His patronizing smile made my stomach churn, but in light of the circumstances, I was trying very, very hard to be good. “Yes.”

Malone huffed in disbelief, glancing around the room to make sure everyone else shared his skepticism. On his right, Paul Blackwell placed one wrinkled hand on the table. He scowled, scraggly gray eyebrows drawing low over small, dark eyes. “Why is it, then, that you can’t show us this ‘partial Shift’?”

Because I’m not quite ready to give in to murderous rage. Fortunately I was getting pretty good at not saying the first thing that popped into my head. Mostly. “I can’t do it on command. Not yet anyway. I have to be in a certain mood—excited, in one sense or another—to make it happen.”

“Well, isn’t that convenient?” Malone said with a conspiratorial glance at Blackwell.

“Quite the opposite, actually,” I snapped, and Michael kicked my shin under the table.

Malone’s fist clenched around his notes and his mouth opened. But before he could speak, the Alpha on his left cleared his throat conspicuously, drawing all eyes his way.

“Calvin, I assume you have a legitimate question for Faythe?” By some miracle, my uncle Rick Wade—my cousin Abby’s father—had been selected for the tribunal, and in my father’s honor, he’d made his allegiance to my family well-known. If not for him, I’d have already been convicted and sentenced.

“Of course.” Malone shot an annoyed glance at my uncle, then adopted a professional pose. But when he faced me, I saw that same gleam of animosity in his eyes. “So you were in an…excited state when you bit Mr. Wallace?”

A mischievous grin lurked behind my solemn courtroom face, and it took all my self-control to stifle it. As well as a hard, self-inflicted pinch on my arm, through the white blouse my father had chosen to make me look innocent. And to cover the new belly-button ring he didn’t think projected the right image during my hearing.

“You might say that. We were at school, on our lunch break. Neither of us had a class for a couple of hours, so we wound up at his apartment.”

“In bed?” Paul Blackwell leaned forward from Malone’s right side, gripping the curve of his cane hard enough to make his withered fingers creak.

Blackwell was the senior member of the tribunal, as well as the Territorial Council, and had been clinging tenaciously to his position as Alpha of the southwest territory for years, in spite of urgings from his family and several other Alphas to turn the reins over to his son-in-law. He was mulish, out-spoken, and hopelessly old-fashioned, stubbornly adhering to outdated ideas about premarital sex and a woman’s place in the world. In fact, he seemed as scandalized by my “indecent” relationship with Andrew as by the thought that I’d infected and murdered him.