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He would have followed her if Lucas hadn’t sounded so ominous. His face turned to stone, his shifter senses heightening.
“What?” he implored.
“He’s dead. We found him at another campsite. You have to get out here.”
Gabriel went still as Lily emerged from the bathroom. Her sexy expression became dour in a split second.
“Stay where you are," Gabriel said, shoving the sheets off and moving to the closet. "I'm bringing backup. Don't touch anything at the scene.”
“Understood."
Lucas sent Gabriel his coordinates, and then Gabriel rushed to get himself dressed. Lily watched him from the bed, looking somber.
“What happened?” she asked.
Gabriel had pulled on thin track pants and a T-shirt. He would be shifting soon, so no point putting on anything heavy. He shook his head as he approached her, laying a light kiss against her warm, lovely forehead.
“I will explain everything when I get back. Just stay here. I’ve got my phone on me."
Lily was the kind of woman who would protest when given the opportunity, but at that moment, she merely nodded in agreement. She had lived with the pride long enough to see that he wasn’t just their leader but their investigator and their father. He was everything to his people.
“Okay. Please stay safe,” she said, placing a delicate kiss on his palm.
It wasn't easy for Gabriel to leave, but one of his own had been murdered, which meant his pride was directly under threat. He tried to reassure himself that Lily was safe in his home, surrounded by a number of other beasts who would sacrifice themselves for her at a moment’s notice.
It helped somewhat as he emerged into the twilight dusk and moved through the growing dark. He summoned a few more of his men to accompany him to the site. He drove to the location Lucas had sent him, which was only a few miles from where the pride’s compound was located.
Headlights threw themselves across the tangled brush, where Gabriel found Lucas and Mark standing over Sebastian’s lifeless body. Gabriel was suddenly heartbroken and livid at the sight of one of his brothers lying still. A permanent expression of dead-eyed surprise stretched across his face like a mask.
He climbed out of the car with two of his men, and they trampled through the undergrowth. Daylight was quickly dying, so they used flashlights to pour over their tracks and ultimately arrived upon where their slain brother lay.
Mark was white, his fixed expression gliding from Sebastian’s corpse to the earth below. Lucas looked even more disturbed, his usual air of charm and wit put on hold. Gabriel touched his good friend's shoulder, his deep blue eyes nearly gray in the dusk.
“Tell me everything from the beginning,” he said.
“We were looking most of the day. Couldn't find much of anything. Until we found another campsite." Lucas pointed east from where they were standing.
“Then?" Gabriel said, encouraging him.
“It looks like humans again. They weren't there when we found the site, but we caught a scent of something familiar. So we followed it, and then we found Sebastian."
All of the men were trying not to look down at their fallen comrade, but they also didn’t want to avoid it. Death wasn’t as taboo a concept for shifters as it was for humans. Death meant the sealing of a legacy more often than not.
But the pain of loss was far more palpable. Grief was treated as a sickness within shifter communities, one that would rarely be remedied.
The only cure was time, reverence, and justice.
Gabriel would take that on within the community as was his duty. He knelt to look at Sebastian in a way that was objective, albeit difficult. It was also part of his duty to apply his detective skills before getting any form of police involved. They were only called when it was absolutely necessary.
“Get me a blanket from the truck,” Gabriel said, motioning toward the vehicle.
One of the men he had arrived with did as he was asked. While he trekked through the brush, Gabriel did a quick once-over assessment before his man returned with the blanket.
They weren’t going to need a pathologist to identify Sebastian’s cause of death. A clean hole the size of a dime was visible, the wound in the center of his forehead. He lay on his side, one arm stacked on top of the other. His mouth hung open, his lips purple and bruised. His eyes were blank but strangely serene.
The back of his head was turned away from them into the shadows, and Gabriel thought it was better that way. The skull had likely been blown out, shards of bone mixed with strings of blood and brain dotting the dry shrubbery. It wasn’t an image anyone needed to have permanently etched into their memories.
He took the blanket and quickly threw it over Sebastian’s remains. He used two fingers to close his eyes forever, then pulled the blanket taut around his head area. All four of them stood there for a moment in a somber dignity over their fellow tiger shifter. The only sounds were those of their bereaved hearts beating and the nightcrawlers that were rising.
