Pride (21 page)

But the tabby wasn’t done. “Kaci-with-a-
K
-and-an-
I
.” She said it as if the whole phrase was one word, and her speech had the distinctive cadence of long-term habit, as if she’d said that same thing nearly every day of her life. I could sympathize. No one ever spelled my name right the first time either.

“Nice to meet you, Kaci. I’m Faythe-with-a-
Y
-and-an-
E
.” My smile widened, and I was delighted to see a tiny echo of it on her face. She was happy to have made me happy. Or else she was laughing at me silently.

Hoping fervently that it was the former, I said, “You look pretty young.”
Hopefully much younger than you actually are.
I inhaled slowly, then asked the question before I could chicken out. I needed to know, whether I
wanted
to or not. “How old are you, Kaci?”

“I’m not that young.” She twisted her face into a look of displeasure; it was a bit like watching a pixie frown. A very thin, dirty pixie. “I’m just a late bloomer. At least, that’s what my mo—” She stopped in midword and looked away, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how the sentence ended in her head. “Anyway, I’m not as young as I look.”

Thank goodness.
But her reassurance wasn’t enough to unclench my hands in my lap. “So? How old are you?”
Please, please, please say seventeen. Sixteen, even.

“Thirteen. And a half.”

Shit. Ohhhh, shit
. Thirteen and a half was too young for…
anything.
There was no way any enforcer worth his own canines would let a tabby that young out of his sight. Especially with her parents dead.

“Thirteen and a half?” I heard the flat, shocked quality of my own voice and winced at it, even as Kaci frowned. How the
hell
had a thirteen-year-old survived on her own long enough to become so thin and malnourished? It just wasn’t possible, even if she
had
been stuck in cat form the whole time, which was how the story seemed to be shaping up.

“Where are you from, Kaci?” I tried to hide the horror in my voice, without much luck. But before she could answer, a loud, persistent knock came from the other side of the door.

Knowing none of the toms I’d left in the hall would interrupt us, I sniffed in that direction and felt the blood drain from my face, even as the voice bellowed from the hallway.

“Katherine Faythe Sanders, get your
tail
out here
now!
”

Damn!

“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Kaci. Swallowing thickly, I started to stand, but then sank back onto the floor when I noticed that Kaci’s eyes had gone huge. “Don’t worry,” I mumbled, shoving sleep-tousled hair back from my face. “It’s just my dad.”

“W
hat were you
thinking,
disobeying a direct order?” my father demanded, and I had to stand on my own foot to keep from scuffing my bare, freezing toes in the dirt. I hadn’t even had a chance to put shoes on before he marched down the stairs and out the back door, his very posture an unspoken command for me to follow. All the way to the woodpile stretched between two trees behind the main lodge.

“I was thinking about what Marc said earlier. Right now the council has no use for me—no reason to keep me alive. The best way I can help myself is to prove them wrong. To prove myself useful.
Indispensable
. So when Dr. Carver said she might calm down for another woman…”

My father’s scowl deepened.

Shit.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Dr. Carver’s part in the whole thing. Now he would get his ass chewed, too.

“It’s not his fault, Daddy. He didn’t make me do it. No one did.” But that wouldn’t matter. If I went down, the doc would go down with me. And we probably wouldn’t be alone.

I stared into the skeletal branches overhead, trying to remember what I was originally getting at.
Oh, yeah…
“But my point is that I finally had something to offer. Something no one else could do.”

Early-morning sunlight highlighted the gray patches at his temples as he shook his head, mouth already open to interrupt. I rushed on before he could. “No one else could have gotten her to Shift, Daddy, much less talk. She was too afraid of the guys to relax enough to even
listen.
She split Dr. Carver’s arm wide open!”

“Which is
exactly
why we said no one was to go in there alone! We’re all here trying to keep your head attached to your shoulders, yet for some reason, you feel the need to flaunt your disobedience in front of the very tribunal demanding your life! Not to mention how badly hurt you could have been. You had
twenty
stitches removed from your stomach not
ten hours
ago. We can
not
afford to have you injured again.”

“I’m fine.” I spread my arms, showing him how perfectly intact I was.

“You could have been mauled.”

“Yes. I could also be struck by lightning on my way back to the cabin. Or I could be hit by a falling tree. Or run over on the crosswalk. Life isn’t safe, Daddy. Not for your little girl, and
certainly
not for one of your enforcers. I saw an opportunity to prove my own worth and help that poor child, and I took it. I stand by my decision.” Though I was so nervous about it my hands were starting to sweat in spite of the cold…

“And furthermore…” I rushed on, ignoring both my own nerves and whatever he’d been about to say. “I think you should be
proud
of me, instead of mad. I think I did exactly what
you
would have done in my place.”

