Titus and Drew were still arguing. Their human-form ears hadn’t picked up the sound.
I snuck through the foliage toward the fence, listening. Trying to decide what to do.
“Six parties in six days!” The voice was soft, yet obviously excited. “But you can’t bail on us tonight, man. This is the last one.” Three men rounded a curve in the path, still talking. Each carried an open bottle of beer, and none of them had any idea they weren’t alone.
“I’m not going to bail,” the guy in the middle said. “I got sick, I told you. Bad shellfish.”
It was the familiar quality of his voice that made me look closer at him. But it was his face that drove a bolt of shock through me. Looking at him was like looking at a younger version of Titus. A youngerreplica.
Practically a clone.
A sniff in the kid’s direction confirmed it. Justus Alexander had arrived. He had come to party. And threaded through his scent, I caught a ribbon of his infector’s—
Son of a bitch.
TWENTY-ONE
Titus
“Okay, we’re not going to argue about this.” Drew swept one hand through his hair, and I had to fight for calm, when my instinct was to inform him that he wasn’treallythe Alpha. He was a pretender to the throne. A temporary fix until I could be sure I wasn’t a detriment to the Pride.
He hadno rightto make demands of me.
“You stepped down voluntarily and asked me to do what’s best for the Pride,” he continued. “And that’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’vebeendoing, since this whole thing was just a crazy idea you and I came up with in the middle of the night, several bottles in. Andthisis what’s best for the Pride. It’s not a death sentence, Titus. The council doesn’t want to hurt Robyn. They want to do what’s best for her.”
“That’s up to her to—”
A dark blur shot across my peripheral vision. Something seized the left leg of my pants, over my calf, and dragged me backward. Hard.
I stumbled, righted myself, and whirled around. “Robyn! What the hell?”
She whined, deep in her throat. Obviously, she was trying to tell me something, but without words, all I could pick up clearly was anxiety. And urgency.
“You can’t be seen. What’s—?” Then I heard the voices.
“—make you forget about that lying bitch. You won’t even remember her name.”
“Ivy who?” The second voice laughed, and I turned, stunned, as my brother rounded a curve in the manicured path, sandwiched by two other kids in Millsaps shirts and light jackets.
“Justus?” Disbelief echoed in my voice. We’d discovered two corpses in our forty-eight-hour search for my brother, and there he was, laughing with his friends, carrying an open bottle of beer, as if he had nothing in the world to worry about.
“Titus?” He stopped, and his friends squinted in my direction. The humans probably couldn’t see well enough in the dark to know that I was too old to go to a college party, and I could tell from the lack of panic that they couldn’t see Robyn at all. Black fur blends well into the shadows.
Justus’s gaze slid toward her and he frowned. “What’s…going on?” His focus narrowed on Robyn, then flicked up to me, and I could see him trying to mentally connect dots that—in his mind—had nothing in common. His brother. And a big black cat.
He had no idea I wasn’t human. Whether Robyn was a shifter or an escaped zoo cat, he didn’t understand why she seemed willing to stand next to me, instead of fleeing into the foliage. Or attacking.
“You guys go on in,” I said to his friends. “Justus will be there in a minute.”
“Jus?” The one on the right squinted, trying to focus on me in the near-dark. “Who the hell is that?”
“It’s okay.” Though he sounded unsure of that. “It’s my brother. Go on. I’ll be right there.”
His friends hesitated for a second, then turned right and headed into the herpetarium. Music and beams of brightly colored light fell onto the sidewalk, then died the moment the door closed behind them, leaving nothing but the soft thump of bass to remind us that the party had started. That the path we stood on would soon be overrun with more attendees.
“Titus, what’s going on? And who the hell is that?” Justus stared at Robyn. “Is that…? Is she…?” He had no way to finish the question he didn’t even really understand. He’d probably never seen a female shifter. He’d probably never seen another shifter at all, except the one who’d infected him, and surely he hadn’t known that’s what was happening to him, at the time.
I jogged down the path toward him. “I’ve been looking for you fortwodays,” I said as I wrapped one arm around his shoulders, already guiding him toward the exterior fence and away from Drew. “Where—”
