Jane Yellowrock World Companion

Beneath a Bloody Moon A Jane Yellowrock Novella By Faith Hunter

Faith’s Note: This novella takes place (in the Jane Yellowrock timeline) after Blood Trade, after the short “The Devil’s Left Boot” in the anthology Kicking It and before Black Arts. It takes place over two days, in February, before Mardi Gras.

“Jane.”

I turned to the side and pulled the cell closer to my ear so my partners couldn’t see the stupid smile on my face. Deep inside, my Beast rolled to her paws, gathered them tight beneath her, and started to purr. I could hear her response in the tone of my voice when I drawled, “Ricky Bo LaFleur, as I live and breathe.”

He chuckled. “You’ve been in New Orleans too long if you’re picking up the lingo and the accent.”

Too long without you. But I didn’t say it. I was getting smarter. Finally. Our jobs and his little problem meant stealing moments when we could, and none of them were particularly satisfying. Rick is a special agent with PsyLED, the Psychometery Law Enforcement Department of Homeland Security, and so some things he can’t share. His job takes him all over the Southeast. My job means traveling too, hunting and killing rogue-vampires or keeping the secrets of the sane ones, so ditto on the not sharing. It puts a barrier between us.

The relationship—if I could call it that—with Rick was still wobbly: bruised by miscommunication, stupid accusations, big-cat pheromones, and worse, the tattoo spells that kept my werecat sorta-boyfriend in human form. Oh. And the were-taint that was said to be communicable by, um, having fun. Okay, maybe “relationship” was too strong a word nowadays. I pulled my hip-length hair across my shoulder as I walked out the side door and onto the porch. “So, where are you?”

“Too far for a meet and greet. I hope to get your way soon and make up for lost time, if you still have room for me with all the new men in your life.”

“New men?” Incredulity laced the word.

“The Younger brothers?”

I’m not the most man-savvy gal in town, but even I detected the hint of jealousy in his tone. “Partners, Ricky Bo. Not hanky-panky.”

“Good.” His voice dropped into the big-cat-purr register, more vibration than note. “I was kinda hoping you’d save all the hanky and the panky for me.”

“I was leaning that way. But for that to work, we need to cross paths sometime. You suck at the boyfriend stuff almost as much as I suck at the girlfriend stuff.”

“Soon,” he promised, “we’ll remedy that. But meanwhile, would you be interested in a side job for Uncle Sam?”

I sat on the edge of the porch, my legs in the weak March sun, feet in the lemon thyme ground cover. The smell wafted up from my feet and tickled my nose. “PsyLED?” The arm of the government that employed Rick seemed more likely to want me on a dissection table than on their payroll. Of course, maybe not. They had hired Rick. “Do they know . . .” About me? Not said aloud.

“That I’m dating a statuesque Cherokee? I told them all about us. They’re good with it.”

The subtle emphasis on statuesque Cherokee told me that he was keeping my secret. Not that my being a skinwalker would be secret for long. Not now that I had been outted to the paranormal world in such a spectacular way—by changing to one of my animal forms in the back of a car—in front of numerous people, including the vampire Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier. It was the only thing that had saved my life. But yeah. My anonymity wouldn’t last long. “Why don’t you do it, what’s the job, how dangerous, and how much?”

“You don’t have to sound so suspicious,” he chuckled, “because this one is boring and the pay sucks.”

“Oh, well, as long it’s all that.”

“And more, Jane. Seriously, though, there have been a number of wild dog attacks west and south of you.” His tone changed and I couldn’t tell at first why. “They’ve been going on for four months with increasing severity. All on the full moon. All the victims died. Eaten.”

Werewolf, I thought, feeling all the joy leach out of me. I had helped decimate the pack of werewolves that had invaded Louisiana, killing almost the entire pack to save Rick from them. Instantly I remembered the sound of gunfire, the sight of wolves falling and dying, their howls and screams of fury and pain.

My team and I had saved Rick, but he’d nearly died. And saving him had left him scars, not the least of which were the spelled tattoos the alpha wolf-bitch had tried to eat from his arm and shoulder. She had mangled the tattoos badly, and messed up the magic spelled into them, which now kept him from turning into his werecat black leopard form on the full moon. He had been tortured. Raped. Abused beyond sanity, yet he had survived. Rick was tougher than nails, which was not something I had expected when I met the pretty boy on my first day in New Orleans.

His tone in the safety zone of cop-speak, he went on. “The attacks started in Alexandria, and at first seemed to follow a trail leading south, along I-49.” The location and trail indicated that there could be a connection between the decimated werewolf pack and the pack of so-called wild dogs. Wild dogs didn’t follow highways. Werewolves might. “Recently the attacks have been centered near Chauvin, which is two hours from New Orleans and south of Houma. And I’m stuck farther north for the next few days.”

I thought about that. Centering in one location meant that they had chosen hunting ground and claimed territory. However many there were now, they were likely getting ready to expand their numbers—build a big pack. And two hours was within the distance I could safely travel from New Orleans. Long story, but I was bound to the MOC, the chief fanghead. Only he didn’t know it. The job Rick offered was doable. And I was bored. . . .

Carefully, trying to keep from hurting him, I said, “So. Okay. I’m to rule out . . . um . . . werewolves. That’s the job, and you’re too far away, and that’s why you aren’t doing it. So what about the danger and the pay? I’m still listening.”

“We need you to ride around, talk to the sheriff and the local law, see what you can sniff out.” He meant in animal form but wasn’t saying that over a phone. He added more slowly, “Inspect both the crime scene pictures and the scenes themselves. I’ve seen the pics, but you might see things I missed.”

Gruesome. The pics would be gruesome. But my other half, my Beast, wouldn’t be bothered by them. She liked to hunt, kill, and eat her dinner raw and still kicking. And she knew something about pack hunters and how they ate. Pack, she murmured deep inside. Hate pack hunters.

“Yeah,” I said to both of them. “So what else?” With cops there was always more.

“The sheriff asked me personally to look into this.” It took a second to make sense of the sheriff calling a special agent with PsyLED.

“And the sheriff is . . .”

He had the grace to sound embarrassed, even if only mildly. “Related. I have family there.”

“Reeeeeally?” I said, trying for droll but probably just managing sarcasm. “Old home week?” Rick ignored the tone and plowed on. “Uncles and aunts, my first cousin Nadine, the sheriff of the parish, a good number of other first, second, and third cousins. One second cousin who has a single-engine plane if you need to scout. LaFleur kids in the local schools. Some in diapers and day care. A few in nursing homes up in Houma and Terrebonne. A first cousin who has a hotel south of Chauvin who’ll donate rooms.” In other words a large extended family, people he cared for. “If you take the job, I’ll let them know you’re coming. They’ll help any way they can.”

“Uh-huh.” This sounded too easy. Had to be a catch. “How many people are whispering the word werewolf?” When Rick didn’t reply, I said, “And heading into the swamps and woods with torches and shotguns. And forming mobs with pitchforks and priests.”

Rick chuckled, but it didn’t sound amused. “It isn’t that bad. Yet.”

I put it together and shook my head. My words wry, I said, “Your cuz the sheriff called you and pleaded her case, and you pushed all the paperwork through to keep the family populace happy.”

“To keep Mama happy, actually.”

“Ouch.” Southern women were tough as nails. New Orleans women were that and more. Rick’s mama was a charming New Orleans woman, graceful, gentle, and delicate. She was also determined, strong-willed, and manipulative—scary good at getting her way. The whole barbed-wire fist in a velvet glove, or maybe pearls, pink pumps, and a horsewhip, or, worse, crinolines, debutants, and shotguns. Take your pick, that was his mother. I’d spent a week or so getting to know his family when Rick and I first started hanging out. His mama scared me.

“How many do we think there are?” I hedged. “Werewolves.” Not mamas. Fortunately there was only one of those.

“Maybe three. From the pictures and paw prints. One or two small, and one . . . big. Real big. I don’t want to say more because I want you to draw your own conclusions.

“You’re not to take them on,” he said. “That’s not the job. All we want is for you to rule out or confirm weres. Then, if you have time, see if you can determine a general direction or location. I’m thinking a day. Two max. And PsyLED will pick up expenses and pay a stipend and—”

“I have a contract for this stuff,” I interrupted. “I’ll fax it to you. We can dicker. But there will be a contract, and liability will be covered by Uncle Sam. Flat fee and all expenses. And Leo has to vet it.” Leo was my boss, but he didn’t really have to approve the job. It was entirely up to me. But I wanted all my bases covered if I was going to accept a contract with PsyLED.

I could hear the smile in Rick’s voice when he gave me a fax number. “I’ll push it up the hierarchy and get back to you A-sap. Thanks, darlin’.” The call ended.

Darlin’? Where had that come from?

I walked back into the house. In the living room, Alex was bent over a bunch of screens, incorporating all of them into one, huge, touch-screen computer that would eventually cover an entire wall, his straggly hair hanging in tight curls, hiding his face. Alex was the tech guy for our security company, also known as the Kid for various reasons.

His brother Eli was standing in front of the wide-screen TV, a forty-five-pound hunk of iron disguised as a hand weight in his left hand. He was watching the news—CNN, NBC, and Fox in three corners of the screen, and a local station on the fourth, as he did reps. Ten reps with each arm, his dark skin glistening with a thin sheen of sweat, his muscles bunching and relaxing, his workout clothes sweaty and sticking to him. He’d been at it awhile and he looked good. Eli was a totally buff former Ranger who ate only healthy food in healthy portions, and who exercised and trained daily. Like all day. As if Uncle Sam’s army might call him back any minute to fight a war, and he wanted to be ready. Eli didn’t have a nickname. Yet. Or maybe never. Some people just didn’t need one.

“You looking at my butt, babe?” Eli asked, without turning around.

“I’m not your babe. But it’s a nice butt,” I said. Without raising his eyes, Alex made a gagging sound. Eli tilted his head to me, giving me his version of a wide grin—lips moving a fraction of an inch, a hint of his pearly whites. Expressionwise, Eli was a minimalist all the way. “It is,” I said.

“Babe, I know my butt is good. Real good. But I’m taken. Keep the eyes off my butt.”

I grinned at him and cocked out a hip, waggling the cell at him. “Yeah, I know. No poaching on Syl’s territory. But I could take her, you know. I could.” Sylvia Turpin was his hunny-bunny, and also the sheriff of Natchez, Mississippi.

“Chick fight,” the Kid muttered, and I could hear the laughter in his voice. I decided to stop the teasing before we all started trying to outsnark each other.

“YS might have a job,” I said. YS came out Wizeass, which was our current nickname for our security company, more formally known as Yellowrock Securities. I let my grin widen. “With PsyLED.”

“No sh—way,” the Kid said, lifting his head, his eyes bugging out. Eli went still, his left arm frozen midcurl.

I raised my eyebrows. “You lost count, didn’t you?”

Eli frowned. “That was just cruel, babe. Cruel.”

I laughed. “Yeah, now your arms will be all lopsided. When you finish pumping up and showering, we can talk about the job. Meanwhile, Kid, e-mail Rick LaFleur our standard short-term, hunting-only, no-termination contract, and the liability one and—” I waved my empty hand in the air to suggest my uncertainty—“something to cover us having to kill supernats to protect the human populace in any life threatening, emergency, crisis, legal mumbo-jumbo situation. And whatever else you think we need.” The Kid had taken over the company paperwork and instituted files and files worth—various contracts, disclaimers, exclusions, standard expenses, and even a rider list (things the customer had to provide for us to do a job) all in legalese. Reams of the stuff. Ten times what I used to have as a one-woman company. He was a teenaged mutant ninja geek, and he was worth his weight in gold, even at today’s rates. I rattled off the fax number. Eli headed upstairs to shower, muttering under his breath about cruel women.

I got my old laptop and did a sat-map search for Chauvin, Louisiana. It was an odd little place by mountain standards, mostly a lot of water, a lot of swampy ground, a lot of weird canals going everywhere and nowhere, and most of them looking unused, some flatland along Highway 56, and less lining Highway 55. The city stretched out along the two parallel roads, hugging them like lifelines, which they probably were, during hurricane season.

Chauvin was in Terrebonne Parish, the sheriff’s office in Houma, north of Chauvin. So far as I could tell, Chauvin had no independent police and depended on the sheriff for law enforcement. There was no public airport closer than New Orleans, no hospital in Chauvin, and most of the parish social life seemed to take place in Houma. So I’d start out there. Assuming I took the job.

Eli trundled down the steps, the scent of vanilla preceding him. The shampoo had been a prezzie from his girlfriend and Alex had razzed him unmercifully about how sweet he smelled and how his old Ranger buddies would think he was pretty. Neither man was homophobic, and Eli took the teasing well, which all was a sign of how important his relationship with Syl was. He rounded the corner wearing only jeans and a T-shirt slung over one shoulder. Sweet mama, he looked good. And he knew it, flaunting it. And I had been too long without Ricky Bo. I just shook my head as he opened the fridge and pulled out a container of boiled, peeled eggs.

“Details,” Eli said. He stuffed a whole egg in his mouth and dropped into a chair, chomping with exaggerated jaw motions.

I told him all I knew about our job and said, “I’ll stick a bag in the SUV and head out. I’ll text you with the hotel and where to meet up.”

Eli had eaten three eggs while I talked and stuffed a fourth one in his mouth as I walked off. Over my shoulder, I said, “One thing. If those eggs give you gas, I will not pay to have the hotel room fumigated.”

Alex groaned and snorted with laughter behind me. “His egg farts are enough to gag a goat.”

“Yeah, you should worry about that, Kid,” I said. “You’ll be sharing a room with your brother.”

“Aw, man. No private rooms? Gimme that box of eggs. Give it to me.” There were sounds of scuffles, muted screams, and laughter behind me, and I was pretty sure Eli gave me an obscene hand gesture, but I didn’t look back to be sure if the guys were really killing each other or not. It took effort to live with two men, and part of that effort meant treating them like brothers, crudities and all. And besides. Eli did get awful eggy-flatulence, and he had been on an egg protein kick for weeks.

Weapons locked into the special compartment and a satchel of work clothes tossed in the back of the SUV along with all the special equipment I might need in a were hunt, I helmeted up and zipped up my winter riding leathers. No one who had lived in the Appalachian Mountains would call the temps cold, but the air was always wet. What some locals called humid in summer was just damp and miserable in winter. Unpleasant most any time.

Eli—who was truly a jack of all trades—had become a pretty good Harley mechanic. Just last week we had taken the carb apart and cleaned it, replaced the plugs and checked the points and spacings, made sure the battery was working well and that the fuel lines were flowing. I had noticed it took more general maintenance to keep a bike running smoothly in the humidity of the Deep South. Dense, wet air is hard on engines, and thanks to Eli’s expertise, Bitsa was in excellent working condition as I took off on her, the engine a dark snarling purr between my thighs.

But even with a smoothly running bike, riding a Hog in Louisiana is a challenge. The roads are ribbed because their surfaces expand and shrink, and because the ground beneath them is marshy, with a high water table. By the time I got to Houma, I was vibrating all over and my hands were swollen like the hands of a jackhammer operator, so I stopped for a late lunch just outside town. After a plate of fried soft-shell crab po’boys and a huge vanilla shake, I cleaned up in the restaurant bathroom before I went to visit the sheriff. She was Rick’s first cousin and I wanted to be presentable. I even put on lipstick, the bloodred I preferred, and rebraided my hair.

Like a lot of places in the South, everything important to a town—except for grocery stores—is within walking distance, having been built back when walking was the poor man’s transportation method of necessity, if not of choice. Churches, graveyards, lawyers’ offices, restaurants, specialty shops, businesses, hair and nail salons, antiques shops were cheek by jowl with parish offices, farm bureau offices, and corporate offices. There were Porta Potties on street corners and men in construction clothes, most of the workers looking Latino—part of life in this part of the world, so close to the gulf and Mexico. The place smelled of water, but different from New Orleans. There, the scent hinted of power and sometimes I thought I could almost feel the force of the Mississippi moving so close by. Here I still smelled the salt of the gulf and the brine of the swamps, but I also got the lazy, sunbaked, rotting-vegetation scent of marsh, and the smell of slow-flowing water. Languid was the word that came to mind.

