Cade and Coyt dropped me on the overhanging porch with a bone-jarring thud, and I remained crouched on the floorboards—a little frightened by the cracks I saw between them upon such close inspection—until they landed on either side of me, silent but for the last beat of their wings against the air.
“What the hell?” Lance shouted, and I stood to find him standing with his back—and his bound hands—pressed against the front wall of the nest. He glared at me, arms shaking, face pale. “You could have warned me.…”
“About the trip up? Yeah, it’s a bitch the first time.” I regretted the words before the last one had even fallen from my lips; Lance’s first time would be his last.
Flustered, I started past him toward the open front door, beyond which dozens of thunderbirds waited for us in varying degrees of human form. When Lance didn’t follow, I turned to him. “You have two options—inside…” I gestured toward the open doorway. “Or down, the hard way. Which is it gonna be?” He hesitated, and I sighed. “Dignity, Lance.”
He spared one fleeting, terrified glance at the ground below, then squared his shoulders and walked past me into the huge main room of the nest—where he stopped, apparently frozen, three steps from the door.
I knew how he felt. Before this flight, Lance had only ever seen one thunderbird, and that poor cock had been alone and pounced upon before he had a chance to take to the sky. And now we were facing fifty or so of his closest friends and relatives, a much more representative—and intimidating—sample of the thunderbird population and their tendency to stick together.
And to avenge their own at all costs.
When Lance hadn’t moved several seconds later, I gave him a little shove, and he stepped forward slowly, trying to take in everything at once, his eyes already glazing over with the effort. He may have been going into shock, and frankly, that was probably better for all involved.
Before I could make a better assessment, or address any of the dozens of birds now staring at us, a door squeaked open overhead and I looked up to see Kaci step out onto the exposed second-floor walkway. “Faythe!” she shouted, and was running before the single syllable of my name faded into silence.
She raced along the hall and around the corner, nimbly avoiding the two fully human thunderbirds she passed in the process, and thumped down the stairs like a bull about to charge. But she was all smiles when she flew across the huge room and into my open arms.
“You came!” Kaci buried her tear-streaked face in the shoulder of my leather jacket.
“You say that like there was some doubt.” I pried her just far enough away that I could get a good look. Other than her sob-reddened face and an unusually pale countenance, she looked…fine. Which supported my theory that the birds would keep their word, so long as we kept ours. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Kaci wiped fresh tears from her face with the sleeve of her shirt—the one she’d been wearing since the day we were taken. “Just ready to go home.” Then she blinked and frowned, staring at my cheek. “What happened to your face?”
“It’s fine. Barely hurts. Just a keepsake from an old friend.”
Her frown deepened, and her hand rose as if to touch the scab, before she thought better of it and clasped her hands together. “That’s a joke, right?”
A really bad joke…“Okay, he wasn’t a friend. More like a mortal enemy.” Now, anyway.
“Did you kill him?” Kaci asked without missing a beat, and it was my turn to frown.
“Of course not!” Though, apparently I was alone in believing I was right to let him live. “But he’s gonna be in a lot of pain for a very long time.”
“Good.” Kaci glanced around at the crowd of thunderbirds watching us closely. Listening. Waiting. “Can we go home now?” she whispered.
“Come this way,” called a screechy voice, uneven with age, drawing our attention to the far end of the room, where I’d last addressed a smaller crowd of birds.
“In just a minute,” I whispered to Kaci, and waved Lance forward. He came slowly, still standing tall, but staring at me as if I were his one shot at salvation. The irony truly stung. How could he look at me like I was supposed to save him when I was the one turning him in?
Maybe I should have just knocked him out.
“Who’s that?” Kaci stared at him openly.
“This is Lance Pierce,” I said, and he met and held Kaci’s gaze, as if his curiosity could not be denied. Maybe he wanted to know who I was trading his life for. Or maybe, like most toms, he couldn’t turn away from the sight of a young tabby, the very treasure enforcers—and indeed all toms—were taught from infancy to protect.
