Victor Di Carlo shot me a long-suffering smile, then turned back to the road. "Speed limit's seventy-five, Faythe. I'm doing eighty. But if you think you can get there faster on foot, be my guest."

But of course, I couldn't. Not even on four paws. A cheetah can run sixty-five miles an hour, but can't sustain that speed for long. And I'm no cheetah. So I was stuck drumming my stubby nails on the passenger-seat armrest in Vic's Suburban as it stubbornly maintained a speed I considered unacceptable.

"Relax." Vic flicked on the left blinker, then moved the SUV smoothly out of the right lane to pass a lumbering semi. "We'll get there on schedule, and Marc will be waiting."

I nodded, locking and unlocking the passenger-side door until he glared at me. "Sorry."

"Jeez, Faythe, you act like you haven't seen him in weeks," Ethan said, and I twisted in my seat to see him roll his eyes from the back row, his usual good-humored grin firmly in place. He was the youngest of my four brothers— only two years my elder—and the one most likely to beat me up in training, then bring ice for my bruises. "How long has it been?"

I stared out my window at empty fields and winter-bare trees growing dim in the late-afternoon light. "Nine weeks, tomorrow." A lot had happened since Marc had been exiled, and the most notable example lay sleeping in the seat behind me.

Manx's baby. Des. The two-week-old was fastened into a reclined, backward-facing car seat on the bench next to his mother. Who somehow managed to look disarmingly beautiful, even with drool trailing from her open mouth. Since the bab