Michael’s anxiety was contagious, and curiosity and worry for Owen had temporarily eclipsed my zeal for escape.

“Owen? What did you find out?” my father said into the phone.

Michael nudged me with his elbow and nodded at the couch. I shook my head.

I was afraid to back down because once I had, I might never gather enough courage to stand my ground again. Instead, I’d be tempted to run off in the middle of the night, like I’d always done before. While that technique was pretty effective, it made me look like a coward and a child. Neither of which I was.

I caught a blur of movement as Michael’s foot shot out behind my ankles.

Before I could move, he swept my feet out from under me. My backside hit the rug with a bruising thud, and my teeth snapped together, the sharp click resounding through my head. Daddy turned to look at us with a raised eyebrow, but Michael just shrugged at him. He hauled me up by my arms, dropping me onto the couch like a naughty puppy onto a pile of newspapers.

Michael straightened his suit coat, smiling, then settled onto the love seat across from me as if he were sitting down to his afternoon tea. I glared at him as I rubbed the marks his fingers left on my arms, but it was just for show. I’d learned long ago that even though Michael no longer official y worked for our father, he took his orders seriously. I defied him at my own risk.

“Is he sure?” Daddy asked, turning to face the curio cabinet so that I saw him in profile. Light from the cabinet bathed his strong features, highlighting the tension on his normally unreadable face.

Leather creaked as I leaned sideways on the couch, rubbing my tailbone while I listened closely for Owen’s side of the conversation. “Yeah. It was a jungle cat,” he drawled. “No doubt about it.”

“What about the scent?” My father glanced at me, then turned back to face the display case, as if that would keep me from hearing the answer.

“My guess would be Brazilian,” Owen said. My pulse jumped, and I sat up straighter, my sore tailbone forgotten. “But he could be from anywhere in the area.

He’s definitely South American, though, and definitely a stray.”

Strays have a distinctive scent, which is easily distinguished from that of a Pride-born cat. It’s like the difference in taste between Coke and Pepsi: subtle if you never drink either, but unmistakable if you’re accustomed to one and suddenly confronted with a mouthful of the other.

Marc told me once that Pride cats smel differently to strays too, which I wasn’t surprised to hear. We have a family-specific identity—a base scent, if you wil —threaded through our individual scent ID, which lets us classify a cat with his blood relatives with a single whiff.

This isn’t possible with strays because they have no base scent. They have only the feline smel of werecats in general, and of themselves specifical y. Which led me to an interesting thought as my eyes skimmed the family photos on my father’s desk: if Marc and I had given my parents the grandchildren they wanted, would they inherit my Pride-born scent, or his stray scent? For that matter, would they even be werecats at al ? If Marc wasn’t born with a werecat gene, how could he possibly pass one on?

It was easy for me to forget, considering how long he’d been a part of the south-central Pride, that Marc was stil —and always would be—a stray. Hel , I hardly noticed the difference in his scent anymore; it was just part of who he was. But with any other stray, I would detect it immediately. And so would Owen.

“What about the police?” Daddy asked. I couldn’t see his face, but the tension in his broad shoulders was obvious, even through his suit jacket.

“They don’t know what to think. The detective in charge of this one is convinced that some psychopath is keeping a jaguar as a pet and letting it eat his victims.”

I inhaled sharply, turning on the sofa to fully face my father. Daddy glanced at me over his shoulder, nodding to let me know he’d caught the plural ending, too.

“Victims?” he asked, straightening stacks of paper on his desk. “Are there others?”

Static crackled over the line, then Owen’s voice came through loud and clear.

“…one in New Mexico three days ago.”

Daddy rubbed his forehead as if trying to stave off a headache. “How did we miss that?”

“Wel , it’s not like we have any sources in the free territories. But we probably would have missed it anyway. It was reported by the media as a typical dismemberment, as if there is such a thing. The police are keeping the cat angle quiet to weed out the nut-bal confessions.”

Daddy walked around his desk and sank wearily into his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on the blotter. “The one in New Mexico was another girl?”

“Yeah. Just like this one. Hang on a second, Dad.” More static, papers shuffling, and a muffled version of Dr. Carver’s distinctive rumbling voice. Then Owen was back. “She was a sophomore at Eastern New Mexico University, in Portales, just across the Texas border. Raped, then mauled and partial y…um…

consumed. A groundskeeper found her in an alley.”

I pulled my bare feet up onto the couch cushion, hugging my knees to my chest as I leaned back against the arm of the couch. This can’t be happening, I thought. Two missing tabbies and two dead humans. All in the last three days.

Daddy would never let me go now. Not that he would have anyway.

My father rubbed his chin in silence for a moment, staring down at his desk blotter. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you or Danny could get a look at her, is there?”