“Lance killed your bird. Finn.”

Thirty-One

The reaction from the crowd was immediate and terrifying. Every bird in the room suddenly seemed to swell, as if together they could suck up all the air in the room, suffocating the rest of us. But air wasn’t the cause of the change.

It was feathers.

Suddenly everyone but the three of us had feathers. And talons. And wing-claws. And most had sharp, curved beaks. All in the span of a single breath.

Lance sucked in a startled breath and jumped back. Feathers rustled behind him and he whirled around, then turned again. He’d never seen the avian, like-magic Shift, and I could only imagine how terrifying it must be to see the show for the first time, magnified by five dozen. One cock came close enough to use his talons to cut the tape from Lance’s hands.

Finally, Lance exhaled and made a visible effort to regain calm himself.

“Will you speak for yourself?” asked an elderly female thunderbird, one of only half a dozen who still sported a human mouth. Her cold, shiny black bird eyes were trained on Lance.

“I will,” he said, and I turned to look at him, surprised by the strength in his voice. I was even more surprised by his mostly steady stance, and the direct gaze he leveled at the last bird who’d spoken. He’d taken my advice seriously. Would wonders never cease?

“Hey, Lance, just FYI,” I said, and when his head swiveled toward me, I saw that the fear had been buried deep behind his eyes, replaced with a hot, ripe anger ready to burst through him like rotten fruit through its own skin.

Oh, shit. That was a dangerous look. One that said he knew he was going to die, but didn’t plan to go down easy.

Lance wasn’t composed; he was contained. And only barely, at that. Any resemblance to his brother that I’d seen in him was gone. Parker wasn’t capable of that much rage.

But then, Parker wasn’t capable of letting an entire Pride full of innocent people—including his own brother—pay for his mistakes.

“Yes?” Lance raised a calculating brow my way.

“You should know they have no Alpha,” I said warily, shifting to subtly move in front of Kaci. “Regardless of who speaks to you, you’re actually talking to all of them, so don’t be thrown off by their round-robin routine.”

Lance nodded curtly, then turned back to the bird who’d addressed him, dismissing me with apparent ease, though I found it much more difficult to reciprocate.

“The only right you have within our nest is the right to speak in your own defense. Succinctly,” said another bird, this one a younger man, whose talons clicked over and over on the floor, like a metronome counting down the last seconds of Lance’s life. “What would you say?”

Lance inhaled, then began to speak, glancing from one to the other of the birds who still bore a few human characteristics. He never even glanced at those who had fully Shifted, as if by keeping them out of sight, he could actually put them out of mind.