Chapter 10

I almost expected things to seem better in the morning. The flock waking up, stretching from the puppy-pile where we'd huddled together for comfort, shaking off the nightmares of the day before. But it wasn't. My eyes hurt from crying, my throat hurt from screaming, my jaw hurt from clenching my teeth on the whimpers that tried to escape me. And my heart ached with a pain that felt like it would never go away. I didn't even want it to.

I waited for Nudge to say she was hungry but she didn't.

I watched her, plucking at the sleeve of her jacket and she looked up, sad brown eyes meeting mine. She searched my face for comfort and I looked down – there was nothing comforting about your leader letting you down.

"So… we're going to bide our time a little – try to do some real research instead of just aiming in what we think is the right direction. Gazzy's killer cannot get away; we have to do this right," I said intently, "They've raised the stakes, it's time we did the same, but for that we need to know who and what we're facing. We need to find how far these guys are in, how high the order came from – meaning how much support they'll have from around the world."

I took a deep breath ending my spiel there and took in the determined faces around me. Fang gave me a small approving smile and a nod; I was being the leader they needed – they wanted this and, for once, there was absolutely no disagreement on how it would go down.

Marco wasn't the worst company I could have had. Our kind was notoriously cocky – we were, of course, made that way. If we were born without that particular personality trait we mightn't be at all useful. There wasn't much point in a shy spy. The trait made being with others of our kind a form of torture, always competing and trying to outdo the other – we'd been developed with a feline edge and cats were not usually social animals. As with any animal, we needed a hierarchy, a chain of command, and that's where most of us would have trouble.

Fights for dominance were not allowed. We could only go so far into letting our nature affect our mission. I struck lucky with Marco for a partner – he was a rare submissive and had no problem with bowing to my greater experience (cocky, remember?). He mimicked me when it came to teaching him and didn't try to improve on what I said – the perfect beginner student. Not that I didn't welcome improvements, if he could work out a better way to do things I was smart enough not to shoot him down for it, but when it's the basics there usually isn't a better way to do it.

Right now, for instance, I was slinking along a thick branch silent even to my superior hearing and Marco was doing exactly the same to my left and a few feet above. We were closing in on the Flock. It wasn't quite dawn yet so not a bad time for them to be getting themselves together to move on. Marco and I had tracked them through the night though. I inhaled deeply and started untangling the various scents 

to find each of the flocks, it was hard work tracking them when they could fly but knowing their scents would help for when they'd touched down. They didn't smell like normal humans.

I searched the young faces and saw the grief that hadn't been there yesterday. I frowned and peered more closely at them, something was missing, but it wasn't from them. I didn't feel the rush of adrenaline and pride that the others described, when you see the direct impact of what you've done reflected on the faces of your surviving enemies – when you see you have weakened them.

Angel looked towards us, like I knew she would, and Max followed her gaze. I shifted, meeting Max's eye, she stiffened as the weak light of day caught my eye, flashing green for a moment.

"Max," I heard Angel's clear, high voice, "She pulled the trigger,"