And the food scents filling the air from deep-fat fryers and ovens and stove tops smelled equally of Mexican and fish, different from New Orleans. And here there was no overreaching stink of urine and vomit, scents I had come to ignore most of the time in the party city of the South. The air smelled cleaner. Slower. Easier.

The sheriff’s office and the tax collector were in the same white, two-story building where I parked Bitsa under a tree and entered the front doors. I was stopped by a guard, a big-bellied man of about sixty, with a gun and an attitude. He hooked one hand over the butt of his gun and the other into his belt and stepped in front of me as I entered. “Hold on there, little lady,” he said to me. “How can I help you?” He smelled of chewing tobacco and his teeth were stained dark brown. He was going bald on top and trying to disguise that fact by the futile comb-over from just above his left ear.

I chuckled and said, “Little lady? Really?”

He squinted at me as if checking to make sure he had gotten my gender right. “What else I’m supposed to call you?” he asked, his eyebrows coming together. I looked like a motorcycle mama in my leathers, and my skin was dark, like a furriner, so I knew why people didn’t want to let me in. But really. Little lady?

I didn’t bother to enlighten him on the modern forms of address. When I was growing up in the children’s home, it was called throwing pearls before swine to try to explain manners or etiquette and simple basic pleasantness to people who simply had no clue. “I’m looking for Sheriff LaFleur. She’s expecting me.”

“You don’t say. Lemme check on that. Name? ID?”

“Jane Yellowrock.”

He grunted, looked at my driver’s license, and told me to have a seat. Instead I stood, staring at him until he began to sweat. Then pulled my cell and dialed Rick. I didn’t give him time to even say hello. “Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I am trying to get into the sheriff’s office, and Officer”—I peeked at the man’s badge—“Officer Delorme won’t let me in.”

“I’ll call the office. Sit tight.”

“I’d rather stand and stare at Delorme.”

“Be nice to the locals, Yellowrock.”

I laughed and disconnected. About two and a half minutes later a woman rounded the corner. “Dellie, this is the woman I was expecting.”

“You sure, Nadine?”

“I’m sure.”

I followed Nadine LaFleur to her utilitarian office, admiring the building but fighting off a case of the sneezes. The building was old enough to have a faint, nose-wrinkling stink of mold and dust and age. The sheriff’s perfume was strong enough to take the edge off, but was also an additional odor for my sinuses to fight.

I stepped into Nadine’s office and took my first good look at Rick’s first cousin. She was Frenchy—dark-eyed, black-haired—and stout, maybe five feet four inches of shrewd, narrow-eyed, political acumen. She looked meticulous, tough, and competent, giving off a far different impression from Rick’s pretty-boy, come-hither personality. Not that Rick wasn’t smart and tough, but he hid it well. Nadine didn’t try to hide it. Underneath her perfume were pheromones of aggression, anger, frustration, and territoriality.

Nadine was glad I was here but equally wanted me to be gone. She settled on a grudging but determined welcome. Closing the office door with a firm snap, she stuck out a hand and gave mine a firm shake before indicating one of the chairs in front of her no-nonsense desk. “Rick says you can help me with the dog attacks,” she said,

“Uh—”

“Except I don’t think it’s dogs. I think it’s werewolves.” She slapped a stack of files on the desk in front of me, opened the top one, and spread the photographs inside across the desktop. I had been right in my first estimation of what I would see here. It was gruesome. And Nadine was watching me like a hawk for any reaction that was squeamish or girlie. I hadn’t taken a seat yet, and so I inhaled slowly as I leaned over the desk, palm flat on the desktop, letting my weight fall onto my left arm and using my right hand to reposition the photos in order of interest: overall crime scene photos together, heads together, torsos together, limbs together.

My Beast pushed into the forefront of my brain and looked with me, though she still had some trouble accepting two-dimensional photographic representations of anything. No scent, she thought at me. No dead meat smell.

No scent, I agreed. Paper pictures.

Stupid paper pictures. Need scent.

I have a feeling we’ll get all the scent we want, I thought back. Sadly.

A quick scan of the first crime scene showed me body parts scattered over a small clearing, blood soaked into the ground, clothes bloodied and shredded, a backpack, contents spread to the side. The body had been dismembered and eaten. The age and gender of the victim was impossible to discern: no face, eyes, nose, or lips over the gory skull, no flesh or viscera over the chest and abdomen, hands too swollen by decomposition to guess at a gender. Long brown hair on a chewed scalp. And maggots. Lots of maggots. I hate maggots.

Oh yeah, Nadine was watching me like a hawk.

I lined the photos up the way I wanted and opened the file beneath. This one had sat in the sun for a while before it was discovered. Scavengers had been on the scene longer. There was less to see. The third crime scene, however, was fresher and had taken place after a rain. The black mud had dried, protecting the tracks and physical evidence better than the other scenes. I checked the time stamp. Yesterday. These pics were the ones I needed.

I had studied up on wolves, wild dogs, and other predators after I fought the werewolves, research that would have come in handy ahead of time, though that wasn’t something I could have planned on needing. But it was handy now, and I dredged up the facts from my memory.

“Measurements differ on how and who you ask, but researchers with digital bite meters have done testing and discovered that adult humans have a narrow range of bite force between one twenty to two hundred twenty pounds per square inch, or p.s.i., of bite force.” My voice sounded dispassionate, reasoned, and almost pedantic. Maybe even bored. And not at all nauseated. Go, me. Keeping my eyes on the photos, I continued. “Wild dogs, German shepherds, pit bulls, and Rottweilers can have a bite force from three-twenty to five hundred p.s.i. Hyenas, by contrast, have a p.s.i. of a thousand, and wild male crocodiles have been measured at around six thousand, by far the highest bite force on the planet. Wolves at play measured in at four hundred. Wolves eating have, rarely, measured in at fifteen hundred and can snap their way through an elk femur in less than eight bites.”

I turned the shot of the shattered femur to Nadine. “I’m guessing this wolf bite was upwards of twelve hundred p.s.i., maybe even higher than fifteen hundred p.s.i., because I’m not seeing but two bite marks, which means he snapped it like a twig.”

I pushed the skull pictures to her. “The orbital bones are cracked, the jaw was forcibly removed in what looks like a massive wrenching motion, and the skull itself was cracked open.” I turned to another shot. “Brain removed.” I pushed a photo of the torso toward her. “All internal organs eaten.” I pointed to two what looked like puncture marks. “Wolves and dogs share a similar canine tooth length and have the same number of teeth—forty-two—but this one bite mark”—I indicated a set of score marks on a meatless bone—“looks deeper than dog canines. What did the medical examiner say?”

Grudgingly, Nadine said, “He suggested the canines of the predator were longer and sharper than dogs. Maybe two and a quarter inches long.”

That was big even for a werewolf. “And?”

“He says there’s no animal in the state that has teeth that long except the Florida panther.”

She was testing me. Nadine smelled of challenge. Which meant she was holding back on something and was wondering if I’d catch it. I paged through the photos and realized what was missing. Inside me, Beast huffed with amusement. Alpha woman is playing cat-games. Hiding paw prints in mud. Inside me, she yawned to show her canines. Beast killing teeth are longer than small cousin called Flo-ree-da.

Still mostly toneless, I asked, “Where are the photos of the footprints?”

Nadine relaxed suddenly and blew out a breath. “Okay. You know your way around. I wasn’t sure Rick—never mind. Here.” She handed me another folder, this one much thinner.

I chuckled dryly and opened the file to expose prints in the mud, cracked and partially dried, several full of dried blood. Without looking up, I said, “You weren’t sure if he sent you some ditzy woman he was sleeping with or a real expert.”

“Yeah,” she said, her tone as dry as mine. “Women seem attracted to my cuz.”

I separated out and placed three different paw prints on the desk. “He is a pretty boy, not saying he isn’t.” I pointed from print to print. “All these photos have claws in the prints. Puma concolor coryi, like all pumas, have retractable claws and most prints display clawless, meaning claws retracted. Yours?”

“All with claws exposed. So. Not a lion.”

“And Florida panthers have been extinct in this state for a century or more,” I said. “It would be astounding to have three in one place.” I tapped the smallest print and spread my hand over it. According to the ruler beside the print, the paw pad was over four inches across. “This wolf or dog is the smallest of the three, and while the density and water content of the substrate makes a difference in the size of the paw prints, I’d estimate this one weighed in at one twenty. Big for a gray wolf.” I pointed to the larger print, which was more than five inches long and more than four inches across. “Maybe three hundred pounds. Gray wolves in this country are big, very big, at one fifty. That medical examiner?”

Nadine shook her head. “He said something about a dire wolf.” She shrugged. “An extinct wolf. He’s an amateur paleontologist and archeologist.”

I went back to the photos and handed her shots as I explained them to her.

“The limbs were disjointed by wrenching, pulling, and biting, the tendons twisted and snapped. The femurs were well gnawed but also cracked open for access to the marrow, indicating that strong bite I mentioned. The pelvic cavity was wrenched apart. I need to see the site to be sure, but I’m inclined to say werewolves, at least three, and one of them a freaking monster.”

Nadine shook her head and rubbed the back of her neck as if to massage away tension. Her skin was tanned, but above her sleeve line her skin was pale olive and very much like Rick’s. She gathered up all the photos and shuffled them into the order she liked and set them in the proper folders. Then she sat in one chair on the supplicant side of her desk and pointed again at the other chair. It put us sitting side by side. She crossed her legs, to reveal a pair of fancy cowboy boots, which I wanted to inspect, but I figured it might be rude for me to grab her foot and haul it up. She tapped the folders on her knee, staring off into the distance.

“Ricky said you have a contract with PSYLed to identify the animals and/or perpetrators and attempt a general location.”

I guessed where this was going. “And kill it or them only if necessity or emergency or exigent situation requires it. At which point I get paid a flat kill fee per head. All liability to be covered by the federal government.”

“How about if I get the governor to one-up that?”

Ah. Negotiation. I was getting good at negotiation. Innocently I asked, “Meaning?”

“What if the state government and the governor agrees to pay for any liability over and above what the feds pay, but you agree to per head cost for kills?” She met my eyes, hers cold and hard and mean. “Those things killed Mason Walker. He was a harmless, homeless war vet with enough medals to decorate a good-sized Christmas tree. He lived under one of the overpasses in town that cross over the canal. There was no reason for him to be down in Chauvin, or none that I could see. He didn’t have transportation, he didn’t have money, he didn’t have anything to offer anyone.”

Except sport, I thought. And didn’t say it aloud because sometimes the truth is unnecessary and cruel. Instead I said, “So someone picked him up. Drove him south. Into the woods or the marsh.”

“And chased him. And killed him. And. Ate. Him.” Her words were harsh, her tone vicious. Okay, so she got the sport part.

“And you liked him,” I said gently.

“He was nice. Would give you shirt off his back. Nice people are few and far between in this world.” She slapped the folders onto her desk with a sound like a gunshot. “I want them dead. Not in a jail where I couldn’t keep them. Not in a court system that would just as likely let them loose because they can’t help it if they are this way. I want them dead.”

“And the way to get the governor to do this?” Because in my experience the governor of a state had a dearth of both money and compassion.

But Nadine smiled, and it would have looked good on an alligator, all teeth and killing intent. “Because I used to be married to him. And because I asked. And because he owes me more than money can ever repay and he knows it.”

Ah. Blackmail of a sorts. Nadine had something on her ex and wasn’t above using it. I gave her a figure and her eyes didn’t bug out, which I thought was a good start. “Per head.” Still unbugged. “Not including all expenses, hotels, ammo, food, lost or damaged weapons to be replaced, all medical costs or burial costs in the event one of my men is injured or dies, all liability costs, and a nice fancy piece of paper that waves any chance of litigation should someone innocent or collateral get injured or killed before, during, or after the takedown. Your ex will be expected to sign a contract and get it witnessed.”

“I’ll call and get the contract faxed.”

“Ricky Bo might get riled at you taking this away from PSYLed.”

Nadine suggested that Rick could do something anatomically impossible with himself. I left the sheriff’s office laughing, with a promise of a call about the governor’s agreement. And the promise of the contracts to be faxed once that agreement was reached. I could probably have gotten the promise of her firstborn if the kid was a big enough of a pain in the butt, but I had the Kid. I didn’t need another. I promised her nothing, except to read any contract the governor marked up and sent back to me. I didn’t expect it to happen, but it would be interesting if it did.

Twenty miles later I checked the time and the GPS Rick had sent me. The crime scenes and two wolf sightings were south of the small burb of Chauvin. I made the ride through the small town—mostly a fishing and sports enthusiast locale—and continued down Highway 56 another few miles. By then it was getting close to sundown and I had things I needed to do, like check out the hotel that had been donated and see if it was someplace I was willing to stay.

I checked in at the Sandlapper Guesthouse, the mom-and-pop hotel owned by Rick’s family, which usually catered to fisherman—if the fish-cleaning stations and the fenced gear lockers on the grounds were anything to go by. Clara and Harold were nice people and welcomed me like family. I was pretty sure they’d been contacted by Nadine before my arrival, because they didn’t even look surprised when I walked in, though it was off-season and the place was deserted.

The rooms were up on stilts and offered a view of the marsh and open water across the street. It was lot better than a box hotel. It had ambience. And oddly, a small granite boulder near the front steps. It was painted white with the word WELCOME on it in red, but it was granite and it was possible that I might need some mass, if I had to go after a giant werewolf.

I got adjoining rooms, hoping Eli’s eggy gas problem would be over by the time they arrived. I really didn’t want to have to apologize to Clara and Harold for the stench.

After checking e-mail, I took a catnap for half an hour as a stray storm blew through, the rain like a mad drummer at my window. When it passed, there was an odd stillness in the room and outside, as if the world was waiting for something to happen. I shook off the thought and dressed for dinner, which mostly meant a fast shower, rebraiding my hair, and clean undies and T-shirts. I was sliding into my Lucchese boots when I heard the SUV pulling up next to Bitsa. And it was weird how just hearing the engine lightened my heart. I wasn’t sure when the Younger brothers had become family, but it had happened pretty fast. I wasn’t sure how I felt about people having ties on my feelings. It was weird. And maybe kinda scary. The last time that happened was with my best friend, Molly. And she had broken off the friendship. I was hard on relationships and I hated having a broken heart.

I stuck my head out the door and shouted to the Younger boys, “I figure the seafood in this town should be spectacular.” I wasn’t wrong.

The boys and I still reeked of the wonderful stink of fried fish and shrimp, and fried veggies—onion rings and squash and okra—and hush puppies as we gathered around the small table in their room. The Kid had his tablets set up and my old laptop, and we were studying Google maps and some sat maps from a source known only to the kid. I had a terrible fear they were classified U.S. government maps, but I didn’t ask and neither did his brother. We were viewing from about a thousand feet aboveground, with the crime scenes and wolf sightings tagged in bright red droplets.

“If this was the work of real wolves,” Eli said, “we could trace out a hunting ground from the sites, but since our wolves can drive around . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

“Put dates to all the sites,” I said, “and see if they form a time-stamp pattern.”

They didn’t. The Kid shook his head, his scraggly hair swinging, and mumbled, “We’re missing something. What what what?” He opened the takeout container and nibbled on a cooling hush puppy. “Got it!”

Leaving the maps in place, he opened another program and drew lines from place to place, some curving, some straight. And when I saw what he was doing, I laughed.

Only one thing connected the kill sites, and that was the canals. The werewolves were traveling to places most easily reached by boat and water. Canals were everywhere along the Gulf of Mexico, some long and straight as rulers for miles and miles, some curved in massive semicircles, some with a rare zigzag like something out of a geometry book. “What’s with that?” Eli asked.

“I had always thought slaves built the canals in the Deep South,” I said. “But that looks like something . . . humans couldn’t do.”

The Kid opened another program and traced one canal, a double canal with a raised area between the waterways like the center line on a road. It entered the gulf to reappear, still in a straight line, on an island out in the deep water. “It’s over a hundred miles long,” he said, his voice low as if he were sharing a secret or revealing a sacred mystery. “Holy freaking ancient aliens, Batman.”

