Shift

by Rachel Vincent

  Jace pulled up three minutes later, with Marc in his passenger seat—Marc’s car had been left at his house in Mississippi—and they were both out of the vehicle before the engine even stopped rumbling.

  “What the hell happened?” Marc demanded, running his hands along my arms, as if I were the one hurt. Jace paused almost imperceptibly beside me, and his heavy gaze met mine. Then he stepped past us to kneel by Kaci, inspecting her shoulders, gently prodding her ankle, and generally fussing over her as if she were the only tabby on earth. In spite of her shock, pain, and lingering grief, she blushed beneath his innocent attention and held herself straighter than in the moments preceding his arrival.

  I almost felt sorry for Owen, all by himself and bleeding, still standing with his front paws on the unconscious bird-monster.

  “They just swooped out of nowhere and snatched her from the front yard.” I gestured toward my brother, and Marc turned with me. “We need to get Owen back to the house.”

  Marc followed me to the downed bird, as my brother moved away to give us a better view. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “If you think it’s a thunderbird, then, yeah, I think so.”

  Marc prodded one feathered half-arm with the toe of his boot and whistled. “Look how big his wings are.”

  “They were longer than that in flight,” I said. He started to kneel, but I pulled him up by one arm. “Trust me, if he wakes up, you don’t want to be anywhere near those talons.” I pointed at the curved two-inch claws, the points of which were finer and sharper than any knife I’d ever seen.

  “Okay, let’s tie him up and haul him in,” he said as I knelt next to Owen, gently stroking the fur on his good side. He whined again and laid his head on my shoulder as Marc looked over my head. “Jace, get some rope.” Because handcuffs designed for humans would never restrain those narrow bird wrists.

  Of course, if the bastard woke up, he could slice right through rope, or even duct tape.

  But on the edge of my vision, Jace stiffened and made no move to follow Marc’s order.

  Well, shit. That was new.

  Technically, Marc hadn’t been accepted back into the Pride or formally reinstated as an enforcer, in large part because we were busy with other things, and Marc’s return to the fold felt normal without official proclamations. None of the other enforcers would have hesitated to follow an order from him. Except maybe me.

  Yet there Jace stood, arms stiff at his sides, jaw clenched and bulging. And he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the ground, as if trying to control his temper.

  But Jace didn’t have a temper. Marc had a temper.

  I stood, shooting Jace a silent warning, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Kaci stared up at him in confusion, and a moment later Marc noticed that his order had not been followed. He glanced from the bird that had thus far held his fascination and raised a brow at Jace. “What, you don’t have rope?”

  And finally, Jace looked up. He glanced briefly, boldly, at Marc, then turned toward his car without a word.

  “What’s with him?” Marc brushed a comforting hand over the top of Owen’s head, where my brother stood ready to chew the bird’s throat again, should he wake up.

  I shrugged, hoping my casual gesture looked authentic. “He’s probably freaked out by the giant bird attack. What is this, Hitchcock?”

  Jace came back with a coil of nylon rope and a pocketknife, and in minutes we had the thunderbird’s human feet bound, and his wing-claws awkwardly tied in front of his half-feathered stomach. Even with his wingspan shortened to less than nine feet in mid-Shift, I didn’t think we’d ever get him wedged into the cargo space without further injuring him or waking him up, but Marc finally got his wings/arms bent toward his face and the hatchback closed. Barely.

  Still, since we were far from sure the ropes would hold him if he woke up during the five-minute drive, Kaci rode up front with Jace, and Marc and I took the backseat, with Owen stretched over the floorboard at our feet.

  Alphas and enforcers poured out of the house when we pulled into the driveway, and my father actually had to bellow for quiet to be heard. After that, my mother helped Owen into the house, and everyone else watched in silence as Marc and Jace carefully pulled the thunderbird from the back of the Pathfinder and lowered him to the dead grass in the arc of the half-circle drive.

  Then the whispers began.

  The Alphas made their way to the front of the crowd and my father stepped forward, pausing first to put a broad, gentle hand on Kaci’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, and she nodded, her eyes huge. “Manx, can you take her inside and get her cleaned up?”

