Page 14 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 14

Casey waited while Jack peered out of the cave. Then he nodded to her. “It’s clear. C’mon.”

They stepped out into a world washed clean. The sun winked at them through towering cliffs of clouds, and all around them, the entire mountainside glittered. All the little gullies and ravines were full of water; puddles gleamed atop every rock and on every spot of flat ground. From every tuft of moss, on each leaf of every small alpine plant, a bead of water hung like a little diamond. The air smelled fresh and wet.

“We shouldn’t have waited so long. The rain was the biggest advantage we had.” Jack sounded angry, but at himself, Casey hoped, not at her.

“We had to rest. We couldn’t have gone on like we were.”

In his human form, the extent of his injuries was shockingly visible. He’d been torn up on both arms, across his chest, down his sides. There were deep bite marks on one of his legs.

He still moved with the supple grace that was one of the first things she’d noticed about him, though. When he turned to look down the mountain, her eyes were drawn to the smooth play of the muscles on his back.

And, as tired as she was, her body responded to him. She could still feel the lingering heat of his lips on hers. God, in the cave, how she’d wanted —But, no. He was too badly hurt. They were in too much danger to let go and stop paying attention to their surroundings.

Yet.

Rain check, she thought, and ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, tasting him.

Most of the island was gone below them, lost in a wall of clouds that made her feel like she was standing on a much higher mountain. They were both already shivering in the clinging chill of the mist. Elsewhere on the mountain chain, dark walls of rain still obscured Casey’s view—localized now, though, to isolated downpours. The bulk of the storm had passed over, and blue sky was visible in the oceanward direction.

Looking up the mountainside, Casey was surprised to realize they were almost at the top. “Should we see what’s on the other side of the mountain?”

“We’d better.”

The rocks were slippery, the wind wet and cold, so they both shifted by unspoken consent. Casey breathed deeply with relief at slipping back into her warm lynx fur, leaving the shivering human body behind.

The wet world was a wonderland of rich after-rain scents, but she couldn’t smell any lions. Not yet.

She and Jack skirted around the rocky outcrop that sheltered the caves. From there, it was only a short scramble across steep rocks and loose scree to the summit. Jack crouched and crawled the last few yards on his belly. Casey followed suit, and together they peeked over.

It was much steeper on this side. The mountain fell away sharply, plunging down a frightfully steep slope—more of a cliff, really—to scattered patches of wind-gnarled pines attempting to eke out a living on its lower slopes. Long curling banks of mist crept below them, whipped by the wind into shaving-foam humps, concealing and revealing the crawling gray sea far below.

In front of them the sky was black, lit by brief flickers of lightning as the storm blew on inland.

In fact ...

Casey shifted. Her human vision was more acute at a distance than her lynx eyes. She wanted to see if she’d really seen what she thought she had, dimly glimpsed through the heavy curtains of rain.

“Jack!” she said, sinking her hand into his shaggy fur. “I can see land over there. I think it might be the mainland.”

Jack shifted, so now she was gripping his bare arm. “How far?” he asked, squinting.

It was hard to gauge distance, especially through the rain. There wasn’t much she could use to judge scale. She couldn’t make out individual trees, or any features of the landscape at all, really. But it went as far as she could see in both directions, at least until it vanished into mist and rain.

“I don’t think we could swim to it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said dubiously. Lynx and bear could both swim, and wouldn’t be as bothered by the cold water as humans, but she wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer even in her lynx form.

“What else do you see?”

Right. Seeing-eye dog. “Cliffs below us,” she said. “Trees farther down. It’s really steep on this side. I’m glad we came up the gentle side, because I’m not sure if we could have climbed—Oh my God!”

“What, what?” Jack demanded, staring in the general direction she was looking, as if he could penetrate the blurry haze of the distance from sheer willpower alone.

“Jack,” she said slowly, shading her eyes from the residual rain and trying to see better. “I think I know how we got to this island.”

