Abby smiled sympathetical y at me in the glass, and I immediately felt guilty for my self-pity, when she’d been through so much worse. “Here,” she said, handing me a shoe box. “We had to guess your size, but I thought you’d like the style.”

I lifted the lid to find a pair of white Reeboks with red-and-black accents. “You guessed wel .” They were only half a size too big. “Thanks. It’l be good to wear shoes again.”

“No problem.”

We laced up our new shoes together. Hers had pink-and-purple accents.

In the hal , whistling accompanied a set of heavy footsteps. “If you’re al dressed, make yourselves useful,” Lucas said, leaning against the door frame.

“Catch.” He tossed a can of dust spray to Abby and a bottle of no-wax floor cleaner at me. I say at me because Abby caught hers with the ease of nine years as a softbal catcher, but mine slipped right through my congenital butterfingers and burst open on the floor.

Lucas laughed. “Wel , that’s one way to do it. There’s a mop in the kitchen, by the fridge.”

Abby and I got to work, and half an hour later Marc official y declared the house clean. “They’d even get their security deposit back, if not for the dent Faythe put in the wall,” he said.

“Like you’re one to throw stones,” I retorted.

Parker and Owen stuffed the trash bags into the back of Daddy’s twelve-passenger van, while Ethan gathered up the cleaning supplies and made a last-minute check to be sure we hadn’t overlooked anything.

While everyone else piled into the van out front, Marc and I stood in the basement, watching Lucas prepare the prisoner for transfer. Ryan’s perpetual frown deepened as he stared at the transport restraints: solid steel wrist and ankle cuffs, each attached with little slack to a waist chain of the same material. The restraint system was one of a pair kept in the back of the van, for emergencies. I’d never seen them used before; we rarely had the opportunity to bring anyone back alive.

Ryan didn’t seem particularly grateful to be the first.

“Put both hands through the bars, wrists together,” Lucas ordered.

Rubber soles shuffled on concrete as Ryan stepped forward to comply. He looked both scared and irritated, but was wisely exercising his right to remain silent.

So far, at least. Handcuffs closed around my brother’s wrists with a metal ic click-slide-catch. More clattering followed as Lucas opened the cage and cuffed his prisoner’s ankles together.

“A cat’s body can sustain a lot of damage without actual y dying,” Lucas said, his voice as deep as the rumble of the earth itself. “You just think about that before you so much as scratch yourself without permission.”

Ryan gulped and nodded, stil mute.

Marc had chosen Lucas as the transport guard for two reasons, both of them obvious. As the biggest cat any of us had ever met, Lucas stood the best chance of intimidating Ryan into submission without having to lift a finger. And since every finger lifted against Ryan endangered our chances of catching Miguel, we needed him to remain conscious and cooperative.

But mostly, Marc chose Lucas because as Abby’s brother, he had more reason than anyone else present to want Ryan dead. And Ryan knew it. It was Marc’s way of scaring the living shit out of my brother. It was also the only revenge any of us would have until Ryan had worn out his usefulness.

Twenty-Nine

Owen drove us to Jackson International Airport, parking in a nearly empty pay-by-the-hour lot rather than in the crowded loading zone. We couldn’t risk a passerby noticing the thin and obviously exhausted man chained hand and foot inside a van registered to my father. Unless the officer cal ed to investigate happened to believe we were into traveling orgies and bondage, we’d spend the rest of the night in jail, trying to come up with a suitable explanation before Daddy arrived to bail us out.

Yeah, better to avoid humans altogether.

Marc, Parker, Ethan, and I stood in the parking lot, while Lucas repositioned Ryan in the second row, where Abby could reach him from the front passenger seat.

She had his cell phone, and would hold it up to his mouth if Miguel called.

Lucas gave Ryan one final warning, involving how little room his shredded corpse would take up in a garbage bag if he so much as sneezed on Abby before they got to the ranch. Then he slammed the sliding door shut on Ryan’s protests that he wasn’t violent, for crying out loud. By then, we’d al heard enough of his sniveling about being forced into working for Miguel, and no one was happier than I was to be separated from his nasal whine by a sliding sheet of steel and tinted glass.

Lucas said goodbye to his sister and warned Owen not to get pulled over.

Then he slapped the hood of the van like the flank of a horse. Owen pulled out of the parking lot, his brake lights flashing at us, and Abby waved goodbye with her head hanging out the front window. Lucas waved back until Owen turned a corner and the van drove out of sight.

We stood in line at the ticket counter to show our IDs to an over caffeinated clerk tapping away at a keyboard we couldn’t see. Our tickets were already reserved and paid for. Daddy had bought them over the phone as soon as he knew for sure who would be driving back with Abby and Ryan.

Unfortunately, there were no direct flights from Jackson, Mississippi, to Saint Louis, and the forty-minute layover in Cincinnati, of al places, put our travel time with Delta Airlines at almost exactly four hours. The ninety-minute drive from Saint Louis to Oak Hil meant we wouldn’t arrive in Carissa’s hometown until around eight in the evening.