She hadn’t said anything to confirm or deny my suspicions. She didn’t need to. “No one lives here,” I said. “This is . . . a way station? A safe house?”
“Sort of a combination of the two,” Shelby said. “It belonged to one of our founders. Anyone can use it, if they have legitimate need and can get approval from the rest of the Society. Basic furnishings and such come with the house, and we all work to keep them updated and keep the place in proper shape. It’s good to have bolt-holes, when you need them.”
“It is,” I agreed, thinking of the family home back in Buckley. It was old and crumbling, and the walls were full of black mold, but we kept it all the same. You never knew when you might need to run away. “I thought we were going to your house.” It was hard to admit, even to myself, but the fact that I wasn’t seeing the place where Shelby had grown up stung. I knew less about where she’d come from than I liked; I’d been looking forward to seeing her childhood home, and starting to get an idea of what it had meant to her.
But this wasn’t about me. This was about werewolves in Australia, and the danger they presented to the entire continent. I tried to remind myself of that as Shelby pressed a hand against the hallway wall and a section swung inward, revealing a hidden door. The smell of our waiting dinner grew stronger. “Seeing the places where we actually live comes later,” she said. “Maybe after the danger’s past. Now in you get.”
“Is this a ‘so everyone can aim a weapon at me’ request?” I asked warily.
Shelby smiled like the sun rising across Botany Bay. “Call it a bonding exercise,” she suggested, while Flora chirped and flapped her wings.
I sighed. “If they shoot me, you get to explain it to my family,” I said, and stepped through the door in the wall to the room on the other side.
It was a large space, big enough to be considered a small ballroom, with several long wood tables pushed together in the center, bringing back unpleasant memories of summer camp. Half the tables were full, packed with people I had to assume belonged to the Thirty-Six Society. Some of them were in the archetypical Australian khakis, but most were dressed like the sort of people I saw every day at the zoo back in Ohio: jeans and light shirts, knee-length skirts and tank tops, shorts and sundresses and every other combination of casual clothing that could be easily moved in while still being substantial enough to conceal a reasonable number of weapons. Some of those weapons were on display.
As soon as I had stepped through the wall, almost every person in the room had drawn a gun, knife, or sling of some sort, and aimed it in my direction. Only Raina, whose attention was back on her DS, and the thin, short-haired blonde girl sitting next to her were disinterested in threatening my life. Given placement, the short-haired girl was probably Shelby’s other sister. It made sense that she’d be reluctant to attack me: the sooner we dealt with the werewolf problem, the sooner she could get back to opera school.
“Er, hello,” I said, offering a small, nonthreatening wave. “I’m Alexander Price. You must be the Thirty-Six Society. I would greatly prefer it if you didn’t put a bullet into my brain; it would complicate my plans for life, most of which involve not being dead.”
Shelby appeared behind me, pulling the door shut as she entered. She crossed her arms, looking at the gathered crowd with the bland disinterest that she always brought to staff meetings at the zoo, and asked, “Well? You lot going to shoot us or what? Because I’m starving, and I’m going to take it personally if somebody decides to kill my boyfriend.”
“Well, I’m going to take it personally if I get eaten by a werewolf because we went and shot the dude who actually knows how to kill them,” said Raina, finally looking up from her video game. It was a video game now, not a monitoring device—when she tilted her screen, I could see colorful animated monsters beating the snot out of each other. “Can we all say ‘yay, we waved our dicks around,’ and eat our damn dinner already?”
“I think I like your sister,” I murmured.