She’d only glimpsed it through the fog and clouds, and now she had to wait for the wind to move that stupid fogbank again and let her get a better look at what she thought she’d seen. Then the clouds below them tore open like a ripping sheet of paper, rolling back in slow motion, and there it was: a dock and a cluster of roofs, tiny as child’s toys from up here. There was a white boat moored at the dock, sleek and teardrop-shaped. It wasn’t the enormous private cruise ship that the Fallons had sailed out of Seattle’s harbor—God, was it only yesterday? But this wasn’t some fisherman’s tiny skiff either.

And there was more. A little way back in the pines, a neatly rectangular green square had been cleared for a helipad. She knew it was a helipad because there was a toy-sized helicopter sitting in it.

She described what she was seeing to Jack as best she could, while the fog closed in again, draping a wet sheet over the sea and dock and scatter of buildings.

“It’s so hard to tell scale from here. I can’t tell if it’s a giant resort and a huge boat, or just a few cabins and a little speedboat.”

“And their own private helicopter,” Jack said. “Don’t forget that. Must be nice to be loaded.”

Casey imagined their limp bodies being shoved out of the helicopter into the trees the previous night. She shuddered. “Can we steal it and fly out of here?”

“I don’t know how to fly one,” Jack said. “Boats, I can do. Can you tell if there’s anyone down there?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody moving around or anything. But it’s so hard to tell from here.”

The sun broke out of the clouds just then and ignited a rainbow across the deep blue gloom of the retreating storm. A second ghostly rainbow shimmered below it. Casey had never seen a double rainbow before.

If she was going to believe in such things, it seemed like a good sign.

“We’re going down there, aren’t we?”

“No choice,” Jack said. “It looks like that’s the only place on this whole damn island that we can get what we need most.”

“A way off.”

“Or at least a way of getting a message out.”

And to do it, Casey thought, they had to go into the actual lion’s den itself.

* * *

They began the arduous climb down in shifted form, but had to shift out of their animal forms frequently, so they could use their human hands and dexterous toes to clamber across the scarier places.

Fog still draped the mountainside, and they often had no more than a few feet of visibility as they passed through bands of it. In a way it was merciful: it kept them from being able to see how far they had to fall if they lost their grip on the slippery rocks.

It was cold down here on the shadowy side of the hills. There were patches of blue sky overhead, but the sun was lost to them again, the rainbow having gently shimmered away to nothing after placing its tacit blessing on their plans.

The sun is setting, Casey thought. That must be the west over there.

They’d been out here for almost a whole day. Soon it would be night again. Lions were day hunters, Jack had said, but after they’d fought and bested two of them, Casey was pretty sure the Fallons wouldn’t be observing any such niceties.

In evening’s lengthening shadows, they paused to rest once they’d entered the trees. Jack was currently in bear form, and didn’t bother shifting back; he just slumped into a bulky heap of fur, eyes closed.

He’d been limping badly, but there was nothing Casey could do. Besides, she was a mess herself. Shifting back to human shape, she stretched her sore limbs and studied the pink, healing lines of the cuts and scrapes on the lower part of her legs. Her feet were bruised and swollen. The small amount that she’d managed to eat in the cave was gone as if it had never been, leaving her stomach hollow as a beach ball.

On top of everything, having to shift repeatedly to navigate the slope had worn down what little energy the two of them had left.

At least they weren’t thirsty. There were innumerable little streamlets coursing down the steep side of the mountain, as well as hundreds of puddles trapped on the tops of rocks. They’d been able to drink their fill, and Jack had encouraged it. The water helped fill their empty stomachs.

Maybe I should hunt, Casey thought. But taking the time, with pursuers on their trail, seemed like the height of folly.

Besides, that would involve getting up.

Instead she flopped on her back and gazed up at the sky. It was a crazyquilt of clouds and deep blue patches, stained now with traces of sunset’s colors. Throughout their descent, small rain squalls had continued to sweep across them from time to time. They would have been sodden anyway, though. All the foliage was dripping and bent under a load of water it was happy to shed on fur, hair, or skin.

The last Saturday she’d ever spent with Wendy was a day like this, fresh and brisk and wet, with clouds and patches of impossibly vivid blue chasing each other across the sky. They’d gone to Pike’s Market, carrying umbrellas to ward off the inevitable showers, then tempted fate and had a picnic in a park on the waterfront.

