they’re being illegally and maliciously monitored by the ‘Big Brother’ faction of your Territorial Council.”

Oh, shit.
Even if most strays living in the free zones
hadn’t yet found reason to come together in opposition to council authority, they
would
once Milo Mitchell’s conspiracy came to light. And they were no more likely to recognize the distinction between good Pride cats and bad Pride cats than most of the council was between friendly strays and hostile strays.

The ugly cycle of conflict would be perpetuated, all thanks to one or two Alphas’ arrogance and complete lack of ethics.

“Ben, please don’t do that,” I begged, glancing at Jace to see if the repercussions had sunk in for him yet. They had. I could tell by the tension in the line of his jaw. “This—” I gestured with the box of microchips “—is the work of one or two of our
worst
examples of leadership. Please don’t let the entire council—the whole Pride-cat society—pay for the incredibly bad judgment of those few.”

Feldman sighed, and for a moment he looked blessedly conflicted. But then his expression hardened. “I see what you’re saying, and I sympathize. And I’ll do my best to assure them that your family was not involved in any of this. But these toms have been violated, and they don’t even know it. They have a right to know what’s been done to them.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even argue with that, no matter what the ramifications of full disclosure would be for my Pride. So I nodded, clutching the half-empty box to my chest like a life raft. “Okay. But please, as a gesture of goodwill between the affected toms and the south-central Pride, offer them our doctor’s services.
Dr. Carver can quickly and safely remove the chips, and give them to you on the spot to be destroyed.”

“Miss Sanders, I don’t know that they’d trust a Pride doctor to do that. Considering that it must have been a Pride doctor who implanted the chips in the first place.”

“But not
that
Pride doctor,” Dan interjected. “He took my chip out with no problem. I trust him.”

Feldman studied Dan for a moment, then nodded again, and met my eyes. “I’ll extend your offer. But I make no guarantees.”

I forced a smile. “Thank you.” That was all we could ask of him. All we had any
right
to ask. And though I’d played no part in the microchip debacle—other than trying to sort it out—I felt guilty by association, for simply
knowing
Milo Mitchell and his hell-spawn son. I hated that feeling. And suddenly I understood how Jace felt about his stepfather being the driving force behind the effort to have my father removed from the council.

When I looked up, I found Jace watching me, as if he knew what I was thinking. Or as if he
wanted
to. But he knew better than to ask in front of anyone else.

“Okay, let’s go.” I slid the lid back onto the box and shoved the tracker into my front pocket, then marched for the door, confident that at least two of the toms would follow me. “It’s not getting any earlier out there. Or any warmer.”

J
ace, Dan, and I parted ways with Feldman at the playground where we’d parked, and as we turned left coming out of the lot, I glanced back at Feldman to see him gripping his steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, his face twisted into one of the fiercest scowls I’d ever seen. He reminded me of Marc in that moment, because of both the stress he clearly took out on his vehicle, and his fierce determination to see justice done. I couldn’t help but respect his motives, even if his actions would oppose mine in the end.

“Hey, Dan?” I twisted in my seat as Jace swerved smoothly onto the on-ramp. “Could you turn around and make sure we have everything we need? I’m hoping this thing will shorten the length of our hike—” I held up the tracker “—but we need to be prepared for the worst.”

“Sure.” Dan unbuckled and stood on his knees to peer over his seat back into the cargo area of Jace’s
Pathfinder, then reached up and pressed a light panel in the ceiling to illuminate the area. “Looks like we have a first-aid kit, four bottles of water, a shovel, some tools, and a couple of flashlights. And Marc’s coat.” Which he lifted from the backseat to show me.

“Good. Thanks.” While Dan turned the light off and rebuckled, I watched Jace’s profile lighten and darken as shadows cast by a series of highway lights passed over him. “We have to stop by Marc’s house,” I said, a supply list running through my head. “We need more water, something quick to eat, and some more caffeine. And a restroom. And we need to cover all that very quickly.”

Jace nodded, and flicked on his blinker when our exit approached. Six minutes later he pulled into Marc’s driveway, and we all raced into the house. The guys gathered supplies and filled Dr. Carver in on what he’d missed while I used the restroom, all in under eight minutes.

But that still felt like too long. I felt like we’d been looking for Marc forever, and that even though we finally knew where he was—in theory—every second was still crucial.

I was zipping up my coat on the way to the front door, a newly loaded backpack over one shoulder, when my phone began to ring. I didn’t recognize the number, and only vaguely noticed that the area code was the same as Marc’s, so I didn’t expect to know the caller. But he definitely knew me.

“Faythe?”

My insides went cold, and I spun to face the guys, one finger pressed to my lips, warning them to be silent.
Kevin Mitchell,
I mouthed.

Jace scowled and Dan’s eyebrows arched in surprise, while the doctor simply nodded his acknowledgment.

“Yes?” I said into the receiver. “Who is this?”

“You know damn well who this is,” Kevin snapped, and I wondered if he already knew about our little B and E. “And I can tell you have company by the sudden silence in the background. Do you have them holding their breath?” I rolled my eyes but made no reply, so he continued, unflustered. “Are you still in Mississippi?”

