for a moment on ice, and I whacked my head on the window, then gravel crunched when we pulled off the shoulder and back onto the road. As we drove away, I saw Marc and Painter walking backward toward the trees on our side of the road, each pulling two dead cats by the tails.
“We can’t just leave them,” I insisted, as Manx crouched over Des in the car seat behind me.
Ethan sighed, eyes on the rearview mirror. “They’re moving bodies, not storming the Bastille. They’ll be on the road in a couple of minutes.”
“We should have helped,” I snapped, turning to stare through the rear window as Marc went back for another corpse. How many had we killed? “And what the hell do you know about the Bastille?”
He shrugged, squinting into the patch of road illuminated by the headlights. “Angela wrote a paper on the French Revolution.”
“And you read it?” My tone conveyed more than adequate skepticism. Angela, his girlfriend, was a college senior. It was an odd pairing, to say the least, but their “relationship” had outlasted my most conservative estimate by nearly three months.
No one had won the office pool.
“I am literate. And no, we should not have helped Marc and Painter. We should get Manx and the baby to safety.” Ethan wiped a dark smear from his forehead with the back of one palm. “Not to mention Vic. He’s bleeding pretty badly.”
Oh yeah.
The crinkle of plastic drew my eyes to the third row, where Vic was spreading black plastic sheeting across the seat, to catch his own blood. Even injured, he was trying to protect his upholstery. Must have been a guy thing.
But my brother was right—a decidedly odd turn of events. So I took one last look at Marc and Painter and made my way to the back of the vehicle to see what I could do for Vic. Then we did what I couldn’t remember any Pride cat ever doing before: we ran from the strays.
We’d been driving for about ten minutes when Marc called my cell phone.
“You guys okay?” I asked by way of a greeting, as I fiddled with the vent above the rear bench seat. I’d bandaged Vic as well as I could, then stayed in the back to keep an eye on him.
Over the line, Painter’s crappy old engine protested as he accelerated. They were on the road, too. “All scratched up, but I’ve been worse,” Marc said.
“Me, too,” Painter spoke up, his voice slightly muffled from distance to the phone.
“What happened?” Des started to fuss behind me, and I looked up to see Manx dig a capped pacifier from a pale blue diaper bag.
Marc exhaled deeply over the phone. “After you guys left, their motivation faded. We dragged the dead ones into the trees. Same with the unconscious ones.”
“What about the rest?”
“The strays who could walk hobbled off on their own. We knocked the rest of them out and moved them into the trees with the others.”
“How many bodies?” Vic called from behind me, his excitement obvious, even through the pain in his voice. I’d never heard of Pride cats facing foes in such great numbers before, and we’d more than held our own. The news would travel fast, and surely even my father’s opponents would be impressed. How could they not be?
“Six dead,” Marc said. “Five unconscious. Seven more injured, but awake until we fixed that oversight. At least three got away.”
Ethan whistled as he changed lanes, and I did the math in my head, gasping at the total. “Twenty-one strays, all working together?”
My brother huffed. “Plus however many would have been in the second wave.” The very thought of which made me shudder.
“What do you think they wanted?” I said into the phone, staring out the window at the passing darkness. After the ambush, my imagination was working overtime, and I kept thinking I saw eyes staring out at me from the woods.
“Well, they weren’t dressed for conversation,” Marc said. In fact, they weren’t dressed for anything, which was his point. It was impossible to negotiate—or even make demands—without human vocal cords.
The strays had come to kill. But why?
“We need to call Dad.” Ethan flicked off the high beams when headlights appeared on the road in front of us.
“Already have.” Soda fizzed and Marc gulped in my ear, and I pictured him drinking directly from Painter’s two-liter of Coke. “He’s sending a crew to take care of the bodies.” He paused for another drink. “There’s a Holiday Inn just off the Meadville exit. Check in and get several adjoining rooms. Preferably on the back side. We’ll be there in half an hour.”
Adjoining rooms would make it easier to keep an eye on Manx and the baby, and parking in the back would help hide our vehicles, in case the second wave of strays came looking for us.
“Got it. See you in a few.” I hung up the phone and immediately wished I’d told him I loved him, especially considering how close we’d all just come to dying. “How you holding up, Vic?” I twisted again to look at him in the constant ebb and flow of the highway lights, now that we were on an actual highway, instead of some dark, two-lane back road.
“The bleeding’s slowed,” he said, accompanied by the crinkle of plastic. “But my arm stings like a bitch.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you all fixed up.”
Forty-five minutes later, I sat in the center of the left-hand bed in the hotel room Vic and Ethan would share. Their room was connected by a currently open set of back-to-back doors to another room, where Manx sat in a wheeled desk chair, nursing Des. Again.
Marc and I had our own room, next to Manx’s, but not connecting. A little privacy was all we’d be able to salvage from the botched transport/reunion. That, and dinner together, if Ethan and Painter ever returned with food.
“Okay, let’s take a look at the damage,” Marc said from the end of the other bed. He clenched the shoulder of Vic’s T-shirt and pulled. Seams split with a rapid-fire popping sound, and the detached material slid fromVic’s arm to the floor. We’d learned through experience that the torn-sleeve approach was much easier than making the patient pull his shirt over his head with an injured arm.
I sucked in a deep breath at the sight of Vic’s gored arm, and my fist clenched around the hideous orange-and-yellow-print comforter. But Marc didn’t even blink. He’d seen worse. Hell, he’d been through worse.
So had I, come to think of it. I fingered the healed slash marks on the left side of my abdomen as I stared at Vic’s arm. My scars were ten weeks old, and still pink, a permanent reminder of Zeke Radley and his Montana band of loyal/crazy strays—which had just been dwarfed by the gang we’d faced an hour earlier.
“What do you want for the pain?” Marc asked, angling Vic’s arm into the glow from the lamp on the bedside table. Why don’t hotel rooms ever have overhead lights?
Vic grimaced. “Whiskey.”
“You’re in luck.” Marc smiled as he lifted a white plastic sack from the floor; he and Painter had made a supply run on the way. He pulled two bottles from the bag. One was Jack Daniel’s, the other hydrogen peroxide. But the clink from the sack as he set it down told me Marc was prepared for Vic’s second and third choices, too.
For the next twenty minutes, I watched Marc clean and stitch Vic’s wounds, grateful that they were shallow, if long and ugly.
I was next. We’d decided the bite marks on my arm could simply be bandaged, since they hadn’t torn. But my leg needed stitches, and apparently that fact was nonnegotiable.
Marc held my arm to stabilize me as I hobbled across the dingy carpet to the cheap dinette, wearing only the tank top and snug boy-shorts I usually slept in. My pants had gone the