Author Archives: Emrys

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It might have been dark out after that, according to some people. None of us were that sort of people, though. Even without the nearly-full moon, we probably wouldn’t have had a particularly difficult time. I have exceptional night vision, Aiko was…Aiko, and Snowflake was a dog. Nighttime was not a problem for us.

 

The sun had been down for about ten minutes when Aiko struck up a conversation again. “So why are we coming all the way out here again?” she asked me. “Wouldn’t a nice, convenient street corner have worked?”

 

“Not for me,” I said. “This is what my magic is about. Wild places, shadows under the trees with the wind in my face. I might live in the city, but it’s not really where I belong.” I shrugged. “Somebody who’s better with people than I am would probably rather do this in a subway tunnel or something.”

 

“So what exactly are you doing?”

 

“Getting a familiar,” I said. “The idea is that you summon an entity from the spirit world and bargain with it for its services.”

 

She frowned, which even with my eyes I perceived only as a vague motion in the darkness. “Spirit world? You mean the Otherside?”

 

“No,” I said. “The Otherside is another world, right? It’s a whole different place, which just happens to be connected to this reality somehow.” She nodded. “Well, the spirit world is more like the opposite surface of this world. Like the whole two-sides-of-one-coin metaphor, I guess. It’s the opposite, the balance. All about energy and ideas instead of forces and matter. The things that live there are the same way—their bodies, insomuch as they can be said to have them, are composed of ideas. They embody concepts.”

 

“Huh,” she said. “I…think I’ve heard of it. We call it by another name.”

 

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “People call it all kinds of things. Probably because, as important things go, it isn’t. There aren’t any real political factions over there, and beings from that world can’t contact us directly.”

 

“So if nothing from there can interact with us, how do we know about it?” She paused. “And what good does summoning something from that world do you?”

 

I smiled. She was a lot quicker on the uptake than I had been, at first. “I didn’t say they couldn’t interact with us. You and me think, right?” Snowflake growled gently. “And so do you,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The point is that we have ideas of our own. That means that we’re constantly interacting with the spirit world on some level. And just because they can’t affect the physical world directly doesn’t make them powerless.” I paused. “Demons are spiritual entities.”

 

Aiko didn’t shiver, but there was a long silence on all parts. Not too surprising; all of us had some nasty memories of the demon that had been possessing the werewolf Garrett White. Snowflake—or rather the wolf who shared her body and mind—had suffered the worst of anyone, but none of us made it through without a few new scars.

 

“What does a demon embody, then?” Aiko asked me after a few minutes.

 

I was silent for a long moment. “Decay,” I said finally. “Destruction. Endings. Entropy, you could say—the collapse of complex things into simple things, the eventual end of everything.”

 

“Nice,” she commented. “Why are you doing this again?”

 

“I’m not looking for a demon, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said dryly. “Balance is the heart of the spirit world, which means that for every bad thing, there’s a good thing to equal it out. Spirits of charity and preservation and such.” I shrugged. “And then there’s a whole bunch of things that are essentially neutral. Embodiments of thought, for example, or memory—that’s the sort of thing I’m angling after here.”

 

She considered that for a moment. Actually, both of them did—it’s easy to assume that, just because Snowflake looks like a dog, she’s the same as an ordinary animal, so easy that I fall into that trap myself much of the time. It doesn’t help that she tries to encourage it herself, because it means that people don’t pay attention to her. Underneath that, though, she was at least as clever as I was. She understood English perfectly well, she could access much of my mind on top of that, and she was thinking about what I’d said.

 

If I didn’t trust her so much, it would be almost scary.

 

About that time we walked out into a roughly circular clearing maybe seventy feet across. The grass was tall, almost up to my knees. I glanced around critically, then nodded. “This’ll work,” I said, dropping my pack carefully to the ground. Aiko dropped hers with a sigh of relief, though I knew for a fact that it was in no way a heavy burden for her. Kitsune aren’t strong like werewolves, but they aren’t human either. She wasn’t especially muscular, but Aiko was quite fit by human standards.

 

“So how do you go about summoning these things?” Aiko asked curiously.

 

I grinned. “Watch and learn,” I said to her.

 

She snorted, sat down next to the packs, and turned into a fox. Unlike the werewolves she doesn’t contort around when she changes, and rather than larger she gets a lot smaller, so she doesn’t actually have to take her clothing off to change. It just involves a lot of squirming around to get comfortable when she doesn’t.

 

By the time I’d finished surveying the area, a perfectly ordinary-looking fox had finished nosing the pile of clothing into a comfortable position, and was curled up on it with her tail over her nose. Aiko looked like she was sleeping, but I saw her glittering eyes watching me, and her ears were pricked.

 

She didn’t have to explain why she’d changed, either. She was hardy by any normal standard, but she was still essentially flesh and bone. And, unlike me, she felt the cold about as much as anybody. Now, it might seem like July should be warm, but when the sun’s gone down and you aren’t moving around—and you’re in the mountains, that always helps—it still gets pretty chilly. Things with fur coats tend to not be bothered by it as much.

 

The really funny thing was that Snowflake was curled up next to her in almost the same position. So I wound up doing my preparations being watched by a husky and a fox, both of them staring at me with disconcerting focus.

 

The first thing I did was draw Tyrfing and mark out a circle in the ground, about twenty feet across, near the center of the clearing. It wasn’t perfectly round, but it didn’t really have to be. I could have used a square if I wanted; circles are just easier to envision.

 

The enchanted sword sliced easily into the dirt, and even the rocks didn’t slow it down much. There isn’t much that that Tyrfing can’t cut. Once that was done I cut all the grass inside the circle down to about ankle height, tossing the cuttings outside the boundaries.

 

I was very cautious setting my feet during and after that process. Tyrfing is a wonderful sword, the best I’d ever seen, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was made to kill and destroy—and that includes its wielder, if it gets half a chance. The entropy curse on the sword did not make exceptions for me, and if I wasn’t careful after I’d had the sword out it would be a simple matter for it to harm me.

 

Once the outermost circle was drawn, I established another circle just inside of it. This one was delineated with small rocks, pinecones, and bits of wood placed on the ground. Most of the markers were hidden by the grass. That didn’t much matter either. It was the idea that was important, really. The complicated arrangements were just a concentration aid for the ritual I was about to perform.

 

Inside the second circle I laid out two smaller ones, each about eight feet across, with a little space between them. The first thing I did was take a knife and trim down the grass to the ground inside the circles. Then I fetched a few bags from my packs and carefully mixed the contents into two different, off-white powders.

 

The first circle, on the northwest side of the larger circle, was mine. The base of the powder was salt, into which I’d mixed expensive cocoa powder, peppermint, lavender, and lupin. The result was a fine dust which, even without the somewhat toxic lupin, would never, ever be used in cooking. It didn’t smell bad, exactly, but it sure didn’t smell like food.

 

The things I’d mixed into the salt weren’t really important in and of themselves. Magical components almost never are. Oh, sure, there are a few—silver, for example, hurts werewolves simply because the energy associated with it isn’t compatible with their magic. But for the most part reagents are important more for what they symbolize and represent than anything. All of the substances I’d used—excepting the salt, which was just a convenient base to work from—were things that I had an affinity for. They were there, in some sense, simply to represent me.

 

The second circle was similar, but not quite the same. On the southeastern side of the enclosure, the powder I used started with salt as well. To it I had, very carefully, added hemlock, oak sawdust, and monkshood—which, as Aiko had teased me about earlier, I had labeled as wolfsbane.

 

There’s a lot of folklore surrounding werewolves, much of which is flat wrong. Others, which I find even more amusing, are sorta right but for entirely the wrong reasons. One of my favorites is the claim that werewolves can be cured (or killed, which for medieval Europeans often meant the same thing) by eating wolfsbane.

 

People who read those legends these days don’t necessarily realize that wolfsbane is another name for monkshood, which is noted for being poisonous. Like, really poisonous. Like, if-you-take-one-bite-you’re-probably-going-to-die poisonous.

 

So yeah, it’ll kill a werewolf all right. So will almost any sufficiently strong poison. The thing to keep in mind is that, although werewolf healing is very impressive, it isn’t unbeatable. It can handle minor toxins, things like poison ivy or most kinds of lupin. It can even deal with most drugs, making it possible for a werewolf (or me) to drink the average person under table and then some without it really having much of an effect, or take a tranquilizer dart that would drop an elephant without being incapacitated for more than a minute.

 

 

But a really potent toxin can overwhelm that healing, especially in high doses. A werewolf, like a human, will most likely die if they eat a monkshood salad. The same as they will most likely die if they take a sniper round to the head, or are exposed to nerve gas. Maybe wolfsbane is a little more effective than other toxins, I don’t know. It hardly matters.

 

So yeah, I was careful mixing that powder. I’d really hate to kill myself in a way that dumb.

 

The circles were really very simple. The idea of a magical circle is one of the simplest ones there is in magic. You’re establishing a line, and saying that this side of the line isn’t like that side of the line. That’s it. The only thing you’re doing is establishing a magical fence. Granted, once it’s established you can use it as the basis for more complicated spells—but the circle itself is very simple.

 

In this case, the outermost circle was just that. All it was there for was to keep outside energies from interfering with what I was doing. There are currents of magic everywhere, gentle eddies and flows of power. What I was doing was delicate enough that I didn’t want them getting in the way.

 

The second circle would form the skeleton of my summoning spell. You don’t actually need to use a circle as the foundation of a spell, but it makes it a little easier and more efficient. For something this difficult, I wanted every advantage I could lay my hands on.

 

The third layer of circles weren’t really necessary for the summoning. The one around me was there for protection, and the one where I was hoping my familiar would soon be was there for confinement. Spiritual entities might not be able to affect the world directly, but in order to summon them I would necessarily be putting myself in their world. I wanted every scrap of protection I could get before I did that. This was outside my scope, and that meant my ability to protect myself over there was pretty minimal.

 

Once the outline of the spell was set up I got my props from the bags. The first thing I did was dig a small pit just inside the southern edge of the middle circle. I grabbed some newspapers from my pack, and used them to kindle a fire in the pit. There was plenty of dry firewood around, and within a few minutes the fire was burning merrily.

 

East was even simpler. I piled gravel and a few larger rocks into a mound about six inches high and a foot across. On top of it I set the same river stone that I’d thrown in the restaurant. That was enough to anchor earth.

 

Water was trickier. I had to go nearly half a mile to find a stream, where I filled a small vase made out of glass so clear you could hardly see it at all. I brought the water back, being careful not to spill any, and set the vase on the north side of the circle. Done.

 

Then I pulled out a small, finely tuned set of wind chimes. I set them up on a collapsible metal stand inside the western boundary of the circle, where the gentle wind set them to tinkling. Perfect for symbolizing air.

 

That, too, was unnecessary. I mean, as anyone who passed even a basic chemistry class knows, the classical view of four elements of nature is pretty much bogus. Everything has an energy associated with it, though, and between air, water, earth, and fire, you have a pretty rounded set. That was what I was really going for.

 

And, of course, part of it was purely psychological. I could just as easily have, say, replaced earth with iron, fire with a hair plucked from a werewolf’s back while they were changing, air with a light show, and water with a set of lenses, and had roughly the same energies and ideas associated. I could have—but it wouldn’t have the same dramatic feeling to it, the same panache, and in magic style counts. In this kind of magic, magic counts for a lot.

 

That just left the inner circles. The elemental anchors were at the cardinal points of the compass, so for the other circles I worked in between them. On my circle I put a lock of my hair in one corner, and a drop of my blood in another. Both of them would represent my body. The other points held a bit of black walnut wood I’d idly carved into a pleasing, abstract shape one day, and the wolf’s-head pendant which had been crafted by an expert to resemble my mother, and which I’d worn off and on for most of my life. Those were to symbolize my will, my mind, my emotions—the essence of who and what I was. My soul, if you will.

 

The other circle was trickier. I wasn’t choosing items for their energies or affinities at this point; I was selecting them based on their symbolism. Objects have meanings, represent intentions. If you don’t believe me think of all the things a ring can symbolize. A knife. A straightjacket. They all carry meaning, all represent ideas. In the spirit world ideas are power, quite literally. A spirit can walk through walls without even thinking about it, but a locked door will stop them cold.

 

I chose objects which symbolized restraint, confinement. A closed padlock. The key, placed at the opposite side of the circle, was facing pointedly away from the lock. In between were a short length of chain and a heavy leather collar.

 

I checked over everything one more time. All of the circles were, if not perfect, close enough. I fed the fire another piece of wood. The wind had died down a little, but there was still enough to make the chimes sing.

 

Everything was ready. Well, almost everything.

 

I left the circle and extracted the bones of the faerie hound from the backpack. I reassembled it, being careful not to break anything, and placed the completed skeleton in the circle of entrapment. If everything went right, that skeleton would soon be housing my familiar.

 

I left the circle and walked back over to where Aiko and Snowflake were watching me. I knelt down near them and took my jacket off, setting it on the ground.

 

 

“What I’m about to do is dangerous,” I said to them, quietly. I met their eyes in turn. Snowflake’s were classic husky blue, pale and icy and disturbingly intense. Aiko’s were, as a fox, green-yellow rather than almost-black the way they were as a human. She, too, was watching me intensely.

 

I removed my magical foci and set them down on the jacket. Two rings, one of bronze and one of steel. One simple leather bracelet. With them I could do wonders with air, with darkness, with predators. None of them would help with what I was doing, and I didn’t want the enchantments on them to interfere with what I was doing.

 

“Whenever you attract the attention of spiritual entities, you run certain risks,” I continued. “There is a possibility that they will kill me. There is a possibility that they will possess me, take over my body. I don’t think this is very likely, but it is possible.”

 

I swallowed dryly and continued divesting myself of tools and weapons. All three of the knives were set on the jacket, along with the contents of my various pockets. Tyrfing I rested against one of the packs, the strap holding it into the scabbard securely fastened. Then I took my pistol and loaded a magazine into it. I worked the slide to chamber a round and then replaced it in the magazine from one of the small ammo boxes I’d removed from my pockets. I was, in a distant and detached way, surprised that my hands were so steady. I was very, very nervous about what was going to happen, but my motions were rock steady as I prepped the gun. Then I set it down in front of Aiko, making sure it wasn’t pointed at anything I valued—including the circle I was going to be working in.

 

“That’s why,” I said quietly, “I am telling you this, very seriously. This gun is loaded with charged-silver ammunition. If I seem to have difficulty exiting the circle, if I don’t speak to you or speak in a way that doesn’t make sense, if anything about my behavior seems wrong to you—either of you—I want you to shoot me.”

 

Two sets of canine eyes looked back at me. Snowflake whined, softly, uncomfortably.

 

“Oh, not until I’m dead or anything,” I told her. “Just enough to stop me. Once I’m down, you need to call this number.” I wrote Alexander’s phone number on a scrap of paper, setting it down next to my cell phone on the jacket. “Someone I trust—mostly—will answer. He might be upset that you called. Tell him who you’re calling on behalf of and what’s happening. Do what he tells you.”

 

What if he doesn’t answer? Snowflake whispered in my head, making me jump a little. Or we can’t find service?

 

“Then I guess you’ll have to improvise, won’t you?” I said seriously. Then I slipped my boots and socks off. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was that I’ve never been fond of having my feet confined, and if I was about to have my mind and spirit eradicated by some beastie from the nether realms I’d rather be comfortable beforehand. The second, of course, was that being barefoot might slow down whatever ate me long enough for Aiko to transform and shoot it until my body was dead as well.

 

I walked over to my place in the circle and sat down, crossing my legs beneath myself. The cool grass tickled my feet as I did. Even barefoot and wearing a T-shirt I wasn’t worried about the cold. It would take more than that to harm me.

 

I took a few deep breaths, calming myself and slowing my breathing, then gently rested my hands against the grass to either side.

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Back home, I baked and ate a frozen pizza, giving some to Snowflake. Then I sat at my small table and made a list of what I would need to summon a familiar. She slept on my feet as I did, twitching occasionally as she dreamed of snatching birds out of flight. It was a simple, entertaining dream, and I was careful not to wake her from it as I stood.

 

If you have to ask how I knew what she was dreaming about, I quite frankly don’t think I can help you. I mean, really. Thanks to the amount of time I spent around her (and probably also her unusual intelligence), I didn’t even have to think to share Snowflake’s mind. I didn’t even have to be in the same room as her. Especially not when the moon was near-full and I’d already been using my magic that day. So I felt it when she woke up, even though I was busy putting things into a backpack. A moment later I heard car door shut outside.

 

“So what do you want to do tonight?” Aiko asked cheerfully as she walked in. She’d ditched the umbrella look in favor of her more normal—if that word even applies—T-shirt and battered jeans.

 

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d go out into the middle of the woods at midnight and perform magical rituals of dubious coloration. You game?”

 

“I don’t know about that,” Aiko said doubtfully. “Sounds kinda boring.”

 

“Hey,” I protested. “They might not have all been fun, but I don’t think I’ve ever taken you somewhere boring.”

 

“True,” she said thoughtfully. “I suppose I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, then. Where in the woods were you thinking?”

 

“Actually,” I said, clipping Snowflake’s long leather leash to her collar, “I need to pick a few things up first.” I patted the empty backpack meaningfully where it hung next to the full one over my shoulder.

---

 

“What is this place?” Aiko asked as she parked. Her expression was dubious, and I couldn’t really blame her for it. Colorado Springs doesn’t have any real ghettoes, but the neighborhood we were in was about as close as it came. It was the kind of place that your average person wouldn’t willingly go near even in full daylight, and I have to admit I would be a bit nervous myself after dark. I could almost certainly take a couple of human thugs—but almost means not quite, and guns are vastly more dangerous than most mages give them credit for.

 

I was comfortable there, though. Repeat visits will do that for a person. I walked confidently to a small, particularly run-down looking house. The walls were absolutely covered in layer upon layer of graffiti, so thickly that you couldn’t see the bricks—or the elaborate symbols which had been painted over them originally, and used to anchor a really impressive set of wards. They predated my ownership of the building, and were quite a bit more subtle and complex than anything I could do.

 

I opened the outer door, which matched the neighborhood, and swept a low and intentionally ridiculous-looking bow in the kitsune’s direction. “Thees ees mein la-bor-a-tor-y,” I said in my best hokey accent. Snowflake stayed to watch the car—a Siberian husky might not look like a terribly powerful guard, but Snowflake was intelligent and much more dangerous than she looks. In a straight-up fight between the two of us, if I didn’t have Tyrfing to hand, I’d only give myself about fifty-fifty odds.

 

Aiko walked in like she was considering buying the place, and her offer was dropping with everything she saw. “You have a laboratory?” she asked incredulously.

 

I followed her in and quickly shut the door behind us—it wasn’t the kind of place where a smart person left the door open longer than was really necessary. “Yep,” I said, crossing the dark and narrow entryway in a couple of steps to open the door in the opposite wall. “Had it for a few months now. I thought about showing you the place, but ‘Come over and look at my magical laboratory’ sort of projects more of the creepy, evil wizard vibe than I was comfortable with.”

 

I flicked on the lights to show the main room of my lab, which used to be a kitchen. I’d turned the battered Formica countertop into my workbench, complete with various tools and Bunsen burners. The cabinets held reagents, and I’d replaced the kitchen table with another worktable which was mostly covered in half-finished projects. The wall over the workbench held a big sheet of butcher paper mostly covered in hash marks to record the various assassination attempts I’d withstood. I added a few more lines to it in Sharpie first thing, before I forgot.

 

Aiko was wandering around looking at things. “Nice stock,” she commented, looking in one of the cupboards. “What do we have here,” she said, mostly to herself. “These labels accurate?”

 

“Yep,” I said. Some mages, including Alexander, intentionally mislabel their reagents. I believe that the idea is that anyone stupid enough to rob a mage deserves what they get. Personally, I think it’s more likely to cause trouble for me than a thief.

 

“Huh. Silver nitrate…valerian, that’s always good…white hellebore? Wouldn’t have guessed that. Wolfsbane? Seriously, Winter, who calls it wolfsbane anymore? Ooh, jimsonweed…yew bark? Well, I guess you’d be the one who could get it, right? Poison sumac extract, always a fun one. Let’s see…baneberry, belladonna, foxglove, oleander, hemlock, celandine, lupine, bloodroot, lobelia, ground-cherry…you know, Winter, I’m noticing a distinct and somewhat worrying theme here….”

