Redeeming Rue AP4 (7 page)

Chapter 8

James snarled angrily.  “What do you mean?  We’re not going to let you be killed, or your son.  John and I are both cops.  They can’t kill you.  It’s against the law.”

Rue pulled her chin free of John’s grasp and looked at James with a snort.  “If they think for a moment that I’ve ratted them out to the police, they’ll take off faster than you can blink, and Dom will be tortured.”

James looked at John, who in turn looked at him helplessly.  James didn’t like feeling impotent.

He asked John for his cell phone and John handed it over.  Scrolling through the contact list, James found Dag and dialed the number.  “Hi Dag, it’s James.  Can you and Hanai meet us at the diner in town?  Don’t tell the kids, please.  We’ll be there in an hour.”

“You’ll explain what’s going on?” Dag asked.

“I promise.”

“We’ll be there.”

James handed the phone back to John and pulled Rue to her feet.  He reached for the brunette wig she wore and she flinched, but then she seemed to resign herself to him taking it off.  He tugged the wig off her head and was surprised to see that she had white hair.  It was the purest white color he’d ever seen.  Her hair was pinned, and as he began to pull out the bobby pins, John went over to the door and closed it.  Someone had broken through the door.  The deadbolt had been ripped away from the wall, and the security chain hung loosely against the door.

Combing his fingers through her hair, he rubbed a silky lock between his forefinger and thumb and looked into her bright green eyes.

“We need to know everything, Rue.  We won’t let you go through this alone.”

John joined them.  Rue dropped onto one of the beds, and he and John sat on either side of her.  She was quiet for a moment, and then she began to talk about her clan, led by Gerarli.  She’d had a good life, until she shifted into an albino panther on her sixteenth birthday and had been attacked by her own family, chained up, branded, and banished.

Her story tugged on his heartstrings.  She’d survived nearly insurmountable odds.  A teenager, all alone in the world, relying on a few kind strangers to help her along.  She’d suffered because of her clan’s backward thinking.  Her clan believed her mutation was because of a sin or evil she’d brought to them.

“I was forbidden from returning to the clan or having cubs.  They must have seen me and tracked down my car.”  Her shoulders slumped in defeat.

“I don’t get why you having white fur is such a big deal.  There are anomalies in every shifter group.  Heck even humans have unusual traits that pop up from time to time, odd eye and hair color, an extra toe.  Nothing to kill someone over,” he said.

“My clan is very traditional and resistant to change.  In their minds, I’d done something that caused my shift to create white fur, and the fact my naturally dark hair turned white, too, was viewed as being derived from evil.”

She was torn up emotionally and mentally, and right now she drooped from exhaustion.  James stood and pulled her gently to him.  Cupping her face, he studied her bright green eyes fringed with thick lashes.  She had a straight nose and high cheekbones.  The lips he had kissed repeatedly were lush and parted slightly as she stared at him.

His thumb traced the lower swell of her bottom lip.  “We’re not letting you go through this alone.  We’ll figure it out.”

She tried to shake her head, but he held it steady.  “You could die.”  She gripped his wrists.

“No one is dying today or any other day.” John stood and placed his hands on her hips.

“You don’t know me.  You have a family.  You can’t risk yourself for me.  They could kill you if they believe you’re helping me.”

James withheld the snort.  Her clan might think they could go around killing people just because they happened to be different, but they had another thing coming.  It was true Rue was a stranger to him and John, but he felt a soul-deep connection to her because they were mates.  She was beautiful and she was theirs, and no one was going to take her from them, or take her son from her.

“Go take a shower,” he ordered.  She gaped at him in surprise, and even John looked at him as if he’d grown a second head.  James chuckled and gave her a warm smile.  “There’s no need to hide anymore, Rue.  We know who and what you are, and honestly, my cat can’t stand the artificial scent.  We have time before we need to head to the diner to meet Dag and Hanai.”

“Okay.”

She grabbed some clothing and a zippered bag from a suitcase on the dresser and walked into the bathroom.  When they were alone, he looked at John.

“This is all kinds of fucked up,” John said.

“She has to be wrong.  What kind of person would kill someone for having white fur or forbid her from having a kid?”

“Panthers are different.  Dag will help sort things out.”

“What if he believes in the same stuff as her clan?  They’re related.”

“No way.  He’s the kind of guy who would never hurt anyone in his family.  Besides, you’re the one who called him to meet with us.”

True.

“It was a gut reaction.”  And he did trust the male who had been spending a lot of time at the boarding house helping with the ceremony.  The panthers were very protective of their own kind, but he knew they didn’t know Rue’s entire story.  Things were rotten in her former clan.  They wanted her and her son to die, but he wasn’t going to let her pay for whatever sins they believed she had committed with her blood.

* * * * *

Rue scrubbed at her skin with the bar of soap provided by the hotel and a scratchy washcloth.  She washed her hair twice, using up the entire bottle of miniature shampoo.  As she lathered her skin a second time, she pondered her future.  The two males outside were talking about her.  She could hear their low voices but didn’t know what they were saying.  They were probably thinking like cops and planning to say she wouldn’t be going to her death if she met with her clan.  She wanted to believe that, but she didn’t see a way out of her predicament.  If she didn’t go to her clan, they would torture Dom, and she absolutely wouldn’t allow that.

She felt like a failure.  Since the moment she took a pregnancy test and discovered she was carrying a forbidden child, she had taken every precaution she could think of to keep them both safe.  Staying to the north, never shifting outside, never sharing their secret.  Her curiosity had gotten the better of her, and now they were as good as dead.

Letting her head fall back, she closed her eyes and rinsed the soap from her body.  Dawn would be here soon enough.

