Fortunately, the cold front had already passed over Texas, so it was nearly ten degrees warmer at the ranch than it had been in Rosetta.

“I’ll take her.” I stood, intending to pour coffee into a travel mug before heading back into the great outdoors.

My father frowned, templing his hands beneath his chin. “I want you to stay here and rest. You look like hell.”

“Um…thanks?” But I sank back onto the couch, partially relieved. I couldn’t remember ever being quite so tired.

“Jace and Ethan can take her,” the Alpha continued. “She seems to enjoy their company.”

“Yeah, that’s because she has ovaries.” The wonder twins were chick magnets, plain and simple, and Kaci was not immune to their powers. But if anything, that strengthened my father’s argument. She’d enjoy a walk in the woods with two handsome, older men. And we could trust them to watch her carefully.

The Alpha dismissed us both, and the doc went to set up his stuff in Manx’s room, currently the only unoccupied bedroom in the house.

I headed into the kitchen for some coffee, but I got there just in time to see Jace pour the last of it into a clean mug. I groaned in frustration when he added sugar and cream, then began to stir. I’d hit that odd point of exhaustion at which I could no longer function without caffeine, but I was too tired to make a fresh pot of coffee. It was like being too hungry to eat, or too tired to sleep. Only worse.

“Damn it, Jace,” I moaned, opening the cabinet over my head to pull out a five-pound bag of coffee beans.

He smiled and took the bag from my hands, replacing it with the mug. “I’ve already had two cups. This one’s for you.” Then he turned to the coffee grinder and dumped the beans in before I could reply.

“Thanks.” My heart thumped harder when his hand brushed mine as he reached up to replace the bag of coffee, and I stepped back, confused and startled by the spark. I sipped from my mug and forced my pulse to slow. “Hey, can you and Ethan take Kaci for a short, predawn walk in the woods when she’s done eating? To get her mind—and her ears—off of Dan’s… checkup.”

At the sound of his name, Ethan looked up from the table in the dining room, where he was entertaining Kaci with impersonations of Owen during his single, disastrous semester as a 4-H roper, chasing terrified calves around their pens.

“No problem.” Jace leaned against the counter next to me, and from the dining room, Ethan nodded, though his consent wasn’t really necessary; the okay from one of them was assumed to go for both. It had been that way for most of their lives.

“Don’t take her too far, and pick her up if she gets tired. We only need her out of the way for about thirty minutes, and we want her energized but not exhausted. At least, no more so than she already is. And I’ll make sure she dresses warmly.”

Jace smiled. “We’ll take good care of her.”

Fifteen minutes later, I watched through the back door as Kaci—bundled like an Eskimo in the arctic winter—walked across the dark expanse of the backyard between her two favorite toms. She’d asked about Marc while I helped her dress, but I’d avoided specifics, telling her only that Ethan and I would return to help with the search after Dan’s checkup. Jace was coming with us, too, since Michael would be back to help out on the ranch later that afternoon.

As soon as Kaci and her escorts disappeared into the woods, I took my refilled mug into Manx’s room, where Dan had taken off his shirt and was now lying on his stomach on Manx’s bed, which my mother had thoughtfully draped with black plastic. The patch of skin surrounding his scar was rust-red from iodine, and a clean white towel had been draped over the back of his head, to keep his hair from getting messy.

Carver was using a local anesthetic only, so Dan would be conscious and coherent the whole time, and thus able to answer questions during the simple procedure. Which would conveniently kill two birds while our thirteen-year-old stone was out of earshot.

“You have no memory of the implantation?” my father asked, from an overstuffed armchair opposite the bed. I leaned against the end of Des’s crib, since there were no more seats.

“Uh-uh.” Dan started to shake his head, then remembered there was a syringe poised over his back and froze. He flinched as the needle slid into his skin, then continued talking, as if to distract himself from the procedure. “I wouldn’t’ve believed anything was in there if I hadn’t seen the scar myself in the mirror.”

Which I’d held for him. The placement of the microchips was genius; how many people study their upper backs in the mirror on a daily basis? Assuming there was no discomfort from the procedure, the strays would have no reason to suspect a thing.

Dr. Carver gave Dan another shot, and again the stray flinched. Then the doc sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the anesthesia to take effect.

My father cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea when this happened? Any lapse of memory?”

“Just one.” Dan shrugged, an awkward movement, since he was lying facedown. “I went out drinkin’ after work one night—I think it was a Thursday—and woke up the next mornin’ with the worst hangover I ever had. I couldn’t even stand up without getting dizzy, and I puked on the floor by my bed. I had to call in sick for work, and to this day I have no idea how I got home, or what I did before I got there.”

“That seems to be the pattern,” I said, then sipped from my mug while my father nodded. Then a new thought occurred to me. “Dan, has Marc ever seen that scar?”