 

“Maybe that’s because you’re in the poisons cupboard?” I guessed, pouring a few powdered herbs into Ziploc bags.

 

“Ah,” she said, closing it pointedly. “That might be it. At least you separate them out, I suppose.” She eyed me. “You did wash your hands before you made that stew, I hope?”

 

“Relax,” I said. “If I were trying to kill you I think you’d have noticed it by now.” I paused. “Besides which, as many times as you’ve drugged my food it seems like you’re in a very glassy house.”

 

She ignored that with the ease of long practice, instead looking at what I was packing. “So what’s valerian doing mixed in with the poisons?”

 

I shrugged. “I guess I either put it back in the wrong place, or for some reason I thought it was toxic.” I frowned. “It isn’t toxic, is it?”

 

“Don’t think so. Silver nitrate?”

 

I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? Silver nitrate? I don’t know that it would do anything, but it isn’t something I’m terribly eager to find out, either.” I shook my head and dropped the bags into the pack before grabbing the next thing I would need.

 

“Hey,” she exclaimed delightedly. “I forgot about that skeleton.” She frowned. “I wondered what you did with that thing. I never saw it around your house, so I figured you’d thrown it out.”

 

I finished dismantling the skeleton, which she had made out of the bones of a dozen or so faerie hounds and given to me as a present. “Of course not,” I said to her, packing the sections carefully into the bag. “It just fits the ambience here better.”

 

She looked pointedly at the cupboard full of poisons, some of which were quite potent. Between them I had enough material to kill at least a couple dozen people, although I am of course of such a fine moral character that no one would ever, ever think that I would do such a thing. Really. “Yeah, I see what you mean. What else you got here?” Without waiting for me to answer she opened another cupboard. I pulled out my list and checked it over again.

 

“Wormwood,” she said in the background. “Peppermint, what’s that doing here? I mean, really, doesn’t exactly blend in very well, do you think? Hawthorn powder, that’s more like it, and willow bark. Cat’s claw? That from the plant or the cat?”

 

“Both, actually,” I said absently, checking through the packs. “The actual claw’s in the next cabinet over. The one you’re looking at is all botanicals.”

 

“Can you call rosemary a botanical?” Aiko said doubtfully. “Rue I can see, I suppose, and goldenseal, but rosemary? Sage? And thyme? Come on, that’s just a bad joke waiting to happen. Wait a second, wolfberry? Really? Couldn’t you just call it goji berry like everyone else? I get it that you have a theme and all, but seriously.” She moved on to the next cabinet while I grabbed another bag of kosher salt—I probably had enough already, but I’d really hate to run short.

 

“How many kinds of alcohol do you really need?” Aiko exclaimed. “Come on, Winter, you don’t even drink. Why do you have five kinds of brandy in here? And a bottle of absinthe?”

 

“Alcohol forms the base of a lot of potions,” I said absently.

 

“I didn’t realize you made potions.”

 

“I can’t, actually. Maybe soon. All I said was that it was useful, not that I can actually use it.”

 

She snorted and moved on to the last cupboard. “Ah, this is more like it. Cat claws, yep. Rock dust, iron filings, modeling wax…is that cement mix? Huh. Powdered bird bones? Wow, Winter, wouldn’t have expected that from you. Not with you always rocking the animalistic stuff and all.”

 

“I hate pigeons.”

 

“Ah. They aren’t that bad, you know. Not much different from chicken once you pour some gravy on top, although I’ll grant that the texture’s a bit of an acquired taste….”

 

I sighed. “Think that’s about everything, if you can tear yourself away. I promise I’ll show you around more thoroughly another time.”

 

I wasn’t too concerned about someone breaking in, even in that neighborhood. The exterior wards were all about concealment and masking, but they were very, very good. Most people never even realize the building’s there, and I’ve never had someone try to come in without me explicitly showing them where to go. Then the actual cabinets were locked and, if you didn’t open them with my keys, you’d set off a few more wards. Granted they weren’t, like, lethal force or anything, but still.

 

I still locked the doors behind us. The things in there weren’t just expensive and difficult to obtain; they were also, as you might imagine from Aiko’s reaction to my cupboard of toxic reagents, not something I wanted in anybody else’s hands. It’s best to be cautious with such things.

---

 

Aiko drove quite a ways out along a forest service road, about as far as you were going to get without a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I pointed out that dirt roads and nice sedans aren’t a very good mix, but she didn’t seem to care particularly. Once we were parked, I got out and started getting my gear together. I put on a sturdy jacket—it was July and I’m really hard to freeze to death anyway, but I believe in being paranoid. Also in pockets, of which it had quite a number.

 

“Which pack you want?” I asked Aiko.

 

She looked at the almost-empty bag I’d brought from home and then the big, bulging pack I’d filled at the lab. “You’re the super-werewolf-freak,” she said. “You get the heavy one.”

 

I grinned and shrugged it into place. It looked heavy, but the bones took up a lot of space for relatively little weight, so it only actually weighed about fifty pounds. Not too heavy, for me. Once it was tightened down and I was sure it wouldn’t slip, I belted on Tyrfing.

 

I didn’t actually need the sword, but Tyrfing is…clingy, for lack of a better word. I’d been assured by Alexander that I wasn’t going to be ridding myself of the thing anytime soon, if ever, and although I hadn’t tested it I had no difficulty believing him. This was largely because it had already found its own way to me several times. The first occasion was when I got back from the hospital and found it sitting on my mantel, when everybody who could have put it there swore they hadn’t had anything to do with it.

 

Since then it had pulled the same trick a number of times. Let me tell you, the first time I was working in the shop and I turned around and tripped over the sheathed sword, it scared five years off my life. Which, given that I appeared to be aging about as much as the average werewolf—which is to say literally not at all—wasn’t that big of a deal.

 

Over time I’d figured out the rules by which the sword functioned. It would let me stay away for approximately eight hours before it came and found me. In a strange location, that tended to be a bit of a high estimate—six hours was closer. On the other hand, sometimes it would stay in my house for ten or even twelve hours at a time without my being present.

 

I probably would have complained more if it weren’t for one more feature of the sword’s uncanny transportation system. If I thought about it, concentrated on how I really and truly needed Tyrfing, it was there. Instantly. No matter if it were ten feet away or ten miles, whether I’d been gone most of the day or only minutes.

 

That’s a really nice feature in a weapon. Really, really nice. Nice enough that I didn’t mind it occasionally getting underfoot and causing me trouble. It also, as a convenient side effect, meant I could safely leave it pretty much anywhere, or watch a thief take it right in front of my eyes, and not worry a bit. It would be back before long.

 

It was irritating occasionally, but I pride myself on being adaptable. I’d learned to adjust to being the owner of a cursed sword. So, even though I had no need of Tyrfing for the spell I was about to pull, I brought it along, because I would probably be gone longer than it would tolerate and it was simpler to carry it from the start than have it show up halfway through. It had nothing to do with my ordinary paranoia; it was just forward planning and simple practicality.

 

The three knives, pistol, and miscellaneous toys I was carrying, on the other hand, had everything to do with my paranoia.

 

We started off on the road and continued down it for quite a while, moving at a brisk walk. I’d taken Snowflake’s leash off as soon as we left the city; she doesn’t particularly mind it, mostly because I’m the one holding the other end, but I do. She’s an intelligent being perfectly capable of making sound decisions. Most of the time she doesn’t make sound decisions, having been much too influenced by my bad example in that regard, but she’s capable of it. You don’t lead a sapient being around on a leash. It’s just not okay.

 

After a while on the road, we split off on a game path leading deeper into the forest. Considering how close they are to Colorado Springs, the woods surrounding Pikes Peak are surprisingly wild places. You don’t have to go too far to leave all trace of humanity behind, and by the time we’d been on the game path twenty minutes or so you would have been hard pressed to find any sign of a human presence. Good.

 

Somewhat to the annoyance of my traveling companions I insisted that we stop and watch the sunset. Well, to be fair, I didn’t insist that they stop; I just said that I was, and since I was pretty much the whole reason we were here they elected not to keep going without me.

 

I sat on a nice little granite outcropping and watched the sun sink below the mountains. It was a beautiful sunset, the sort of thing that doesn’t happen nearly as often as it ought to, staining the thin clouds amber and vermillion and carmine, as though some deity had been inspired to go at them with a paintbrush. I sat and watched until the oranges and reds had faded to soft violets and then, finally, to the deep blue tones of the sky at night. I stared up at it for a moment more, feeling almost lost in indigo so pure and perfect it almost hurt to see.

 

I’ve never been much for religion. But if there were anything that might convince me, a truly lovely sunset might be it. When I see something so fleeting that is, nevertheless, so perfectly, tragically beautiful, something that’s beautiful in part because it’s so fleeting, well…. I could almost—almost—believe.

 

But I didn’t have time to meditate on the nature of beauty tonight. There was work to be done.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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After a quick breakfast, I wound up back at the shop.

 

Part of that was simply that, without Val around, if I wasn’t there it would be closed all day, and I needed the money too much to do that casually. Part of it—but, given that Kyra was offering cash, not much. Mostly it was because I found making things, magical or mundane, deeply satisfying. It was like a balm for the spirit.

 

Oh, don’t get me wrong. A lot of the time it’s just a job, and a pretty sucky one at that. There are times when the customers are impossible to deal with, when I’ve screwed up the same piece five times and number six doesn’t look much better, when I want to scream from pure frustration, and at those times I wonder why I keep doing that job. There are times when I think that mercenary work, although dangerous and unpleasant, is still a pretty attractive prospect.

 

With magic it’s even worse. Take my latest toy, for example, a rope twenty feet long woven of shadows. For a month, I spent most of my free time working on it, either actually doing magic or working out formulae and patterns in my head. It took me nine tries to figure out that it needed a solid base to build on or it wouldn’t hold. Another five to settle on moonbeams as that base. Seven to work out that it worked better with a variety of shadows and moonbeams. Eventually I used moonlight gathered from full, half, and crescent moons, and shadows cast at dusk, dawn, noon, and midnight. It took me hours and hours to gather all the materials, more hours to work the magic itself, all for a piece of rope currently coiled up into a lump the size of my thumb sitting in my jacket pocket. Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it.

 

But sometimes, just occasionally, you finish something and look at it, and think That looks awesome. There’s a satisfaction to it, a pride that’s hard for me to describe. There are times when I look at something, and see that it’s well made, and get a feeling that’s absolutely incredible. I realize that it makes the world better, and I made it. My hands, my mind, my will the forces that shaped it. It’s an awesome feeling, really.

 

I started working with Val because I needed money, but I stayed for that feeling. I worked at the shop until about three, and left feeling much better. It’s like therapy, but they pay you to do it instead of the other way round.

 

After that was through, I walked into town to attend my next lesson in manipulating the fundamental forces of the universe for fun and profit. On the way, in what was possibly the easiest assassination attempt to deal with yet, an animate shadow tried to strangle me. I dissipated it with hardly more than a spare thought and kept going. I mean, seriously. After mortal animals, shadows are the last thing you’d want to attack me with. Somebody really should have done their research.

---

 

My lessons with the wizard called Alexander Hoffman had started tapering off recently. He still taught me a great deal, but more and more he’d been pushing me to pursue my own research and projects. I didn’t especially mind; making things with magic was hard but, now that I knew how it worked a little better, it was also really fun. I’d even stopped working weekends at the shop for the most part in favor of working in the lab.

 

My lab has been steadily improving over the months, largely because I’ve been pouring significant quantities of effort, time, and money into it. That said, it’s got nothing on Alexander’s. His laboratory is a concrete box which, if I weren’t pretty short, would have an uncomfortably low ceiling. It’s big, though, a single enormous room that probably had as much floor space as my entire house.

 

When I first saw the place, I looked at the incredible and frequently baffling clutter, and I was confused out of my skull. I smelled the magics in the room, a thousand aromas that blended and swirled and clashed like a spice shop on crack, and I was overwhelmed.

 

I’d spent a lot of time there since, and I’d focused my skills a lot. My senses were much keener now than they had been, and they weren’t exactly dull to begin with. I could look at the lava lamp on one bookshelf, sliding slowly through a range of vivid colors found nowhere on earth, and tell from the look and smell of its magic that it was a magical focus of some kind, and if I’d put some time into it I probably could have guessed what it would do. Several of the knives burned with low, dangerous enchantments, smells of pepper and rust with an edge of old blood; the nasty looking stiletto, in particular, seemed to lust for violence. Having wielded Tyrfing in a fight I knew better than to discount that feeling, and I stepped carefully around all of the weapons.

 

There were other things, too, that I still only vaguely understood. The assorted bits of glass, metal, and stone were (obviously, to me) stored spells, which I had only recently learned to make—sort of like a focus, but it does a specific spell instead of just focusing and tinting energy, you don’t have to be a mage or expend your own power to use it, and (most importantly) it only works once. They’re extremely difficult to make, especially considering that it’s a one-off. In the month and a half since I’d learned how to do it I’d produced exactly two. Alexander had at least thirty that I could see, which probably meant he had another hundred that I didn’t know about. Any one of them might do something as innocuous as perfume the surrounding area with the scent of lilies, or it might release a fireball big enough to turn an entire building into a rapidly expanding cloud of smoke, flame, and debris. And, without setting it off or studying it for at least an hour and a half or so, there was absolutely no way for me to tell which a given spell would do.

 

Long story short, I understood Alexander’s lab a lot better than before—but, if anything, my respect for the place (and person) had increased. I was extremely careful around the lab.

 

Alexander himself looked little like a person who should inspire that kind of respect. As always he greeted me at the door, which was locked and chained and warded, and as usual he looked a bit ridiculous. An old man in a flannel robe, his grey hair sticking up more or less at random from his head, he resembled your eccentric neighbor more closely than a powerful wizard. He’d replaced the stained Godzilla rug covering the trapdoor to his lab with one depicting a snarling mountain lion that was probably meant to seem ferocious but looked more constipated than anything else. It was new since my last visit a week and a half earlier, and already stained with half a dozen unsavory-looking substances. It stank of bromine and sulfur, and I was just as glad to leave it behind.

 

Down in the lab things were pretty much the same as always. There were a handful of worktables, so cluttered that the surface was hardly visible. The walls were lined with bookshelves packed with everything from ancient-looking books as thick as unabridged dictionaries bound with black leather that could have starred in a Stephen King book, to things actually written by Stephen King.

 

Alexander makes his money by selling magical items, for the most part—things like stored spells. There’s always a market for, for example, a bit of glass you can break to release a fog bank a hundred feet across and so thick you can’t see your own nose. Something like that is perfect for arranging an untraceable assassination.

 

The result of that business was that the contents of the lab were constantly changing. Some things—the lava lamp, the knives, the jars and bags and crates and tubs that contained reagents and raw materials—were constant. Other things come and go on a weekly or daily basis. This time he’d ditched the shimmery, diaphanous, iridescent curtain that had hung on the opposite wall for nearly a month. In its place was a ten-foot length of thin chain made from some black metal I didn’t recognize, which stank of magic and fire even from across the room.

 

“What do you want to work on today?” Alexander asked as he crossed to the big workbench in the middle of the room, which was the only one not covered in materials or half-finished projects. There was a big, leather-bound book lying open on it, which he casually shut as he sat down. The cover was largely unmarked, but embossed with a single rune—a single vertical line, crossed by a short slash halfway up. I recognized it as the Norse rune Nauthiz, which could stand for need, hardship, or the letter N. I shivered slightly at the ominous-looking thing and looked away.

 

“I had a few questions,” I told the wizard.

 

“Oh, good. Your questions are usually entertaining. Even if I do have to clean the lab afterward.”

 

“It was just the once,” I protested. “And it was the Cu Sith that did it, not me.”

 

He raised one eyebrow. “And the incident with the acid last month?”

 

“I helped to clean that up. Besides, it wasn’t entirely my fault. That one could have happened to anyone.”

 

“I’m sure you find yourself saying that everywhere you go,” he said dryly—and accurately, was the worst part. “What was your question?”

 

“First off, what do I owe you for this month?” I pay Alexander on a monthly basis, more or less, for the tutoring. His prices are…odd. Even by my standards.

 

“Thirty one-dollar bills,” he said promptly. “Preferably Canadian. One pound of herbs, gathered from a wild environment by moonlight. Two ounces of werewolf saliva. One half-pound of dried apricots. A piece of gravel swallowed by that kitsune you chum around with and then regurgitated not less than half an hour later. A quartz crystal at least one inch in diameter, which is found rather than purchased. One you find yourself, mind, that’s very important.”

 

I wrote it down, where it looked like the world’s strangest grocery list. “Do you care what kind of herbs?” The really sad part is that that wasn’t all that weird, by his standards. Some of the things he asks me for I know can be used in potions, which I was just beginning to learn about, and others could play a part in rituals. There are a lot, though, that I frankly have no idea why he would want. I think my favorite was the pound of raw organic almonds which (he’d stipulated this very specifically) I’d had to steal one at a time from a local health food store. Personally, I think he does it just to see how far he can go before I object.

 

So far I hadn’t complained. The prices were, frequently, not only difficult but time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes downright unethical to meet. In spite of that, it was a lot cheaper than it could be for training by someone of his caliber. I didn’t know much of anything about Alexander, but he was one of the best.

 

“I care that you know what kinds they are, and that they’re stored separately and labeled. Other than that, no.”

 

“Right.” I finished the list and tucked it back into a pocket. “I’ll try and have it for you by next month.”

 

“No hurry,” he said easily. “Did you have any other questions?”

 

“A bunch, actually.”

 

He smiled eagerly—ever since I brought back Tyrfing for him to study, he’s excited by my having questions. I guess bringing back an ancient, powerfully cursed relic to examine is the kind of thing a wizard remembers.

 

“First off,” I said, “how much of the legends regarding the Fenris Wolf is accurate?”

 

“No idea,” he said promptly. “I’ve never spoken to anyone who had a source for them besides the Eddas. Certainly, if they are accurate, his birth wouldn’t have been witnessed by anything mortal, and the prophecies of Ragnarök are—thankfully—unsubstantiated so far.”

 

“Is he really Loki’s son?”

 

He hesitated. “Possibly. They certainly have some kind of relationship with each other, but what it is nobody knows for sure. Some mages think he really was the wolf’s father. Others think the relationship between them is more adversarial than anything, although the two aren’t mutually exclusive by any means. Now what brought this line of questioning on?”

 

I told him about my encounter with Fenris, in as much detail as I could remember. Given how much time I’d spent working on my memory recently, that basically meant reciting the conversation word for word. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been so open, but with Alexander I’d long since learned better than to keep information back. The wizard was not inclined to take no for an answer when it came to topics he found intriguing.

 

“Interesting,” he mused. “If you thought he was Fenrisúlfr, by the way, you were probably right. Beings like that have a very distinctive aura, and even if you hadn’t encountered him before I don’t expect you could have been fooled about that. Besides which, there aren’t very many people who would be willing to imitate him.”

 

“Because they don’t want people to think they’re the godlike embodiment of hunger?” I guessed.

 

“No,” he responded wryly, “because the godlike embodiment of hunger gets upset when people pretend to be him. And Fenrir is…let’s just say that when people, even very powerful people, hear that he’s up to something, they go the other way at a run. There are very few who would chance his anger lightly.”

 

Well, that was reassuring. Sort of.

 

“Interesting,” he said again. “Very interesting. Do you think he was telling the truth?”

 

I frowned. “I honestly have no idea. He was…very hard to read. If I had to guess, I’d say he was keeping a lot of information from me, but what he actually said was probably true.”

 

He nodded slowly. “I would consider the idea of him being the creator of werewolves to be very unlikely. Fenrir isn’t a creator. Rather the opposite, if anything. For him to be the progenitor of an entire species would be very unexpected.”

 

“Makes sense,” I admitted. “I got the feeling that wasn’t even what he was trying to say. Maybe it was something more like…I don’t know, that there was too much power in me to change? Or that I was too close to a wolf for it to be much of a change?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Have you ever heard of Fenris having children?”

 

“Oh, certainly. He was the father of the wolf that will swallow the moon at the end of days—never can remember his name. I think he might have fathered the wolf that will eat the sun, too—”

 

“Mortal children,” I clarified.

 

“Oh. No, but if they were as wolflike as he claimed I wouldn’t have.”