“Do a search on ancient canals,” Eli said.

And when the Kid did, dozens of sites popped up, most related to a single site about the canals. He opened six of the sites simultaneously and arranged his tablets so we could see them all at once. There were prehistoric canals all over the world. And the greatest majority of them were right here, in southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. I got the willies just looking at the numbers of canals and their locations.

The Kid read from one site and paraphrased for us. “Some of them are from the early-twentieth-century oil exploration. Probably ones like this and this.” He pointed at some canals that seemed to be of the same width. “But some were there when the Spanish came and they were old even then. Duuude,” he said softly, using the word almost as an expletive. “These other, older canals have been estimated at seven thousand years old, from before the end of the last ice age. The civilization that built them was considered to be a worldwide, water-going civilization, back when the oceans were five to seven feet lower than now.”

My eyes darted from screen to screen, from miles-long canals in straight lines to what looked like building sites in the marsh, as seen from the air, if the canals had been roads. Like water-going neighborhoods. Eli said, “Huh.”

A few screens later the Kid said, “The civilization—assuming it existed—was either destroyed when a massive ice dam in Canada broke and a wall of water twenty feet high flooded the entire U.S., or when the second Storegga”—he stumbled over the word—“methane gas eruption in Denmark and Iceland caused a subsurface landslide six hundred miles long and forty miles wide. That’s been estimated to have created a mega-supertsunami that swept west and buried the entire East Coast of the U.S. under thirty to a hundred feet of water. Like . . . duuude.”

“So basically, archeologists don’t want to consider a geometry-loving, water-going, water-based, monolith-building, higher civilization, prior to the Egyptians, even though there’s evidence all over the world,” Eli said. He snorted softly. “Worse than bureaucrats.” For Eli that was a major insult.

The Kid said, “In their defense, archeologists are academics. They have to publish papers to keep their jobs and funding, and no one is going to reconsider new evidence or old evidence that contradicts what they already put in print and got paid for.”

“Bureaucrats.”

“Scientists with an agenda. And speaking of which, I got accepted into MIT. I’m looking at a new doctorate. I can start when my parole is up.”

The room went deathly silent. No one moved. I forgot to breathe. I had just been thinking about how great it was to have family. Stupid other shoe had just dropped. My eyes went hot and dry. Where was MIT? Up North someplace.

The Kid went on, his voice casual. “I also have an offer from Tulane. They just opened a brand-new computer science doctorate program and they stole three of MIT’s top professors to do it.” I could hear the smile in his voice, when he added, offhand, “I get a free ride at TU. That’s all expenses paid, for you Neanderthals. And I can start at TU this coming fall, even with the parole in place. Just something to think about.”

I remembered to breathe.

Eli said, “You little shit.”

I didn’t comment about language. This time I fully agreed. “What he said.” And I swatted the Kid on the back of the head.

Alex laughed without looking up. “You don’t think I’d leave you two alone, do you? You’d end up dead without me, in like, three days. Two if we had a job going.

“So. Tomorrow,” he went on, “I think we need to take that plane ride Rick told us about and get a feel for logistics. And see about renting a boat. Maybe an airboat, so we can go over marsh.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Eli said.

“Okay,” I said, letting the feeling of relief flutter through me like butterfly wings. “I’m for bed. Let’s start early. Like four a.m.”

The Kid groaned. Eli just thumbed his phone on and threw himself on the queen bed he’d chosen. “Hey, gorgeous. Guess where I am? Nope. Way further south.”

I left for my room, closing the door between the guys and me. Eli was talking to Syl, his girlfriend-of-sorts, and the Kid was uploading a World of WarCraft game up on his tablet. I stripped and fell onto my bed, and was asleep instantly.

Rick’s family was freaking everywhere this far south. The pilot, Rick’s second cousin on his mother’s side, was a Vietnam vet named Sarge Walker, a grizzled guy about sixty-five years old, who met us at his front door just before dawn, wearing camo pants and a beat-up flight jacket that looked old enough to have been to war with the man, and carrying a satchel that smelled of coffee and snacks. He grunted as we introduced ourselves, and grunted again when he pointed around the house, to the backyard. We turned away and I caught the faint scent of magic, as if someone in the house was a practitioner. I was betting that Sarge’s wife was an earth witch, a conclusion I drew from the look of the lush gardens. Without magic, it was impossible to keep a garden so green, even in south Louisiana. And Sarge didn’t smell of magic. Just coffee.

And then his copilot trotted up.

The two-hundred-pound tan monster was named Pity Party, PP for short. The mastiff-bison mix (had to be, because she was too big to be anything else) had no manners, and sniffed us each in proper doggy-style. No one objected. Though I wanted to swat her nose away, I held very still as the dog took her time with me. I could feel her low-pitched growl at my confusing, mixed, human-predator scent, and waited until she decided I wasn’t going to attack and eat her master. PP was still wary of me, and I made certain to put plenty of room between Sarge and his protection and me, with Eli and the Kid between us. It was often true that dogs and cats don’t get along well, especially a dog bred for war, one who was big enough to give Beast a run for her money in a fight, and a big-cat. And for once, Beast kept her snark to herself and didn’t disagree. PP was huge, menacing, and . . . huge.

The airstrip actually wasn’t. An airstrip, that is. It was a canal, out in back of Sarge’s house, the water a straight strip, blacker than night, the only sounds the drone of insects and the rare splash of fish. The plane appeared out of the gloom like a white swan illuminated by the rising sun; it looked too delicate to survive a takeoff, let alone a flight.

I didn’t like flying in planes. Wings and feathers were different, and I was almost used to the way that flight worked as a bird, the shift of wing and body, the spreading of flight feathers, the angling of wing into the wind, the way my body would plummet when I folded my wings and dove. This was no bird.

The plane was a single-engine Cessna with amphibian landing gear, and the inside stank like PP and fish, a combo that made me want to laugh when I thought about it. The cabin was cramped and tight for four plus Sarge’s dog and the pile of stuff in back. Some of it looked like fishing gear, and some of it looked like plastic wrapped up in twine. One seat was fitted with a seat belt harness for PP, and she seemed as at-ease in the plane as Sarge was himself, and even more taciturn.

I had never made a water-to-air flight and it felt all wrong, so I closed my eyes, gripped the arms of the seats, and swallowed my breakfast back. It had been tasty going down. Not so great coming back up. Once we left the drag of the water, Sarge spent several minutes talking into his headset about his flight path and altitude and flying stuff, all of which I ignored, just glad he actually spoke airplane-speak.

But the sight that met my eyes once we were airborne and leveled out gave me chills. This was the way the world had to look, back at the dawn of life on Earth. The sun was a golden ball at the horizon, the clouds a dozen shades of pink and plum and purple, with feathery fringes of gray and charcoal. We were low enough to see the black fingers of trees reaching for the plane, low enough to see fishing boats leaving the canals for the open gulf, their wakes rolling with the reflected sun. The water below us was black as sin except where it reflected back the sky’s pink light and the falling, nearly full moon. It looked bloody—bloody moon, bloody water, blood, blood everywhere, and I couldn’t repress a shudder at the sight. It felt like an omen. It was glorious and frightening, and it meant nothing, nothing at all, my brain assured me. It was only the sun rising. But my heart felt different.

The moment we leveled out, Sarge started drinking his coffee and talking to us over the roar of the engine. We got a geology lesson, with an emphasis on why Louisiana had so much oil and natural gas, a geography lesson with the central tenet being the rivers: the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, the Red , the Sabine, the Calcasieu, and a dozen others, most with Indian tribal names. So much for taciturn, but the chatter did help settle my nerves—along with the sun rising and turning the world golden instead of bloody. I listened with half an ear until the Kid got a question in.

“We mostly want to see the sites of the coordinates of the dog attacks.”

“Werewolf attacks,” Sarge said.

“Why would you think that?” Alex asked.

“You’ll think I’m crazy, I know, but there’s stuff out here in these marshes and canals and bayous, stuff no one’s ever seen before. Stuff the U.S. government won’t let no one near. Places they won’t let no one go to no more.”

“Like what?” The Kid suddenly looked younger than his nineteen years. Like a puppy all agog with the world. Like a kid looking up to an idol. I wasn’t sure it was real fascination or just a way to get the older man to talk, but it worked.

“We got people who don’t appear on no census, got no footprint on any information grid, and who live off the land and the water. We also got people who are there one day and disappear the next. Just gone, like that.” He snapped his fingers. PP wagged her tail. “We got animals that scream in the night and leave eviscerated carcasses on the banks of bayous—carcasses that have been surgically dissected and drained of blood.”

I perked up. That was sounding like the possibility of rogue-vamps eating whatever they could once their favorite food source was killed off. Before I took up working for Leo, I’d made my living killing rogue-vamps, and the old pocketbook could always use a positive attitude adjustment. Leo Pellissier paid better than Uncle Sam any old day.

“What else?” Alex asked.

Sarge looked at him out of the corner of his eye, as if to measure Alex’s interest, or maybe his level of gullibility. “We got magic. Real magic. The magic of the earth and the sky and the slow-moving water. There’s power here, buried deep. And the government is trying to cover it up.”

“You mean like ley lines?”

Sarge tucked his chin in surprise. “You know about magic?”

“I know a witch or two,” Alex said. “Or maybe five or six.”

Sarge made a huffing sound. “I ain’t talking about no witches. I’m talking about the rainbow people. The sirens. And the people of the straight ways.”

The Kid looked back at me, his expression saying, Can you believe this guy? But actually I could. I’d seen a person-shaped being leap through the air once, forming a rainbow of light and shadow, a here-not-here stream of energy and motion that covered the distance in a flowing surge of light-motion-force-time. Rainbow people was a good description. Sirens I didn’t know about, except for the mythical creatures that sang sailors off their ships and into the sea. Maybe they were the same thing. But the straight ways—they seemed to slide off into ancient geometry and ancient mystical practices, like the Freemasons, but even older. Maybe as old as the ruler-straight canals below us.

I took a shot. “Were the canals built along the ley lines?”

“No so’s we can tell, at this time,” Sarge said. “Ley lines are straight lines that connect certain, specific ancient sites, and the lines have to connect three or more sites in a single straight line to count as powerful.” Sarge looked over and back at me as he banked the plane. “Only five major lines run through Chauvin, though I expect we’ll find more as archeologists discover more ancient sites in Mexico and South America.”

“They aren’t, like, magical power lines?” I asked.

“Sure they are. But ley lines are not something humans can use. Only witches can use ’em, and the last witches disappeared from here in the early nineteen hundreds.”

“Disappeared how?” Eli asked.

“Disappeared as in vanished from their beds overnight. Signs of struggle, some blood in the house, and they were never seen or heard from again.”

“Oh.” I had seen a house like that. The witches had been taken by vamps and were nearly dead by the time I had found them.

“What about liminal thresholds,” the Kid asked. Beside me, Eli’s eyebrows twitched slightly in what might have been surprise at his brother’s question.

“Liminal thresholds are different buggers entirely, son. They run in three curving lines across the earth,” Sarge said, “but only one matters here. It starts in southwestern Mexico, curves across the Gulf of Mexico to Chauvin. Then it follows the Appalachians east and north.” His hand made a curving shape up and down, like what the trade winds might make, but bigger and smoother. “It curves up through New York and Nova Scotia, across the North Atlantic and back down toward the U.K. There it intersects some ancient sites including the Stonehenge, follows the map through middle Europe and down Greece into the Mediterranean, through Saudi Arabia and into the Indian Ocean.”

I didn’t know what liminal thresholds were, and I no longer had a witch best friend to ask. Fortunately the taciturn man who hadn’t even spoken on land was voluble and verbose in the air. “Liminal thresholds are sites and places where the fabric of reality is thin, where one reality can bleed into another. Like physicists tell us the universes are stacked one atop the other like a stack of coins. You ever hear of that?”

Alex nodded.

“Well, at certain places along the liminal thresholds, some beings can push through from one reality to another, and sometimes they end up here. Near Chauvin. And then there’s the vertices,” he added, and I figured he was now pulling our collective legs.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “But we’re interested in the crime scenes and the dog sightings.”

“Werewolves,” Sarge spat.

He said it with such certainty that I didn’t bother to disagree. I’d seen the photos. He was right. “Fine. Show us those.” The plane banked again and took us along Highway 56, back south to Chauvin.

The sites were all over the place, one close to 56, one near the end of 55, one off a canal on a spit of land that could only be reached by boat or plane. One was in downtown Chauvin. The others were scattered here and there, with no apparent relation to one another. Nine deaths in three months, here, and more, older ones, scattered along roads heading north. If this had been a mystery story, we would have been able to draw lines from site to site and determine the murderer’s home at the site where the lines intersected, but that didn’t work. Not here. The only thing the sites had in common was that there was always water nearby, but in Chauvin, there literally was water, water everywhere, on all sides as far as the eye could see.

And then I began to notice another similar feature of the earth and water below us. “Can you graph the sites,” I asked the Kid, “and tie them to the biggest ancient canal? The one with two lanes that goes so many miles? And then maybe put them in order along access from that one canal, with little numbers besides each one, so we can get a timeline based on the canal? I know the ones in town—”

“The two closest to town were the first and second ones,” the Kid interrupted, seeing where I was going. “Like they were hungry when they got to Chauvin. All the following ones were on the water. And yeah. All on the smaller canals that look like neighborhoods.” He traced them with his fingers. “And all related to and accessible from the big canal.”

I stared down and down, trying to memorize the world from above and hoping that I’d be able to put this view together with the Kid’s tablets and then the actual, ground-and-water-level sites.

“You want to see the sites?” Sarge asked. His tone was without inflection, and he didn’t take his eyes from the sky and the horizon line, but I could detect a scent from his pores that said he was disturbed, and far too interested in the answer to his unruffled question.

“How close can you get us?” Eli asked into the silence.

Sarge took the tablet from Alex and studied it for a moment. “I can land near some of ’em. Get you to within a few feet of shore. I keep a self-inflating, two-person raft packed in back.” He jabbed a thumb to the back of the cabin, and I figured that the twine-wrapped plastic was the raft.

“Let’s do it,” Eli said. “Which site first?”

I sat, thinking, as the men discussed landings and locations. It didn’t really matter which one we saw. I’d seen the pics both before and after the cops finished with them. And scavengers would have dealt with anything the cops left behind. We wouldn’t see much.

More quickly than I had expected, we were dropping altitude and I got queasy again. Not because of the flight. But because of the smells I’d expect to find on the ground. My Beast was used to the smells of rot and decay; she even ate things that were farther along in decomposition than were strictly smart, at least from a human perspective. But . . . there could be maggots hatching from blood-dried ground or from small bits of tissue missed by the cops. I hate maggots. I just do.

We made the Kid stay in the cockpit with Sarge and PP, which he pouted about, but we wanted to see as many sites as possible before sundown. And a two-person raft meant time spent ferrying back and forth over the water if he came. “I promise pizza suppers once a week for four weeks when we get home,” I said to cheer him up. His brother harrumphed softly, and Sarge chuckled, but Alex grumbled to silence at the promised treat.

The raft was easy to use but had a musty smell, as if PP had slept here one night. And as if Sarge fished from the raft from time to time. But it was functional, if a little black-moldy.

There wasn’t much left at the first crime scene site we visited, which had taken place on the second full moon after the wolves arrived. Even most of the smell of rot had been washed away by wind and rain and the movement of tides, and now there was little more than the stink of distant death, snakes, rats, nutria—humongous rats—and maybe armadillos, which would have been attracted to the insects feeding on the leftovers. And I caught the old, wet-dog-that-rolled-in-something-dead smell of a werewolf, only one—a male, of course, since females went into permanent heat and went insane very quickly after being changed.

The second site was much the same, differing only by the smell of alligator. But the third site, which had taken place on the most recent full moon, only four weeks past, was very different. The paw prints and indentations in the mud were gone, thanks to the weather, and the body had been very carefully removed. But here I could still pick up, not only the stink of rot, but the gender of the victim. She had been young. And terrified.