Casey hadn’t enjoyed any of it much. She was stressed and overwhelmed by her job, and frustrated that her life had started to feel like she was spinning her wheels in neutral. Wendy encouraged her to try a class or two at the University of Washington—U-Dub to locals.

“But I don’t know what to study,” she’d wailed to her friend. “I don’t have any talents. There’s nothing special about me. I’m twenty-five and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.”

“That just means you have all the options in the world,” Wendy had said. She leaned back on the park bench, the breeze tugging at her short hair. There was a green stripe dyed down the side, the same rich jewel green as the trees. “See, I’ve always been good at computers, and now I have a job writing software for them. I always figured I’d do something like that as a career, and I was right. So I never really tried anything else. But you haven’t found what you’re good at yet. So you get to try everything .”

“I don’t think it works that way,” Casey said, unwilling to be cajoled out of her misery. “For one thing, I’ve got to make money somehow while I’m off finding myself or whatever. Which means I can look forward to more shit jobs like this one. Besides, what if I’m not good at anything ?”

“Now that’s a defeatist attitude if I ever heard one.”

“Come on, Wen. I can’t Pollyanna my way out of this. You must have known computers were the thing for you, right? Like, it clicked or something. I don’t have anything like that. I’ve never had anything like that.”

Wendy wrinkled her nose in the way she had of laughing without actually laughing. “Have you heard the expression ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’? I like writing software, and I’m pretty good at it, but I don’t think I’d call it a passion. Not everybody has a calling, and that’s okay. You might never have a job that feels like you were born to do it, but you can sure as hell find something more satisfying and fulfilling than feeding overpriced burgers to stingy-tipping yuppies. Take a class. You might like it.”

“I don’t know. I’m so tired at the end of the day. The last thing I need is more work. And work I’m doing for free, on top of everything.”

Wendy leaned forward, suddenly serious. “Look, Casey, I want you to promise me you’ll at least go online and look through the U-Dub’s catalog and find some classes that look fun. You don’t even have to sign up. Just write them down. The more frivolous the better, honestly. Find something that looks fun or cool or exciting. There are careers in literally everything . Didn’t you say one time that you wanted to learn Spanish? There’s jobs everywhere for translators and ESL teachers. You could learn to paint, or take a first-aid class, or try women’s studies.”

“Oh yeah, I bet there’s loads of jobs for that.”

“See? This is what I’m saying. You decide something won’t work out before you even try it, and then you never try.”

“I don’t do that,” Casey protested, and then hesitated. “Do I?”

Wendy slung an arm around Casey’s shoulders. She smelled like peach shampoo. “Just do it as a favor for me, okay? Go online and find some fun-looking classes. You can show them to me and we can talk about it. Maybe we’ll take one together. I think that sounds like a blast.”

But, of course, it had never happened. Wendy had disappeared, and Casey had taken classes, all right: classes in Microsoft Word, classes in accounting, a self-guided crash course in skip tracing. She’d finally found a passion, and as it turned out, the passion was pursuing Wendy’s killer.

I think I found out what I’m good at, Wendy. I’m a pretty good spy.

Except, no. She wasn’t a good spy, because she’d ended up getting caught. Or maybe she was just stupidly unlucky. But of all the things she’d ever thought about doing, the one she’d eventually thrown herself into, body and soul, was spying on her boss.

Wendy would probably have found that hilarious.

Wendy , she thought, if it’s the last thing I ever do, I’ll make them pay for what they’ve done.

“Hey ... Jack?” she called softly. “Do we have a plan once we get there?”

There was no response. Casey sat up and looked over at him, concerned. Then the furry hulk heaved, moved, and collapsed down to Jack’s naked human form. He panted for a moment before raising his head.

“Guess we’d better work something out.”

“Do you have any ideas?” she asked, wrapping her arms around her knees.

“Trouble is, it’s tricky to work out a plan without having any idea what we’ll find when we get there. Odds are good they left at least one lion behind to hold down the fort. There might be more of them here than we know about.”