“Don’t worry, she doesn’t like you,” Shelby murmured back. Louder, she said, “I’m Shelby Tanner; you all know me; my parents are custodians in residence of the house you’re all sitting in, and my mum cooked that stew you’re getting ready to enjoy; I affirm and testify that Alexander Price is who he says he is, and that he’s here to help us, assuming all this nonsense doesn’t scare him off. I further affirm and testify that if you don’t all stop being such right twits, I’m going to take him and go find a nice motel. Dad.” She turned, focusing on her father. His cheeks were red, and he looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be amused or angry. “I know you’re just trying to look out for the Society, and I also know that when Thomas Price came through here, he was still with the Covenant, but you know that he was in the process of quitting, and we both know his descendants never signed up at all. So can we stop? This isn’t funny, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t dealing with the werewolf problem that’s threatening to eat us all.”
Shelby wasn’t the sort of person who got impassioned. Even when her old apartment had been set on fire, she had remained relatively calm, right up until we were free and clear and passing out from shock and pain. But as she addressed her father, spots of hectic pink appeared in her cheeks and her hands clenched into fists at her sides, clearly telegraphing her frustration. I hesitated before reaching out and taking her hand in mine. She shot me a quick, surprised look, but she didn’t pull away. She needed me as much as I needed her. That was becoming increasingly clear.
“Sir, even if I belonged to the Covenant, which I don’t, and even if I wanted to cause difficulty for the Society, which again, I don’t, I would never do anything to hurt your daughter.” I shrugged a little. “I’ve been subverted, if you can call it that when members of two organizations that should be capable of getting along and working together start sharing information. I’m not here to make trouble.”
“No, but you’re apparently here to make speeches,” said Charlotte Tanner, walking in through a door at the back of the room. She was holding a large covered bowl from which the scent of freshly baked soda bread drifted. Looking around the gathering, she sighed and shook her head. “Look at all those guns. I swear, half you people signed up to protect our ecology because you secretly wanted to be in an American Wild West movie. Weapons away, it’s time for supper. Shelly, you and Alex will be eating with me and your father. We want to start filling him in.”
“Yes, Mum,” said Shelby, and pulled her hand out of mine as she trotted over to relieve her mother of her burden. It was a perfectly domestic moment, and the only things that detracted from it were the people looking shamefaced as they made their weapons disappear back into vests and pockets. In a matter of seconds, we looked more like a revival meeting or church group than we did a gathering of cryptozoologists. That was okay by me.
Raina looked over and waved, gesturing for me to join her and the third sister—Gabby—at the table with the pair of them, some people I didn’t know, and Riley Tanner. Lacking any other options (and any bowls to carry), I shrugged and walked over to drop myself into an open seat. “Is dinner always this exciting around here?”
Riley shot me a flatly hostile look, but Raina shrugged and said, “Nah, sometimes we actually get to shoot people. Way more interesting, and the crocs get a snack out of it. You haven’t met Gabby yet, have you?”
“You know I can’t tell whether you’re joking or trying to imply that you would happily feed me to a crocodile,” I said. “Since I’ve fed several people to an alligator snapping turtle, I’ll take it both ways. No, I haven’t met Gabby. Hello, Gabby. I’m Alex.”
“Hiya.” The third Tanner sister held her hand out for me to shake, flashing a quick smile that was very much like Shelby’s: it lit her up from the inside. I was starting to feel like the three of them charted a line from melancholy to joy, with Shelby on one end and Raina on the other. This sister, Gabrielle, seemed to be somewhere in the middl
e. “Nice to meet you.” She had a sweet, liquid voice; I could understand why she’d chosen opera school. Cryptozoology isn’t for everyone. Some people want to live.
“I just wish it could have been under better circumstances.” I reclaimed my hand and took another look around the room. Pots of stew had been placed on three of the long tables, each too large to have been moved by a single person, and bowls were being filled by servers who clearly had experience at dishing out food for crowds of this size. Shelby and her mother were among the servers. I would have felt bad about that—my mother taught me it was never appropriate for me to sit back while women waited on me—but the other three pots were being staffed by men, and I wasn’t sure I would have been allowed to help if I’d tried. I was a guest, after all, and more than that, I was an untrusted guest. The last thing I needed was for someone to get food poisoning and accuse me of attempted murder.
