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car, frigid against my back, even through my jacket. My sore arms hung at my sides and I took several deep breaths, letting the cold reinvigorate me. The air smelled like blood and pine, an oddly festive combination.
    My arm throbbed where that bastard had bit me, and though frozen blood crusted the rip in my pants, my leg had stopped bleeding. But it hurt with every move I made.
    Marc watched me inspect my wounds, his eyes shining in the glare from the Suburban’s headlights. He glanced from me to the woods, where the reinforcements presumably raced toward us. “Faythe, get in the car,” he said over the disharmonious yowls of the injured cats. His eyes never left the trees, though he was breathing hard and bleeding from countless gashes. “With you and Manx gone, they’ll have no reason to keep fighting. Ethan, get them out of here. Painter and I will clean up, and I’ll call you when we leave.”
    “I’m not leaving you behind!” I shouted, and only when my breath puffed up in front of my eyes did I realize I could no longer feel my fingers. Or my nose. I’d cooled down too quickly after that first round and was now getting stiff.
    Marc nodded to Ethan, who sidestepped an injured but still hissing cat and pulled open the driver-side door. He shoved me inside before I could protest, then climbed in after me.
    “Buckle up,” he ordered, already sliding the gearshift into Drive. “If you go through the windshield, I’m not stopping for you.” He swerved around several motionless feline forms glinting with moonlight and blood. We slid for a moment on ice, and I whacked my head on the window, then gravel crunched when we pulled off the shoulder and back onto the road. As we drove away, I saw Marc and Painter walking backward toward the trees on our side of the road, each pulling two dead cats by the tails.
    “We can’t just leave them,” I insisted, as Manx crouched over Des in the car seat behind me.
    Ethan sighed, eyes on the rearview mirror. “They’re moving bodies, not storming the Bastille. They’ll be on the road in a couple of minutes.”
    “We should have helped,” I snapped, turning to stare through the rear window as Marc went back for another corpse. How many had we killed? “And what the hell do you know about the Bastille?”
    He shrugged, squinting into the patch of road illuminated by the headlights. “Angela wrote a paper on the French Revolution.”
    “And you read it?” My tone conveyed more than adequate skepticism. Angela, his girlfriend, was a college senior. It was an odd pairing, to say the least, but their “relationship” had outlasted my most conservative estimate by nearly three months.
    No one had won the office pool.
    “I am literate. And no, we should not have helped Marc and Painter. We should get Manx and the baby to safety.” Ethan wiped a dark smear from his forehead with the back of one palm. “Not to mention Vic. He’s bleeding pretty badly.”
    Oh yeah.
    The crinkle of plastic drew my eyes to the third row, where Vic was spreading black plastic sheeting across the seat, to catch his own blood. Even injured, he was trying to protect his upholstery. Must have been a guy thing.
    But my brother was right—a decidedly odd turn of events. So I took one last look at Marc and Painter and made my way to the back of the vehicle to see what I could do for Vic. Then we did what I couldn’t remember any Pride cat ever doing before: we ran from the strays.
    We’d been driving for about ten minutes when Marc called my cell phone.
    “You guys okay?” I asked by way of a greeting, as I fiddled with the vent above the rear bench seat. I’d bandaged Vic as well as I could, then stayed in the back to keep an eye on him.
    Over the line, Painter’s crappy old engine protestedas he accelerated. They were on the road, too. “All scratched up, but I’ve been worse,” Marc said.
    “Me, too,” Painter spoke up, his voice slightly muffled from distance to the phone.
    “What