And maybe a full pardon. That would be nice, too.
Jace slid into the seat on my right, setting his own mug on the table in front of him. I mouthed, “Thanks,” and held up my cup before sipping from it, my attention already focused on the Alphas and the bruin.
“What can you do for me?” Keller ran one broad, thickfingered hand along his scraggly beard, tugging it as he stared down at my father. “Keep your cats off my mountain.”
Bruins, like the bears they Shifted into, lived almost exclusively in the northern rocky districts—mostly Alberta, British Columbia and Alaska. Very few lived in the continental U.S., and those who did stuck to isolated regions of the Northwest—including the werecat free zone in Montana, where we’d come for my hearing.
“Our cats?” My father glanced at his fellow Alphas, but none seemed to have any idea what our ursine guest was talking about.
“Well, they certainly aren’t my cats,” Keller scoffed. He lifted his mug—which looked like a toy cup in his tennis racket-size hand—and drained the contents in one long swallow. Then he set the empty cup on the coffee table and eyed my father steadily.
“What are these cats doing, exactly?” Calvin Malone asked.
“They’re carrying on like a pack of rabid dogs, not five miles from my place.” Keller shifted in his seat, and the couch groaned with his movement. “Hunting and fighting in the daytime. Making all kinds of racket. It’s a bad time for such ruckus, what with humans crawling all over the mountain looking for those missing hikers. Damn fools. Those cats of yours are either gonna make trouble, or be trouble, and I want no part of it either way.”
Missing hikers?
On my left, the kitchen door creaked open, and I turned to see Marc step inside. His gaze found me instantly, the gold specks glittering in his brown eyes. He looked away first, as had become his habit since we’d broken up ten weeks earlier. Ten weeks and four days, to be exact. And approximately ten hours.
But who was counting?
A familiar ache settled into my chest, and I tried to drown it with coffee.
“Are you sure they’re Shifters, and not natural cats? Cougars, maybe?” Uncle Rick asked from the living room. I tried to concentrate on what was being said, but I couldn’t seem to drag my gaze from Marc.
“What’s going on?” he whispered to Jace, avoiding my eyes as he sniffed in the direction of the living room. “And what’s that smell?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Keller rumbled from the other room, and Marc froze at the sound of the strange voice.
“Is that what I think it is?” Marc murmured, crossing the kitchen to stand behind us, where he could see into the living room. “A bruin?”
Jace nodded, a grin practically splitting his face in half. Bruins were rarer than thunderbirds. Rarer even than tabby cats, at least in the U.S. My father said they’d be gone for good someday. Maybe during my lifetime. I’d never expected to see one in person.
“They’re bigger than cougars, and jet-black, every one,” Keller continued. “Smarter ’n cougars, too. But they lack the common sense to be frightened when they ought.”
Definitely tomcats, then, I thought. And probably teenagers.
“I expect you boys to round ‘em up, and soon,” the bruin said, glancing from one Alpha to another. “I’ve already buried one—figured you’d wanna know why he didn’t come back—and I don’t mind diggin’ more holes, if need be. Seems only fair to warn you first, though.”
My father frowned, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. What they all must have been thinking. We weren’t missing any cats. Though he didn’t seem to know it, Keller was talking about strays. Reckless, likely suicidal strays. He had to be.
“We’ll take care of the problem.” My father tapped his index fingers together beneath his chin. Then, as if he’d read my mind, “Can you describe the scent of these werecats? They were male, I assume?”
Keller nodded. “No doubt about that. Not with ‘em pissin’ on every tree and rock for ten square miles.”
My father cleared his throat to disguise a smile, but Jace wasn’t so fortunate. He choked on a gulp of coffee, spewing it across the table and down the front of his shirt. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, and Marc grabbed a pile of paper napkins from the counter behind him, dropping them over the mess on the table.
“Could you tell anything else from their scents?” Uncle Rick asked, while my father glared at us from the living room. I shrugged at him in apology, while Jace tossed the soggy napkins across the room into the trash can. “Were they Pride or stray?”
Keller stroked his beard again. “Can’t say as I know the difference.”
My father nodded, as if he’d expected that very reply. “A stray is a werecat who was born human, then infected by being scratched or bitten by one of us in cat form.”
I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortably aware that nearly every eye in the living room had just focused on me. Always in the past when the topic of strays came up, Marc became the unwilling center of attention. But that was no longer the case. I was now infamous for having created a stray. In fact, I was the only Pride cat in living history to admit to such a thing. No one else was that crazy. Or stupid.
But things were different for bruins, as Elias Keller had just reminded us. His species wanted nothing to do with the human population. Or with each other, for the most part. Unlike werecats, bruins lived alone, typically in rough cabins in isolated mountainous regions virtually untouched by civilization. They were the “mountain men” of legend, reclusive giants in huge flannel shirts, fur hats and colossal boots, stomping through the forest with an ax over one shoulder and a dead deer over the other. They were likely the source of the Paul Bunyan stories. Hell, in one form or another, they were probably also Bigfoot, almost never seen, because there were very few of them to be seen.
Bruins weren’t rare only because they bred slowly, though that was certainly part of it. The rest of the problem was that like thunderbirds, they could only be born, not made. Being mauled by a bruin would not turn a human into a “werebear.” It would kill him or her. Period. Which was why the concept of a stray was completely lost on Keller.
“And there’s a difference between the smell of a stray and a…Pride cat?”
Malone nodded. “We’re all Pride cats. This cat you…buried? Did it smell like us?”
Keller sniffed the air dramatically, and his entire beard twitched with the motion. It might have been funny, if he didn’t look so very serious. “Yes. You’re all cats. They were all cats. You all smell like cats to me.”
“He needs to smell a stray,” Paul Blackwell said, and dread settled into my stomach. I knew what was coming. I just didn’t know who’d be dumb enough to do it.
But I should have known.
“Where’s Marc Ramos?” Malone demanded, glancing around at his fellow Alphas, as if he expected Marc to suddenly appear in their midst. “He’s a stray. Someone bring Marc in