Casey looked up the mountainside. It was impossible to believe they’d climbed down that; it looked vertical from here, hanging over them with a scarf of cloud wrapped around its head. “Do you think they’re following us?”

“I’m sure they’re trying. We managed to lose them pretty good on the mountain, I think. That storm would’ve washed out our trail completely—maybe not for something like a bloodhound, but cats aren’t the world’s greatest scent hounds. As I guess you know.”

She shrugged, conceding the point. Her sense of smell was perfectly adequate in her shifted form, but not enough to follow a trail through pouring rain.

“So they’ll have to do a brute-force search of the area,” Jack said. “That gives us a window until they find us again.”

Casey sighed, appreciating the irony. “And what we’re doing with our precious window of freedom is going straight to them.”

“No,” Jack corrected her. “We’re going on the offensive, circling around behind, and taking the fight to them. They won’t expect that.”

“Could we do something else? Hide, maybe?”

A weary gesture took in their ragged appearance. “We’re dying the death of a thousand cuts here. We can keep circling the island, getting worn down, or just taken out in one swoop. Or we can fight on our own terms.” He clenched his jaw and heaved himself to his hands and knees. “And if we want to do that, we better get moving before they catch up. We’ll have to work out a plan on the move.”

Still, he hesitated for a moment, head hanging, while he gathered the energy to shift.

“Jack, wait.” She scrambled to his side and put her hand on his arm. “Can I suggest something? What if I went and scouted ahead?”

He gave her a startled look, jolted out of his exhaustion by surprise. “No. Too dangerous.”

“You yourself said time is important. My shifted form is fast, and I’m not hurt.” Much. “I can go straight down the mountain, get a close look at their compound, and come back to tell you about it.”

“No,” he said again. “We need to stay together. I’m the only one who can go toe to toe in a fight with them—and that’s not chauvinism, it’s just a simple matter of size and physics.”

“But if I can bring back some ... what’s the right word ... intel, we’ll know which way to approach their camp from. We won’t be as likely to be spotted.”

He looked unswayed.

She decided to appeal to his military background, the part of him that clearly enjoyed his bond with Avery and the rest of the SCB. “We’re a team, aren’t we? That means we share the work.”

For no reason she could completely fathom, this made something sharp and startled go across his face. “A team.”

“Yes, Jack, a team. So far you’ve been pulling most of the weight. But this is something I can do. So let me do my part to help.”

Jack chewed his lip. Then he said tightly, “Okay. Fast. In and out. Do you know which way to go?”

“Yes,” she said, and then realized this was not at all true. She thought she knew—but she didn’t trust her wilderness navigation skills. “But verify it for me.”

Jack pointed down the slope at an angle. “This is the bearing we’ve been on since you pointed the direction out to me from the top. Simple trick for going in a straight line: pick a tree or another landmark in the direction you’re going, line it up with another one farther off, and then a third. When you get to the first one, pick a new third in a line with the other two.”

That would only work if you could tell apart individual trees, which she decided not to mention. She would have to try. “Okay.”

“Do you think you can outrun a lion?”

Honesty was probably best here, as much as she didn’t want to damage his tentative faith in her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can try. And I can go places they can’t.” This thought buoyed her spirits a little. “Yeah, these close-together trees will slow them down more than me, I think.”

“Yeah. That’s good strategic thinking. If they find you, turn around and run back to me as fast as you can.”

“But that’ll lead them straight to you.”

Jack smiled grimly. “So they’ll run right into a pissed-off grizzly bear. Sound like a bad plan to you?”

“Well, when you put it that way ...”

“Lions are ambush predators. Remember that. Be very careful.”

“I will,” she said.

She took a deep breath, then lunged forward and kissed him, hard and sudden. Their kisses in the cave had been gentle, exploring the newness of each other’s mouths. This, though—she took his mouth with a confidence she’d never known, biting his lip and drawing it between her teeth, kissing him until both of them were breathless.

“For luck,” she explained, pulling away.

Then, before he could speak, she shifted, folding herself smoothly into her lynx body.

