“I know. There must be more somewhere.” I crossed the room pulled open the top filing cabinet drawer, then started thumbing through the three hanging folders. They held nothing but receipts for equipment and hunting gear.
“We’ve been through all of that,” Teo said. “There were no pictures.”
“I know. But we’ve missed something.” Something Abbyhadn’tmissed. Something that had upset her badly enough to make her kill.
I slammed the first drawer and squatted to sort through the middle drawer. “They know that most tabbies would be easy prey, if they can catch one unguarded, and they seemed to think they’d done that. But Melody’s never been unguarded, and Hargrove never actually said her name. He just said they were going after the ‘other’ tabby. Then Abby killed him, and I couldn’t ask—”
I dropped onto my knees as the obvious conclusion fell into place. “She killed him to keep him quiet.”
“Jace…” Teo sounded doubtful, and I could understand that. It was hard to think of Abby killing anyone out of anything other than self-defense or PTSD, but it was becoming increasingly clear that she’d thought this out, evidently on the fly. “To keep him quiet about what?”
“The other tabby’s identity. It has to be.” She’d figured out what we hadn’t.
“But why would Abby do that? The more of us who know who they’re after, the better protected she’ll be. Who’s the closest of the other tabbies?”
I had to think about that. The East Coast Territory bordered ours, but Abby was their only tabby. The Southeast Pride—Mateo’s home territory—also shared a border, but they’d lost their tabby, his sister Sara, to the same monsters who’d kidnapped Faythe and Abby almost five years ago. That left the New England and Great Lakes Prides, but their capitals were both more than a day’s drive away. If he’d headed to either of those territories, Darren would never make it back by nightfall, which had been his plan, according to Hargrove.
“There’s no one else close enough.” I stood and shoved the middle file drawer closed. “This doesn’t make any sense. It’s someone Abby knows”—though all the tabbies knew one another—“and someone within a day’s drive. And someone the hunters found undefended long enough to camera-stalk.” My focus strayed to the stalker wall again, searching for a photo we’d missed. One that wasn’t of Abby.
But they wereallpictures of Abby. The only other girl in any of those photos was her roommate Robyn, and Robyn was…
Human.
“Oh, shit, Mateo, we’ve messed up.” I was across the room in an instant, gloved hands pressed to the grisly surface of the taxidermy table as I stared at the wall above it. “I’vemessed up.”
“What? How?”
“It was here the whole time.” I pulled a picture down from the wall and held it out to him. The image was taken through the window of Abby’s dorm room, and it showed her sitting on the edge of her bed, with one arm around her roommate. Her crying roommate. Her crying roommate who had smudges of dirt on her hands and…was that blood on her mouth?
The focus wasn’t sharp enough for me to tell for sure, but suddenly, every move Abby’d made—every lie she’d told—came through in perfect clarity.
“Robyn’s a shifter.”
Teo shook his head. “She’s human. We both saw her in that cabin, after Abby killed those hunters.”
“She must have been infected after that, because she’s a shifter now, Mateo.” I stared at the photo as the ramifications of what we’d just discovered—and the implications of Abby’s cover-up—pelted my brain like hail against a window.
Abby knew Robyn had been infected, and she’d hidden that from the council.
She’d hidden that fromme.
“Wait.” Mateo’s eyes widened, and he looked like his late sister, the tabby we hadn’t been able to save. “You’re saying Robyn’s a stray? Afemalestray? That’s not possible.”
“According to Manx, it is.” From the beginning, she’d insisted that the warlord shifter bastards who’d used her as a broodmare had also succeeded in creating a female stray, but because we’d never seen one, in the entire history of the US Prides, we’d dismissed her stories as the misrememberings of a tabby traumatized enough to kill multiple men, in the grips of post-traumatic stress disorder.
But Manx had been right all along.
“Okay, but even if that’s true—and I’m not going to believe it until I see it,” Teo said, “what does that have to do with Abby killing Hargrove? How would she even know he’d known about Robyn, if she didn’t know they were being stalked until she saw his board yesterday?”
And I wassurethat was the case. Abby had been as shocked and horrified to find her pictures on his wall as I was. So, what had she been trying to hide when she’d insisted on going to Hargrove’s house—the scene of a murder—if she hadn’t known the rogue stray we were after had actually been taking out the hunters? Or that the hunters had been stalking her and Robyn?
What had we gotten from that first crime scene other than the stalker-board?
We’d gotten Darren’s name and the names of two other remaining hunters, but she couldn’t have anticipated that, because we hadn’t known the mauling victims were the hunters. All we’d hoped for, going in, was to identify the scent of whoever’d murdered someone in Hargrove’s house, and in the end, we hadn’t even been able to isolate that scent. Thanks in no small part to Abby, who’d managed to get her own scent—and Robyn’s—all over the place, because of that stupid borrowed…
A groan slid up from my throat.
“What?”
