Shift (25 page)

My back arched. My ball joints cracked in and out of their sockets. I moaned as my pelvis contorted to accommodate a quadruped’s stance and posture. My mouth fell open out of habit when the Shift flowed over my head, creating new bulges and hollows in my face. Repositioning my eyes for a predator’s vision. I gasped as my jawbone undulated with the lengthening of my blunt human teeth into longer, deadly curved points. Hundred of tiny barbs sprouted in a wave across my tongue, arcing toward my throat, so that I could now lick a bone clean of all edible tissue.

For several minutes, my body pulled itself apart and reassembled the pieces in my new shape, but the familiar licks of pain from my joints and restructured musculature never eclipsed the acute agony in my right arm. Toward the end, the soles of my feet and the palm of my left hand thickened and bulged into paw pads. My nails lengthened and hardened into sharp claws.

But my stubborn right wrist remained mostly human. I was stalled there, and my fur would not come.

“Finish it, Faythe….” Marc murmured, careful to keep his distance. I wasn’t much danger to him at the beginning of my Shift, but I now had canines and three sets of deadly claws. If I lost control and he got in the way, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. “Let it come. You can’t finish until you let your arm Shift.”

I know!
I growled, but if he understood, he showed no sign.

“Do you really want to have to throw all your punches with your southpaw? Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to throw some resisting son of a bitch’s head back with your right fist? You can’t do that until it heals. Let it heal, Faythe.”

“Rrrrrgggghhhh!” I closed my eyes, clenched my newly formed jaw, and mentally shoved the Shift into my arm.

Pain exploded in my wrist. Both halves of my bone wrenched themselves into place, and I screamed again, an inarticulate expression of sheer torture.

Distantly, I heard the door open, and a brief, thin line of sunlight slanted across my in-between form. “Shhh!” Jace whispered as he closed and locked the door. The scent of sausage washed over me, and my feline stomach growled. “Faythe, you have to hold it down, or someone’s going to call the cops. You sound like you’re giving birth!”

Insensitive bastard.
He’d never hurt like this. He couldn’t have. He hadn’t Shifted until he’d had several weeks to recuperate from his broken bones.

Deep down, I knew Jace was right. Knew I was being irrational. But in that moment, I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted the pain to stop.

“You’re almost there,” Marc said. “Just your paw. Come on…”

I sucked in a deep breath, and once again directed the Shift toward my right hand. My fingers shortened. My palm lengthened. The agony in my newly formed wrist radiated halfway up my arm.

The instant my paw formed, my skin started to itch and burn all over. Fur sprouted in a wave across my back, rippling to rapidly cover the rest of me. And finally, as a sort of Shifting coup de grâce, the uneven line of fur flowed over my front legs. The gash in my left arm burned like hell as new fur sprouted to cover my new stitches and developing scar.

Then, at last, it was over.

I lay there panting from my physiological miracle, and the guys both stared at me. Marc sat on the floor a foot away, and Jace squatted several feet from him. “Damn,” he said finally, staring at me. “I can’t believe she really did it.”

“I can.” Marc smirked. He’d never had a doubt.

“I just know how much it hurt me after six weeks.” When Marc had beat the living shit out of Jace for leaving his keys for me to use to run away from the ranch. “She’s had less than two.” Jace crawled closer and stroked the fur and whiskers on my exposed left cheek. “You’re amazing, Faythe. I don’t know of anyone else who would have even tried that.”

I huffed at him. Then I licked his hand.

“I agree.” Marc stroked the entire length of my newly compact, powerful torso. “Now, Shift back so we can eat.”

T
he Shift back hurt just as badly, but it went a little quicker. And when I stood—naked and fully human—I could tell little difference in my broken arm. It still hurt like hell to move, so I kept it as still as possible.

Fortunately, the gash in my left arm had closed. It was red, and swollen, and tender—still a wound; not yet a scar—but it was no longer oozing blood, and it didn’t hurt quite as badly. After one more set of Shifts, Marc would remove the stitches.