Kaci’s eyes widened and she edged closer to me as the circle of birds grew tighter around us, herding us to the end of the room. “Parker’s brother?”
“Yeah.” The floor of the great room was packed with birds now, and hardly a glimpse of empty floor showed, but for the five-foot circle surrounding us, putting us at the center of their unnerving attention. “He killed Finn.” A single glance up confirmed my suspicion: the perches and ledges had been abandoned. Everyone wanted to participate.
“What’s going to happen to him?”
I swallowed, then stood straighter, trying to emotionally distance myself—and Kaci—from whatever would happen next. Hopefully after we left. “That’s not up to us.”
“Faythe Sanders?” a voice called from behind us this time, and I whirled, but was too late to pinpoint the speaker. And so it begins…
“Yeah?”
“Present your evidence to the satisfaction of the Flight, and you and your kitten may go.” I saw the speaker that time, a mostly human man with only the suggestion of a beak in the protrusion of his nose.
“Sure. No problem.” I swallowed thickly and pulled Kaci closer. It sounded too easy. How exactly did they define satisfaction?
“This is Lance Pierce.” I gestured toward him with one hand, but he didn’t even glance at me, having evidently decided that I was the enemy, after all. We all were. But he had nowhere to go. I inhaled deeply and stared straight forward, avoiding looking at any particular bird, since I was speaking to all of them at once. And because I was far from comfortable with my decision. With what I had to do to walk out of there alive, with Kaci in tow.
“Lance killed your bird. Finn.”
Thirty-One
The reaction from the crowd was immediate and terrifying. Every bird in the room suddenly seemed to swell, as if together they could suck up all the air in the room, suffocating the rest of us. But air wasn’t the cause of the change.
It was feathers.
Suddenly everyone but the three of us had feathers. And talons. And wing-claws. And most had sharp, curved beaks. All in the span of a single breath.
Lance sucked in a startled breath and jumped back. Feathers rustled behind him and he whirled around, then turned again. He’d never seen the avian, like-magic Shift, and I could only imagine how terrifying it must be to see the show for the first time, magnified by five dozen. One cock came close enough to use his talons to cut the tape from Lance’s hands.
Finally, Lance exhaled and made a visible effort to regain calm himself.
“Will you speak for yourself?” asked an elderly female thunderbird, one of only half a dozen who still sported a human mouth. Her cold, shiny black bird eyes were trained on Lance.
“I will,” he said, and I turned to look at him, surprised by the strength in his voice. I was even more surprised by his mostly steady stance, and the direct gaze he leveled at the last bird who’d spoken. He’d taken my advice seriously. Would wonders never cease?
“Hey, Lance, just FYI,” I said, and when his head swiveled toward me, I saw that the fear had been buried deep behind his eyes, replaced with a hot, ripe anger ready to burst through him like rotten fruit through its own skin.
Oh, shit. That was a dangerous look. One that said he knew he was going to die, but didn’t plan to go down easy.
Lance wasn’t compo
sed; he was contained. And only barely, at that. Any resemblance to his brother that I’d seen in him was gone. Parker wasn’t capable of that much rage.
But then, Parker wasn’t capable of letting an entire Pride full of innocent people—including his own brother—pay for his mistakes.
“Yes?” Lance raised a calculating brow my way.
“You should know they have no Alpha,” I said warily, shifting to subtly move in front of Kaci. “Regardless of who speaks to you, you’re actually talking to all of them, so don’t be thrown off by their round-robin routine.”
Lance nodded curtly, then turned back to the bird who’d addressed him, dismissing me with apparent ease, though I found it much more difficult to reciprocate.
“The only right you have within our nest is the right to speak in your own defense. Succinctly,” said another bird, this one a younger man, whose talons clicked over and over on the floor, like a metronome counting down the last seconds of Lance’s life. “What would you say?”
Lance inhaled, then began to speak, glancing from one to the other of the birds who still bore a few human characteristics. He never even glanced at those who had fully Shifted, as if by keeping them out of sight, he could actually put them out of mind.
