Coyt’s frown spread into a hard scowl as he considered. It took him three long seconds—more wasted time—to make up his mind. “I will call them back.”

“Good.” I raised my arms, ready to be flown. “Can you carry me on your own?” I asked, remembering that it had taken two birds to safely balance my weight before.

Coyt shrugged and spread his wings. “Down is easier than up.”

Not exactly confidence-inspiring…

But before I could protest, he lifted himself into the air and grabbed my arms in both talons. An instant later we were in the air, my hair whipping around my face and neck, my arms bruised by his fierce grip.

We fell more than we flew, and Coyt used his massive wings like a glider, slowing our descent and directing us toward the tree line. Several terrifying seconds later, he dropped me two feet from the ground, then thumped to the earth behind me, already half-human.

I glanced back to see Kaci clinging to Jace in the middle of the road, and Marc racing toward me in the last rays of the scarlet sun. He may have been pissed, but he wouldn’t let me hunt alone.

I ducked into the trees and veered sharply to the left of the path the human-form birds were stomping, to keep from getting trampled. My clothes hit the ground, and I shivered—nudity in February is rarely fun—then dropped to the ground on all fours, glad I’d taken the time to fully heal my right arm. I was halfway through my Shift—groaning over the popping in my joints—when Marc dropped to the ground next to me, already nude.

I’m a faster Shifter than he is, and I already had a head start, so when I rose in my newly feline form, I rubbed my cheek against his flank in greeting, then bounded off into the woods, on alert for the sound of rushed footsteps, or Wren crying.

Unfortunately, the woods were alive with footsteps. Human-form birds crashed through the forest all around me, and I couldn’t distinguish one loud, ungainly set of feet from another. And if Wren was crying or calling for her mother, I couldn’t hear her over the stampede in progress.

Damn it, Coyt!

I sat back on my haunches and was about to give as loud a roar as I could manage, when an unearthly screech ripped through the night. My feline ears were much more sensitive than the human version, so Coyt’s appeal to his fellow birds was like fingernails raked down the chalkboard of my sanity.

Whining, I lowered my head to the earth and covered it with my paws until the sound stopped. When I rose, the footsteps were still there, but now they were crashing in the opposite direction: toward the road where Jace waited with Kaci.

When most of the birds had gone, I ventured forward silently, on alert for any movement around me. The sun had finally sunk below the horizon while I was Shifting, but the residual light reflected in the sky was more than enough for me to see by in feline form.