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“No problem.” He shifted into gear, then pulled the car smoothly onto the road. “We’re just lucky I’m not out patrolling tonight.”

That we were. Otherwise, our walk would have been much, much longer.

Half a mile later, I Shifted my eyes back, then autodialed my father. “Hey,” I said when he answered. “We’re free and clear.”

“Good. Call when you get to Henderson. We’re scrounging up weapons, and plan to make the first offensive in about an hour.”

For once, I had no idea what to say. Everything I could think of—be careful, watch out for Mom—seemed a bit obvious. Nothing an Alpha would need to hear. So I swallowed the grapefruit-size lump in my throat and told him the truth. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too, Kitten. Watch out for them.”

“I will. Will you tell Marc I love him?”

He laughed, a sound of genuine amusement, when I really needed to hear exactly that. “He already knows.”

We said goodbye again, and I slid my phone into my pocket, then twisted to accept the tire iron Manx handed me. Kaci sat in the middle row, holding a hammer. “Hey, be careful….”

“Oh, shit!” Dodd stomped on the brakes. The van started to skid. Teo threw out one hand to protect Manx and Des. Kaci slammed into the back of the driver’s seat. I flew forward, then my seat belt snapped tight against my hip.

Stunned, I dropped into my seat—and screamed. Fifty feet ahead, and closing with every second, the largest thunderbird I’d ever seen soared right for us, lit from beneath by our headlights. His talons clutched something big, and dark, and obviously heavy.

Before Dodd could safely change course, the bird opened his talons, directly over us. Whatever he was carrying slammed into the hood of the van.

We all screamed. The van swerved. I rocked violently from side to side as Dodd tried to control the vehicle. And I could only stare at the huge boulder deeply embedded in the hood, pinning the thick canvas it had been carried in.

The van swerved left. Dodd overcompensated. We swerved right, and I braced my good arm against the dashboard. Dodd swerved again. The van careened off the road and smashed head-on into a trunk at the edge of the tree line.

For a moment, there was an eerie, shocked silence. Then Des started screaming.

I took a second to assess my injuries—a single, rapidly forming lump on the side of my head—then twisted to check on everyone else. “Are you guys okay?”

Manx nodded, dazed, one hand patting the screaming infant. Kaci peeked up from behind the backpack in her lap, and after a moment of consideration, she nodded, too. “I think so—”

That’s when Teo’s door was ripped completely off the car.

K
aci shrieked as a vicious half-bird head appeared where the door had been an instant earlier. Human hands attached to long, muscle-bound arms hauled Teo out of the car and tossed him to the ground. Manx screamed and beat the bird with her right fist, while her left clutched the screaming baby.

The thunderbird made strange, aggressive screeching sounds deep in his human-looking throat, pulling on Manx’s arm. But she was still buckled, and he couldn’t reach the latch.

I jabbed the button on my own seat belt, then leaned over my seat to punch the intruder with my good hand. Dodd reached for Manx but was too far away in the driver’s seat. I only realized he’d gotten out of the car when his door slammed shut.

A second later, Teo roared, and the thunderbird was hauled backward, out of my reach. Dodd wielded a crowbar and bared human teeth at the bird, who half Shifted rapidly in Teo’s grip. All three fell to the cold grass in a violent, snarling, snapping tangle.

I groped for my door handle with my bruised left hand, staring over the back of my seat at Manx. “Are you okay?”

Manx didn’t answer. She was hunched over the baby, protecting her infant with her own life. Her back heaved. I heard sobs and saw tears, but I smelled no blood—none of Manx’s, anyway. So I looked past her to Kaci—just in time to see the young tabby throw open her car door. I could practically smell her panic.

“Kaci, no!” I shoved my own door open, but she didn’t listen. I wasn’t even sure she could hear me over Manx’s crying, Des’s screaming, and the odd snarls and screeches coming from Teo and the bird-man. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered even if she had heard me. Kaci was terrified of being snatched again, and she was not strong enough to defend herself.

That was my job.

“Stay here and stay buckled,” I shouted to Manx, then I dodged the full-out brawl at my feet and took off after Kaci, putting everything I had into my sprint.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t concentrate well enough to Shift my eyes while I was running, so once we’d gone beyond the dim red glow of the van’s taillights, the young tabby’s dark hair and jeans faded into the night. If not for her bright white ski jacket, the slap of her shoes on concrete, and the terrified sobs floating back to me in the wind, I would have thought I’d lost her completely.

Go into the woods!
I thought desperately as Kaci frantically threw one foot in front of the other. Thunderbirds couldn’t follow us there. At least, not in full bird form. But I couldn’t afford to waste my energy shouting something that might not sink in, anyway. If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have headed for the trees in the first place, rather than racing along the shoulder of the road, fair game to anything that swooped out of the sky.

Then, as if my own thought had called it into being, a powerful
thwup, thwup
echoed at my back.

