“No pink. It clashes with my hair.” Which wasn’t an issue my redheaded brother had to deal with.

“Got it.” Lucas got out of the car, then bent to peer in at me. “I won’t be gone long enough for it to get cold in here. Stay put.”

I watched him walk toward the entrance to the mall, and where it shone through the clouds, the sinking sun seemed to set his hair on fire. I had maybe half an hour of daylight left, but that was half an hour too much.

A glance around the lot showed me more cars than shoppers, and the few people I saw were all headed toward the mall, focused on getting out of the cold before the rain started. They didn’t look back once they’d left their cars. No one was watching me.

I wasn’t going to get a better shot.

Still watching the parking lot for any unwanted attention, I stripped out of Robyn’s jacket, careful not to get my hands any bloodier than they already were. My green sweater was clean, except for a spot of blood at the hem, which had been exposed when I’d…taken care of the Hargrove problem.

I’d known from the moment Jace started questioning him that I would have to kill Hargrove to keep him from talking, and I would not let myself feel too bad about that. Hargrove had tortured and killed many of my fellow shifters, and he’d have done the same—or worse—to me if he’d gotten the chance. And to Jace. And to all of his men, including my brothers. But I’d hoped for a more obviously justified homicide; I’d been prepared to bait him into attacking me.

What I hadn’t counted on was Hargrove’s cowardly nature. As soon as he’d been disarmed, he’d considered himself helpless. I’d had to act with no obvious provocation, and the only part I regretted was how that would make Jace look. I desperately didn’t want my actions to reflect badly upon him, but in that moment, I’d had no other choice.

In this one, you don’t either.

I shoved Robyn’s jacket onto the floorboard and glanced briefly at my ruined phone, wishing for the millionth time that it hadn’t gone for a dive in a pot of greasy water. Or that Lucas had left his accessible. But like Faythe had once told me, wishes are for victims. Survivors make their own luck.

With that in mind, I climbed into the back of the truck cab, where I found several plastic bags wadded up on the floor. Lucas couldn’t drive for more than half an hour without a soda and a stick of beef jerky, and he always threw the grocery bags over his shoulder, onto the backseat of the king cab.

I wadded the bag up in my fist, then got out of the truck and closed the door softly, stuffing my hands and the bag into my pockets. The blood splattered across my dark jeans could easily have been water, and no human nose would be able to tell otherwise. There was nothing I could do about the blood on my white boots, although the drier it got, the more it looked like tar and the less it looked like blood.

Shivering from the cold, I walked away from the mall, headed for a gas station across the street. It had recently been upgraded with new credit-card-accepting pumps and a digital sign, but the building itself was old and still had a bathroom built onto the outside, with its own entrance/exit.

The restroom wasn’t an ideal place to shed my human disguise, but that was better than stripping down to a blue leotard in a phone booth.

The overgrown field stretching behind the gas station was just a bonus.

I kept my head down as I crossed the street, passing two customers and the large front window, but I already knew that everyone who saw me would remember me. I was the height of a young teenager with enough hair for three girls my size, and I had no coat. They probably all thought I was a runaway.

That wasn’t far from the truth.

The restroom had no gender sign, and the door stood open to reveal a small, filthy space. I closed the door from the inside and considered locking it, but I wouldn’t be able to unlock it without human hands, so I settled for the desperate hope that no one would try to come in while the door was closed.

A glance at myself in the mirror showed a streak of blood I’d missed on my left cheek, but the hair hanging in my face would have covered that. My eyes looked glazed with exhaustion—or the remnants of shock?—yet I recognized determination in the set of my jaw. I was out of options and out of time, and the only hope I had for my own future was the possibility that taking out Darren myself, before he could capture or kill his next victim, would be enough to redeem me for killing Hargrove.

Shivering from both the cold and my own nerves, I pulled my sweater over my head and stuffed it into the plastic grocery bag. My boots came off next, followed by my pants, then underwear. Only once I stood naked in a frigid, filthy public restroom did the absurd, dangerous reality of my situation truly sink in.

Would leaving the restroom as a giant cat really be any safer than walking around covered in blood? The police were apt to get involved either way, considering they’d lost three citizens in the past month to a feral wildcat. And that at least one semi-local officer knew about shifters in general, and about me in particular.

Fear and haste fueled my shift, and my bones lengthened and popped, rearranging my skeleton out of some primordial instinct I would never truly understand. My eyes ached with pressure and my jaw crackled as a new structure of bone and teeth was imposed. My limbs popped in and out of joint, burning as if I were made of fuel and flame rather than flesh and bone. An itch washed over my skin in a brutally slow wave as fur grew from my follicles. My nails hardened into claws, lengthening, thickening, and when I tried to grip the floor, they dug into the concrete, chipping away tiny particles of grit.

My tail swished behind me, stirring dirt from the ground. I sniffed, and my nose twitched, my whiskers bobbing on the lower edge of my vision. And as my senses sharpened, the stew of old scents became a foul backdrop for my cruel transformation, but I could only breathe it in, waiting for the pain to fade.

When it finally did, after minutes that felt like hours, I stood tall on four legs, welcoming a configuration of bones and muscle I hadn’t taken on in weeks. My ears rotated on top of my head, instinctively listening for danger, but I heard only ordinary sounds. Water running inside the convenience store. Gasoline rushing from thick hoses into rapidly filling tanks. Customers chatting as they pumped gas, lamenting the encroaching clouds and the frigid gusts.

Fighting skittishness—werecats do not belong in unlocked public restrooms—I made myself wait until the two cars closest to the restroom drove away. Every moment that passed drew the cloud cover closer and pulled the sun nearer to the horizon, but once I left the restroom, I would be exposed for the entire eighty-foot sprint into the empty field. Anyone who saw me would call the cops, which was why I couldn’t leave my blood-covered clothes in the restroom.