I blinked, but for a long moment, his words made no sense. Not the refusal. The part about cannibalizing my theoretical future child. “Well, isn’t that…gruesome? Who are you, Rumpelstiltskin?”

Kai frowned, as if I made no sense to him. “No thunderbird would claim a name so senselessly flamboyant.”

Or any sign of a sense of humor, for that matter. What was I thinking?

“Never mind.” I rubbed my temples with half-frozen fingers, and when I licked my lips, I tasted blood. They’d cracked open from the cold. “Are you prepared to pay your debt or what?”

“Yes. But failing to take my life when I was willing to lose it is not worth such a task.”

“You wouldn’t be in any danger—” I started.

“Of course not. I have nothing to fear from creatures who can’t even leave the surface of the planet under their own power,” Kai insisted, though he probably still bore the scars Owen had given him.

Grrr… I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass thunderbirds were. Inevitably.

“Okay, I get it. You’re scared. But maybe you could talk to one of your friends for me. Get someone else to—”

“No one else will do it. No member of our Flight would debase himself as your errand boy.”

I swallowed a growl of frustration. “You can’t answer for them. You guys may have this weird hive-mentality thing going on, but you don’t actually share a brain, right?”

Kai’s eyes narrowed as he frowned, obviously as impatient as I was. “They will say no. I know that like I know exactly how you’d taste, just from smelling you, but…”

Marc’s growl ripped through the air. Jace snarled and lunged at Kai. I threw myself between them, chest to chest with Jace. Cade and Coyt sprouted insta-feathers and beaks, facing off against Marc, two on one.

“Stop!” I shouted, desperate to avoid a confrontation we could not win. I wedged my arms between my body and Jace’s and shoved him as hard as I could, then held out one hand to stop his rebound. Only once he stayed back—eyes and canines already Shifted—did I dare take my gaze from him to glance at Marc. Marc stood with his legs spread wide for balance, eyes glittering with rage, fists high and close to his body. He was ready to throw down, and that could only end in death. Whose, I was afraid to speculate.

I stood with my arms spread in the universal signal for Stop! “There will be no tasting of any kind. Right?”

“Damn right,” Marc snapped, while Jace only growled.

When Kai made no reply, I glared at him. “Will you guys play nice if we do?”

He narrowed dark, small bird eyes at my phrasing. “We will not attack unprovoked. That would be dishonorable. But with provocation… Well, I’ve never actually tasted fresh cat, and while I typically find carnivore flesh distasteful, I’m feeling like something a little exotic tonight.”

Great. Somebody was obviously still bitter over his time underground….

“No provocation. Just take us up there so I can present a rational request to someone who isn’t looking to peck my eyes out.”

Kai made a high-pitched screeching sound in the back of his throat, and it took me a moment to realize he was laughing. “You won’t find that in the nest. But if I get you an audience…you will consider my debt paid?”

I hesitated just long enough to decide that was the best deal we’d get out of them. Unless they had another infant I could rescue. Finally I nodded. “Paid in full. Should we shake on it?” I stuck my hand out, but Kai only frowned.

“Is your word worth so little you must offer pointless physical gestures?”

I huffed and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fine. Never mind. Safe passage to your nest and an audience with someone more useful than you obviously are. Passage for all three of us,” I added as an afterthought.

Marc mumbled something behind me, and I twisted to hear him better. “What?”

He rolled his eyes. “Safe return passage, too. Don’t get us stranded up there.”

Oh, yeah. I turned back to the birds, trying to hide my embarrassment. “And safe return passage for all three of us. If you promise all of that, I’ll consider your debt absolved.”

Kai nodded quickly, looking so relieved that I wondered if I should have pressed for more. “Fine. You’re first.”

“Okay. Just one minute.” Already dreading the short, safety net–less flight, I turned to Marc and Jace and motioned them into an impromptu huddle. “Do not lose your temper in there. We’ll be safe as long as we don’t start anything. Got it?”

They both nodded reluctantly, and I turned to find all three thunderbirds already in full avian form—one of the scariest sights I’d ever seen in my life. Much scarier than either a bruin or a werecat in animal form, because we looked very much like our natural-born counterparts. But there was no bird in the world as big as a thunderbird, and by all the laws of physics—what little I understood of it, anyway—that meant they shouldn’t have been able to fly. They were too heavy. But then, they shouldn’t have been able to Shift so quickly, either. No wonder they held themselves apart from us.

The world had never seen anything like the thunderbirds, and with any luck, neither had our enemies on the council, other than Malone. They’d never know what hit them.

“Okay, let’s get this over with.” I held my arms out, and at my signal, Cade and Coyt rose into the air with several flaps of their huge, powerful wings. The air they moved blew hair back from my face and froze my already-dripping nose, but I barely had time to notice that before Cade—or Coyt—wrapped his thick talons around my upper arms in a bruising grip.