 

I grimaced. It had been a long shot, but I was hoping that he would have known a little more than that. “Okay, next question. What advice do you have for me about fighting a magical duel?”

 

“Don’t,” Alexander said seriously. “You aren’t anything like ready for that.”

 

“Let’s say the other guy isn’t going to go along with that plan,” I said dryly.

 

He thought for a moment. “Your shields aren’t worth much, so don’t go toe-to-toe with them,” he said eventually. “And a mage of any skill can stop any magic you can throw at them. My advice would be to make it as little like a classical duel as possible.”

 

I considered that. “So hit them when they aren’t expecting it?” I asked. “Ambush, hit-and-run, that sort of thing?” It was a lot more in line with my talents than outright combat anyway. My magic lends itself towards concealment and mobility, along with access to a whole lot of information and a facility for making things. Those are all useful talents, but they aren’t exactly good at making people dead.

 

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Or hit them with what they aren’t expecting. Most mages have very little skill at physical combat, for example. That sword of yours could probably cut through most shields with a little time, as well. I think breaking magical defenses is part of what it was made to do.” Alexander had appreciated the chance to examine Tyrfing, but he didn’t like the sword. He seldom referred to it by name, and had told me to never bring it into his home again after the first visit.

 

“So can you think of any reason for two relatively untrained human mages to attack the werewolves with what they claimed was a motive of…justice, I suppose you’d call it? They seemed to fancy themselves monster-hunters.” I briefly described the incident at the restaurant.

 

“I have no idea,” he said simply. “They weren’t from one of the clans, I can tell you that much.”

 

“You sure?” I said skeptically. “I mean, surely not every clan mage is as skilled as you are. There have to be apprentices, if nothing else.”

 

“Yes,” he said patiently. “And even the dimmest apprentice would know better than to aggress upon the werewolves like that. Challenging the wolves is equivalent to challenging the Khan, and no mage clan wants to do that. They would hang the offenders out to dry.”

 

Huh. I hadn’t thought about it like that, but Conn was the ruler of all the werewolves in North America and a few other places besides. He would quite likely take what they had done as a personal insult.

 

I’d known that he was powerful, but I’d never really thought about what that meant in a concrete sense before. Now I did, and it was terrifying. Never mind that he was quite possibly the single oldest, most powerful, and most knowledgeable werewolf in the world—that was only the tip of the iceberg.

 

I didn’t have an exact count, but when I’d grown up I’d learned that there were a few thousand packs in the U.S. Another several thousand in Canada, maybe a hundred in Mexico and Central America, a dozen in Japan, around fifty in Iceland. All of those werewolves answered to the Khan. Call it an average of forty or fifty werewolves to a pack, and there had to be a few hundred thousand werewolves in that group.

 

I tried to envision the damage an army of two hundred thousand werewolves could do, and quite simply couldn’t. The scope was too big for me. I’d seen a piece of one pack, about fifteen werewolves, most of them relatively inexperienced, in action. It had been impressive and there aren’t many people who could stand against it. Compared to that army it was too tiny to bother with.

 

And that was still just scratching the surface of what the Khan could do. He had extensive contacts among the European werewolves, so call that another hundred thousand at least that would help him if he asked, including a number that were nearly as powerful as Conn was. On top of that you have his alliances within the Pack, a sort of loosely affiliated group that represented the common interests of various sorts of shapechangers. Werewolves make up the bulk of their numbers, but the Pack includes a number of other creatures as well, some of whom are quite nasty.

 

First you have shapeshifters, humans who’ve developed a natural, magical ability to turn into animals. Most of them aren’t as scary as, for example, werewolves. But they’re still intelligent, dangerous, and quite a few of them have other magical talents as well.

 

And then you have the heavy hitters. A few hardcore mages with a talent for shapeshifting—they could do everything a shifter could, but they also had a solid grounding in other kinds of magic. They were basically like having any other mage on your side, except that they were additionally dangerous in physical combat—and, because that was no easy trick for those who aren’t strongly enough inclined to it to be a shifter, they tend to be very skilled. One step nastier are the skinwalkers. They’re heirs to a powerful Native American magical tradition. Very powerful, very scary, very evil. I knew barely anything about them and they still terrified me.

 

On top of that there are a few groups who have embassies there—the kitsune, for example. Although they were largely an independent neutral party, they still maintain friendly relations with the Pack. There are quite a few groups that can say that, including various fae beings, a couple of dragons, and various stranger, less easily classifiable things.

 

I imagined an army of thousands and thousands of werewolves. They would be supported by shapeshifters and mages and skinwalkers, and who knows what all else that I couldn’t even name. And hell, Conn could probably get some of the fae on his side too, especially now that they were technically allies for the moment. The whole force would be directed by the strategic and tactical genius of Alphas with centuries or millennia of experience.

 

I thought maybe I was starting to see why people treated Conn with as much respect as they did. And why a mage clan would sooner lose almost any number of apprentices than start a fight with him. When a force like that goes against you, there are really only two options. One is that you get utterly destroyed. The other is that you manage to arrange an equal or greater force against it, and with that much sheer power involved on both sides the resulting conflict would make World War Two look like a food fight. It would be the kind of war where you counted yourself lucky if the continents had the same general shapes afterwards.

 

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “I think I get it. So how much do you know about vampires?”

 

He looked at me with something between disbelief and disgust in his eyes. “Vampires too? Good Lord, boy, how many things have you got yourself mixed up in?”

 

“Like I said,” I said wryly. “The other guy wasn’t inclined to let me keep things simple. So can you think of any way to kill a vampire without marking the body?”

 

He thought for a moment. “Not really. Research on that sort of topic is…strongly discouraged, so my knowledge is fairly basic. Most of the time, killing a vampire doesn’t leave a body at all, just a pile of ashes. I could probably design a ritual setup to do something of the sort, and I’ve seen a couple of witches use tricks that could likely manage it, but once you start considering those kinds of people, well, all bets are off.”

 

I sighed. “Thanks anyway.”

 

“It sounds to me,” he said, “like you really needed more information than that.”

 

“I sort of do,” I admitted. “How do you think I can get it?”

 

“I’m guessing asking more knowledgeable people than me is out of the question?”

 

“The last time I tried that,” I said dryly, “was that Sidhe party in January. I got screwed by Loki and I still owe him a bloody favor for it. I wound up being used by a Twilight Prince as a tool in his political game. And I made an enemy of the Dragon King by escaping from his dungeon, even though the only reason I did was because Loki slipped me a fake invitation and I was imprisoned because I was, accidentally, trespassing.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I can afford to do that again so soon.”

 

He chuckled softly. “Point. The next possible choice is a vision quest.”

 

“Wait a second, you mean those are for real?”

 

“The concept is sound,” Alexander said. “The basic idea is actually common to a number of cultures.”

 

“And that concept is?” I asked. Alexander is a great teacher, but sometimes getting actual information out of him is like pulling teeth. He firmly believes that knowledge you gain for yourself is better than that given to you by another, because you remember it better and the process of actively learning is good for your mind. Logically I can see where he’s got a point. In the moment it sometimes seems like a bit more annoyance than it’s worth.

 

“Basically, the idea goes that what you experience as reality isn’t, actually, real. It’s your mind’s perception of reality. Everything you see and feel goes through that filter. With me so far?” I nodded. “Well, your mind contains a lot of barriers to true learning. Filters and blocks and so on that keep you from actually realizing the major portion of what you know.”

 

All of that made sense. “And the idea is that by fasting and dehydration and near-hypothermia, you’re breaking those barriers down?”

 

He nodded. “Essentially. The hope is that severe privation will degrade your mental blocks. Things like the difference between past and future, this world and others, me and you. It’s actually the same concept that’s used by, for example, Asian monks. They do it by fasting, exposure, and chanting, but the objective is the same.” He paused. “Of course, that’s a bit of a long-term process, and you sound like you’re in a hurry. A vision quest would take you at least two weeks, maybe more.”

 

“Wait a second,” I protested. “I thought shamans did vision quests for, like, healing sickness and stuff. That doesn’t sound like something you take two weeks about.”

 

“Yes,” he said patiently. “And they were shamans. Experienced mages who did things like that all the time.” He shook his head. “Those barriers are there for a reason, Winter. It would be difficult or impossible to live in this world without them. Break them down too far, too quickly, without a great deal of prior experience, and you might never get them back in place. That’s how people go mad doing things like that.”

 

I sighed. Somehow I knew that offer was too good to be true. “Okay,” I said. “Two weeks it is. I don’t have that much time. So maybe I’ll leave the vision questing for later. Next option?”

 

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I still think a familiar spirit would be a good idea for you.”

 

Alexander had been trying to get me to take a familiar for quite a while, and he was very persistent about it. I’m not quite sure why, actually, given that I don’t think he had one himself. Maybe he just wanted me to go to someone else with my stupid questions. “You really think I’m ready for that?” I asked him.

 

He shrugged. “In terms of power you’re more than ready. I think you have the skill for it too. Beyond that only you can say for sure. It’s not a decision anyone can make for you.”

 

“How exactly does that work, anyway? I don’t really know the specifics of how a mage and a familiar relate to each other.”

 

“Essentially,” he said in a lecturing tone of voice, “a familiar is a spiritual entity you’ve made an ongoing bargain with. It owes you loyalty as a result. Exactly what services it provides varies. Some mages are looking for a research assistant. Others desire a thug. Some are interested more in companionship than anything. Needless to say all of them have different needs.”

 

I blinked. “It owes you loyalty? That’s it?” He nodded. “So, theoretically, it would do whatever I wanted. Anything.”

 

“Within the bounds of your agreement,” he confirmed.

 

Damn. “What do they get out of it?” I asked.

 

He shrugged. “That, too, depends on what bargain you make. As a spiritual entity they require a body to act in this world—most of the time the mage provides an animal, which is where the common use of the term ‘familiar’ came from. In addition the mage provides for the familiar’s needs. You protect it from harm. If its body requires food or shelter, you provide it. You might also be obligated to provide it with energy or amusement. It depends.”

 

I frowned. “Still seems like the spirit gets the short end of the stick.”

 

He smiled thinly. “Of course, if they happen to know that a powerful being wants them dead, protection and shelter are valuable things. Other spirits are simply interested in the physical world and wish to experience it. Because they are dependent on someone from this world to provide them with a body, they don’t have many other ways to do so. Keep in mind that most of the spirits interested in becoming familiars are also fairly weak, as such things go. Service in exchange for protection and opportunity is not a bad deal for them.”

 

Huh. It would answer any question I had. That was…a bit scary, really. I knew better than most that some knowledge really is dangerous and unpleasant and in hindsight not something you would choose to learn, could you have the choice again. And it seemed like the kind of deal that would be absolutely guaranteed to bite me in the ass later.

 

On the other hand…any question I had. At no additional price. It would be like having a mentor, research assistant, and living computer all at the same time. I wouldn’t just be able to find out more about my current problems, vampires and mages and the Fenris Wolf. I would have something on hand to help with my magical studies.

 

It might only have taken me one try to make that rope of shadows if I’d had a decent source of advice right there while I was planning it.

 

I would like to say that the deciding factor for me was helping people like poor Robert, shot because he had the misfortune to be there at the wrong time. I would like to say it, but it would be a lie. I am not that good a person.

 

Ultimately the deciding factor was thinking about all the things I could learn. All the knowledge I wouldn’t have to blunder into on my own. The things I could do, the things I could make.

 

I have often proven to be…not as good at resisting temptation as I might like.

 

Alexander saw the decision in my eyes. “When?” he asked simply.

 

I chewed on that for a moment. He might say that it was within my abilities, but that wasn’t the same as saying it would be easy. I would definitely want to be operating at my best when I did it. The peak of my power was at the full moon, which had already come and gone. If I were going to wait for the next one, I might as well fall back on the vision quest. That meant that the longer I waited, the harder it was going to be.

 

“Tonight,” I told him. “Probably around midnight.”

 

He nodded. Then he took the next several minutes to explain the specifics of what I had to do, writing out several formulae of how the energy would have to be manipulated. I paid close attention and took notes. This kind of magic was far from my specialty, and I didn’t want to screw it up. When he’d finished I put those sheets of paper, too, into a pocket. “Thanks,” I said, standing up.

 

He frowned. “You haven’t done your exercises yet.”

 

“Maybe I should save my power for tonight’s ritual. I thought I’d skip them today.”

 

His frown deepened. “Winter, if you’re going to be dueling you need to practice your exercises today especially.”

 

Which was, annoyingly, impossible to argue with. I sighed and sat back down.

 

Alexander had recently started me on an extremely irritating set of exercises. They were, theoretically, meant to improve my focus, concentration, and precision. Difficult does not begin to describe them. Neither does frustrating.

 

Today was no different. First I had to light one specific candle out of a dozen in a room upstairs I hadn’t ever seen. To make things even more fun, Alexander devoted his energy to screwing with me—not as hard as he could, of course, that wasn’t even remotely a fair contest, but still. At first he spent his magic keeping the candle cold. Then, without warning, he stopped, then started trying to help me so that the heat I was putting into it would light all the candles, or make them explode for that matter. He switched back and forth irregularly, and each time I had only a fraction of a second to adapt what I was doing or I would fail. It took me seven tries to get the right candle lit with all the others extinguished. The effort took almost an hour and left me sweating.

 

After a short break, he turned on a small laser pointer in one corner of the room, and set up a piece of paper in the opposite corner. I had to bounce the light around the intervening objects, change its color from red to blue, and get it to land on the paper using nothing but magic. Every time I got it right, he changed the relative position and colors of the two points. I was a little better at that game. After four repetitions of that we moved on.

 

The third exercise was a trickier one. He set a glass of lemonade on the table. Working with my eyes closed, I had to form four ice cubes in the drink—without affecting the rest of the liquid at all. To make things even harder, the cubes couldn’t be made of lemonade, meaning that I had to filter sections of the drink into water, then freeze them into the appropriate shapes, all while keeping the rest of the lemonade room temperature. All without using anything but pure magic. Without even being able to see whether the cubes were forming or not—I had to feel everything with just magical senses. It was hard, irritating, and took me five attempts. All the same, I was clearly improving; the last time I did the same exact trick, it took me seven.

 

Alexander sat and drank the lemonade while I kept working. He’d gotten the big leather book back out and was paging through it with an unconcerned expression, the bastard.

 

After that, there was a Ping-Pong ball I had to navigate through a miniature dog agility course. Again, blind. There were poles, ramps, tubes, and balance beams. This, fortunately, was more in line with my talents. I managed, using carefully timed and placed puffs of air, to guide it through the course, only slipping up once on a ramp, and even then I caught it before it hit the ground.

 

The last trick was a little easier. I took a deck of cards and, wearing a blindfold, dealt a solitaire pattern. And, without ever removing the blindfold or peeking around it, proceeded to play several hands. I lost, badly—but I never misplayed or had a hard time figuring out which card went where. Then, just for fun, I did fancy shuffles without using my hands, relying instead on solidified planes of air and carefully controlled gusts to move the cards around. When I finished I swept them together and returned them to the box—also without hands, of course. Alexander applauded me sardonically, not looking up from his book.

 

They might seem like useless things to be able to do, largely because they are. I have never yet had call to change the color of a laser pointer during a fight. In fact, none of the things I’d just practiced was a particularly valuable skill. Generally speaking it’s easier to use a freezer than turn lemonade into ice cubes.

 

That wasn’t the point, though. It was a bit like complicated math in a way. Calculus isn’t valuable because it lets you do fancy things with numbers, at least not to most people. It’s valuable because learning it stretches your mind and makes you think in ways you otherwise wouldn’t. The magical exercises were the same way. Those specific skills weren’t useful, but the things they taught me—precision, delicacy, absolute control over how much power I exerted—were very useful. It was like yoga for the mind.

 

As I left Alexander’s house I was tired, hungry, and satisfied. My mind felt calm and relaxed, like an especially lazy housecat after a fruitful hunt. I wanted to go home and eat a large meal, then go to sleep.

 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t exactly likely to happen.

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Back at the hotel I sat on a conveniently nearby bench and did some magic.

 

There are all kinds of magical rituals. The variety is truly enormous—everything from ominous chanting and pentacles drawn in goat’s blood to incense and birdsong. The interesting thing is that, because magic is so intimately bound up with thought and emotion, theoretically any approach can work if it’s done by someone with the right abilities who genuinely believes that it will. So, in some ways, every single description of magic is in some ways accurate, simply because if you think it’s accurate and your will is strong enough, you can make the magic agree with you. It might not be the most technically correct view, it might not be the most efficient or practical, but you can make it work.

 

So there’s a place in magic for complicated rituals and incantations. I’ve been known to use ritual setups myself for particularly difficult, involved, or foreign spells. But at the same time, the elaborate stuff isn’t always necessary, especially not for something closely in line with your natural talents.

 

You would not have been able to tell by watching that there was any magic going on at all. I didn’t paint intricate symbols on the ground, chant verses in Latin, or produce unnatural lights. All that happened was that I sat down on the bench and closed my eyes to concentrate.

 

Predators are close to my heart. There are all kinds of reasons for that. My blood came from a werewolf and what might have been a genuine wolf that bore some measure of power inherited from the Fenris Wolf. My longtime association with werewolves, which had a serious influence on me growing up. And, of course, endless hours spent in mental communion with predatory animals didn’t hurt. When you do something like that, it’s not just telepathic speech, at least not the way I do it; I share their mind and body, experiencing everything they do in real time, first person Technicolor. It’s the sort of thing that leaves a mark on you.

 

So what I was doing was very much in line with my own nature. I sank into myself, carefully removing all distractions from my perceptions. In the resulting darkness, I felt the slight-but-noticeable pressure of other minds against mine. My magic was always active, always bringing in sensations from animals around me whether I instructed it to or not. I’d had enough experience with it that most of the time I blocked them out, filtered out everything that didn’t come from inside my own mind without even thinking.

 

Now that I stopped blocking them, they intruded on my otherwise vacant perceptions. I could feel curiosity from Kyra, who was as much a predator as I was, and smell the distinctive aroma of city-at-night through her nose. I could feel the gentle dreams of a dog napping in a nearby home, and the significantly more active mind of an alley cat in heat. All of the sensations seemed to come from very far away, almost as though I were on a heavy dose of painkillers or something. That was to be expected, without a solid connection. If it weren’t for the nearly-full moon I wouldn’t likely receive sensation at all, just an awareness that they were out there.

 

Eventually, I found what I was looking for, and whispered an offer. I opened my eyes a minute or so later and saw that a fox was sitting near my feet, looking at me with bright eyes, having been drawn by my power—not a compulsion, I don’t do compulsion, just a polite request. Once I’d seen him, he jumped up onto the bench next to me. I reached out and rested one hand lightly on his shoulder—not a good idea, by the way, if you’re a normal person. Wild animals don’t react well to being petted. People seem to think they should, for some reason, to the frustration of zookeepers everywhere.

 

Physical contact helps a lot to focus my magic. I felt the fox’s mind distinctly this time, without the previous sense of dislocation. I focused on that connection and, without anything resembling words, asked what he remembered of the past night.

 

He wasn’t a kitsune or a magical beast or anything, just an ordinary fox. As a result his mind wasn’t much like a human’s. His response was a disjointed thing, like flipping rapidly through a disorganized photo book. There were impressions of memorable scents, a particularly delectable bit of garbage, a whole series of memories of catching a rat. I closed my eyes again as I began sifting through the memories—I knew from experience that trying to manage two sets of senses at the same time is a difficult, headache-inducing trick.

 

He’d spent most of the night near the hotel, and at some point in that whirlwind I saw what I was looking for. It was just a glimpse, but I’ve had a lot of practice at this sort of thing. Another mental nudge brought that incident back to the forefront of his mind, and—in bits and pieces—I sorted out what had happened.

 

The fox had initially seen the two men about three blocks away. He had little concept of time as I understood it, but from the position of the moon I guessed that it had been about two in the morning, the heart of the night. One of the men had smelled like any other man, unpleasant. He had been the one walking. The other man, being carried over the human’s shoulder, had smelled different, sweetish and flowery, almost like a perfume. It had been an exotic smell to the fox, one that he hadn’t encountered before, and he had been intrigued. Being not especially hungry and, like most of his kind, curious, he had followed the pair, sticking to the shadows and alleys. They never noticed him.

