almost completely healed, but the scar tissue where her fingernails had been was still bright red and puffy. She hated the sight of them, and wore thin gloves whenever possible, only taking them off to care for the baby or herself.
I turned to glance at Kaci—halfway to the apple tree, and loping at her own pace—and idly noticed a pair of hawks circling overhead.
“How is your arm?” Manx asked, recapturing my attention.
I held up my cast, smiling at the doodles Kaci had drawn between the enforcers’ perfunctory signatures. A flower with purple petals and X-shaped eyes in the center. A pink skull and crossbones. I’d sat still for several of her masterpieces. Anything to make her smile. Though, I’d threatened to paint over them with black nail polish if she plastered any more pink on my arm.
Still, I had to admit that thinking of Kaci when I looked at my cast was much better than thinking about how I’d broken it. About the bastards who’d stolen Marc and beaten him to get information out of me—when beating me hadn’t worked.
“It’s fine. Dr. Carver says I can try Shifting in a couple of weeks.” Because broken bones take longer to heal than simple cuts and gashes. I was already itching for the transformation—and from the cast, which somehow made my arm sweat, even in the middle of February.
“She really misses him.” Owen nodded at something over my shoulder, and I twisted to see Kaci on the ground beside Ethan’s headstone, one knee brushing the freshly overturned earth.
“Yeah, she—”
“What the hell?” Owen demanded, and I peered over the porch railing. “Have you ever seen hawks that big? They must have spotted something to eat, from the way they’re circling.…”
I was on my feet in an instant, a sick feeling churning in my stomach. “Those aren’t hawks.…” They were too big, for one thing. And their wings were all wrong. Especially the tips. Even from a distance, the ends looked…weird. The birds must have been really high up before, because now that they’d flown lower, swooping in from over the woods behind the eastern field, they looked huge.
My heartbeat suddenly felt sluggish, as if it couldn’t keep up with my body’s natural rhythm. The birds were too huge. And too low. And too fast…
Oh, shit… “Kaci!” I screamed as the first bird dove toward her. She looked up and screeched, and I was already halfway across the yard.
Kaci leaped to her feet, then ducked as the first bird swooped, huge talons grasping perilously close to her head. She screamed again, and when the bird rose into the air, beating giant wings so hard I could hear the air whoosh from two hundred feet away, she stood and took off toward me.
Kaci raced across the dead grass, screaming at the top of her lungs.
I kept moving toward her, unwilling to waste energy on screams of my own. But in human form, neither of us was fast enough. I was a heartbreaking fifteen feet away when the second bird swooped, his powerful wings displacing so much air I was actually blown back a step. His talons opened wide, then closed around her upper arms.
For a moment, as he regained his balance with his new burden, I had a breathtaking view of the magnificent creature. Smooth, brown wings. Terrible, curved beak. Powerful, horrifying talons. And long, sharp wing-claws, protruding from beneath the feathers on the tips of his wings.
An instant later, the bird was aloft again, and I came to a stop with my fingertips grasping air three feet beneath Kaci’s dangling sneaker.
My heart raced along with my feet as I followed them, knowing my chase was futile. I couldn’t fly, and I couldn’t run fast enough to keep up. Because Kaci hadn’t been picked up by hawks. Our new tabby—my own beloved charge—had just been kidnapped by the first thunderbirds seen by werecats in nearly a quarter of a century.
Two
“Kaci!” I screamed as I ran, adrenaline scorching a path through my body so hot and fast I could feel nothing else. Not the biting February cold, not the ground beneath my feet, and not the bare branches slapping my face and neck when I broke into the woods behind the house.
Overhead, Kaci screamed and thrashed, skimming mere feet from the naked treetops. If it had been summer, I could never have seen her through the foliage.
The thunderbird dipped and wobbled wildly as Kaci threw her legs to one side, then he straightened and pushed off against the air with another powerful stroke of both wings. In seconds, he was ten feet higher up, and still Kaci fought him, shrieking in wordless terror.
“Hold still!” I shouted as loud as I could, hoping she could hear me over the wind and her own screams. If she fell from that height, she’d be seriously injured, even if the limbs broke her fall. And if they didn’t, she’d be dead.
Beyond Kaci and her abductor, the second thunderbird flew in a wide arc, rounding toward us again. I had a moment of panic, assuming he’d dive-bomb me, until I realized he couldn’t while I was shielded by the forest; there wasn’t enough room between the trees to accommodate his impressive wingspan—twelve feet, easy. Maybe more.
Instead of diving, the second bird simply turned a broad circle around his cohort, playing lookout and probably backup.
If the thunderbirds hadn’t been slowed by Kaci’s weight, I would have lost them entirely. Even with their top speed dampened considerably, they flew much, much faster than I could dodge trees and stomp tangles of undergrowth on two human legs. Especially considering that my focus was on the sky, rather than on my earthbound obstacles.
Within minutes, they were a quarter mile ahead, at least, though they never rose more than about forty feet over the skeletal forest canopy.
How long can he carry her? I shoved aside a long, bare branch just in time to avoid a broken nose. But then I glanced up again and tripped over an exposed root, and tumbled forward like a felled tree.
My hands broke my fall, but the impact radiated up both arms, shooting agony through the still-broken one. I barely paused for a breath before shoving myself back to my feet, brushing my scraped and bleeding hands on my jeans. But before I’d made it back to full speed, my tender, broken arm now clutched to my chest, a black blur shot past on my right, leaping easily over a tangled evergreen shrub I would have had to circumvent.
Backup. Thank goodness someone had Shifted. If I’d taken the time, we’d have lost sight of Kaci.
The tom moved too fast for me to identify by sight, but a quick whiff as I dodged a reed-thin sapling and skirted a rotting stump gave me his identity. Owen. And surely more were on the way.
Not that there was anything any of us could do from the ground…
My brother sprinted ahead of me and out of sight, but I could still hear him huffing and lightly breaking twigs, since speed was more important than stealth at the moment. And I pressed on at my infuriatingly human pace, my throat stinging from the cold air, my hands burning with various cuts and scrapes.
After about a mile, I was blindly following both Owen and Kaci, and had completely lost track of what heading we were facing. I was pretty sure we’d changed directions at least once, and I could see no logic in the birds’ flight path, other than trying to lose us. And staying over the trees, presumably so that cars couldn’t follow.
So
