Cameron

T he words on my computer screen had begun to meld and twist together.

I was reading a police report about Rick’s great-aunt on his mother’s side.

The rabbit hole I’d fallen into was getting ridiculous.

The most remarkable thing was how squeaky clean everyone around Rick and his family was.

His biological mother, a moderately well-known model, had been busted when she was twenty-two for a half ounce of weed.

Other than that? Nothing but Lincoln’s speeding and parking tickets and that shoplifting incident.

In the time Nate had been gone, I’d made almost no headway in finding anything concrete we could use against the Masters family.

Madison Masters née Revell, Rick’s stepmother, had an even more law-abiding past. Nothing of note stuck out, though she came from old money, which meant anything unfavorable might have simply been washed away with money and threats.

It frustrated the hell out of me. At this point, if I didn’t know better, I’d have said it was impossible that Lincoln or Rick were anything but good little boys toeing the line.

My phone rang beside me, where it lay face down on the couch. Without glancing at it, I reached over and answered, assuming it was Nate giving me an update on his detective work or Ollie giving us more leads.

“Hello?” I said, leaning forward to squint at an old photo of Madison Masters’s grandfather, a railroad magnate named George Stevens Revell. He seemed as boring and pointless as the rest of the people I’d researched.

“Where are you, Cam?”

My eyes snapped open, and I leaned away from my computer, horrorstruck to hear Rick’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Cam? Can you hear me?” Rick said again after my terrified silence stretched on for several seconds.

“Rick?” I said dumbly, hands shaking.

“Are you okay?” His voice was low and worried, almost as if he were scared.

“Why are you calling me?” It was all I could say. My eyes automatically shot to the windows and door. Was he outside right now? Had he somehow found us again? Was he about to kick the door down and drag me into the night?

With a start, I realized now was the time to gather information. Just like that, my journalistic instincts drowned out my fear and shock at hearing Rick’s voice. I quickly turned on my phone’s recording app, ensuring this conversation would be saved.

“Cam, I’m only looking out for you,” he said. “This is all one big misunderstanding. You have to see that.”

“A misunderstanding? You tried to kill me!”

Rick sighed wearily. “No, no, no. Not you, I tried to kill that prick cop.”

“Because that’s what a normal fucking person does,” I hissed, standing and pacing from window to window.

My mouth was suddenly parched like it was stuffed with sand, dry and rough, my tongue a withered husk. My heart thudded hard against my ribs, and my body actually shook with each beat. Where was he? What was he trying to do?

“I needed to get you away from him, for your own protection.”

“Are you really trying to play the hero card here? You were a freaking madman. Christ, I’d thought you’d gone crazy, Rick. Wait, I’m sorry, that’s not true. You haven’t gone crazy—you and your douchebag father have always been crazy.”

A trembling breath came through the line. I peered out the window to the parking lot below, scanning for movement in the shadows. The only saving grace was that this hotel only had interior entrance doors, but that didn’t mean Rick couldn’t find some way in if he knew where I was.

“You are my bonded mate, Cameron,” Rick went on, his voice less sympathetic than before. Now he sounded like a tired parent explaining something to an unruly toddler. “I would never hurt you.”

Spinning away from the window, I clenched my jaw and said, “You most certainly are trying to hurt me. Or is hiring a feral shifter to bite me considered romance in that fucked-up family of yours?”

“That was a gift! I wanted you to become a shifter so that we could be a happy family together, with no secrets. Do you know how hard it is for Dad to keep this world from my mother? It’s exhausting. I thought once you knew, you’d be happy about it.”

“ Happy ?” I scoffed. “Happy that something was done to me without my consent? Wow, Rick. Next, you’ll tell me that feeling a stranger up on the subway is a great way to get to know someone.”

“That’s not fair?—”

“And another thing, Rick ,” I said, sneering as if I was addressing a pile of dogshit. “I’m not your bonded mate, or whatever you call it. This thing between you and me is over. I told you that when we broke up. I meant it then, and I mean it even more now.”

“Don’t say that!” Rick shouted into the phone, his voice loud enough that I had to pull the cell away from my ear. “You are mine. We are meant to be together. This is fate , goddamn it. You’ll see it.” He lowered his voice to a growl. “One way or another. Do you understand me, Cameron?”