 

That wasn’t as surprising as you might think. Most people, if trying to avoid detection in the city, will overlook an animal watching them. It’s a psychological thing. It’s easy to look at a big city, the ultimate triumph of human engineering over nature, and think that it’s a place where only people belong. The truth, of course, is that all kinds of things make their home there. Pigeons, rats, stray pets, raccoons, ravens and the occasional hawk, and, naturally, foxes all make their homes on the streets. On the edges of the city you get things like rabbits, which for my purposes are useful primarily because they attract things that hunt rabbits, and coyotes, which are a rare treat to work with.

 

The point is that this was another such case. The man looked for pursuit by other humans constantly, but a little fox watching from the shadowed mouth of the alley? Way below his notice.

 

The fox thought, and I agreed, that the other man was dead. He didn’t move, not even a reflexive twitch, and the human’s attitude reminded the fox of someone bringing their prey home to eat later. Eventually the pair came to the hotel, a place he was very familiar with—he had often dined on their refuse, and on the smaller scavengers it brought. He never tried to go in, though, knowing too well that it would end badly.

 

These two did. The human opened the door and entered. The fox saw the man inside start to stand, mouth open, then sit back down with a confused expression on his face. Then the door swung shut and hid them from his view.

 

While I pondered that, I thanked the fox for his assistance and tore open the package of meat. He seized the steak in his jaws and, looking comical with the relatively huge piece of beef hanging from his jaws, trotted off into the predawn darkness.

 

“Anything?” Kyra asked.

 

“Yeah. About three in the morning, two men. One had the other in a fireman’s carry. They came in from the east, at least for the last few blocks. Man being carried was probably dead, probably the corpse they found. The man carrying him smelled human but didn’t look to be having a hard time with the body. They went in through the front door like I thought. The clerk saw him then sat back down without saying anything, suggesting that the mage hit him with something mental. That explains why the fox saw so much, too; a spell that hits the mind directly has to be targeted specifically, and he didn’t bother with confusing animals.”

 

She blinked. “That much?”

 

I shrugged. “Foxes are curious and smart. If they see something that gets their attention, they can notice a lot of detail.”

 

“I take it you’ve done this before,” she said dryly.

 

“Somewhat regularly.” I coughed self-consciously. “Actually, most of the animals within about two miles of my house spy for me at least occasionally. All of the cats, dogs, foxes, and coyotes, and most of the birds too.” It’s not flashy, but in my experience it’s a seriously underestimated ability.

 

“Why didn’t you do it when we were chasing Garrett, then? Or back in January?”

 

I shook my head. “Totally different situation. Then we knew what we were looking for, and the problem was just in finding them and killing them. Actually tracking somebody like that’s a lot harder. This time I just wanted to get a glimpse of them so I knew what we were looking at.”

 

She nodded. “So the mage was human and carried the body in. What about the corpse? He human?”

 

I grimaced. “That’s where it gets tricky. At the door, I thought I smelled two signatures—one human, one vampire. The vamp was really, really faint, so I thought I was just imagining it. But the fox smelled something weird off the other guy, like it wasn’t quite human.”

 

“So we can assume the corpse was a vampire. Does that explain the magic?”

 

I shook my head. “Not really. Even people with magic don’t leave a trace that strong unless they’re actually doing something with magic, and if he was dead he couldn’t have been. Even if he wasn’t, why would he be helping at that point? Doesn’t make sense to me.”

 

“Me either,” she said thoughtfully. “So that leaves two questions. One, why was there vampiric magic involved? Two, how do you kill a vampire without leaving a mark of any kind?”

 

Huh. That hadn’t even occurred to me. “I don’t know much about vamps,” I told her. “Never much wanted to learn. Things give me the screaming creepies.”

 

“Bad experience?” she asked.

 

I shrugged. “Not really. Never even met one that I know of. They just freak me out. I mean, they’re the walking dead, they drink people’s blood, they’re supposed to be scary powerful and harder to kill than cockroaches. What’s there to like?”

 

“Heh. Most of what I know about vampires comes from Dracula, so I’m guessing you’re still one up on me. Think you can find out for me?”

 

“Maybe.” I paused as something occurred to me. “How’s Robert doing?”

 

“Not too bad. Bastard shot him with a silver bullet, but his aim was lousy. Deflected off the shoulder bone. Give him a week or so and he’ll be all right.”

 

“Glad to hear it.” I paused again. “I’m pretty sure the folks that did that were mages too. Weak ones, but still human mages.”

 

That gave her pause. “Think it’s related?”

 

I thought that there was something going on that I didn’t understand. I thought that it might involve a mage powerful enough to kill vampires without leaving a mark on the body and weave an illusion as solid as I’d ever seen without breaking stride, and there couldn’t be that many people like that around. I thought that the freaking Fenris Wolf was paying attention to this one, and that alone should tell me there was something bigger going down than two kids shooting a werewolf and one dead vampire.

 

Out loud, all I said was, “I think these days coincidences are harder to find than unicorns.”

 

She snorted. “Fair enough. Look into it for me, would you? I’ll make sure you’re compensated for it.”

 

“No problem.” I mean, at least this time I was getting paid to do something stupid and stick my nose into dangerous things bigger than me. Most of the time stupid is free.

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I slept like a rock until someone knocked on my bedroom door and triggered a burst of paranoia that sent me scrambling for one of the knives next to the bed before I’d quite opened my eyes. Fortunately I’d managed to convince Aiko that transforming for the first time in years under those circumstances wasn’t the best idea, and as a result I was still human-ish. Aiko wasn’t, which was unfortunate because she was a lot less dangerous in her fox form. Luckily, she didn’t take nearly as long to transform as a werewolf.

 

“Get up,” Enrico said.

 

Stabbing your friends is generally not considered good manners, so I settled for glaring at the door. “What are you doing here at,” I checked the clock, “five forty-three in the morning?” I demanded.

 

The former cop and current werewolf pushed the door open. “Kyra wanted you to come give us a hand with something,” he said as he came in. A moment later, he blanched and walked right back out, closing the door behind himself, his posture conveying embarrassment as clearly as if I’d seen him blushing.

 

I felt Snowflake’s low chuckle reverberate through my mind. The dog looked like she was still sleeping at the foot of my bed, but it was an act; she’s nearly as paranoid as I am and has much better senses.

 

Oh shut up, I sent back, dressing hurriedly. I found Enrico sitting at the kitchen table with a cardboard cup of expensive coffee in his hand. He hadn’t brought one for me, because he knew that I’m not much of a coffee person.

 

“So,” he said awkwardly, staring out the window. “I, ah, knew you were a bit off, Winter, but I have to admit I never got the bestiality vibe from you.”

 

There were a lot of things I could have said to that, but I tend to be a bit surly at that time of morning. “I don’t know,” I said, with a carefully cultivated tone of academic interest. “‘Bestiality’ is a word coined to describe humans who have sex with animals, right? So if you have one nonhuman entity who looks like an animal but isn’t engaging in consensual sexual activity with another nonhuman entity who doesn’t look like an animal but in some ways is one, can you describe that as bestiality? It seems like another term is needed. Maybe—”

 

“Forget I asked,” Enrico interrupted. “And Winter? Don’t ever bring up that line of thought again,” he said seriously. “It weirds me out when you people start talking about that sort of thing.”

 

I frowned. “Us people? What do you mean?”

 

“Not important,” he said. “This conversation? Moving on now.”

 

I laughed. “What did Kyra want?”

 

He frowned. “Not sure,” he said. “Freak squad called her around five. Whatever it is, she sounded pissed.”

 

“Freak squad?” I asked.

 

“Officially,” Enrico said dryly, “werewolves are ordinary citizens and require no special treatment by the law. Unofficially, they scare people and most cops want nothing to do with them.”

 

“Ah. Does the freak squad have an official designation?”

 

“Yeah. Officially, it’s designated as not existing. Mostly it’s just whatever cops pissed off important people most recently. They take care of all the things that nobody else wants to deal with.”

 

I grunted. “They call Kyra often?”

 

He shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m not allowed within a mile of police business.” He smiled thinly. “People might start to wonder why I’m not living with my family in New York the way I said I would be when I quit.”

 

Aiko walked out and sat on one of the misshapen kitchen chairs backward. Unlike the werewolves, she doesn’t take more than a heartbeat to slide from one shape to the other; just now you’d never guess that she’d been a fox less than ten minutes earlier. “Sucks to be you,” she told Enrico. “So what’s the crisis?”

 

“What makes you say there’s a crisis?” he asked.

 

“I’m awake before six,” she replied dryly. “That is, itself, a crisis situation.”

 

“Kyra wants some help with a crime involving weirdness and possibly werewolves. You interested?”

 

She frowned and stared blankly into space for a moment. “Love to,” she said, “but probably better not. I have to work today. See you tonight.” She sauntered out, having already collected her completely unnecessary umbrella.

 

“That is possibly the strangest person I have ever seen,” Enrico said after she left.

 

I grinned. “You don’t know the half of it.”

 

“And I hope I never learn. You ready to go see what the boss wants?”

 

“Thought you weren’t allowed near the police.”

 

“I’m supposed to give you a ride and drop you off without dallying or talking to anyone.” Enrico’s voice was wry.

 

I shrugged. “Sure, why not. Not like I had anything better to do today.”

---

 

Kyra was waiting for us outside the building. Enrico exchanged a few words with her that I didn’t hear before he left. I didn’t need to hear them; I could see the important bits simply in how they stood, how they interacted with each other. He was, ever so slightly, deferential; she took it in stride, acting as though it was the natural order of things—because, for them, it was.

 

Kyra had always been dominant. It showed in dozens of small ways—her stubbornness, the way that when she encountered a problem she acted to solve it, without spending any time complaining or wishing for someone else to make it go away. For most of the time I’d known her, though, she’d kept it pretty well hidden. Her psychological scars had been such that she kept largely to the background, preferring to let others claim the spotlight.

 

Since she became…what she was now…things had been changing. She moved with a quiet confidence—something that wasn’t so much buried or muted as it was deemed too obvious to need stated. When she wanted my help—something that had been known to happen before—she didn’t ask in person, didn’t even call. She sent a minion with instructions to bring me.

 

She was still the same person. In fact, she might have been more the same person than she was before, if that makes any sense. And certainly the changes weren’t bad ones. Her friends could hardly wish they hadn’t happened.

 

I’d been telling myself that since January. Most of the time I even believed it.

 

She turned to greet me with a smile—that, at least, hadn’t changed. “Winter. Thanks for coming out here.”

 

“I was afraid I’d die of curiosity otherwise. So what’s your merry band of werewolves gotten up to now?”

 

She grimaced and leaned against the wall of the building, a classy hotel in the middle of town. “It actually wasn’t us this time. How much did Enrico tell you about what happened?”

 

“Virtually nothing,” I told her. “I understand that the group of cops who were unofficially detailed to deal with werewolves called you in the middle of the night for help.”

 

“It’s not just werewolves,” she said. “They get handed all the problem cases nobody else wants.”

 

“Sounds like a worse job than mine,” I commented. “They call you often?”

 

She shrugged. “Occasionally. They know I’m the one to talk to if it looks like the werewolves are acting up. Other than that…sometimes they run into something weird, right? And ever since we went public people assume werewolves are the ones to talk to about weird, God only knows why.”

 

I could sympathize. I’d recently had someone come into my shop and ask me to recommend a good exorcist. I mean, seriously. An exorcist? Why would you go to a furniture shop looking for an exorcism?

 

“So what’d they run into this time?”

 

She frowned. “Wish I knew. They found a body on the fourth floor. Not too big of a deal, except that they can’t find any cause of death. There’s literally nothing wrong with him, except that he’s dead.”

 

“Huh. That happen often?”

 

“No clue. They wouldn’t have called me if they weren’t concerned, though. I charge them.” She glanced at me with an impish gleam to her eyes. “Speaking of which, they’re paying you by the hour. I figure if they want an expert that bad, they can cough up the same as for the other consultants.”

 

“Expert, huh?” I said dubiously. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on much of anything. “What are they paying me to do?”

 

She shrugged. “Show up. Look around. Make cryptic comments for all I know. I really just wanted to know if it’s something you recognize.”

 

“Maybe. Any chance I could look at the place?”

 

“Officially, it’s being treated as a crime scene and nobody gets in. Unofficially…” she grinned. “Unofficially, you’re with me and I go wherever I want to.”

 

It’s good to be the Alpha.

 

I paused when we walked in the door, then proceeded more slowly across the room, looking around nervously. The scent of magic lingering in the doorway wasn’t terribly strong, but it was there, and between that and the dead person I was feeling more than usually paranoid.

 

In the elevator Kyra turned to stare at me. “What are you so twitchy about?” she asked. “You’ve been on crime scenes before.”

 

“Well, sure,” I said. “But this time I’m allowed to be here. I mean, that’s just weird.” She snorted.

 

Kyra unlocked the door with a key. The room itself was totally unremarkable. I mean, it was so normal it was a little freaky. Everything looked just like you’d expect from a vacant hotel room. Everything clean, everything tidy. The bed was made with military precision, the carpets vacuumed. In the bathroom everything sparkled, and the towels had been straightened up.

 

If she hadn’t told me, I would never have guessed that anything amiss had happened here, even with my unnatural senses. There was quite simply nothing there. No physical scent that didn’t belong, no lingering trace of magic. Nothing.

 

“Did you get a look at the body?” I asked her.

 

She shook her head. “They took him down to the morgue already. It wasn’t until after they couldn’t turn up anything there that they called me.”

 

I nodded. “You get any odd scent from the room?”

 

“Nope. You?”

 

“Nothing. Come on.”

 

Back on the ground floor, I paused just long enough to confirm what I already knew. Once I was paying attention to it, I couldn’t just smell magic at the doors; there was a fainter, lingering trace throughout the lobby, especially strong near the front desk and the elevator. The main tone was familiar, human disinfectant. There was another note, very slight, that was almost but not quite like blood; it was spicier, somehow, as though a dash of cayenne had been added.

 

“Did you find anything?”

 

“Maybe,” I said. “There wasn’t anybody checked into that room, was there?”

 

“No. How’d you guess?”

 

“Traces of magic on the ground floor, especially near where other people would have been. The desk, the elevator.”

 

Kyra was fairly experienced, and there wasn’t anything wrong with her mind. “You think somebody used an invisibility spell to sneak the corpse past the desk?”

 

“Um. Maybe, but probably not. Actual invisibility is a pain in the ass—very complicated, very difficult, and usually a waste of time. Most people just go for concealment.”

 

She nodded. “Like that shadow thing you do.”

 

“Yeah, sometimes. Or you can just convince people that they don’t see you, even though you’re right there—that’s what Garrett did, remember?” I chewed on my lip for a second, thinking. “There’s a supermarket not far from here, right?”

 

“Couple blocks north. Why?”

 

“I’ll explain on the way.” We didn’t bother getting her car; it was a short walk, and neither of us was particularly upset by cold.

 

“The problem with concealment spells,” I told her as we walked, “and with invisibility for that matter, is that there’s only so much you can do. Unless you’re, like, absolutely incredibly good, there’s always going to be gaps in your coverage. Most skilled people know that, and they plan around them. Take invisibility, for example. It’s hard enough to do that it demands your total attention—meaning that you’re not putting any effort into stopping them from hearing you.”

 

Kyra nodded slowly. “That’s why most people don’t do it, right?”

 

“Right,” I confirmed. “Why bother working so hard and still having to move quietly, when you can just be really hard to see and still have some left to cover hearing? That’s what I do with the shadows—it’s hard to see somebody covered in shadows standing in a dark corner, and ’cause I’ve been working out I can do a little to muffle things at the same time.”

 

“What about the other kind of concealment? If you’re just convincing people they can’t see you, it shouldn’t matter how much noise you make, right? You can convince them they can’t hear you just as easily.”

 

“Yeah. But that has its own limitation. See, because you’re screwing around with their head directly, hitting one person won’t do jack to keep they guy standing next to him from seeing you. You have to get every person individually, and that means you have to know they’re there.” I shrugged. “Like I said. There’s always going to be a gap in your coverage. The trick is to make it overlap with something you don’t need to worry about.”

 

“So, if you’re standing in a dark room, you put less effort into being invisibility and more into making sure nobody hears you?”

 

“Exactly. The thing is, humans are your main concern, right? So most mages put a lot of effort into blocking sight and hearing, and almost nothing else.”

 

She frowned. “But I couldn’t smell them either.”

 

“Unless maybe you could. Mages don’t smell any different from regular humans.” She knew as well as I did that trying to sort out a specific human scent from a total morass of similar scents such as you find in a public place, like a hotel is functionally impossible if you don’t already know the scent from somewhere else.

 

She considered that for a moment. “So I take it you’re doing your freaky animal mind meld thing hoping they forgot to conceal themselves from nonhuman senses when they brought him through?”

 

“Pretty much, yep. I figure a fox is probably the best bet.” Like I said, Kyra’s not stupid.

 

“Yeah, I’m sure,” she said, smirking suggestively.

 

“Get your mind out of the gutter, Kyra.” We walked into the store, one of those big twenty-four-hour places. “Don’t suppose you have any cash on you?”

 

“Sure, if you answer two questions. One, what are we doing here? And two, wouldn’t a spider make more sense? I mean, they say there’s always a spider within three feet of you, right?”

 

I grimaced. “Maybe if I could do it with a spider. That kind of magic depends on making a connection with the object of the spell. In the greater scheme of things, there’s relatively little difference between me and a fox. Both mammals, both predators—”

 

“Both interested in your girlfriend,” she interjected, grinning.

 

I sighed. “We get the point, thank you. Anyway, we’re relatively similar. The more similarity, the easier it is to bridge that gap. A spider is much harder for me to use—not only have I not spent much time thinking like a spider, it’s a freaking arachnid. Not a lot to work with there.”

 

“Okay. And we’re here because?”

 

“We’re here because I forgot to grab a pound of raw meat when I woke up this morning, and so did you or I would’ve smelled it.”

 

She blinked. “You’re bribing it?”

 

“‘Bribery’ is an ugly word,” I said in a mock-offended voice. “I prefer to think of it as an honest wage for honest work. I mean, it’s taking valuable time—one of the best parts of the day by its standards—to give me a hand. If a human does that, you give him cash. If a fox does it, you should pay him in what he values.” I glanced at the plastic-wrapped packages of meat in the cooler. “Speaking of which, you’re buying, right?”

 

“Technically, the pack’s buying, and then the police are reimbursing the pack.”

 

I put the hamburger down and picked up a package of steak. “Cool.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I have a pretty fast reaction time, and thanks to my ever-increasing paranoia I was especially quick off the draw. By the time most of the people downstairs had even seen the newcomers I was already standing, with both hands shoved into my pockets. I usually carried a pretty impressive assortment of tools and weapons in my pockets, and thanks to Fenris’s visit I had extra today.

 

Conn, though, made me look slow. By the time I had stood halfway up he was standing next to the balcony, seemingly without crossing the five feet between it and our table. His hands were gripping a section of rail in a way that suggested that he was perfectly ready to rip it free and use it as a weapon.

 

The swaggering young man, whom I immediately nicknamed Blondie, took another few steps into the room. He seemed to enjoy the attention he was getting. “You monsters have been getting too comfortable lately,” he said with a sneer. “I think it’s time someone taught you a lesson.” Wow. That was a first. I mean, in my experience, bad guys don’t actually go in for the melodramatic speeches so much these days. Seriously, who talks like that?

 

The barman gave a long-suffering sigh. “The werewolves,” he said, emphasizing the term, “are legal citizens with the same rights as everyone else. Now how about you fellows get out of here before I call the cops?” From my angle I could see that he already had one hand on his cell phone, and the other on a shotgun tucked behind the bar. Smart man.

 

The nervous man leaned closer and muttered something, but Blondie wasn’t listening. He sneered even wider and, by way of answer, lifted his pistol and shot Robert where he was laying near the bar. There was a sudden, shocked silence broken by the werewolf whining in pain and surprise. Blondie grinned and lifted the gun to point at the bartender—particularly unfair in his case, since he was just an average guy trying to make a buck. Only two or three werewolves actually worked there; the rest were normal people or those tangentially involved with the supernatural.

 

A number of things happened very quickly in the instant after that shot. First, Conn ripped a three-foot section of railing out so easily you’d think it was rotten pine instead of oak. He dropped to the floor below with it, and I could hear his snarl from where I stood.

