Jace closed the hatchback and stepped aside to make room for his Alpha. My father knelt next to the bound, unconscious creature and began a slow, thorough visual examination, no doubt cataloging every detail in his head. If the council weren’t fractured—possibly beyond repair—he would make a formal report of the incident as soon as possible. And though that would almost certainly not happen under the current circumstances, I had no doubt that he would record his observations.
Sightings of thunderbirds were rare enough to be historic, and I’d never heard of a werecat making actual physical contact with one. Much less being snatched and carried off like a giant worm for a nest of monstrous chicks. A kicking, screaming worm.
“What is that?” Ed Taylor, Alpha of the Midwest territory, eased forward slowly, as if his curiosity barely trumped his caution and blatant disgust.
My Alpha stood but didn’t take his gaze from the spectacle. “I believe this is a thunderbird.”
“Greg, it has feet,” Blackwell pointed out evenly, leaning on his cane from several feet away.
“As do you,” my dad said. Several toms chuckled then, and I couldn’t disguise a smile. “He’s obviously partially Shifted.”
“And they’re much better at it than I am. Than we are,” I corrected, glancing around to see several of the toms who had already mastered the partial Shift. “They can Shift in the middle of a landing. Rapidly. That’s why he has feet and wings at the same time. And they have these wicked wing-claws.” I pointed to where his nonhands were tied, and several toms edged closer for a better look. “Owen could tell you all about those.”
“What on earth do they want with Kaci?” Uncle Rick knelt at my father’s side for a closer look. “They aren’t known to attack people. If they were, we’d know more about them. As would humans.”
But no one had an answer to that, so I shrugged as Marc’s arm slid around my waist. “Maybe they didn’t want her in particular. Maybe she was just the first one they saw.” Because the rest of us had been under the porch roof. “Or maybe she’s the only one light enough to carry.”
My father gave me a vague nod. But the truth was that we had no idea.
Marc started to say something, but Jace beat him to the punch, stepping up to my other side. “What do you want us to do with him?”
Marc scowled, but looked to our Alpha for an answer, as did everyone else.
For a moment, we got only thoughtful silence, as my father stroked the slight, graying stubble on his chin. “For now, we’ll put him in the cage, and when he wakes up, we’ll question him. In the meantime, let’s see what we can find out about thunderbirds.”
It took some careful maneuvering, but finally Marc and Jace were able to carry the bird down the narrow concrete steps into the basement, then into the cage. They left him tied, because as easily as he Shifted, we had no doubt he could get out of his bonds as soon as he woke.
On my way to my room to shower after my race through the woods, I passed the room Owen had shared with Ethan. At first I couldn’t make myself go inside. Ethan’s death was still too fresh. His memory too immediate. His room still smelled like him, and entering it felt like walking through his ghost.
But then Kaci beckoned me with a wave, and I steeled my spine and stepped through the doorway, pausing to smile to Mateo Di Carlo, my fellow enforcer Vic’s older brother. Teo hardly noticed me, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in Owen, either. However, he watched Manx tend to her patient as if her every motion fueled a single beat of his own heart.
I sighed and turned to my brother. Owen lay on his bed in human form now, naked but for his green-striped boxers. The gashes across his ribs looked horrible, and the one bisecting his left thigh looked even worse.
“You okay?” I asked, as Manx knelt to gently blot his leg with a sterile cloth.
“I’ve had worse,” he said, and forced his smile. That was the standard enforcer reply, but in his case, it wasn’t true. Owen had seen less action than Ethan or our oldest brother, Michael, or even me. Not because he couldn’t fight, but because he was just as happy tending the farm while the others patrolled and went on assignment. Only Ryan, the second born, had done less fighting, and we all considered that a very good thing; he was still officially on the run after having broken out of the cage two weeks earlier.
But I nodded. Owen had stepped up in Ethan’s absence and likely saved Kaci’s life. He’d earned his scars, and like the rest of us, he would wear them with pride.
