My father nodded. “What can we scrounge up in the way of weapons?” Because in human form, even with that swing-overhead advantage, we were pretty defenseless against talons.
“Tools,” Marc said. “Hammers, crowbars, tire irons, a couple of big wrenches.” All of which had gotten plenty of use two weeks before, when we’d fought a huge mob of strays trying to kill Marc in front of us to send a message.
“Knives,” my mother added softly. “I have three sets of butcher knives and several boning knives, all of which should work just as well on live birds as on dead ones.” The only person who looked more surprised than I felt was Paul Blackwell, who surely realized by then that his appeal to my mother as the “gentler sex” had fallen on not only deaf, but grief-hardened ears.
“And a meat mallet.” Jace crossed thick arms over his chest, and that time he did smile at me, while most of the toms chuckled. Even those who hadn’t been present had heard about me taking out a stray with a massive meat mallet in lieu of my claws, during my trial in Montana three months earlier. Apparently that one was going to stick with me.
“Good.” Even my father cracked a small, brief smile. “Karen, will you arm the troops?” Anyone else would have gotten a simple order. My mother got a request.
She nodded solemnly, then ushered Kaci into the kitchen as Dad turned back to the rest of us. “Pair up, and report to my wife to be armed. Call your Alpha if you find anything. Dismissed.”
Marc and I stood as the others filed out of the office and across the hall. He took my hand, and Jace watched us, forgetting to look away for a moment. To look uninterested. But then Brian stepped into his line of sight, just before Marc looked up, and surely would have noticed.
“You ready?” Brian had been paired with Jace since Ethan’s death, and now that Marc was back, we’d been reunited in the field, even with his unofficial status. Owen and Parker were still partners, but since my brother was temporarily out of commission, Parker would head out with Vic, who was currently partnerless because of the uneven number of enforcers.
Jace nodded and followed Brian across the hall with one more glance at me.
“He’ll be okay.” Marc nodded toward Jace’s back as he slid one arm around my waist. “Ethan’s death hit us all pretty hard, but it changed him.”
My heart nearly burst through my chest and I struggled to get my pulse under control. “What do you mean?”
He hung back to let me through the doorway first, so he didn’t see my eyes close in silent, fervent hope that he hadn’t seen too much difference in Jace. Or in me. “He’s serious all the time now. Morose and angry. It’s creepy.”
“He’s a better enforcer for it,” I said, and Marc nodded without hesitation. I knew what he was thinking: too bad it took my brother’s death to bring out Jace’s true potential.
A line had formed in the kitchen, leading in through the hall and out through the dining room. Kaci and my mom stood behind the bar, handing out an assortment of makeshift weapons that would have made any action-movie bad-ass proud. Toms left in pairs, clutching knives or tools someone had gathered from the basement and from assorted car trunks.
Ed Taylor and my uncle Rick were at the head of the line, and right behind them stood my father and Bert Di Carlo. The Alphas selected weapons, then headed toward the door with the enforcers, and I blinked in surprise. Then nodded in growing respect. Most Alphas were past their physical prime—although a glance at Taylor would undermine that assumption—and while they still had to Shift and exercise to maintain good health, they didn’t often patrol or hunt with their men.
The fact that they were all going to go out in search of our missing man filled me with more pride than I knew how to contain. They knew that every life was valuable, and unlike Calvin Malone, they were willing to put their own tails on the line to prove it.
Jace and Brian accepted their weapons in front of us and headed outside without a backward glance.
“Here.” As I stepped up to the counter, Kaci reached to the side of the dwindling selection and picked up a large hammer with a black rubber grip. “I saved this one for you. Figured you’d need an advantage, working left-handed.” She nodded toward my casted right arm.
My mother watched out of the corner of her eye, sliding a large wrench across the counter toward Marc while I arched one brow at Kaci. The tabby hated violence, which, on the surface, should have made her the ideal young tabby. But Kaci was raised as a human, by human parents who’d had no idea they’d each contributed the recessive gene necessary to transform their youngest daughter into a werecat at the onset of puberty.