 

At the same time, I pulled my right hand out of my pocket. I was holding a stone, a smooth river rock that fit neatly into the palm of my hand. I’d been using it in some of my recent magical studies, and forgotten to take it back out of my pocket afterward.

 

You might think that, as a result, I would have done some complicated magical ritual with it. You could think so, but you would be wrong. I can do a little earth magic, sure, but it isn’t my forte. I wasn’t very quick at it either, and this was a situation that called for rapid and decisive action.

 

So I threw it instead. I used my power to give it a heavy tailwind too, which combined with my moderately superhuman strength to propel the rock pretty damn fast. Not like bullet fast or anything; I fully expected Blondie to dodge it. But for a second it would make a pretty nice distraction.

 

Except that as it turned out, I had been overestimating these folks. He never even saw it coming, and the stone hit him in the temple hard enough to snap his head to the side. He crumpled, the gun dropping from his hand. In the same instant I threw more wind, a concentrated blast of air that I was hoping would knock the other man from his feet.

 

That was when things got really interesting. There was an impediment to its progress about a foot away from the nervous man. I felt another will come into conflict with mine, someone using magic to keep anything from coming near him. It was a kinetic barrier, one of the simplest shielding spells possible; basically just energy bent to prevent things from crossing, and exert force sufficient to stop them. I wasn’t much good at making them. Raw kinetic energy isn’t something I work with well, which is why I tend to use blasts of wind instead. But Alexander was good at them, and he could throw up barriers that would stop a catapult or a machine gun with equal ease. I’d tested my skills against his shields before, and I couldn’t even ruffle his feathers.

 

This shield, though, was nothing like that. It wouldn’t have stopped bullets. It barely even stopped my gale, and what leaked through was enough to stagger him. He looked straight at me, his face gone pale, and I saw him lift his gun to point my way.

 

Then Conn threw his piece of railing like a javelin. It wasn’t sharp. It didn’t need to be. I was stronger than I looked, much stronger than the average human, but Conn outclassed me enormously. That piece of wood flew maybe twenty feet with no noticeable drop, smashed through the kinetic barrier with such contemptuous ease that it might as well not have existed, and hit the young man in the chest. It didn’t stop when it hit his sternum, either.

 

He, too, crumpled to the ground. He looked very surprised, very bloody, and very, very dead.

 

I dropped to the floor below, crouching to absorb some of the impact, and walked over to join Conn near the intruders. He bent to check the pulse of the man I’d hit with the rock, and then stood, shaking his head. He tossed the stone back to me as he did.

 

The air around them was quietly charged with magic. As I approached I could smell it, a tingling almost-burn in my nostrils. The scent had a familiar note to it that was almost like disinfectant, and which was common to human magic. It wasn’t strong, certainly nothing like as strong as Alexander’s, but it was there.

 

“I hate this job,” Conn muttered under his breath as I approached. No one without superhuman hearing would have heard him. “Doesn’t matter where I go, it’s waiting for me.” He looked at me directly. “You should get out of here. The cops will be along shortly.”

 

“Shouldn’t I stay, then?”

 

“Things will be easier if there’s only one person answering the questions,” he said dryly. “And I can afford it more easily than you. Now go.”

 

I went.

---

 

On the walk back to the shop, I drew a few conclusions. Number one, and most obviously, two human mages had just attacked the best-known werewolf hangout in town. That in itself raised a number of other questions. Like, why would people that raw be attacking anything? You have to be pretty inexperienced at violence to get taken down with a thrown rock. I wasn’t sure about the arrogant one, but the man whose barrier I’d felt had to be even worse at magic than me, and I’m an apprentice as such things go. Nobody that clumsy ought to be getting in a fight with anyone, let alone challenging a bunch of werewolves.

 

The second thing I realized was that, unless my life was about to get even more complicated than usual, this was what Fenris had been referring to, which raised a few questions as well. For example, what was so important about this event that an immortal, divine being better known for terrifying gods would be paying attention to it? And, equally important, how had Fenris known it would happen? As far as I knew nobody had ever really proved the existence of prophecy beyond a few minutes, or an hour or two at the most. Certainly I had never heard of the Fenris Wolf having that kind of ability. Generally his powers are more oriented around death, destruction, and endless hunger.

 

Such were my thoughts as I approached my shop and found Anna Rossi waiting for me. After I unlocked the front door, she and a woman I didn’t know followed me in. The stranger took a very short time to select one of my stock pieces, a small china cabinet made from rosewood that I wasn’t particularly proud of. She paid and left, without even being introduced to me.

 

Anna lingered. “Late lunch,” she said, seeming very casual unless you looked at the tension in her posture. Having spent most of my life near werewolves, I looked. She wasn’t here for chitchat.

 

I wasn’t about to rush her, though. Anna doesn’t typically approach topics directly, at least not with me. “Foster family’s in town,” I said with what I hoped was an appropriate grimace. It was partially true—I hadn’t been raised in Conn’s pack, but I spent a couple years there after I (maybe) turned into a werewolf with disastrous results.

 

She nodded sympathetically, and we spent the next ten minutes looking at various finished and half-finished pieces. We made small talk, which I have gotten slightly better at over time; she commiserated about the unwanted attention I’d been receiving, and I laughed at stories about her latest inept boss.

 

Eventually, though, I got fed up with dancing around the subject and turned to face her. “What really brought you here?” I asked bluntly.

 

She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “It’s about my brother,” she said. “I’m concerned about him. He’s been avoiding me lately.”

 

“That’s not uncommon for new werewolves,” I said awkwardly. Enrico had made the choices that led to his being injured severely enough that turning into a werewolf was his only chance to survive, but I still felt responsible. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been there. He wasn’t one of the publicly acknowledged wolves—no new werewolf would have been put into that position—but Anna knew about it.

 

“Should I be worried about him?” she said quietly.

 

I considered lying to her for about half a second before discarding the idea. I’d been lying to friends most of my life, but that hadn’t made me any fonder of it. “Some,” I said. “The first year is a dangerous time for a werewolf. Some people don’t take well to it.” I shrugged. “I haven’t seen any sign that he’s one of them, but sometimes you don’t.”

 

“What will happen if he is?”

 

I looked away and didn’t say anything, which was answer enough. Being Enrico’s sister and one of my best friends, Anna knew more about the wolves than most people. She knew that they weren’t the cuddly, ridiculous people they were presenting themselves as.

 

I like werewolves. I’ve spent most of my life around them, and I’m close to them magically and psychologically. I don’t let that blind me to what they are. The truth is that werewolves are monsters. They’re dangerous, violent, and kill people on a regular basis. That doesn’t make them evil, but it does make them hazardous to be around sometimes.

 

Anna nodded as though she wasn’t surprised, which I don’t suppose she was. “What are the odds?”

 

I shrugged. “It’s hard to say. He’s already survived the initial change, which is one of the biggest hurdles. At this point, I’d say there’s anywhere between a thirty and sixty percent chance he finishes the adjustment process and comes out okay.”

 

“I see,” Anna said. “Do all werewolves have odds that low?”

 

“No,” I said. “It depends on how well you mesh with the wolf. Some people have personalities that can roll with the changes. Your brother…doesn’t. That makes it a lot harder.”

 

Anna nodded. Her eyes were thoughtful. “I think I understand,” she said. “Take care of him, Winter. No matter what happens.”

 

I sighed. “I will,” I said, though I suspected I didn’t mean it the way she wanted. If he snapped and started killing random people—which has been known to happen when somebody really, really doesn’t do well as a werewolf—not only would the pack need to kill him, he would want them to.

 

If it came to that…well, I’d take care of him. I’d done such things before, for other friends that couldn’t handle the change. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but what in life is?

 

“Thank you,” Anna said, quietly but with great sincerity, and then she walked out the door.

---

 

I was understandably distracted on the walk home, and as a result the quasi-rabid flying squirrel actually drew a little blood before I smashed it into a building with another gust of wind. That wasn’t especially dangerous to me—I healed the injury within a few seconds, and even if the animal had been rabid (which I doubted) werewolves are generally immune to disease. But it was irritating, and a sobering reminder of why I take such pains not to become complacent.

 

Once I was home, I started throwing some stew together. I am not a good cook, not even a little, but I can make stew. I mean, all you have to do is throw stuff into a pot and cook it ’til the bleeding stops, right? Can’t be all that hard.

 

Conn showed up about the same time it finished cooking. I dished up two bowls and carried them into the living room. He tried one bite and grimaced. “I see,” he said, “that your cooking skills, at least, haven’t changed.”

 

I glowered and ate some stew. It was perfectly acceptable, I thought, so long as you dumped a bunch of pepper and garlic into it. If you can’t taste the food, everything tastes good, right?

 

Conn put his almost-untouched bowl back on the table. “I think that you were about to explain something when we were interrupted.”

 

I grunted an acknowledgment and finished my food before speaking. “You remember that after a few months, I stopped being a werewolf?”

 

He nodded.

 

“Well, that might not have been as permanent a condition as we thought.” From there I explained the whole of Fenris’s visit, maybe spending a little less time on the part about my parents than the rest. I valued Conn’s advice, but some things are private.

 

When I finished, he frowned and didn’t speak for a few minutes. “You think he was who he said?”

 

I shrugged. “Probably. I mean, who would pretend to be Fenris? Besides…” I struggled to phrase it for a moment, then shrugged. Conn would understand. “He felt right. He felt like I would expect the Fenris Wolf to feel.”

 

He nodded slowly. “Might be you should ask Bryan. He knows those stories better than I do. He was a skald for a while.”

 

I hadn’t known that. I tried to envision the grim, taciturn, almost emotionless man I’d known off and on for much of my life as a traveling Nordic poet and singer. “I have a hard time imagining that,” I admitted.

 

Conn looked away from me. “He wasn’t always the way he is now.” The old werewolf brooded for a moment, maybe thinking of what had changed his son. I didn’t even want to know about that.

 

“You must know something,” I urged, more to break the silence before it could really settle in and become oppressive than anything.

 

Conn nodded again. “Fenrisúlfr. You’d be wise to step carefully around that one. He doesn’t involve himself in mortal affairs often, and when he does it’s never good. Chaos and destruction follow in his wake.” Conn paused and looked at me in a way I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. It was too…considering, given that it came from the Khan of the werewolves.

 

“What is it?” I said irritably.

 

“Just wondering if that’s why he said you remind him of himself. You aren’t entirely different in that regard, after all.”

 

“I don’t know if I’d go that far. I mean, things happen around me, sure, but chaos and destruction in my wake? That’s a bit much.”

 

“How many people have died around you?” Conn asked. His voice was more conversational than accusatory. It didn’t have to be accusatory. He knew the answer as well as I did, and it was: a whole lot.

 

I shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not that different from any werewolf in that.”

 

“No,” he allowed. “Death isn’t a stranger to us. But do you know how many female Alphas there have been?”

 

I frowned. “No.”

 

“Three that I know of.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One was overthrown and killed within a week. One is old and powerful. A French werewolf I would say is roughly on a par with me. And the third is Kyra Walker.” He was silent a moment to let that sink in. “She doesn’t have anything like the power Marie does. But the pack follows her without question. They obey her as surely as any Alpha.”

 

I shrugged. “Maybe people are just more open-minded these days. I mean, there’s no reason females shouldn’t be Alpha. Not like they can’t do the job just as well.”

 

“Granted, but the fact remains that it represents a major break from tradition. Not to mention that werewolves have been publically acknowledged. That’s a serious change, don’t you think?”

 

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “I wasn’t exactly important to either of those things. You could just as easily say Kyra’s a harbinger of chaos. She played at least as much of a part.”

 

I could tell that he wasn’t convinced, but he let the subject drop. “I take it that’s why you were asking me where werewolves come from?”

 

I nodded. “He said I’m closer to the source. I think maybe that’s what he meant. If he’s where werewolves originate, and I’m related to him somehow, that might explain it.”

 

He made a thoughtful noise. “But he said his children were mostly just wolves, not werewolves or godlike sorcerers. After twenty generations you’d think it was even less than that, not strong enough to make a werewolf’s power look like small change.”

 

Before I had a chance to stew on that, Aiko came in. “Ah, good,” Conn said, not looking up from the dog. “I was hoping I’d have a chance to meet your girlfriend while I was in town.”

 

“Hey,” Aiko said, dropping a dripping wet umbrella next to the stove—even though it wasn’t actually raining outside. “I take it you’re the überwerewolf I’ve heard so much about.” She swept a complicated-looking bow in Conn’s direction which ended up with her sitting on the floor next to me eating his bowl of stew.

 

He raised one eyebrow. “‘Überwerewolf’ is a new one in my experience,” he commented.

 

Aiko shrugged carelessly. “You spend too much time with boring people then.”

 

“Quite likely,” Conn said gravely. “I take it you’re the psychotic kitsune I’ve heard so much about.”

 

“That’s me,” Aiko said cheerily. “You know, Winter, you were totally right about that prison break helping my rep. People recognize me now.”

 

“Ah yes,” Conn said. “The great escape from the dungeons of the Dragon King. Was that really wise?”

 

“Don’t look at me,” the kitsune protested. “It was his idea.”

 

I shifted uncomfortably. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Besides, so far nothing catastrophically bad has happened which I can definitively say was his doing as a result of that event.”

 

“When you have to hedge that much,” Conn pointed out, “it’s usually a sign that your life is a wreck.” Which was hard to contest. “Did you need any more answers before I go?”

 

“Well,” I said, “I’d love some, but I think first I’d better figure out the right questions.”

 

“Finally,” he said dryly. “Just when I was starting to think you’d never learn. Well, as much as I enjoy your company, I’d probably better be going. You know how the pack gets when I’m not around to ride herd on them.”

 

“Actually,” I said as he stood up to leave, “I did have one question. How’d things turn out at the restaurant?”

 

“That? Not much to say. The cops got there about a minute after you left. Turns out both of those men had a criminal record already, and one of them was wanted in relation to another crime. The police were perfectly happy with the self-defense explanation.” Conn shrugged. “It helps that I’m pretty sure your friend Kyra had already crossed their palms with silver beforehand.” He walked out the door without another word.

 

“Nice guy,” Aiko commented after he’d left. “Remind me to never piss him off.”

 

I snorted. “No kidding. You should have seen the look on his face when I got a bunch of beavers to try and turn his house into their new pond.” I’d never openly admitted to that before, but I figured Aiko would find it amusing.

 

“Nice one,” she said admiringly. “What’s he doing in Colorado?”

 

That, of course, prompted a full explanation, including the details on my discussion with Fenris. When I’d finished, she sat there and absorbed it for a minute, scratching Snowflake’s neck as she did. “So let me get this straight,” she said eventually. “You’re the distant descendant of a deific wolf-monster that embodies hunger and destruction. Said wolf-monster thinks you’re funny and is almost certainly setting you up just for kicks. That about it?”

 

“Yep, pretty much.”

 

“Awesome!” she exclaimed. “I mean, that’s way cooler than just being a distant niece of the Dragon King. Think you’ll get invited to all the family parties now?”

 

“Maybe. His father already set us up with that one forged invitation, remember? So in a certain manner of speaking I’ve got ins with both of them.”

 

Her expression turned wistful. “I remember. That was the most fun I’ve had in ages.” She glanced at me slyly. “Speaking of fun, you can turn into a wolf now, right? ‘Cause there’s some things I’ve been wanting to try with that….”

 

And that was all that was said about gods, ancient monsters, and harbingers of chaos and destruction for quite some time. Anything else that might have happened that night is, quite frankly, none of your goddamn business.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The next thing I remember is waking up in bed the next morning. I felt incredibly comfortable, and so well rested you’d think I’d slept twelve hours, although my clock said it was barely six and I couldn’t have gone to sleep earlier than midnight. Snowflake was curled up next to me, staring at me with an expression of concern in her ice-blue eyes.

 

It faded the moment I woke up. You’re awake, she whispered into my mind. Good. I was worried about you. That was a very dangerous man.

 

I tensed up. That wasn’t a dream?

 

I wish.

 

I shivered. The Fenris Wolf was…a very scary person if even a fraction of what was said about him had even a kernel of truth.

 

This is the short version of his story. Loki, the god of fire and chaos and, at least occasionally, a terrible enemy of the gods, had sired three children with a giantess. The gods prophesied that they would cause great harm, and as a result cast one of them into the ocean and another into the underworld.

 

Fenrisúlfr was the only one they raised themselves. He was a wolf, and quickly grew to such a size that the gods themselves came to fear him. They arranged for him to be bound with a fetter purchased from the dwarves, made with magic and utterly impossible to break. He was bound at the edge of the world, and a sword was thrust between his jaws so that he couldn’t close them.

 

But he won’t be bound forever. Eventually Ragnarök, the battle that will kill the gods and destroy the world, will come, and his bindings will break on that day. And he will go forth with a hunger fit to devour the world, his jaws stretching from the earth to the sky. Odin himself, the strongest of the gods and their king, will go to do battle with him and fall.

 

That’s what the myths say, anyway. I found his version, in which most of that was a metaphor for something humans weren’t really able to understand, more likely. Not so much because I trusted him—only an idiot trusts a god that easily—as because it made sense. I could imagine that deific beings were so far beyond human experience that we couldn’t really understand them at all.

 

I got up, dressed, and ate, thinking. I was worried about Fenris’s visit. Part of it was simply that the freaking Fenris Wolf was paying attention to me—but not much, because at this point there were enough powerful people looking my way that one more wasn’t too critical. More of it was because of the things he said about my not being a werewolf. That worried me, because if I hadn’t ever been a werewolf….

 

What had I been?

 

I thought about that for a while, and got no closer to an answer. I could turn into a wolf, I had all the secondary abilities associated with werewolves—strength, speed, healing, and such—I was pained by the touch of silver and affected by the full moon. That seemed like a pretty clear portrait of a werewolf to me.

 

Clearly, I needed to speak with someone who knew more about werewolves than me if I wanted to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, people like that are few and far between.

 

I knew a few of them, though. So I called a familiar number and left a message when nobody answered. Then, as I was getting ready to go to work, I had another thought.

 

Why had Fenris said I had a big day ahead of me?

 

I frowned and grabbed another handful of toys to throw in my pockets. Somehow, whatever Fenris had been referring to, I was pretty sure I couldn’t over-prepare for it.

---

 

I used to work at a sorta weird repair shop owned by a fae called Dvalin Kovac. He hired me while I was still in college, and I’d been working with him since. For years it was a pretty important part of my life.

 

In some ways I guess I was still working there. I mean, it was the same shop, and I did a lot of the same work. Val was gone, though. Not long after he presented me with the dubious gift of a powerful, powerfully cursed sword, he’d given me the shop and disappeared for parts unknown. Okay, maybe not completely unknown; the last I heard, he was planning to return to the Otherside for a while and visit his family.

 

I felt a bit ashamed when I heard that. In all the years I’d known him, it had never once occurred to me that he might have a family. I mean, it was obvious, but…it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of a fae with family. Even harder when that fae was Val.

 

I’d mostly quit doing repairs in favor of making and fixing furniture. It was sort of funny, because I had two almost completely different groups of customers. One of them were the people who’d been coming for years, mostly since before I started working there, who kept coming for the plethora of services Val had provided. I helped them with what I could, and apologized for the things I couldn’t do. Considering the variety of things Val had done for most of them, I wound up apologizing a lot.

 

The other group were the new customers, who mostly didn’t realize that I had only had the shop for a couple months. They’re mostly gawkers who come in because I’m publicly known to be a werewolf even though I’m not one (complicated story, don’t ask), and werewolves are new enough to the public eye to make me a kind of celebrity around town. A lot of people are still convinced the whole thing is a hoax, and I honestly can’t blame them. Werewolves are still banned from giving clear evidence that it isn’t, after all, and that tends to limit the credibility of the claim. At this point most of the support for their existence is in the form of various videos, and while those videos are very plausible, people don’t take that kind of thing on faith these days.

 

Either way, though, people are still fascinated by the prospect. There are plenty of people who are willing to go to my shop just so they can say that they bought something from a werewolf.

 

I vastly prefer the first group. There are people who would probably kill to get that much attention, but I’m not one of them. It makes me feel like I’m in a zoo.

 

On the way to work a fire hydrant exploded and sent a chunk of metal the size of my fist at my head with lethal force. I dropped to the ground instantly and without thinking, rolled under the spraying water, and came up on the other side. The whole incident barely interrupted my stride.