“Tell me about it,” said Gabrielle. “I was at school, happily getting ready for midterms, and suddenly I’m being pulled out for a ‘family emergency.’”
“Werewolves are a family emergency,” said Raina. She managed to make the words sound halfway reasonable. No small feat. “If they ate us all while you were away at singsong school, you’d have to avenge us alone, and you’d get eaten, too. This way there’s still a chance in hell you’ll graduate.”
“Troll,” said Gabrielle.
“Shrieking kookaburra,” countered Raina.
“Girls,” said Riley. Both Tanner sisters fell instantly, ominously silent, watching their father with wary eyes. Riley shook his head. “We do not fight in front of company.”
Translation: we do not fight in front of the visiting cryptozoologist whom we do not yet completely trust. “I don’t suppose any of you have seen the mice running about, have you?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light and casual. “They weren’t hosting a bacchanal on the pillow when I woke up, so I’m assuming they’re off somewhere exploring and endangering the local wildlife.”
“Mice?” said Gabrielle.
“You’ve got that backward,” said Raina. “The local wildlife is going to be endangering them.”
“You haven’t spent much time around Aeslin mice,” I said.
Riley laughed. I smiled, pleased with myself. If I could just get things to lighten up a little bit on the personal level, maybe we could start properly focusing on the utter devastation the werewolves were preparing to send our way.
Before the conversation could resume, Shelby and Charlotte walked over with a smaller bowl of soda bread and a tray containing six bowls of stew and a large platter of roast root vegetables. They plunked their burdens down on the table; Shelby sat next to me, and Charlotte sat next to Riley, plucking the DS from Raina’s hands as she descended.
“Hey!” protested Raina.
“Not during dinner and strategy sessions,” said Charlotte. The DS vanished into her pocket. “You can have it back after we’ve finished discussing the situation.”
Raina folded her arms and scowled. Gabby snickered, half-covering her mouth with one hand. Raina redirected her scowl at Gabby, which turned her snicker into a full-fledged laugh. Shelby pressed a spoon into my hand, and I turned toward her, startled.
She was grinning at me. “My sisters are better than most of what’s on television, especially if you get Gabby drunk enough that she’s willing to start singing the really filthy arias, but right now, you need to eat. Food’s going to help you get switched over to local time.”
“I don’t think that’s scientifically accurate,” I said, sticking my spoon into the bowl.
“No, but my mum made the stew, and a bunch of people who probably aren’t intending to poison us helped make the damper, just be a peach for once in your life and eat, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. Then I paused. “What’s damper?”
Shelby rolled her eyes and pointed to the soda bread. “Damper,” she explained. “Eat.”
“Okay,” I said again, and ate.
Meals with large groups of people are always essentially the same. No one wants to do any serious strategizing until the food is done, but everyone wants to get it over with before dessert, if possible. What felt like the entire Thirty-Six Society stopped talking and bent to the all-important task of cramming stew, soda bread, and semi-identifiable tubers into their mouths.
The break was welcome. I hadn’t been expecting quite this large a crowd when I arrived; Shelby’s family, yes, and probably a few more of their colleagues, but not everyone they’d ever met. I do reasonably well with groups—better than Antimony, who never met a congregation outside of a comic convention or roller derby bout that she didn’t immediately want to set on fire, not as well as Verity, who thinks an auditorium full of people is another word for “Heaven,” as long as they’re all there to see her dance—but I have my limits. Being put on display in front of the entire Thirty-Six Society was pushing them.
At least it was making me focus on my table manners with an intensity that my mother would have been impressed to see.
