Shift (20 page)

“It’s worth a try,” I insisted, and Marc nodded, though he seemed less convinced. “Especially considering it’s our only idea so far. And if the feathers are there, we won’t have to go anywhere near Malone or his men.”

“That’s a long shot, Faythe,” Jace said softly.

I shrugged. “This whole damn thing’s a long shot.”

Marc frowned and turned from me to Jace. “Can you find it?”

“If it’s still there, I can find it.”

An hour and a half later, I stood beside the Pathfinder, staring up at the tree-covered hill in front of me. It wasn’t as high or as sharp an incline as the Montana mountain where the Territorial Council had held my trial, but it would certainly be a workout compared to the relatively flat woodlands behind our ranch.

There was no sign of the sun at three-thirty in the morning, but dawn would come fast—I had no doubt of that—and we needed to be long gone before then.

“You ready?” Jace shut the driver’s side door behind me, and I nodded as Marc tossed his backpack over one shoulder. We’d stopped about an hour away from Malone’s property for bottled water and snack bars, and had no choice but to risk leaving our scents in the all-night gas station, hoping none of the local cats would stumble in at that hour.

“I still think you should Shift,” I said, frowning at Marc. “I won’t be much good like this if we run into a fight.” I held up my casted arm, still pissed that I couldn’t Shift. Heading up the side of a mountain in cat form sounded practically sporty. Half exercise, half game. But hiking up on two legs sounded like a huge pain in the ass.

“I’d rather keep you company.” Marc stepped closer, and the heat from his body felt wonderful in contrast to the bitter February chill, even more pronounced at the higher elevation. His head dipped and his lips found my neck just below the right side of my jaw.

I shivered from pleasure, rather than the early morning cold, and my arms wound around his back as his mouth trailed lower.

Then Jace’s footsteps crunched loudly on the loose gravel, and I sighed, pulling away from Marc reluctantly as he stiffened in irritation. “Besides,” he said, as Jace’s shirt hit the ground at his back. “You might need help. You can’t afford to fall on this.” He ran his fingers down the top of my cast, and for the millionth time, I wished I could feel his touch there.

Damn Kevin Mitchell for breaking my arm!
But Kevin was already damned. Or dead, at least. Marc had made sure of that.

“Maybe I should just stay here. You guys could get there faster in cat form. I’ll just slow you down.”

“You can’t stay by yourself….” Marc began, and when I frowned, Jace interrupted.

“You won’t slow us down.” He grinned and dropped his pants. And he wasn’t wearing underwear. “And I think we’d
both
enjoy your company.”

My face flamed, in both anger and embarrassment. What the hell was he
doing?

Marc turned on Jace, already pissed over the innuendo. His hands bunched into fists, and his jaw worked as if he was either going to yell or break every one of his own teeth. But he didn’t make a sound. And I understood in that moment that there was very little he could say without directing more attention toward Jace, which was the last thing he wanted to do.

Technically, Jace had done nothing wrong. He had to undress to Shift, and on the surface, he’d paid me a compliment on both of their behalf. But Marc wasn’t stupid. He may not know how far things had gone between me and Jace, but he knew Jace was openly flirting and inviting me to look. And that bold of an invitation could not be blamed on any of our recent tragedies.

“Watch it….” Marc growled at last. Jace only grinned harder and tossed his clothes onto the backseat, heedless of my silent, wide-eyed pleading over Marc’s shoulder.

Pissed now, I slammed the door, and Jace had to jerk his hand away to keep from getting it caught. I tugged Marc toward the trees as he resettled his backpack on his shoulder. “We’re heading south, right?” I asked Jace as he scowled after us. He nodded and dropped to his knees. I led the way into the woods with Marc at my side, the sounds of Jace’s Shift almost inaudible over my own footsteps. “Catch up with us when you’ve Shifted.”

J
ace caught up with us eight minutes later, and his posture said “anger” just as clearly as his claws and canines said “approach at your own risk.”

“What the hell is his problem?” Marc grumbled as Jace sprinted past, leaving us to follow the sounds of his progress.