This time she took a moment longer to orient herself with her changed senses than she usually did after shifting. Things looked different, smelled different, felt different as a lynx. The forest that seemed like little more than samey green wallpaper to her as a human was a sudden wonderland of scent and sound to her lynx senses. And the navigation that had seemed so challenging to her human mind was a cakewalk for the lynx. She could run in a straight line all day if she had to.

Before Jack could change his mind and try to stop her, she bounded off down the mountainside.

They were past the worst of the climb now, over the unstable scree slopes and bare cliffsides that they’d spent much of the afternoon navigating. And the forest posed no problems at all for her lynx body. She glided like a smoke shadow through brambles and over beds of pine needles that would have torn up her human feet.

Rabbit and squirrel trails through the forest understory made her mouth water. Surely there was time for a little hunting ...

But, no. She had a job to do. She was a lynx on a mission.

It was lion smell that alerted her as she approached the Fallons’ base camp. Her ears twitching, whiskers bristling, she slowed to a trot and then a slow prowl, sniffing every twig and leaf. Lots of it here, but older, before the rain.

And now she caught whiffs of woodsmoke, trailing low on the wet breeze. Other things too: diesel, paint, cooking smells, garbage. A low drumming sound puzzled her, and she stood still for several minutes, feeling it through the pads of her paws, until she realized it was the deep thumping of a generator.

There was another smell, too, one that had been growing stronger for long enough that she’d almost stopped noticing. It was the wet, mud-and-metal smell of the sea.

Casey glanced behind her, where her passage had bent leaves and parted grass slightly, marking her backtrail by sight as well as scent. If she had to run, she’d need to go in a hurry.

Then she crouched low and prowled forward.

By the time the trees began to open up, she was almost on her belly. She lay flat in the grass and peered ahead. She had come upon the edge of the helipad. The helicopter was parked in a circle of flattened grass, lashed down with a couple of long cables moored to concrete blocks. A narrow, rutted road led away into the trees, the sort that was made by four-wheeled ATVs rather than cars.

There was no sign of movement. No fresh smells of either lion or human. She heard no voices.

Casey ghosted along at the edge of the clearing. She did not step on the road, but stayed beside it in the trees. Every tiny rustle of her paws made her tense. She paused often to look back, partly to check her escape route, and partly because of paranoia about having the Fallons sneak up on her from behind.

Lions are ambush predators.

Comforting, Jack. Thanks so much.

Open space was visible ahead through the trunks of the trees. The thumping of the generator was louder now, the smell of woodsmoke stronger. Casey slowed to a crawl.

The trees opened up into a field of stumps. Wildflowers and meadow weeds grew in masses among them, drooping their heads under their burdens of water. Casey risked standing to see over the tops of the tangle of meadow foliage. She could see the dark, wet backs of several small wooden buildings, some ways distant.

She didn’t need a background in military strategy to understand that the Fallons had cleared around their base camp to make sure no one could sneak up on them.

Suspicious bastards.

Okay, now what? She’d found the place, but she didn’t know much more than she had when she left Jack. The only thing she knew for sure now was that it wouldn’t be easy getting to the dock and the boat without being seen. She still didn’t know if anyone was home, or what other advantages the Fallons might have brought with them. Guns? There had been that flash from the hills, as of binoculars or a rifle scope ...

An icy chill went through her. She could outrun a lion, she thought, but she couldn’t outrun a bullet.

But she’d come too far to turn back without gathering a little more information to take to Jack.

She turned right and prowled along the edge of the clearing, careful to stay on the downwind side of the encampment. The land rose in a little ridge, and soon she was above the Fallons’ camp, among the trees.

Suddenly there was no more land in front of her, just a steep bluff dropping some thirty or forty feet to waves crashing on jagged rocks. She was on a small headland, sheltering the bay where the Fallons had decided to build their dock.

It looked like a good harbor, at least to the extent she could tell. The little bay was a deep cleft in the mountainside—was that what they called a fjord?—very steep on the other side and more gentle and rolling on this side, where the Fallons had opted to build their camp. From up here, through the trunks of the pines and cedars, she had a decent view of the boat, a white cabin cruiser, bobbing at its moorings. There was a short wooden dock and then a beaten muddy road that went up a short, steep hill to the flatter area where they had built their camp.