Considering what she’d been through—accidentally killing her mother and sister during her first Shift, then wandering through the woods for weeks on her own, stuck in cat form—Kaci’s die-hard pacifist stance was no surprise. But it wasn’t enough to make her into what the opposing half of the council wanted. Because she was raised as a human, Kaci had human expectations from life, none of which included marrying the tom of her Alpha’s choosing and siring the next generation of werecats—as many sons as it took to get a precious daughter.
And Kaci had a mouth, and she was not afraid to use it. Which made certain elements of the council even more determined to get her out from under my questionable influence.
“Thanks.” I forced a smile, and met my mother’s gaze over Kaci’s head.
“Be careful,” she said, and I nodded. Then Marc and I went out the front door after the others.
Several pairs of enforcers had gone into the woods, but Jace and Brian were headed for the west field, so Marc and I started out in the opposite direction, walking several feet apart, and breathing through our noses in spite of the February cold burning my nostrils. We didn’t want to miss a scent.
It was eerily quiet in the field, other than the whisper-crunch of our boots crushing dead grass. Though the temperature had risen dramatically from the ice storm a couple of weeks earlier, it was still hovering in the mid-thirties, and my fingers had gone stiff with the cold. I tried to shove them in my jacket pockets, but my cast stopped my right hand at the first knuckles. My nose was running, and I sniffled as we turned at the edge of the field, eyeing the periwinkle-colored sky in distrust.
Danger had never literally come out of the blue before. Out of tree branches, yes. Overhead beams, second stories, and even porch roofs. But never from the sky, and suddenly I felt unbearably vulnerable standing in a wide-open field, where before, such surroundings had always made me feel free and eager to run.
And my paranoia was not helped by the fact that, though no one had said it out loud, we were obviously looking for a body on our own land.
On our third pass through the field, I dug a tissue from my left pocket and held it awkwardly to blow my nose—yet another simple activity rendered nearly impossible thanks to my cast. Then I froze with the folded tissue halfway to my pocket. My first unobstructed breath had brought with it a familiar scent, and an all-too-familiar jolt of fear.
Blood. Werecat blood.
“Marc,” I said, veering from the path in search of the source of the scent. He followed me, sniffing dramatically, and his pace picked up as he found the scent. Cats can’t hunt using only their noses. Unlike dogs, we just aren’t equipped for that. But we could find the source of a strong scent if it stayed still.
And this scent was horribly, miserably, unmoving.
The scent grew stronger the farther north we went, and after race-walking for less than a minute, glancing around frantically for any sign of the missing tom, I froze in my boots when my gaze snagged on a smear of red on a stalk of grass, half hiding a pale hand lying limp on the ground, fingers half curled into a fist.
I made myself take that next step forward, in spite of the dread and fury pulsing inside me. And when the body came into full view, I gasped, horrified beyond words.
If the whole mess hadn’t been nearly frozen, we would have smelled it sooner.
Jake Taylor lay on his back, so covere
d in blood that at first I couldn’t make sense of the chaotic, violent images my eyes were sending my brain. There were too many gashes. Too much blood. Too little sense.
“Oh, hell,” Marc said, and I flinched, though he’d spoken in little more than a whisper. He flipped open his phone and autodialed my father with the hand not holding the wrench while he squatted next to the body, careful not to step in the blood.
But I still stared.
I’d seen a good bit of carnage in my seven months as an enforcer, but nothing like this. Nothing so utterly destructive. So senselessly violent. Not even the scratch-fevered stray I’d seen perched in a tree, consuming a human victim. Even that had made a certain mad, gruesome sense compared to Jake’s death. The stray had been hungry, and had only damaged his victim in the process of eating him.
But Jake was damaged beyond all reason. His face was a mass of shredded flesh, eyes ruined, his nostrils and lips almost torn from his face. His arms had fared no better; the sleeves of his jacket were ripped along with his skin, from wrist to elbow, probably in defense of his face.