 

It’s probably a bad sign when you get that accustomed to assassination attempts, but I couldn’t help it. In the past six months I’d encountered two hundred and forty-seven of them, none of which had come all that close to succeeding. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. There wasn’t any pattern to them that I could find. Sometimes weeks would go by uneventfully. On the other hand, I’d also run into twenty-three in one day. They had been as absurd as a basket of exotic venomous snakes launched out of a catapult, as difficult to arrange as a car crashing into a store downtown while I happened to be standing near the window, and as unlikely to succeed as a paper airplane that had somehow been sharpened, reinforced, and sent flying at my head one evening.

 

I’m pretty sure whoever’s behind it isn’t actually trying to kill me, because there’s been a distinct lack of…more or less anything which makes sense as an actual means of assassination. I mean, if you really want somebody dead, most of the time the simple plans are best. Guns work pretty well. If you really have to go all Wile E. Coyote, you should probably pass on the catapults and skip right to a metric ton of dynamite. That works pretty well too. Failing that lighting somebody’s house on fire while they’re sleeping isn’t a bad choice, and of course you can always fall back on poison.

 

None of which had been used on me so far. Well, technically poison had shown up a few times, but not in any practical way. I mean, a poisoned apple placed on your table while you’re gone isn’t exactly subtle, and you’d have to be tragically stupid to eat it if you already know somebody’s trying, in even a very casual way, to kill you. The pie that had been laced with strychnine and dropped on my doorstep without a note was almost worse, because that’s a bad idea even if you don’t have any enemies.

 

The repeated and ridiculous attacks have accomplished one thing, though. I mean, I thought I was paranoid before, but that’s got nothing on now. Case in point: fire hydrant. I’m fast, but not fast enough to duck that unless I was already sort of expecting something bad to happen.

 

Once I got to work things were pretty uneventful. There were a handful of people there throughout the morning, which was moderately irritating since I had to drop everything every time somebody came in, but not serious. Certainly nothing like what you would expect to bring a warning from the Fenris Wolf.

 

About noon, when I’d just started thinking about wrapping up for lunch, the bell at the front counter dinged again. I walked out and found a pleasant-looking young man with dark hair and bright green eyes waiting for me. I must have had an interesting expression on my face, because when he saw me he laughed. It was a pleasant, light sound, but not especially remarkable.

 

“Conn?” I said incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

 

The Khan of the werewolves looked at me with laughter in his eyes. “Aren’t you the one that called me looking for advice?” he asked.

 

“Well, sure, but that was just this morning. I hadn’t even heard from you yet. I sure wasn’t expecting you to visit in person.”

 

He shrugged. “When you called I was flying home from California with a layover in Denver. Wasn’t hard to get from there to Colorado Springs.”

 

“And you didn’t call me back because…?”

 

He grinned slyly. “I thought it would be more fun to surprise you. And I was right.”

 

I sighed. “You,” I said, “are ridiculous.” It was the kind of thing I would be more likely to expect from a twelve-year-old than the oldest and most powerful werewolf in the world.

 

Conn ignored me, instead lounging on one of the chairs I had in the office portion of the shop for waiting customers. I idly noted that he had already flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED. “How do you like being in business for yourself?” he asked me.

 

I shrugged and sat down as well, so that it wouldn’t seem like I was looming over him. Conn is secure enough in his authority that he doesn’t care if people act in a way that suggests dominance to him, but I generally don’t anyway. “Could be worse,” I said. “I never realized how many things Val took care of that I didn’t know about.” Things like licenses and taxes, both of which I was pretty sure he had ignored with a casualness that I could only envy.

 

Conn nodded sympathetically. “You doing all right for cash?”

 

“Pretty much, yeah. Speaking of, why did you send me that money back in January?”

 

He shrugged. “You took care of an element in the Courts that was bothering me endlessly. Seemed like the least I could do to pay you for your trouble.”

 

I estimated that he’d paid quite a bit better per hour than my day job, not even counting the other rewards that I’d gotten for that particular event. Considering the condition I came out in, I wasn’t arguing. It might pay well, but I wasn’t going to be taking a job as a supernatural mercenary any time soon.

 

“So what did you need advice on?” he asked.

 

I hesitated. “It’s kind of complicated….”

 

“Goodness,” he said dryly. “A situation involving you? Complicated? I never would have guessed.”

 

I tried to look indignant, but couldn’t manage to keep from smiling. If you can forget what he is and what he represents, Conn is actually very good company. Then you remember that his job description includes ruling a good chunk of the world’s werewolves with an iron fist, and ruthlessly killing anyone that gets out of line, and you go back to being scared of him.

 

“Well,” he said, “it’s lunchtime, and in my experience complicated problems seldom suffer for being discussed over food.”

 

Of course not. In a werewolf’s mind, there isn’t anything that doesn’t benefit from the addition of food. “What did you have in mind?”

 

“Well,” he said slyly, “I hear a new place opened up around town recently. Sort of a theme restaurant, I understand. I think it was called the Full Moon Grill. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

 

I sighed. Of course. “Ridiculous,” I repeated.

 

“You really think it’s a good idea to talk that way to the person buying you lunch?” he asked. “Besides, from what I hear it isn’t that ridiculous of a place. I mean, we might even see a werewolf.”

 

I followed him out the door with a sigh.

---

 

The Full Moon Grill is an interesting place. It reminds me of a casino in some ways, simply because the glamorous image it presents is so utterly different from the reality. If you know what’s really going on, it seems incredible that so many people get taken in by the glitzy facade.

 

To the outsider, it’s a theme restaurant that’s made its reputation on the recent werewolf craze. Everything about it is engineered on that basis. The menu items are overpriced, have ridiculous names to fit the theme, and tend to involve lots and lots of meat. The furniture is all wood, mismatched, and some of it looks like it’s been chewed on. All of the publicly acknowledged werewolves in town, including me, eat there on a semi-regular basis. Werewolves in fur, hang out there as well. In just a few short months it’s become a popular tourist destination for those who are, or think they are, enamored with all things lycanthropic.

 

The behind-the-scenes look is a little different. I made most of the furniture myself, and as a result know perfectly well that it isn’t my best work. The chewed-on look was produced with power tools rather than teeth. The food isn’t much different from what you would get at any steakhouse in the city, except that it maybe costs a little more. Oh yeah, and the werewolves? We spend most of our time there talking about how much we hate the attention we’ve been getting. None of us is the type to enjoy being in the public eye. It makes it even worse being in a place where practically everybody is guaranteed to recognize us, and stare.

 

The only reason that most of us go is that, as I think most of the customers suspect, the pack owns the place. Kyra, the recently minted Alpha and my good friend, asks us with exceptional vigor to spend a certain amount of time there every month. The idea is to make werewolves seem both everyday and a bit ridiculous, so that even the people who believe the stories can’t take us seriously. Strangely enough, it seems to be working. Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to see someone as mysterious and terrifying when they’re basically a sideshow at a tourist trap.

 

I’m sure it’s a total and unintended coincidence that the restaurant also rakes in cash hand over fist. Sure it is.

 

Not that it’s all worked out that smoothly. There have been quite a few lynchings in rural areas, and wherever you go it’s not hard to find people muttering that werewolves ought to be shot. Honestly, it makes me sort of glad that Conn’s taking the low-key, careful approach that he is. The werewolves went public six months ago, and since then almost nothing’s changed. They aren’t allowed to change in public, and any breaches of secrecy are treated as harshly as they’ve ever been. The government is still treating the whole thing as a hoax.

 

I think my favorite part of the restaurant’s act is the werewolves in fur, though. Conn and I walked past one lounging near the bar as we entered, a dark-furred wolf named Robert that I knew very vaguely. Anywhere else he would have been assumed to be the owner’s dog or something, and treated like part of the scenery. Werewolves don’t really look all that doglike, but in my experience, most people will if given the slightest opportunity gladly deceive themselves to an absolutely absurd extent to avoid an uncomfortable truth.

 

The amusing thing is that the same goes in reverse, too. So, elsewhere, people mistake werewolves for dogs. In the Full Moon Grill, they mistake dogs for werewolves. See, there are a relatively few werewolves in the pack willing to loiter around in fur in a restaurant all day. Maybe a dozen, tops. Most of them are the same wolves who are currently known to the public and therefore have to appear there in human form on a regular basis anyway.

 

So, to make up the difference, Kyra has dogs come in and pretend to be werewolves. Several of the pack have dogs, and most of them are pretty well trained. Snowflake does her share, and in fact she’s actually one of the most frequent choices, because her uncanny intelligence makes her an excellent actor. She find the whole thing very amusing, as do I.

 

Conn and I sat at a small table near the railing on the upper level. From that position, both of us could see the door, and if we really wanted to it wouldn’t be hard to get down there very quickly. A ten-foot drop isn’t all that much of an impediment to a werewolf.

 

“I’m surprised you wanted to come here,” I said.

 

He looked at me as though puzzled. “I thought the whole point of this restaurant was that it appealed to werewolves.”

 

“It’s more of a tourist trap than anything. Most of the serious people on the scene go to Pryce’s place.”

 

Conn frowned, and it seemed as though a shadow were passing over his normally cheerful features. “I don’t care for that man. What he’s done to himself is wrong in every sense of the word.”

 

I looked away, shivering a little. For an instant—just one instant—Conn had stopped looking like a pleasant young man, and started to resemble what he really was. He might not look like much—actually, I know he doesn’t look like much—but Conn is scary. No one’s ever been willing or able to tell me how old he is, but I know that his youngest child is at least two hundred years old, and she says that Conn was old when she was born.

 

More than that, though, he’s the Khan, with everything that means.

 

Alpha werewolves are powerful. They are, by virtue of the personality traits that enable them to be Alpha in the first place, generally domineering and disinclined to take orders. Thanks to the position they hold within their packs they don’t generally have to, which just makes them like it less.

 

Conn rules all the Alphas in a good portion of the world. All of them. If he tells them to jump, the only question they ask is how high. You don’t get that kind of authority by being pleasant.

 

Oh, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t a lie. Conn really is a nice guy, most of the time, and he has a sense of humor—the fact that he chose a title phonetically identical to his first name is ample testament to that. it’s just that underneath that is an old, powerful werewolf who brooks no threat to his authority, and is perfectly willing to kill those who challenge him. I’d seen him do it once. It was…memorable.

 

And when I mentioned Pryce’s name, for one second I saw through the surface to the darkness underneath, and was reminded of why I was usually more uncomfortable around Conn than this.

 

And then the moment was over. Conn shook his head like a dog shedding water, and I got the sense that he was aware of what I had seen—and it made him as uncomfortable as it did me. “What did you call me about, anyway?” he asked in the too-casual tone of someone trying to change the subject quickly.

 

I was happy to comply. “I realized that there are a few things about werewolves I don’t know that might be important to me.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“Well, for one thing, where do they come from? I know that people can be changed into werewolves,” I said, forestalling his immediate response. “But that only works if there’s a werewolf to change them, so obviously that can’t be where it started. So where did werewolves originate?”

 

He seemed to think about that for a moment, staring past my shoulder as though looking at something only he could see. “An interesting question,” he said slowly. “One I’ve often wondered myself.”

 

I blinked. “You don’t know?” I asked. Logically I knew there was no reason he shouldn’t be as ignorant as I was, but on a subconscious level I was used to Conn knowing everything.

 

He grinned briefly. “I’m old, but I’m not that old. Werewolves had existed for a long time before I was born. That said, I am familiar with a few stories about our origins.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“Well,” he said slowly, as though remembering something he hadn’t thought of in a long time, “one of the more common is that werewolves are as ancient as humanity, or more so. Some say that in ancient times, before the magical and the mundane were seen as being quite so separate, there were men and women who had a talent for what we call magic. These people, like many of that time, were hunters, and their nature was such that other hunters found in them a kindred spirit. They sought greater and more powerful knowledge and magics, and in the seeking they changed. They became as other hunters, as the beasts that preyed on them as they preyed on others. Over time, these people became the first of what we now call werewolves.”

 

Conn’s voice had taken on a measured, almost ritual quality, which reminded me of the long hours I’d spent hearing old stories from Dolph and Erin—unsurprising, given that they’re his children. In spite of that, though, there were cues if you knew what to listen for. “You disagree?” I asked.

 

“I find it an incomplete explanation. If that were the case you would expect to find shapeshifters everywhere, which you do. Actual werewolves, though, are native only to western Europe. If it’s a universal magic that was formed from shamanic traditions in prehistoric times, why would it only have developed in a small part of the world?” He shook his head.

 

“So what do you think the answer is?”

 

He frowned. “The story I find most believable is that once, long before the birth of Christ, the fae were as powerful as gods in that part of the world. Much more powerful, even, than they are now. In that time there was a young warrior who was favored of one by the greatest of the fae. He was smart and strong and dangerous, but it came about that he was also tired and outnumbered, and he knew that he would die on the morrow. So, as desperate young warriors have been known to do, he called upon those more powerful than himself for aid. And, of course, this fae lord heard him, and answered. He was given power enough to defeat his enemies, but like all fae gifts it came with a cost.” He smiled a little. “I think you can guess it from there.”

 

Well, that was interesting. It made sense, in a way. I knew that some of the greater fae had been worshipped as gods by the early Europeans, especially in the British Isles. It was true, too, that being a werewolf was about equal parts gift and curse. I could see a faerie gift taking that form.

 

Of course, the fae weren’t the only ones who might do something like that. “Have you ever heard Fenris mentioned in that context?” I asked.

 

Conn frowned again, more deeply. “Fenrisúlfr? Not specifically, no.” He shrugged. “Fenrir is as likely a source as any. It would explain a few things, I suppose. Now what brought this on?”

 

I frowned and opened my mouth to explain. Before I could, though, somebody kicked the front door in. Two young men walked through. One of them had the arrogant swagger of a kid with more bravado than sense who hadn’t ever been in real danger. The other moved with a kind of nervousness that suggested that he was just starting to realize that this might not have been the best idea, and it was too late for him to back out now. I saw him glance longingly out at the street a few times as the duo entered the restaurant.

 

Oh yeah, and both of them had already drawn pistols which looked significantly more deadly than the men themselves.

 

It is days like this that I hate my life.

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The phrase “werewolf society” is intrinsically misleading. In most respects, werewolves belong to the same society as their human neighbors; they speak the same language, celebrate the same holidays, and complain about the same politicians. By and large a French werewolf is going to have more in common, culturally, with a French human than an English werewolf.

 

There are, however, a few exceptions to the rule, a few elements of a shared culture which bring lycanthropes together. Probably the most universal example is the lunar festival. I’ve never encountered a pack of werewolves that didn’t celebrate it, and that most definitely includes the Colorado Springs pack.

 

They don’t hold one every time the full moon comes around. Usually it’s every third or fourth moon, and it’s kind of a big deal. Most werewolves regard it as something between a party and a religious holiday, and they wouldn’t miss the event for love or money.

 

Being the Alpha’s best friend, I always got invites and usually attended. For most of my life I’d been too upset over not being a werewolf to want to, but in recent months that had stopped bothering me so much and I’d started to actually enjoy them.

 

Admittedly, there was a lot to enjoy. When werewolves throw a party, they go all out. It starts with a massive barbecue at around noon. Most of them show up human, and there’s always plenty of raw meat for the rest. That lasts ’til sunset, and goes through an almost absurd amount of food. You might think your guests eat a lot when you throw a party, but trust me, it doesn’t begin to compare to what an entire pack of werewolves can put away.

 

Around dusk is when it stops resembling a human party. As the shadows lengthen werewolves start changing, filling the air with sounds more suited to the primordial forest than a suburban backyard. By the time the moon’s fully risen, all of them are in fur. That’s when the hunt starts, and God help you if you get in the way. Thirty moon-happy werewolves out hunting is a dangerous thing.

 

There is such a thing as the Wild Hunt, but I think a lot of the legends about it were actually started by full-moon werewolf hunts. It’s incredibly beautiful, in the same way as a forest fire.

 

Shortly before dawn, the hunt finally wounds down. They’ve almost always caught something by then, and as the moon’s influence starts to wane they start to pull themselves together. Or some of them do, at any rate; the festival formally ends with the conclusion of the hunt, but it’s generally accepted that there’s an unofficial third portion. Usually, the only people who participate in that aspect of the celebration are the ones who either aren’t in a romantic relationship or don’t take that sort of thing as seriously as most. Odds are good you can imagine what’s involved, and if not you definitely don’t want me to describe it for you.

 

It’s a commonly cited fact around werewolves that wolves mate for life. Commonly cited, accurate, and totally worthless. The thing people often forget is that a werewolf is every bit as much human as wolf, and there are plenty of humans who can’t hold down a relationship for two weeks. Given that a werewolf can live for, theoretically, forever, and that they aren’t human no matter what they sometimes look like, it shouldn’t be too surprising that some of them have attitudes which are, by the standards of society, odd to say the least.

 

So far this one was just at the tail end of the feasting portion. The sun was mostly down, and I was one of the few who still looked human. If it had been winter I might have had a cup of hot cider or something, but even in Colorado it doesn’t get cold enough to bother the likes of me in July. Even in December the cup would have been mostly decorative; I don’t really get cold under natural conditions, unless I’m in the Antarctic or something.

 

So I was pretty much standing around bored waiting for the last of the wolves to finish the change, idly spinning webs of shadow between my fingers. I’d gotten a lot smoother at that over the past few months, enough that I didn’t even really have to think about it. Practice makes perfect, in magic the same as everything else.

 

I felt it, when the moon rose. I couldn’t not feel it; it was too much a part of me. As the light of the full moon touched my face I felt a sudden need to hunt, to chase things and revel in the blood, the same urge the werewolves were feeling. It’s a combination of psychology and magic that, while not a compulsion to the hunt, is certainly a very strong encouragement.

 

That wasn’t unusual. Most of the time I would have shaken it off easily. Tonight it was stronger than usual, and I considered using my magic to sort of ride along in the minds of the pack. It was something I’d done before, more times than I could remember. With my power buoyed by the full moon, it wouldn’t even be an effort.

 

As I debated whether I wanted to do that tonight, I felt myself reaching automatically for the power that would let me change my shape to join them physically instead of just mentally. That wasn’t too unusual either; even after more than a decade had gone by since I stopped being a werewolf, I still tried to change occasionally. It was instinct, especially under the full moon.

 

What was unusual was what happened next. I felt a sort of strain, as though I were pushing against something almost too heavy to move—except this was a purely mental sensation. Then, to continue the analogy, it started to move with a feeling like I’d broken the seal of ninety years of rust. Then the really worrisome stuff started.

 

I felt sensations which, although entirely familiar to me, I hadn’t felt in my own body for years and years, and which I’d never expected to feel again. A tension to the muscles. Elevated heart and breathing rates. Things slowly beginning to shift under my skin….

 

I looked at my hand and saw that it wasn’t my imagination. The shapes were…not right. The bones had started shifting around, which I felt with hot, tiny pains. My nails were elongating, ever so slightly. Thickening, becoming claws.

 

In other words, I had started to turn into a wolf.

 

I thought, absently, that I should have felt something. Pride, maybe, satisfaction that I was finally able to change when it had eluded me for so long. Terror because the last time I managed it turned out really badly for me and a bunch of other people. At the moment, though, I was too stunned to feel any of that.

 

A moment later, I realized that if I didn’t want to change right there, right then, I’d better do something about it. I closed my eyes and focused my will, forcing the power I’d called back down. A few years ago I probably couldn’t have done it, not under the full moon, not as hard as it was hitting me right now. Fortunately, I’d been practicing a lot with magic, and doing serious magic requires absolute strength of will. I managed to choke the wolf back down, although it felt like I was trying to bottle up a geyser.

 

I opened my eyes and looked at myself. Everything seemed to be back where it belonged, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Moving very carefully, I gathered my things and collected my mostly-dog Snowflake, clipping her leash on. She didn’t need it—she was at least as intelligent as most people—but it would make people feel better.

 

All of that was pretty normal. I usually left at this point, only “staying” for the actual hunt about one time in three. Snowflake trotted along beside me cheerfully.

 

She figured out something was wrong about the time I was sure we were out of sight and earshot of the werewolves, and I started to run. Normally I would have said that was a bad idea around a bunch of hunt-minded werewolves—like dogs, they have an instinct to chase things which run. Fortunately I knew that they were hunting the forest tonight, and I had no intention of leaving the city.

