“They don’t know that.”

Jace flinched again when I flipped the gun over, looking for the safety. Most cats I knew had an innate fear of guns, which went hand in hand with our fear of hunters. Thanks to our fantastic hearing and reflexes, there really wasn’t much danger of us getting shot, but the chances of dying from a bullet wound were greater than the chances of dying from the average mauling. To which our scar-riddled bodies could attest.

Thus, no one looked particularly comfortable with me waving a gun around the room.

“What are you doing?” Marc started across the floor toward me—brave tom—but my father reached me first.

“I’m checking for bullets. To see how many are in there.”

“What are you going to do, stand on the porch and hold a turkey shoot?” Taylor asked, running one hand over his close-cropped hair.

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that.” I frowned and turned the pistol over again. “How do you open this thing?”

My father calmly plucked the gun from my hand, then pulled back a lever at the top of the grip with his thumb. Something clicked, and the clip slid into his waiting palm. He held it up for me to see, then slid it back into the grip of the gun until it clicked again. “One in the chamber, fifteen in the clip. Safety’s on.”

He gave me back the pistol, and I gaped at my Alpha like I’d never met him. “How did you…?”

My dad lifted both graying brows. “When are you going to stop being surprised by what I know?”

“Where did you learn about guns?”

He sighed but looked pleased by my interest. “Facing your fears is the best way to overcome them. But that’s a story for another day. And Ed’s right. You can’t just walk out there and start shooting.”

“I know.” Even if I wanted to kill one of the thunderbirds—and I wasn’t willing to kill in anything other than immediate self-or friend-defense—if our gunman shot and missed, they’d know we were bluffing. “I was hoping to scare them off long enough for us to…come up with a better plan. Learn how to fight them, or work on finding more proof. Or at least get the power back on.”

Without it, we couldn’t access the Internet, charge our phones, or even cook. Much less heat the house. Heat wasn’t an immediate concern, with all the bodies keeping things warm, but we would get cold eventually. And we would definitely run out of food. We’d stocked up the day before, but two dozen full-grown werecats go through food very, very quickly. We’d eaten fifteen pounds of beef in the chili alone.

“Okay, that’s a solid, attainable goal.” Uncle Rick nodded sagely.

Taylor frowned. “No, it’s spinning our wheels. Even if we get the power back on without any trouble—and for the record, this smells like a setup to me—they’ll just knock it out again. We need a permanent solution.”

“We’re not going to get rid of them without killing them,” Marc said. “And that’ll just bring more of them on the fly. Pun intended.”

No one laughed.

“They’ll lay off if we can come up with proof that we’re not involved,” I repeated. That was our only hope for a peaceful resolution.

“Yeah, and they’d disappear into a wormhole, if we knew how to open one,” Michael said from the doorway, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Why are you holding a gun?”

“I think we should try threatening them. Maybe clip a couple of wings in the process. We have to show them we’re willing to fight back.”

“Even if it brings more birds down on us?” My father eyed me with an odd intensity, as if he were looking for something in particular from my answer.

“Yes.” I nodded definitively to punctuate. “We can’t just cower here, waiting to be picked off one by one. They’re birds of prey, and we’re acting like a bunch of mice trembling in a field. We all need to remember that in the natural order of things, cats hunt birds, not the other way around.”

“Agreed…” my Alpha began. But he looked less than convinced by my proposition, so I sucked in a deep breath and tried again.

“Look, even if they leave long enough to bring reinforcements, that’ll give us time to arm ourselves and get the power back on.”

“Arm ourselves?” Ed Taylor asked, and I turned to see him holding a fresh bottle of Scotch. I’d never seen Taylor drink, but with his eyes still red from crying over Jake, I could hardly blame him. “With guns?”

“Yes.”

Taylor set his glass on the bar and poured an inch from the bottle. “We’ve never resorted to such crude measures before, and frankly, I’m afraid to think where a step like that might lead.”

I met his gaze steadily, trying to strike a balance between confidence and criticism. “We’ve never been held prisoner in our own home before, either. And I’m afraid to think where that might lead.”

“A valid point,” Di Carlo declared, and I could have hugged Vic’s dad.

My uncle Rick reached for the bottle of Scotch. “So, does anyone know how to fire that thing?” He looked pointedly at his brother-in-law.

My father rubbed his forehead. “I was a decent shot in college, but I haven’t fired a gun in nearly a quarter of a century.”

I shrugged. “Has anyone else ever shot a gun?”

No one spoke, so I held the pistol out to my dad. He sighed but took it and turned to his fellow Alphas. “Are we in agreement over this course of action? Should I call for a vote?”