I moved across the clearing made by death and wolves and many human law enforcement officers and crime scene people, using my nose, and sometimes my eyes, to tell me what had happened here. And by what I saw and scented, we had a bigger problem than I expected.

“Eli?” I said. “Those three wolves? Two were males and the other one was in heat.”

Eli grunted. He’d heard the stories about werewolves. He understood what I meant. We had a crazy female on our hands, and the bitches were always smart, wily, and inevitably in charge, thanks to the mating, rutting madness that drove a pack with a female in it.

And then I smelled something else. I bent and let my nose guide me into the edge of the rough land, the low trees and brush of the wet world. I found where a boat had come ashore, a scar on the mud, one that extended up into the brush as if it had been pulled high. And from the scents scattered all around, he had changed into his wolf, in the boat, before leaping into the brush.

I said, “The wolf—a wolf, maybe not one of the wolves—came to the site, maybe back to the site, recently, like maybe yesterday, which is odd. Why would he do that?” I moved to the edge of the killing ground and found his scent stronger there. He had marked his territory only once, against a short, broken tree, as if leaving a calling card. And it was definitely not one of the three wolves who had done this killing. “Eli, we have three wolves killing. And one, maybe, investigating. Or something. And this one was smart. Not a single good track left anywhere.”

I found one poor, dried-out paw print track, mostly just leaves pushed into the soil, but there was enough to compare against the tracks of the crime scene photos. Not one of the killer wolves. It didn’t make sense. But yeah. “We have four wolves, three in a pack and one a lone wolf,” I repeated. Which, for reasons I didn’t examine, scared me more than anything else.

We landed back at Sarge’s place for lunch and to gas up, eating sandwiches on the dock, watching him work. The sun was high in the sky, and temps were cool, so there were few mosquitoes and gnats and there was enough wind to keep the no-see-ums away. If the full moon hadn’t been near, it would have been pleasant lying back on the dock, sleeping in the sun. Or it would have been if PP hadn’t lumbered over and stuck her slobbery face into mine. I had felt her heavy paws landing on the board of the dock, and I didn’t react. Just lay still while she snuffled my neck. She didn’t bite or growl and I figured it was a form of acceptance, so I slowly reached up and scratched her belly. She flopped down beside me, exposing her underside to me. “You’ll never be finished with her now,” Sarge said. I figured out what he meant when she head-butted me to keep scratching. Lunch was a nice break from the noise and vibration of the small plane.

In the early afternoon, we saw two other sites before heading back to Sarge’s place. One of them had been visited by the fourth werewolf, after Crime Scene had finished with it, and he had landed on the same side of the small bit of land where the crime scene people had come ashore. He had stayed a long time at that one. He had tracked the other wolves back to their landing site on the other side of the spit of land, where the pack’s boat had come ashore. He had marked this site only once too, which just felt wrong for wolves of any kind. I bent over the site and sniffed, pulling in air over my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Eli looked away as I did it, and I couldn’t tell if he was fighting laughter at the expression I made or some other emotion.

When I stopped and stood upright he said, “Babe, just a suggestion. Don’t do that in front of a date. It’s . . . not pretty.” When I grinned at him, Eli flipped a hand to show he was just sayin’, and I chuckled.

Either way, the lone wolf smelled . . . worried.

Oddly, this one had smelled as if he’d been a wolf for some time. He smelled in control, and even when he lingered over a place where the bitch had relieved herself, he hadn’t gone into the male werewolf version of mating frenzy. He had kept it in control. And what was even odder, this guy—like the rogue weres—hadn’t been traveling with a grindylow. He had nothing to keep him in line, to keep him from killing and eating humans, or turning humans into pack. Our lone wolf was in control of himself and really, really alone.

Over dinner of fresh seafood at a place called Joe’s Got Crabs, (this time mine was broiled, with fried soft-shell crabs to the side, with a house-made, Cajun-style rémoulade sauce that was to die for) I explained to the guys what I’d deduced. “This last guy, the lone wolf, has lived here long enough to have bayou skills. He knows the area.”

Eli nodded and gestured with his fork as he chewed. “He knows how to approach, how to move along the edges of the kill sites. Even in broad daylight, he’d move almost unseen.”

“And he’s worried about the other werewolves.”

“Worried how?” the Kid asked. I shrugged, and he went on. “Like he’s afraid they’ll track him? Attack him? Hurt him?”

“Interfere with his standard of living?” Eli asked.

I thought about that one. “Weres used to live in Lousiana. Then they had a run-in with Leo Pellissier and he kicked them out of the state. What if one—I don’t know—stayed? Took up residence? Lived among humans without turning anyone?”

“And now his lifestyle is in danger,” Eli said, having allowed us to provide potential confirmation toward his own point. He ordered beer for us both and bowls of ice cream all around. When Alex looked dumbfounded, Eli said, “You were a good sport today, staying in the cabin with the dog and the old guy. Figured you deserved a treat.”

“I’d rather have a Ferrari, but ice cream isn’t bad.”

I spent an hour texting Rick, because his carrier didn’t offer good cell coverage this far south. Sometimes the government’s predilection to pick the cheapest bid on a job caused problems later on. Go figure. Rick made plans to join us, but it would be another day before that could happen, which left me many hours before he could get here. And few hours before the first day of the full moon.

Just after the texting ended, I heard back from the sheriff and the governor. The gov felt that PsyLED would take too long to find and kill the “wild dogs” and offered me a contract. But the wild dog clause was a problem, legally speaking. With the tentative exception of vamps, supernats and their legal standing had not yet been addressed by congress. Vamps were already in a legal limbo, with Leo having asked for a status like American tribal Indians had—called tribal sovereignty, making vamps a dependent sovereign nation within the federal government. It would give them a position that was similar to a state in some situations, and similar to a nation in others, with certain amounts of recognition, self-government, and sovereignty. It was a huge legal jumble of problems, which would take decades to sort out, and even longer to implement, all which made the master of the city of the Southwestern states happy, because it left him in charge of his people and free to act in any way that led to the safety of the human public. However, no such legal interference had been instituted or started for weres or witches, making their legal limo even worse than the vamps’. And calling a were a wild dog was . . . wrong. Werewolves were sentient beings.

Yet people were dying. And I was stuck in the middle of the problems.

I copied Leo, my partners, and Rick on the offer and got a single-word text reply from my sorta-boyfriend.

Sigh . . . , it said.

“Yeah,” I said to my empty room. Our “wild dog” were had suddenly become a pack of three led by a sex-starved female. Add a lone wolf into the picture, and a state government that wanted in on the kill action, and this was suddenly FUBAR territory. I was not touching this with a ten-foot pole, not until Rick’s bosses at PsyLED decided on a course of action. Which might mean we were headed home in the morning. Yet the next night was the full moon, which would mean death for someone unless I acted. Which the legal situation could prevent. This sucked. I wanted to hit something, but Eli was asleep. Which sounded all wrong too. I rolled over in bed and demanded myself to sleep. I felt Beast sling out a claw and instantly I went under. My last conscious thought was of Beast as a sleeping pill.

It rained all night, sometimes so hard it beat against the windows, with lightning and thunder all around, the noise enough to rouse me several times. Mostly, thanks to Beast, I slept through it, knowing that the next three days could be sleepless and dangerous and deadly. Or not.

Sometime during the night, I got an official e-mail from PsyLED, but with the noise outside, I missed it. An hour before dawn, the storm broke, Beast slapped me awake, and I found my cell blinking. I rolled up to a sitting position and discovered that I had an official offer from the U.S. government, one worked out with Leo’s lawyers, two congressional committees, approved by the Louisiana governor and vetted by the president himself, all in just under seven hours.

I had a kill order to take down the pack. And I was gonna get paid big bucks. “How cool is that?” I asked my dark, silent room. And best? No one said anything about the lone wolf, who hadn’t been in on the carnage and feasting.

As I sat there, I got a second text from Nadine, the sheriff, with a new sighting location. During the storm the night before, four local fishermen had taken refuge on land in the swamp over near Lake Boudreaux. They had seen two huge dogs and a bear as the storm cleared. Nadine sent both a map and a GPS, saved by the men. I pulled up a sat map and studied it. The sighting had been inland, if you can call the swampy area north of Lake Boudreaux inland, up through an old canal, on actual land.

I studied the site on sat maps and determined that we could get there via boat. I loved modern detecting methods. I got up, stretched hard and slow, and walked to the connecting door.

Banging on the Younger brothers’ door, I shouted, “Wake up, sleepyheads! We got a job with a GPS, to start the day. Big enough bucks to buy the Kid a pony for his birthday!” I started to run away but banged once again, my fist flat on the door. “And I’ll need my special equipment, pronto.” I sent the proposal and the GPS to them and got dressed, glad I’d gotten some sleep. I was gonna need it.

I was packing my boots and other supplies into a bag when my cell chimed. On the screen were the words Darlin’. PsyL authorized me to area. Officially. Flight landing at NOLA at two. See you at 4p.

“Again with the darlin’?” But something like longing or hunger flowed through me and I dropped onto the bed, grinning foolishly into the dark. Rick was coming. Maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms. Not that there would be any actual sex—not with the possibility of me getting the were-taint as a really bad, incurable, untreatable STD—but maybe I should have gotten nonconnecting rooms anyway. Just in case.

I texted back, I may not be me. Fair warning. Rick was a were. He’d figure it out.

Several minutes later he texted to me. Noted. Which made me happy all over for reasons I didn’t understand.

Eli knocked on my door, one tap. That was all. One. Mr. minimalist. “Come.” Who says I can’t do terse?

Eli entered, geared up for the day, a bulge under his arm visible as he entered, another in the back of his shirt, both which were nine-millimeter semiautomatics. I knew he’d have more weapons on—a silver-plated knife or two and a few stakes. All that just to greet the dawn. Eli, a minimalist in all other ways, was not into austerity where weapons were concerned. In his hand was my fetish box. He put it on the bed beside me, and for once was unable to keep his curiosity off his face.

Feeling a little uncertain, because I’d never done this in front of him before, I opened the box and rummaged around inside, finally pulling out a short necklace strung with glass beads and wired with canine teeth and three largish bones. I knew what almost all my necklaces were, animalwise, but some I didn’t use often, and this one I had never used.

Trying to sound offhand, Eli said, “You’re gonna track in animal form?”

My eyes on the bones, I nodded, letting a small smile form. I said, “Think you can find the most recent sighting place?”

“Does a mountain lion scream in the woods?”

I smiled wider without looking at him. “Loud. Even if no one is there. And yeah. Animal form. One with a good nose and who can swim.”

“In gator-infested waters?” He sounded half-teasing, half-appalled.

I chuckled softly. “Most gators are hibernating. Water’s still too cold for them to feed.” I looked up under my eyebrows. “Sarge told me. Anyway, swimming is only important if I really need it.”

“And?” The word was phrased the way he must have spoken in the Rangers, sharp and cutting and demanding of more than just an answer.

“Newfoundland,” I said. “I have the bones of a huge black Newfoundland, two years old, who was in training to work with an SAR team because of her swimming ability and because she had an air nose.”

Eli grunted. “Change in here or the Kid will want to watch. I’ll go get some protein.” He left, closing the door behind him. He hadn’t asked about the air nose comment, because he knew what it meant.

Some dogs track on the ground. Others over water. Yet others—some very special few others—can track through the air, sometimes for miles. They were the wunderkind of tracking dogs as far as I was concerned.

I stripped and put the folded clothes into the bag. It was bright pink with big flowers in hot pink, red, and fuchsia, with green leaves on it. Peonies maybe. The zippered duffel had been a gag gift from the Kid, who expected me to gag and throw it away. Instead I’d brought it on two other jobs. And Eli made him carry it while we both cooed about how cute he looked. Mean? Yeah. Probably. But “turnabout’s fair play” had been fun.

Naked, sitting guru-style, I adjusted the length of my doubled gold chain around my neck. On it was wired a gold nugget from the first place I’d changed after I left Bethel Christian Children’s Home when I was eighteen, and a tooth from the biggest mountain lion I’d ever seen. It was a sort of safety tool, a last-ditch survivor device. If I got killed, and if I had time between my last heartbeat and death, I could change into my Beast form and maybe live. It had saved me a couple of times already, and I went nowhere without it.

I propped a pillow behind me, got comfy on the bed, and dropped into the place of the change. Once upon a time, and not that far in the past, changing into a different shape had been much more difficult. I’d had to calm my heart rate and breathing, meditate, really work at it. Now—maybe because of the times I’d changed in extremis, which could also be called near-death experiences—I could drop into the place of gray energies much faster.

My magic was some active form of quantum mechanics, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand it. I just knew how to use it in the same way I could turn a light on without knowing how electricity worked. I held the fetish necklace in both hands as my breathing evened out; I dropped into the gray place of the change.

I sank deep into the bones and teeth and marrow of the Newfoundland, finding the snake that lives in the heart of all animal cells, the double helix of DNA that skinwalkers knew about and knew how to use long before the human medical research community discovered it.

I let myself flow into the genetic makeup of the dog that died saving its trainer from an attacker, shot before she could ever use the training she was getting to save more lives. My skinwalker energies rose. Pain shocked through me, sharp as a knife blade slicing along my bones. I sucked in a final breath and . . . changed.

Smells and smells and smells. Snuffled in scents and blew out, dewlaps fluttering. Snorted. Scented in again. I was Beast, but not Beast. Something was wrong. I smelled female human, scent strong and powerful. Layered beneath her, were smells of many other humans. Strong, vital, sick, old, young. Many humans. Much smell of fish. Rain. Female human scent was familiar.

Oh. Jane’s scent.

Jane woke slowly in brain of dog, stunned, as always, by overwhelming power of scents around me/us. I chuffed, Beast’s sound different from New-found-land-dog’s mouth. More . . . doggy. Do not like dogs.

Beast? Jane murmured into the deeps of mind.

Beast is here. Ugly dog. Tilted big dog head. Not as ugly as last dog. Good smells. Good fish smells. Feed us? Am hungry.

Eli said he’d have food, Jane thought back, trying to remember why I/we were in this form. The smells nauseating to her, too strong, disorienting.

As Jane struggled to get her bearings, Beast stood on the covers of the bed, stepped to the floor, and went to the doorway, where I/we rose on my/our back legs to make us taller.

What are you—? Stop!

I snuffled with laughter and tapped on door with claws. Ugly black claws, hard and short and not made for hooking prey.

Door opened. Kid smell swept out.

Lunged inside. Knocked Kid down. Stood over him huffing into his face, drooling on his jaw.

“Holy crap. How can you have dog breath?” Head tucked, he rubbed his head on the floor back and forth as if to protect his throat and get away at the same time. Stupid prey move. Should attack instead. Alex-Kid shoved with his hands into our belly, making us oof out a breath. “Ugh. Get off me!” he shouted. Loud in dog-ears.

Stepped to side and chuffed up at Eli. He was leaning against wall, shoulder taking his weight, smelling of laughter, small smile on his face. He looked to us. “Did you sign a no-pets clause on this room?”

Jane took over for us and snorted with laughter. Shook head, like human shakes head. Eli held out a leash. Again Jane shook head. I trotted back to deeps of mind and let Jane take over.

I wanted to say the ambush wasn’t my fault, it was a big-cat move, but I was laughing too hard. The Kid’s body odor was strong enough to choke a goat—or a Newfoundland—this morning. No more snack foods for him. He stank of the house-made, Cajun-style rémoulade sauce and fried fish and obviously hadn’t showered today. Or last night. Ewwww. And then I smelled eggs cooking.

Eli bent and put a plate of microwaved eggs on the floor beneath my head. Like maybe two dozen eggs. And they must have been delicious because I inhaled them—probably nearly literally because dogs don’t have a great sense of taste to complement their great noses.

While I changed, Eli had been loading up the SUV and we were ready to go. Rather than stay near the Kid, I licked the egg plate clean, trotted out the door and down the stairs to ground level, and leaped into the backseat. From the seat, I jumped over onto the gear in the very back. And we were off.

