The first bird took me just below my shoulders, his talons squeezing mercilessly. But this time, I found the painful pressure comforting; surely a lax grip would have increased my chances of falling to my death. When I hovered twenty feet in the air, the second bird swooped to grab my shins. Then, with practiced ease, the two birds synchronized the beat of their wings—amazing, considering their proximity to each other—and we rose steadily toward the nest, bobbing for a heartbeat between each powerful flap before soaring up with the next.
I risked a single glance at the ground, and through the strands of long black hair whipping around my face, I saw Marc and Jace standing watching me side by side, each with a hand shielding his eyes from the crimson glare of the setting sun. From so high up, the differences between them were almost impossible to find. They were two anonymous bodies on the ground, watching helplessly as I was flown away from them both.
Cade and Coyt dropped me on the overhanging porch with a bone-jarring thud, and I remained crouched on the floorboards—a little frightened by the cracks I saw between them upon such close inspection—until they landed on either side of me, silent but for the last beat of their wings against the air.“What the hell?” Lance shouted, and I stood to find him standing with his back—and his bound hands—pressed against the front wall of the nest. He glared at me, arms shaking, face pale. “You could have warned me.…”
“About the trip up? Yeah, it’s a bitch the first time.” I regretted the words before the last one had even fallen from my lips; Lance’s first time would be his last.
Flustered, I started past him toward the open front door, beyond which dozens of thunderbirds waited for us in varying degrees of human form. When Lance didn’t follow, I turned to him. “You have two options—inside…” I gestured toward the open doorway. “Or down, the hard way. Which is it gonna be?” He hesitated, and I sighed. “Dignity, Lance.”
He spared one fleeting, terrified glance at the ground below, then squared his shoulders and walked past me into the huge main room of the nest—where he stopped, apparently frozen, three steps from the door.
I knew how he felt. Before this flight, Lance had only ever seen one thunderbird, and that poor cock had been alone and pounced upon before he had a chance to take to the sky. And now we were facing fifty or so of his closest friends and relatives, a much more representative—and intimidating—sample of the thunderbird population and their tendency to stick together.
And to avenge their own at all costs.
When Lance hadn’t moved several seconds later, I gave him a little shove, and he stepped forward slowly, trying to take in everything at once, his eyes already glazing over with the effort. He may have been going into shock, and frankly, that was probably better for all involved.
Before I could make a better assessment, or address any of the dozens of birds now staring at us, a door squeaked open overhead and I looked up to see Kaci step out onto the exposed second-floor walkway. “Faythe!” she shouted, and was running before the single syllable of my name faded into silence.
She raced along the hall and around the corner, nimbly avoiding the two fully human thunderbirds she passed in the process, and thumped down the stairs like a bull about to charge. But she was all smiles when she flew across the huge room and into my open arms.
“You came!” Kaci buried her tear-streaked face in the shoulder of my leather jacket.
“You say that like there was some doubt.” I pried her just far enough away that I could get a good look. Other than her sob-reddened face and an unusually pale countenance, she looked…fine. Which supported my theory that the birds would keep their word, so long as we kept ours. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Kaci wiped fresh tears from her face with the sleeve of her shirt—the one she’d been wearing since the day we were taken. “Just ready to go home.” Then she blinked and frowned, staring at my cheek. “What happened to your face?”
“It’s fine. Barely hurts. Just a keepsake from an old friend.”
Her frown deepened, and her hand rose as if to touch the scab, before she thought better of it and clasped her hands together. “That’s a joke, right?”
A really bad joke…“Okay, he wasn’t a friend. More like a mortal enemy.” Now, anyway.
“Did you kill him?” Kaci asked without missing a beat, and it was my turn to frown.
“Of course not!” Though, apparently I was alone in believing I was right to let him live. “But he’s gonna be in a lot of pain for a very long time.”
“Good.” Kaci glanced around at the crowd of thunderbirds watching us closely. Listening. Waiting. “Can we go home now?” she whispered.
