SEVENTEEN

Jace

I knocked on my open bedroom door, and Abby rolled over to face me. Seeing her in my bed—even though I’d hardly touched her all night—triggered a primal satisfaction, like that first deep breath after a long dive. As if having her scent on my sheets meant everything was exactly as it should be, when in reality, everything was falling apart.

She sat up in bed as I crossed the room toward her.

“How’d you sleep?”

Abby shrugged and pushed a mass of red curls back from her face. “You could probably answer that better than I can. How many times did I wake up?”

I sat on the edge of the bed and she scooted closer, dragging the blankets along. “Seven.” The nightmares were back, triggered by Darren and his damn paralytic drug. “But I would have had to wake you up once an hour anyway because of the concussion.” From the looks of it, she’d hit her head when the drug knocked her out. “Doctor’s orders.”

As near as I could tell, her dreams were some fucked-up amalgamation of her abduction at age seventeen, the assault on her campsite during fall break, and what went down in her dorm room sixteen hours before. The recurring theme seemed to be helplessness and an inability to protect herself.

I would gladly have killed everyone who’d ever laid a finger on her, if they weren’t all already dead, but I couldn’t fight her demons. All I could do was rub her back and remind her of where she was when she woke up screaming, and that made me feel helpless.

It made me want to rip someone apart, then lick the blood from my claws while the body cooled.

But I’d already done that.

“Did you get any sleep?” Abby straightened her nightshirt, then pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band she’d left on my bedside table the night before.

“I got enough.” Wherein “enough” was defined as almost none. But there’d be time to sleep later, when the chaos had settled. When I was sure she was going to be okay.

My gaze fell to the bedside table again, where her ruined phone lay next to an extra ponytail holder—they were always snapping beneath the pressure of her hair—and a tube of scented lip balm. Strawberry. Seeing her things on my nightstand… That felt right. Normal. Completely at odds with the fact that her parents were on their way from South Carolina, an emergency meeting of the Territorial Council had been called, and two of my men had spent half the night moving the body of a cop whose death would definitely be both noticed and investigated.

Mateo and Lucas had left Darren’s body in a field behind his home. With any luck, his death would look like exactly what it was—a mauling by a large cat. But even if they’d gone unseen by the only neighbor within viewing distance, the lack of blood at the scene would tell even a bad forensic investigator that Darren had been killed elsewhere, then dumped in the field.

But there was nothing we could do about that.

“Where’s Robyn?” Abby glanced at the other side of the bed, where her roommate had slept. Robyn had refused to be separated from Abby, even while her leg was being sewn up, and only hunger had driven her out of bed alone in a house full of strange scents and faces.

“She’s having breakfast and probably developing a deep-seated reluctant tolerance for my sister.” Melody was fascinated by Robyn. Almost as fascinated as she was with herself, which was a miracle all on its own. “Dr. Carver got here early this morning. Melody was going to keep her secret, but when she saw all the attention Robyn was getting, she practically demanded a prenatal exam.”

Dr. Danny Carver had driven all night to get from Oklahoma to Kentucky. He was actually a medical examiner, but as the only shifter physician in the eastern half of the country, he was constantly on call for injuries beyond the scope of an enforcer’s ability to suture.

And for pregnancies.

“So, no problems?” Abby said.

“Well, he didn’t come packing stirrups, but he said that as far as he can tell without doing an ultrasound, all is well.”

Since we hadn’t previously announced Melody’s news and my mother had done a pretty good job on Robyn’s leg, I could only assume our new tabby herself was the reason for the doctor’s long drive. Carver wanted to examine the first confirmed female stray.

“He took blood samples from Robyn this morning, and he wants to do an exam and a shift observation after lunch.”

Abby groaned. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid by keeping her a secret. She’s having enough trouble adjusting to the fact that she’s not fully human anymore. The last thing she needs is to be poked and prodded.”

“All strays have trouble with the adjustment. You should have told us—”

“This is different, Jace.” Abby pushed back the covers and folded her legs beneath herself. “Other strays don’t wake up one day and realize they’re responsible for propagating a species they didn’t even know existed.”

“So, you just decided not to tell her?” Robyn had been hysterical and nearly incoherent in the minutes after we’d met her. Some of that was because she’d just narrowly survived a home invasion by a psychotic shifter-hunting cop. Some of it was probably due to the fact that her first encounter with the local Alpha—yours truly—included seeing him rip that cop’s throat out. But it soon became clear that the bulk of her shock and confusion was because she’d had no idea my men and I existed.

Robyn knew what she had become and what she could do, and she knew there were other shifters in the world, somewhere. But she’d had no idea there was any governing body around to hold her responsible for her actions. Or to help her.

“No, I decided to delay telling her,” Abby insisted. “But I taught her about everything she needed to know immediately—shifting, and instinct, and enhanced senses. About keeping everything a secret. I just left off all the social and political stuff. Alphas, territories, Prides. Procreation. I was trying to give her time to adjust to all the physical stuff first before I threw everything else at her. I was trying to help her. She was having a lot of trouble with the transition.”

“That’s normal, Abby. That’s why we monitor strays during their first weeks, whenever possible.”

Unfortunately, that was rarely possible. Most strays are infected by other strays, who know little to nothing about their own species, including how transmission works, how to prevent it, and the fact that it’s forbidden by long-standing council decree. Most of them don’t realize that they have a responsibility to help their victims through the transitional period, because they weren’t helped by the shifters who infected them. It was a vicious, violent cycle, which we had no way to stop unless strays in the free zones were taken into the fold. Given authority, official standing, and organization.