“Rrrrrgggghhhh!” I closed my eyes, clenched my newly formed jaw, and mentally shoved the Shift into my arm.
Pain exploded in my wrist. Both halves of my bone wrenched themselves into place, and I screamed again, an inarticulate expression of sheer torture.
Distantly, I heard the door open, and a brief, thin line of sunlight slanted across my in-between form. “Shhh!” Jace whispered as he closed and locked the door. The scent of sausage washed over me, and my feline stomach growled. “Faythe, you have to hold it down, or someone’s going to call the cops. You sound like you’re giving birth!”
Insensitive bastard. He’d never hurt like this. He couldn’t have. He hadn’t Shifted until he’d had several weeks to recuperate from his broken bones.
Deep down, I knew Jace was right. Knew I was being irrational. But in that moment, I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted the pain to stop.
“You’re almost there,” Marc said. “Just your paw. Come on…”I sucked in a deep breath, and once again directed the Shift toward my right hand. My fingers shortened. My palm lengthened. The agony in my newly formed wrist radiated halfway up my arm.
The instant my paw formed, my skin started to itch and burn all over. Fur sprouted in a wave across my back, rippling to rapidly cover the rest of me. And finally, as a sort of Shifting coup de grâce, the uneven line of fur flowed over my front legs. The gash in my left arm burned like hell as new fur sprouted to cover my new stitches and developing scar.
Then, at last, it was over.
I lay there panting from my physiological miracle, and the guys both stared at me. Marc sat on the floor a foot away, and Jace squatted several feet from him. “Damn,” he said finally, staring at me. “I can’t believe she really did it.”
“I can.” Marc smirked. He’d never had a doubt.
“I just know how much it hurt me after six weeks.” When Marc had beat the living shit out of Jace for leaving his keys for me to use to run away from the ranch. “She’s had less than two.” Jace crawled closer and stroked the fur and whiskers on my exposed left cheek. “You’re amazing, Faythe. I don’t know of anyone else who would have even tried that.”
I huffed at him. Then I licked his hand.
“I agree.” Marc stroked the entire length of my newly compact, powerful torso. “Now, Shift back so we can eat.”
Twenty-Five
The Shift back hurt just as badly, but it went a little quicker. And when I stood—naked and fully human—I could tell little difference in my broken arm. It still hurt like hell to move, so I kept it as still as possible.
Fortunately, the gash in my left arm had closed. It was red, and swollen, and tender—still a wound; not yet a scar—but it was no longer oozing blood, and it didn’t hurt quite as badly. After one more set of Shifts, Marc would remove the stitches.
As soon as I stood, I grabbed my towel and clutched it to my chest. I’d never had qualms about nudity before—Shifters have to be naked to Shift, unless they want to ruin a lot of clothes—but as we’d already established, everything had changed. Marc always had heat in his eyes when he looked at me, and I didn’t want to run the risk of Jace having a repeat reaction in front of him. Or me.
Unfortunately, with my wrist still in serious pain—much more than when it was immobilized in the cast—I had to let Marc rewrap me in my towel. I still couldn’t eat right-handed, but that didn’t stop me from devouring several sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits and two cartons of hash browns in under five minutes. It turns out hamburgers are hard to find before ten in the morning.
“What’s that?” I asked around a mouthful, nodding my head toward a plastic grocery bag on the far bed.
Jace swallowed a drink from his cup. “Duct tape, for Lance. Picked it up on the way to Burger King. I also got a brace for your wrist, in case you don’t have time to fully heal it.” Which was a definite possibility.
“Good thinking on both.” I couldn’t help smiling.
“So, let’s talk details.” Marc took a long drink from his soda, then set it down and focused on me as I swallowed the last bite of my biscuit. “When you’re whole again, we’re just going to sneak in—under the cover of glaring daylight—and do a quick snatch-’n’-grab?”
Jace snorted. “You make it sound dirty. It’s a covert operation, not a quickie in a public bathroom stall.”
I desperately wished he hadn’t said quickie and bathroom in the same sentence. Not when Marc was suspicious enough of my cast-soaking bath earlier.
