tabby

so I knew who to rip apart with my teeth and claws. Once I got on their scent, no one could escape me.
“But it was a setup. Bae wasn’t there. Neither was there a computer. And the moment I entered the room, the door swung shut, locking me in.”
I turned to face Bae’s figure. He stopped pacing but tensed as if he knew what was coming. “And where were you, Bae?”
His head dropped along with his shoulders. “I never made it to the room. Ed stopped me, telling me that he had some important investors that he needed me to meet. So while Arin was being locked in the room, I was in the main lounge schmoozing with the bigs. I didn’t know Arin wasn’t with her until he broke free.”
Arin banged his head against the brick wall. The idea had merit, as my fists ached to pound against something, but I didn’t want to hurt them before they took care of the SOB who had my pussy. “What happened next?” My jaw hurt from how tightly it was clenched.
“We did a quick search of the club and called the hotel. There was no sign of her anywhere.”
“That’s good,” I said, thinking fast. Bae and Arin looked at me like I had two heads. “Not good that she’s gone but good that we know she was abducted here.” Again, I felt the need to explain myself based on their looks. “If she’d disappeared from the hotel, she would have been seen arriving there, so we know she was taken from here. That narrows our initial search.”
“But we searched it once already.” Arin may have protested, but I saw how his posture perked up at the idea of a plan.
“Yes, but you didn’t have me there to track her.” I walked to the back door, punched in the code, and walked inside, trusting that they’d follow.
We made a direct beeline to the side of the stage that she always exited from. From observing her behaviour, I’d gathered what I thought was a fairly comprehensive picture of how she acted. That picture had been changing in the past week, but I hoped between what I might know, what they might know, and with my tracking skills, we would find the path.
That side of the stage was filled with scents. Not one of them unfamiliar, but hers stood out from among them all. Separating it out from the others was the easy part, but separating it into the ten different times she passed through this area this evening would be harder. I leaned into the shadows and closed my eyes, letting her drift over my nose, picking out the various tones in her pheromones to judge where she was in her dance routine.
My eyes popped open. A matching rush of emotion flowed through my veins as I pulled Mike’s scent from hers. As the stage manager, Mike frequently crossed her path, marking it with his scent, but not when she was anxious. But at least we had a starting point. If I couldn’t track her, we could question Mike.
Without a sound, I stalked down the hallway toward the dressing room. My partners followed, not saying a word to disrupt my concentration. I stopped outside the room. “Here.” I took another sniff. “Something’s not right.”
I paced up and down the final ten feet of the hall. Up until now, Mike had never showed an interest in Tabitha, as she had her own team, unlike the rest of the dancers. His contact tended to be with either Arin or Bae. And it didn’t seem suspicious that he would escort her back to the dressing room, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what these scents were telling me.
“Mike’s human, correct?” In our division of labour, I’d focused on Ed and his contacts, while Bae had spent his time on Mike and any other suspicious people. But I had done a cursory examination of Mike and had never found anything to dissuade me of the notion that he was human.
Arin and Bae shrugged and shared a look. “From all I can tell. When I followed him, I never saw any evidence to the contrary. Arin?”
“The same for me. Why? What are you getting?”
I ran my fingers through my hair, scratching my scalp. “Mike walked her here, where a new scent is introduced.”
“So someone new took her, and Mike knows who that is. That’s great. Let’s go question him.” Bae started toward the door, but I grabbed his arm, pulling him to a halt.
“Not so fast. There’s more.” I shook my head, trying to remove all the scents from my brain so I could start fresh for a second look. “Mike doesn’t leave. His scent stays here, mingled with hers and this new one, but his scent changes. It’s no longer human, but it’s something I’ve never smelled before.”
Arin pushed off the wall. “A mutant?” He clenched his fists, and I saw his sloth bear tendency to stand up and fight take over. “So that’s the connection.”
Bae raised his hands, palms out. “No, wait a second—”
“We don’t have time to wait.”
I stepped in between the two, worried a fight would start. “We can’t just run off. We have to trust Tabitha and her training while we do things correctly. If we don’t, if we run off without examining everything, we can do more damage to Tabitha.”
Arin fought the logic of my argument, but in the end, his posture relaxed a little and some stiffness left his shoulders and spine. The need for Tabitha’s safety trumped all else, and none of us wanted to risk that further. “So what do we do?”
The features on Bae’s face turned to stone, the mask he wore when he was in full command mode. “Kasim, did the mutant Mike take her with him?”
I turned to walk down the new corridor that led to a private area of the club. It was an area that Tabitha had not been down yet, as