Kaci screamed and pounded on the window from the dining room, to my right. On the front steps, Marc spun to his left, tranquilizer gun raised and ready. But he had no clear shot. My father kept his pistol trained on Neve. His back and shoulders were so tense I was afraid his muscles would snap like stressed ropes.

Uncle Rick ran through the open front door onto the porch steps and I went after him, peering into the night for his son. My heart raced, demanding action. Instead, I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to think.

A crescent moon shone through the cloud cover, too weak to illuminate much and the candles’ light only penetrated a few feet into the dark. Lucas’s enraged shouts echoed from somewhere to our left, and not too high up, giving us his general direction. But we couldn’t help him if we couldn’t see him.

I stepped to the back of the covered porch, out of immediate danger, and closed my eyes, already working on a partial Shift. Just my eyes. The bird was obviously having trouble with Lucas—no surprise, considering my cousin had to be nearly double his weight. If I could find them before they got too far away—or too high for Lucas to survive a fall—we could still save him.

I both heard and felt my fellow enforcers file onto the porch, and I smelled Jace at my side. But I blocked it all out as the first bolt of pain speared my eyes.

“Bring him back, now, or I’ll shoot her other wing,” my father warned, and distantly I realized Neve couldn’t fly away with a hole in her arm. She was almost literally a sitting duck.

Fresh agony licked at the backs of my eyelids, and my eyes felt like they would explode. I gritted my teeth and rode the pain, focusing on what I could hear in the absence of sight.

Another set of wings beat the air in the distance, but it wasn’t Lucas’s captor. I could still hear my cousin shouting—slowly drifting farther away—from my left.

“Stay back, or we’ll hobble you, too!” Marc shouted at whoever now approached, and I wondered if the birds could even hear him over the din of their own flight.

The pain began to ease behind my eyes, and I spared a moment of thankfulness that they were one of the fastest parts of the body to Shift—no bones, no large muscles, and no sprouting fur. Then I opened my cat eyes. My newly vertical pupils dilated instantly, letting in every bit of the little available light. And suddenly I could see in the dark.

In the arch of grass defined by our half-circle drive, a naked, fully human woman sat on the frigid ground, shivering miserably. Neve held her left arm close to her chest, folded like a wing and dripping blood. She eyed my father in abject hatred, her jaw clenched.

At her back, another bird coasted straight for the confrontation, moonlight glinting off dark, glossy feathers. Neve glanced back and up, and relief washed over her. He was coming to get her, but not at top speed—not with the continued threat of gunfire.

My father watched the new bird’s slow approach, tense with controlled fury. Marc stared after Lucas, tranq gun aimed in his general direction, judging by my cousin’s screams. I wound my way around half a dozen enforcers and peered over the left railing. Lucas and his captor were almost to the apple tree, flying very low. The bird pitched and dipped as Lucas fought him, swinging his crowbar and kicking furiously.

When his feet skimmed the top branches, my cousin stopped fighting. He bellowed an impressive roar and rammed the end of the crowbar up through the bird’s torso. The thunderbird screeched, and his next flap faltered. Lucas shoved the crowbar deeper. The bird screamed, sounding almost human. His talons opened. Lucas fell into the bare limbs of the apple tree.

Yes! Marc and my uncle peered over the rail with me, but they couldn’t see far in the dark. Not with human eyes. “Lucas impaled the bird,” I whispered urgently. “He fell in the apple tree, alive, but probably hurt. The bird fell somewhere past the tree.”

“Come on,” Uncle Rick whispered to Marc. Then he jumped the porch rail in one smooth, lithe motion. Marc landed beside him, still carrying the tranquilizer gun, and they ran off into the night.

I scanned the darkness, looking for other birds, or any sign that this was a setup, but I saw nothing. With any luck, my father was right—their eyes were no better in the dark than a human’s.

“Stay back!” my Alpha roared, and I turned to see that the approaching bird had almost reached Neve.

I jogged down the steps to my dad’s side. “He can’t hear you over the wind he’s stirring up. Fire a warning shot.”

My dad’s mouth formed a thin, angry line. “I can’t see him well enough.”

“Then shoot her again.” The girl bird sat in a pool of light from two different enforcers’ flashlights. “Disable her other wing, so he gets the picture.”

My father considered for less than a second. Then he fired again.

The bullet grazed the she-bird’s right arm. Neve screamed. Blood ran from the new wound, fragrant in the night air. At my back, toms shuffled their feet as the scent fueled their rage, threatening to turn it to bloodlust. On a very large scale.

But the second shot accomplished its goal.

“Neve!” The bird in flight thumped to the ground in the darkness a good hundred feet behind her, now fully human but for his wings.

“I’m okay, Beck!” she yelled, without taking her glittering, black-eyed gaze from my Alpha.

“I don’t want to kill her,” my father shouted to Beck. “But if you come any closer, I’ll have…” His voice faded into an uneasy silence as the background whisper of wings beating the air grew to a thundering crescendo. I looked up. My cat gaze narrowed. My breath caught in my throat.