Wild Cat

always work for the dokk alfar. The magic is different. So I searched for humans who knew Fae lore, as I told you. The ritual I found in that grimoire used the blood of a Shifter, in a spell performed at the spring equinox. It’s supposed to open the gate.”

“Great,” Jace said softly.

“I’d already been a police officer for a while,” Reid said. “I was good at it. In my world, I was a warrior and an enforcer. I easily passed the tests to get into the police. Once I found the spell that used Shifters, I got myself transferred into Shifter Division. I figured it was just a matter of time before I found an un-Collared Shifter that I could use. When the hunting law changed, I saw a way to speed up the process. I found some hunters experienced in tracking down un-Collared Shifters and paid them to help me. Except, they were hot to kill any Shifter, Collared or otherwise. They shot Donovan Grady before I could stop them, then pulled off his Collar to try to fool the cops…”

The speech, delivered rapid-fire, faded.

In the silence that followed, Cassidy could hear Nell talking to Shane and Brody outside. Warm, family conversation, so different from the anger and fear in this room.

“Are you telling me you would have let Donovan live once they’d captured him?” Cassidy asked. “As desperate as you were?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you try to kill me? Not just any Shifter, but me in particular?”

Reid met her gaze with eyes like the black of space. “I knew you were his mate. I learned all about you and your family. I became an expert on you. I know that Shifters perform a ritual on the one-year anniversary of a death, and I knew you’d come out there again, right at the equinox. I told myself that you were so unhappy that it wouldn’t matter if the spell killed you. I justified it like that. But when I shot at you, I missed, and you ran. I chased you, so obsessed about doing the damn spell that I didn’t care about anything else. I realized, right then, that the hoch alfar had broken me. They’d made me become a dakhlar who’d sacrifice an innocent being for my own benefit. I’d grab you, use the spell, and deal with my guilt later.”

Cassidy put her bare foot on his thigh. “Why did you keep hunting me after I eluded you the first time? I went back to finish my ritual, but I brought plenty of guards, and we were alert for you. We almost got you that night. There must have been easier targets.”

Reid shook his head. “I told myself it had to be you, and you alone. To put you out of your misery, I reasoned. I thought you’d be happy to die.”

Cassidy rolled her foot on his thigh, increasing the pressure a little. He looked so pathetic, wrists and ankles bound with plastic ties, Diego with the barrel of the rifle in his stomach, Xavier watching with double weapons. Here was the man responsible for her mate’s death, at her feet, and now her victory tasted hollow.

Jace spoke behind her. “You’re talking as though the Fae have qualms about killing Shifters.”

Reid lifted himself halfway up. “No, no, the hoch alfar don’t care about killing Shifters. They’ll kill anything that gets in their way-they’ll do it for amusement. I know that, because I watched them do it to my mate and my children.”

Cassidy took her foot from him. “Diego, let him go.”

Diego shot her a surprised look. “He’ll vanish. We might never find him again.”

“Let him. I want him gone. I don’t want to look at him anymore.”

Eric’s voice rumbled. “He caused Donovan’s death, Cass. No matter how he tries to spin it, he’s guilty of that. It’s your right to do what you will with him.”

“I know.” Cassidy looked back at Eric, her heart bleak. “And I’m exercising my right.”

She’d wanted Reid to be gloating, rubbing his hands like a villain, so she’d feel triumph when she ripped out his throat. Instead she found a creature of shame, anger, and emptiness.

Diego held her gaze. “There’s nothing to say he won’t try to kill another Shifter if we let him go.”

“He won’t,” Cassidy said. “We’ll make sure of that.”

Diego’s eyes held compassion. Only last night, he’d dispatched one of his old enemies, one he’d grown to pity. Diego understood.

Cassidy and Diego looked at each other a moment longer, then Cassidy turned and walked out of the house. She didn’t bother with shoes; she walked barefoot outside to the swath of grass and brush down the common. She walked past houses of her friends and extended family, and Donovan’s friends and family. She walked all the way to the eight-foot-high cinderblock wall that marked the end of Shiftertown. Why humans had built the wall, she never understood-nothing but scorching desert lay beyond it.

Cassidy leaned on this wall, soaking the cool of it into her bones.

Donovan’s killer. Hers to kill, quickly or slowly. Her right as the mate whose mate bond had been broken by murder. Even Donovan’s mother didn’t have the bond that Cassidy had shared with Donovan. The vengeance kill belonged to the mate.

Cassidy knew that more lay behind her sudden despair besides Reid not being the evil killer she’d wanted him to be. Reid was responsible, but his finger hadn’t pulled the trigger. Those human hunters were still at large, still fair game, still hers.

She knew damn well that part of her grief was for the severing of one mate bond and the beginning of another.

How could this happen so quickly? Eric had lost his mate, Kirsten, when Jace had been born, and Eric had never shown any inclination to mate again. Having offspring lessened the mating instinct, that was true, but though Eric occasionally had casual relationships with females, he hadn’t made another mate-claim, hadn’t even voiced the inclination to.

Cassidy had thought she’d be like him, letting forty years go by before she even declared herself interested again.

Then she’d met Diego, a human who’d bound her and arrested her for little more than being Shifter. But he’d made Cassidy start erasing Donovan from her heart.

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

And yet, the mate bond sang.

Cassidy screamed to drown it out. She beat her fists on the wall, the cement grating her skin. She slapped her palms to the stone, over and over, her frustration, fear, and anguish boiling out of her.

“Stop.” Diego’s warm voice was in her ear, his strong hands closing over hers. He pulled her from the wall and gathered her into his arms. “Don’t, amada mia.”

Cassidy turned to the strength of his embrace. “I loved him. I loved him.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want that to go away.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Diego asked.

She nodded, tears flooding her eyes. “Donovan deserves to be avenged. And I couldn’t do it.”

Diego pulled her close. “Don’t, mi ja. We think that if we keep hunting, keep trying to fix what hurt them, they’ll stay alive somehow. But that’s not what keeps them alive. It’s us, remembering the good of them.”

“Oh, Goddess, Diego, I don’t want to forget him.”

“You never have to.”

She looked up at him again. “I’m feeling the mate bond for you. It’s erasing the one I had for him. I don’t want that!”

“Mate bond?”

“It’s what Shifters feel for each other when the mating is right. It’s a magical thing-a Goddess thing.”

Diego’s black brown eyes were as dark as night. “And that’s what you feel for me?”

“Yes.”

Diego gazed down at her, his lips parted. Cassidy cursed herself for babbling it all out to him. He was human- how could he understand? Maybe the last thing he wanted was a Shifter woman confessing she considered herself emotionally bound to him.

The next thing she knew, Diego was crushing her into the wall, his body heat and scent all over her.

“Damn it, Cassidy,” he whispered.