The rented airboat was loud. Like really, really loud, when Eli cranked it over. There was no ear protection for dogs as part of the rental, so I’d just have to stand it. The craft was a wide, flat-bottomed johnboat, powered by a gasoline engine and a wooden, aircraft-type propeller in a massive cage. It had two bench-style seats, the back one mounted higher than the front one, with the accelerator and the steering mechanism—a long handle that operated rudders—located up at the backseat.

I leaped onto the front seat and shoved Alex off it, forcing him to sit up behind me with his brother on the backseat. Eli clearly had a massive sinus infection because he was able to ignore Stinky beside him. I let Eli strap me into the seat belt, figuring that a sideways spin might slide me right into the water without it. As we took off from the dock, I stretched out on the seat I had claimed, closed my eyes, let my tongue loll out, and took in the wind. It buffeted my facial hair, flopped my ears back, caressed my face, and filled my nose with goodgoodgood smells, and I was in doggy heaven.

Even Beast seemed okay with this form. Inside me, she rolled over and lay on her side, eyes closed in enjoyment.

Time is different when I’m in animal form. Minutes and hours seldom matter. There is only now, this moment, this set of smells, all finding places in my doggy brain. A scent dog’s brain is wired vastly differently from a human’s brain. It’s like a huge card catalogue, each smell, with its breakdown, root smells, tucked in a different niche or drawer, each interconnected and attuned to memories. But I had no dog memories in this form, so each smell had to find its place. I’d done this before, in bloodhound form, and the experience was totally befuddling, disorienting, and weird. And wonderful.

The other times I’d been in dog form were before I met Eli and Alex, working alone, usually for a single fast bit of reconnoitering. This would be something very different. I’d be working with humans. My humans. Like my brothers, or my family. Possessive, personal, intense. That was the way the dog instincts made it feel. As if the Younger brothers were my humans.

In this form, with them present, I wanted to work. Despite how great I felt as the sun rose around us, heating the air and warming my coat, no matter how great the world smelled, I felt excitement rushing through me at the thought of getting to land and starting a search for big bad uglies.

Maybe this feeling was why humans had begun to domesticate wolves and breed dogs into today’s breeds, because some wolves had wanted to work with humans, had liked the challenge, and because wolves could breed down into something manageable. Maybe. Or maybe humans bred wolves to have something around that fleas liked better than they did humans.

Flea catcher, Beast murmured into my hind brain, chuffing with laughter. Stupid dogs.

There was no awareness or measurement of time, except the sun lifting from the watery horizon, until the stench hit me, I sat up on the seat, my nostrils widening and fluttering. Werewolves. A pong on the air like rotten flesh, wet-dog stink, a reek like nothing else, especially in this form. I stayed upright, taking in the wind, snuffling and shaking my head when the odors of dead fish and dead carrion—turtle, I thought—buzzards, armadillos, rotting vegetation, were too strong. Seeking the were-scent. I could get used to being a dog.

Beast chuffed, her ear tabs lying flat in disproval. Ugly dog, she thought at me.

The airboat ran up on the ground with a slight lift and change of its center of gravity. I rocked back and forth on the seat, digging in with my claws, and huffed. Without opening my eyes, I took in the site, smelling human males. They had urinated everywhere, used one particular area as a toilet for other functions, another as a fish-cleaning station, pitched tents in the lee of some kind of aromatic tree. They had done a little fishing, a little target practice. I smelled guns and nitrocellulose, beer. Lots of beer. No weres had been here. The wide-bottomed boat shifted again and I barked.

Okay. That felt weird. Sounded weird too. I opened my eyes to see the brothers looking at me. Musta sounded weird to them too. I focused on Eli, who had one foot up in the air, about to get off the boat, and shook my head slowly. He stopped his weight transition, thinking, and put the foot back into the boat. “No one here?” When I didn’t respond he asked, “No were-smell here?”

I huffed again, agreeing with his statement.

“Can you smell them?”

I huffed, broke our gaze, and turned my head. We were on a long, straight canal that ran, unwavering, for several miles through the swamp. The stink of werewolves floated down the wind from that way. Eli returned to his seat, started the rented airboat, and backed us off the flat expanse of muddy land. I kept my gaze in the direction that I wanted us to go.

It wasn’t far. It was actually within visual distance of the drunken fishermen, just as they had said. I stared hard at the small outcropping of land and—despite the seat belt—wagged my tail at the site. Eli, following my visual cues, pulled up to the shore, and beached the boat. Sawgrass grew in bunches here, some taller than my dog form’s shoulder, and stunted, weather-twisted trees, with a number of buzzards sitting in the branches. It was hard to estimate in a dog brain, but Beast whispered to me, More-than-five birds-of-the-dead. Something large dead here. It was jungle, reeking with the overpowering stink of . . . Ahhhh . . . dead alligator and stink of werewolf. Eli released me from the seat belt and I leaped out to the muddy bank, paws sinking into mud. There was no smell of human, just were—

The attack came from my left. It bowled me over, into the mud, and rolled me into the water. Teeth, fangs like razors, came at me from above. Beast ripped me away and slung me to the back of my mind.

Rolled away from attacker, deeper into canal. Feet found log beneath, not deep. Pushed off. Leaping, rising, slinging self out of water. Screaming with dog roar. Leaping, stretching, leaping, hard, muscles pulling. Seeing two attackers. Werewolves. Sick. Male. Smell of were-taint on air. They lunged. Heard gunshot.

Landed on smaller werewolf. Bowled him over. Saw hairless belly. Sank teeth into ab-do-men. Foul, stinky blood, awful taste in mouth. Ripped into belly. Shook head, tearing flesh free. Heard yelps. Dog-screams. More gunshots. More-than-five. Swung head hard. Tore out chunk of werewolf-flesh. Spat it out. Bad taste.

Wolf scrambled onshore, wolf-claws sinking into mud. Insides of wolf trailing on ground. Prey-enemy-pack-hunter was wounded. Beast is good hunter!

Lunged for wolf.

Was hit in side. Lifted. Batted away by paw. Big paw. Bigger wolf attacking. Was slammed up. Into air. Beast-side rammed into sharpness of airboat. Screamed-yelped. Fell. Wolf killing teeth/fangs sank into Beast neck. Tore into flesh. Smelled/felt hot dog blood. Was yanked to side. Painpainpain. No breath. More gunshots. Too many to count. Bigger wolf staggered. Stumbled. Jaws opened and Beast/New-found-land fell free. Rolled into water.

Beast tried to swim. Could not move. Pain arched across ribs. Sank deep. Water covered head. Painpainpain. Cannot breathe. Looked up. Saw through water. Big wolf had gray coat, hairs with black tips. White underbelly. Black claws and muzzle. Big teeth. Biggest wolf ever. Short back legs. Sloping back. Big. Bigbigbig.

Dire wolf, Jane murmured into brain. Holy crap. A dire werewolf.

Wolf backed away. Carrying injured, smaller wolf, in jaws, like pup.

World began to go black around edges of eyes. Beast—I/we—was damaged. Was wounded. Blood poured into dark brown water, staining it with blood. Death striking deep.

Oh, crap, Jane thought. We’re bleeding. Holy crap. We’re dying. Too late to shift! Again.

Saw Alex dive into water, spindly arms and knobby legs. Water moved in ripples of cold. Felt Kid grab ruff of neck. Darkness fell over Beast.

“You will not die, damn you.”

Eli voice. Saying words Jane did not like.

But breath did not come. Only blood bubbling from mouth. Ribs cracked and moving out of order. Broken. Piercing lungs. Throat shredded. Am dying.

Light began to go. Darkness flickered around edges of vision.

“Damn you! You will not die! I will not lose another one!”

“Bro. Stop.” The Kid’s voice, full of pain. “She’s gone, bro. Stop. Jane’s dead.”

Eli grabbed head and swung it around. Stared hard into eyes. Fierce. Lips pulled back to show blunt human teeth. “If you die, I’ll fucking kill you myself. Again. So shift or I’ll shoot you, I swear to God, I’ll shoot your dead body full of silver.”

We had never done this—shift from another, lesser animal into Beast.

Inside, Jane laughed, sound broken and far away. We got nothing left to lose. So. Try it. Shift already, she said.

I reached down into self, and . . . shifted.

Eli scrambled away. Shaking his hands in pain. Cussing.

Jane laughed, laughter half wild, and feral. Yes! she shouted into mind.

I fell into self. Into Beast. Energies like lightning and fire, and loud, like thunder. Rumbled through gray place of change. Screamed with pain. Am Beast!

I died.

And lived.

I lay in water, half in, half out. Took breath. Filled lungs. Vomited water out of lungs, onto shore. Gagged with misery and agony. Spluttered water onto land. And breathed. I lay on Beast-paws and closed eyes, body half in water of canal. Deep in brain, Jane cussed. I breathed.

Clawed onto land, out of water. Pulled self onto shore. Claws extended. Body, mud-caked. Stinking of mud and rotten flesh. Dead alligator loomed at eye level, thick skin torn open, flesh spilled onto mud. In rushes saw dire werewolf, small dead werewolf in jaws. It watched, and growled low. Smelled of anger and confusion, watching big-dog that was now big-cat.

I clawed to feet and stood. Screamed into sky. Am Beast. Have killed pack-hunter. Have killed enemy. Have killed werewolf. Screamed into sky. Have won!

Yeah. Go, us, Jane thought into mind, thoughts tasting of sadness. Attack it.

I lunged. But bigger werewolf dragged smaller one away. Deep into sawgrass. Into shadows of trees. It ran.

I chuffed. Jane and Beast live.

I was in Beast form. Puma concolor. I looked to Eli and the Kid. They smelled of fear. I chuffed. Do not be afraid. I am Beast. Will not eat you.

“Jane?” Eli asked. “Are you there?”

I chuffed in laughter. And I smelled the were-magic of the change. Wolves changing, one still alive. Then smelled second one, smaller one change. Heal. In distance, I heard sound of boat starting, high-pitched, mechanical, electrical. Human-sound. Boat moving off small area of land, and into water. Humans did not hear—too far away.

Well, crap, Jane murmured, we lost them.

Smelled smell that was familiar. Will find them again.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. We just got bitten by a werewolf again. Jane took over thoughts and padded to airboat. Sniffed blood on boat sides. Stepped over low side and up onto seat. Lay down. Closed eyes.

Woke to hear the Kid, voice on cell phone—metal thing with ears and mouth, alive and not alive. Heard voice on other ear of cell, then another voice. Then heard voice of Gee DiMercy, Mercy Blade of Leo. “Tell me exactly what happened,” Gee said. Alex told him about wonderful fight with werewolves. Told how Beast killed one. Beast is good hunter. Told how werewolf bit Beast in dog form.

I opened eyes. Sat up on the seat of airboat. Mercy Blade killed rogue things. Would kill werewolf-Jane. Deep inside, Jane woke. What? she asked. I/we stared at the Kid.

“How soon can you be here?”

Eli took cell and said, “Take the helo.” Handed cell back to Alex.

Mercy Blade-and-killer-of-deveveo-vampires said, “Yes. That I can do. I’ll be there soon.” Call ended.

I growled low, pulling back lips, showing killing teeth. The Kid backed away, moving slow. Frightened prey.

Eli laughed. Showed white teeth in dark-skinned face. “Not coming to kill you, Janie girl. Coming to heal you of the were-taint. Meanwhile, let’s get you into the SUV and back to the hotel for a bath.” He unhooked seat belts.

I/we stopped growling. Looked around. Had not noticed where we were. Were back at boat landing near hotel. Saw ess-u-vee near. Thought about humans. Thought about humans with guns, afraid of big-cat. I chuffed. Stepped from airboat and into water. Lay down and rolled in water-over-rock called cement. Mud and blood came loose from coat. Rolled into water and rolled. Rolled. Stood and walked to shore. Walked to the Kid. And shook water from pelt.

The Kid yelped. I chuffed with laughter, walked to Eli. He raised hair over eyes and pulled steel claw. “Try it,” he said. Eli had hungry look on face, as if would try to hurt Beast with puny steel claw. As if he wanted to fight big-cat. Jane watched deep in brain, saying nothing. Waiting. I blew deep breath like sigh. Walked over to ess-u-vee. Climbed into back onto blanket Eli had spread there. Blanket was green and smelled of man-chemicals for cleaning. Stinky. Stuck nose into middle. Smelled old blood. Much old blood, Eli blood hidden beneath smell of chemicals. Looked at Eli, reaching up to close door of ess-u-vee. Saw scar on Eli collarbone.

Eli had died on this blanket. Was blanket of warrior. Of hero.

Curled up on blanket, laid head on paws. Closed eyes.

Metal and glass bird with noisy wings settled onto road, in wide broken pavement of old parking lot. Helicopter, Jane thought.

Stupid bird. Too loud to catch prey. More like a buzzing bee, but with no stinger. And vomits out live people. I chuffed with laughter, watching as Mercy Blade climbed from bubble stomach of noisy, stinky helo. Narrowed Beast-eyes. Will not ride in bird again. Do not think you can force me.

I don’t. I won’t try.

Mercy Blade was pretty human by Jane thinking, small, with long, lean muscles, long hair in tight braid, narrow pelvis, and wide shoulders. Moved like dancer or hunter. Like swan on water. Wore denim jeans and boots and long-sleeved shirt that glimmered in sunlight. Wore magics like cloth layered over body; hard to see real body under magics, but maybe bird form. Blue and green and silver magics in Jane’s vision; green and sliver in Beast vision. Gee carried sword on belt, on side, in green leather sheath.

Muscles tensed to leap out of ess-u-vee, but Eli put hand on head. Scratched behind ears.

“Easy there. I won’t let him pull that sword.”

Looked up at Eli, sitting on back of ess-u-vee. Smelled gun oil and bullets. Eli had pulled gun, hidden by side in edge of blanket where Eli died one time. Chuffed with laughter.

Mercy Blade stepped to ess-u-vee. “Jane?” he asked.

I chuffed. Kept narrow eyes on him. Pulled back lips to show killing teeth.

“Hello, little goddess. It has been many years since I dealt with a shape changer in animal form.”

Jane sat up tall inside mind. How long? What kind of shape changer?

Mercy Blade did not hear. Did not answer. I closed lips over killing teeth. Leaned into Eli’s hand. His fingers started scratching head again, and up under jaw. Yawned to show teeth and happiness with Eli.

“Well. Let’s get on with it, then,” Gee said. He moved slowly in presence of big-cat, and reached toward head.

I growled.

Eli swatted ears. “Stop that.”

I showed killing teeth to Eli. Growled louder.

“I’m not impressed, Jane. Not even a little.”

Inside, Jane laughed. I huffed and stopped growl. Laid head on paws. Glared-stared at Gee, sniffing air, delicate nose membranes fluttering. Last time when he healed me/us, it was a one-day-moon and we were in Jane-form. He smelled then of jasmine and pine. Today he smelled of pink flowers and green grass and pine needles. And a little of catnip. Catnip is good. Like to roll in catnip.

Gee touched face. I/we flinched. Then lay still. Fingers of Gee’s hands cupped face and curled into bristly hair. Pressing over scent sacs in jaw and over eyes. His magics flowed down his arms and across his hands. Toward Beast.

Hot and cold, green and silver. A net of many magics that crawled over Beast and into Beast. Stinging. Hurting. I/we spat. Hissed. Snarled. Pulled away from Eli and Mercy Blade.

Gee DiMercy released head and stepped back. He smelled confused. Face looked strange, lips drawn up and pointing like bird’s beak. “I don’t understand. There is no were-contagion.”

Jane looked through Beast-eyes at Gee DiMercy. Heart was beating hard. Was thinking of Rick. Of mating Rick. Of not getting were-taint through mating.

“Was she in human form when she was bitten? And then changed into the puma form?” he asked.

“No,” Eli said, his voice without emotion. But his body smelled of fear and worry. “She was in dog form, a Newfoundland. She was injured, the werewolf took out her throat—carotids, jugulars, trachea. She was dying.”

“And when she shifted, she became”—he made a sweeping movement with arm and hand like swan’s wing over water, but over Puma concolor body— “this? Not her human form first? Then into this?”