“Just ignore him.” I considered explaining that Jace’s post-Ethan transformation went beyond a die-hard determination to see Malone pay. But that skirted too close to the truth, and I wasn’t willing to flat out lie to Marc. I was only lying by omission because I had yet to find an appropriate moment to tell him what I’d done. A moment when Jace was several hundred miles away—to keep Marc from killing him—and when no one else’s life depended on our ability to focus on the job at hand.

Such moments were rare lately. And hiding the truth made me feel like I’d swallowed a slow-working poison that was gradually rotting away my insides. Beginning with my heart.

Jace let us catch up with him a quarter mile later, and after that, the hike was blissfully uneventful, if tedious. Even though Marc and I had both Shifted our eyes, it was rough going. I tripped several times—my human body is much less graceful and coordinated than my cat form—and each time Marc caught me before I could even throw out an arm to catch myself. And I was too tired, cold, and worried about further injuring my arm to be anything other than grateful for his help.

To his credit, Jace never looked unsure of where he was going, though he hadn’t been back to his birthplace once in the seven years since my dad had hired him. To me, that said the deer stand was a much more important part of his childhood than he’d let on, and if the same was true for Brett…we might just get lucky.

My pulse spiked at the thought of serving justice to Malone using evidence his own son had given us. The son he’d murdered. Malone’s downfall was imminent. I could feel it.

After an hour and a half of hiking through the woods, Jace stopped and swished his tail to catch our attention. His bearing held no tension and no warning; he was simply telling us we had arrived.

A minute later, the forest gave way to a small clearing with irregular, undefined edges, as if someone had chopped down a few trees to gain just a bit of workspace. And there was the deer stand.

It was built into the branches of a large, sturdy tree on the opposite side of the clearing, maybe twenty-five feet off the ground. The wood was weathered and rough, and looked grayed even in the muted colors of my cat vision. A homemade ladder led from the ground to the edge of the platform overhead, its plank steps made from mismatched lengths of two-by-fours, several of which swung loose on one end.

“Well, at least it’s still standing.” Marc’s voice sounded odd after an hour of hearing nothing but twigs snapping beneath our feet and the occasional rustle of some small creature through the winter-crisp underbrush. “But there’s no telling if it’ll hold our weight.”

“I’ll go. I’m the lightest.”

“No.” Marc grabbed my arm when I started forward, but let go when I winced from the pain in my talon-shaped bruises and turned on him with an angry scowl. “What if it collapses?”

I shrugged. “You’ll catch me.”

“And if I miss, you’ll break your other arm, or a leg, and you won’t be able to fight when we go in for real.”

“Marc, in all the times I’ve fallen, you’ve never failed to catch me.” I tugged my arm from his grip gently and stood on my toes to kiss him, acutely, uncomfortably aware that Jace was watching. Then I turned my back on them both and faced the deer stand.

I tested the first step with one foot before putting my full weight on it. When it held, I started up. The fourth step was hanging from one nail, and the fifth was missing completely, and with the grip of my right hand compromised by my cast, I was afraid to depend too heavily on it. I glanced back at Marc. “Can I get a hand?”

He was behind me before I’d even seen him move, and suddenly I was sitting in his cupped hands. He lifted me easily past the fifth and sixth planks, and I stepped onto the seventh, a good eight feet off the ground. “Thanks,” I murmured, and continued climbing. Marc stayed at the base of the ladder, just in case.

The tenth step creaked beneath my foot, sending an adrenaline-spiked bolt of alarm through me, and the thirteenth was rotten under my hand. The seventeenth lodged a huge splinter in my left palm. But two steps after that, my head rose above the floor of the stand, and my cat’s eyes focused easily on the small chest in one corner, thanks to the last rays of starlight now peeking from behind a cloud.

The first bit of daylight would shine shortly after 7:00 a.m., which gave us under two hours to get what we came for, get back to the car, and get the hell out of Dodge.
No pressure…

I hauled myself up carefully, wincing when my cast scraped the floor, though it didn’t hurt. I wondered if I would have smelled Brett’s residual scent on the wood, if I were in cat form. Assuming he’d actually been where I now sat, a couple of days earlier.

