Ever the puppeteer, Vause had pulled my strings and made me dance. I had shifted into Lori and used the memory of my sister to interrogate the only one of Charybdis’s victims to survive. Painful as it had been, the intel we had gained from the McKenna girl was worth the cost to me.

“Okay.” Letting the remark slide, he brought his hands together in front of him and cracked his knuckles. “I can respect that.”

Face quirked in an odd expression, Dell glanced between us, either attempting to read the tension thrumming between us or playing spymaster for Graeson, I wasn’t sure.

“I used seven donors this past week,” Isaac informed us without a hint of bravado.

No surprise there when he made a point to never use the same source twice, to always stretch the limits of his abilities by choosing the rarest or most difficult magics to imbibe. Oh the hearts those experiments had broken. As the lone man in our caravan, except for the rare occasions when Theo condescended to join us, he pushed himself hard to hone the edge of his skill.

“Do you want the honors,” he said, shaking out his hands, “or should I go first?”

“You can go first,” Dell chimed in.

He shot me a glance to see if I minded.

“Knock yourself out.” I wasn’t about to fight him for the privilege. His recalls were stunning.

“One.” Left arm extended, he coaxed the change forth until his skin turned a sunburned hue. The fingers of that hand stuck together, the thumb popping out of alignment as his melded digits flattened, curved. Bands of white striped his joints, and peculiar, bristly hairs sprung from his hardening carapace. In under thirty seconds, he wielded a giant crab pincher. A grunt of effort, and he spun into a flying kick that ended with him snapping his claw an inch from my nose. “Pagurus armatus.”

“Where did you run into a giant hermit crab?” Tennessee was a landlocked state.

Click-clacking his weapon, he shrugged. “She rented lot 4B.” The appendage dissolved in a ripple of magic and pink skin. “I noticed her species on her renter’s form and got curious.”

Maybe Dell was just biting her tongue to avoid cracking a really good joke about getting crabs from hooking up with a stranger in a trailer park, but the barely audible growl vibrating in the air around her at the mention of a previous lover reminded me of what curiosity did to the cat.

For his sake I hoped none of his recalls were feline.