“Are
you?
” I only realized I was pacing when I reached the kitchen table and had to turn around. He knew we were at Marc’s house earlier because Yarnell had found our scents when he’d come to clean up the bodies we’d already disposed of. But did Kevin know we’d made a trip to the ranch? And did he know
why?

“Where else
could
I be?” he huffed in irritation. “You may recall that I’m restricted to the free zone now.”

“That does sound familiar….” I couldn’t keep anger from bleeding into my voice. I was desperate to find Marc, but couldn’t afford to hang up on Kevin. We needed him in custody, in order to bring him before the council.

“The real question is what are
you
doing here? Other than making a bonfire out of Adam Eckard’s car?”

“There was a fire? Ohhh, too bad I missed that. I
never pass up an opportunity to make s’mores.” I shrugged at Jace, wondering if it would be stupid of me to talk to Kevin from the car, on the way to find Marc.

“I missed it, too.” A soft suction sounded over the phone, then a low-pitched hum met my ears. Kevin had just opened a refrigerator. The bastard was having a
snack
while he taunted me!

Did that mean he was at home? Did he already know we’d been through his stuff and taken the tracker? Was he just stringing me along? I shot a desperate look at Jace, but he only shrugged. Either he didn’t know what I was thinking, or he didn’t have the answers to my unspoken questions.

Kevin continued, oblivious to my silent panic. “By the time I got there this afternoon, there was nothing left but a burnt patch of grass on the side of the road. But then I noticed a break in the tree line, like several people had stomped through the woods.”

“Weird.”
My coat was too thick to be worn indoors, and I was starting to sweat, either from the warmth or from nerves.

“I know!” Kevin exclaimed too brightly, and suddenly I was tired of our role-playing, and ready for him to cut to the proverbial chase. But Kevin liked to hear himself talk. “And it gets weirder from there. I found blood on the ground near that break in the trees, from two different strays. I assume you know whose blood I found?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Kevin, this is stupid. Cut the shit and get to the point.”

Jace groaned and let his forehead fall into his hand; evidently he would have handled it differently.

“Who’s with you?” Kevin asked, and I glared at Jace for giving away their presence. “It’s Jace, right?” Kevin guessed, and I inhaled sharply in surprise. How the hell had he known that? “Obviously it’s not Ethan. I hear the youngest Sanders tom met with an unfortunate end this morning.”

This morning?
Had it really been less than a day? It felt like forever since Ethan died, yet each second seemed to slip away from me faster than the last, time sliding rapidly through my fingers like a rope burning my palm. Hearing my dead brother’s name spoken in Kevin Mitchell’s irreverent voice made me want to reach through his stomach and pull his intestines out inch by excruciating inch.

A growl rumbled from my throat before I could stop it, and on the edge of my vision, Jace’s fist flew. An instant later, his travel mug hit the wall, leaving a cupshaped dent in the Sheetrock and splattering still-steaming coffee over the wall and floor. Obviously furious and hurting, Jace suddenly seemed to take up more room than he should have, like a cat whose fur is standing on end. It was an angry-Alpha pose, and I would have been impressed if I weren’t just as pissed and wounded as he was.

Kevin laughed into my ear. “Tell Jace I said hi.”

“What do you want?” I demanded, and had to make myself loosen my grip on my phone before I crushed it.

“I just wanted to extend my sympathy for what
happened to your brother—
so sad
—and to assure you that nothing so tragic has happened to Marc. Yet.”

What?
Shock jolted through me, and my heart hammered against my sternum. “You’re bluffing.” But my voice came out weak with doubt, and we all heard it. I cleared my throat and tried again, pacing quickly now to burn off the fury racing through my veins with each beat of my heart. “You don’t have Marc. Pete Yarnell said he was dead.” And hopefully Kevin would think I believed that.

“And that’s what we truly thought at the time. Until I followed that trail of blood through the woods and discovered Adam’s lonely, unmarked grave. And I suspect the trail was even easier for
us
to follow than it was for
you,
thanks to the path you broke. What’d you do, march an elephant through there?”

No, just four werecats in sturdy boots.

“You
disinterred
your own…friend?” Or fellow henchman. Or evil sidekick. Or…whatever. Shivers of disgust raised chill bumps all over my arms and legs, in spite of the winter coat I still wore. The only task worse than burying a body was unburying one.

“You didn’t leave us much choice. We had to verify that it was really Adam in that hole. And it was, as you know, which means Marc was still out in the woods somewhere. Fortunately, finding him was easier than I expected. Remind me later, and I’ll explain to you just how we did that.”

My eyebrows shot up and a satisfied smile bloomed on my face. Kevin didn’t know we knew about the
chips, much less that we could track them! Which meant he wasn’t at home. But he’d figure all of that out the minute he stepped into his own house. So we couldn’t let that happen.

“Why don’t you tell me now?” I asked, stalling for time as I pinned the phone between my shoulder and my ear, then dug the chip tracker from my pocket. I typed Eckard’s code into it again, this time from memory.