Jace whined, and Marc asked the question for them both. “Do you see it?”

“Yeah. We are a go for an old wooden chest.”

They both exhaled in relief from twenty feet below.

Several patches of the floor looked suspiciously soft and dark, so I crawled around them on my knees and elbows, staying close to the right-hand railing. Crawling distributed my weight over a broader area, and my elbows kept pressure off my broken wrist.

The box was nothing more than a rough wooden cube, but I could see how a pair of small boys might call it a treasure chest. Might even have kept their own valuables in it.

The lid was a simple pine board, attached to the back of the box by a set of rusty hinges, which squealed when they were used. I lifted the lid slowly with my eyes closed, sending up a silent, fervent prayer that Brett had remembered this place. That he’d thought of it when he needed somewhere safe to store the evidence that could seal his father’s fate, and save so many others.

I opened my eyes. And laughed out loud.

Relief bubbled up inside me like a fountain of joy, and it would not be stifled, even with dawn less than two hours away. Even though we were well inside enemy territory. Even though Kaci would die and my Pride would be slaughtered if we were caught.

“Is it there?” Marc demanded as Jace continued to whine softly, begging for information.

“Yeah. He even put them in plastic.” I lifted the gallon-size bag and held it up. Inside were two huge feathers, striped with a distinctive pattern of colors I couldn’t make out without more light, even with my cat vision. But I saw the dark smears of blood, and I could smell it, even nearly a week old and sealed inside plastic.

On the front of the bag was a white strip, and Brett had printed on it, in clear black letters. “Thunderbird feathers. Lance Pierce’s blood.”

Brett, wherever you are, I hope you’re being spoiled rotten in the afterlife
. “Jace, your brother’s a saint.”

Jace huffed, as if he had a dissenting opinion to add, but I only laughed. And when I glanced into the box again, I laughed even harder. “They’re still here!” I called. “Brett’s pop guns and your knife. They’re all still here! Do you want me to bring them down?”

For a moment, there was only silence. Then Jace huffed again, but I couldn’t interpret that one without body language to add nuance, so Marc called up with a translation. “I think he wants you to leave them there. For Brett.”

He must have gotten that right, because Jace didn’t contradict him. So I closed the box and left the abandoned toys as a memorial to Brett, and to the childhood friendship he and Jace had once shared. Then I started back across the floor with the zipper of the plastic bag clutched in my left hand.

I was about a foot from the edge when my jeans caught on something, and my right leg refused to slide forward. I let go of the bag and propped myself on my good hand to twist for a better view. The hem of my jeans was stuck on a nail sticking up from the floor.

“Shit!”

“What’s wrong?” Marc asked immediately as Jace whined louder in question.

“I’m caught on a nail. Hang on. I think I can get it.” I pushed myself slowly backward and shook my foot to dislodge the nail. When that didn’t work, I shifted my weight onto my left hand and reached back toward the nail with my right.

The deer stand creaked, and fear spiked my pulse. My hand broke through the floor. Jagged edges of wood raked the length of my forearm, pushing my sleeve up in the process. I screamed. My face slammed into the floor, and I bit my lip. Blood poured into my mouth.

“Faythe!” Marc shouted. Jace growled, a deep, fierce sound, and Marc’s next words were directed at him. “Let go!” But Jace only growled harder.

“I’m okay,” I said, but it came out as a whisper, with my left cheek still pressed into the wood. Still, the guys heard me.

“I’m coming up!” Marc called, and Jace’s growl grew even fiercer.

“No!” I said, when his meaning finally became clear. “It won’t hold you. I’m okay. Just let me pull myself out of this hole.”

“Let go of me, or I’ll cave your face in,” Marc said, his voice soft and dangerous. Jace growled once more for good measure, then must have let Marc go, because he voiced no further complaint. “Can you get up?” Marc called to me.

“Yeah.”
I hope
. “Just a minute.” My left arm was useless, hanging beneath the floor from my shoulder on. The lower half of it was on fire, the pain so acute and encompassing that I couldn’t tell exactly where it hurt.