This appeared to consist of four or five cabins arranged in a rough horseshoe shape around a muddy central yard. They were rough frame buildings with metal roofs, utilitarian rather than pretty. At least one of them was some kind of equipment shed—she glimpsed a brawny red ATV with a trailer under the overhanging edge of its roof—and another was probably the generator shed. The trees were cleared in a broad swath around and behind the buildings. At the far edge of the open field, a bulldozer gleamed like a splash of bright yellow paint amid all that green and brown.

Overall, the place was not beautiful. It was actually something of an eyesore, a plain and homely hunting camp rather than the sort of pretty resort she would have expected the Fallons to favor.

Of course, it wasn’t like they brought investors here to impress them. This place was strictly for the family.

But were any of the family home, was the question. The only sound was the thumping of the generator. No engines droned; no vehicles moved. In the late afternoon light, she couldn’t tell if lights were on in any of the buildings.

The wind, coming to her from the campsite, brought her smells of lions and people, but it was impossible to tell if it was residual, or if some of them were still in residence.

She gazed down at the tempting target of the white boat. The element of surprise was on her side, and most members of the cat family were capable of short bursts of great speed. She could dash down the hill and leap onto the boat right now. Even if anyone saw her, they couldn’t possibly be close enough to do anything about it.

Briefly she gloried in the mental image of the look on Jack’s face when she presented him with the stolen speedboat as a fait accompli . A much better gift to lay at his feet than a dead squirrel ...

But then common sense reasserted itself. First of all, she had no way of knowing if any of the Fallons were actually on the boat itself. She didn’t see any sign of it from here, but that’d be just her luck, to leap onto the deck and find herself facing a couple of lion shifters on their home turf.

Also, her only experience with boats consisted of a handful of ferry trips to various islands in Puget Sound—and then, of course, the ill-fated cruise that had landed her here. She hadn’t the slightest clue how to operate one. Even if it was similar to a car, or as simple as “push the button to go forward,” she didn’t think trying to figure it out while maneuvering out of a narrow bay, under attack by lions, was a good idea.

And what if a boat, like a car, needed a key?

Focused on the boat and the campsite, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a man’s, voice behind her said quietly, “Hi there.”

Casey jumped and whirled, ears going flat. She knew that voice.

Roger Fallon, human-shaped and naked, stood at the edge of the low, wind-sculpted trees on the headland.

He was only about twenty feet from her.

She had neither smelled nor heard him approach, and she realized now that he’d taken advantage of the wind in the same way she had. While she was carefully circling downwind of the camp, Roger had been stalking her from downwind as well.

Casey flattened her ears and snarled.

Roger smiled. It was the same pleasant smile he’d always had, with an apologetic note to it. His blond hair fluttered in the wind. He spread his hands to show he was unarmed.

“Hi, Casey. Don’t run off. I just want to talk.”

Jack had said to run if she encountered the Fallons. But Roger was between her and the escape route. He could shift and block her.

Also— lions are ambush predators . There might be more of his siblings out of sight in the bushes. And, if so, there was very little room to maneuver around them.

She had allowed herself to become trapped on the headland.

Casey took a quick look down the cliffside to the waves pounding on the rocks. It wasn’t that much of a fall. Into deep, still water, she could have risked it. But it would be suicide to attempt a leap onto those jagged rocks with surf swirling between them.

Still, if it was a choice between dashing herself on the rocks, or being torn apart by lions ...

“Casey, don’t do anything rash,” Roger said. He didn’t approach her, just remained where he was, hands turned palm-up and body language open. “I’m here to talk to you. We’re alone. No one else is nearby.”

She didn’t believe that for an instant, but she also didn’t see she had much choice. She shifted and stood up.

“That’s better,” Roger said, still smiling.

In lynx form she hadn’t cared, but as a human she was struck by how handsome he was. All the Fallons had clean, golden good looks. Even their skin was burnished with a golden tint, as if lit by the sun.

And beneath that pretty skin beats the cold heart of a killer. Don’t forget that.