“No,” Eli said, smelling now of protection. Inside Beast, Jane crouched, listening, not sure what was wrong but certain that something was wrong. Eli’s fingers clenched in Beast-pelt, at neck. Holding on, like kit in den to mother-cat. He pulled we/us to his side. He smelled of den and home, of kits and littermates. “From dog to this.”

“You are certain?”

Eli looked at Mercy Blade with thin eyelids. “Yes. Why does it matter?”

Gee DiMercy stepped away from ess-u-vee. “When she died, she should have resolved into her natural birth form. Jane is not a werecat to be born in her cat form and then later to find a human shape. She is a—” He stopped, tilted head, looking Beast over. “I thought she was a little goddess, but perhaps I was wrong.” He looked back at helo-bird and whipped arm in circle. Helo-bird made whirring noise that rang in ears. Strange winds began to turn. Beast bent ear tabs down to protect ears. “I don’t know what she is, but whatever she is, or whatever bit her, she is free of were-taint. Without my services.”

Changing from dog to me would have left me with the taint? But changing from a dog to Beast means I don’t have it? So being with Rick would . . . What? What? I’d have to have sex in dog form and then change into a cat? Ewww. Not gonna . . . Just ewww.

But Gee DiMercy was in helo and the clumsy bird was lifting away. Jane cursed inside mind. Beast stayed silent and still, remembering presence of angel Hayyel and . . . things he did to me/us. Things Beast could not tell Jane.

“You okay, Janie?” Eli whispered.

Beast pressed head into Eli side, demanding scratches. But Beast did not purr.

“I like your hair down,” Rick said.

I was in human form, sitting at the top of the hotel steps, watching the day end, waiting for him to arrive. He’d ridden up in a small red car, a rental, and had gotten out, walking straight to me in the dying light, his car door left open.

My body reacted to the heat in his voice and I shifted on the cold step, orienting to face him. He stood below me on the staircase landing, halfway up. The light was mostly gone and he looked like a black silhouette against the dusk, lean and feral, dangerous. He smelled of cat and human and lust. Earbuds hung on his neck, playing magic music, the musical spell that kept him from going insane from the pain of being a werecat who couldn’t change form.

I turned from my sorta-boyfriend to the last glimmer of sunset and moon rise. The moon was full and huge and bright, resting in the clouds on the horizon—a pumpkin-orange ball nested into bloodred bright clouds. The moon’s reflection spread across the water like blood and flower petals, like the promise of spring and the curse of death. I looked back at him, moving just my eyes. “You okay?”

He shrugged, the movement uncannily catlike. “As well as can be expected.”

I shook my head, my hair sliding across one shoulder to pool on the steps. He watched it move. Like a cat intent upon a toy. I knew without asking that he wanted to gather up my hair and run his claws through it. I almost asked if he knew about the pronouncement made by Gee, and then I closed my mouth on it. Eli and the Kid wouldn’t tell him. Nor would Gee or Leo.

And I didn’t know if I wanted him to know or not, that there was some small possibility that we could be together and me not get the were-taint. Before I could tell him that, before we could explore that remote possibility, I had to ask some tough questions, and even asking them was . . . probably stupid. Frustration zinged through me like a pinball, alarms sounding. I took a breath, knowing I had to ask. Knowing as I did that it might break us. “I gotta know, Ricky Bo. Did you know you were sending me into a life-or-death situation? One where a werewolf was trying to start a pack? And had a female?”

I watched Rick’s face fall as he remembered his own past as a hostage, kidnapped by a werewolf pack. “No,” he murmured. One hand reached up to massage his shoulder where the werewolf bitch had tried to chew off his tattoos. “No. No females. Not possible.”

“Yes. And not only possible. Fact. Two males, one huge, big enough to be a dire werewolf, coat color gray. The other male was smaller, more familiar in size, reddish, like the pack that attacked me once before. Attacked you. And died, the whole sick lot of them. Or so we thought.

“One of the males must have survived, and he made a female. She survived her first turn and now lives, if you can call it that, a crazy bitch in heat. I know. I smelled her.”

Rick climbed the steps slowly, his boots slipping out and up. He stopped two steps below me and sat, his scent surrounding me, hot and rich, with just a hint of Old Spice. An odd choice for a young man, but maybe his cat liked it. My Beast did.

He shook his head, looking up at me as the yellowish lights of the hotel stairwell came on. “Are you sure?” I hadn’t noticed, but he had a blade in one hand, the center plated with sterling silver. He turned it, the sterling catching the light.

“Yeah. I’m sure,” I said. “The small one smelled like the bitch who tortured you. He smelled like her pack. The bigger one smelled like . . . like something else.”

The white form of Rick’s partner—the white werewolf stuck in wolf form—climbed the steps behind Rick. The irony of a werecat stuck in human form and a werewolf stuck in wolf form being partners for the Psychometry Law Enforcement Department wasn’t lost on me, but that didn’t mean I’d cut him any slack. “Hey, Brute. What’s kicking? Anyone broken your nose lately?” He snarled at me, fangs white in the darkness, and I chuckled. “Try it, big boy. How many times do I have to break your ugly snout to make you understand that you’re only a wolf?” I made the last three words an insult, and I heard a chittering in the night, though I didn’t see the source. Staring the wolf down, I said, “Sorry, Pea,” though I knew she could smell the lie on me.

I heard a scrape in the hallway behind me as Eli decided to reveal himself. He knew he needed to be downwind if he wanted to spy on creatures with better-than-human noses, so clearly he had wanted his presence known. “LaFleur,” he said.

“Younger,” Rick said back, measuring the former Ranger.

It was like a testosterone factory out here. I sighed and stood, pivoting on a boot heel and walking down the hallway to my room. Hand on the knob, I pointed three rooms down. “Room fourteen.”

Rick looked at the door of room fourteen, and back to me, his face suddenly playful. “Is that a challenge? Because if it is, consider it taken, darlin’.”

Heat sang through me. Pea, Rick’s supernatural grindylow, the mythical creature charged with keeping were-animals from spreading the were-taint, chittered angrily and stood up from her perch in Brute’s fur. Eli, instead of taking my side, laughed. “She needs to get laid, man, can’t say she don’t, but my room’s right next door, so keep it quiet.”

“Good grief,” I muttered, and went into my room, closing the door with finality. To the empty room I said, “Men.” And not in a nice way. Then I turned to my weapons, laying them out on the bed. These I understood. Men, not so much.

Moments later I heard a tap on the door and soft music from outside. I opened the door a crack. Rick stood in the hallway’s yellow light, that same expression on his face, laughter, playfulness, teasing. Dear God in heaven, I’d missed that look. The heat that had started in the stairwell bloomed and spread through me. He leaned in, smelling totally delicious. “You’re really gonna make me stay all the way down there?”

“I really am.” The words were more whisper than I wanted and I cleared my voice.

Rick’s smile widened, and I knew he could smell my need on the air. “You gonna join me?”

“I’m really not.”

Rick nodded, his lips drawing into a thoughtful frown. “Well, then. We should take advantage of the moonlight. Let’s hunt.”

My Beast reared up in me, staring through my eyes at a man she had claimed as her mate. Mine, she purred. I didn’t bother to push her down but opened the door to reveal my room with my weapons spread on every surface. “Was kinda hoping you’d wanna hunt,” I said.

Rick whistled and Brute trotted up. I looked at the wolf. “He willing to chase down a wolf who might have been his hunting buddy once upon a time?”

“He’s good with it.” Rick nodded to the adjoining room. “Your pals up for a night hunt?”

The adjoining door opened. “Thought you’d never ask,” Eli said. “Where do we start?”

“That restaurant we ate at last. The werewolves have eaten there. I smelled the house-made, Cajun-style émoulade sauce on them when they changed back to human. By the stink, I’d say they’re regulars at Joe’s Got Crabs.”

The waitress at the restaurant wasn’t interested in talking to me about the threesome who ate there every night. But when Rick walked in, things changed fast. He turned that million-dollar smile on her and I thought she’d toss off her clothes right then and there and take him on the floor.

I sat at the bar and watched, nursing a beer so they wouldn’t toss us out, Eli with a Coke standing behind me. The waitress bent over Rick and let him get a good look at her cleavage while they chatted. I couldn’t decide if I was jealous or if she was pathetic. Both probably.

Eli leaned over me and said, “So. You want to rip her head off or tear her a new one lower down?”

“Both. Neither. She stinks of mango, jasmine, and roses perfume with a dash of fried fish and horseradish. He can act interested all he wants, but I can see his nostrils. To him? She reeks.”

“Even with those boobs?”

I looked down at my own chest and back to the waitress. “There are the boobs,” I acknowledged. “And the long blond hair.” And the fact that Rick was a pretty boy and generally unfaithful. Minutes later Rick walked back to us, a strip of paper in his fingers.

“Her number?” I asked, hearing the snark in my voice, which—hopefully—disguised the hurt.

“A license number, a credit card number, a name, and an address,” he said with pride and not a little swagger. He handed me the strip of paper.

“And you didn’t get her number?” Eli asked, disbelieving.

“Oh, I got her number.” Rick pulled out another strip of paper and extended it to Eli. “For you.” Eli’s eyes went wide as he looked from Rick’s hand to the waitress. She gave him a little wave. “My good-looking friend who is smitten with her down-home Southern looks and charm, but who is too shy to get her number.”

“You didn’t.” There was a Beast-worthy growl in the words.

Rick tucked the paper into Eli’s shirt pocket and patted it down. “Oh, but I did.”

Chortling with laughter and more relieved than I wanted to admit to myself, I waved to the waitress as I followed the men out the door. “Be sure to burn that,” I advised Eli, “before Sylvia sees it. She wouldn’t bother with ripping off your head. She’d let Smith and Wesson do the talking.”

The water sped by us in the rented airboat, the moon now cold and icy, bright on the black water. We had given the Kid the information that the waitress had provided, matched it with newcomers to the area and missing persons reports in the parish—information provided by the police—three prime addresses to work with—all easiest to find by boat. Eli drove, Brute sitting beside him, Rick and me on the lower, front seat, his arm around my shoulders, seat belts holding us in place. You really needed the nylon flex straps in an airboat at any speed.

The first place was a vacant mobile home that had been used for target practice by the locals for so long that it was mostly a hole. Neither Brute nor I got a whiff of werewolf. And it felt weird to be working with the wolf, asking him if he smelled our prey. Beast growled low in the back of my mind, and I had to soothe her raised ruff. It’s just for now, I thought at her.

Want to fight wolf. Scratched his nose one time.

You did? I didn’t remember that, but I thought it might be prudent to not continue the conversation. And when Eli whirled the airboat in a tight arc to take us to the next place on our list, I used the centrifugal force as an excuse to hold on to Rick and not respond.

The second place was more likely. I smelled werewolf stink from yards away. The airboat roared up onto land in front of a house; the engine cut off.

Brute stepped over the back of the seat and shoved his snout between Rick and me, pushing us apart, sniffing, getting dog drool on my shirt. I was sure it wasn’t an accident. I shoved his nose away. “I smell it,” I said. I stepped onto the land, boot heels sinking into the mud. Brute landed beside me, shaking his head, the human gesture looking all wrong on him.

“What?” Rick asked. “Is this the right place?”

Brute nodded.

“Are the weres here?”

Brute lifted his snout and sniffed as the airboat went silent and shook his head.

“They’re hunting,” I said softly.

Brute snuffled agreement. Pea crawled up his back, holding his ruff in her tiny little fists. She sat astride his neck, holding on, and sniffed the air. She chittered, the sound menacing and deadly, strange coming from the green-coated, kitten-sized grindy. She closed her eyes and sniffed, tiny explosions of air. She opened her eyes and looked at Rick. There was an intensity in her gaze that belied her cuteness.

“I haven’t touched Jane. Oh. Wait. You know where the werewolves went?”

Pea sniffed again and pointed with a tiny paw/hand, one finger extended, the two-inch steel claw at the tip. Deep inside, Beast hissed at the sight. I know, I thought at her. I don’t know where she keeps them either, but when she pulls them out, they are scary.

Behind us, silent, Eli started the engine again, the prop deafening in the night. Brute and I leaped back inside, and we followed Pea’s nose and steel claw down the canal.

Pea directed us to shore along a stretch of water that was black as sin. Eli pulled up and beached the boat, cutting the engine. Another airboat was beached beside ours, and it stank of were. And wolf-in-heat. And terrified human. Female. They had captured a woman. When she was in the boat, she was unharmed, no blood smell. But she had been so filled with fear that her sweat stank of it. And she had urinated on herself. Recently.

Eli turned a bright flash on the boat, where we could see clothing, shoes, beer cans, and jewelry in piles. He moved the light and studied the muddy bank. Close to the boat it was hard to tell what was what; there were human prints and wolf prints. But farther out, one pair of bare, human feet led off into the brush. And three wolves followed.

Eli leaned over the seats and started passing out weapons. The rest of us took them, checking their readiness by feel, holstering them, checking the slide of blades and the position of, well, everything. My M4 Benelli was in its spine holster, the grip above my ear, loaded with hand-packed rounds containing silver fléchettes. They had been designed to kill vamps but most supernats could be poisoned by silver, weres among them. I retied my boot laces. Made sure water bottles were easy to hand. Eli carried a U.S. army med kit, mostly for him and any hurt victim, because the rest of us would be likely to heal fast. He had walked me through everything in it, and their uses. I had managed not to laugh at his description of the uses of tampons—“Great bandages to insert into gunshot wounds. They have their own tail to locate the injury later.” Uh-huh. Kinda knew that.

When we were all ready, we stepped to the bank, and mud sucked at our feet, each step a slurping sound, each foot an effort to lift. With a whiff of satisfaction in his pheromones, Eli pocketed the keys of both boats. The wolves had left theirs. He turned off the flash and we stood to let our eyes acclimate.

There were no lights anywhere. There was only the stink of rotting vegetation, scat, the rot of a dead animal in the distance, and the smell of fear, aggression, violence. No sounds but the rare splash of a water animal, the trickle of slow-moving bayou and tide. In summer there would be frogs croaking, insects buzzing, night birds hooting and calling. Gators roaring. The smell of animals nesting and sleeping and hunting everywhere. From time to time, there would be boats and campsites with lights and fire pits, and the sounds of drunken humans would echo through the dark. But the weather had turned cold in what passed for winter here, and tonight it was just us and the smells and the small round moon on the black water and the silence that was left after the roar of the boat. Until the scream rent the air.

Everyone but Eli jumped. Eli settled his low-light gear over one eye and, with the other one, looked at the tiny kitten and the white wolf. “You take point. Move slow and steady. No matter what you hear.” To us, he added, “Stay together. Jane, you got our six.” It wasn’t a request, and I fell in at the back. When it came to paramilitary operations I was the novice, he was the expert. And he was the one with the fully automatic weapon. I had learned that current Louisiana gun laws didn’t prohibit magazine capacity, and that was why Eli felt so safe carrying them everywhere we went. I hadn’t asked, and he had seen no reason to enlighten me.

I had also learned that no wet place in Louisiana is similar to any other. Walking through land bordering a saline marsh meant mud, shrubs, mud, stunted trees, mud, broken limbs, some sharp as stakes, mud, sawgrass and regular grasses, lots of them taller than we were, and more mud. It clung to our boots and sucked at each footstep. The white wolf was two toned, his bottom half black with muck, his upper half bright in the moonlight. Pea chittered softly, directing the wolf, using his hair like reins, pulling him where she wanted. It was a weird hunt, to be at the back of a pack, and I pulled on every sense Beast could lend me, from power in my leg muscles, to her night vision, which was much better than mine. Beast didn’t like this hunt. Neither did I. Not with the snarls and yips and screams that came from ahead, in the dark.

The snarls and yips were excited and vicious; the screams were full of terror and agony, and we were taking too long—too long!—to get there. But the muddy terrain set the pace, not the victim, who, by her screams, was being torn apart, eaten alive, so damaged she would die, no matter how fast we got there. I bared my teeth in a killing rage. Forcing my feet to lift high, to run faster. Ahead, Eli did the same, and I could smell his desperation and fury.

