Following the voices led me to the top of a flight of stairs. I stopped and pressed my back against the wall, listening.
They were arguing about something. I couldn’t make out what it was, but the female voice sounded angry, and the male voice sounded more placating. Cooper wasn’t there, or if he was, he was sitting by silently, observing his people while they fought.
Cooper had taken Chloe and Trigby with him when he went to get Shelby. My stomach sank. Either there were more werewolves than I had suspected, or Cooper was already back with my girlfriend. Neither option was good. To be honest, I had hoped that Cooper’s people wouldn’t come back at all. Shelby wasn’t some defenseless little flower, and with her mother and sister right there, she stood a good chance of taking out any attacker. But Cooper knew her. He might know how to get around whatever security the Tanners had in place.
Bastard. I didn’t enjoy thinking of myself as a killer, but I couldn’t deny that I would enjoy seeing him dead.
Slowly, I peeled away from the wall and began creeping down the stairs, so tense that my shoulders felt like they had been replaced by iron bars. The knives in my hand were no real comfort. I still couldn’t use my left hand for knife-throwing, and this wasn’t the sort of situation I wanted to walk into one-handed and without a gun. I listened even harder as I descended, hoping for something to indicate how many werewolves were beneath me, and whether they were the two I had seen before.
The step beneath my foot creaked loudly.
I froze, pulling back a step, but it was too late: the alarm had been sounded. “Blithe?” a man’s voice, much closer than it had been only a few seconds before: he was approaching. Dandy. That was just what I needed. “Did you need something? You know you’re supposed to stay with the Price fellow until Cooper gets back.”
Maybe this was just what I needed. Now I knew that Cooper hadn’t returned with Shelby, even if this confirmed the existence of at least two more werewolves. Like Blithe, this man sounded faintly familiar; I had probably walked past him at some point, maybe even been introduced to him, and failed to register anything out of the ordinary. Assuming I got through this alive, I was going to recommend the family seriously improve our werewolf detection training.
A narrow male face appeared around the wall separating the stairwell from the front room. He had time to widen his eyes and open his mouth in preparation for shouting for help, and then a knife was in his throat, making it impossible for him to do more than choke. He staggered backward, out of my line of sight, before I could throw another knife.
“What the fuck—?!” shrieked the female voice.
So much for stealth. I ran the rest of the way down the stairs, whipping around the corner into the living room to find a skinny teenage girl holding up the man with the knife in his throat, a terrified expression on her face.
“We didn’t do it,” she said rapidly. “We didn’t kidnap you we didn’t touch you we didn’t do anything please. Please don’t do this. Please we haven’t hurt anyone please.” The man was still choking and clawing at the knife in his throat, and for a moment, I was afraid I had acted too quickly: that I had killed, or at least direly injured, an innocent bystander.
Then I noticed her hands. They were shortening, the fingers becoming stubby as the nails became more pronounced, stretching into claws that dug into the man’s skin without quite breaking it. These people were werewolves. Whether they had chosen this or not, they were, for the moment, the enemy.
She proved it a second later, when she shoved the man aside, revealing the reshaped angles of her legs, which had stretched and bent while his body had blocked them from view, giving her a wolf’s jumping power while leaving her with a human’s height and versatility. She snarled, showing a mouth full of teeth, and leaped for me, clawed hands extended.
I flung a knife at her, aiming for the dark triangle of her open mouth. She batted the blade aside while it was in the air. Shit.
With only two knives remaining and no chance of getting more, I did the only sensible thing: I turned and ran, trusting panic to grant me greater speed. There was a door only a few feet away. I wrenched it open, revealing a dark porch, the night spread out beyond it like a prayer—and Cooper, Shelby slung over his shoulder, standing there. The look on his face must have mirrored mine, all stunned confusion and disbelief. Then it hardened, and his eyes flashed amber.
Well, shit.
Cooper recovered first. “Don’t kill him!” he barked, directing his words to the girl behind me. I raised my knives, preparing to throw, and stopped as clawed hands seized my arms and yanked them painfully behind my back. “Disarm,” Cooper snarled.
The hands tightened, compressing until I could no longer keep my right hand closed against the pain. The knives clattered to the ground.
“He put one of those in Albert’s throat,” said the unnamed female werewolf, her words garbled by her mouthful of lupine teeth but still intelligible. “Albert’s not getting better.”
“Silver throwing knives?” asked Cooper, looking back to my face. I didn’t answer him. He smiled. “Clever. I’m assuming Blithe is dead?”
“You’re next,” I said. “Shelby—”
“Not bitten yet. Thought I’d show you I mean business and give you one more chance to come along willingly. That way you can bite her yourself, once you understand what we’re offering you.” Cooper’s smile was full of teeth, but they still looked mostly human. He was keeping himself under control, for now. “And before you start thinking that we’re easily fooled, remember, I left Blithe with you for a reason.”
I stared at him. It had seemed awfully convenient, me left alone with a single werewolf, especially one who was so cocky that she’d let herself get into range. “You set her up.”