“Come this way,” called a screechy voice, uneven with age, drawing our attention to the far end of the room, where I’d last addressed a smaller crowd of birds.
“In just a minute,” I whispered to Kaci, and waved Lance forward. He came slowly, still standing tall, but staring at me as if I were his one shot at salvation. The irony truly stung. How could he look at me like I was supposed to save him when I was the one turning him in?
Maybe I should have just knocked him out.
“Who’s that?” Kaci stared at him openly.
“This is Lance Pierce,” I said, and he met and held Kaci’s gaze, as if his curiosity could not be denied. Maybe he wanted to know who I was trading his life for. Or maybe, like most toms, he couldn’t turn away from the sight of a young tabby, the very treasure enforcers—and indeed all toms—were taught from infancy to protect.
Kaci’s eyes widened and she edged closer to me as the circle of birds grew tighter around us, herding us to the end of the room. “Parker’s brother?”
“Yeah.” The floor of the great room was packed with birds now, and hardly a glimpse of empty floor showed, but for the five-foot circle surrounding us, putting us at the center of their unnerving attention. “He killed Finn.” A single glance up confirmed my suspicion: the perches and ledges had been abandoned. Everyone wanted to participate.
“What’s going to happen to him?”
I swallowed, then stood straighter, trying to emotionally distance myself—and Kaci—from whatever would happen next. Hopefully after we left. “That’s not up to us.”
“Faythe Sanders?” a voice called from behind us this time, and I whirled, but was too late to pinpoint the speaker. And so it begins…
“Yeah?”
“Present your evidence to the satisfaction of the Flight, and you and your kitten may go.” I saw the speaker that time, a mostly human man with only the suggestion of a beak in the protrusion of his nose.
“Sure. No problem.” I swallowed thickly and pulled Kaci closer. It sounded too easy. How exactly did they define satisfaction?
“This is Lance Pierce.” I gestured toward him with one hand, but he didn’t even glance at me, having evidently decided that I was the enemy, after all. We all were. But he had nowhere to go. I inhaled deeply and stared straight forward, avoiding looking at any particular bird, since I was speaking to all of them at once. And because I was far from comfortable with my decision. With what I had to do to walk out of there alive, with Kaci in tow.
“Lance killed your bird. Finn.”
Thirty-One
The reaction from the crowd was immediate and terrifying. Every bird in the room suddenly seemed to swell, as if together they could suck up all the air in the room, suffocating the rest of us. But air wasn’t the cause of the change.It was feathers.
Suddenly everyone but the three of us had feathers. And talons. And wing-claws. And most had sharp, curved beaks. All in the span of a single breath.
Lance sucked in a startled breath and jumped back. Feathers rustled behind him and he whirled around, then turned again. He’d never seen the avian, like-magic Shift, and I could only imagine how terrifying it must be to see the show for the first time, magnified by five dozen. One cock came close enough to use his talons to cut the tape from Lance’s hands.
Finally, Lance exhaled and made a visible effort to regain calm himself.
“Will you speak for yourself?” asked an elderly female thunderbird, one of only half a dozen who still sported a human mouth. Her cold, shiny black bird eyes were trained on Lance.
“I will,” he said, and I turned to look at him, surprised by the strength in his voice. I was even more surprised by his mostly steady stance, and the direct gaze he leveled at the last bird who’d spoken. He’d taken my advice seriously. Would wonders never cease?
“Hey, Lance, just FYI,” I said, and when his head swiveled toward me, I saw that the fear had been buried deep behind his eyes, replaced with a hot, ripe anger ready to burst through him like rotten fruit through its own skin.
Oh, shit. That was a dangerous look. One that said he knew he was going to die, but didn’t plan to go down easy.
Lance wasn’t composed; he was contained. And only barely, at that. Any resemblance to his brother that I’d seen in him was gone. Parker wasn’t capable of that much rage.
But then, Parker wasn’t capable of letting an entire Pride full of innocent people—including his own brother—pay for his mistakes.
“Yes?” Lance raised a calculating brow my way.