Second Nature (69 page)

Griffin stared at the little book. She had almost died for it. "No. He had it in his possession, but the diary belonged to a dream seer named Thomas McCree. He wrote about hunting down humans. Maybe Jennings thought he was a kindred spirit, and that's why he kept the diary. I can't be sure until I read more of the entries."

Jorie's body jerked. Her hand reached out and touched the diary. "Thomas McCree?" she asked, making them sound like sacred words. "Are you sure that he really was a dream seer?"

Something in Jorie's voice raised the hairs on Griffin's neck. She looked up from her blood-soaked sweatshirt. "You know him?" How was that possible?

"I saw him in my dreams," Jorie said. Her voice was shaking. "He was the one that Jennings hunted down and killed in the alley. Jennings was shouting his name to let him know there was no escape."

Griffin half turned and stared at her. "But that means... He was human. A human dream seer."

Jorie's eyes widened. On hands and knees, she crawled closer to Griffin and helped press the sweatshirt to the wolf's wound. The scent of stormy emotions that emanated from her made Griffin dizzy. "You mean... there are others like me? Other human dream seers?"

Griffin's breath caught.
Others like you,
she silently repeated. She couldn't imagine anyone being like Jorie. Jorie was special, but still... If Jennings had encountered other human dream seers before, that would explain why he hadn't been surprised when Griffin had told him Jorie might be a maharsi. It explained why he had been so intent on killing Jorie even without proof of a traitor or inside source. He had known there was none.

Jorie's scent wavered back and forth between confusion and hope.

"Maybe," Griffin said. "It would explain a lot."

The injured wolf groaned in pain but remained unconscious. Jorie's fingers weaved through his thick fur, soothing him without thought.

"But if I'm not the only one, if there were others before me, why didn't the Wrasa realize it before?" Jorie asked, striving to understand.

The pieces of the puzzle finally fit together for Griffin. "Because Jennings made it his mission to hide that secret. He felt threatened by human dream seers because Thomas McCree," she nodded down at the diary, "used his dream visions to identify and kill Wrasa. Jennings systematically searched and killed humans he thought might be dream seers."

Twigs snapped in the forest.

The pack's alpha charged toward them.

Griffin stuffed the diary into her pocket and jumped to her feet, taking a protective stance in front of Jorie.

The shrubs parted, and Brian appeared behind the alpha, followed by Gus, Nella, and the female Syak.

A barely human-sounding growl wrenched itself from the alpha's throat as he skidded to a stop in front of Griffin. "You! You are the one who killed Cedric!" The rising sun glinted on teeth that were slowly lengthening.

Brian shouldered past him.

Nella followed, wedging herself between the alpha and Griffin.

"Do you want to fight and let the stupid pup here bleed to death, or do you want us to save him?" Brian asked harshly.

The alpha forced his gaze away from Griffin. His fists opened and closed as if he could already feel his nails transforming into claws. "Save him!" he finally barked.

Griffin wrapped her arm around Jorie's still trembling form. "Come on. Let's get out of here." When she turned, her gaze fell onto Leigh's car that was parked across the street. Laughter bubbled up. "You stole Leigh's car?"

Jorie shrugged. "There was no time to ask. I'll pay for the outside mirror that I crushed in my hurry to get here."

"Uh-oh." Griffin chuckled. "This time, I might not be able to save you from being hunted down by an angry Wrasa."

*  *  *

Jorie bent her head and let the scalding hot water beat down on her. Traces of the wolf's blood swirled down the shower's drain, and Jorie tightly closed her eyes.

The water couldn't drown out her thoughts, though. They were pouring down on her with more force than the water did.

Another dream seer...

Her whole life, Jorie had never really felt as if she belonged anywhere. While she loved her parents, she didn't share her blood, her personality, or much of her life with them. Never had she met anyone who was like her.

During the last few chaotic days, she had found out more and more about why she had never fit in. Sometimes she still couldn't grasp it. She was a maharsi, a dream seer who was somehow connected to a mysterious race of shape-shifters.