As soon as I stood, I grabbed my towel and clutched it to my chest. I’d never had qualms about nudity before—Shifters have to be naked to Shift, unless they want to ruin a lot of clothes—but as we’d already established, everything had changed. Marc always had heat in his eyes when he looked at me, and I didn’t want to run the risk of Jace having a repeat
reaction
in front of him. Or me.

Unfortunately, with my wrist still in serious pain—much more than when it was immobilized in the cast—I had to let Marc rewrap me in my towel. I still couldn’t eat right-handed, but that didn’t stop me from devouring several sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits and two cartons of hash browns in under five minutes. It turns out hamburgers are hard to find before ten in the morning.

“What’s that?” I asked around a mouthful, nodding my head toward a plastic grocery bag on the far bed.

Jace swallowed a drink from his cup. “Duct tape, for Lance. Picked it up on the way to Burger King. I also got a brace for your wrist, in case you don’t have time to fully heal it.” Which was a definite possibility.

“Good thinking on both.” I couldn’t help smiling.

“So, let’s talk details.” Marc took a long drink from his soda, then set it down and focused on me as I swallowed the last bite of my biscuit. “When you’re whole again, we’re just going to sneak in—under the cover of glaring daylight—and do a quick snatch-’n’-grab?”

Jace snorted. “You make it sound dirty. It’s a covert operation, not a quickie in a public bathroom stall.”

I desperately wished he hadn’t said
quickie
and
bathroom
in the same sentence. Not when Marc was suspicious enough of my cast-soaking bath earlier.

“My point,” Marc continued, holding a hash brown patty aloft, “is that we need to know more than the broad strokes before we go in.”

As soon as he heard
broad strokes
, Jace laughed again and choked on a drink from his soda. Marc glared at him, and I shot him a frown. I wished we had time for a leisurely breakfast, peppered with stupid sex jokes, but somehow, I never seemed to find time for such simple pleasures.

“Okay, look.” Jace set his biscuit down on its paper wrapper and met my gaze across the table. He was serious now, and the transition was truly something to behold. I was fascinated by the fact that he could be so like Ethan one moment—bighearted and easygoing; all carefree jokes and smart-ass-ery—then so like Marc. So dedicated, and determined, and…formidable. “I think I know how to get into Cal’s guesthouse, and I think I can get Lance out without making anyone suspicious. Or not
too
suspicious, anyway.”

I raised my brows, and Marc nodded for him to go on.

“Well, my mom was begging me to come home the other day. After Brett died. I said hell, no, for obvious reasons. But what if I changed my mind?” His blue eyes shone with possibility. “What if I came to town, hoping for a peaceful reunion with my mother, but I didn’t want to just drop in without calling first?”

Something eased deep inside me. Some horrible tension. Some deeply rooted anxiety over our obvious and distressing lack of a plan. “Jace, that’s brilliant!” I balled up my wrapper one-handed and tossed it into the trash can beside the dresser, ignoring the sting and creepy
tugging
sensation in my half-healed gash.

Marc sat in silence for a moment, obviously weighing the idea. “Do you think they’ll fall for that?”

“Cal?” Jace scowled—his usual response to his stepfather’s name. “Probably not. But my mother will, and if I’m here under her invitation, it’s not trespassing. He has no excuse to kill me.”

I stirred the ice in my cup with the straw. “At least until he can drum up some bogus charge.”

“I don’t plan to be around that long. I’m thinking, I’ll go home, have a quick and painful reunion with my family, then find some excuse to get Lance alone long enough to knock him out and do Marc’s snatch-’n’-grab.” Jace grinned and Marc ignored the reference. “I might even be able to talk him into going somewhere with me willingly. In which case, we all get in on the snatch-’n’-grab. It’s more fun with a group, right?”

That time his grin was all for me. And I couldn’t resist shooting one back—if only because his plan was actually good. Much better than my “sneak through the woods, create a distraction, grab the guilty party, and run” idea. And Jace’s was much less likely to get us caught. Or at least more likely to give us a head start. Hopefully we’d have an hour or more before anyone realized Jace and Lance were missing, rather than just late.