“She thought she was in charge. I thought you might have something up your sleeve.” Cooper shrugged. “Guess I was right and she was wrong. Thanks for cleaning up that little mess for me. Now we have a better understanding of how far you’ll go, and I don’t have to kill her myself.”
“Albert,” whined the werewolf who was holding me.
“He should’ve known better than to go investigate a strange noise—I’m assuming that’s what happened, yeah?” Cooper didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed past us, carrying Shelby inside. The door remained open, but there was no way I was making a break for it: not now, not with Shelby in his control. He might be willing to refrain from biting me until I consented. I knew he wasn’t going to offer her the same courtesy.
Besides, Chloe and Trigby appeared on the porch almost as soon as he’d vacated it, prowling out of the darkness as naked as the day they’d been born. Chloe smirked at me when she saw me. “Like what you see?” she purred. “Tanner girls don’t know how to have fun. Maybe once you’re properly one of us, you and I can play a little chase-the-rabbit around the meadow, hmm?”
“Business first, pleasure later,” snapped Cooper. “Deb, keep hold of him. Chloe, come help me tie her down.”
“You’re no fun at all,” complained Chloe. She stepped past me. “Ew, what happened to Albert? Is he dead?”
“He will be soon,” said Cooper, sounding unconcerned. “Deb, come on. Kitchen, now.”
Deb growled, apparently too upset to continue using words. Her claws were breaking the skin on my arms. I winced, but did my best not to struggle. She was on the verge of losing control, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to disobey Cooper.
“Better move, Deb,” said Trigby, not unkindly. “You know the boss doesn’t like being kept waiting.”
“Hate him,” spat Deb, her voice now so distorted that it was virtually incomprehensible. She turned, yanking me along with her. I caught a glimpse of Albert, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor—and apparently quite dead—and then I was being shoved across the room and down a short hallway that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see before. It
ended in a small, homey kitchen with a tile floor and floral wallpaper. A dining set took up a large portion of the available floor space. Shelby, still unconscious, had been dumped into one of the chairs, and Cooper was in the process of tying her hands behind her.
“Put him down,” he said, jerking his chin toward an open chair.
Deb shoved me into the seat, harder than she had to, ripping my arms even more in the process. This time, I didn’t bother to conceal my wince. Cooper was watching. The more hurt he thought I was, the better my situation was going to be.
“You’ve killed two of my people,” he said. “I hope you understand that you’re going to replace them. I am a fair man. I know you may have had other plans for your life. At the same time, I can’t allow you to weaken us like this.”
I stared at him. “You put me in a situation where it was her or me.”
“Yes, and you could have chosen to let her kill you and thus spare yourself a lifetime on all fours. You elected to live. That’s good for me—I wanted you to make that choice—but it’s not necessarily best for you.” Cooper smiled. “At least you’ll still be together.”
“It didn’t have to be like this,” I said. “It still doesn’t.”
“I think you’ll find that we’re well past the point of no return,” said Cooper. He moved to stand behind Shelby, licking his lips once, and then bent forward, like he was going to kiss her neck.
I couldn’t help it. I jerked against Deb’s hands, cutting myself worse in the process, to no avail. Her grip was too tight. I wasn’t breaking free.
Someone rang the doorbell.
The entire room went still. Cooper snarled, straightening again, and looked first to Chloe and Trigby—who were naked—and then to Deb, who was half-transformed and had shredded much of her clothing. Seeing no useful flunkies, he lowered his voice and said, “Be quiet. I don’t know who followed us here, but they don’t know for sure that anyone’s inside.”
The doorbell rang again. Shelby groaned, beginning to stir. Cooper checked the knots on her hands, looking flustered for the first time. Too much was happening at once; his plans might be elaborate, but they didn’t cover anything like this.
“We can kill whoever it is,” said Chloe, in a mild, almost disinterested tone.
“And then we have one more body on our hands,” snapped Cooper. “How many of those do you think we can feed to the bunyips before somebody notices that the locals have started disappearing? We need to be careful, until we’re the dominant species.”
“As I told your former boss back at the Society, the Covenant is not going to tolerate an entire continent of werewolves,” I said. “They’re going to find out, and they’re going to stop you.” And even more people were going to die. No matter how we sliced things, a lot of lives were going to end if this fight continued.
“Let them come,” said Cooper. “They’re only men, by their own design, and we’ll be something so much more that they won’t stand a chance.”
Someone knocked on the back door.
Every head in the kitchen swung toward the sound, except for Shelby’s; she was still unconscious, slumped forward in her chair to the limits of the ropes that bound her hands behind her. Everyone was silent, even me. Crying for help would endanger Shelby, and might get whoever was standing outside killed.
The knock came again. And then, to my surprise, the doorknob turned.
“You didn’t lock the door,” said Chloe, in a surprised tone that would have sounded more natural coming from the ingénue in a horror movie than it did from a naked werewolf. “We’re hiding in the middle of nowhere, and you didn’t lock the door.”
There wasn’t time for Deb to answer. The door swung open to reveal Helen Jalali, dressed in tan slacks and a cream-colored sweater, holding what looked like a Bible against her chest. She smiled pleasantly as she looked around the room at the stunned werewolves, unperturbed by the blood and nudity. “Hello,” she said. “Have you heard the good word of Wadjet, Protector of Egypt and great snake of the Milky Way?”