My father’s face turned purple faster than I could backtrack. “What
I
would have done is irrelevant.” He stepped into my personal space and I backed up instinctively, groaning inwardly when my spine hit the tree trunk. “I am your sire and your Alpha. I do whatever has to be done, in large part because whelps like
you
can’t remember to follow orders!”

“Okay, yes. You’re right.” Like he needed me to tell him
that. I exhaled slowly, gathering my wits as I grounded myself with the feel of the bark beneath my fingers. “But what you would have done is
not
irrelevant. It’s imperative. You’re training me to take over for you one day, right? To be as good a leader to the Pride as you are now.”

I probably shouldn’t have played the successor card, especially coupled with a heavy helping of sycophancy. But if the ends justified the means… “How can I do that better than by emulating you?”

His scowl deepened. “You’re not going to get out of this with flattery, so don’t even bother.”

Damn
. “Fair enough.” I sighed and made myself meet his angry stare. “But can you honestly tell me you would have let that poor girl—that
child
—suffer alone out of fear for your own safety, when you could help her and everyone else by simply showing a little courage and compassion?”

For a moment, my father only looked at me, and I held my breath in anticipation of his reaction, mortified to realize I was scolding my-Father-the-Alpha.
Oh, shit
.

Then, to my absolute amazement, my father crossed his arms over his chest and nodded, by all appearances conceding my point. “Well said.” His face showed no hint of a smile, meaning that while he might—by some miracle—be proud of me, he was far from happy. “I hope you can say it again just like that, because no matter how good your intentions were, they don’t excuse you disobeying a direct order. The tribunal is going to want a word with you.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking. When I opened them again, I found my father watching me, still in that same closed-off posture. “I’ll do whatever I have to do. Apologize, take another suspension, or even a night in the cage.” Since we both knew there
was
no cage here. “All I ask is that you protect Kaci.”

His brows rose in surprise, and his expression softened ever so slightly. “She told you her name?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you. I was in there
working,
not goofing off with my girlfriend. We didn’t paint a single toenail!” Not that I’d ever done that in my entire life.

He actually smiled at that one briefly before recomposing his business face. “What did she say?”

“Just her name and age. She was about to say more when you…
arrived
.” My father scowled again, and I rushed to fill the pause. “Her name is Kaci Dillon, and she’s thirteen and a half years old.”

“Thirteen…?” His words faded into horrified silence and he reached for the woodpile, as if to steady himself. “That isn’t possible.”

“That’s what I thought.” I glanced at the lodge, where several gaps had appeared in the blinds covering the windows—toms watching us from relative safety. Evidently everyone was awake now, which made me
really
glad my father had posted Marc and Jace at the tabby’s door with orders not to let anyone in—or out—until further notice from him. Including the other Alphas.

It was a risky move, and they wouldn’t be able to hold the door themselves if the entire tribunal decided they wanted in. But that wasn’t likely to happen, thanks to Uncle Rick, and even if it did, we’d hear the ruckus from outside and come running to straighten things out. So for the moment, I was confident that the tabby was safe.

“Who is she?” my father asked, now pacing the length of the woodpile, crunching dead leaves beneath his feet. The question was rhetorical, fortunately, because I certainly didn’t have the answer. “I’ve never heard of the Dillons, or their Pride. How could I never have heard of them?”

No, we didn’t know every Pride in the world personally, but my father knew every Pride in North America, by name and reputation at least, and several of those in Middle and
South America, as well as Europe. And Kaci spoke English.
American
English, as far as I could tell, with no accent I could discern in what few words she’d said so far. It made no sense.

“It gets even weirder than that. She didn’t know how to Shift. I had to talk her through it step by step.” I rocked on my heels, my hands clasped nervously at my back. “You know, there’s a possibility no one else seems willing to say out loud…”

“No.” He stopped near the far end of the woodpile, to glare at me over one shoulder. “She was probably too nervous to Shift on her own, which makes sense considering how young she is. She is
not
a stray, Faythe.”

“Why? Because we’ve never seen a female one? There’s a first time for everything, Daddy.”

His eyes glazed over and the pacing recommenced, and just like that, I was dismissed, along with my theory-threatening, comfort-zone-shattering, too-new-to-be-considered yet perfectly-possible idea.

Irritation clenched my jaws, so I spoke through them. “Why is it that when Manx claims to have
met
a female stray, everyone smiles and says anything’s possible, but when I merely
mention
that very possibility, the same people roll their eyes and laugh in my face?”

My Alpha reached the end of the woodpile and turned. “They’re humoring her. They expect more of you. You’re well educated, well trained, and even well respected in certain circles.”