“You’re bleeding. A lot,” Marc said, and twigs crunched beneath his boots as he paced.

“So I noticed. Just give me a minute, please.” When silence followed my request, I exhaled and braced myself for more pain.
Just do it quickly
. We needed to be out of the woods and out of sight before dawn, and we were running late already.

I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath, hoping against all logic that the rest of the floor would hold me. Then, since I couldn’t support my weight on my right arm, I stretched over my head, flat on the floor, and rolled to my left.

Wood dug into my arm like daggers as it slid through the hole. I screamed again. I couldn’t help it.

“Faythe!”

I lay on my back, breathing hard though I’d barely exerted myself, afraid to move lest the floor collapse beneath me. Marc’s footsteps came closer, and wood snapped, dull and heavy. “Damn it!” he whispered fiercely, and my eyes popped open.

“Don’t!” He’d broken the first rung of the ladder. The deer stand couldn’t take much more damage without collapsing, and I desperately didn’t want to be on it when that happened.

“Sorry.” Marc’s boots backed several steps away, and I made myself roll over carefully, avoiding even the briefest glimpse of my newly injured arm. It burned and felt cold at the same time, and I could barely stand the brush of my jacket sleeve against it. “Are you okay?”

“My arm feels pretty bad, but I’m not gonna look at it until I get down.” Because I was pretty sure that if it looked as bad as it felt, my brain would tell me I
couldn’t
climb down.

“Be careful.”

“I will. Look, just…don’t talk for a few minutes, so I can concentrate, okay? And catch this.” Without waiting for his response, I shoved the gallon bag off the edge of the platform.

Marc’s steps crunched forward. “Got it.” Then he was blessedly silent.

I blinked and inhaled deeply, then pushed myself onto my knees and elbows, busying my eyes in the search for more weak spots in the wood, so I couldn’t accidently look at my new wound.

But it was bad. I could tell from the strength of the scent of my own blood, and the pool of it I was now crawling through. I’d be light-headed soon, and I wanted to be safely on the ground before that happened.

I eased slowly toward the ladder, and after a few tense minutes found myself sitting on the edge of the deer stand. Marc stood in front of the ladder, with Jace at his side on all four paws. I could see them clearly thanks to my cat’s eyes, and the slight lightening of the sky as dawn approached.

Damn it!
We needed to be halfway back to the car already.

I pushed that thought away and took another deep breath through my mouth. Then I twisted to lie on my stomach and put one foot on the third rung from the top. The next step was a bitch, even once I was sure the rung would hold me, because I couldn’t grip the ladder well enough with my casted right hand, and moving my fingers made my left arm explode in agony.

A whimper of pain escaped before I could lock it down, and Jace echoed the sound from below.

I stepped down again, and again gripped the bar, this time biting my still-bleeding lip to keep from crying out. So far, so good.

The next rung snapped beneath my foot.

Marc gasped. I screamed as my feet fell out from under me, and almost passed out from the agony in my left arm. I hung from it, my life dependent on a grip weakened by my shredded flesh.

“Let go,” Marc said. “Let go and I’ll catch you.”

“No.” I was too high. My body twisted, and my feet scrambled for the nearest rung, but it had been broken before we arrived, and the next hung a full foot below my feet.

“Faythe. Let go.”

I glanced down at Marc, and if I’d seen fear in his eyes, I couldn’t have done it. But I saw only confidence. If he said he could catch me, he could catch me. It was as simple as that.

So I closed my eyes and let go.

My hair blew back from my face as I fell. My cast broke through two more rungs, each impact reverberating in my broken wrist. My right foot slammed into the side of the ladder, and the blow radiated up my leg. Then I landed hard in Marc’s arms.

He staggered beneath the impact, but didn’t fall.

I clung to him and didn’t even try to stop the tears. Screw being strong. I could be strong and hurt at the same time, right?

Because
daaamn
, I hurt.

Marc set me on the ground, and I caught his quick glance to the east. The sun would be up in an hour, and if anyone had gone for an early morning run, my screams had probably been heard.