But the worst was his stomach. Jake had been completely and thoroughly eviscerated from so many lacerations—any one of which would have been fatal—that it was impossible to identify individual wounds.
“East field, near the tree line.” Marc glanced up to see if anyone else was nearby, the phone still pressed to his ear. “But it’s…gruesome. Don’t let the Taylors over here. They shouldn’t have to see this.”
“Thanks. We’ll be right there,” my father said from the other end of the line.
Marc pocketed his phone, and I knelt before he could ask if I was okay. I was fine. An Alpha-in-training was always fine, right? There was no other choice.
“Damn, these bastards are brutal,” Marc said, and I nodded, plucking a brown-and-black chevroned feather from the grass where its tip had landed in blood, like the devil’s quill. It was easily twice the length of my hand.
“But this wasn’t either of the birds who took Kaci. Couldn’t have been. We’d have seen blood on them. Smelled it. We were only a few yards away when they landed.”
“The driver, then?” Marc asked.
“That’s my guess. I didn’t get very close to him, and he was dressed. So it’s certainly possible.” I hesitated, unsure I really wanted the answer. Then I pressed on, because I needed to know. “Have you ever seen damage like this?”
“Never.” And that was saying a lot, coming from my father’s most experienced enforcer. “Cats don’t do this. Not even the crazy ones.”
Footsteps crunched toward us from behind, and we turned to see my father headed across the field, Bert Di Carlo on his heels, both frowning in grim certainty.
My dad came to a stop at my side and his jaw tightened when his gaze found Jake Taylor. Di Carlo’s face went completely blank. Without a word, my father pulled his phone from the pocket of his one casual jacket and pressed and held a single button.
“Hello?” Jace said.
“Take Brian back to the office and pour him a drink.”
For a moment, there was only silence. Then, “I’m on it.”
My dad hung up, then scrolled through his contacts list as Di Carlo reached out for the feather I still held from the puffy, bloodless end. I gave it to him gladly, and he whistled, morbidly impressed with the size.
“Rick?” My father said into his phone when a muffled, scratchy voice answered.
“Yeah?” My uncle came in loud and clear that time.
“We found Jake, and we’re taking him to the barn. Take Ed back to the house, please.”
“Will do.”
The last call my dad made, while Marc rubbed my upper arms to warm me, went to Vic. His order was simple. “Grab a roll of plastic and come to the east field, near the tree line. You’ll see us.” He hung up without a word from Vic.
“Well, Greg,” Di Carlo said, as my father slid his phone into his pocket. “I don’t know what they want, but it looks like they’ve got our number.”
“Kaci…” I whispered, horrified by the possibility of what might have been. But then merciful logic interceded. “But if they’d wanted to hurt her, they could have. They wouldn’t even have bothered with the car. Right?” I needed to hear that she hadn’t come close to a horrible death. A horrible kidnapping was quite enough.
The Alphas nodded, and Marc took my good hand in his. “So why kill Jake, then?”
My father sighed and finally looked up from the dead tom. “My guess is that he saw them coming. Didn’t you say they flew out in that direction?” He pointed toward the trees to the east.
“Yeah. So they killed him to keep him from warning us?” I glanced from face to face in disbelief, but the question was largely rhetorical. We all knew the answer. “Why didn’t he call?”
“Reception’s spotty in the woods, but it looks like he tried.” My father gestured to something in the grass behind me and I turned to see a cell phone lying on the ground, smeared with blood, already flipped open and ready for use.
“They couldn’t have gotten to him in the woods. Their wingspan has to be twelve feet or better. They’d have broken both arms trying to flap in there.”
Marc’s frown deepened. “They waited until he came into the open, then attacked.”
“And they must’ve done it fast to keep us from hearing.” Di Carlo shook his head. “This was planned. They want something.”
“What could thunderbirds want with us?” I wondered aloud, as Vic and Parker appeared from around the barn, one carrying a large black bundle.
“We’ll find out when Big Bird wakes up,” Marc said.