 

Snowflake kept pace easily. She’s a Siberian husky, in good shape, and the things that make her not quite a dog had recently started showing up physically as well as mentally. She could have outstripped me without making an effort, and I can move faster than any humans but dedicated athletes.

 

My magic is good at communicating with predators. Up until recently, in fact, that was about all it was good for. As a result I could feel Snowflake’s worry in the back of my mind. Even under the full moon, which makes my magic significantly stronger, I couldn’t distinguish actual words (another way Snowflake differs from a dog; normal animals don’t really form distinct thoughts as you understand the term) without skin contact, eye contact, or an effort on my part.

 

I’d spent enough time around her that I didn’t need to. I knew how her mind worked. She was concerned for me, wondering why I was in such a hurry. I sent back reassurance as strongly as I could and picked up the pace a little.

 

I was in good condition, and physically somewhat superior to the average human. I was still somewhat out of breath by the time we reached my house, most of the way across the city from the pack’s house where the party had been held. The whole time the urge to change and go hunting became more powerful, not less, and by the time we were there I was starting to feel genuinely afraid.

 

We stopped at the door for me to lower my defenses. At Alexander’s suggestion, I’d started putting up wards around my cabin. They were nothing like the multilayered fortress around the old wizard’s house, but they were still pretty good. Attack my home and you’d best be ready for blasts of wind to hit you like a sledgehammer, shadows to try to trip, tangle, and disembowel you, and (my particular favorite) a bit of magic that would make every animal within a two mile radius start raising hell. I figured that last one alone would be enough to make most people bent on stealth go running. Generally I only left them up when I was away, so that nobody could sneak in while I was gone.

 

The problem was that they wouldn’t allow me through, either. In the circles I’d started running with, shapeshifting into a perfect imitation of me wasn’t all that difficult. As a result my wards were programmed to try and kill me if I didn’t disable them first. Most of the time I considered constantly lowering and raising my defenses to be good practice. Tonight it was an irritant and an expenditure of time that I resented.

 

A minute or so later I opened the door and we went through. I took Snowflake’s leash off and locked the door behind us, raising my wards again as well. I made my way to my quasi-living room and sat down on the floor not too far from the fire.

 

After that I spent a while…meditating, for lack of a better word. Concentrating on relaxing, as much of an oxymoron as that is, focusing on being calm and peaceful until the wolf inside me finally started to fade from the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t gone, not even close—the urge to slip into fur and go hunting was still there, would be there at least until the sun came up. But my mind was clear enough that I could think straight.

 

I could, for example, think about how it was July and as a result I hadn’t set a fire today. Even if I had, I’d been gone for hours and hours at the party. The fire should have been out long since. The fact that it wasn’t suggested that someone had been feeding it. That, in turn, implied that someone had been here, inside of my wards and locks, and I hadn’t even known it.

 

About the same time I noticed that, a voice spoke for the first time since I came in. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” The voice was male, and fairly deep, but otherwise not that remarkable.

 

I opened my eyes and looked at the source of the voice. There weren’t any lights on and he was between me and the fire, so I couldn’t make out much beyond a silhouette. He was tall, I could see that much, and very thin. He was squatting comfortably next to the stove, warming his hands at the fire.

 

I got up and turned on the lamp without answering him, casting a dim light through the room. As I did he turned around and I got a look at his face for the first time.

 

Silvery-grey hair. Golden eyes that reflected the light like a cat’s. Gaunt features, with hollow cheeks and pronounced bones that made him look like he’d come from a concentration camp. He looked somewhat disturbing and entirely too familiar. I’d seen his face only once, but I wouldn’t ever forget it.

 

I was raised around werewolves, and tried to become one myself when I was sixteen. It worked, sort of, and drove me mostly insane as a result. A number of people died, and I spent about three months locked up and getting steadily crazier. At some point in that time this entity—I wasn’t sure if the term “person” applied—had appeared and undone the change somehow.

 

Except that I had started to shift tonight. Which suggested that I hadn’t fully understood what happened that night.

 

This time I wasn’t feverish and hallucinating, so I noticed a few details that I either hadn’t seen the last time, or which hadn’t been there. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, both well-worn. More noticeably, there was a silver ribbon that shimmered in a way I hadn’t seen before around his neck, and his lower lip was pierced. It didn’t look much like jewelry; it was just an ugly metal spike in his mouth that gouged at his gums when he spoke. Creepy looking. The instant I saw him I also became aware of the scent of magic, so thick it was almost choking, reeking of a predator’s musk.

 

“I wondered when I’d see you again,” I said eventually.

 

He raised one silvery eyebrow. “That’s it? I was expecting at least a little surprise.” His voice, at least, sounded normal this time. The last time I’d seen him it had been made up of hundreds of unrelated sounds combined into speech that was nothing like human. Although I might have hallucinated that part; you never know.

 

I shrugged. “Nah. I’ve been expecting this for years now. And after what happened earlier, makes sense I’d see you again. I take it you’re here to settle that debt?”

 

He looked confused. Then, suddenly, he laughed, and there was an echo of that earlier, inhuman voice in it, the sound of a windstorm blended with howling wolves. “Oh, you mean from when I helped you out a few years back?” He waved one hand carelessly. “You don’t owe me for that. That was common decency.”

 

Well, that was a weight off my shoulders. I’d spent half my life, almost, thinking he owned me and I was just living on borrowed time until he decided to collect.

 

He turned back to the fire. “Do you remember what I said to you back then?” he asked.

 

I moved up to sit more or less next to him. The fire was very nice. “You asked, ‘Do you want to be free?'”

 

He nodded. His features were even weirder in the flickering orange light. “Good memory. Can you guess why I asked that?”

 

“Because you thought the answer was important?” I guessed.

 

He shrugged. “Maybe a little. Mostly it’s because it’s natural to talk about what’s precious to you. Ask a starving man what he thinks of steak and he’ll wax eloquent for hours on end.” He shrugged again. “Only natural.”

 

I considered that for a moment. I don’t know why, but most supernatural beings of any age or power seem to delight in talking around the subject. You have to pay careful attention to really see what they mean.

 

“To a starving man,” I said slowly, “steak is important because it’s what he wants but can’t have. It’s precious because it’s the thing he lusts for most.”

 

He smiled at me, showing teeth that were very sharp. He said nothing.

 

I thought some more. He looked a lot like me, really; both of us were only vaguely human in appearance. We looked more like wolves than men, in a lot of ways. Amber eyes and grey hair, in particular.

 

He looked and smelled like a wolf and spoke of freedom the way a starving man speaks of steak. I looked at the silvery ribbon, which I saw now had no seam or knot, as though it had been woven in place around his neck. No way to get it off without snapping it, and somehow I knew that I could tug on it all day with superhuman strength and not affect it at all. I looked at the spike in his mouth, which had to be pure agony when he spoke.

 

For some reason, at least some ancient and powerful beings take great pleasure in making their disguises as transparent as possible. I don’t know why; maybe because, even when they try to blend in, their pride demands that people have a way to recognize them. Maybe they just think it’s funny.

 

“You’re the Fenris Wolf, aren’t you?” I asked him.

 

He smiled delightedly. “Oh, you are good. What gave me away?”

 

I rolled my eyes. “What didn’t? I thought you were supposed to be bound until the end times.”

 

“Who’s to say I’m not?” he asked seriously. “A silver cord around my neck and a sword stabbed into my mouth. Admittedly I couldn’t fit the whole sword, but I think the symbolism is there nonetheless, don’t you?”

 

“Funny,” I said dryly, “but I was kind of not joking.”

 

He looked back into the fire, staring at the tongues of flame as though they held answers to my questions. For all I know they did. “The old poets weren’t stupid,” he said abruptly. “Not stupid at all. Some were brilliant. But they were still human. Even when they heard the truth, which was seldom, they didn’t have minds to process it. So they translated it into something they could understand. That’s what you grew up learning.”

 

“So what is the way things really are?” I asked curiously.

 

He glanced at me almost regretfully. “You can’t really understand it either. You’re too much like them, and not enough like me.”

 

“Try,” I suggested.

 

He seemed to spend a moment thinking. “There is more than one kind of binding,” he said eventually, “and more than one way to be free. Sometimes if you want to be free in one way, you have to be bound in another. And that really is the best I can explain it.” He waved one hand vaguely and both the ribbon and the spike vanished as though they’d never been. “The accoutrements were metaphors at best, and at worst outright lies.”

 

I thought about that. It sounded like a paradox on the surface, but it actually made a kind of sense to me. “Sort of like when I was a werewolf,” I said after a moment. “When you took that away from me, you were restricting my freedom in some ways. But it made me free to think clearly and control my own actions.”

 

“Not a bad example,” he allowed. “But you’ve never been a werewolf.”

 

I raised one eyebrow, a trick that took me forever to get down. “That’s funny,” I said dryly. “I distinctly remember being changed into one.”

 

He shook his head. “No. Changing you into a werewolf would be like trying to drown a fish. You’re closer to the source than they’ll ever be. You just…woke some things up, inside yourself, that were sleeping until then. I just put them back to sleep.”

 

“That’s why I started to change tonight,” I said suddenly, realizing it even as I spoke. “It woke back up.”

 

He shrugged. “Has been for a while now. Nothing sleeps forever.” He glanced at me slyly. “And you’ve been helping it along, too. Playing about with things you don’t understand. Spent quite a lot of time with werewolves lately, haven’t you?”

 

I mused on that for a moment. “Will it affect me the same way it did last time?”

 

He shrugged again. “Maybe. Probably not. You weren’t ready for it to wake up back then. Now I think you might be. I can put it back to sleep for a while if you want, but it won’t last as long as last time. Especially if you keep using magic and such.”

 

I thought about it, but I didn’t really need to. The truth is that if I had had a chance to be a werewolf anytime in the past twenty years or so without going crazy, I’d have taken it without a second thought. “Maybe later. For now I think I’ll just see what happens.”

 

He nodded and didn’t say anything, still watching the fire. We sat like that for a minute or two, not speaking. The silence felt…oddly companionable, in a way I wouldn’t have expected while speaking with Fenris. I’d encountered a couple of beings like him before, including his father Loki, and never been comfortable in their presence. They had scared me just by being. Fenris…didn’t.

 

“Why’d you do it?” I asked suddenly. “Help me out when I was going insane.”

 

He shrugged. “I value freedom. Seemed like offering you yours was the right thing to do.”

 

“I notice you aren’t staging prison breaks worldwide,” I said wryly. “What made me special?”

 

He didn’t say anything for a minute, and I thought he might not answer. “You reminded me of myself, a little,” he said eventually. He shrugged again. “And I knew your mother. I thought she might like me to take care of you a bit.”

 

My eyes widened. “How’d you know my mother?”

 

He looked at me like an idiot. “How did anybody know Carmen?” He smirked suggestively, in case I hadn’t caught on already.

 

I sighed. I knew my mom was…not what you might call discriminating, in the slightest, but seriously. I would have hoped she had enough sense to not have sex with divine monstrous wolves older than time, maybe literally.

 

And then my eyes widened. I never knew my father, never even knew who he was. All my mother said (and not to me, because she’d killed herself before I was old enough to talk) was that he had been an enormous, beautiful wolf in Canada. A wolf who had impregnated her when that should have been physically impossible, who had left no tracks and no scent.

 

I looked at the Fenris Wolf, who could easily fit that description. “Are you my father?” I asked. It sounded strange, phrased so simply.

 

“No. Sorry, no. We just…had a good time together.” He shrugged. “There aren’t many people willing to be near me once they know who I am. I liked her. Tried to help her out when I had the chance.”

 

There was another long pause, during which I stared into the fire too. I wasn’t sure whether I had been afraid that Fenris was my father, or hopeful. Maybe I hadn’t had enough time to get used to the idea to know. In any case, it was a disappointment to go back to not having any idea.

 

“I did know your father,” he said abruptly. “Decent fellow. I was the one who kept Carmen from following him.” He sighed. “Oh, she wanted to. I think she really might have settled down with him, you know? But it was for the best.”

 

“Who was he?” I asked.

 

“Didn’t have a name,” Fenris said. “Not one you’d understand, anyway. He really was what he looked like.”

 

I frowned. “My father was an actual wolf?” I asked incredulously.

 

He shrugged. “Mostly. A wolf bigger than most. Smarter. There’re a few of those around.” He looked at me, inviting me to finish the train of thought.

 

I thought for a moment, then smiled. “Let me guess,” I said slowly. “You were in western Canada a while ago. Having a good time.”

 

Fenris grinned, his teeth red in the firelight. “Good guess. About two hundred years ago. It was a nicer place back then, I think.” He frowned and looked back into the flames. “Not sure how many generations back that was. Generational time in wolves varies a lot, anywhere from about two to ten years.”

 

Which made Fenris anywhere from my hundred-times-great-grandfather to a meager twenty generations back, roughly. “Long time ago,” I commented.

 

He shrugged. “It lingers. They’re still wolves. Just not quite like other wolves.” He shrugged again and prodded at the fire.

 

I frowned as I saw an incongruity in his story. “If you were trying to help me, why wait until then? I can think of a few times when I was younger you could have helped me a lot.”

 

He put another piece of wood on the fire. “Didn’t know about you. I still don’t know how she carried you to term—she must have gone somewhere else for help with that. I didn’t find out you existed until about a month before I saw you.” He shrugged. “After that, I hung around a little. You seemed happy enough. You didn’t need my help.”

 

“And after I left?”

 

“You were trying so hard to blend in,” he said quietly. “Trying to leave all that behind you. Having me around wouldn’t have helped you any. You had to make your own way.” He smiled again, sadly this time. “I knew it wouldn’t work. Walking away from what you are never does. But you were trying, and I had to respect that.” He sighed and stood up. “I have to be going now.”

 

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

 

He grinned. His teeth were very white, and very sharp. “Probably before long. Looks like if I wait very long you’ll be dead. No offense.”

 

I snorted. “None taken. As much trouble as I’ve been getting myself into I’d bet against my living very long, except I can’t find anybody to take it.”

 

He smiled at me in an almost proprietary way. “I like you,” he said with satisfaction. “Much more amusing than any of my other toys these days.”

 

I bristled. “Toy?” I demanded.

 

He shrugged. “No offense. I’ll admit words aren’t my strongest suit. But you’re one of mine. How could I not take pride in what you do?” he asked rhetorically. Then, while I was still processing that, he said, “You should get some rest, Winter. Big day ahead of you and all that.”

 

And, as though triggered by his words—which it probably was—a wall of blackness hit me like a crashing wave.

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The next day was maybe the strangest I’ve ever experienced.

 

To start with, I woke up in my bed at home. The wound on my leg, which had been covered in bandages when I went to sleep, was entirely gone. I didn’t even have a scar.

 

The next thing I noticed was that, according to the computer, it had been three days since the fight. When I called Kyra, she confirmed this, but seemed confused that I found it surprising. Apparently I’d called her several times to assure her that I was healing properly, but it would be some time before I felt well enough to be up and about.

 

Enrico had gotten lucky and survived to become a werewolf. He was currently living with the pack and learning the details of what he’d become. I felt a little guilty about that—Enrico was hardly the ideal candidate for lycanthropy, and I was sure that this was a little more than he’d intended when he said that he wanted to get involved with the supernatural—but at least he was alive.

 

All of that was strange enough. But what really threw me was how much seemed to have changed in the few days that I was unconscious, or whatever happened there. The murders had already been pinned on a gang with a wolf fetish, with impressively thorough evidence. There were weapons improvised from the claws and teeth of wolves and dogs that matched the injuries, transcripts of incriminating conversations, and reams of personal correspondence. DNA samples from the scene, which had somehow been overlooked before, were a perfect match. The accused protested that they were innocent, and in fact didn’t know each other at all, but in the face of the evidence their claims rang hollow for the jury. They all received a long prison sentence.

 

I watched the coverage of the trial afterwards. It wasn’t until that point that I realized that one of the supposed gangsters had been the same asshole customer I’d intimidated at Val’s shop. I was pretty sure the Twilight included him in the frame-job purely as a favor to me, and made a note to never get on their bad side.

 

I’d also slept through Conn’s big reveal, which was televised live by most of the news outlets in the world. There were public letters, and testimonials—including one by the Colorado Springs Police Department. Christopher had apparently sealed the deal with them, although I hadn’t known about any of it beyond my conversation with the Chief.

 

Conn isn’t taking any chances with this plan, and he isn’t rushing things. The videos and letters were all delivered anonymously, including the live films. Quite a few people have publically admitted to being werewolves, a lot of them fraudulently, but most of the actual werewolves are keeping it very quiet. There are still rules against doing anything werewolfy in public. Only a handful of trusted, reliable people are allowed to talk about it at all.

 

My name was signed to a couple of the letters, apparently, and for me to deny it would raise some serious doubts about the other alleged werewolves. So, for the sake of Conn’s publicity stunt, I wound up publically admitting that I was a werewolf, even though I technically wasn’t.

 

The universe seems to delight in such small ironies.

 

When I woke up, I found a number of things had been left in my house. The first was an envelope containing several thousand dollars in cash and a note from the Khan asking that, in the future, when I was planning to do something idiotic beyond the wildest nightmares of sane individuals, I let him know in advance so that he would have some small chance of saving my stupid ass. In exactly those words. I smiled and took the money.

 

The second thing was a green glass vase containing a bouquet of roses in a plethora of colors, all of them perfect blossoms. The attached card read, simply, Excellent work. I’m not sure who it was from, but I threw it out immediately. I wasn’t sure whether they’d put some kind of spell on it and I didn’t want it around me.

 

And the third thing was Tyrfing, resting neatly on my mantle. It looked…satisfied, somehow. Kyra still had all of my other weapons for safekeeping, and when I asked her she didn’t know anything about how it had gotten back. I chalked it up to the weirdness Alexander had told me about and stuck the sword in a closet for the time being.

 

As it turned out, the first house I found Black in had been provided by his employer. She arranged for it to be given to me as a sign of her gratitude. I spent most of Conn’s money refurbishing it into my new lab. It’s nothing like Alexander’s setup, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, which is what I had previously. I even have a skeleton to add ambience to the place. Aiko pieced it together out of a dozen barghest corpses and gave it to me as an April Fool’s Day gift.

 

Speaking of Aiko, we’ve been sort of dating, which I guess I should have seen coming ever since that party at Ryujin’s palace. I say sort of, because neither one of us is quite right in the head, and I think we bring out the worst in each other on top of that. The first time we went out to dinner was a Mexican place. She dosed my drink with some sort of hallucinogen, and I bribed the cooks to put finely chopped habanero all through her fajitas. The resulting night was…amusing.

 

Aiko and I were both invited to the formal investiture of Kyra as the next Alpha, two days after I woke up. It was a rare privilege to be extended to a nonwerewolf.

 

It was held at noon in a small clearing in the woods, not too far from the city. The whole pack was there, of course, about twenty-five werewolves in human shape. That was on the small side for a pack, thanks to the numerous deaths of recent months—and, before that, more deaths under Roland’s rule. Kyra stood at the center of the pack, surrounded by her people.

 

Aiko, Enrico and I weren’t part of the ceremony. It was something for the pack alone, and none of us was a part of that. Enrico might be soon, but the pack wouldn’t take a new wolf until they made at least one full moon without dying or going crazy, and the ritual proper wouldn’t take place until the next moon after that. We stood at the edge of the trees and watched. Enrico had a thoughtful, faintly disturbed expression on his face, and made no move to speak with me or Aiko.

 

The kitsune asked me, “Why so glum? I’d have thought you’d be proud of her.” Her voice was quiet, so as not to disturb anyone.

 

“I am, ” I said quietly. “But I wouldn’t have wished this on her.”

 

She looked at me as though confused. “Isn’t it a step up?”

 

I sighed. “Maybe. That kind of power…it changes you. She won’t be the same person after this.”

 

We were silent after that for a while. In truth, her new position was changing Kyra already. It was there, if you knew how to look. I did. I could see it in her stance, in how she moved as though when she spoke, the world would bloody well listen, in the way the pack looked at her. She was becoming the axis around which they moved.

 

That was what the Alpha was. The cornerstone, the solid point around which the pack was built. It was inevitable. It was necessary. My personal feelings on the matter were irrelevant.

 

So, for that matter, were hers.

