“We punish the guilty as a warning to future aggressors,” Kai insisted, and I turned to see him scowling, small dark eyes flashing in the dim light from the dusty fixture overhead.

“There was no aggression!” I threw my hands into the air. “Your boy tried to take a werecat’s kill. That’s fucking suicide. Don’t you harpies have any instinct? Or common sense?”

Kai drew himself straighter, taller, though the movement must have stung in every untreated gash spanning his chiseled stomach. “We are birds of prey, but carrion will suffice in a pinch. The kill was abandoned in our hunting grounds. Finn had every right to a share.”

“It wasn’t abandoned. The hunter—” I was careful not to give out Lance’s name “—just went to tell the group he’d brought down dinner. And for the record, a werecat is only obligated to share his meal with higher-ranking toms and his own wife and children, should he have them. Our custom says nothing about donating to any vulture who swoops out of the sky.”

“He wasn’t in werecat territory.”

Okay, technically Kai had a point, but that was only by chance. In many cases, territories of different species often overlap, mostly because what few other species have outlasted werewolves exist in such small numbers as to be inconsequential to us.

Or so we’d thought.

“You know what? None of that matters.” Frowning, I kicked a boxing glove across the floor and crossed my arms over my chest, annoyed that they didn’t fit there, thanks to the cast. “The cat who killed Finn wasn’t one of ours. If he had been, your bird would have died in our territory. But you just said he didn’t.”

Kai’s scowl deepened, and his good hand tightened around the bar until his knuckles went white, the muscles of his thick hands straining against his skin. “If your people are innocent, where is your proof?”

Incensed now, I stomped across the gritty concrete into the weak light from the fixture overhead, careful to stay well back from the bars. “Our proof was murdered this afternoon. By your honorable informant.”

The bird only stared at me, probably trying to judge the truth by my eyes. But I couldn’t read his expression. Couldn’t tell whether he believed me, or even cared one way or the other. “You need new proof.”

“No shit, Tweety.” I turned my back on him and stalked across the floor, then over the thick blue sparring mat to the half bath on the back wall. “Do you even care that while you guys are out here slaughtering innocent toms, the man you’re after is hundreds of miles away, laughing his ass off?”

Okay, Lance probably wasn’t laughing, but he had to be at least a little relieved that he wasn’t the one being dropped from thirty feet in the air by a vengeful, overgrown bird.

I squatted and dug beneath the small, dingy sink until I found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a gallon-size bag of gauze squares and medical tape. We had hydrogen peroxide, but frankly, I wanted the walking eight-piece dinner to sting in every single cut.