Finally, Marc nodded, and neither of us missed the appreciative lift of his left brow. “Okay, sounds like a plan.”

We decided I should Shift into and out of cat form one more time before Jace called his mother, because there was no way to disguise the sounds of the process, and if she heard me, our ruse would be over before it had even started.

The second set of Shifts was a little easier, but only because my recent meal had given me more energy. My right arm still hurt like I was being tortured for information, but by the time I sat up again in human form, my left arm had healed to a thick but raw-looking pink scar. It would have taken several days for it to heal that far on its own.

I talked Marc into removing the stitches while Jace called his mother, to save time.

“Jace?” Patricia Malone’s voice rose into the dog whistle range in surprise. Evidently her son didn’t call very often.

“Yeah, Mom, it’s me.” Jace crossed into the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet seat but left the door open. He couldn’t stop us from overhearing, but wanted at least the illusion of privacy. I could only imagine how uncomfortable that conversation must be for him.

“Are you…? What’s wrong?”

Marc used a tiny pair of scissors to clip the first stitch, then tugged it from my skin with tweezers. It felt weird but didn’t hurt. With any luck, I’d regained full use of my left arm.

“Nothing. Well, Brett’s dead.” Jace leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the bathroom wall. “Do you still want me to come home? For the funeral?”

“Of course. Will you, please? It would mean so much to…Melody.”

Jace sighed, and I heard genuine reluctance in the sound. I couldn’t imagine how nervous he must be. Nor could I imagine having a father figure who hated me, and openly lamented not killing me as a kitten.

“Is Cal okay with it? Did you ask him?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jace,” Patricia snapped. “I don’t need to ask him if my own son can come home. You’re always welcome here. When can you come?”

Jace lifted his head and met my gaze as Marc pulled out the third stitch. I nodded, the best I could do to tell him he could back out if he wanted to. We could find another way. He shook his head; Jace was fully committed. “I’m already here.”

Patricia Malone burst into relieved, overwhelmed sobs, and Jace slid one strong hand over his eyes to hide the tears he didn’t want us to see. Marc busied himself with the fourth stitch, but I could tell by his determination not to look up—and by the fact that he pinched my skin along with the thread—that he was listening, too. And that he was not unaffected.

“Where?” Patricia asked, when she had herself under control. “Where are you?”

“I’m…around. I just…I wanted to make sure Cal’s okay with this before I come over.”

His mother clucked her tongue. “I told you he’s fine with it.”

“No.” Jace wiped his eyes and frowned at nothing. “You didn’t. I don’t want to make things worse.”

He was telling the truth. But he was also setting it up perfectly. Malone would be less suspicious if he knew Jace was reluctant to come in the first place. And it wouldn’t hurt if he thought his stepson was afraid of him. Malone could not know what a serious threat Jace had become, or he would never let his guard down enough to let Jace leave his sight.

“You won’t. Come home, Jace.”

Jace hung his head, hiding most of his face behind his hand and the small phone. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

He sat in the bathroom for several minutes after the phone call, then he closed the door and I heard water running in the shower. And I might have heard him crying softly, though I couldn’t be sure.

“He’ll be fine,” Marc whispered while the water ran. “He’ll do his job. Better now than ever.”

“I know.”

Marc was working on the last zag of my massive new scar when the bathroom door finally opened. Jace stepped out in a clean change of clothes from his carryon, wearing his business face—completely void of emotion. Which is how I knew he was both nervous and eager. And dreading every second of the most personal assignment he’d ever accepted.

“How long will it take you to get there?” I’d slept through most of the drive to the motel, so I had no clue how far we were from Malone’s home base.

“About fifteen minutes.”

Which meant he’d have to leave in about forty. “That’s not enough time. I can’t fit in enough Shifts to fully heal before then.”

“I know, but I can’t just pop in and ask Lance to get in the car. I have to be there a little while. Talk to my mom. Deal with Cal. Let everyone think I’m really there because of Brett.”

