“But the hunters are all dead now?” my father said over the phone, and I only understood the words because I knew what he was most likely to ask.
“We think there’s still at least one out there. Someone must have put the pictures up after the cops left.”
“Send her home,” my dad said, and that time I understood him, loud and clear.
“I actually considered that.” Jace’s tone straddled the line between respectful and assertive—Alpha politics at work. Technically, he didn’t need my father’s permission to keep me. I belonged to the Appalachian Pride. But my father was the council chair, and Jace had butted heads with him less than twenty-four hours before. “But the fact is that she’s safer here. My enforcers are younger than yours by a decade, on average, and they’re strong and fast.”
They’d had to be, to help Jace hold onto territory that had been hostile for nearly the first two years of his tenure as Alpha.
“Hell, two of them are your own boys, Rick. Between me, Teo, Isaac, and Lucas, we’re better able to protect her than anyone else on the planet.”
There was another pause, and my father’s silence over the line told me he was thinking. Hard. I couldn’t understand what he said next, but Jace’s reply filled in the blanks.
“I swear on my life, Rick. I won’t let her out of my sight.”
The guys arrived thirty-five minutes later, which told me they’d broken every speed limit between Jace’s lodge, which functioned as the capital of the Appalachian Territory, and the dead taxidermist’s house.
“Holy fuuuuuck,” Chase Taylor breathed, glancing around the gruesome cellar. He ran one hand through his dark curls and for a second, he looked just like his brother Brian. Only older.
“Those sick bastards!” my brother Lucas said from the bottom tread.
A heartbeat later, Isaac pushed him out of the way and clomped down the last three steps. He followed Lucas’s gaze to the Abby-board, and after a second spent processing, Isaac pulled me into a hug designed to block my view of the pictures. As if I hadn’t already seen them. “You okay?” he said into the top of my head.
“No. You’re smothering me.”
Isaac finally let me go, and a second later, Lucas, my second-oldest brother, pulled me into an identical embrace. At six foot six, Luke was a full half foot taller than our father, and as I had, he’d inherited our mother’s pale skin and red curls, though he kept his pretty closely cropped.
Isaac was the youngest of my brothers, yet still two years older than I. He had our dad’s straight brown hair and no freckles at all, and at six foot two, he was practically dwarfed by Lucas.
“What is all this shit?” Chase ran one finger over the nose of one of the mannequins, which resembled a skinned cat about his size, in feline form.
“They’re forms used for stuffing taxidermied animals,” I explained. “As near as I can tell from an internet search, cat-shaped forms are kind of hard to come by. My guess is that they were custom-ordered from a company that specializes in safari hunting supplies.”
“That is so fucked up,” Mateo murmured.
Jace had left the cellar untouched so that his enforcers could grasp the full scope of what we were facing. He and I had spent the past half hour upstairs, combing through the information we’d gathered about the house’s owner. His name was Gene Hargrove, and based on current pay stubs from a gun-and-archery range, taxidermy was just his hobby.
A very expensive, dangerous, time-consuming hobby.
Unfortunately, according to all the news stations, the name of victim who’d died in Gene Hargrove’s house was Joe Mathews. Which meant that the gun-toting, shifter-stuffing Hargrove was still out there. Still hunting.
Teo whistled as he glanced over the taxidermy tools and a small supply of unfamiliar chemicals. “How did we not see this coming?”
Jace shrugged, but his grim expression and the tight line of his jaw belied the casual gesture. “They’ve been targeting strays. Wildcats.”
“Titus didn’t say anything about wildcats going missing? I smell at least…what?” Teo glanced at the rest of us. “Six? More?”
“At least,” Jace agreed. “I’m waiting for a call back from him, so we’ll know something soon.” Titus Alexander was Jace’s contact in the Lion’s Den—a stray who’d been infected several years before. I hadn’t met him, but both Jace and Faythe spoke very highly of him.