Rogue 2 by Rachel Vincent

Author:Rachel Vincent
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780778329145
Publisher: Mira
Published: 2010-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

No. I shook my head in denial, though no one was there to see it. That’s not possible. Yet it was true, nonetheless.

They don’t even know about me, do they? You never told them. The words from my last conversation with Andrew played though my head, and they made so much more sense in retrospect. He wasn’t talking about our relationship. He was talking about his new species. He seemed to think I knew what he’d become, and had been keeping it from my family. But I hadn’t known. How the hell could I have known?

Chill bumps popped up all over my arms and legs, in spite of the hot Texas night. This couldn’t be happening. Andrew was human when I left campus. Absolutely, positively one hundred percent human. No fur. No claws. No canines.

So when had that changed? And who changed it? I rubbed both my arms at once, trying to offset the chill spreading over me from the inside out.

Andrew’s family was from Tennessee, which belonged to the Midwest Pride, and he went to school in Texas, which was in our territory. So unless he’d been to one of the free zones lately, he was pretty unlikely to have ever met a stray.

That left only one other possibility. As badly as I hated to admit it, he could have been scratched by a Pride cat. But the chances were slim. Creating a stray carried an automatic death sentence, and very few Pride cats were willing to take that kind of risk. Very, very few.

And it’s not like strays could be created by accident. An infectious scratch or bite could only be delivered in cat form, so casual physical contact with humans—such as a rough round of sex or even a fistfight—couldn’t possibly result in the creation of a stray.

So where could Andrew have come into contact with a werecat in cat form? Any werecat?

I refused to believe that my ex-boyfriend had been targeted by chance; that was like saying Lincoln was just in the wrong theater at the wrong time. Someone had intentionally dragged Andrew into werecat business, and whoever the bastard was, his fate would be sealed once we got one good whiff of Andrew. The infector’s base scent would be forever threaded through that of his victim—however lightly—just as Marc’s scent carried a permanent reminder of the stray who’d killed his mother and infected him.

It was a bitch of a double whammy, and the reason more than a few strays never came to terms with their new identity. But in this case, the scent trail would help us catch the slimy prick who’d put an end to Andrew’s human existence. At which point we’d end his own. An eye for an eye.

Tell Marc I’ll see him, too. I think he and I have a lot to talk about.

Shit. The very thought of that conversation introduced me to all new levels of stress. And humiliation. And…

An ache began behind my eyes and quickly grew into a searing, throbbing pain and pressure.

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