The screams ended with a panting, pained moan, over and over with each fast breath, moans that seemed to roll out over the water and the low land, seeming to come from everywhere. “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Je . . . ssssuusss.” And then there was nothing but the sounds of tearing and growls and the crack of bone. Just ahead.

We slogged out of the low trees into a clearing, Eli firing a burst from his automatic weapon, the sound and the muzzle fire ripping through the night. Yelps, howls, and shrieks followed. Beast flooded me with strength and I raced for the body on the ground. I took it in with a fast glance and didn’t need to check for a pulse. She was dead—very dead, with nothing left inside her abdomen and a pool of blood on the wet ground an inch deep. It trickled off in tiny rivulets, toward the water.

If we had gotten here sooner . . .

I screamed and whirled and dove into the fight. A vamp-killer in one hand and a nine-mil loaded with silver shot in the other.

Brute was battling a reddish wolf, the coat color visible in the moonlight. Rick was side-to-side with Eli, taking on a . . . a monster. I fired into the monster’s side, aiming for his heart, emptying my weapon into him. I slapped the blade flat under my arm and changed mags.

I caught a hint of motion out of the corner of my eye and dropped to one knee, lifting the vamp-killer. The bitch was in midair, midleap. Her body lancing through the space where I had stood. My blade took the bitch along the side of the belly, the point penetrating deepest beneath the back left leg. She screamed with rage and ducked her head, tumbling in midjump. Her fangs snapped close to my face with a click I heard over the deafness of the nine-mil firing. I fell back. Into the mud. Rolled to my knees.

The bitch landed two feet away, spun on three legs, and rammed me. Lifting me high.

I slammed into something. Took a broken branch to my lower ribs. Right side.

I fired at the bitch point-blank. She yelped and raced away, into the sawgrass. The monster whirled and followed her, limping. The third wolf was hanging in Brute’s jaws, dangling and broken.

I was injured. I knew it was bad because I was hung on the broken tree as if I’d been skewered for cooking, bleeding like a stuck pig. I was having trouble getting a breath. Rick and Eli dropped to either side of me. Both turned flashes on me, so bright I closed my eyes. Or maybe it was the sight of the wound, vivid and slick with blood. I smelled bowel. Saw what might have been a strip of liver. Inside me, Beast hissed, and I hissed with her.

“If she was human, we’d cut the limb and take it with us to an ER,” Eli said to Rick. “But maybe she’ll—”

“Pull her off it, fast, before the pain sets in,” Rick said.

Before? I thought. Too late.

“Under her arms,” Rick said. “On three.” They grabbed me under my arms, braced their bodies, and Rick counted. On three they lifted and jerked me off the branch. I didn’t even scream. I couldn’t. I had no breath. My chest ached, heart suddenly beating unevenly and with pain in each contraction. Lung collapsing maybe.

They let me down, gently, into the mud. I was under the branch I’d been impaled on. It was covered in gore for the first five inches. And yes, there was a piece of tissue hanging on the wood that looked suspiciously like part of my liver.

“Idiot damn woman!” Eli spat. “Just because you can heal is no reason to keep dying.” His voice was gruff, not even trying to hide his worry/anger/fear. “You could try to be more careful.”

“What’s the fun in that?” I whispered. Huh. My lips were numb.

“Someday you’re gonna wait too long,” he warned.

I managed a chuff of laughter as he turned my body to the side. I was facing the water. It was closer than I had thought. Just beyond where the girl’s body lay, her blood trickling into the canal. At the edge of the water something glimmered, an arc of bright light, all the colors of the rainbow, swimming through the water, moving with the up-and-down sweeps of a dolphin or porpoise. It was beautiful. Cool and bright and muted all at once, like a rainbow come to life and shot through with silver. I tried to point, but my hands weren’t working.

The light being, so much like Rick’s partner, Soul, but not, most certainly not, cavorted in the cold water, leaping in and out of the canal without a splash. When it came close to the shore, it halted, the light of its spirit body coruscating. It slithered closer, like a water snake, and seemed to dip part of its energies into a trail of the dead girl’s blood. It wrenched itself back, leaped into the air, and was gone. Something indefinable inside me mourned. And the light, what little there was of it, began to go.

“Shift,” Rick said as he cut through my clothing and loosened my holsters and my Kevlar vest. “Shift, Jane. Now!” He unbelted leather and zipped my pants down. Eli unlaced my boots, their flashlights dancing pools of light on the scrub around us. If the wolves came back they’d never know in time. I tried to tell them, but my mouth wasn’t working. I shivered in the cold air. Or in the cold of death. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

I sought the gray place of the change, the place of my skinwalker energies. But it eluded me, like phosphorescent water slipping through my fingers.

Beast? Can you help?

Jane is stupid human. But deep in my mind, I felt her bend and pick me up by the scruff of my neck. Holding me in her killing teeth as tenderly as though I were one of her kits.

And together we dropped into the gray place of the change.

The energies of what I had determined might be quantum mechanics, of the movement of electrons and neutrons and all the trons, were a nimbus of light, arcing and racing and waving and dancing in a silver cloud of light. The energies were struck through with darker sparks of black light and blue-white sparks of brilliance.

The pain increased, but a different kind of pain, sharper, cutting. As if my flesh was being stripped from my bones.

Beast leaped away from men, shaking free of boots and clothing and racing up a stunted tree. Screamed into the night, big-cat scream. Claiming life and hunting grounds and calling to spirit being that had fled the dead.

“Jane?”

I hissed. Am Beast. Not Jane. Jane is asleep inside. Then smelled blood. Not Jane-blood. Not dead-girl-blood. Not werewolf-blood. Rick-blood. I dropped to ground, sniffing. Opened mouth and pulled air in over scent sacs in roof of mouth. Tasting/smelling mate. He was injured.

I walked to him and stuck snout to arm. Rick held still, not even breathing. Smelled Rick and smelled werewolf. Rick was bitten. Backed away. Hissed, snarled. Turned to Brute and snarled again. Brute and Pea were Rick’s pack. His den-mates. Should have protected Rick like kit against predator, I thought at them. I growled and walked toward them. Angry. Should have protected mate.

Wolf backed away. Lowered head. Dropped dead werewolf. Like offering. Pea chittered from Brute-back. Sounded sorry. Beast looked at Pea. Will mate become werewolf? Werewolf and werecat too? Will mate die?

Pea jumped from Brute and raced to Rick. Climbed up his leg. Studied bite mark. Rick lifted Pea to shoulder and bent over Jane clothes.

“You’re hit,” Eli said, opening box with bandages. Voice was toneless, but Eli-body’s smell changed, unhappy. Thinking many things. He put flashlight in mouth held it with blunt human teeth. Ripped open large bandage. Cussed at sight of wound. “It bit you?” Placed sheet of white over Rick’s arm.

“Yeah.” Rick wrapped wounded arm and bandage in Jane T-shirt. Pea chittered softly. Sad. “Tie it off,” Rick said. Eli wrapped T-shirt-bandage in stinky stuff that changed shape to wrap arm. Pressed on wound. Rick hissed with pain. “He tried to rip off a hunk of muscle, but he got distracted when Jane shot him full of silver.”

“Bad?”

“Hurts like a mother. But I’ll heal.”

“But . . .” Eli stopped. Bent and gathered up Jane clothes and weapons. “Let’s book. We got a hike to make. And two pissed-off wolves between us and it.”

“And you with their keys,” Rick said, laughter in tone. Rick said, “Brute. That thing dead?” Brute nodded head up and down, human gesture. Looked stupid. Pea chittered in triumph, claiming kill.

“Okay,” Rick said. Slung weapons over shoulder. Rick stood, wavering on two feet. Should be on four feet. Would not waver.

Brute looked at girl, dead on ground. She smelled of meat. Of food. Beast was hungry. Needed meat after change. Did not look at girl-meat. Growled at Brute. Wolf dropped own head and turned away from prey-meat.

“Jane?” Rick said. “Let’s get back to the . . . back to the . . . boat.” But Rick dropped to knees. And fell to ground, face in mud.

Pea leaped clear. Landed on Beast. Made soft mewling sound in ear, like kit. Beast chuffed with laughter.

Eli rearranged weapons and Jane-gear. “Brute, get over here.” Wolf growled, knowing what Eli wanted. “You’ll carry him or I’ll shoot you myself,” Eli said. Not mad. Not angry. Speaking truth. Brute walked to Rick, growling.

Making grunting sound, Eli lifted Rick and laid him on Brute back. With more stinky stuff, tied Rick to Brute. I chuffed with laughter. Went to Rick. Smelled wound. It stank. Stank of were-taint.

Pea mewled in ear. Not death sound. But sound like Rick was sick again. Sick with wolf. Beast swiveled head to see Pea. Thinking. Thinking like Jane. Was hard. Pea should have chased werewolves when they ran. Was Pea’s job. But Pea stayed with Rick. Knew Rick was sick. Knew Eli and Jane and Beast would kill wolves. Beast walked upwind. Sniffing. No werewolf scent ahead. But they might circle in back. Hunters. Pack hunters. Sneaky pack hunters. But big wolf was full of silver. Could not change back to human form with silver inside. Would have to get female wolf to cut out silver bullets. Did not know what werewolves would do, attack or run away and try to heal.

“Okay. Let’s go,” Eli said to Beast. Beast turned and faced water and scrub and bushes. Walked into dark. “So what? You taking our six?”

Beast chuffed with agreement.

“Good by me.”

Trip back to boat was long. Beast was hungry. Was muddy, dirty. Do not like mud. Do not like mud at all. Belly aches with hunger. Body is weak. Want to eat. Want to eat deer and cow and rabbit. Looked at Eli. Looked at Brute. Would even eat Brute.

Eli untied Rick from Brute back while Beast stood watching trees and scrub. Did not smell wolves. Eli lifted Rick to lay on long seat of airboat. Was noisy—feet on hollow boat bottom. Rick groaned. Was sick. Retching.

Brute jumped into canal and swam. Blood and mud washed away.

“You too, Jane,” Eli said. “Make it quick.”

Beast snarled. Am not Jane. Am Beast. But stepped into water. Swam out from shore and back. Looked for spirit being of rainbow colors but did not see it. Followed Brute from water. Brute shook, pelt showering water and mud all over Beast. Chuffed with laughter.

Beast snarled. Leaped on Brute. Sank in claws. Bit hard on nose. Holding. Brute yelped/whined. Quivered. Did not know what to do. Froze like prey.

Beast let go and walked back to water. Washed again. Shook water from pelt. Climbed into airboat and sat beside mate. Kept back to wolf, but eyes turned to see. In wolf pack, Beast would be alpha. Wolf would be beta. Saw him lick his snout. Could smell his blood on air.

Was near dawn when we got to hotel. Jane was awake, watching through Beast eyes. Eli carried mate up stairs to room. Wolf and Beast followed. Eli turned on shower in Rick room, washed Rick. Cut off his clothes. Opened wound and saw healing. Carried Rick to bed and laid him, naked, on bed.

Beast went to mate and sniffed. Rick was sick. Sick with were-taint. Pea jumped from Beast back to bed with Rick and curled up in space at shoulder, neck, ear. “Is he gonna turn wolf?” Eli asked. Jane was shocked at question. Felt her pull away. Fear action.

Pea made sound, “Uuuuu,” and shook head.

“Is he gonna die?”

Pea made same sound and shook head again.

“So he’s just gonna be sick as a dog and then get better?”

Pea made “Sssss,” sound and nodded head.

Jane made choking laughter sound deep inside Beast.

“Janie? You want to wait till dark to go after the wolves?”

Beast nodded head. Padded from room and went to door of Jane room. Eli opened door and Beast went inside. The Kid rushed out of room talking too much, too loud. Was prey action when werewolves were hunting. Stupid human. Beast pawed door shut and lay down on floor. Entered gray place of change.

“Oh, crap. That hurt.” It still hurt. And I had a wide, white scar, to show me how close I’d come to dying. I made it to the shower, turned the water on hot, and rested against the wall as the water beat against me. I was starving. I could tell from the way my ribs stuck out that I’d lost at least ten pounds, shifting twice with no caloric intake. I needed food and a lot of it if I was going on a hunt. Beast? You there?

Beast is here.

What happened?

Beast showed me. Showed me everything. When I saw Rick fall, I ached inside. When I saw the spirit being, the thing like Rick’s Soul, I was taken off guard. But there wasn’t time to whine or grieve or worry. Dawn had broken. We needed food, guns, planning, and we needed to get back in the swamp. I half crawled from the shower and dried off, using the blow drier on my hair. Tossed my wet, muddy, bloody clothes into the shower and washed them off, wrung them out, and left them hanging over the shower door. I fell on the bed and closed my eyes, desperately needing rest, maybe even more than I needed food.

After my forty winks, I dressed in clean clothes and weaponed up, the leathers wet and slick even after I dried them with a towel. They needed oiling and a lot of attention, but they weren’t going to get that until the wolves were dead.

I knocked on the connecting room door. Eli opened it and stood aside to let me enter. He had showered with scentless soap and dressed in clean clothes, not wearing the smelly stuff his girlfriend gave him. Brute was on the floor near his bed. Eating. Before I could accuse him of feeding the wolf before he fed me, Eli shoved a fork and a plate of microwaved scrambled eggs at me. I sank to the floor and shoveled the eggs in. Before I was done, he dropped four pancakes on my eggy plate and drenched them with syrup. Then more eggs. And then he handed me a twenty-ounce protein shake that tasted like chalk and artificial blueberries, but I downed it too.

Then he handed me my M4 harness and helped me strap it on. All without a word spoken. When I was weaponed up, and he had checked the readiness of my slimy-wet, leather gear, he said, “I called the death in to Rick’s partner. They’ll handle the crime scene, rather than calling in the state boys, since we fu—messed it up so bad. I heard the call go out forty minutes ago.” I nodded and he pointed at me. “You, the wolf, and me. Back on the water. Now. We need to hit them while the big wolf is weak, while the female is still cutting rounds out of his body and he’s injured and stuck in wolf form. Our best bet is the crime scene, since they can’t get off the water while wounded and without their boat. Okay?”

I nodded. And accepted the bag of candy bars, energy bars, prepackaged high-protein energy drinks, and chips packed by the Kid. On top was a sugary, icing-coated, cream-stuffed snack cake. It looked totally bad for me and totally delicious. It had to come from his secret stash, the one he hid from his brother, the health food nut. I took it with a smile and he shrugged. “Enjoy. Be safe. And keep him safe.” He thumbed at Eli. “He’s hard enough to live with now, without adding raw meat to his diet and him howling at the moon three nights a month.”

Eli ruffled his brother’s hair as if he were a child and loped down the stairs, Brute on his heels. I followed more slowly, not because I felt bad, but because my stomach was so full I could hardly move. And I was already thinking about eating the snack cake.

The sun was high overhead when we hit the water. The airboat trip back into the canal took too long, and we were too late anyway. The wolves’ airboat was gone. Eli killed the engine, leaving us floating with the meager current, thinking. “They had another key,” he said.

“Looks like,” I agreed.

“I hate when the bad guys are smart enough to plan ahead.”

I opened an electronic tablet and pulled up the crime scene GPS locations, and compared them to the current crime scene, then layered them on a satellite map and showed it to Eli. He nodded and spun the airboat in a three-quarter turn before heading to the closest house, which was the house we had started out at the night before. No one was home. There was no scent of werewolf, no scent of blood. I figured they had smelled us on the beach and found another place to lair up, so we took a deeper turn into the swamp. That GPS location turned out to be a burned-out hulk. The next place we got to was a falling-in mess of wind-damaged, water-damaged timbers, maybe the result of a hurricane—Katrina or Rita. Three places later, we were stumped, but we had no cell signal at all, to call the Kid for advice. So Eli texted his genius of a brother and we ate a late lunch: Brute wolfed down a three-pound roast that smelled a little rank, I ate most of the goodies in the pack Alex had made for me, and Eli ate a veggie and pulled pork sub sandwich he had hidden in a cooler in the bow. I thought he was sneaky to keep the sandwich for himself. He thought I was stupid for eating the “crap food” his brother packed for me. And we got Cokes all around.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a white werewolf drinking Coke from a bowl and then having a sneezing fit when the carbonation got up his nose. The laugh did me good, even if it did make Brute mad. Fortunately, before he could decide to fight me over the offense, we got a text from Alex accusing us of sitting on our butts. Dang cell phones were nothing more than tracking devices. We went back to searching. And the day went back to getting shorter and shorter. We were running out of time.

