“Hello?”

“Faythe?” Marc said, and relief spread through me like sunshine, warming me from the inside out. “Are you okay?”

“Better now,” I breathed, trying not to chatter in his ear.

“We should be getting close. Any specifics on where you are?”

“Um, yeah. Just a minute.” I clenched the phone tight to make sure my numb fingers wouldn’t drop it, then jogged forward with my gaze glued to the water tower until the bottom half of the letters rose above the treetops. “To the north, I see a water tower that says…Cloud…something.”

“Cloudcroft,” Jace said in the background, and I heard the rustle of paper closer to the phone as Marc unfolded a map. “Look, it’s right there,” Jace continued, and there was an electronic beep from his GPS unit. “We’re only a couple of miles away.”

Marc huffed, and more paper crackled as he folded his map. “Head toward the tower. We’ll go south from there and find you.”

“Hurry…” I said, but the end of the word was swallowed by chattering.

“Hang on. We’re almost there.”

Eighteen

Jace’s Pathfinder pulled to a stop in the middle of the gravel road, and Marc was out before Jace could shut the engine down. He squeezed me so tight I couldn’t breathe, and the talon bruises on my arms ached, but I was happy to exchange my breath for his warmth. Not to mention his company.

Jace stood with one hand on the driver’s side door, watching us with a mixture of relief and frustration. I gave him a bittersweet smile with numb lips, then lost his gaze when Marc set me down and pulled his leather jacket off to layer it over my own.

“Come on, let’s get you warmed up.” Marc led me toward the Pathfinder by one hand and pulled the back door open for me.

“It’s warmer up here,” Jace said before I could climb in. I shot him a censorious glance, but he ignored me in favor of Marc. “All the vents are in the front.”

“Good call.” Marc pulled open the front door, and I found myself seated next to Jace, bundled in Marc’s jacket, before I even really processed what had happened. Jace restarted the engine and cranked up the heat, then turned all the vents toward me.

Marc got in and leaned forward as Jace pulled onto the side of the narrow road to turn the car around. “So, the nest is back there?” He tapped his window, facing the direction I’d come from, and I nodded. “How far?”

“Not sure. Maybe eight miles?” My words were choppy, spoken around my chattering teeth, but they both seemed to understand me.

Jace frowned and shifted the car back into Drive. “According to the GPS, the road’s a dead end.”

I pulled off my gloves and dropped them in my lap, then held my hands in front of the vents. “Yeah. But it dead-ends right in front of the thunderbirds’ nest.”

Jace hesitated with one hand on the gearshift. “Kaci’s only a few miles away. We can’t leave her there.”

“You got a better idea?” Marc didn’t sound hostile, exactly, but he was definitely impatient, and I was glad I’d missed the first half of the road trip, even considering the bitter cold and the airplaneless flying.

Jace shrugged. “She must be terrified on her own.”

“She is.” I used the toes of one foot to pry off my opposite shoe, then stretched my frozen toes toward the floorboard vent. “But we can’t get her back without either evidence or a fight, and the three of us don’t stand a chance against several dozen thunderbirds. Especially since they have the home field advantage.”

Jace’s jaw tensed and his hand tightened around the wheel, but his foot stayed firmly on the brake pedal.

“Let’s go,” Marc insisted. “There’s nothing we can do for Kaci without proof that Malone’s guilty, and if we miss our flight, she’s as good as dead.”

“Please,” I said when Marc’s order had no impact on him, a fact which made me vaguely sick to my stomach. “You know if there was anything else we could do, I’d be the first one to suggest it.”

Jace’s hand twitched around the steering wheel, then he nodded once, briskly, and hit the gas so hard gravel spewed behind us. I’d have flown forward if I hadn’t been buckled in. Marc hit his forehead on the back of my headrest and let out a string of Spanish profanities too fast for me to understand.

“Watch it, asshole,” he finished at last, glaring at Jace in the rearview mirror. “We’re no good to her if you plant us in a ditch.”

Jace scowled, but slowed to a speed less likely to sling us into the next dimension. “You getting warm yet?” He glanced at me briefly and turned right onto the first paved road I’d seen, running perpendicular to the thunderbirds’ long private drive.

“Yeah.” But my teeth were still chattering. “How far to the nearest gas station? I’m starving.”

“We gotcha covered. Marc, grab the…”

But Marc was already lifting a bulging white plastic bag over the front seat into my lap. “It’s probably cold by now, but it’s better than candy bars and soda. And there’re a couple of bottles of Gatorade by your feet.”

“Thanks, guys.” For the next twenty minutes, I devoured convenience store chicken strips, potato wedges, fried mozzarella sticks, and corn dogs. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. A Shifter’s metabolism runs much faster than a human’s, and if I’d had to Shift, I probably would have passed out from hunger.