Page 33 of Captive Mate
My destination was one of the smaller buildings out back, basically just a lounge with a small bathroom and kitchenette, that Sam Kimball had always used as his private office and a place for his closest cronies to drink and smoke and carry on. I was betting that his brother Bill, now almost certainly the pack leader, would’ve taken it over for the same purposes. I hadn’t seen or smelled him out front, so that was likely where he’d be, along with everyone else in charge of this circus.
I was right. I froze, my heartbeat ratcheting up painfully, as I caught Parker’s scent. It was unmistakable, and so strong through my lynx’s nose that it made me glad I hadn’t eaten any mice to vomit up. His sweat, pungent and musky and faintly sour, his whiskey-tinged breath…I swallowed down bile.
This was good news. It was good news, because it meant he was still here to kill. I had to focus on the goal.
Fuck, but I wanted to turn stubby tail and run for it, run and run and run all the way to…Matthew, his dark head bent over me, his tongue turning me molten…fuck, I had nowhere to run to, especially if the Kimballs and Parker were planning an attack on the Armitages. Nowhere to go but — somewhere Parker wasn’t, and I couldn’t live like that.
I forced my jittery nerves to calm and drew deep breaths until my tangled thoughts drew back together into something like order.
Parker’s scent was only one of several, and I parsed through them as I crept forward, keeping to the shadows and slinking on my belly through taller tufts of grass and bits of undergrowth. Bill Kimball was there. So was his younger son, Jackson. There were two other scents I vaguely recognized but couldn’t put names to: one Kimball, and one from Parker’s pack.
Since Adam was dead, and Parker didn’t have a shaman of his own, there wouldn’t be any magical interference in my eavesdropping.
As I snuck around the corner of the building, looking for an open window, I caught another familiar scent: Colin Kimball. He wasn’t inside. His smell was coming from down the hill behind the meeting room.
Curious. He might be on guard, but with his father as the de facto pack leader, he’d be able to delegate that to someone else, right?
I detoured down the hill a little, picking my way around the small concrete patio littered with cigarette butts onto which the back door of the office opened. A few bushes ringed it, and I kept to their shadows. I was downwind from Colin, so I felt fairly confident.
As I got closer I could hear him, and I could finally catch his silhouette. One of his arms was bent, holding something to his head.
On the phone, then. I slunk closer.
“…not listening,” Colin hissed. “He’s convinced Taft and his pack are going to be enough to give him an edge. But they don’t give a fuck about us. Taft’s out to get his shaman, and once he does that, he’ll fuck off back to Nevada and leave us holding the bag. My dad thinks Jonah — yeah, the shaman — is going to end up staying with us and joining the pack, or something. He’s nuts.”
My ears pricked up. Dissent in the ranks? Someone who recognized Parker for the solipsistic, sadistic son-of-a-bitch he was?
I didn’t know Colin very well; he wasn’t someone I’d gone out of my way to talk to. He was lazy, and he didn’t take anything seriously, and I didn’t have time for people who didn’t care enough to have a purpose. And of course he was an alpha, so I despised him on principle — and my overall opinion of the Kimballs was somewhere down below what I thought of the parasitic worms you could catch from eating rodents. But maybe he wasn’t a total idiot.
More to the point, maybe he’d be a useful tool.
Colin was shaking his head, listening to whoever he was talking to. Whowashe talking to? It couldn’t be someone in the Kimball pack. He’d have talked to them in person.
“Yeah, well, I tried that,” Colin snapped. “I’m telling you, he’snot listening. He’s so pissed about my uncle Sam he can’t fucking think straight. They want to go after Jonah early this morning, a full-on assault. The Armitages have their own pack, and no one in their right mind wants to fucking fight Ian Armitage, right?” Colin paused and then laughed, a humorless bark. “Right. And they have a warlock now, plus the vamp and his psychotic bodyguard to call in, since they hate us right now too after that bullshit with kidnapping those other vamps, plus whatever Jonah does. He could’ve been an ally in the Armitage territory if it was just us, but now with Taft coming after — no, he’s not Taft’s fucking mate, I told you. No. And even if he was, he’s too smart to want to — dude, I’m not going to go into it, but the shit Taft’s saying about what he wants to do to the guy —” Another pause. “Fine. Fuck. Call me back.”
Colin poked at his phone like he wished it was an old-fashioned landline he could slam back down into its cradle, cursed, and stuck the phone in his pocket.
My mind whirred through what Colin had said, trying to process it all at once. The hardest part for me to wrap my brain around was that the Kimballs, and Parker, still thought I was on Armitage territory.
The Armitages knew I was gone, obviously. Or at the very least, Matthew did.
Had Matthew somehow hidden my escape from the rest of his pack? No. That was absurd.
So the pack knew, but they were hiding it from the Kimballs. But why? Parker might want revenge for Tyler, but…I’d never gotten to do that exam on Tyler I’d wanted to perform. Whatever was on his claws had been deadly to Matthew, and it had to have been seeping into his bloodstream too. Parker would’ve known that; if he’d planted that booby-trap on Tyler, Parker probably wasn’t that broken up about his death. He must’ve finally gotten paranoid about Tyler and decided he was expendable.
If Parker didn’t want revenge, then he’d have no reason to go after the Armitage pack if I wasn’t there. Of course, they didn’t know Parker, and might not follow that chain of logic. They might think pretending to still have me gave them leverage, rather than simply making them a target.
In a few hours Matthew would be fighting for his life, fighting Parker, because Parker wanted me. I shivered, my fur ruffling, and my claws flexed involuntarily.
Matthew wouldn’t be fighting Parkerforme. I’d ended any chance of that when I took the spell off of him. He’d be fighting Parkerbecauseof me, a subtle but significant difference. Why did that leave me so hollow? Defended not because I was worth defending, but because Matthew was embroiled in a pack war that he had no way out of other than through…I owed Matthew nothing. Nothing at all. Just as little as he owed me.
I didn’t care if the Kimballs killed him and Ian and Nate and all of them, as long as I killed Parker.
I could picture it as clearly as if it was a memory and not my imagination: picking my way through the battlefield, stepping around bloodied, torn-up bodies until I found Matthew’s. His blue eyes glassy, staring at nothing, his throat a bloody pulp, one arm thrown out at his side with the fingers curled as if waiting for someone to take his hand, just like when he’d slept beside me after taking me to bed…
Fuck. My stomach was in painful, twisting knots, and I couldn’t attribute it to the fast-food hamburger I’d scarfed down earlier in the evening.
The fact was, I couldn’t walk away, not knowing what was going to happen.