Oh, shit
. Either Mateo and Dodd had lost their fight, or more than one bird had come after us. Probably both.

I dug deep and threw every spark of energy I had left into my sprint. My focus stayed glued to Kaci’s back, an inverse shadow in the nightscape. I surged ahead, and she was only twenty feet ahead now.

The wind-beating sound grew steadily closer. The accompanying rush of air blew my hair out in front of me. Ahead, Kaci tripped and screamed. She went down only yards from the tree line.

She stood unsteadily, but I was closing on her.
Eighteen feet
. My lungs burned. She started running again, but more slowly, and with a limp.

Fifteen feet. My side cramped, but any minute, I’d have her.

Twelve feet. I was already reaching out, moments away.

Then the whoosh that had been a warning was suddenly a horrifying roar. I couldn’t hear myself breathe; I heard only menacing wind. I couldn’t feel my pounding heart or rushing pulse; I felt only the surge of air now pushing me backward, away from Kaci.

I squinted against the dust that terrible wind blew at me. A huge, dark shadow swooped low, only feet in front of me. Kaci screamed. Her white jacket shot off the ground and into the air, bobbing higher with each powerful flap of wings. She kicked, the stripes on her shoes reflecting the little available moonlight.

“Hold still!” I shouted, stumbling to a stop beneath her, terrified that her tossing and turning would make the bird drop her. But she couldn’t hear me. I stared up at Kaci in horror, and the fresh ache in my chest threatened to swallow me whole. I’d lost her.

I was supposed to protect Kaci, and I’d lost her. I’d failed, and now she would pay the price.

What little I could see of the night blurred with the moisture standing in my eyes as I forced my legs into motion again. I couldn’t catch her without wings of my own; I knew that. But I had to try.

I stumbled along, wiping tears on the sleeve of my jacket, hoping I wouldn’t trip and further injure my arm. And that Teo and Dodd had won their fight. And that they could get Manx and the baby to safety. I couldn’t see if any of that had happened without losing sight of Kaci. And I couldn’t hear anything—not even Des screaming—over the roar of wings beating overhead and behind me.

Wait, beating
behind
me?

I spun, my heart trying to claw its way out of my throat. He dove the instant I saw him, a great hulking shadow blocking out the silver crescent moon. In that moment, the bird was everywhere. He was all I could see, and everything I feared. Talons. Hooked beak. And a possible forty-foot fall.

I couldn’t outrun him, so I dropped to my knees, then onto my good elbow, half-convinced he would land on me and crush me. Or drop another big rock on me. But his huge, curved talons were empty.

I tucked my head between my knees and screamed, but could barely hear my own voice. An instant later something gripped my upper arms, then jerked viciously. My shoulders screamed in pain. The world tilted wildly around me. And suddenly the ground was gone.

Just…gone.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I forced myself to hang limp, afraid that thrashing would get me dropped. And so far, the only thing I was sure I’d hate more than flying was falling.

I’d had only seconds to adjust to being aloft when another grating screech ripped through the air behind me. Something grabbed my right ankle in midair. The world swerved around me again, and I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter, still screaming. Then I was horizontal, my stomach to the earth, my left leg and forearms dangling awkwardly.

After several deep breaths, which only calmed me enough to bring my terror into sharper focus, I forced my eyes open. Then immediately slammed them closed again.

Below me, the van was a two-tone spot of light on the ground: white from the headlights, and red from the taillights. I was already too high to make out the occupants—if they were even still there.

The woods stretched out for miles to the right of the van, and we flew over them. From my horrifying new perspective, the skeletal deciduous branches were as thin and tangled as steel wool in the moonlight, the evergreens dense spots of darkness. And in that moment I hated my abductor for turning my beloved forest—my refuge from all things human and artificial—into a place of nightmares.

And still I screamed. I screamed until I lost my voice. My arms and one leg went numb from being gripped so tightly. They felt like they’d be ripped from my sockets at any second. I chattered uncontrollably. If it was cold on the ground, it was literally freezing in the air, and my toes tingled painfully. I couldn’t feel my hands. Couldn’t move my fingers.

After several minutes, I lost it. What little composure I’d had could not survive two hundred feet in the air, with nothing to catch me. Nothing but the ground to break my fall. No way to save myself. I could see calmness in the back of my mind, but it cowered in the corner like a little bitch, leaving panic to rule the roost.

My free leg flailed uncontrollably. My arms tried to twist themselves from the bird-bastard’s grip, though part of me knew that would only lead to my death. My mouth opened and I screamed again, though no sound came out.

I wouldn’t survive this. No one could survive such torture. Cats don’t fly without airplanes. We can’t survive it—not physically, not psychologically. And if dangling two hundred feet in the air was enough to fracture my sanity, what must it be doing to Kaci?

