As I walked, I classified each sound as my ears picked it up. The scurry of some small animal through the underbrush. A rabbit? They don’t hibernate. Wind rattling the skeletal branches of the deciduous trees sprinkled among the pines. The distant chatter and screech of dozens of scared, angry thunderbirds.

Marc joined me several minutes into my search, his approach even closer to true silence than my own. Together we walked and listened.

I was just about to point him in another direction—we could cover more ground if we split up—when an avian screech speared my brain. I froze, and Marc went stiff at my side. The screech was too loud to have come from the birds presumably gathered in the road.

Wren. It had to be, unless one of the thunderbirds hadn’t heeded Coyt’s call.

I whined softly, then tossed my head in the direction the sound had come from. Marc nodded, and we took off together.

Two minutes later, a human child’s cry came from that same direction, followed by the distinctive snap of a twig beneath someone’s foot. Lance was too busy trying to keep Wren in hand to worry about moving silently. She was going to get him caught. If he had let her go, he might well have gotten away.

A quarter of a mile later, I glimpsed movement between two trees, and froze. Marc saw it, too. He tossed his head to the right, and I nodded. We would split up and approach them from two directions. He went left; I went right.

I picked my way silently around clumps of evergreen brush and tall, broad pine trees, avoiding the sparsely sprinkled deciduous trees both because the lack of foliage left me exposed and because the fallen twigs would snap beneath my paws.

Lance crashed through the undergrowth fifteen feet away, struggling to hold on to the squirming, crying toddler who twisted to peck at him with her beak one minute, then reached up in the next instant to tangle human fingers in his hair. Scared and angry, the toddler went stiff and let loose an eardrum-bursting screech without letting go of his hair. He jerked in surprise, and she came away with two great handfuls of dark waves.

Lance shouted in inarticulate pain and stopped to reposition the child. He crooned to her for almost a minute as he went, and when that didn’t pacify her, he started yelling. “Shut up! Just for one minute, shut the fuck up!”

A growl built in my throat, and I struggled to swallow it to keep from exposing myself, though I had serious doubts he could hear me over Wren’s cries and his own yelling.

I edged along with Lance, unseen, waiting for Marc to get into place; his had been the longer, more circuitous route. And finally I caught a glimpse of movement beyond Lance. Just a smear of shadow among heavily laden pine boughs, but that was enough. Marc was in position.

I was all ready to pounce when it occurred to me that in cat form, I’d have no way to hold the child, even if he handed her over voluntarily. Damn it!