“You’ve lost your mind,” I whispered.

“You and I? We are one,” Rick said, his words beginning to tumble out so fast, I almost couldn’t make them out.

“Together forever. One body, and one soul. You’ll be mine, and I’ll be yours.

You’ll see how good I can make life for you.

Cars, houses, vacations. Oh , you said once you always wanted to visit Japan.

We’ll go there. We’ll travel the world. I’ll make love to you in Paris.

In Rome. In Tahiti, anywhere. And the babies we’ll have? They’ll be beautiful?—”

“What the fuck are you doing?” a gruff voice in the background said, halting Rick’s manic tirade. The voice was distant, as though the person it belonged to was standing a few feet from Rick.

Rick, sounding surprised and maybe a bit scared, said, “When did you get here? I thought I locked that door.”

“Put that fucking phone down, you dumb shit.”

Suddenly, the line went dead. I gaped at my phone.

That had been the most surreal call of my life.

Rick was even more psychotic than I’d thought.

It was terrifying. And who the hell had busted in on him?

His father, maybe? If so, it sounded like Daddy Masters hadn’t known Rick was going to call me.

It also sounded like Rick wasn’t waiting in the shadows outside the hotel. That did little to calm me, though.

My anxiety and paranoia, already hovering around a simmer at the best of times lately, surged to a full, roiling boil.

Despite being in a warm, dry, and clean hotel room, I had the same feeling I’d had when running through the forest. Like something was right behind me, ready to sink its teeth into me if I stopped for a second.

No matter what I told myself, I could still picture shadowy figures surrounding the hotel, ready to pounce on me.

I needed to talk to someone. Someone who understood what was happening. Nate was out of the question. He was on a mission and most likely wouldn’t answer. Mom and Lesley were out since they didn’t know about shifters. With only one option left, I called Ollie.

“Cameron? What’s wrong?” Ollie sounded harried, and I was immediately embarrassed for having bothered him.

“Sorry, Ollie. I got a call from Rick. Nate’s out investigating a lead, and I was freaked out.”

The words sounded even more dumb than they had in my mind. Ollie probably thought I was being a stereotypical panicky woman. But blessedly, he didn’t act condescending or irritated.

“Shit. What did he say?” he asked, keeping his voice low. I could hear other people talking near him through the phone.

“Nothing but a bunch of crazy shit, really. He sounded like he was one or two steps away from the nuthouse.”

“Look, I’m at a scene right now. Work, you know?”

A scene? Ugh. That most likely meant a homicide.

I wasn’t sure how Ollie managed to do his job.

The mere thought of dealing with so much death and destruction made me sick to my stomach, and he waded hip-deep into it every day.

Murdered women, children… it sounded like hell to me, but someone had to do it.

Somebody needed to find the killers and bring them to justice.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Seriously. I was a little freaked out after his call. That’s all.”

“No, I get that. But let me see if I can find any trustworthy contacts to be nearby. Text me the address, and I’ll see if I can get anyone to keep you company, or at least hang around outside to make you feel safer.

I’ll text you a safe word. That way, if you see someone you don’t know, they can assure you I sent them. ”

“Ollie, you don’t have to do that,” I said, more embarrassment washing over me.

“It’s fine. There’s a bunch of folks I know who could do it. I gotta go. Send me that address, though.”

He hung up. I begrudgingly texted him the address and flopped down on the sofa. My anxiety hadn’t abated. If anything, I was even more worked up and twitchy. Turning my attention back to my computer helped a bit, but my mind kept going back to that call from Rick.

The clock in the lower right hand of my computer said it was nearly 11:30.

A question had occurred to me, and I needed an expert’s answer.

Looking into the Masters family holdings, I continued to think of the things Mitch had told us about his cousin.

It made me wonder exactly what kind of effects meth might have on animals versus humans.

Grabbing my phone, I shot a text to Lesley.

Me: Hey, random question, have there ever been any studies done on the effects of crystal methamphetamine on animals?

Lesley: You ask the weirdest shit, you know that? What does this have to do with anything?

Sighing, I tapped out a response that I hoped wouldn’t cause her to question me too deeply.

Me: It’s for a story I’m working on.

Lesley: Sounds like a weird story. You sure have a lot of meth questions lately. Anyway, the only studies I can think of were done on lab rats.