Kaci
. Fresh panic flooded me, oddly warm in my numb extremities. I lifted my head and forced my eyes open again, this time resisting the silent scream my abused throat wanted to indulge. I couldn’t see her; it was too dark, and the wind too harsh. I couldn’t hear her; the
thump thump
of giant wings was too loud. Then, just as my eyes started to close, a cloud shifted, gifting me with a weak beam of moonlight.

I twisted carefully to the left for a better view. Kaci’s white jacket and reflective shoes were the last things I saw before a giant wing slammed into the side of my head.

“Faythe, wake up!” Kaci whispered, and something shook my left arm fiercely. “Faythe!”

“What?” I groaned and rolled over on the lumpy bed. My sore left arm flopped off the side, but I kept my eyes closed.

Wait, lumpy bed? I had a good mattress, and it was big enough that my arm shouldn’t hang off. Alarm spiked my pulse. My eyes flew open as a barrage of unfamiliar scents flooded my nose. Raw meat, not all of it fresh. Wool and steel. People. And poultry. Lots of poultry.

Shit!

I sat up and glanced around the small, dingy room, taking everything in at once. Bare, wood-plank walls. Scarred hardwood floor. A single twin bed with a rough wool blanket and no pillow. One window made of a single pane of glass, flooding the room with daylight too weak to be anything but late afternoon.

And Kaci, who sat curled up next to my feet on the other end of the bed.

“Where are we?” I whispered, as sounds from the building around us began to filter in. Squawking, screeching, and human speech. Heavy footsteps, and light, sharp scratches against wood. And a television. Somewhere, someone was watching Looney Tunes. The one where Bugs Bunny directs the opera. My favorite episode.

“I don’t know.” Kaci’s hazel eyes were wide with fear. She sat cross-legged on the twisted wool blanket, her hands clenched in her lap.

“How long have we been here?” I slid my legs off the side of the bed and onto the floor, then stood carefully, hoping neither the mattress nor the floor would creak and reveal that we were awake.

“I just woke up,” she whispered. Kaci started to stand with me, but an old-fashioned metal spring groaned softly beneath her, and I waved one hand, silently telling her to stop. Then I dug in my front pocket for my cell. But, of course, it was gone.

“Do you have your phone?”

She shook her head. “It was in my backpack.” Which she’d left in the van when she ran.

Great
. “Are you okay?” I kept my voice as low as I could; I knew she would hear me, but wasn’t sure about the thunderbirds.

Kaci leaned against the wall and pushed one sleeve up to expose her upper arm, which was ringed with a single deep bruise, thicker on the front than the back. “Just bruises.” Talon marks. I pushed my own left sleeve up as I inched slowly toward the window, trying to avoid creaks in the obviously aged wooden floor.

My left arm was similarly marked, and I knew from the tenderness in my right arm that it would match. As would my right ankle. “Anything else?”

“I’m cold and hungry.”

“Me, too.” I made it to the window without a creak from the floor and noticed two things immediately. First, it wouldn’t open. It was a single pane of glass built into place along with the house. Or whatever kind of building we were in.

Second, we couldn’t have snuck out even if we could break the window without attracting attention. We were a couple hundred feet off the ground, jutting out over a cliff. And there was no balcony.

“Damn it!” That one came out louder than I’d intended, though it was still a whisper. I let my forehead fall against the glass and immediately regretted it. After my most recent flight, I wasn’t eager to see the earth from on high ever again.

“What?” Kaci whispered, and the bed creaked again as she leaned forward.

“We’re in their nest. And it’s not exactly built in the treetops.” The window was directly opposite the only door, so I edged my way along the wall to the corner, then made the turn, still hugging the wooden planks. The floor was much more likely to creak in the middle than along the edges.

“What do they want?”

“Oddly enough, I think they were trying to protect us.” From the violence
they
brought forth.

Kaci glanced from the window back to my face. “I don’t feel very safe.”

“Me, neither.” When I reached the door, I bent to study the knob. It was a plain, old-fashioned brass sphere with a small round hole in the center. Which meant the other side held a simple push lock. I twisted it slowly and the knob resisted. It was locked.

I could have forced the lock with one quick twist, but the
pop
might be heard, and I didn’t want our captors to know we were awake until we knew a little more about our surroundings.

“How the hell did they get us here?” I wondered aloud, barely breathing the sound. “There’s no way they could have flown us all the way here.” I didn’t know exactly where “here” was, but I couldn’t think of a single cliff of any size within several hundred miles of the ranch.

“They didn’t,” Kaci said, and I turned to see her twisting the edge of the coarse navy blanket in one fist. “I must have passed out when they were carrying us, but I woke up later, in the back of a car. Something like Jace’s, with a big area in the back for luggage and stuff. We were all tied up, and you were still out cold.”

“They tied us with ropes?”

Kaci nodded. “Thin yellow ones.”

Nylon
. I glanced at my left wrist, but found no marks. A glance at my ankles revealed none there, either, which meant they hadn’t tied us very tightly. If they had, the ropes would have left marks even through our clothes. And we’d woken up unbound, barely locked into a room. Together.