Thus, no one looked particularly comfortable with me waving a gun around the room.

“What are you doing?” Marc started across the floor toward me—brave tom—but my father reached me first.

“I’m checking for bullets. To see how many are in there.”

“What are you going to do, stand on the porch and hold a turkey shoot?” Taylor asked, running one hand over his close-cropped hair.

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that.” I frowned and turned the pistol over again. “How do you open this thing?”

My father calmly plucked the gun from my hand, then pulled back a lever at the top of the grip with his thumb. Something clicked, and the clip slid into his waiting palm. He held it up for me to see, then slid it back into the grip of the gun until it clicked again. “One in the chamber, fifteen in the clip. Safety’s on.”

He gave me back the pistol, and I gaped at my Alpha like I’d never met him. “How did you…?”

My dad lifted both graying brows. “When are you going to stop being surprised by what I know?”

“Where did you learn about guns?”

He sighed but looked pleased by my interest. “Facing your fears is the best way to overcome them. But that’s a story for another day. And Ed’s right. You can’t just walk out there and start shooting.”

“I know.” Even if I wanted to kill one of the thunderbirds—and I wasn’t willing to kill in anything other than immediate self-or friend-defense—if our gunman shot and missed, they’d know we were bluffing. “I was hoping to scare them off long enough for us to…come up with a better plan. Learn how to fight them, or work on finding more proof. Or at least get the power back on.”

Without it, we couldn’t access the Internet, charge our phones, or even cook. Much less heat the house. Heat wasn’t an immediate concern, with all the bodies keeping things warm, but we would get cold eventually. And we would definitely run out of food. We’d stocked up the day before, but two dozen full-grown werecats go through food very, very quickly. We’d eaten fifteen pounds of beef in the chili alone.

“Okay, that’s a solid, attainable goal.” Uncle Rick nodded sagely.

Taylor frowned. “No, it’s spinning our wheels. Even if we get the power back on without any trouble—and for the record, this smells like a setup to me—they’ll just knock it out again. We need a permanent solution.”

“We’re not going to get rid of them without killing them,” Marc said. “And that’ll just bring more of them on the fly. Pun intended.”

No one laughed.

“They’ll lay off if we can come up with proof that we’re not involved,” I repeated. That was our only hope for a peaceful resolution.

“Yeah, and they’d disappear into a wormhole, if we knew how to open one,” Michael said from the doorway, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Why are you holding a gun?”