Cat form again, and that time I couldn’t stand. I fell onto my stomach, panting, and the room refused to come into focus. The pain echoed inside me, filling the emptiness, sucking at the cold with blazing agony. My stomach was eating me alive, demanding fuel, but I wanted only the blaze. The fire.

Colin Dean aims his gun, and the flash is blinding in the dark. My father falls. Blood blooms on his shirt like a midnight rose. And then he is gone, and I’m being sucked into darkness the size of a pinprick, and the pain is…

The Shifts began to run together. Memories of loss and triumph—because Shifting was my glory; it enabled justice and was my sword and my shield—fueled them long after my energy waned, long after the buzz of power faded. The pain was all a blur—past and present, physical, and psychological. And for the past two cycles, I couldn’t even stand. Could only force my body through its paces one final time, wondering if that would be enough.

When it was over, I couldn’t sit up. I lay on the floor panting, huffing, sweating, boiling with agony. My ribs had healed. My knee had healed. My cheek looked normal at the bottom of my vision. And still there was pain. Deep, deep pain, in places I couldn’t reach.

My weight on the floor bruised my hip. My neck creaked when I lifted my head. I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. How many times? It was too much. Too fast.

Tears poured down my face, silent, because I didn’t have the energy to sob. The buzz of power had abandoned me, and part of me had gone with it. I didn’t deserve the power. Not yet. But I deserved the pain.

“Faythe?” The door creaked open, and I smelled Marc. “Faythe!” He was at my side in an instant, lifting me, and even his gentle touch bruised. A second later, Jace was there, too. “Get her some water,” Marc whispered. “And something to eat. But don’t say anything.”

“What happened?” Jace took his cue to whisper from Marc.

“I think she Shifted. Look at her face.”

“But…one Shift can’t heal like that. Hell, four Shifts can’t heal like that.”

“I know. Get the water. And close the door behind you.”

Marc laid me on the bed, and I blinked up at him, but his face wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were so dry it hurt to blink.

“What the hell are you doing? Trying to kill yourself?” His voice was thick with emotion, and his eyes were damp. “You’re stronger than that. Suicide is the coward’s way out. People are depending on you!”

“Don’t want to die,” I whispered. “I needed the pain.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” His eyes narrowed, like he wanted to understand, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. Everything was black and white for Marc. Right and wrong. Good and bad. He understood the spectrum of pain—he’d certainly been through enough of it—but not what it meant to me. He didn’t understand how making myself suffer and relive so many bad memories could possibly lead to catharsis, a psychological release of emotional poison. “You weren’t in enough pain already?”

“It clears my head. I needed more.”

The door creaked open, and Jace came in with a sweating bottle of chilled water and a box of protein bars. He cracked open the bottle and handed it to me.

It took all of my concentration to manage the bottle, to keep from dribbling water all over myself, but I drained half of it before coming up for a breath.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Marc took the bottle when I lowered it, while Jace ripped open the snack box. “Even under the best of circumstances, you should eat between Shifts, and this is hardly the best of circumstances. How many times did you Shift?”

“I don’t know. Lost count.”

“In half an hour?” Marc cursed in Spanish, and I flinched. “What are you, brain-dead?”

“I’m sorry.” I swallowed thickly and took the protein bar Jace handed me. “I didn’t mean to go so far. I just…I needed to heal, and I needed it to hurt. That’s the only way I could make sense out of any of this.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Marc demanded, forgetting to whisper that time.

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t make him understand what I could hardly understand myself.

Jace sighed. “She was punishing herself.”

“No, I…” I shook my head. That wasn’t it. That sounded crazy. Yet he was right, though I would never have put it in those words. “It just… It seemed like a failure on so massive a scale should involve more pain. Like I shouldn’t have been able to just walk away from a loss that cost everything for so many people. Like if I wasn’t hurting, I wasn’t paying for what I cost us.”

“You didn’t walk away from it,” Marc pointed out, ever helpful with the literal interpretation. “Jace carried you. And damn, Faythe, Dean nearly killed you. How is that not enough pain?”

“It just…wasn’t.”

“You’re not making any sense. You did the best you could, and what happened wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was.” I bit into the snack bar and avoided his eyes. “My best wasn’t good enough, and that’s not an option for an Alpha.”

Marc stared at me for nearly a minute, and I could almost hear the gears whirring in his head. Grinding. But he didn’t really get it, and he hated that. Finally he stood and stomped toward the door. “Make sure she eats the whole box,” he growled. Then the door closed behind him, and I was alone with Jace.