Rachel Vincent - Rogue

I turned to face Marc, preparing to go again, whether I was ready or not. But Marc was gone. I spun to my right, and Ethan was gone, too. Damn it, I thought, comprehension sinking in a moment too late.

I whirled toward the whisper of a soft sole on concrete. Marc was on me before I could react. He shoved me backward with one hand. His foot swept my legs out from under me. Air exploded from my lungs as I hit the mat on my back. Again. Marc straddled my hips, his hands pinning my shoulders to the mat. My hands encircled his wrists trying to push him away, but he didn’t budge.

Adrenaline scalded my veins, prompting me into action. I struck out. My right fist slammed into the left side of his head, just above his ear.

His eyes widened in surprise, and his smile vanished in a grimace of pain. Before he could react, I shoved him in the chest with both hands. He fell onto the mat on his left hip, one hand pressed to his head. I leapt to my feet, pleased with my performance.

Marc stood, rubbing his skull.

“Damn, Faythe.” Ethan whistled. “Dad, I don’t think we need to see her best during practice anymore. We all know what she’s capable of.”

From the corner of my eye, my father nodded, his expression caught between surprise and pride.

Hinges creaked overhead, and we all looked up. “Greg, you have a phone call.”

Blinking, I made out Victor Di Carlo standing on the top step, his bulky form dark against the background of afternoon sunlight shining from the kitchen behind him.

“Take a message,” the Alpha said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Vic frowned. “Um, you should probably take this one. It’s Parker. They found another body.”

My father paced back and forth in front of the sturdy oak desk in one corner of his office, the telephone pressed to his right ear. His stride was characteristically long, smooth, and confident, in contrast to the tension clear in the lines of his face. From the telephone receiver came the steady cadence of Parker’s voice, calmly explaining what he’d found.

I sat on the leather love seat with Marc, listening in on my father’s phone call.

We weren’t just being nosy, though; it was expected. If my father hadn’t wanted us to hear, he would have kicked us out of his concrete-walled, and thus virtually soundproof, sanctuary. Most humans would have used the speaker phone, but we didn’t bother.

Ethan and Vic sat opposite us, on the matching leather love seat. Covering the hardwood at the center of the seating arrangement was an Oriental rug in rich shades of silver, jade, and black, across which my father paced as he listened to Parker’s report.

What I’d gleaned from the conversation so far was that Parker and Holden, his youngest brother, had found the body of a stray in an alley behind a restaurant in New Orleans—in broad daylight. Parker had left the Lazy S the day before to drive Holden back to campus for his senior year at Loyola, after a month-long visit to the ranch. Holden had talked him into staying for a late lunch at his favorite Cajun restaurant in nearby Metairie. After their meal, and probably a couple of drinks, if I knew Parker, the Pierce brothers had gone outside to catch a cab back to campus. Instead they’d caught the scent of an unknown stray.

New Orleans and the surrounding communities were on the edge of the south-central territory. Our territory. As one of my father’s enforcers, Parker was honor bound to find the trespasser and escort him across the border into Mississippi, as Marc and I had done with Dan Painter two days earlier. But as the search for the stray in New Orleans led them to the alley behind the restaurant, the scent grew stronger rather than weaker. The stray wasn’t running from them, which meant that he was either looking for a fight, or he’d already found one. And lost.

After a few minutes, Holden spotted a foot sticking out from beneath a pile of trash, and they knew why the stray hadn’t run. Shoving aside several garbage bags, most already torn open by neighborhood dogs, they uncovered the corpse of a Caucasian male in his midtwenties. He was definitely a stray, and he was definitely murdered. Unless your definition of natural causes includes a snapped neck. Mine doesn’t.

“Please tell me you didn’t leave the body exposed,” my father said, one thick hand massaging his temples as he paced. His glasses lay on his desk blotter, looking abandoned and useless.

Parker’s voice carried over the line, surprisingly clear. “Don’t worry. We covered it back up with garbage, and we’re still in the alley. It’s not like we can walk around Metairie smelling like day-old crawfish. What do you want us to do?”

My father’s silence caught my ear, and I looked up to find him standing still, his eyes closed in concentration. While we didn’t bury bodies on a daily basis, disposing of a corpse was nothing new for an enforcer, and generally required little more than a phone call to the Alpha to report the situation.

Unfortunately, this case couldn’t be handled quite so simply; the body was found in the middle of the day, in a very wellpopulated place. That hardly ever happened, because even most strays had the sense to take care of werecat business in the dark, and in complete isolation from human society. To do otherwise was to risk revealing our existence to the human world. It was an issue of self-preservation, which—unlike humans—most members of our species seem to understand instinctively.

Still, every now and then we came across a werecat—be he stray, wild, or Pride—who showed no interest in hiding his activities, and thus our very existence, from the rest of the world. While public exposure would be most threatening to strays, who had no network of protection, ultimately we all stood to lose everything we had. And we weren’t about to stand back and let that happen.

Disclosure—the Council’s term for the failure of a werecat to keep his existence secret—was a capital crime, and leaving a body unburied fell well within the definition of disclosure. The Territorial Council’s policy on capital criminals—called rogues—was to eliminate them as soon as possible, using any means necessary. Enter my father, Alpha of the southcentral Pride and head of the Territorial Council.

The fate of the rogue who’d killed the Metairie stray was already sealed. My father was his judge, and Marc his executioner. And there would be no appeal.

However, before we could worry about catching and eliminating the murderer, we had to figure out what to do with his victim, a rather interesting dilemma. How do you dispose of a murdered werecat in the middle of the day, in the outskirts of New Orleans?

Ethan shifted on the couch, and his movement drew my attention. He scratched one bare shoulder absently as he stared at our father, clearly as intent on listening in as I was.

Finally, my father stopped pacing. He stood in front of his desk with his back to the room, the phone still pressed to his ear. “What other businesses open into the alley?”

“Um…hang on,” Parker said. Holden’s slightly higherpitched voice came through, muffled and indistinct, then Parker was back on the line. “It looks like…a florist, another restaurant, a print shop, an antique store, a hardware store, and…I think that’s a dry cleaner. Why? What do you have in mind?”

“Where did you leave the van?” the Alpha asked in lieu of an answer. Parker had taken our old twelve-passenger van, loaded with Holden’s luggage.

“On campus, about four miles away.”

“Have you already unloaded it?”

“Yeah, last night,” Parker said.

“Okay, listen carefully,” my father began, and an attentive silence descended in the office, as well as over the line. “Send Holden into the hardware store for two pairs of painter’s coveralls and two pairs of work gloves. When he gets back, you put on one set of coveralls and gloves, then give him the keys to the van and some cash. Tell him to take a cab back to campus, empty several of his moving boxes and throw them in the back of the van, to give you both a reason to be in the alley. While he’s gone, you stay with the body, just in case.