“Last week, I killed a thunderbird in a dispute over a meal. According to werecat law, it should have been my decision whether or not to share my meal, and I never offered…Finn a portion of my kill. By our law, my actions are justified, but I understand that your customs are different. I’ve broken one of your rules, and all I can do is ask for your mercy and plead ignorance of your laws. I swear I had no idea our cultures differed so dramatically.”
“Your culture is irrelevant here,” another bird said, while the woman beside her snapped her beak together over and over. “Your laws are simply words fallen on deaf ears. You killed one of ours in his own territory, and ignorance of our practices is no excuse.”
I knew from what little I’d spoken to Kai that the thunderbirds were aware of other species’ territorial boundary lines, if only so that they could avoid unnecessary encounters.
“I wouldn’t have killed him if he hadn’t fought back!” Lance snapped, gesturing angrily with one fist, and an alarm went off in my head.
Shut up! The silent shout reverberated in my skull, but I could not give it voice. It wasn’t my place to defend him—not simply because we shared a species. Lance was in the wrong, for both his crime and for letting Malone blame us. People had died because of him.
“Do you intend to imply that Finn’s murder was his own fault?” a young female demanded, her pale brown eyes blazing in fury. “That if he’d only submitted to an intruder’s strange practices in his own land, he would still be alive?”
“That may be,” said an elderly male bird, whose head feathers had begun to gray. “But none among us would debase himself for a few more years on earth. What good is life if you live it in dishonor?”
Lance had no answer for that. He had done the very thing the thunderbirds could not abide: he’d sacrificed his honor for his life. Worse yet, he’d let others pay for his crimes.
A petite woman stepped forward on small, sharp talons, weaving birdlike with each movement. “Have you anything else to say for yourself?”
Lance hesitated, his hands folded together at his back. “Just that I’m truly sorry for what I’ve done to Finn and for what I’ve allowed to happen to the south-central Pride. They are completely innocent.”
My exhalation was so ragged and heartfelt that it echoed in the near silence. Kaci squeezed my hand, and I knew without looking that she was smiling up at me. Most of the tension had drained from her bearing with Lance’s admission.
The small female bird turned to me. “Faythe Sanders, you and your kitten may go. Cade and Coyt will take you down.”
“Thank you.” I glanced at Lance, then turned toward the door. But Kaci’s grip on my hand pulled me to an abrupt stop.
“What about him?” She nodded toward Lance.
“That’s out of our hands, Kaci,” I said, pulling her forward. “Let’s go.”
She shook her head and stood her ground. “But we can’t just leave him. What are they going to do to him?”
“You should listen to your mother,” Brynn said, and I glanced up to see her standing on the edge of the crowd, holding her ever-morphing daughter on one hip. “Lance Pierce will be put to death for his crimes, and you don’t want to see that.”
She was trying to help; I could see that. She considered Kaci my daughter—even if not biologically—and she was trying to help, from one mother to another. Unfortunately, outside of the giant aviary, telling a child that someone is about to be executed is not a good way to calm that child down.
“What?” Kaci’s screech was almost bird-worthy. “They’re gonna kill him, Faythe. You have to help him.”
I pulled her close and made her meet my stern gaze. “Kaci, there’s nothing I can do for Lance. We all have to pay for our mistakes, and Lance made a big one.”
“So did I!” She glanced at him, then back at me. “I messed up a lot. People died. But no one killed me, ’cause I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s what you said. You said I wasn’t really guilty if I didn’t know what I was doing. And he didn’t know what he was doing, either. You heard him. He didn’t know thunderbird law, so he’s not guilty, right?”
I shook my head slowly and closed my eyes, trying to figure out how to explain. “It’s not the same, Kaci. Lance…I’ll explain it to you later, okay? When we get home. Let’s go.” I turned toward the door, and again she refused to move.
“No. You have to help him, Faythe. That’s your job. We can’t leave him here.”
