Shift Read online

  Kaci’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead. “Seriously?” I nodded, and for a second, I caught a glimpse of what a happy Kaci could look like. “Cool.”

  We stepped onto the porch and I had actually gone two steps before I realized we weren’t alone. Mercedes Carreño—Manx—sat in the wrought-iron love seat with my brother Owen. They both looked up as we approached, but their easy smiles said we hadn’t interrupted anything. No conversation, anyway. They were simply sitting together, enjoying the winter silence. And somehow their easy comfort seemed more intimate than many kisses I’d seen.

  “Hey,” Kaci said, oblivious as I raised a curious brow at my brother. “Where’s Des?”

  Manx shrugged deeper into her wool coat. “He is sleeping.”

  My eyebrow went even higher, and Owen flushed, sliding his cowboy hat back and forth on his head. Manx never left Des. Never. The baby slept in her bed, and she sat with him when he napped. And she wouldn’t even go to the bathroom until she’d found someone she trusted to watch him while she was gone.

  Yet here she sat next to my cowboy-gentleman brother, doing nothing, her hands resting easily in her lap, butchered fingernails concealed by stretchy, crocheted gloves.

  “Can I play with him when he wakes up?” Kaci asked.

  Manx smiled. She’d already realized that playing with the baby—though that amounted to little more than letting the one-month-old grip her finger—set Kaci at ease as little else could. “Of course.”

  Kaci’s shoulders relaxed, and I couldn’t help wondering if two babies might mean twice the therapy, for Kaci and for us all. We hadn’t had time to verify it yet, but Ethan’s human girlfriend, Angela, was pregnant, and I had no reason not to believe that the baby was his.

  My mother was cautiously optimistic over the news, with occasional, unpredictable bouts of unbridled delight in the moments when she let herself believe it was actually true. Nothing could fill the hole that Ethan’s death had left in all of our hearts. But his son—my mother’s first grandchild—could go a long way toward healing the wound. She couldn’t wait to meet Angela, but we’d all agreed that for the new mother’s safety, introductions would best be done after our troubles with the Territorial Council were over.

  Kaci’s gaze roamed the yard in the direction of the barn. Then her eyes narrowed and a frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. I knew what she was looking at without turning.

  Ethan’s grave.

  We’d buried him beneath the apple tree, halfway between the front yard and the eastern field, and his headstone forever changed the familiar landscape. But that was the plan. We wanted to see him every day. To remember him without fail. To mourn for as long as we saw fit.

  “I’m goin’ on ahead,” Kaci mumbled, then jogged down the steps without waiting for a response.

  I hadn’t intended to linger with Owen and Manx, hesitant to interrupt…whatever they had going on. But Kaci clearly wanted a moment alone with Ethan, and I had to respect that.

  “How are the digits?” I asked, sinking into a wicker chair at the end of the porch.

  “Pardon?” Manx frowned until I nodded at her hands, then she held her fingers up, as if to check on them. “Oh. Much better. They only hurt when—” she paused, searching for the right word in English “—bump things.” She pushed her hands forward against nothing to demonstrate.

  Nearly two weeks after being declawed, her hands had 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 ser
iously 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 when the birds—and Kaci—suddenly dipped out of sight, I totally panicked. My heart tripped so fast I thought it would explode, yet I couldn’t urge my feet into motion fast enough. I lunged ahead, slapping aside branches with both arms now, heedless of my cast, barreling through the woods in the direction I’d last seen Kaci. I could no longer hear Owen over the whoosh of my own pulse in my ears.

  Until he roared, up ahead and to my right.

  I put everything I had left into one more sprint, and seconds later, I burst through the tree line onto the side of a country road less than two miles from the ranch.

  And froze, staring at the spectacle laid out before me.

  Owen raced down the deserted street, already ten yards ahead, heading straight for a car parked on the shoulder a good three hundred feet in front of him. Over his head, both birds soared swiftly toward the car, descending as they came, Kaci still clutched—now struggling anew—in the talons of the nearest bird.

  I ran after Owen as the driver’s side door opened and a man stepped out of the car. Owen huffed with exertion. My quads burned. The man pulled open the car’s rear door. The first thunderbird swooped gracefully toward the earth—and shock slammed into me so hard it almost knocked me off balance.

  Three feet from the ground, the bird had feet. Bare, pale human feet, where there had been sharp, hooked talons a moment before. Then his head was human, but for the wicked, curved beak jutting in place of both his mouth and nose.

  Surprised to the point of incomprehension, I slowed to a jog, my gaze glued to the most bizarre Shift I’d ever seen in my life. I could perform a very limited partial Shift. A hand, or my eyes, or even most of my face. But this was beyond anything I’d ever even considered. No cat could Shift so quickly, and what the thunderbird had just done was tantamount to a werecat Shifting in midleap!

