“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 composed; 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?”