LITMIR.BIZ

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a meat mallet.” Jace crossed thick arms over his chest, and that time he did smile at me, while most of the toms chuckled. Even those who hadn’t been present had heard about me taking out a stray with a massive meat mallet in lieu of my claws, during my trial in Montana three months earlier. Apparently that one was going to stick with me.

      “Good.” Even my father cracked a small, brief smile. “Karen, will you arm the troops?” Anyone else would have gotten a simple order. My mother got a request.

      She nodded solemnly, then ushered Kaci into the kitchen as Dad turned back to the rest of us. “Pair up, and report to my wife to be armed. Call your Alpha if you find anything. Dismissed.”

      Marc and I stood as the others filed out of the office and across the hall. He took my hand, and Jace watched us, forgetting to look away for a moment. To look uninterested. But then Brian stepped into his line of sight, just before Marc looked up, and surely would have noticed.

      “You ready?” Brian had been paired with Jace since Ethan’s death, and now that Marc was back, we’d been reunited in the field, even with his unofficial status. Owen and Parker were still partners, but since my brother was temporarily out of commission, Parker would head out with Vic, who was currently partnerless because of the uneven number of enforcers.

      Jace nodded and followed Brian across the hall with one more glance at me.

      “He’ll be okay.” Marc nodded toward Jace’s back as he slid one arm around my waist. “Ethan’s death hit us all pretty hard, but it changed him.”

      My heart nearly burst through my chest and I struggled to get my pulse under control. “What do you mean?”

      He hung back to let me through the doorway first, so he didn’t see my eyes close in silent, fervent hope that he hadn’t seen too much difference in Jace. Or in me. “He’s serious all the time now. Morose and angry. It’s creepy.”

      “He’s a better enforcer for it,” I said, and Marc nodded without hesitation. I knew what he was thinking: too bad it took my brother’s death to bring out Jace’s true potential.

      A line had formed in the kitchen, leading in through the hall and out through the dining room. Kaci and my mom stood behind the bar, handing out an assortment of makeshift weapons that would have made any action-movie bad-ass proud. Toms left in pairs, clutching knives or tools someone had gathered from the basement and from assorted car trunks.

      Ed Taylor and my uncle Rick were at the head of the line, and right behind them stood my father and Bert Di Carlo. The Alphas selected weapons, then headed toward the door with the enforcers, and I blinked in surprise. Then nodded in growing respect. Most Alphas were past their physical prime—although a glance at Taylor would undermine that assumption—and while they still had to Shift and exercise to maintain good health, they didn’t often patrol or hunt with their men.

      The fact that they were all going to go out in search of our missing man filled me with more pride than I knew how to contain. They knew that every life was valuable, and unlike Calvin Malone, they were willing to put their own tails on the line to prove it.

      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.

      On our third pass through the field, I dug a tissue from my left pocket and held it awkwardly to blow my nose—yet another simple activity rendered nearly impossible thanks to my cast. Then I froze with the folded tissue halfway to my pocket. My first unobstructed breath had brought with it a familiar scent, and an all-too-familiar jolt of fear.

      Blood. Werecat blood.

      “Marc,” I said, veering from the path in search of the source of the scent. He followed me, sniffing dramatically, and his pace picked up as he found the scent. Cats can’t hunt using only their noses. Unlike dogs, we just aren’t equipped for that. But we could find the source of a strong scent if it stayed still.

      And this scent was horribly, miserably, unmoving.

      The scent grew stronger the farther north we went, and after race-walking for less than a minute, glancing around frantically for any sign of the missing tom, I froze in my boots when my gaze snagged on a smear of red on a stalk of grass, half hiding a pale hand lying limp on the ground, fingers half curled into a fist.

      I made myself take that next step forward, in spite of the dread and fury pulsing inside me. And when the body came into full view, I gasped, horrified beyond words.

      If the whole mess hadn’t been nearly frozen, we would have smelled it sooner.

      Jake Taylor lay on his back, so covered in blood that at first I couldn’t make sense of the chaotic, violent images my eyes were sending my brain. There were too many gashes. Too much blood. Too little sense.

      “Oh, hell,” Marc said, and I flinched, though he’d spoken in little more than a whisper. He flipped open his phone and autodialed my father with the hand not holding the wrench while he squatted next to the body, careful not to step in the blood.

      But I still stared.

      I’d seen a good bit of carnage in my seven months as an enforcer, but nothing like this. Nothing so utterly destructive. So senselessly violent. Not even the scratch-fevered stray I’d seen perched in a tree, consuming a human victim. Even that

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