I was?
Cool.
A tingle of pride shivered its way through me, though I knew the downside was coming…

“Spouting nonsense like that makes you sound like those idiots who turn up in the woods with their cameras every year hoping to spot Bigfoot.”

“You know, they’re not completely off base.” I plucked a lone brown leaf dangling from the branch over my head and
broke off the first lobe. “Someday one of them might get lucky and capture a shot of Elias Keller.”

He growled softly in reproach. “You’re missing the point. She’s
not
a stray, and I’m basing that on nothing more than the fact that she doesn’t
smell
like a stray. If she did we’d all have noticed immediately.”

“She doesn’t smell like a
male
stray, but maybe she
does
smell like a
female
stray and we don’t know because we’ve never smelled one.”

He huffed in exasperation. “We’ve smelled female cats, and we’ve smelled strays. It’s not too hard to imagine what a combination would smell like. She’s
not
a stray, which means she had to come from somewhere. From some Pride. We need more information from her.” Having obviously come to a decision, he stopped pacing to face me. “You’ll have to ask her some more questions.”

Ya think?
I rolled my eyes. He’d interrupted us and practically dragged me from the room by my hair, only to tell me to go back and do more of what I’d been doing in the first place. Lovely.

“Don’t start, Faythe. This is different. Now you’ll be going in with permission and an approved agenda, not disobeying a direct order in the middle of the night.”

Technically, it was five-thirty in the morning…

I ripped the last of the leaf in half and let the pieces flutter to the ground. “You think Malone will go for it?”

He hesitated, obviously thinking unpleasant thoughts. “After he’s had his say and you’ve taken whatever’s coming to you, I don’t see that he’ll have much of a choice.
He
won’t be able to get her to talk.” Without another word, my father headed for the lodge, his steps firm and heavy.

As I followed, trying to catch up without actually running, one last whispered sentenced floated back to me on the
chilly, early-morning breeze. “By damn, they can’t call her useless
now
.”

I smiled in spite of myself, and in spite of the tribunal, every member of which no doubt sat waiting for me inside.

Twenty minutes later, I sat on the living-room couch trying not to nod off on Dr. Carver’s shoulder. Lucas was perched in the armchair on our right, much too stiff and nervous to fall asleep, and Marc sat across the coffee table from him, hands clenched around the arms of the chair nearest the front door. No one spoke. We looked like children lined up outside the principal’s office, waiting to be called in. And essentially, that’s what we were doing.

My father had locked himself in the dining room with the other Alphas to brief them on what we’d done. Try as I might to overhear their meeting, I could only catch the briefest of urgent whispers. They had Beethoven cranked on the stereo again, probably trying to make me sweat.

It was working.

It was nearly 8:00 a.m., and though I was on my second cup of coffee in under five minutes, no one had even started breakfast, because there was no one around to cook. My father and a couple of the other Alphas had called in extra backup to help with the search, but none of the flights would land until evening, so Jace and Michael were about to head into the woods. One of the other enforcer pairs had had to take a double shift because Marc and Lucas were in trouble along with me and Dr. Carver.

Everyone who’d searched until dawn was now sleeping.

So after another night without finding either the strays or the missing human hikers, we were understaffed again, and now walking on eggshells.

Still straining to hear something useful from the dining room, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a sudden pop
sounded from the kitchen, followed by a soft fizzing sound—someone opening a can of soda. An instant later Jace stepped into the doorway with a Coke in one hand. “Anyone else thirsty?” He smiled at us hopefully.

My eyes met Jace’s, and irritation fueled the fire of nerves smoldering deep inside me.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Jace’s eyes pleaded with me as the can hovered in front of his mouth. “Your dad was already up when I got to the cabin, and I couldn’t very well lie to him, could I?”

“Of course not.” I sighed. It wasn’t Jace’s fault. We’d known the Alphas would find out eventually. “I’m not mad. I’m just…nervous.” I’d told my dad I was ready to accept the consequences of my actions. But that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it.

“Look, you were actually doing them a favor, and no one got hurt.” He gestured with the can as he spoke. “They’ll bluster for a while, then the whole thing will blow over. Right?” Leaning against the door frame, Jace took a long swallow of his soda, and when no one answered, a tight, cautious smile stole over his face. “I mean, what are they going to do? Execute you twice?”

“That’s not fun—” I started. But then Marc’s fist slammed into the coffee table, and my last syllable was lost beneath the splinter of wood as it broke in two.

“You think this is a joke?” He stood, kicking one-half of the table out of his way. “Because I can
guarantee
you the Alphas are taking it seriously.” He turned from Jace to glare at me, but I saw the truth in his eyes. He wasn’t mad at either of us. Not really. He was mad at himself. “I should
never
have let you go in there.” He pulled his foot back and kicked the other half of the coffee table, and I flinched when it smashed into the wall near the door.