The stunned silence stretched on. Pagan missionaries were not, it seemed, on Cooper’s docket for the evening.
“I have some pamphlets, if this is a bad time,” Helen continued. “I think you’ll find that when you’re looking for a patron goddess to consume your eternal soul and save you from the fires of your current religion’s afterlife, Wadjet is absolutely the best choice available.”
“Get out,” growled Cooper.
Helen’s expression cooled as she looked at him. “That isn’t a very charitable reaction to a neighbor expressing her religious freedom,” she said.
“Get out!” Cooper shouted, and stepped toward her, menace evident in his posture.
“Oh, if you’re going to be like that—Alex, cover your eyes!” Helen whirled, throwing her book as hard as she could at Deb’s face. The cover came open on impact, and a glass jar full of my lycanthropy treatment fell out, shattering as it hit the edge of the table. Aconite and silver nitrate sprayed everywhere. Deb howled and fell back, clutching at her arms where the liquid had hit. Chloe danced away from the spill.
Cooper growled. So did Trigby, who stalked forward, the bones of his spine beginning to distort. Helen hissed, her fangs descending from the roof of her mouth and gleaming with amber beads of poison. Trigby and Cooper were both Australian; they knew better than to mess with a snake that was determined to stand its ground. They stopped where they were, apparently too perplexed to continue.
That was the pause I needed. I jumped to my feet before Deb could grab me, pulling another knife from my belt and whirling to jam it into her chest. Throwing knives aren’t designed for stabbing people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them that way, if you have to. Deb’s eyes went wide, and she clawed at me before she collapsed, fingers scrabbling for the knife.
I have an excellent grasp of human and demi-human anatomy. She wasn’t transformed enough to have moved her lungs. Whether she died of silver poisoning or oxygen deprivation didn’t matter to me; what mattered was that she stopped moving in a matter of seconds, leaving me with only three werewolves to contend with.
Three werewolves, and an immobilized girlfriend. Chloe jumped up on the table before I could move, grabbing Shelby by the hair and snarling, “I’ll break her neck, don’t you push it. I will kill the little bitch!”
Her declaration appeared to be what Cooper and Trigby needed to hear. They started moving again, stalking toward Helen with the calm, practiced precision of wolves going for their prey. For Helen’s part, she smiled, the expression only slightly twisted by her fangs, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “THAT’S A GO!”
The shout preceded the front door being kicked open by less than a second. “Get the fuck away from my sister, you asshole!” Raina was the first Thirty-Sixer into the kitchen. When she saw me standing, she yanked a pistol out of her belt and lobbed it at me, yelling, “Think fast!”
I caught the gun without thinking about it. The safety was on, thank God. Raina might be a little more cavalier about safety than I liked, but she wasn’t trying to get us all killed.
Charlotte was the next into the room, followed by three men I didn’t recognize. One of them shot Trigby in the face as he was turning, and he went down. Cooper tried to lunge for Helen, but she was already dancing backward, out of the doorway, and slamming the door behind herself. He was too slowed by shock and confusion to stop her. I was glad of that. She was an ally, and a good person, and she didn’t deserve to get caught in this crossfire.
Chloe howled in dismay when she saw Trigby fall. She lunged for the man who had shot him, and three of us shot her. She went down with a perfect trio of holes in her breast above her heart, hitting the ground like a sack of dead meat. In a matter of seconds, we had gone from three werewolves to one.
Cooper turned, snarling, and froze when he realized that every gun in the room
was aimed at him. “How . . . ?”
“Turns out it’s pretty hard to hide a god,” said Raina. She dipped her hand into the pocket of her coat, pulling out the priest of my Aeslin colony, who sat on her palm and glared with tiny black eyes at Cooper. “Shouldn’t have started taking hostages.”
“It’s over, Cooper.” Charlotte sounded exhausted. “Give up, and maybe we’ll let you live.”
“In quarantine? In captivity? Never.” He bared his teeth. “You’ll have to kill me—and if you’re going to kill me, I think I’ll make sure you’ve got something to remember me by.”
I knew what he was going to do even before he moved. That was why, when he threw himself at Shelby, my gun was already aimed at the space above her head. My shot caught him cleanly in the neck, and he had time for one startled glance in my direction before four more bullets hit him, and he went down.
Silence, and the smell of blood and gunpowder, fell over the room. It stretched on for almost a minute, none of us quite sure what to say, no one wanting to be the first one to move. Then Shelby lifted her head and blinked at the rest of us, eyes bleary and unfocused in that “I just woke up after being hit with chloroform” way.
“Did somebody get the number of that bus?” she asked.
Raina snorted. Then she began to laugh. The back door opened, and Helen stuck her head inside.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, moving to take the mouse priest from Raina’s hand and letting it run up into the safety of my collar before I crossed to Shelby and began untying her hands. “I think it is.”
Epilogue
“The best thing you can ever do for the people who love you is to make it home alive.”