shit. Oh, noooo!
Stop it, Faythe. He’s lost a lot of blood, but that doesn’t mean he’s dead. Marc would be fine. We just had to find him.
“Where does the trail go?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice calm and even. If I panicked, Dan might panic, and we’d lose valuable time that would be better spent looking for Marc. “Does it continue out the front door?”
“Yeah. Across the front stoop, down the steps and over the grass. That’s how I knew something was wrong when I got here.”
“So, it ends in the grass?”
“On the edge of the driveway.” Painter paused, and I heard a metallic groan, as a screen door creaked open. “It looks like they put him in a car and took off with him. There’re big ruts in the gravel from where they peeled off too fast.” He hesitated again, then asked the question I hadn’t even posed to myself yet. “Do you think he’s dead?”
My eyes closed, and I inhaled deeply. Then exhaled slowly. “I don’t know.” I sucked in another breath and forced my concentration back to the work at hand, and away from thoughts I couldn’t bear to entertain. “Did they take his car?”
“No. It’s up next to the house. Along the south side, where he always parks it.” The screen door slammed shut with a horrid tinny screech, and Painter’s voice echoed slightly, now that it had four walls to bounce off again.
“Should I go look for Marc, or start cleaning up the mess?” Painter inhaled deeply, obviously trying to calm himself. “And the bodies…?”
I wanted to tell him to forget about the bodies and start driving around town on the lookout for Marc. Or into the forest, keeping an eye out for fresh tire tracks. But the truth was that if there were enough of them to take Marc down, there would be too many for Painter to handle on his own. Assuming he found them.
My mind was flooded by the possibilities. Maybe they’d taken him alive. But if so, why? And where?
Maybe they’d killed him, and had left to dispose of the body. My eyes watered, and my fist clenched around the phone, the nails of my opposite hand biting into my flesh. No. That’s not what happened. If they’d killed him, why not dispose of all three bodies at once? Why leave the others?
Unless the killers drove a compact…
“Okay, let’s take it one thing at a time.” My feet moved as I spoke, and I found myself on the aisle formed by two rows of weight-lifting equipment. “The other bodies. Are they strays? Do you know them?” I thought about going upstairs, but didn’t want Kaci to overhear anything that might upset her.
“Yeah, they’re strays. I recognize the scents, but don’t know the names.”
“There are two of them, right?” I ran my hand over the leg press, cursing silently when a flake of paint slid beneath my fingernail. “And they bled on the carpet?”
“Yeah.” Floorboards creaked, and I pictured Painter leaning over the bodies. “The carpet, themselves, each other. The biggest one has a huge gash on the top of his skull. Near the back. And the coffee table’s broken and covered in his blood. Looks like he fell and hit it. Or else someone hit him with it.”
Yeah, that sounded like Marc. An odd pang of pride and pain rang through me, as I hoped fervently that he was still alive to repeat that performance someday.
“What about the other one?”
“Side of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone took a rung-back chair to ‘im.”
“Okay, now I need you to sniff around. Concentrate. Do you smell any scents that don’t belong to either Marc or the dead strays? Did anyone else bleed in there recently? Or sweat? Or touch anything? Sniff the doorknobs first, then anything that might have been used as a weapon. Did you touch the doorknob?”
“Only from the outside of the door.” There was a pause on his end, and I thought I heard floorboards groan as he knelt. Or stood. “Yeah, there’s another scent on the front door. The wood and the knob. It’s another stray, but no one I know.”
“Good.” I was walking again, my feet whispering on concrete, my hand trailing over the long bar on the bench press. That scent belonged to the last person who’d touched the doorknob—presumably whoever had taken Marc. “Don’t touch the knob. We’ll need to smell that scent.”
I didn’t hear what he said next because of the footsteps thundering toward me from the kitchen. My dad jerked open the door and jogged down the steps, breathing deeply from exertion, his eyes wide with alarm. I’d rarely seen him so flustered, and it meant the world to me that Marc meant so much to him.
My father wore no coat other than his usual suit jacket, and only once I noticed that his cheeks were flushed from the cold did I realize that I was completely covered with chill bumps, and that I was actually shivering.
Now that I was done exercising, my sweat had dried to leave me cold in the basement chill.
“What happened?” Moving briskly, my father stepped over the corner of the mat and snatched the blanket from Kaci’s chair.
“Hang on a second, Dan,” I said into the mouthpiece, while my father draped the blanket over my shoulders. “Daniel Painter found two dead strays in Marc’s living room. Marc’s missing, and a trail of his blood leads out the house and to the driveway, where it looks like he was loaded into a car. At least one other stray was there, based on the scent on the doorknob.”
My Alpha’s expression grew bleaker with each word I spoke. “How much blood did he lose?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, just as Painter said, “A lot.” My heart thumped harder, aching within my chest at the thought of how much blood he’d lost, and my father motioned for me to sit in the chair Kaci had vacated.
“Are these dead strays in cat form or human form?” he asked, knowing Painter would hear him.
“Human form.” Painter sighed, and when springs squealed over the phone, I pictured him sinking wearily onto Marc’s couch. A couch I’d never sat on, or even seen.
My father frowned, and I shared his confusion. Why would werecats attack someone they obviously meant to kill, based on the earlier ambush, without the use of their best weapons—claws and canines? For that matter, why attack Marc at all? Weren’t Manx and I the original targets? Wasn’t the objective the usual: kidnap the women and kill the men? If so, why go after Marc when Manx and I weren’t even there?
My phone was getting hot, so I switched to my other ear.
“Are the dead men carrying anything?” My dad dug in his inside coat pocket and pulled out his own cell phone, scrolling through the menu as he spoke. “Wallets? Checkbooks? Phones? Anything that might identify them?”
“I don’t know.” More springs groaned as Painter stood again. “Want me to search ‘em?”
Instead of answering Painter, my father turned to me with his free hand outstretched. “Give me the phone.”
I hesitated, even though my father—not to mention my Alpha—had given me a direct order, because handing over my phone felt like giving up my link to Marc. Or at least to the man currently in the best position to help him. But after a second, I obeyed.
“Painter?” my father barked. His concern came through as gruffness. But then, that’s how most of his strong emotions sounded. “This is Greg Sanders, Alpha of the south-central Pride. Thank you for alerting us. Can you stay there until my team arrives?”
“Yeah, sure,” Painter said, and I pictured him nodding eagerly, pleased to be needed, in spite of the circumstances.
My concern for Painter paled in comparison to my fear for Marc, but I still didn’t want him to get hurt, especially trying to help us. “What if they come back to clean up the rest of their mess?”
My