“My point,” Marc continued, holding a hash brown patty aloft, “is that we need to know more than the broad strokes before we go in.”
As soon as he heard broad strokes, Jace laughed again and choked on a drink from his soda. Marc glared at him, and I shot him a frown. I wished we had time for a leisurely breakfast, peppered with stupid sex jokes, but somehow, I never seemed to find time for such simple pleasures.
“Okay, look.” Jace set his biscuit down on its paper wrapper and met my gaze across the table. He was serious now, and the transition was truly something to behold. I was fascinated by the fact that he could be so like Ethan one moment—bighearted and easygoing; all carefree jokes and smart-ass-ery—then so like Marc. So dedicated, and determined, and…formidable. “I think I know how to get into Cal’s guesthouse, and I think I can get Lance out without making anyone suspicious. Or not too suspicious, anyway.”
I raised my brows, and Marc nodded for him to go on.
“Well, my mom was begging me to come home the other day. After Brett died. I said hell, no, for obvious reasons. But what if I changed my mind?” His blue eyes shone with possibility. “What if I came to town, hoping for a peaceful reunion with my mother, but I didn’t want to just drop in without calling first?”
Something eased deep inside me. Some horrible tension. Some deeply rooted anxiety over our obvious and distressing lack of a plan. “Jace, that’s brilliant!” I balled up my wrapper one-handed and tossed it into the trash can beside the dresser, ignoring the sting and creepy tugging sensation in my half-healed gash.
Marc sat in silence for a moment, obviously weighing the idea. “Do you think they’ll fall for that?”
“Cal?” Jace scowled—his usual response to his stepfather’s name. “Probably not. But my mother will, and if I’m here under her invitation, it’s not trespassing. He has no excuse to kill me.”
I stirred the ice in my cup with the straw. “At least until he can drum up some bogus charge.”
“I don’t plan to be around that long. I’m thinking, I’ll go home, have a quick and painful reunion with my family, then find some excuse to get Lance alone long enough to knock him out and do Marc’s snatch-’n’-grab.” Jace grinned and Marc ignored the reference. “I might even be able to talk him into going somewhere with me willingly. In which case, we all get in on the snatch-’n’-grab. It’s more fun with a group, right?”
That time his grin was all for me. And I couldn’t resist shooting one back—if only because his plan was actually good. Much better than my “sneak through the woods, create a distraction, grab the guilty party, and run” idea. And Jace’s was much less likely to get us caught. Or at least more likely to give us a head start. Hopefully we’d have an hour or more before anyone realized Jace and Lance were missing, rather than just late.Finally, Marc nodded, and neither of us missed the appreciative lift of his left brow. “Okay, sounds like a plan.”
We decided I should Shift into and out of cat form one more time before Jace called his mother, because there was no way to disguise the sounds of the process, and if she heard me, our ruse would be over before it had even started.
The second set of Shifts was a little easier, but only because my recent meal had given me more energy. My right arm still hurt like I was being tortured for information, but by the time I sat up again in human form, my left arm had healed to a thick but raw-looking pink scar. It would have taken several days for it to heal that far on its own.
I talked Marc into removing the stitches while Jace called his mother, to save time.
“Jace?” Patricia Malone’s voice rose into the dog whistle range in surprise. Evidently her son didn’t call very often.
“Yeah, Mom, it’s me.” Jace crossed into the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet seat but left the door open. He couldn’t stop us from overhearing, but wanted at least the illusion of privacy. I could only imagine how uncomfortable that conversation must be for him.
“Are you…? What’s wrong?”
Marc used a tiny pair of scissors to clip the first stitch, then tugged it from my skin with tweezers. It felt weird but didn’t hurt. With any luck, I’d regained full use of my left arm.
“Nothing. Well, Brett’s dead.” Jace leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the bathroom wall. “Do you still want me to come home? For the funeral?”
“Of course. Will you, please? It would mean so much to…Melody.”
Jace sighed, and I heard genuine reluctance in the sound. I couldn’t imagine how nervous he must be. Nor could I imagine having a father figure who hated me, and openly lamented not killing me as a kitten.