Stray. Rachel Vincent

my suitcase with knuckles white from tension. His stride was long, each step firm and heavy. But most telling was his posture as he wove between the cars in the parking lot. Head high and shoulders squared, his bearing was stiff and formal, as if he were truly nothing more to me than my chauffeur.

      And in case I missed any of those more subtle signs, when I moved up to walk alongside him, Marc favored me with a growl, low and angry, and too soft for anyone else to hear.

      Great. Nothing beats several hours in a car with a pissed-off werecat. Welcome to my life.

      Two

      The drive home from the University of North Texas seemed interminable, even with Marc driving. He took out his anger at me and Andrew on the car, and by the time we merged with the highway traffic, he was going twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. At that rate, the drive from Denton to Lufkin—220 miles across the Texas prairie into the lush eastern woodlands—would take him two and a half hours. It should have taken more than four.

      When we left the interstate loop around Dallas for state highway 175, the traffic noise ebbed, leaving an awkward silence. Marc glanced at me, his mouth set in a grim line. “Tell me about Andrew.”

      “Not for all the money in the world.” Although freedom was the currency I truly valued. I stared out my window at moonlit fields and defunct oil wells. Northeast Texas had few trees, fewer hills and way too many miles of empty highway.

      “Why not? You ashamed of him?” Marc’s eyes flashed with smug satisfaction.

      Damn him! Five years, and he still knew exactly how to piss me off. My fist clenched around the “oh shit!” handle built into his car door. The plastic casing cracked, falling apart in my hand to expose the steel frame inside. Oops.

      I brushed shards of plastic from my lap onto the floorboard, but a few slivers protruded from my palm like spines from a cactus. I plucked them out one by one, dropping them at my feet with the rest.

      My palm was dotted with several tiny spots of blood and one long, shallow cut. Such minor wounds would likely heal during my next Shift, if not before. That was one of the advantages to spending half your life on four paws, along with increased metabolism, strength and hearing. No superhuman lifespan, though, as cool as that would have been. In fact, in some places, many toms die young, in fights over territory or mates.

      Marc glanced at my hand, his face impassive. He didn’t care about the broken handle. His driver’s seat was missing an armrest and his steering wheel resembled a dented hexagon more than it did a circle. My little accident couldn’t begin to compare with the damage he’d done to his own vehicle in past fits of anger.

      “I’m not ashamed of him, Marc.” I snatched a tissue from the box he kept on the center console and wiped the blood from my palm in short, angry strokes. “I just don’t want to talk about him.”

      “To anyone, or just to me?” His voice was strained, and his eyes flicked to my face quickly, then back to the road before I could read his expression.

      To anyone with fur and claws. But I couldn’t say that. “Does it matter?”

      “I guess not.” However, the tense lines around his mouth argued otherwise. “Aren’t you going to call him?”

      I flipped my phone open and closed, considering. As much fun as it might have been to make Marc listen while I spoke to Andrew, it certainly wouldn’t make the ride home any more bearable. “I’ll wait till we stop for gas.”

      “We won’t be stopping for a couple of hours. Won’t he worry before then?”

      I almost laughed out loud. As if he gave a damn whether or not Andrew would worry. “No, he won’t. He’s my boyfriend. Not my conscience, my conjoined twin or my father.”

      Marc frowned, and I looked away, dabbing at my palm again, though the bleeding had already stopped. His question was typical of Pride mentality. A tomcat’s strongest instinct was to protect the women at any cost, with no consideration for our desires for privacy or independence. Or for whether we wanted, or even needed to be protected.

      As I’d demonstrated an hour earlier, I did not need his protection. What I needed was a life of my own, which was exactly what I’d found on campus. My decision to live outside the Pride confounded the entire werecat community. Including my parents, which I’ll probably never understand. After all, they taught me to think things through and to defend myself. Then they seemed genuinely surprised when I fought for the very independence they’d prepared me to handle.

      While a tomcat would be labeled strong and self-sufficient for pursuing his own interests, I was considered stubborn and selfish for abandoning my Pride in favor of an education and a life of my own.

      My parents had decided to humor my “phase,” indulging me on the assumption that I would either grow out of it or come home after graduation. They thought they would lose, at most, four years of manipulation and micromanagement. They were wrong.

      I’d intentionally spent an extra year as an undergrad, then applied to the graduate program without telling anyone. The day after graduation, I enrolled in two summer classes. The only notice my father got that I’d completed my B.A. was the bill for grad school tuition. He’d underestimated me. Like Marc.

      I scanned the car for somewhere to put the blood-smeared tissue but couldn’t find anyplace that didn’t involve making Marc bend over. Stifling a laugh at the thought of where I’d like to shove the tissue, I dropped it on the floorboard, making a mental note to clean up my mess when we got home.

      “What about you?” I asked, thinking of the sorority girls in the food court. “Have you been dating?”

      “No, I haven’t been dating.” He spat the word as if it tasted bad, and I suppose it did. Marc had never been one for casual relationships, which had been a big part of our problem. Everything he did, he did with his whole heart and soul. Including me. It was sweet for about the first ten minutes. After that, it got old quickly.

      “Do you really think that’s healthy?” I asked, still irritated by his prying questions. “It’s been years, Marc. You can’t be my father’s hired muscle forever. You need a plan for your life, something to give it meaning.” Like I was one to talk. My grand scheme, which consisted of avoiding my family for as long as possible, had already failed. But that didn’t stop me from dispensing advice I couldn’t follow.

      “I had a plan.” The gold specks in Marc’s irises flashed at me in the glow of passing headlights. I started to respond but he cut me off with a look. A very angry look. He was mad enough that I almost felt sorry for the steering wheel. “My personal life is none of your business, Faythe. Not anymore.”

      “That’s a two-way street.”

      “No, it really isn’t.” He glared at me, ignoring the road long enough that I wanted to grab the wheel. “Your personal life is the business of the entire Pride, by custom and by necessity. You can’t change that, no matter how long you hide out at school pretending to be human.”

      I growled, deep in my throat; it was a sound no human could have made. Some people think only dogs growl, but cats growl too, mostly in warning. For once, Marc took my warning and shut up.

      For the next two hours, I faked sleep, beyond caring whether or not he bought the act. Just as my eyes were starting to close for real, Marc jerked the wheel to the right and veered across two lanes of highway—both empty, fortunately. He sped down the off-ramp and swerved into an all-night service station, sliding in front of another customer in line for the only available pump.

      I twisted in my seat to see the unfortunate driver—a chunky man in ill-fitting slacks and a dress shirt—burst from his Volkswagen Passat and slam the door. His face was comically red in the fluorescent light from the awning overhead. He was yelling before he’d taken two steps, his gestures becoming more and more animated with each word.

      Marc watched in the rearview mirror. His grip on the steering wheel tightened. The metal