My heart ached for her, and over my own reluctance to hand over a fellow werecat to be executed. But I’d made my decision and it was far too late to change my mind. “Kaci, my job is to protect you, and I’ve done that. We have to go. Marc and Jace are waiting for us outside.”
But she only shook her head and turned back to Brynn. “How?”
“How what?” Brynn asked, and the baby bird on her hip Shifted its nose and mouth into a tiny, sharp beak and began nipping at her mother’s arm in a bid for freedom.
“How will he die?” Kaci stood straight and tall, as if steeling herself for unpleasant information. Information I didn’t want her to have, even if I didn’t know precisely what it was.
“He will be eaten, of course.” Distracted, Brynn set the struggling child on the floor as she spoke, and clearly had no idea the effect her words would have on Kaci. “Consumed by the family of his victim.”
Oh, hell…
Kaci’s eyes widened, and her mouth opened and closed, as if her response had been stolen by sheer horror. “You’re going to eat him?”
Such a sentence was unheard of among werecats. Man-eaters were among the most reviled of our criminals, and those most severely punished before they were executed. And the idea held special horror for Kaci, because a few months earlier—starving and half out of her mind—she’d partially consumed a hunter she’d killed while stuck in cat form.
Nothing Brynn could have said would have upset her more.
We were all watching Kaci, me in concern, as I tried to herd her toward the door, the birds in detached curiosity. They obviously could not understand her reaction. But so focused were we on the young, near-hysterical tabby that no one paid much attention to Brynn’s little chicklet, scampering from bird to bird, as if she were playing tag in a great forest.
No one paid attention, that is, until she gave a sudden startled squawk.
Every head in the room turned, and Brynn gasped in horror. “Wren!”
Lance stood in the center of the circle, holding the child by her currently human waist, her thin legs and talons dangling, his broad hand loosely gripping her neck. “Promise you’ll let me go, or I’ll kill her. I swear I’ll do it.”
“Lance…” I warned, as all around us, the birds who’d retained a few human featur
es Shifted completely into avian form, and the entire throng pressed subtly, aggressively toward him. “You don’t want to do this. This is not the way to get on their good side.”
“They don’t have a good side!” he snapped, glancing at me briefly before returning his attention to the birds posing the most immediate threat. “I mean it. Stay back or I’ll pull her arm right off.” His hand slid from Wren’s neck to her pudgy little elbow, and the child giggled like it tickled. Then, as if in response to the touch, her arms Shifted into small, beautifully feathered wings.
Lance jerked in surprise and dropped her arm, then grabbed her neck again before anyone had a chance to make a move toward the child. By sheer, bumbling luck, he’d managed to grab the toddler with her back to him, and all her most dangerous parts—beak, claws, and talons—were facing away. He could hold her like that for quite a while, if necessary.
Kaci made an odd noise and I glanced over to see her staring at Lance in horror and mounting fury. She looked disillusioned, and I felt almost as bad for her as for the child Lance held hostage.
Wren began to struggle, obviously tired of whatever game she thought they were playing. She flapped her wings but couldn’t reach back far enough to bother Lance. When that didn’t work, she squeezed her eyes shut in concentration, and one wing Shifted almost instantly into a chubby little arm, though the other remained stubbornly feathered.
Wren fussed—an inarticulate stream of nonsense words and squawks—and waved her mismatched arms in the air.
“Lance, what do you plan to accomplish with this?” I kept my voice calm, hoping to talk him down rationally.
“Survival,” Lance spat, glancing at me briefly. Then his focus flitted from thunderbird to thunderbird, though he still spoke to me. “You said they’d honor their word, so I’ll let her go if they promise to let me go.”
I started to tell him it didn’t work like that. That they’d feel no obligation to stand by a promise made to someone who’d already proved himself dishonorable. They’d broken their promise to Malone for that very reason. But then I realized that explaining that would only make things worse. Make Lance more desperate. Instead I turned to Brynn. Or, to the bird I thought was Brynn. It was hard to tell when no one had a human face.
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