“I’m not sure. Hopefully nothing.” I couldn’t lie to her, not when she’d just started to trust me. But neither could I tell her the whole truth. Not that I actually knew the whole truth yet. “I’ll be right back. Okay?”

She nodded reluctantly, and I slipped into the hall without a word to the guard on duty, in spite of his obvious curiosity.

When I got downstairs, the living room was deserted, so I jogged through the kitchen and out the back door, where a group of toms—including all four Alphas—was gathered in a heavily shaded corner formed by the back porch and the rear wall of the lodge. Chill bumps formed instantly beneath my clothes, and my breath puffed from my mouth in thin white clouds.

“Oh, shit!” someone whispered, and no one admonished the guilty tom for his language in front of the Alphas. That couldn’t be good. I tried to elbow my way through the huddle, but was shoved back like a runt at its mother’s teat.

“Do you smell that?” Jace asked, and Marc nodded.

“Move!” I ordered, and when that got no response, I pinched Jace through his shirt.

“Ow!” he snapped, but shoved the guy on his left, then moved to make room for me.

I stepped into the narrow gap before it could close, and my gaze fell instantly to the cat on the ground at my feet. Something was wrong with it—other than the fact that it was dead—and it took me a minute to figure it out. The stray was missing his left rear leg. Not just the paw, but everything south of his knee.

Son of a bitch! Nate and his partner had found the missing honeymoon hiker, and not only was he dead, he was a werecat. He hadn’t just been attacked by the strays in the forest. He’d been infected.

“I assume he was dead when you found him?” my uncle asked, and all eyes turned to Nate and his partner, who stood opposite me in the huddle.

“Yeah.” Nate wiped his palms on his jeans, in either nervousness or excitement. “Looked just like that, only he was half under a clump of brush, like he’d crawled in there to die.”

“I see no obvious signs of trauma,” my father said. “Danny, what do you think?”