The tenth step creaked beneath my foot, sending an adrenaline-spiked bolt of alarm through me, and the thirteenth was rotten under my hand. The seventeenth lodged a huge splinter in my left palm. But two steps after that, my head rose above the floor of the stand, and my cat’s eyes focused easily on the small chest in one corner, thanks to the last rays of starlight now peeking from behind a cloud.

The first bit of daylight would shine shortly after 7:00 a.m., which gave us under two hours to get what we came for, get back to the car, and get the hell out of Dodge. No pressure…

I hauled myself up carefully, wincing when my cast scraped the floor, though it didn’t hurt. I wondered if I would have smelled Brett’s residual scent on the wood, if I were in cat form. Assuming he’d actually been where I now sat, a couple of days earlier.

Jace whined, and Marc asked the question for them both. “Do you see it?”

“Yeah. We are a go for an old wooden chest.”

They both exhaled in relief from twenty feet below.

Several patches of the floor looked suspiciously soft and dark, so I crawled around them on my knees and elbows, staying close to the right-hand railing. Crawling distributed my weight over a broader area, and my elbows kept pressure off my broken wrist.

The box was nothing more than a rough wooden cube, but I could see how a pair of small boys might call it a treasure chest. Might even have kept their own valuables in it.

The lid was a simple pine board, attached to the back of the box by a set of rusty hinges, which squealed when they were used. I lifted the lid slowly with my eyes closed, sending up a silent, fervent prayer that Brett had remembered this place. That he’d thought of it when he needed somewhere safe to store the evidence that could seal his father’s fate, and save so many others.

I opened my eyes. And laughed out loud.

Relief bubbled up inside me like a fountain of joy, and it would not be stifled, even with dawn less than two hours away. Even though we were well inside enemy territory. Even though Kaci would die and my Pride would be slaughtered if we were caught.

“Is it there?” Marc demanded as Jace continued to whine softly, begging for information.

“Yeah. He even put them in plastic.” I lifted the gallon-size bag and held it up. Inside were two huge feathers, striped with a distinctive pattern of colors I couldn’t make out without more light, even with my cat vision. But I saw the dark smears of blood, and I could smell it, even nearly a week old and sealed inside plastic.

On the front of the bag was a white strip, and Brett had printed on it, in clear black letters. “Thunderbird feathers. Lance Pierce’s blood.”

Brett, wherever you are, I hope you’re being spoiled rotten in the afterlife. “Jace, your brother’s a saint.”