Pride Read Online Free Page B

ache settled into my chest, and I tried to drown it with coffee.
    “Are you sure they’re Shifters, and not natural cats? Cougars, maybe?” Uncle Rick asked from the living room. I tried to concentrate on what was being said, but I couldn’t seem to drag my gaze from Marc.
    “What’s going on?” he whispered to Jace, avoiding my eyes as he sniffed in the direction of the living room. “And what’s that smell?”
    “Of course I’m sure,” Keller rumbled from the other room, and Marc froze at the sound of the strange voice.
    “Is that what I think it is?” Marc murmured, crossing the kitchen to stand behind us, where he could see into the living room. “A bruin? ”
    Jace nodded, a grin practically splitting his face in half. Bruins were rarer than thunderbirds. Rarer even than tabby cats, at least in the U.S. My father said they’d be gone for good someday. Maybe during my lifetime. I’d never expected to see one in person.
    “They’re bigger than cougars, and jet-black, every one,”Keller continued. “Smarter ’n cougars, too. But they lack the common sense to be frightened when they ought.”
    Definitely tomcats, then, I thought. And probably teenagers.
    “I expect you boys to round ’em up, and soon,” the bruin said, glancing from one Alpha to another. “I’ve already buried one—figured you’d wanna know why he didn’t come back—and I don’t mind diggin’ more holes, if need be. Seems only fair to warn you first, though.”
    My father frowned, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. What they all must have been thinking. We weren’t missing any cats. Though he didn’t seem to know it, Keller was talking about strays. Reckless, likely suicidal strays. He had to be.
    “We’ll take care of the problem.” My father tapped his index fingers together beneath his chin. Then, as if he’d read my mind, “Can you describe the scent of these werecats? They were male, I assume?”
    Keller nodded. “No doubt about that. Not with ’em pissin’ on every tree and rock for ten square miles.”
    My father cleared his throat to disguise a smile, but Jace wasn’t so fortunate. He choked on a gulp of coffee, spewing it across the table and down the front of his shirt. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, and Marc grabbed a pile of paper napkins from the counter behind him, dropping them over the mess on the table.
    “Could you tell anything else from their scents?” Uncle Rick asked, while my father glared at us from the living room. I shrugged at him in apology, while Jace tossed the soggy napkins across the room into the trash can. “Were they Pride or stray?”
    Keller stroked his beard again. “Can’t say as I know the difference.”
    My father nodded, as if he’d expected that very reply. “A stray is a werecat who was born human, then infected by being scratched or bitten by one of us in cat form.”
    I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortably aware that nearly every eye in the living room had just focused on me. Always in the past when the topic of strays came up, Marc became the unwilling center of attention. But that was no longer the case. I was now infamous for having created a stray. In fact, I was the only Pride cat in living history to admit to such a thing. No one else was that crazy. Or stupid.
    But things were different for bruins, as Elias Keller had just reminded us. His species wanted nothing to do with the human population. Or with each other, for the most part. Unlike werecats, bruins lived alone, typically in rough cabins in isolated mountainous regions virtually untouched by civilization. They were the “mountain men” of legend, reclusive giants in huge flannel shirts, fur hats and colossal boots, stomping through the forest with an ax over one shoulder and a dead deer over the other. They were likely the source of the Paul Bunyan stories. Hell, in one form or another, they were probably also Bigfoot, almost never seen, because there were very few of them to be