  This scary between-creature thumped gracefully to the ground several feet from the car, naked legs half-formed, torso mostly feathered, wings still completely intact. An instant later, Owen pounced on him.

  Powerful wings beat the air—and my brother. Long brown feathers folded around Owen, stealing him from sight for an instant before they spread wide again, and the fight began for real.

  Claws slashed. A beak snapped closed. Blood flowed. Owen hissed. The bird squawked, a horrible, screeching sound encompassing both pain and fear, and other things I couldn’t begin to understand. And a set of thin, gruesomely curved wing-claws arched high in the air, then raked across my brother’s flank.

  Owen howled, and his own unsheathed paws flew. The car’s driver—a short, bulging man with a sharply hooked nose—stood carefully back from the melee, unwilling to intercede on either side in his current, defenseless state. Then his head shot up, and I followed his gaze to see the second bird swooping for a landing, twenty feet from the car, Kaci dangling from his talons.

  I was running again in an instant.

  The second bird dove lower and spread his huge wings to coast on a cushion of air. Then he opened his talons and unceremoniously dropped Kaci three feet from the ground.

  The tabby landed hard on her left foot, then fell onto her hip with a dull thud. Her mouth snapped shut, cutting off a scream that had already gone hoarse. A heartbeat later, her captor simply stepped out of the air and onto the ground a yard away, on two human feet, his feathers already receding into his body, wings shrinking with eerie speed into long, pale arms.

  He lunged for Kaci before his hands were even fully formed, but on the ground, she was faster. The tabby rolled out of reach, then shoved herself to her feet and raced across the road toward me. She had a slight limp in her left leg and her eyes were wide in terror, cheeks still dry. Though she’d been screaming for ten straight minutes, the tears hadn’t come yet. They wouldn’t until the shock faded.

  The now fully human—and naked—thunderbird started after the tabby, but I was already there. Kaci collided with me so hard we almost went over sideways. Her forehead slammed into my collarbone, and her shoulder nearly caved in my sternum. I spun her around in my arms, putting my body between her and the would-be kidnapper. He’d have to go through me to get to her, and claws or not—hell, cast or not—I’d go down fighting.

  At the car, Owen had the first bird pinned, muzzle clamped around his human-looking throat. At some unintelligible shout from the driver, the naked thunderbird glanced back, then turned and raced toward the car, having evidently given up on Kaci.

  The driver slid into his seat and slammed the door, and the car’s engine growled to life. The last thunderbird glanced at his wounded cohort, hesitated, then dove into the backseat through the open door. An instant later, the car lurched onto the gravel road, showering Owen with rocks, and the vehicle raced around a corner and out of sight.

  As soon as it was gone, Kaci seemed to melt in my arms, and it took me a moment to realize she’d just eased the death grip she had around my ribs. I stepped back and lifted her chin until I could see her face, then spit out the only coherent thought I could form. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” Color was coming to her face, and her teeth started to chatter.

  “What about your arms?” I held her coat while she carefully pulled one arm free. Then winced when she pushed up the baggy sleeve. Just below her shoulder were three thick welts, two on the front and one on the back, already darkening into ugly blue bruises. Her other arm no doubt held a matching set. “And your leg? You were
limping.”

  “I was?” Kaci frowned and took a careful step forward, then winced. “I think I twisted it when I…landed.”

  “A quick Shift should fix that.” Kaci nodded, and I led her back across the street slowly, already pulling my cell from my pocket.

  “Faythe?”

  “Hmm?” I glanced down to find the tabby staring up at me, the shocked glaze in her eyes finally fading.

  “I think I’m afraid of heights.”

  I laughed. “I would be, too, after a ride like that.” I autodialed Marc while we walked, and he answered on the first ring, as I stepped onto the shoulder a good ten feet from Owen, who still had the bird—now unconscious—pinned to the ground.

  “Faythe?”

  “We’re on county road three, less than two miles from the ranch,” I said, and he exhaled heavily in relief. “I have Kaci and Owen has a prisoner, unconscious and bleeding. Owen’s bleeding, too.” From several obvious gashes on both flanks and across the left half of his torso.

  “We’re on the way. How’s Whiskers?”

  “Stunned, but okay. Her arms are bruised and she twisted one ankle, but it’s nothing a Shift and some hot chocolate won’t fix.”

  Another relieved sigh, echoed by a satisfied noise from Jace. They were together?

  “We’re on the way.”

  I hung up and slid my phone into my pocket, then extracted myself from Kaci so I could inspect the prisoner without dragging her any closer to potential danger. “Wow. Good work, Owen.”

  My brother huffed in response, and whined as I knelt and ran one hand gently over his flank, angling my body away from the bird, just in case he woke up. Owen’s injuries weren’t life-threatening, but they weren’t comfortable, either. If the bird had gotten near his stomach, he’d have been disemboweled.

  “Thunderbirds…” I whispered, standing to inspect the bizarre half-bird at my feet. What the hell did they want with Kaci?