I started to protest, but Marc was faster. “He’s right. But we only have one car.” He looked up from my arm, now focused on Jace. “You’ll come up with another one—one without Faythe’s blood in the backseat—and we’ll meet you out there once she’s good to go.”

“We need to leave town by four-thirty to be sure we’ll make it to the nest in time,” I said. “That gives us an hour of padding for bathroom breaks, and that’s cutting it pretty damn close.”

Jace glanced at the clock. It was five minutes to noon. “We’ll aim for four, for the takedown,” he said, and his eyes narrowed in concern as his focus settled on me. “Can you be ready by then?”

“I sure hope so.” I could think of very few things I wanted to do less than spend the next four hours Shifting with a broken arm. “Where should we meet you?”

“At the deer stand.”

I frowned over what felt like too big a risk. “What if they’ve already found our scents there?”

“Then we’re already screwed,” Marc answered, and Jace nodded grimly.

I swallowed, and my throat felt thick. “Okay. So, all we need is a car.”

“I saw a rental place about a quarter mile east of here,” Marc said. “They had several vans and SUVs in the parking lot. You can probably get something with tinted windows and plenty of room in back.”

Jace nodded. “Walking’s a bit of a risk, but since everyone knows I’m coming to town now, they’ll all probably stay home, waiting to see Cal’s head explode. Or waiting to see him kill me.”

I frowned, and Jace shook his head. “I’m kidding. He wouldn’t kill me.” I raised both brows, and he shrugged. “Okay, he’d
totally
kill me. But not in front of my mom. I’ll stick close to her until I’m ready to head out with Lance.”

“What if Lance won’t go?”

Jace shrugged again. “He will. And if he tries to balk, I’ll take him aside and tell him I have a private message from Parker. He’ll want to hear that, either because he still gives a shit about his brother, or because he’ll see Parker as a way to gather intel on the enemy.”

Marc crossed both arms over his chest. “And if something goes wrong?”

Jace’s jaw tightened. “Plan B. Fight hard and run like hell.”

My stomach flipped and twisted. If something went wrong, we wouldn’t make it out alive. I had no doubt of that. Marc and Jace would die. Kaci would die. And if I couldn’t escape, I’d eventually have to make them kill me. If my choices were death or Calvin Malone, I’d choose death, hands down.

I Shifted into and out of cat form twice more before Jace left, and during my last Shift, Marc went into the bathroom and closed the door to call the car rental place while Jace was still there to watch me Shift, just in case.

After my fourth set of Shifts, the pain in my right arm had downgraded from mother
fucker
-it’s-breaking-all-over-again to it-merely-hurts-like-hell. I lay naked and sweating and gasping on the floor, my eyes closed, counting my own racing heartbeats in an effort to slow them.

“You okay?” Jace knelt on the floor beside me and ran one hand gently over my shoulder. It was a casual gesture, and one any of my fellow enforcers would have made in his position, with me lying there in obvious pain and exhaustion. But his touch raised goose bumps on my overheated skin, and my heart raced in spite of my best attempts to calm it.

“Physically? Yes. Probably. Except for the fact that I don’t want to move. Ever again.”

He chuckled, and his voice went deep and wistful. “You’re amazing, Faythe.”

I turned my head just enough so that I could peer up at him. “Says the man about to walk into the lion’s den armed with nothing but hope.”

“And faith.” Something about the way he said it made me wonder if he’d spelled it with a
Y
in his head. “How could I be afraid to face Cal when you faced down a whole Flight of thunderbirds with nothing but a cell phone? And look what you’re putting yourself through to save Kaci.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I got her into this. I
have
to get her back.”

“You were trying to keep her away from Calvin.”

“Yeah,
that
went well.”

“It’ll work out,” he insisted, as Marc’s voice echoed from the tiny bathroom while he haggled with the rental car clerk. “We’ll make it.”

I sat up, and he wrapped the towel around me. I was tired of wearing white cotton, but saw no use in putting on the only set of clean clothes I had, when I was just going to get sweaty all over again with the next few Shifts.