After dressing, she rubbed her hair vigorously with one of the extra towels and braided it.  She hadn’t ever willingly let anyone see her hair except for Dom.  It had been a source of shame, the reason for her banishment.  But as James had said, her secret was out now and there was no more reason to hide.

She took a long look at herself in the mirror and walked out into the room.  James and John turned to her, and they both held out their hands.

“Let’s go meet your cousin and see what we can do about this situation,” James said.

She didn’t take their hands.  “Do you always try to fix everything, James?”

He smiled wryly.  “Yeah.”

“I wish I’d met you a long time ago.”

“Us, too, sweetness,” John said.

She took their hands and they escorted her out of the room and to her rental car.  She looked at the note from Gerarli that James tucked into his shirt pocket.  There was a small map drawn on the bottom.  The clan hadn’t been in Ashland long enough to know the street names, but she knew that the big square was the boarding house where the mountain lions lived, the trees were the woods, and the big X in the center of the empty space was the field where the clans had gathered for the bonding ceremony.

She hadn’t seen her cousin Dag since she was a young teen, before her shift.  She had no idea why James had called him, but maybe Dag could speak on her behalf.  Maybe if she gave herself up willingly, Dag could promise to raise Dom for her and let him live.  A little flare of hope filled her.  Not hope for herself; she didn’t think she had an ice cube’s chance in hell of seeing another sunset, but she hoped that Dom would make it through this.  She could plead his case, and maybe they would show him mercy.  It wasn’t his fault that she’d broken the law.  He was innocent.

James and John were silent.  She was okay with that.  She wasn’t sure what she would say, anyway.  They seemed oddly determined to help her, strangers or not, and she knew they believed she was their mate.  She hadn’t even thought about it, really, because first she’d been in spy mode, and then she’d been in flight mode after they found her, and then…horny mode.  Now she was wavering between terrified for herself and Dom and determined to fall on her sword to save her son.  If only that would work.

When James stopped the car at the diner, she got out and found herself staring at her cousin Dag and his brother Hanai.  Dag’s mouth fell open.

“Veruka?”

Unexpected tears sprang to her eyes.  Dag and Hanai stood under a light in the parking lot.  She took a few steps, but old fears stopped her from coming too close.

“Yeah.”

In a heartbeat, Dag grabbed her in a bear hug that squeezed the breath from her lungs.  “They told us that you were killed in a hunting accident when you were sixteen.”  Hanai joined them, pulling her into the spill of light.

Hanai touched her braid gingerly and frowned.  “You’re albino.”

The lump in her throat felt like it was the size of a fist.  “When I shifted on my sixteenth birthday, my cat was white and my hair turned white when I changed back.”

Hanai looked over her shoulder.  “Why do you need our help?  As long as she stays away from the clan, she’s not breaking any banishment laws.  We can’t help her get back into her clan, if that’s what you’re asking.  Gerarli is very old-school and will not lift the banishment.”

James and John joined them, and they both put a hand on her shoulder.  She felt bolstered by their touch.  She didn’t really know her cousins all that well, and she was betting that James and John were wondering how Dag and Hanai were going to react to her news.

“I have a son, and Gerarli took him.”

* * * * *

John listened to Rue tell her cousins the story of her life — the quick and dirty version — but it still unsettled him.  A young girl, tossed out on her own for something she had no control over, eventually finding solace in the arms of a panther who tried to kill her when he discovered what she was, and then the years of fear forcing her to keep her and Domino apart from everyone so they could survive.

“If I petition them, if you’ll agree, I think I can save him.  I think they’ll let him live.”  Rue was talking and John had zoned out thinking about how unfair her life had been.  He focused and looked at James who was growling.

“No fucking way,” James said, his voice snarling.

Rue shook her head.  “You can’t fix everything, James.  Didn’t I tell you that already?  This is done, okay?  My life is forfeit because I broke the laws, but Dom is innocent.”

“So you want to throw yourself on their mercy and hope they let your son live?  Why don’t you want to fight?”

“I can’t fight!  They could torture him!”

John scented her tears a second before she put her head in her hands.  John pulled her against his chest, and she immediately wrapped her arms around him.  Rubbing her back, he looked at Dag.  “There must be something we can do.”

Hanai looked grim.  “There may be a way, but it wouldn’t be easy.”

Dag looked at Hanai.  “Are you thinking about the Rite of Dekray?”

Hanai shrugged.  “There is nothing else that will cover the breaking of banishment law outside of the Rite of Dekray, only blood will do.”

“What are you talking about?” Rue asked.  She didn’t move from John’s arms except to lift her head and look at the two males.

Hanai said, “I’m going to my home to get my books, and I’ll meet you at the boarding house in an hour.”

“I can’t go the boarding house.  The panthers might see me.”

“The party is over, and the clans have all returned to the field for the night.”

James growled.  “I want to know why having us go arrest him and his clan for kidnapping and getting Domino back isn’t the right decision?  We can get all the deputies in here.  Hell, the pride has several males who would scare the pants off anyone.  We can get him back without anyone dying or bleeding.”

“No, you can’t,” Dag said as Hanai nodded at them and walked briskly to his car.  “If you show up with the police force, they will kill Domino immediately and scatter.  They’re using our laws to justify killing.  There was no need for them to hunt down Rue because she was watching the ceremony.  They could have let it go.  Gerarli is not known for his sanity.  He rules his clan with an iron fist and no one defies him.  He is standing on clan law, and no other clan will dare to stand up to him.”

“You are,” John pointed out.

“My clan is not like the others.  We’re more progressive.  And what we’re doing is trying to use the laws to get around the death decree.  Hanai knows more about laws than anyone I’ve ever met.  If he says there is a way to free Veruka and Domino, then there is.”