An hour before dusk, I said, “Let’s check back at the house that they used. The one we were at before Pea sent us off after the wolves. Maybe they circled back to it, thinking we wouldn’t.”

Eli didn’t reply, but moments later we were heading back along Lake Boudreaux and into the canals.

We raced by the house once, as if we were fishermen on the way elsewhere, studying the grounds. By daylight it was bigger than I had thought, with a long, two-story screened porch starting on ground level and the rest of the house up on stilts to protect it from hurricane surge. It stank of werewolves and blood and pain, which made my face contort in what might have been considered by some to be a really ugly smile.

Brute gave a low chuff, a darkly gratified sound I’d heard during the fight with the werewolves in the night. It was the sound he made when he got to kill something that needed killing. My eyes met the wolf’s icy ones and something exchanged between us. We might not like each other, but we understood each other. We were both killers of a sort. And I absolutely did not like that about myself.

Eli pulled the airboat to a halt far downwind, and turned off the engine. “Tromp back and attack by stealth or race back and execute a Normandy?” he asked. When I looked confused, he said, “The One Sixteenth hit the beach by daylight. World War Two.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Yeah. I remember my history lesson. They died like flies.”

“Beach the boat for a frontal attack, versus time and energy to muck it back overland, time when they might heal and be stronger.” He looked up at the sky and the sun that was already below the tree line. It would be dark soon. The moment the moon rose, they’d be stronger, healing the damage the silver bullets had caused, and helping to extrude the bullets. Always assuming they were still alive, of course.

Brute chuffed and stared back down the canal. An immediate beach landing was his vote. But I tilted my head, thinking about the low ground, the house’s floor plan, and even the foliage I’d seen as we raced by. “How about we point the airboat at the beach, but we all jump off before we get there? The boat makes a lot of noise from the beach side, gets their attention, draws them toward the water, and we take them from the rear.”

Brute yipped and grinned, his tongue hanging out to one side.

“Could work,” Eli said, turning my suggestion over in his mind.

Half joking, half provoking, I added to the wolf, “Keep out of the line of fire, dog-face. No one here likes you well enough to cut silver out of your hide.”

Brute narrowed his eyes at me, as if telling me that payback would be painful. But there was something different in his gaze this time. To call it friendlier was an overstatement, but maybe less animosity after the fights in the swamp and a day in a roaring airboat.

“Enough,” Eli said. “Jane, you drive. Angle in close to shore on the first pass. When you swerve to angle back out, the wolf and I’ll jump. Brute will head for the far side of the house; I’ll be in the trees for a clear shot. Take the boat down the canal a ways and then head back at speed for the Normandy. Make sure we get at least three minutes to get in place before you hit the beach.”

“Maybe I was stunned and not hearing right. Do I remember you telling me not to take so many chances? To be more careful?”

“If they’re in wolf form, you’ll have the advantage. They’ll have to charge you across open ground, giving Brute plenty of time to hamstring them, and you and me plenty of time to fill them full of silver. And the shooting angles should keep us out of the line of fire.”

“And,” I said, “if they’re in human form, all bets are off. They’ll shoot me, then Brute, then hunt you down and shoot you. This is Louisiana in the middle of nowhere with werewolves who hunt and take down humans like it’s a game. And eat them for supper, by moonlight. They’ll have guns.”

“Yeah.” Eli grinned, showing teeth. “That’s the most important part of the plan. Don’t get shot.” I didn’t roll my eyes, but it was a near thing. He turned on the airboat, put me in the driver’s seat, and gave me a quick tutorial. Once I was satisfied, I made sure my weapons were easy to hand and gunned it down the canal. I’d be glad if I never heard the sound again.

Eli’s plan would have worked except the wolves were on the beach when I roared up. They were in wolf form, waiting for the moon to rise. Or maybe they had smelled me as I roared past and decided to meet me head-on. Whatever.

It was too late to abort. I had still-shot visions of what might/could/would happen, no matter what decision I made. In half a second I saw what would happen if I tried to whirl the airboat back into the canal. The big wolf would jump on board and eat me. In the next half second, I saw what would happen if I raced along the water and tried to draw them after me. The big wolf would jump on board and eat me. In the final half second, I saw what would happen if I rammed the shore, hoping to break a few legs—hopefully not my own. And that seemed like my best shot. I yanked my seat belt tighter, braced my booted feel on the bench seat in front of me, and rammed the accelerator forward.

I’m pretty sure I was screaming the whole way.

The airboat hit the shore at full speed. I remembered to let off the acceleration only after I hit land. The boat dragged-slowed-stalled. Going from fast to a slewing, out-of-control crawl. The seat belt caught my weight and momentum, trying to cut me in two. My feet slid and flew forward. I reached to catch myself on the seat in front, and bumped wrong. My blade sailed out of my hand. And the dire werewolf leaped. I had another still-shot moment of his massive body, stretched out in the air. Fangs white and fierce.

He landed on me. It was like being hit by a . . . by a four-hundred-pound werewolf. But the boat and I were still in motion. His weight skewed the boat up on its side, around, and back into the water. His claws scrabbled into my hair and scalp, drawing blood. Across my side, abdomen, and hip. Digging deep. The boat kept tilting. Except for the seat belt, I’d have been over and into the water, held down by a monster. Instead the boat rolled over, into the shallow water.

The prop cage went deeper, the still-moving prop showering us hard with tiny, cutting water droplets. The engine whined and stopped. We rolled upside down, into the mud, and began to sink. The only thing holding us out of the water was the seat belt and the quickly sinking cage.

The wolf released his body-hugging embrace and fell into the water at an angle, his mouth an inch from my face. Snarling, snapping. His body was twisted and pinned by the seat back in front of me. I struggled to both pull a nine-mil and get the seat belt lose at the same time. Neither was working, with my body prisoned by the coiled safety straps.

I yanked a boot free and kicked the wolf’s jaw. His head whipped back. The boat sank farther, pulling his body under the surface of the water. Only his teeth and nostrils showed. My head was closer to the high end of the angled boat, but it was only seconds before I’d go under too.

I stopped trying to get the gun free and used that hand and my feet to lift my weight off the seat belt. The narrow strap finally popped free. I caught my body on the seat bracing and pushed off into the water. The wolf’s head vanished under the surface in the same heartbeat. Bubbles came up from the muddy canal. “Yeah,” I huffed for breath as I swam, my weapons weighing me down into the mud. “Drown,” I said to him. “Please.”

The mud was sticky and deeper than my arms, and the canal seemed to have no actual bottom, just mud and mud and more mud, and things were buried in it that I didn’t want to touch but had no choice as I crawled toward shore.

As I crawled I heard growling and snarling and I saw Brute and two other werewolves fighting, the bitch and a small black male. The bitch had Brute by the ear and jaw, and he slung her hard, slamming her against a dock pillar while the black werewolf attacked Brute’s hindquarters, trying to hamstring him. The bitch held on, though I smelled blood.

Eli, his rifle to his shoulder, moved at a crouch from the low trees, watching for a shot, watching the house, and keeping an eye out for more wolves. I was still kneeling in about six inches of water when the three snarling, growling wolves rolled toward me in a mass of snapping teeth, claws, blood, and fur.

I pulled the nine-mil and took two shots into the black wolf’s side. He squealed and broke free, rolling from the fight, making an awful arrarrarr sound of doggy pain and surprise.

I aimed at the bitch. Eli raced into the line of fire, shouting my name. Just as something snared my boot and hauled me back into the water. And under.

The dire wolf had my ankle in his jaws and was backing through the mud. His coat and eyes were the color of the muddy water, and all I could see was his teeth. And my combat boot in his jaws. My heart hit like a jackhammer.

I don’t have nightmares of drowning. Or suffocation. Until he yanked me hard and my head went under. The mud and water was a thick, slimy consistency and if I gave in and took a breath, I’d be full of mud. And I’d die.

I could shift, but Beast would be underwater too. And would die.

The wolf pulled me deeper, placed a paw on my belly, pushing me down.

I fought. Struggling to get away.

I needed to breathe. I needed to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathebreathebreathe. There was no air. The water was deep and dark and sluggish. I had mud in my eyes and ears, and my butt was buried in it, dragging a trail deeper. There was no light. Werewolf claws pierced my belly.

Give in. Stop fighting, Beast thought at me. Pull body to paws and fire.

It was not an intuitive action. And I had no idea if the gun would work in muddy water. But I did it. I stopped fighting to get away and drew my body tight, crunching down toward my feet. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. I shoved the muzzle of the nine-millimeter semiautomatic into the first hard thing I found that wasn’t me. And fired. The wolf let go.

It was too dark to see and I wasn’t sure which way was up or sideways, disoriented by the cloying mud. Once again I had to let go and stop fighting. Hardest thing in the world. Hardest thing ever. Harder than fighting. Harder than dying. To not move and not breathe. Panic clutched at me with suffocating fingers.

But I let my body relax. And I started to float. I was ready to breathe mud long before my butt broke the surface. I was facing bottom and had to writhe upright. The breath I sucked in then was part slime, part air, and part water. It was glorious. I coughed, sputtered, coughed some more. Spat mud that left a grainy coarse film in my mouth and nostrils. My teeth ground on it like fine sandpaper. And it tasted like rotten leaves and clay and dead fish. I wiped my eyes, blinking against the filth that coated them and scraped my corneas.

Eli was standing ankle-deep in mud onshore and he tossed me a rope. Mr. Prepared.

I wrapped it around my left wrist, because I was still holding the nine-mil in the right, and I let him haul me ashore, which mostly meant him dragging me through a trough of mud until I was far enough on what passed for dry land to crawl out of the watery furrow and struggle to my knees. Again. Eli started laughing, and I looked down at myself in the dusky light. In the sunset and moonrise, I was covered in a slick, slimy layer of dark brown mud. I coughed and sputtered some more.

Brute trotted up, laughing at me, tongue lolling. Behind him lay two dead wolves, one reddish and one black. They had died in wolf form and showed no signs of morphing back to human, which was a good way to keep Eli out of jail for murder and Brute off an animal control officer’s death list.

I made it to my feet, Eli not offering a hand up, holding on to his rifle, which was a good thing.

I was standing in six inches of mud and water, trying to find my balance, when the werewolf lunged out of the canal straight at me. Eli screamed, “Down!” bringing his weapon up toward me. I dropped, rolled, and brought up my handgun. Eli fired. I fired. My weapon didn’t. Misfire. The werewolf was directly over me. Jaws reaching.

Brute collided with him. Midair. I heard the thud of bodies over the gun blast. They fell, jaws locked around each other. And landed with me in the middle. Paws shoved me down, deep into the mud. Claws slicing me, them dancing on hind legs. One paw landed on my solar plexus and the last of my air ooffed out.

The water was a frothy, muddy mess all around me. I rolled, pushing deeper into the slick slime. Pushed away from the fighting weres. I came up within arm’s reach of the combatants. My lungs full of mud. I threw up muddy water. Breathing between each retch with a frantic, rubbery, tearing sound. I tasted blood, gagged, and vomited again.

Eli held his weapon, ready to fire, the night-vision scope doing nothing to help him differentiate the two mud-covered werewolves. I caught my breath, staying low to the surface of the water, and crawled through the canal, back to shore, again, still, miraculously, holding my useless, mud-caked weapon. I fell, gasping, on the beach. The roar of the wolves made my eardrums shudder.

They fought in hip-deep mud and water, two enormous wolves. Wrestling like grizzlies, biting, fangs raking, claws trying to keep purchase on wet fur, jostling in the water with supernatural speed as the sun set behind them. I smelled wolf blood and heard their harsh breathing, like broken bellows. I was shivering, hard shudders bashing through me. It was still winter. And I’d been in the winter-cold water too long. And I’d nearly drowned in mud. Twice. My body was reacting to the stress with a case of shock.

The werewolves fought onto shore, Eli backing slowly, not daring to take a shot, unable to tell the two wolves apart. Then one broke away. Rushing toward me. Jaws wide. Eli fired, the concussion echoing across the still water. The wolf stumbled. And Brute landed on top of him. Sinking his fangs deep into the back of other wolf’s neck. With a wrenching motion, he snapped the enemy wolf’s spine with a crack that rebounded across the black water.

Together, the wolves fell, slowly, to the beach. Brute didn’t let go, but worried the wolf’s spine, tugging, tearing, until there was no way that even the accelerated healing of a were could recuperate from the damage. Eli came closer, moving with the careful step and determined stance of the warrior. He placed his weapon against the skull of the dire wolf and said, “Now.”

Brute leaped back.

Eli fired. And fired. And fired.

When there was nothing but pulp left of the dire werewolf’s head, he stepped back. The wolf’s blood flowed into the canal water. Brute lifted his snout and howled, long and lonely. Again and again. No one answered. No wolf replied.

But across the canal I saw a silhouette framed in the sunset, the bloody, setting sun on one side of him, the bloody, rising moon on the other. It was another werewolf. Silent. Controlled. Watching. He met my eyes across the water, letting me see him, letting me know him. It was the lone wolf, sitting in the shadows of the trees, downwind, absolutely still. Beside him was a dog I recognized, her gaze as intense as the wolf’s. I thought about telling Eli, about getting him to shoot the wolf. But . . . the wolf wasn’t a threat. I knew that. He was a lone wolf, watching, living among humans in perfect harmony and control. I lifted a hand to acknowledge the gaze, and his place in the swamps. He dipped his head to me and turned slowly, trotting into the quickly falling night, PP at his side.

Half an hour later, I heard the whine of the airplane engine, and the coughing-thump as the propeller turned over. Moments later, from a mile away, a plane skimmed over the trees, rising into the air, flying beneath a bloody moon. I had no idea how he had masked his scent, but I figured Sarge was a wily old wolf and knew a trick or two.

It took the equivalent of a fire hose to clean us both off, Brute and me. The mud was caked to us, thick and dry, by the time we got to the hotel, and colder than a winter death, even huddled together in the floor of the pilfered wolves’ airboat. Which we stole with impunity. But finally Brute was white in the moonlight and I was . . . at least clean, though shivering so hard I couldn’t talk, even with Beast heating my blood. I managed to climb to my room and stand, fully clothed, under the scalding shower until I was warm again.

It was only then, as the memories of the battle recurred again and again, that I realized that Brute had saved my life. If the werewolf had landed on me, in his leaping attack, jaws open, he’d have caught my throat in his fangs and ripped my head off.

I owed the werewolf my life.

“Well, c-c-c-c-c-crap,” I said to the shower walls.

I was asleep beneath a mound of covers when I heard my door open. “Don’t shoot. It’s me,” Rick said, his voice a croak. He sounded worn to the bone, and when he crawled into the bed beside me, he was feverish hot, barely strong enough pull the covers over himself after he fell against me. Pea scampered between us, nestling into the angle of hip and thigh.

“Your virtue is safe,” Rick murmured, “this time. I honestly just want to . . . cuddle.”

He crawled in beside me and fell asleep against my shoulder. I curled my body around him, breathing in his cat-scent, absorbing the heat of his cat. Together, we three fell asleep.

Note from Faith: I hope you liked Beneath a Bloody Moon.

I fell in love with the gulf years ago, and have wondered for years about the canals. For research on this subject, I talked with John Jensen, and was given privy to some of his groundbreaking research on the area. If you are interested, take a look at his forthcoming books, to be released from this site: www.EarthEpochs.com

The first of five books in the Earth Epochs series is Ancient Canal Builders of North America—Florida and Louisiana Harbors and Canals.

The second Earth Epochs ebook out in about November is Ancient Canal Builders of North America—New York Harbors and the Ancient Inland Waterway.

The third book is the disaster mechanism, cause and effect, due out in April next year: Earth Epochs—The Last Great Cataclysm—7,000 Years Ago.