When I bowed out of the room several minutes later, I found Jace waiting for me in the hall. Suddenly irritated, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching. Fortunately, most of the toms were in the kitchen devouring leftovers from my mother’s Mexican lunch buffet, and Marc, Vic, and the Alphas had disappeared into the office, already looking for information on thunderbirds. So I grabbed Jace by the arm and hauled him into my room without a word.
“Wow, I haven’t been in here in a while.” He grinned the moment the door closed behind us. “But I feel at home already.”
Anger flooded me, tingling in my nerves as if my whole body was losing circulation. “This isn’t funny!” I hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”
Jace’s flirtatious facade crumbled to reveal the weathered pain, anger, and grief that had fueled his every action since the day Ethan died. “I don’t know.” He pulled out my desk chair and sat backward in it, crossing his arms over the top. “I just…for a minute out there, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bend to him.”
“It’s not bending, Jace. It’s working. Marc gives the orders in Dad’s absence, and we follow them.”
“I know,” he said, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief that he hadn’t called me on Marc’s lack of an official position. I couldn’t have handled that without losing my temper. “But it felt different this time, and I couldn’t do it.”
“Jace…” I sank onto the end of my bed wearily, brushing long black hair from my forehead. I didn’t want to get into this so soon. I wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened between us. Not so soon after Ethan’s death. Not with everything else going on.“It has nothing to do with you,” he said before I could find a good finish to my hasty start. “I can’t explain it. But I’m over it. I can play my part until you’re ready to tell him.”
But what the hell would I tell him? That I’d slept with Jace? That was true, but incredibly—miserably—that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I desperately didn’t want to hurt Marc, and I couldn’t stand it if I lost him. I wasn’t sure I could actually force another breath out of my body if I thought I’d ever lost him for good. But I didn’t want to lose Jace, either.
And I wasn’t even sure what that meant.
I didn’t have Jace. But we’d connected after Ethan’s death, and it hadn’t been a simple grief-stricken moment of comfort. Though, it was certainly that, too. But the truth was that grief had crumbled my resistance to a bond we’d formed earlier. One I’d been denying, because of what I had with Marc.
But I wasn’t ready to understand what that meant. And I sure as hell wasn’t ready to try to explain it to Marc. So Jace and I had agreed to stay…apart. Completely hands-off. But if he wasn’t more careful than he’d been today, we’d soon be explaining ourselves to more than just Marc.
“You have to watch yourself,” I whispered, glancing at my hands in my lap.
“I know.” He stood, heading for the door, but I shot up and jogged ahead of him.
“Wait, let me check.” I grabbed the knob, but before I could turn it, Jace was in front of me, so close I could feel the heat of his cheek on mine. But he wasn’t touching me. He held his body so close, a sheet of paper would have wrinkled between us, but he didn’t make contact.
“Jace…”
“I know,” he whispered again, this time against my cheek. “It’s not the time. But that time will come, Faythe. I’m not asking you to choose. You know that. But I am asking you to be honest with yourself. You owe us both that.”
With that, while I stood breathing so hard my vision started to darken, he pulled the door open a crack—pushing me forward a step—and peered around me into the hall. When he was sure it was clear, he stepped out and closed the door.
Leaving me alone in my room, haunted by possibilities too dangerous to even contemplate.
Three
“What did I miss?” I sank onto the couch between Marc and my uncle Rick and glanced around the office full of Alphas. Ed Taylor and Bert Di Carlo sat across the rug from me, on opposite ends of the love seat. Blackwell was in the chair my mother had previously occupied, which someone had moved to the corner of the rug nearest the couch. And my dad sat in his wing chair at the end of the rug and the head of the room, where he could see everyone all at once.
“Very little, unfortunately.” My father sighed and folded his hands over the arms of his chair. “It turns out that we know almost nothing about thunderbirds, other than what you and Owen just learned.”