Roger didn’t leer or check her out. He kept his eyes politely on her face, not even flicking them aside to the wasp stings that must still be visible. He looked so friendly, so reasonable, so normal . Not like a murderer at all.

All a lie. Don’t forget it.

“I would have invited you in somewhere warmer, but I didn’t think you’d come,” he said through that welcoming smile.

“You got that right,” she spat. It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that she realized the depth of her anger.

She had never felt anger like this before. It was a rage so great that it seemed to have its own reality, like another entity dwelling inside her.

This man, this handsome smiling man, had lured her friend to this island, killed her, and left her bones lying in a cave like those of an animal.

He’d smiled at Casey and lied to her face for months, treating her like a valued employee and even a friend, and all the while knowing, knowing that he’d murdered her roommate, that he’d murdered others, that he planned to kill again?—

Her hands were shaking.

“I can see you’re getting worked up,” Roger said, holding his hands up. “Before you get too stressed, listen to me. You don’t understand what’s going on here, Casey. You were never in danger, not really. This is a test.”

“A ... test?” she repeated, derailed from her anger by a wave of confusion.

“I suppose you could think of it as an audition, of sorts. How do you think we test out new people for the upper levels of management?”

Casey stared at him. The words were English; the tone of voice was polite and calm. But there was no sense in anything he said.

“This is a ... a job interview ?”

“You can think of it that way.” Roger took a cautious, barefoot step toward her; she froze on the verge of flight, and he stopped, too. One step closer.

“But that’s ... that’s just nuts . You don’t take people out in the woods and hunt them to see if they qualify for a promotion!”

“All shifters have their own ways of doing things.” That salesman smile. So friendly. So reasonable. “This is ours. Usually, only lions can be promoted to the highest levels of our company. But you’re something special. No one has ever done as well as you and your big ursine friend. Where is he, anyway?”

Jack. The thought of Jack jolted her out of the lulling effect of Roger’s soothing voice and placating words. Jack certainly wasn’t going to accept any bullshit job offer. Jack was an SCB agent. He would put all of these people in prison as soon as look at them. In prison, where they belonged.

Roger’s figured out you’re hard to kill and he’s trying to buy you off. Don’t let him.

She conjured up a mental image of Wendy, like a talisman against Roger’s sweet, lying words. Wendy’s smile was her armor; Wendy’s laugh was her shield. Wendy, with her green-striped hair flung back, smiling on that park bench by the ocean, three days before she disappeared forever.

“What about Wendy?” she asked. “Did you make this same offer to her?”

“Wendy?” Roger said.

“Wendy Lebrun. She worked in the software division and went missing two years ago. Don’t tell me you don’t remember her, asshole. You faked a whole move to Colorado for her, put photos on Facebook and everything.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that last part,” Roger said. “That was probably Mara. She’s a whiz at that kind of thing.”

“Tell me you remember her, at least!”

He spread his hands again; an impatient crease appeared between his sculpted blond brows. “Casey, it’s not the past I want to talk about. It’s your future.”

The rage was growing in her again, swelling in her chest until it seemed she should be visibly puffing up with it. If she’d been in her feline body, all her fur would’ve stood on end. “Wendy isn’t the past. She was—No, she is my friend, and she worked for you, and you killed her. At least have the decency to tell me you remember her fucking name !”

The last word emerged in a scream, and she had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch.

“There’s nothing to gain from getting emotional,” Roger said. His white-toothed salesman’s smile had become somewhat fixed. “Yes, the name rings a bell. She wasn’t anything like your caliber, though. No sense of strategy at all.”

Of course not. Wendy had been a very straightforward, honest person. It was part of her charm. She wouldn’t have been able to understand why anyone wanted to kill her. She’d probably have tried to make friends with them, talk them out of it?—

Casey’s hands balled into fists so tight that her nails bit into her palms.

“Not like me, huh?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“Not at all like you. How interesting that you two knew each other. She was quite intelligent, but not clever at all. A total disappointment. She barely lasted the first few hours?—”

Casey shifted to the lynx, springing as she went.

She almost succeeded, almost tore into his unprotected human belly and throat. They were so close together that he didn’t have time to dodge and barely had time to react. He shifted just as she hit him, and her claws bit deep into the golden fur, scoring his face and ripping across his shoulder.