I scanned the room as I ate, trying to get an idea of the internal hierarchy of the place. Family groups seemed to be seated together, and the Tanners weren’t the only multigenerational family in evidence. The people seemed to come from all races and walks of life; there was a woman in blue doctor’s scrubs, and a man dressed in overalls who looked like he’d just come from a sheep farm. A census of the room might well have produced an accurate racial map of the country, and the gender balance was split roughly down the middle, maybe trending slightly male in the older members, but rebalancing in the younger generation. It was odd. And it was, in its own way, alienating. Thanks to my family’s schism from the Covenant of St. George, I had grown up almost like a member of some fictional order of chosen heroes, Jedi or Knights of the Round Table or something equally silly. We were few, we supported each other, and if we fell, no one would do the job we had been tasked with.
Well, there were over a hundred people in this room who would be quite happy to do the job I’d been tasked with, thanks; the Thirty-Six Society was large and thriving, and wouldn’t have known that I had ever lived or died on the other side of the world if not for Shelby. “Humbling” was the good way to look at it. “Terrifying” was equally valid.
Shelby pushed her bowl aside. I looked down at my own, and realized it was empty; I’d been eating air for the past thirty seconds. Cheeks hot, I put down my spoon. That seemed to be the cue the rest of the table had been waiting for, like civility said that no one could talk about the werewolves until the company was finished eating.
“I’ve heard worse house rules,” I muttered. Shelby gave me a curious look. I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Good, because my dad’s about to get started,” she said. I followed her gaze to see Riley stand and walk across the room to a low podium. There was even a microphone mounted there, Toastmaster-style.
He tapped it once with his forefinger, sending a hollow thumping noise through the room. The expected wave of faintly nervous laughter followed. I guess some things are universal. Leaning closer, he said, “Good evening, everyone. I’m Riley Tanner, and I’m one of the people who organized this meeting, since it strikes me that werewolves in Queensland aren’t a good thing for either long-term survival or the tourist trade.”
More laughter this time, less nervous and more understanding. He was drawing them into a sense of shared camaraderie, and I envied the ease with which he seemed to be handling the crowd. Much like Shelby, who never met a zoo audience she didn’t want to show off for, he was genuinely charismatic and interesting to watch. Whereas I had one of my thesis advisers take a phone call during my defense.
The laughter faded. Riley’s expression turned serious. “I’ll be level with you, everyone: Lottie has been doing some research, and if we don’t get this dealt with soon, the buggers have the potential to infect half the people i
n Queensland. This could become a pandemic while we’re sitting around here drinking coffee and trying to sort out the quarantine procedures.
“We all know about the four members of our Society who have been bitten. I am sorry to report that Trevor McConnell’s body was found earlier today. He had removed himself to an isolated patch of land, and did what he had to do. There’s been no sign of Isaac Wall since he was bitten. If you see him, do not approach, do not engage; withdraw, but mark his position, and contact support as soon as you can. We don’t know whether he’s been infected, and more, we don’t know how long it takes after infection for a new werewolf to be capable of passing that infection to others.”
“The average incubation period is twenty-eight days; they’re not infectious until first transformation,” I said quietly, almost without realizing I was going to speak. Shelby shot me a warning look.
Her father was still talking. “Pamela and Jeffrey Cornish remain in quarantine. We wish them the best, and are hopeful that they’ll be able to avoid this infection. In addition to these members of our Society, we have confirmed fifteen bites in the general local population. We can’t place them under quarantine, for obvious reasons, but we’re in contact with local hospitals, and we’ve placed teams on their homes. If anyone shows signs of becoming symptomatic, we should know.”
It was a calm, reasonable, fair way of dealing with a lycanthropy-w outbreak, and the fact that the Thirty-Six Society was adopting it made it clear all over again how little experience they had with therianthropic disease. There was no need for quarantine, just care, and constant monitoring. If the victims couldn’t be restrained on a moment’s notice—if they couldn’t be put down without causing a riot—they should have been destined for shallow graves where their bodies would never be found. It was horrible. It was heartless. It was almost directly contrary to family policy under any other circumstances. The mere fact that it was policy for circumstances like these highlighted the dangerous nature of the situation.