Still… “Son of abitch,” I whispered.
“I don’t… I can’t…” Robyn’s words seemed to get lost on their way out. I wrapped my arms around her and turned her to face the stairs. Slowly, her hands found my back, until she was squeezing me in a desperate hug. “Someone waseatingher, Titus.”
“We don’t know that it was a shifter.”Please, God, don’t let it be Justus… “The door was open. Anything could have gotten into the cabin.”
“How did she die?” Robyn’s focus was glued to my face as if she couldn’t stand to look at the body anymore.
“My guess would be scratch fever.” I stood and lifted Ivy’s arm, where an inflamed but visibly shallow set of scratches marred her flesh. I repositioned her arm at her side, and when I backed up, my heel hit something. “She had a rifle.” I knelt to pick it up, then slid back the lever on top. “The round is jammed.” I thought for a moment. “Okay. So maybe Justus came to the cabin after he infected Corey Morris. Which could still have been an accident,” I insisted. Robyn didn’t argue. “Ivy got scared, obviously, but her rifle didn’t fire.”Miracle of miracles. “Maybe she swung it like a bat and fought him off, or maybe she dropped it. Either way, he infected her.”
“You don’t know that,” Robyn pointed out. “She never shifted, and her wounds are too shallow to get much of a scent out of, so we can’t be sure who infected her.”
“We can make a reasonable assumption. Justus was the only shifter out here that night, and we know he infected Corey Morris. Who was here with Ivy and…” I frowned. “What happened to the other guy? Morris’s roommate at Ole Miss. What was his name?”
“Leland something. He was Ivy’s boyfriend.” Robyn frowned. “Except we don’t know whether she was cheating on Justus or on Leland. Either way, that would definitely be enough to set off a newly infected stray. Especially if your brother smelled the other guy on her.”
“So, what, we’re thinking that Justus followed them out here, maybe to confront them, maybe to confirm his suspicions? Then he got upset and lost control?”
Robyn shrugged. “That’s happened to me.”
“That’s happened to all of us. But most of us don’t kill.”
“I don’t think he meant to.” Robyn gestured to Ivy’s arm again. “Her gun didn’t work, yet he barely scratched her. If he was newly infected himself and didn’t have the benefit of the counseling and information you give your new strays, he probably had no idea that scratching her would kill her. He may even have been defending himself from a rifle used as a baseball bat.”
“Okay.” The temptation to cling to her interpretation of events was strong. I didn’t want to think that my little brother had become a murderer. But I couldn’t just dismiss the other possibilities because I loved Justus. “We’d know for sure if we could find him.”
“He’s not the only one missing. According to Corey Morris, Leland was with Ivy in the cabin when he was infected.”
“You think Justus infected him too?”
Robyn shrugged. “Chances of him leaving unscathed are slim, right?”
I nodded.Especially if he was sleeping with Justus’s girlfriend. Even in humans, that kind of betrayal often led to violence. To a newly infected shifter unable to control his instincts and urges…?
“This is why the Pride has to be recognized. New strays need structure and assistance. Education. Support. If Justus and whoever infected him knew what they were becoming, they wouldn’t have spread the infection.” Ihadto believe that.
“Agreed. So, what do we do with her?” Robyn braved another glance at the body. “I assume we can’t call the police.”
“You assume correctly. If she made it to the morgue, at the very least, they’d put out a warning about large cats, and hunters would flock to the area hoping to bag one.”
“So what are we supposed to do with her? We can’t leave her here.”
“We’ll bury her. We can do that, at least.”
“But this is her family’s property,” Robyn pointed out. “When they realize she’s missing, won’t this be the first place people look? They’d notice a fresh grave.”
“Yes, but we’re burying her out of respect and to delay the inevitability of discovery, not to hide anything,” I explained. “An autopsy would turn up no evidence of foul play, other than the burial itself, and if they test her blood, the lab will likely assume the sample was contaminated by the cat that scratched her.” I shrugged. “The cops will have a mystery, but no true crime to investigate.”
I glanced around, hoping for a throw blanket or something to cover her with, but there was nothing except the bedding she was already lying on. “Hopefully there’s a shovel in here somewhere.”
The cabin itself turned up nothing more useful than a few large spoons in a drawer beneath the microwave. But a small shed stood in the clearing out back, and inside we found an ax for chopping firewood and two shovels.
One of them was broken.
While I started digging the grave, among the trees well behind the shed, Robyn wrapped poor Ivy in the blanket she’d died on and brought her outside.
“She can’t have been dead for more than a day,” Robyn said as she carefully laid the body on the ground, near the still-shallow hole. If she weren’t a shifter, she never could have carried a woman nearly her own size down the stairs by herself, in a cradle hold. “How can she possibly smell so bad?”
“From the amount of ash in the fireplace, I suspect the fire burned for a while after she died. That would have kept the cabin warm, even with the door ajar, which accelerates the decomposition process.” I threw another shovelful of dirt onto the growing pile next to the grave. “Even so, we’re much more aware of the smell than any human would be.”