 

“Everybody changes,” Aiko said eventually. Her voice was quiet and sad.

 

I nodded. I mean, I knew that from my own life. I’d probably changed as much in the past few months as Kyra would under the burden of her new position.

 

“I’m kinda curious, though,” she said. “You didn’t get this broken up over your cop friend over there. Isn’t that worse?”

 

“Probably,” I admitted. “But he made his choice knowing what might happen to him. She didn’t.” I sighed. “Kyra never looked for power. She didn’t even choose to be a werewolf. But she’d rather die than betray what she sees as her duty.” I shook my head briskly. “You about had enough of this?”

 

She looked at me and smirked. “I,” she pronounced gravely, “have had enough of werewolves to keep me for at least a year or two.”

 

We left together. She tripped me into two different snow banks, but I laughed harder than she did. It wasn’t like I could feel the cold anyway.

 

Not every change is bad. It’s important to remember that sometimes.

 

Kyra drew me aside when we reached the pack house. I wasn’t sure where she’d come from; she just appeared next to me while Aiko and Enrico were getting into their respective cars. I’m not sure either of them noticed when I disappeared.

 

Kyra ushered me silently up into the study, where she shut the door behind us and sat down, looking a little dwarfed by the huge desk. “Christopher never told anybody about you joining the pack,” she said without preamble. She didn’t elaborate, letting me draw my own conclusions.

 

I thought about what Kyra had said about the pack still being in flux. I thought about how much worse it would be now that the Alpha was changing too. I thought about Christopher lying to me. I thought of all the beings who were starting to show an unhealthy amount of interest in me, and how little concern they were likely to have about collateral damage.

 

“I think,” I said slowly, “I’d better wait on that. It’s not a good idea right now. Maybe someday.”

 

She looked at me soberly, and I got the impression that she had seen pretty much the entirety of what I’d been thinking. “Maybe that’s best,” she said quietly.

 

I walked home, lost in thought. On the way I dodged, almost without thinking, a remote control plane rigged with explosives. There was confetti involved.

 Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

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I had to wonder whether there had been an abandoned building sale a month ago that I hadn’t heard about, or what. I mean, I couldn’t even remember how many this one brought us up to for the past week.

 

It was, I had to admit, not like Black’s lairs had been. This was a big, beat-down old shed on the edge of town. It didn’t just look abandoned; it looked like it ought to be condemned. There were holes in the roof and the sheet metal walls; the interior had to be drafty as hell. There weren’t any of the protections Black had used, either.

 

Inside was a different story. There was a small antechamber inside the huge front doors, obviously there simply to keep something of the elements out. We trooped right across it and through the opposite door, which was made of oak and looked significantly nicer than the exterior of the building would suggest.

 

The other side was a bizarre amalgamation of the abandoned building the exterior suggested and a well-furnished house. The whole shed appeared to consist of a single cavernous room, unheated and without insulation and as a result possibly even colder than it was outside—not that it bothered me or anything. There were no holes in the roof, though, or the walls, although they were made of the same corrugated metal as the exterior.

 

Inside that space were an old four-poster bed, complete with canopy, and a mahogany dining table that could seat thirty. At the moment there was only one person there, though, a male Sidhe sitting at the head of the table eating some kind of roast.

 

Oh yeah, and scattered along the length of the table were around twenty barghests. All of them were bright, beautiful Daylight green, with glittering onyx eyes. They had their own sections of meat as well, and were devouring them with every sign of enjoyment.

 

The room was sunk maybe ten feet into the ground. As a result, though the door was at ground level, inside we were at the top of a short flight of stairs leading down into the room. As Enrico shut the door behind us, the Sidhe stopped eating.

 

He wasn’t in a hurry. He set his utensils down and even took the time to wipe his mouth with a cloth napkin. Then he called, in a perfectly calm voice that nevertheless conveyed immense irritation, “What is the meaning of this?”

 

And just that fast there were twenty pairs of glittering black eyes staring at us. Gulp.

 

“We have reason to suspect you of tampering in the affairs of the Pack,” I said as confidently as I could manage. I didn’t bother mentioning the murder bit. The Sidhe Courts, Day and Night alike, had little concern for the life of a single mortal. Or a million. But they had a deal with the Pack, and breaking deals was serious business for them.

 

“Take it up with my employer,” he said dismissively.

 

Huh. So both sides had been acting through intermediaries. That was interesting.

 

“Thanks,” I said, “but I think I’ll take it up with you first.”

 

He looked at us for the first time. “Isn’t a mortal’s life short enough,” he murmured, the soft sound somehow carrying with perfect clarity, “without such foolishness?”

 

“Look,” Erin interrupted before things could get any more heated. “Our conflict is with your employer, not you. Talk with us, maybe tell us who we should get in contact with, and we won’t bother you any more.”

 

“Not interested. However, as you at least know what courtesy is,” he glared at me, “I have a counteroffer. You have ten seconds to get off my property. Do so and I’ll forgive your trespass.” He turned his attention back to his meal.

 

I glanced at the people with me, and gestured slightly down at the table. Erin nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. Aiko grinned and fondled the grip of her carbine with one hand. Kyra was almost snarling. Enrico mostly looked confused, but he didn’t actually argue in favor of leaving, so I took that as agreement.

 

See, here’s the thing about the Sidhe. If they don’t respect you, they’ll walk all over you. You have to earn that respect, too. With Black, that hadn’t been a problem; we’d killed his trolls already, after all, and he knew Erin besides. This fellow, though, still looked at us as something he could brush off casually.

 

Worse, if we let him we couldn’t expect the Courts to respect us, either. They would assume that his judgment had been accurate, and as a result any effort we made to resolve things peacefully would be mocked.

 

So instead of answering him, I bounded down the stairs about as fast as I could. The hounds were standing as I touched the floor, and at the same time I took the restraint off of Tyrfing. I wished that I still had my gun; Tyrfing was incredible, but there’s a reason modern soldiers use shotguns more often than swords.

 

“You are insane,” the mercenary said, rising from his seat as well. “You will be destroyed. And even if you aren’t, Court law is on my side.”

 

I grinned at him, maybe a little maniacally. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, mate. But I don’t see anybody from the Courts here. And I’m really getting sick of not getting the answers I want. So either you start talking, or we’re gonna have problems.”

 

“So be it,” he hissed. He made one small gesture with his hand. And then a number of things happened all at once.

 

All of the barghests started moving as a single unit. They surged toward me in an unbroken emerald tide, faster than any real dog, flowing under the table and leaping over it. They snarled and growled as they came, showing long white teeth.

 

Almost simultaneously, the sound of three different guns broke out overhead, completely drowning out the noise the hounds made. One of the hounds, hit by Erin’s steel-jacketed sniper round, simply dropped to the ground. Three others suffered lesser wounds and continued to charge, dripping blood and emerald flame as they came.

 

The nearest hound threw itself at me in the air, not touching ground at all for fifteen feet. It was preternaturally fast, covering that distance in a matter of instants.

 

But reacting quickly isn’t as important as reacting intelligently. If it had waited a second or two so that it wasn’t attacking me alone, it would likely have done for me in the opening seconds of the fight.

 

As it was, not so much.

 

It was uncannily fast, but it had to move its whole body fifteen feet. All I had to do was draw a sword—and, although I’m nothing like as fast as those things, I’m still faster than human. You can do the math.

 

The cursed sword impacted on its right foreleg while it was still airborne and cut cleanly through it. It struck high on the barghest’s shoulder and cut through that too, before lodging in the clavicle. Good to know Tyrfing had some limitation, at least. I sidestepped its jaws and used the motion to throw it to the side. It slammed into the side of the staircase and immediately rolled to its three remaining feet, pouring blood and fire. If the injury bothered it at all I couldn’t tell it.

 

I managed to kill two more hounds in a couple heartbeats, before three charged me at once. There was no way I could stop them all with just the sword, no matter how powerful it was.

 

Fortunately for me, I have magic. And, although I’m still a bare apprentice in most ways, I’ve picked up some things pretty quickly. Air magic is one of the main ones. I wasn’t up to anything like the display Alexander had put on fighting—slaughtering, rather—the first Cu Sith. But I didn’t really have to be, either.

 

One of the things I’ve always been relatively competent with is making magical foci. A focus is basically a magical cheat code, one that lets you skip a lot of the difficult and complicated work involved in casting a spell. A well-made focus can let even an amateur like me pull off some useful magic.

 

My most recent focus was a braided leather bracelet designed to assist with manipulating air magic. Granted, I hadn’t meant it for quite this sort of thing—but a good focus should be able to do lots of things.

 

In this case it converted a surge of power and will into a gale-force wind directed at the only barghest stupid enough to jump at me.

 

Jumping, as any martial artist will tell you, is a stupid thing to do in a fight. It lets your opponent know exactly what you’re going to do. And, because muscle doesn’t do much without something to push against, for those few seconds you’re powerless to alter your course.

 

My blast of wind didn’t hit the hound hard enough to break bones or anything. It didn’t need to. It was powerful enough to reverse its momentum and toss it back into another hound, sending both of them to the floor. That left only two fighting me for a brief moment. I ducked away from one and beheaded the other with Tyrfing.

 

A fight is a chaotic thing even with only two participants. With more than twenty it was impossible to follow anything beyond my immediate surroundings, impossible to think of the future beyond the next handful of seconds. As a result, I’m not sure when the mercenary stood up and jumped thirty feet or so to land near the door.

 

I am sure that when he did, he immediately grabbed Aiko and Enrico both by the muzzles of their weapons. He let out a bloodcurdling scream of pain at the touch of iron, but it didn’t stop him from throwing both of them to the ground below. Aiko rolled immediately to her feet, both of her hands full of steel, and the hounds showed a certain amount of wariness about attacking her.

 

Enrico hit hard and, for an instant, lay stunned on the ground. It wasn’t long—but it was long enough. The barghests swarmed him, and he disappeared beneath a sea of green fur.

 

Up until that point I hadn’t really wanted to fight. Oh, I’d done it, because I knew that I had to—but I’d seen it as a necessary evil. I’d resisted Tyrfing’s insatiable thirst for blood, because I hadn’t wanted to kill or even injure any more people than necessary.

 

Now I was pissed. And, for the first time since I hit the floor, I went on the aggressive.

 

I turned back toward the stairs. I killed the three-legged hound almost in passing, gutted another and left it bleeding and mewling in agony on the ground, and swept three barghests into a tangled pile with another blast of wind. Then I was at the staircase. I leapt and caught the handrail a good seven feet above the ground with one hand.

 

I don’t look like much, but I have the strength of a werewolf. It was, in my current state of mind, not too hard to pull myself up and onto the stairs with one hand.

 

I arrived at the top just in time to see Erin and the mercenary dueling. She was using her steel staff; he was unarmed. But somehow, just as I got there, he ducked under her swing and clubbed her on the head with one fist. She staggered to the side, staff dropping from her hand, and collapsed against the wall, her eyes closed.

 

Well, shit.

 

The mercenary turned to me, with a sharp-toothed smile. He had produced a short, crystalline sword from somewhere, and looked entirely willing to spar with me.

 

So, naturally, I cheated. I dug out another handful of ball bearings and threw them at his face—

 

Only to see them deflected, without ever getting close to him, by a burst of wind not unlike those I had used. One of them struck my wrist and made my hand go sorta numb. Two more hit me with painful but less immediately worrying force, one in the chest and one in the thigh.

 

Dammit. I hate it when the other guy is as ready to cheat as I am. It takes all the fun out of fighting dirty.

 

The mercenary took two long steps and closed with me. I tried to slash at his face, but, well….

 

Remember what I said about my not being all that good with a sword? Yeah, well, I wasn’t actually joking. Against trolls and faerie hounds I was adequate, largely because I had Tyrfing and they hate the touch of iron. That’s a pretty big handicap.

 

Against one of the Sidhe, armed with a sword and a lot better at it than me, it wasn’t nearly big enough. He deflected my first attack with laughable ease, not even bothering to riposte. The second parry sent Tyrfing down at my own left thigh, where it sliced through cloth and flesh with equal ease and only stopped at the bone. The disadvantage of a supernaturally sharp cursed sword, I guess; even an accidental blow is potentially deadly, and once Tyrfing had been drawn for more than a few moments accidents were inevitable.

 

That time the mercenary did counter, a simple cut that took me across the left side of my ribs down nearly far enough to join onto the cut on my leg. It was painful, irritating, and not life threatening. He was playing with me.

 

On the third stroke my grip, weakened by that stupid ball bearing, gave out entirely. Tyrfing flew out of my hand, bounced off the wall, and totally failed to accidentally impale the mercenary as a result. Figures that the bad luck would only hit me. The sword rested on the floor just behind him, but it might as well have been on the moon for all it would help me.

 

I backpedaled, and the mercenary advanced, still smiling. I tripped. I fell. I continued to scrabble backward, because what else are you supposed to do in that situation?

 

He smiled, standing over me. He spun the crystal sword in one hand idly. “You know,” he said conversationally, “you really should have taken my offer and fled. But you wouldn’t. You have all of the arrogance for which your kind is famed, and none of the power.” His smile widened. “I’ve never killed one of you before. I think I’ll enjoy it.”

 

Things looked bad. Like, really bad. My allies were grotesquely outnumbered, and almost certainly badly injured by now as well. Enrico and Erin might well be dead. I was disarmed—well, I had a handful of weapons still, but I didn’t think I would have the chance to use any of them, and I didn’t really think that any of them would work anyway. I was already bleeding seriously from multiple wounds, and in a second or two none of that would bother me much because I would be dead.

 

The mercenary drew his sword back. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the stroke that would end my (admittedly rather shitty) life. And, as a result, I didn’t see what happened next.

 

The sword didn’t come. A moment later, a familiar voice rasped, “Surrender and call them off, or I shove three feet of steel through your spine.”

 

I opened my eyes. From my angle, I couldn’t see anything but the Sidhe mercenary, standing on tiptoe and bent backward, with a look of utter shock on his face. There were pale fingers tangled in his hair, pulling his head backward. His sword clattered to the floor.

 

There’s no feeling quite like when a megalomaniacal ego freak takes time to gloat before they’ve quite won, and gets totally burned as a result. It had only happened to me a couple of times, because until recently I mostly didn’t run with that crowd, but believe me, the look on their face is priceless. I mean, seriously. MasterCard is totally missing out.

 

I stood, slowly and painfully, and saw Erin standing behind him with a grim expression and Tyrfing pressed to the small of his back. My imagination was more than adequate to fill in the gaps from there. The old werewolf hadn’t been knocked unconscious at all; she might have been stunned momentarily, but that was it. Once she’d seen her opportunity, she’d snagged the fallen sword off the floor and snuck up behind him.

 

The mercenary didn’t move or speak, but I felt a subtle burst of magic that smelled like growing grass, sunflowers, and long, lazy summer afternoons. And, in the same instant, the noises of battle cut off.

 

I walked slowly to the railing, limping heavily, to see that the barghests had stopped fighting and were all sitting, staring up at us. There were about seven of them left standing, and they looked at me with pure hate in their black eyes.

 

Aiko was still standing, holding two blades dripping flaming blood and grinning in a manner that suggested she was happy to keep going if they wanted. Kyra was soaked with blood, making it largely impossible to tell if she was wounded, but her left foreleg was held off the ground slightly.

 

Enrico was lying on the ground where he had landed, with a slowly spreading pool of blood around him. He wasn’t moving.

 

I must have missed something, because when I turned back Erin had let the Sidhe go and was standing, holding Tyrfing in a posture that wasn’t quite relaxed. I took the sword from her and sheathed it, strapping it carefully into place. Then I looked at the mercenary. I’m not sure what he saw in my face, but it made him blanche slightly.

 

“Your employer is stirring up shit between the Khan and the Court,” I growled. “I think trying to make the Twilight Court go back on its sworn word is bloody stupid. I would like you to convey to the Twilight Court this opinion, along with the identity of your employer and all the information you have regarding their plans and activities. Do you understand me?”

 

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Yes.”

 

“Swear it. That you will deliver this information to all of the Twilight Princes you are capable of contacting. Immediately.”

 

“I swear, by my name, my power, and my Court, to do as you ask. I will convey this information to the Twilight Court: the identity of my employer as far as I know it, my knowledge of their actions, and what you have said.”

 

“Also,” Erin interrupted, “you will seek no revenge upon those here today, nor upon the Pack, including economic, political, and indirect harm. You will not hire others to do such for you, nor engage your proxies to act against us in any way unless we offer you fresh insult. You will not provide assistance to other agents for the purpose of causing any of us, our associates, our agents and proxies, or our employees and servants any direct or indirect harm. Following your performance of the agreed-upon task, there will be no debt, grievance, or other imbalance between you, your employees and associates, or your employers and any of us or our associates, agents and proxies, employees or servants, or superiors or employers.”

 

Wow. I guess Erin knew how to talk to these people a little better than she’d let on.

 

His jaw twitched again. “I swear this as well.”

 

“Go,” I growled. “And take your dogs with you.”

 

They vanished in a burst of Daylight-scented magic, leaving behind a godawful mess and a number of corpses.

---

 

The first thing I did was check on Enrico.

 

It was bad.

 

I had a certain amount of medical training. Not a whole bunch, and not especially official; mostly it boiled down to recognizing who can be saved, and who can’t. Enrico was firmly in the second camp. There were bite wounds on his abdomen, his shoulder near the neck, both legs, and probably a bunch of other places. Even if he were in a hospital this instant his chances wouldn’t be good.

 

There are injuries a human cannot survive. Sometimes it really is as simple as that.

 

And then I realized what that meant. Injuries a human cannot survive. That isn’t the same thing as injuries which are downright unsurvivable. “Kyra,” I called.

 

She trotted over, favoring her left foreleg heavily. She looked at Enrico, and I could practically see her draw the same conclusions I had. She looked at me and whined softly.

 

“You know what has to be done,” I said heavily. She nodded and turned back to him.

 

I looked away. I knew that, at this point, for her to try to change him into a werewolf was the only real chance he had to survive. On the other hand, I didn’t want to watch one of my best friends maul the barely-living body of another friend.

 

Technically you don’t have to be severely injured to become a werewolf, and you don’t have to be bitten by a werewolf. All that has to happen is that you get a significant portion of werewolf magic in you, and your own power is too depleted to fight it off successfully. Serious injury is simply the easiest way to deplete your magic. Having that injury inflicted by a werewolf in fur is the easiest way to get that power inside you.

 

His odds weren’t all that great. Only about a third of people who try to Change without preparation survive the experience. Plenty of those die shortly afterward. And if you’re heavily injured already it’s even harder.

 

Still. More chance than he had otherwise.

 

While I was trying to find something else to pay attention to so that I could try and ignore the horrible wet sounds in the background, I saw something strange. There was frost on the ground. I walked over to inspect it and found that it formed a distinct pattern. More specifically, it formed a footprint.

 

More specifically still, it formed my footprint. A number of them, in fact, leading from where I had been standing when Enrico fell over to the stairs. There was frost on the handrail where I’d grabbed it, and more footprints on the stairs themselves.

 

Which brought my disturbing revelations of the day up to: Erin having known something about Black’s employer before he told us, Enrico either about to be a werewolf or about to be dead, another person making reference to my having a heritage known for arrogance, and another case of frost forming around me when I used my magic.

 

I sighed. There are days I hate my life.

---

 

In another case of the anticlimax that seemed to be the theme of the day, that was the end of it. I had a number of injuries, but the only really major one was, ironically enough, the one inflicted by my own goddamn sword. The rest of them I managed to heal in a matter of minutes with magic and the werewolf side of my nature. Apparently, though, there’s something to the claim that wounds inflicted by Tyrfing never heal and anyone injured by the sword will die, because I couldn’t even get that cut to stop bleeding.

 

Kyra had two cracked ribs, a sprained wrist and enough bite wounds that they probably would have killed a human. Erin had a concussion, a broken wrist, and several torn muscles. Aiko, surprising me, came out best of us. She had sprained an ankle during the fall, and been bitten by several barghests, but all of the bites were shallow; they wouldn’t have threatened even a normal person at all. Aside from a really impressive black eye, that was all.

 

As a result, Aiko and I went to the hospital while the werewolves took Enrico and our weapons of questionable legality to the pack house. Fortunately, once I got there, nobody expected me to answer questions. Or maybe they did and I didn’t notice; by that point I was pretty loopy with fatigue and blood loss.

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