Gray

Two days.

That’s how long he’d been standing on guard for. Patrolling the complex.

We really need a name for this, he thought. Something better than “the complex” or “the women’s buildings.” Most designed places like this have names for them, don’t they? Little miniature neighborhoods all to themselves. We’ll have to come up with something.

He added it to his to-do list, though it was pretty close to the bottom. A lot of things had priority just then. Like finding this creeper that Kelly knew.

Or talking to Kelly.

Even the thought of her made his heart ache, his stomach turn inside out, and his limbs quiver with pain. Gray wanted nothing more than to sit down and speak with her, to figure out what had gone wrong, why she’d felt the need to see someone else besides him. And most importantly, to figure out why she hadn’t told him.

That was perhaps the worst of it all. The betrayal. If Kelly had decided she didn’t want to see him, then there would have been nothing Gray could do about it. The news would have been devastating, but he knew it was something he would have had to accept. To deal with. To get over, in time. She was a grown woman, and human at that, which meant she didn’t feel the call of a mate the way he did.

It hadn’t been a simple case of a breakup, however. Instead, she’d simply been seeing another man, without telling him. One who had been in her house late at night, without any signs of forced entry. In other words, he’d been invited inside. Only Gray’s arrival had stopped things from progressing any further, but he knew it was unlikely that had been the first time. The other shifter’s reaction had not been one of unease. He’d felt comfortable around Kelly, and that meant they’d interacted before in the past.

None of which was helping him feel any better.

Nor was the fact that he’d barely eaten in the past two days either. Most of his time had been spent patrolling the pathways between buildings, observing the surrounding streets, and even taking his bear on repeated strolls through the nearby wilderness, both to alleviate some of his stress, but also in an attempt to catch the scent of his quarry.

It irked Gray that he’d been so blinded by Kelly’s actions that he hadn’t put everything together. For close to a year now he’d been Andrew’s right-hand man, helping to oversee the rebuilding of Cloud Lake from the damage it had suffered during the Cadian war with its former rival shifter territory Fenris. After that, he’d helped to plan and build the complex within which he now stalked. Despite all that, he’d still managed to stay atop all the arrivals to Cadia, of all the faces of the few dozen shifters who’d been allowed to visit.

He hadn’t attempted to do so with all the construction crews. Hundreds of faces were beyond him, and besides, there had been other men appointed to do that. Gray supposed that this could just be a rogue shifter from one of those crews, who had been eking out a living in the town, only to reveal himself recently to Kelly. It was possible of course, but he doubted that was the truth.

There was no doubt in his mind that it was the runaway, the shifter who had escaped Armen Cardiff’s facility. It just fit too well. Unfortunately, Andrew had destroyed the folder of information he’d procured, part of his agreement for getting it in the first place. Gray had the picture of the man memorized, but the shifter he’d battled had longer hair and a beard, obscuring many of his features. It was close enough that he was fairly positive it was the same one, however.

“Hey!”

He spun at the shout, to see a woman standing at the back of her little unit, leaning against the wall. His upper lip curled back in a sneer as he saw her holding a lit cigarette in one hand, the other resting a can of what he dearly hoped was soda on her protruding stomach.

“Can I help you?” he asked as politely as possible.

“Yeah. You can go away. You aren’t allowed to be here!” she shouted at him imperiously, as if she were an officer of the law.

Gray gave her a long, flat look. “How do you know that?”

His look, stance, and tone had all been designed to provoke a response. It wasn’t right, he knew that. Gray was supposed to be the bigger man in this sort of situation. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for him to describe what he was doing there and who he was. Instead, he’d done all he could to piss her off.

The woman blinked several times in response. “You can’t be here! I’m calling the embassy. They’ll come and deport your ass back to whatever place you came from.”

“Deport?” he asked, speaking the question out loud more from surprise than anything.

“Yeah, back to that shifter territory,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction of Cadia. “Acadia or whatever.”

Gray carefully closed his eyelids before rolling his eyes. “Oh, I see.”

“Yep. They have guards who will come hunt you down and take you away,” she threatened.

“I’m so glad this is what my money is going to support,” he said dryly, just quiet enough she couldn’t hear.

“What’s that? Are you talking back to me?” she snapped.

“Oh for…” He growled. “Listen, lady. I am allowed to be here. But if you don’t like it, you go ahead and call the embassy. Ask them who they’ll send to stop me. I guarantee it’ll be a shifter named Gray. Then, after that, you can tell them who the person they’re coming to stop is.”

She stared at him for a moment, unsure of how to respond. “Oh yeah?” she said at last. “And who are you?”

Gray started to walk away, passing her on her right. “My name is Gray,” he said, then strode away, fighting the urge to break something. Anything, really.

The woman didn’t respond. Part of him hoped she had gone to call the embassy. That way they could deal with her dumb ass. Seriously, smoking and drinking while pregnant? Didn’t she know how bad it was for her? The answer was probably “Yes, but she doesn’t care, or doesn’t know how to stop.” The unfortunate part of the Institute’s plan was that to get the number of women necessary to see their plan through till the end, they’d had to round up a lot of women who came from poor areas, areas of low education and high crime rate. Women who either didn’t know better, or just didn’t care.

She wasn’t the first woman he’d seen smoking, though to his knowledge she was the first to be drinking. And at such an early hour too. Gray didn’t have much hope for that woman’s baby, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it either. Intervening in her life wasn’t his right. She hadn’t reached out to him for help, so who was he to go and tell her that she was ruining her child’s life? All it would have earned him was a slap in the face. Some people were, unfortunately, not helpable.

Nor was she the first person to accost him, to threaten him with calling the authorities. For the most part the other women had believed him when he’d told them who he was. Then again, he also hadn’t been a dick to most of them either, so that had probably helped. Oops. But his patience was reaching its end.

After nearly two days of hunting the grounds, he hadn’t found a single sign of his quarry, and was beginning to feel hopeless. He’d screwed up, and now the man had gotten away. Perhaps he wasn’t sticking around; maybe he and Kelly had left town, headed off to who knows where. After all, he hadn’t seen her around either, hadn’t caught her scent when he’d gone by her unit. Either she hadn’t left it in over two days, or she just wasn’t there anymore.

He passed by the stairs leading up to her unit one more time, still without any new trace of her scent. His eyes saw where repair work had hastily been done to the lower unit to fix the damage done during his brief fight with the other shifter. Gray felt a twinge of regret for the other occupants, who must have been terrified.

His stomach grumbled. Gray hadn’t eaten much in those two days, and his system was telling him that needed to change, and now. There was a little sandwich shop that had opened up nearby, to service the newfound population of the area, as well as the other visitors to the complex who might be hungry. He headed there now, knowing he was likely to make a large dent in their supplies.

It hit him when he crossed between two buildings near the outskirts of the complex, cutting through the back pathway between them. A scent that he recognized. It was strong, and fresh. He whirled, testing the air repeatedly to determine which way it was going. Once he had it locked in Gray took off, lunch all but forgotten about.

After two days, he’d finally gotten a hit. He wasn’t about to let them get away.

Not this time!