  “Of course.” Manx wrapped one arm around Kaci’s shoulders as she escorted the limping tabby toward the front door. For the first time since the allies had descended upon the ranch, Kaci wasn’t the center of attention. And she seemed just fine with that.

  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.”

  I shrugged and folded one leg beneath me on the center cushion. “How much is ‘almost nothing’?”

  Marc huffed. “They fly, and they’re shy.”

  Umberto Di Carlo—Vic and Mateo’s father—leaned forward on the love seat. “Other than today’s incident, we’ve found no record of any thunderbird sighting since your dad saw one, had to be, what?” He glanced at my father. “Thirty years ago?”

  My dad nodded, both hands templed beneath his chin. “At least.”

  Di Carlo turned back to me and continued. “We don’t know where they live, how many of them there are, or even how their groups are organized. And we don’t know anyone else who knows any of that.”

  “None of the other Alphas?”

  “Who would you suggest we ask?” Marc turned to half grin at me.

  Good point. All the Alphas who weren’t with us at that moment were allied against us. Even if they knew something and were willing to help, how could we trust anything they told us?

  “I’ll make some calls,” Blackwell began. “But I’m sure that if anyone else had had recent contact with thunderbirds, we’d all have heard about it.”

  Heads all around the room nodded. This was big news. Huge.

  “Okay, so what are the facts?” My father glanced around his office like a teacher at the front of his classroom.

  “They evidently Shift in motion.” Ed Taylor ran one hand over dark, close-cropped hair. He looked like a retired marine, and maintained the best physical shape of any of the Alphas, most of whom were beyond the enforcing age.

  Di Carlo nodded. “They know where we live.”

  “They can carry human passengers,” Uncle Rick added.

  “Yeah, but they can’t fly very high or fast under the burden. Or very far.” Based on the fact that they’d had a car and driver waiting. I pulled my other leg beneath me and sat yoga-style on the couch, barefoot. “In fact, I’m not sure they could carry anyone much heavier than Kaci. Not without doubling their efforts, anyway.”

  “Do you think they’re gone?” Marc glance
d around the room for opinions, but only Blackwell seemed to have one.

  “I doubt it, considering we have one of theirs.”

  “And hopefully we’ll know a lot more about this once he wakes.” Something shuffled on the floor behind me, and my father glanced over my head. “Yes?”

  I twisted to see Brian Taylor—Ed Taylor’s youngest son and our newest enforcer—standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. “Sorry to interrupt, but, Dad, have you seen Jake?”

  Each of the visiting Alphas had brought a son and one other enforcer, as both bodyguards and requisite entourage, so the house was practically bursting with testosterone. Jake had come with his father; my uncle had brought my cousin Lucas, the largest tom I’d ever personally met; and Di Carlo had brought Mateo, his second born.

  “Not lately. Why?” Taylor frowned at his son.

  “He went out on patrol about an hour ago and didn’t come back when the whole air raid went down. I kinda got a bad feeling.…”

  Taylor’s frown deepened, and my father stood, instantly on alert. “Everyone in the office!”

  Toms filed in from the kitchen, and my mother stepped in after the last one, with Kaci peeking around her shoulder.

  “You’re going out in pairs,” my father began, as the other Alphas stood. “Spread out, but stay with your partners.”

  “We’re looking for Jake?” Jace asked. He hadn’t looked at me since he’d entered the room, and that very fact told me he wanted to. If we hadn’t connected, he wouldn’t go to such obvious trouble to avoid me.

  Better decide what to tell Marc soon… Because if Jace couldn’t get it together, someone was going to notice him acting weird around me. And Marc.

  “Yes. It doesn’t make much sense to Shift, in case the birds are still in the area. You can’t slash overhead without exposing your underbelly. And hopefully you’ll see them coming from a way off.”

  Now that we knew to look for them…

  “You’ll hear them, too, once they get close,” I added. “Those wings are strong, but not exactly stealthy.”