Justus fell to the ground on his side, writhing in the dirt.

“Listen to me.” I knelt next to him, whispering directly into his ear, softly stroking hair from his forehead. “Calm down. You’re in control of your body. You can tell it to stop. You can stay human. You can fight this.”

His eyes rolled up to look at me, and though his jaw was clenched tightly shut from muscles tensing as they shifted, I could see what he wanted to say clearly in his expression.

He didn’t want to stop this.

TWENTY-THREE

Titus

“Drew!” I shouted as I raced through the darkened zoo, and only when I heard my own voice echo at me did I stop to wonder whether the party-throwers had gotten rid of the entire night security staff, or only those responsible for the herpetarium-side of the zoo.

Drew had a hell of a head start. I would never catch him if he didn’t want to be caught. But he wasn’t running to get away. He’d killed Leland Blum because Blum knew what he’d done, which meant Drew had no intention of fleeing the territory. He wanted to be Alpha, permanently, and for that to happen, he’d have to get rid of everyone who knew or could figure out the truth.

Me. Robyn. Justus. And maybe Spencer.

Drew wasn’t running from me. He was running toward a position of advantage. A place to take his stand. Barreling head-first into his trap would only get me killed.

I stopped on the paved path, forcing myself to focus despite the rage pumping through my body with every beat of my heart. I detected no trace of Drew’s scent, in part because my nose was overloaded by an array and concentration of animal scents unlike any I’d ever experienced in nature. So I closed my eyes, concentrating on what I could hear instead. If Drew wanted to be found, he’d have to show me where he was.

Hooves shuffling in straw.

Birds squawking.

Monkeys howling, swinging on creaking branches from somewhere to the east.

The watery snort of something huge. A hippo?

Then I heard the familiar pounding of boots on pavement, accompanied by a breathless huffing. Drew was running.

I opened my eyes and took off after him. I ran past the carousel and the bathrooms, then across a grassy wooded patch of lawn. Drew’s footsteps led me past a small amphitheater and a closed county-fair style cafe, then the scent of leopard overwhelmed me with its eerily familiar, yet unmistakably different pheromones.

One of the leopards growled. I couldn’t see her, but she could smell me as well as I could smell her. I slowed to a jog. Drew was drawing me into the big cat area. In a zoo as small as Jackson’s, that included only two more enclosures: the tigers and the cougars.

“Is this some kind of irony?” I called as I jogged toward the tigers. But Drew didn’t answer, and I couldn’t hear him anymore.

As I approached the enclosure, I slowed to a walk, listening for footsteps. Breathing. Watching for any out-of-place movement. But my senses were muted by the proximity of caged tigers. Two of them paced in front of the glass wall that let viewers get within inches of the great beasts. They were agitated by my presence and each huffing breath they drew into their huge lungs would obscure the sounds of Drew’s breathing. And his footsteps, unless he wanted me to hear them.

“You couldn’t just go away, could you?”

I spun toward the sound of his voice as Drew stepped into the covered viewing area. Holding a pistol.

“Drew…” Pulse racing, I held my hands up, palms out, my plan to disable him with no real care for his well-being temporarily stymied by the gun. “Why don’t you calm down and tell me what this is about?”

“It’s about the Pride!” He sounded exasperated. As if I should have known all along why he would turn into a violent sociopath. “That’s all this has ever been about!”

“You infected my brother because you want to be Alpha?”

“I deserve to be Alpha.” He gestured with the gun, and my focus followed the barrel. “I am Alpha. This Pride was my idea.”

“The Pride was our idea.” I tried to keep my voice calm. Even. “We said we’d run it together, and we have been. We—”

“Bullshit!” Drew roared, and the tigers stopped pacing to watch him warily. “It was my idea. I asked you to help, and instead, you took over. There was no discussion. No vote. You just assumed everyone would be better off with you in charge.”

“Drew, I didn’t…” Well, not exactly. I hadn’t intended to take over. I hadn’t even consciously thought about taking a leadership role. It just…happened.

“Being wealthy doesn’t make you a leader,” Drew insisted. “Running your dad’s company doesn’t qualify you to be in charge of people’s lives. I was summa cum laude, and you were a B student. I worked for a living, and you practically lived on your trust fund until your parents died. The Pride was my idea, and you took it!”

“You’re right.” Though I would have conceded any point he made, while he had a gun aimed at my chest. “I didn’t mean to cut you out. I didn’t even realize you wanted to be Alpha.” And the plain truth was that someone who had to say he wanted to be the Alpha—or waited for others to ask him to take the position—didn’t stand much of a chance of actually attaining that goal.

Alphas step up because they can’t not step up. They rise to a position of leadership and authority because people follow them, no discussion needed. No permission asked.

Drew hadn’t done that. I had. And that had nothing to do with money.

“Right,” he spat. “You just assumed that because you were everyone else’s boss, that you’d be mine too.” He raised the gun. “Turn around and start walking.”

I almost refused. Then I realized that Robyn and Justus were waiting for me, just yards from a party full of unsuspecting college kids. If I didn’t cooperate, would Drew start shooting? Was he that unstable?

He’d killed Leland Blum in cold blood.

I started walking, on alert for a chance to take the gun.

“So, you framed me,” I said as we passed the leopards, headed back the way I’d come. “You infected Justus, knowing that whatever havoc he wreaked would be blamed on me, as long as no one knew he was a shifter.”

“And as long as you had no alibi,” Drew said, his shadow stretching out on the path in front of me in the glow from a security light overhead. “It took a lot of planning to get him to lose his shit while you were all alone. But I had no idea he’d keep infecting people. Cleaning up after your brother has become a real pain in the ass.”