Got you!

They rolled and came up facing each other. Roger seemed utterly shocked. Other than the marks she’d just made, there were no scars on his glossy hide. He probably didn’t fight until the end, letting his brothers and sisters wear down the pride’s chosen prey before he moved in for the kill. Casey wondered if any of their victims had ever hurt him before.

Then he opened his jaws and roared.

At this close range, the sound was deafening.

Another roar went up instantly, very nearby. Roger roared again. The entire world seemed to be a wall of solid noise.

Casey ran.

She’d been right about the woods and the relative size of her pursuers. She darted between close-standing tree trunks, ghosted through brambles, slid with feline agility under fallen cedars. Behind her, Roger crashed through the brush like an elephant. He couldn’t keep up, and fell steadily behind.

But lynx were not distance runners. She wasn’t sure how long she could maintain this speed.

She also hadn’t realized how hard it would be to backtrail herself while running flat-out for her life. There was no opportunity to check for her own scent or look for the flattened grass of her passing. She just had to hope if she kept going uphill, Jack would be able to find her.

Another lion loomed suddenly in front of her, jaws open, snarling. This was a male, the same one they’d fought at the cabin; she could tell because the side of his face was lumpy with wasp stings. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

Vicious satisfaction filled her. I hope it hurt, asshole.

He swung for her with a big paw. She veered aside, thinking of little now except getting away. The trees ended and she found herself in the edge of the stump field. There was no cover and the Fallons were right behind her.

Could she make the boat from here? No, the open ground favored the lions, with their long legs. But she couldn’t double back; she’d lose her lead.

Instead, she streaked toward the cabins. The lynx had one other advantage over bigger predators: it could fit into spaces they could not. She wished she’d thought of it sooner. She might have been able to scope out a place to hide. Now she aimed for the camp in the hope that something would present itself.

To her gratified surprise, something did: the cabin roofs. They were low, with a shallow pitch. She couldn’t jump all the way from the ground to the roof, but she leaped onto a propane tank behind the cabin on the end, and from there to the roof of the woodshed, and on up to the cabin’s tin roof.

Her claws scraped uncomfortably on the metal, but she was able to avoid sliding off as long as she didn’t stop. She scrambled all the way to the top and crouched on the peak of the roof, ears flat and stubby tail twitching.

She didn’t think the lions could replicate her feat. They were too big and heavy.

The two male lions loped up to the cabin and circled around it, looking up at her, annoyed and confused. Roger shifted first. The one with the wasp-stung face, who had to be Rory, stayed in lion form and paced back and forth, rumbling a low growl.

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Roger said, gazing up at Casey with his arms crossed. “I wondered if it was just the fed’s influence, but no, it’s you, too. You’re good at this. I had no idea you’d be this good. Heck, maybe you’re the brains of the pair.”

Casey hissed at him.

Roger smiled. This time, it was a cold mockery of the friendly salesman’s grin he’d worn earlier. Blood trickled down the side of his face where she’d marked him with her claws.

“Sure I can’t convince you to take my offer? Okay, I admit, I was stretching the truth a bit earlier. I didn’t bring you out here with the intention of vetting you for anything. But I meant it when I said we’d hire you.” He raised a hand, wiped casually at the blood on his cheek, then glanced down at his red-stained fingers. “I think someone with your skills would be a marvelous asset to the pride. Not part of the pride, of course, but a very useful assistant.”

As if! Casey hissed again, hoping her body language said it all. If she could flip him off with cat paws, she’d be doing with all four feet.

“Oh, Roger, do stop toying with the prey,” a woman’s voice said.

Mara Fallon marched into view—or limped, rather, seeming considerably the worse for wear after tangling with Jack. Unlike her brothers, she showed no inclination to shift this time. She was dressed in loose sweats, with her hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail.

She was also carrying a hunting rifle with a scope.

Casey’s stomach went cold.

“Now,” Mara went on, raising the rifle to point at Casey. “Let’s stop messing around, take care of both of them, and get back to a place that has hot showers and decent restaurants.”