My father shook his head. “We’ll find out now. Wake him up and make him sing.”
Four
Marc and I headed for the house while Vic and Parker took Jake to the barn. On the way to the basement, we passed the silent office, where Ed and Brian Taylor were seated on the couch with their backs to us. Jace met my gaze briefly from the love seat, and I shook my head, confirming what he’d already guessed. What the Taylors surely already knew. That we’d found a body, not an injured tom.
I felt guilty walking by them without a word, but it wasn’t my place to tell an Alpha that his son was dead. Thank goodness.
The kitchen was empty, but I could hear Kaci talking with Manx and Owen in his room as I jogged down the concrete basement stairs after Marc, only pausing to flip the switch by the door.
Two dim bulbs inadequately lit a cinder-block room almost as large as the house overhead. The thick blue training mat was scattered with huge feathers the thunderbird had lost on his way down the stairs, and most of our outdated but well-used weight-lifting equipment had been shoved into the far corner near where the old, heavy punching bag hung. The door to the small half bath stood open, and a weak rectangle of light from within slanted over a folding table holding stacks of cassette tapes and an ancient stereo.
The room was damp, grimy, and one of few places in the house that my mother had attempted to neither clean nor decorate. It was strictly utilitarian, and well used.
It was also a prison.
The corner of the basement nearest the foot of the stairs was taken up by a cage formed by two of the room’s cinder-block walls and two walls of steel bars. The cell held only a cot in one corner, with no sheets or pillows. Just outside the bars stood a water dispenser and a single plastic cup, narrow enough to fit through the bars, if held by the top or bottom. A coffee can—serving as a temporary toilet—sat next to the water dispenser.
They were miserable accommodations. And yes, I knew from personal experience. I once spent an entire month in the cage—most of that time in cat form—when I threatened to run away again, after having been hauled back the first time. What can I say? I was intemperate in my youth. And in much of my early adulthood.
And I have to admit that I prefer the view from outside of the bars.
“He’s still out,” Marc said, and I followed his gaze to the half-bird still unconscio
us on the concrete floor, just as we’d left him. He lay on his back, weird, elongated wing-arms stretched to either side so that the feathers on one brushed the bars. The end of his opposite arm lay hidden from sight—and likely folded—beneath the cot.
Even half-Shifted, the creature’s arm span was at least ten feet.
“Suggestions?” I asked, my fury and fear muted a bit by sheer amazement as I stared at the bird up close, half-repelled by the thick, curved beak where his human mouth and nose should have been.
Marc never took his gaze from the cage. “Get the hose.”
I pulled open the door beneath the staircase and rummaged in the dark for a minute before my hand found the smooth, textured hose coiled around what could only be a broken weight bar. I slid my good arm through the coil and carried it to the utility sink near the weight rack. When I had the hose hooked up to the huge faucet—moderately encumbered by my cast but determined to do it on my own—I uncoiled it loop by loop until it stretched across the room to Marc.
He raised both brows, finger poised over the trigger of the high-pressure nozzle. “This should be interesting.…” Marc squeezed the trigger, and a long, straight, presumably cold stream of water shot between two bars of the cage, blasting the back concrete wall and lightly splattering the unconscious bird. Marc adjusted his aim, and the jet of water hit the bird squarely on his sparsely feathered chest.
The thunderbird sat up with a jolt, gasping in air—and a little water—through his malformed beak. His right wing-arm shot up an instant faster than his left, too quick to be anything other than instinct, protecting his face and torso, though his feathers were instantly drenched.
The bird made a horrible, pain-filled squawking sound and backed against the wall, where he slid to his knees and wrapped his long, feathered arms around his torso.
Marc released the trigger and the water stopped, but the bird remained huddled and dripping on the floor. In the sudden silence, he gasped for breath and I heard his heart racing with shock. But his pulse slowed quickly as he regained control of himself, and when he lowered his wings, the bird glared at us through small eyes as dark as my own fur, his expression as hard as the concrete blocks at his back.
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