Jace and Brian accepted their weapons in front of us and headed outside without a backward glance.

“Here.” As I stepped up to the counter, Kaci reached to the side of the dwindling selection and picked up a large hammer with a black rubber grip. “I saved this one for you. Figured you’d need an advantage, working left-handed.” She nodded toward my casted right arm.

My mother watched out of the corner of her eye, sliding a large wrench across the counter toward Marc while I arched one brow at Kaci. The tabby hated violence, which, on the surface, should have made her the ideal young tabby. But Kaci was raised as a human, by human parents who’d had no idea they’d each contributed the recessive gene necessary to transform their youngest daughter into a werecat at the onset of puberty.

Considering what she’d been through—accidentally killing her mother and sister during her first Shift, then wandering through the woods for weeks on her own, stuck in cat form—Kaci’s die-hard pacifist stance was no surprise. But it wasn’t enough to make her into what the opposing half of the council wanted. Because she was raised as a human, Kaci had human expectations from life, none of which included marrying the tom of her Alpha’s choosing and siring the next generation of werecats—as many sons as it took to get a precious daughter.

And Kaci had a mouth, and she was not afraid to use it. Which made certain elements of the council even more determined to get her out from under my questionable influence.

“Thanks.” I forced a smile, and met my mother’s gaze over Kaci’s head.

“Be careful,” she said, and I nodded. Then Marc and I went out the front door after the others.

Several pairs of enforcers had gone into the woods, but Jace and Brian were headed for the west field, so Marc and I started out in the opposite direction, walking several feet apart, and breathing through our noses in spite of the February cold burning my nostrils. We didn’t want to miss a scent.

It was eerily quiet in the field, other than the whisper-crunch of our boots crushing dead grass. Though the temperature had risen dramatically from the ice storm a couple of weeks earlier, it was still hovering in the mid-thirties, and my fingers had gone stiff with the cold. I tried to shove them in my jacket pockets, but my cast stopped my right hand at the first knuckles. My nose was running, and I sniffled as we turned at the edge of the field, eyeing the periwinkle-colored sky in distrust.

Danger had never literally come out of the blue before. Out of tree branches, yes. Overhead beams, second stories, and even porch roofs. But never from the sky, and suddenly I felt unbearably vulnerable standing in a wide-open field, where before, such surroundings had always made me feel free and eager to run.

And my paranoia was not helped by the fact that, though no one had said it out loud, we were obviously looking for a body on our own land.