And there had been others like her. Somewhere another human with the same talent, the same problems of never fitting in might still exist. The thought left her dizzy with hope and fear at the same time.

If there were others, would she ever find them? Did they ignore and suppress their skills as she had, or did they use their dream visions to hunt down the shape-shifters as Thomas McCree had? Were they destined to harm the Wrasa? Jorie didn't want that.

She had skimmed through the diary after they had returned to Rhonda's house. The entries painted an ugly picture of the only other human dream seer she knew of. Far from seeing the Wrasa as magical creatures or living beings with the right to live, he had thought them bloodthirsty monsters who had to be found and killed. He had become exactly what he had accused the Wrasa of: a killer.

How ironic,
Jorie thought.
Cedric Jennings probably started out just wanting to stop this one out-of-control dream seer, but then he took things too far and began to see every human dream seer as a mortal danger to his kind. He became a murderer too.

Jorie bit her lip until she tasted blood.
Is it a never-ending cycle?

She had come much too close today to killing a man — a Wrasa man, but a man nonetheless. His pain hadn't been any different from that of a human. She glanced at her hands, expecting to see the wolf's blood still clinging to them, but of course they were clean. Her stomach roiled, and she pressed a wet hand to her mouth.

A soft pounding on the bathroom door interrupted her almost breakdown. "Jorie?" Griffin's concerned voice shouted through the door. "You've been in there for a while, and Tony will be here soon to pick us up. Are you okay?"

Am I okay?
Her knees trembled, and she leaned her back against the tiles. "Not really," she whispered. Too much had happened in too little time for her to be okay. Her whole life had changed within just a few days.

"Want me to come in?" Griffin called.

Shit. She heard me. I forgot about her Wrasa hearing.
An image of Griffin joining her in the shower flashed through her mind's eye, and she quickly shoved it back. "No," she shouted back. "You can't. I locked the door."

"I already owe Rhonda a new front door, so what's one more destroyed door between friends?" Griffin answered.

Jorie chuckled, and the weight on her shoulders fell away. "No, stay where you are. I'll be out in a second." She turned off the water and reached for a towel, determined to leave her doubts and her fears behind in the bathroom. They had to face the council, and as Griffin had taught her, it was not a good idea to show weakness to a predator.

CHAPTER 29

"
J
EFF MADSEN IS in a pretty foul mood," Rufus warned as he reached out to open the door to the council chamber for her.

Kylin nodded. "That's what I expected." She brushed her hand against his in a silent thank-you. It meant a lot to her that he was on her side even though everyone else expected his loyalties to be with his pack, not with Kylin. "And his mood is about to get even worse with what I'm about to tell him. Did you prepare everything? We need to be able to make a quick getaway if necessary."

"The car is parked out front, and I prepared a nice little distraction for the guards," Rufus said with a hint of a grin.

"Good." One last look back into Rufus's reassuring brown eyes, then Kylin turned around. The door to the soundproof room clicked shut behind her, and she marched forward, ignoring the feeling of being trapped.

Her sister's life was on the line, so she couldn't afford to show any weakness.

Her eight fellow councilors were already waiting for her, a few sitting at the round table, others pacing in the confines of the council chamber.

"Oh, so you're finally gracing us with your presence," Jeff Madsen said. "I was beginning to think you had joined your sister on her mad romp through Michigan."

"And maybe it would have been better if you had stayed away, Westmore," Thyra Davis said as she stood from her seat at the round table. The Maki was the only councilor who was taller and bigger than Kylin, and she often used her size to intimidate others. "I vote for excluding Manark Westmore from this meeting. We're deciding about the future of her sister, so she's too involved to be objective about it."

Oh, no, Maki. After all these years working with a bunch of stubborn cats, you really think I'm just going to roll over and make it that easy for you?
Determination squared Kylin's shoulders. She would fight for her sister as Griffin had fought for her in the past.

"Objective?" Kylin repeated sarcastically. "You mean objective like Manark Madsen, who's an old friend of Cedric Jennings's father? Or objective like you, Manark Davis, who was once mistaken for an escaped bear from a traveling circus, nearly killed by humans, and has hated them ever since?"

