Liam released her. “Is this human all right about Shifters?”

“Yes, he likes them.”

“He?”

Kim laughed at Liam’s sudden, possessive stare. “Don’t worry. He’s just a friend. I’ve known him for a long time.”

Liam’s gaze softened a little, but Kim made a mental note to warn Silas not to touch her, not even casually.

“You make your calls,” Liam said, his voice gentling. He’d climbed down a long way from the ready-to-kill Shifter, but he was still tense. “Myself, I’m going to go visit Sandra again. I’d like to figure out why Fergus is pulling out all the stops to keep Brian from going to trial.”

Liam found Sandra in her backyard, alone. She’d wheeled her shallow charcoal-burning grill to the middle of the grass and started a fire in it. As Liam approached, he heard her chanting a prayer to the Earth goddess at the same time she tossed fragments of paper into the fire.

Liam approached silently. He meant to give her privacy to pray, but when he saw what she burned, he stepped forward and grabbed them out of her hands.

Sandra jerked around with a sharp intake of breath. Her wildcat fangs extended, her eyes going white.

Liam looked at the photos Sandra had been trying to burn. One showed Brian grinning at the camera with his arm around his mom, a bottle of beer dangling from his hand. Another showed Brian and his friends at a lake. Then Brian and a human girl, probably the murder victim, Michelle.

“It’s not desperate enough for this yet,” Liam said.

“Don’t stop me. I need to make sure he gets to the Summerland.”

“Brian’s not going anywhere near the Summerland.” Liam put his arm around Sandra’s shoulder, trying to let his warmth comfort her. “That’s why I’ve come, to ask for your help in springing him.”

Sandra looked up at him with dead eyes. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“That’s not true. Now come on, let’s go in and have something cold to drink. It’s too bloody hot out here to be doing any straight thinking.”

Sandra let Liam take her into the house, where he fetched her a cold beer. He opened a bottle himself and sank down onto her couch to drink it. He’d sat here a couple days ago, he remembered, massaging Kim’s feet. She had lovely feet, tiny in his big hands.

Liam tucked the photos of Brian into his pocket, knowing that if he let Sandra have them, she’d go back to burning them after he’d gone. An image of the loved one, sacrificed to fire, was the best way to make sure the loved one’s passage into the afterlife was peaceful.

Sandra drank the beer but made no sign of enjoying it. “What do you want, Liam?”

“I want to know about this human girl, Michelle. Did Brian intend to make her his mate?”

Sandra regarded him in surprise. “I don’t know.”

“Because he would never have killed her if he did, and you know it. I hadn’t thought of it before, because taking a human female for mate wasn’t something I’d ever considered. But Kim, she’s damn smart.”

Sandra eyed him sharply. “I heard that you claimed her.”

“That I did. Don’t worry, it was sanctioned by Fergus himself. He insisted on it, actually, though I intended to make the bond anyway.”

“Sun and moon?”

“Under the sun, so far. The moon is at its fullest tomorrow night, and Dad will bless us then. Come over. It will be a grand party.”

“And Kim, she’s fine with you claiming her?”

Liam thought of Kim’s confusion, her outrage. He grinned. “Maybe ‘fine’ is going a bit far, but she’ll get used to it. I’ll make sure of that.” He took a sip of beer and saw Sandra actually smile.

He got Sandra to let him have a look in Brian’s room. Brian wasn’t a cub anymore—he’d come of age and found his place in the hierarchy, but he had continued to live here to help out his mother. The custom of human kids moving out as soon as they turned eighteen had always struck Liam as odd. Shifters lived together in family groups for generations.

Sandra had lost her mate long before she and Brian had moved to Shiftertown. Only Brian and she lived in this house, and before Brian’s arrest, Sandra had been hopeful that Brian would soon claim a mate and fill the house with little ones. Now her eyes were devoid of any hope as she led Liam upstairs.

Brian occupied two rooms on the second floor—he’d used one as a bedroom, the other as an office. An old computer stood on his desk, jury-rigged to a couple other boxes as though he was trying to set up a network. Liam wasn’t a computer whiz by any means, though he could navigate the Internet fairly well. But he didn’t know enough to understand whether Brian was trying to make his computer do something illegal or simply work better.

Sandra turned away after she let Liam in, as though she couldn’t bear to enter Brian’s rooms. That was fine with Liam. He went through Brian’s desk thoroughly while he waited for the computer to boot up, but he didn’t find anything useful. Old receipts for gas, cardboard coasters, souvenirs from various attractions around Austin, and old raffle-type tickets.

The computer, it turned out, didn’t have the helpful screen full of icons to click on. A list of files scrolled by when Liam hit the Enter key, and then the cursor sat at the bottom of the screen, blinking at him.

“Shite.” He’d have to have Sean take a look. Sean knew far more about computers than Liam did, more than Shifters were allowed to know.