“How are the digits?” I asked, sinking into a wicker chair at the end of the porch.

“Pardon?” Manx frowned until I nodded at her hands, then she held her fingers up, as if to check on them. “Oh. Much better. They only hurt when—” she paused, searching for the right word in English “—bump things.” She pushed her hands forward against nothing to demonstrate.

Nearly two weeks after being declawed, her hands had almost completely healed, but the scar tissue where her fingernails had been was still bright red and puffy. She hated the sight of them, and wore thin gloves whenever possible, only taking them off to care for the baby or herself.

I turned to glance at Kaci—halfway to the apple tree, and loping at her own pace—and idly noticed a pair of hawks circling overhead.

“How is your arm?” Manx asked, recapturing my attention.

I held up my cast, smiling at the doodles Kaci had drawn between the enforcers’ perfunctory signatures. A flower with purple petals and X-shaped eyes in the center. A pink skull and crossbones. I’d sat still for several of her masterpieces. Anything to make her smile. Though, I’d threatened to paint over them with black nail polish if she plastered any more pink on my arm.

Still, I had to admit that thinking of Kaci when I looked at my cast was much better than thinking about how I’d broken it. About the bastards who’d stolen Marc and beaten him to get information out of me—when beating me hadn’t worked.

“It’s fine. Dr. Carver says I can try Shifting in a couple of weeks.” Because broken bones take longer to heal than simple cuts and gashes. I was already itching for the transformation—and from the cast, which somehow made my arm sweat, even in the middle of February.

“She really misses him.” Owen nodded at something over my shoulder, and I twisted to see Kaci on the ground beside Ethan’s headstone, one knee brushing the freshly overturned earth.

“Yeah, she—”

“What the hell?” Owen demanded, and I peered over the porch railing. “Have you ever seen hawks that big? They must have spotted something to eat, from the way they’re circling.…”

I was on my feet in an instant, a sick feeling churning in my stomach. “Those aren’t hawks.…” They were too big, for one thing. And their wings were all wrong. Especially the tips. Even from a distance, the ends looked…weird. The birds must have been really high up before, because now that they’d flown lower, swooping in from over the woods behind the eastern field, they looked huge.

My heartbeat suddenly felt sluggish, as if it couldn’t keep up with my body’s natural rhythm. The birds were too huge. And too low. And too fast…

Oh, shit… “Kaci!” I screamed as the first bird dove toward her. She looked up and screeched, and I was already halfway across the yard.

Kaci leaped to her feet, then ducked as the first bird swooped, huge talons grasping perilously close to her head. She screamed again, and when the bird rose into the air, beating giant wings so hard I could hear the air whoosh from two hundred feet away, she stood and took off toward me.