I both heard and felt my fellow enforcers file onto the porch, and I smelled Jace at my side. But I blocked it all out as the first bolt of pain speared my eyes.

“Bring him back, now, or I’ll shoot her other wing,” my father warned, and distantly I realized Neve couldn’t fly away with a hole in her arm. She was almost literally a sitting duck.

Fresh agony licked at the backs of my eyelids, and my eyes felt like they would explode. I gritted my teeth and rode the pain, focusing on what I could hear in the absence of sight.

Another set of wings beat the air in the distance, but it wasn’t Lucas’s captor. I could still hear my cousin shouting—slowly drifting farther away—from my left.

“Stay back, or we’ll hobble you, too!” Marc shouted at whoever now approached, and I wondered if the birds could even hear him over the din of their own flight.

The pain began to ease behind my eyes, and I spared a moment of thankfulness that they were one of the fastest parts of the body to Shift—no bones, no large muscles, and no sprouting fur. Then I opened my cat eyes. My newly vertical pupils dilated instantly, letting in every bit of the little available light. And suddenly I could see in the dark.

In the arch of grass defined by our half-circle drive, a naked, fully human woman sat on the frigid ground, shivering miserably. Neve held her left arm close to her chest, folded like a wing and dripping blood. She eyed my father in abject hatred, her jaw clenched.

At her back, another bird coasted straight for the confrontation, moonlight glinting off dark, glossy feathers. Neve glanced back and up, and relief washed over her. He was coming to get her, but not at top speed—not with the continued threat of gunfire.

My father watched the new bird’s slow approach, tense with controlled fury. Marc stared after Lucas, tranq gun aimed in his general direction, judging by my cousin’s screams. I wound my way around half a dozen enforcers and peered over the left railing. Lucas and his captor were almost to the apple tree, flying very low. The bird pitched and dipped as Lucas fought him, swinging his crowbar and kicking furiously.

When his feet skimmed the top branches, my cousin stopped fighting. He bellowed an impressive roar and rammed the end of the crowbar up through the bird’s torso. The thunderbird screeched, and his next flap faltered. Lucas shoved the crowbar deeper. The bird screamed, sounding almost human. His talons opened. Lucas fell into the bare limbs of the apple tree.

Yes! Marc and my uncle peered over the rail with me, but they couldn’t see far in the dark. Not with human eyes. “Lucas impaled the bird,” I whispered urgently. “He fell in the apple tree, alive, but probably hurt. The bird fell somewhere past the tree.”

“Come on,” Uncle Rick whispered to Marc. Then he jumped the porch rail in one smooth, lithe motion. Marc landed beside him, still carrying the tranquilizer gun, and they ran off into the night.