Marc sighed. “Fine. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll check for other wounds.” With an Oscar-worthy grunt of effort, he tugged up on the dead guy’s T-shirt, exposing a tangle of old scars reaching toward his spine from both sides of his chest.

I frowned at the long-healed marks. “You’re right. I admit it. There’s no reason to undress him.”

Marc shot me a cocky smile and lowered the poor man’s shirt.

Biting my lip in frustration, I glanced at my watch, pressing the button on the side to il uminate the face with a soft green glow. Almost one in the morning. Great. I should have been curled up next to Marc in bed, exhausted but satisfied. Instead, I was digging unmarked graves by moonlight, exhausted but creeped-the-fuck-out.

We’d dropped off the unconscious Dan Painter in a thick stand of trees just east of the Mississippi River and north of Arkansas City, still bound and now gagged, to teach him a lesson. Then we’d backtracked two hours northwest, on a predominantly two-lane highway. Or rather, Marc had backtracked. I’d recited the prologue to Canterbury Tales in my head. In Middle English. Backward. Marc had his special skills, and I had mine. Of course, his came in far handier than mine in our line of work.

Bad guys were hardly ever intimidated by a stirring recitation from Hamlet.

Gritting my teeth, I clung to the last of my dwindling supply of willpower and gave up all hope of seeing my bed before dawn. If I was going to be awake all night, I might as well get something done.

“Okay, a broken neck, but no other obvious wounds,” I said, tugging on the hem of my snug white T-shirt.

Of course, if I’d known I would be handling a corpse, I would have worn something…darker. Or disposable. As it was, I considered myself fortunate to be wearing jeans and a T. If not for the bag I’d packed for our weekend getaway, I’d be digging in expensive black slacks and a red silk blouse.

“So, we’re probably looking for another stray,” I continued, brushing imaginary grave dirt from my shirt. “Maybe one with a grudge, or a history of violent behavior?” I could feel the fine layer of grit all over me, like a ghostly dusting of death, somehow itching and burning beneath my skin.

Or maybe I was overreacting.

Marc shrugged, oblivious to my discomfort as his face smoothed into an unreadable expression. “That describes nearly every stray I’ve ever met. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause we’re not looking for anyone. We’re here to dispose of the body, not investigate the murder.”

I nodded and glanced away. I’d known better. The Territorial Council, nominal y led by my father, would never tie up its resources investigating the murder of a single stray. They would almost certainly view the dead cat as one less flea in their col ective fur.

“It doesn’t matter what he was doing here, or who killed him,” Marc whispered, kneeling next to the body. “No one gives a damn.”

He would never have voiced such a concern to anyone else, and my heart ached for him, knowing what it had probably cost him to say it in front of me. I knew he cared not because he’d known the stray, but because he hadn’t. Because no one had. And because, like the dead cat we’d come to bury, Marc was a stray. He was facing what I knew to be one of his worst fears: a quick burial in the middle of the night, without a single friend to remember him kindly.

As long as I was alive, that would never happen to Marc. He had me, my whole family, and our entire Pride to miss and remember him. Yet the injustice of a secret burial for the anonymous cat still bothered him.

Righteous anger burned bright in his eyes when he looked up at me, and there was nothing I could do to put out the flames.

Marc glanced away from my sympathetic look, but before he turned back to the body, his expression hardened into its usual business face, cold and unreadable. It was a defense mechanism I had yet to master.

He pulled a brown leather wal et from the stray’s back pocket and thumbed through the contents: two credit cards, a few folded receipts, a single wrinkled twenty, and at least two dozen crisp new one-dollar bills.

Marc slid a driver’s license from its plastic cover and passed it up to me without even glancing at it.

I looked at the photo, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Until I saw his face, Bradley Moore had just been a body, a nameless corpse to be disposed of quickly, so I could get on with my night.

But now that I’d seen his license, I knew that Moore lived in Cleveland, Mississippi, and was licensed to drive a motorcycle. He’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday, was six foot two and a half, and weighed two hundred and twelve pounds. And he had the most beautiful, hypnotic bluish-gray eyes I’d ever seen.

“Do you smel that?” Marc asked.

“Smell what?” I slipped the license into my front pocket and knelt beside him, eager to forget Mr. Moore’s haunting eyes.

“The killer, I assume. I smell another cat on him. On his clothes, and here, on his neck.” He bent to sniff where he’d indicated, and my stomach churned. I understood his sympathy for the unknown stray; I really did. And after seeing Moore’s face, I couldn’t help but share it. But three months earlier, I’d had to rip out a tomcat’s throat in order to free myself and Abby, my kidnapped cousin. And impractical as it might sound, considering my line of work, I’d had no plans to ever again share such intimate contact with a corpse.

I could handle wrapping the cadaver in plastic and dumping it in a hole in the ground, though that might have been easier if I’d never learned the victim’s name. But sniffing a corpse’s neck went way past my definition of decorous behavior. It was macabre, and disturbing.