Kylin's lips curled into a feral grin when Thyra sent her an irritated glance.
Mmm, I have her trapped like a mouse. That's what I like about my job.

Loud grumbling and arguing broke out in the council chamber.

Jeff Madsen's broad hand shot up. "Quiet! She can stay," he decided. As the speaker of the council, his opinion counted more than most others, even though in theory, he didn't have more power than any of the other councilors.

Kylin knew that Madsen's and Davis's presence limited her chances to get her colleagues on her side. They were the most powerful and also the most conservative councilors, and the more liberal manarks didn't want to risk alienating them by openly supporting Kylin.

"Let's hear what she has to say," Madsen said.

The councilors took their places at the table, all gazes resting on Kylin.

Kylin swallowed. The importance of the moment took away her breath. If she failed now, the consequences for Jorie Price, for Griffin, and probably for the rest of her family would be grave. Now it was she who had to be Griffin's protector instead of the other way around. "Saru Westmore has —"

"She's no longer a saru," Madsen interrupted before she had finished her first sentence. "She broke our most important laws — she revealed herself to a human, and she killed a Wrasa. Our laws carry the death penalty for that."

Icy fear shocked Kylin into immobility for a few moments. She had known what was at stake, of course, but hearing it aloud was terrifying. "Our laws carry the death penalty for murder, not for killing another Wrasa in self-defense," she said, hiding the tremor of fear in her voice. "Cedric Jennings attacked Griffin and Jorie Price, and Griffin acted in pure self-defense when she killed him."

"She defended a human she was supposed to kill," Jeff Madsen objected.

"In forty-eight hours, not right then and there!" Kylin looked from councilor to councilor, trying to get each of them to look her in the eye. "You all agreed to give them forty-eight hours, and Jennings knew his orders were to wait, not to fly to Michigan and take matters into his own paws. He acted on his own personal agenda, against council orders. He shot at Griffin, so don't pretend she had no right to kill him."

"All right. Let's say it was self-defense," Thyra Davis finally conceded. "But if your sister had followed her orders in the first place and had killed the human when Jennings told her to, things never would have gone that far."

True.
Kylin couldn't deny that. Griffin's refusal to kill Jorie Price had been the first step in this chain of events. "Griffin had a very good reason for not killing Jorie Price," she said, even knowing that when Griffin had decided to save the human's life, she hadn't even suspected that she was sparing a dream seer.

"If you are a saru, there is no good reason for refusing to follow an order!" Jeff Madsen snapped.

"Yes, there is," Kylin said. "No soldier should have to follow an order that is morally and lawfully wrong. We can't go on killing humans left and right."

Madsen frowned. "Wrong? The kill order was based on Griffin Westmore's reports. She repeatedly told us that the human is a threat that needed to be taken care of."

"No," Ky answered. "Griffin never told you that. It was Jennings who reported to you — and he lied. He was the one who wanted Jorie dead, so he forged her reports. These are Griffin's original reports." She slid a small stack of paper over the table, then looked at each of the councilors in turn. "Did one of you ever hear Griffin say that she wants Jorie Price dead?"

Ryle Kendrick started to shake his head but stopped when Madsen glared at him.

"Griffin wanted Jorie Price to stay alive," Kylin continued, refusing to duck down under Madsen's disapproving stare. "And she had good reason." Her muscles tightened, and she took a deep breath. "Jorie Price is a maharsi."

A rare moment of silence settled over the council chamber. Even the foxlike Rtar councilor stopped rustling the stack of paper in front of him.

Then noise exploded all around Kylin. Thyra Davis pounded her fist on the table, almost making it collapse. The Ashawe councilor laughed, and two of the other manarks shouted at Kylin across the table.

"What kind of nonsense is that?" Jeff Madsen's voice drowned out all the others. "You know better than anyone else that your grandfather was the last dream seer. And now you want me to believe that a human has these sacred skills?" He snorted and looked as if he wanted to spit at her for such blasphemous words. Jeff Madsen was known as a spiritual man. Kylin's assertion that a human shared the sacred Wrasa gift had to be an insult to him and everything he believed.