“Just my brother and I. Heath is taking a werewolf in our car to find medical care, so I’m in a big ass black SUV.”
“Oh, shit. He must be the med evac I just heard over the comms. All right, well, I’ll meet you there. I’ll tell John and Gina to come too.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling to myself. She hung up, and I dropped the phone into a cup holder, sighing. The smile died quickly. “What kind of impression did you get from them when you met them?”
“They were upset over Gaia and Titan. Haley thought she knew everything about our kind. I didn’t bother dealing with her because I didn’t care to or have the time to properly educate her. John has cancer.”
“What?” I sat up straight again, frowning at him. “How do you know that?”
“I got close enough to smell the illness on him. No, not the illness. I could smell the medications and had run into the scents before. My human lawyer in Botswana passed away about five years ago, and I knew everything about his care, from his disease to his medications. I know the smell of a man who is battling for his life against his own body.”
The explanation stunned me into silence for a long moment until he turned his dark eyes on me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“It happened. He rests in peace now on my property. Back to the problem at hand, please.” He looked back to the road, and I was left trying to process how to go back to the conversation.
“So, yeah…I got the same vibe from Haley. She was a bit bitchy when I explained some things to her because they weren’t what she expected. I didn’t know John is sick. He didn’t mention it or act like it. Um…”
“Gina was just a crying woman. I don’t think it’s her. John or Haley,” Jabari declared.
“Yeah…” I wasn’t sure how to react to that statement, either. “John or Haley. What do each of them get out of it?”
“Depends on what they were offered. We’ll find out when we see them.”
I had the odds of flipping a coin, but I already decided which one I thought did it. I had a feeling Jabari was on the same page.
27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We arrived in the pitch blackness of the night. Jabari turned our lights off but kept the SUV running. Quietly, we waited for the humans to roll up and meet us in the park they had picked out. There was no one around, which made it perfect.
I tapped him and pointed to the two trucks that came in at the same time. They must have lived nearby and driven at the same time on their way to meet us, because it was the same thing they did when meeting Heath and me.
We got out of our vehicle first and let them approach. I sniffed the air, paying attention this time to John’s scent. My brother had been right. There was a smell of chemicals to him I hadn’t noticed before. I was focusing too intently on what I had to deal with and didn’t catch what had been right in front of my nose.
“So…” Haley stepped up closest. “It’s really good to see you both alive…” She looked between us and frowned. “Are you really related, or is that just something you tell people? Because I’m not seeing it.”
“My father Changed her into a werecat,” Jabari explained. “That makes us siblings, though it doesn’t have to. We choose to have that relationship.”
“It’s not a biological relationship at all,” I made sure to point out when Gina raised an eyebrow. “It’s complicated.” It was funny because the relationship between werecat siblings was an odd one. Like Hasan had mentioned on the phone, talking about Davor and Liza, it was perfectly acceptable for it to become romantic as long as the werecats weren’t actually related. I glanced at him, frowning. Jabari and Zuri were from a different time, though…
No. Stop. Don’t need those images.
My mind was going interesting places now that I was safe from immediate death.
“Ah.” Gina nodded slowly. “So, will you tell us what happened?”
“Certainly.” I took the lead, letting Jabari just stand there and be intimidating. “We discovered that you had a small infestation of vampires who had gone rogue and were looking to take over this area for easy feeding. You know how Gaia and Titan regularly helped save humans? Yeah, that was about to