Kevin chuckled. “How ‘bout I show you instead? Meet me at my house in an hour, and—”

“No!” I shouted, as the screen in front of me disappeared, only to be replaced a moment later with a progress bar and the word
Loading…

Damn it!
I hadn’t meant to be so obviously opposed to the meeting place. The gears in my brain whirred to life louder than the rush of my own pulse, scrambling for a good cover. “Someplace public. There’s no way we’re giving you home-field advantage.”

The loading screen dissolved, and new coordinates appeared, but I could tell nothing from the longitude and latitude, so I pressed the Map View button, and the progress bar appeared again as the new page loaded.

“You’re right.” Kevin chuckled again, and I was starting to truly hate the sound of his laughter. “Because you’re coming alone. If you don’t, Marc’s dead.”

Nooooo!
I could
not
come so close to getting him back—alive—only to have him snatched away from me again!

My heart tried to claw its way up my throat, and speech
was suddenly impossible. Instead, a choking sound erupted from my mouth as I dropped the gadget on the table and struggled to draw a fresh breath. Only my hand gripping the back of a folding chair kept me upright.

Jace was behind me in an instant, taking the phone from my hand.
Breathe
…he mouthed, rubbing my back with his free hand.

“Faythe?” Kevin said over the line. Jace put the phone up to his ear, but I snatched it back before he could speak, finally sucking in a deep breath.

“I’m here.” I took a longer, calmer breath that time, and nodded to Jace that I was okay, just as Dr. Carver put a glass of ice water on the table in front of me. “But I want proof that you have Marc. That he’s still alive.”

“Hmm…” Footsteps sounded over the line, and a rough, scratching sound told me Kevin was covering the mouthpiece. Then he was back. “That’s gonna be hard to come by for the moment. He’s unconscious.”

Damn it.
“Is he snoring?” I avoided Jace’s wounded gaze. “Or even just breathing loudly? I’ll recognize it, if it’s him.”

“You’re serious?” Kevin scoffed.

“As a neutered tom.”

Dan flinched at my phrasing, and Dr. Carver grinned—perhaps considering performing such a procedure on the wildcat. But Kevin got my point. “Fine. Just a second.” There was more rustling against the phone, then a soft sound met my ears: a strong, smooth inhalation, with just a hint of a rattle.

Tears formed in my eyes, flowing over when I blinked. I’d recognize that sleep-breathing anywhere. One long inhale through his nose, with a slight whistle on the front end, and a little
puh
sound at the end, where he exhaled through mostly closed lips. It sounded like he had a chest cold—hopefully not pneumonia—but Marc was very much alive.

For the moment, anyway.

I choked off a sob of relief as something brushed Kevin’s receiver again, then he was back. “Satisfied?”

“Not in the least.” I’d just tasted a scrap from the table, when what I really wanted—what I
needed
—was the whole damn feast. “So how’s this going to work?”

“A simple trade.” I could practically hear the satisfied smile in Kevin’s voice. “You for Marc. You show up alone, or we kill him. You show up without fur, or we kill him. You show up ready to play nice, or we kill him. Got it?”

Yeah, yeah.
Standard hostage conditions, and about as sincere as a politician’s promise. “I got it. Who’s
we?
”

“Just me and a friend. I’m serious, Faythe,” Kevin warned, and all humor had drained from his voice, leaving it cold and empty. “I have no reason to keep Marc alive, except to exchange him for you. If that trade doesn’t work out, he’s no use to me.”

Kevin had been human once.
Half
-human, anyway. Had exile changed him so much? Or was this desperation to earn his way back into his birth Pride?

“I know.” I sipped from the water Dr. Carver had brought me, then turned my back on the toms and
closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know, but… “What do you want from me, Kevin?”

Someone else—someone
not
Kevin—laughed lasciviously in the background, until an angry noise from Kevin shut him up. “Information. We just want to talk to you.”

Well, that would certainly be a first…not that I believed it. No one had ever expended so much effort before just to get me to talk; usually people worked to get me to shut up.

“So, what? I show up and you let Marc go? How’s he supposed to leave if he’s unconscious?”

“We knocked him out, and we can wake him up just as easily.”

My grip on the back of the chair tightened until the metal groaned. “Damn it, Kevin, I swear, if you hurt him, I’ll rip your arms out of their sockets and beat your friend to death with them while you bleed out.”

“Oh, I believe you,” he said, though the amusement in his voice said that he did
not.
“But Marc was hurt long before we got to him.”

“Thanks to another one of your goons. Yet you expect me to just hand myself over and trust you to let him go?”

Footsteps clomped over the line, and that soft refrigerator hum was back, this time followed by running water. “I don’t give a shit
what
you trust. He goes out the back door the minute you come in the front. Or not at all. We do this
my
way, or you can take Marc home wrapped in plastic, and have a double service on Saturday.”

Fury shot through me like fire in my veins, and all three toms tensed at the rage and adrenaline I was dumping into the air. “You son of a bitch—”