A hole appeared at the center of its face. It blinked yellow, lupine eyes dumbly, a bit of its original sheepish dullness creeping back in before those eyes went completely blank, and the werewolf collapsed. The untransformed members of the flock scattered, bleating. I let out a slow breath.
“All right,” I began. “That takes care of—”
Something screamed. I turned, as did the Tanners. Five more of the sheep had stopped in their tracks—four ewes, and a second, juvenile ram—and were staring at us with yellowing eyes.
“Well, fuck,” I said, shoulders slumping as my brief-lived hope died. “There’s more than one.”
Of the six werewolves among the flock, the old ram had been infected the longest: that was the only explanation for why he’d transformed so quickly, and so completely. The five that were now advancing toward us, stiff-legged and snarling, were still essentially sheep. Their eyes were yellow, and one of the ewes was starting to shed her fleece in huge, bloody clumps, but they still looked like barnyard animals, more suited to a petting zoo than to a horror movie. I took advantage of their slow approach, checking to see how many bullets I had left. Two more. It had taken four, plus however many the Tanners used, to take down a single werewolf that wasn’t yet prepared to attack.
“Riley?” I began reloading as quickly as I could, jamming the bullets into place with my thumb. I had half a box of replacement ammunition with me. That didn’t feel like it was going to be enough. “Was there a plan here, apart from ‘let’s all go to the meadow and get turned into confetti by the sheep’?”
“These weren’t here yesterday—they’ve got the wrong markings. This is a different flock of sheep,” he said. I heard the click of his own chamber being slotted back into place. “Someone’s setting us up.”
“Oh, that’s splendid.” I aimed, fired, and sent the smallest of the ewes sprawling. In the aftermath of my shot, two more guns went off. I wasn’t sure who they belonged to, but I was sure there was something wrong: while a bloody patch blossomed on the shoulder of the lead ewe, she didn’t fall. She didn’t even stagger.
As she approached, her skull began to warp and twist into a new shape, canine teeth pushing their way through her jaw and piercing her lower lip. She snarled, saliva dripping all around that newly terrible maw.
A sudden, horrifying comprehension seized me. I put the safety back on my pistol, flipped it around, and offered the butt to Shelby. “Trade me guns.”
“What?” She stared at me like I was saying something completely unreasonable. She wasn’t too far off with that.
“I need you to trade me guns.” The werewolves were still stalking toward us, their short sheep’s legs and ongoing transformations slowing them down. That wasn’t going to last much longer. As soon as they were changed enough to break into a proper run, we were going to find ourselves rushed by a small pack of hungry, ruthless predators. The fact that they had started out as herbivores wasn’t going to make any difference. Hell, it might just make them hungrier.
Shelby kept staring at me. I gestured at her with the butt of my pistol, not withdrawing it. If she didn’t make up her mind soon, we were going to be in even more trouble, as I had just effectively removed two of us from the fight. If my left arm had been fully functional . . . but it wasn’t, and introducing throwing knives into a gun fight was just asking for trouble, even if they were tipped in silver.
“Oh, you asshole,” she finally snarled, and thrust her own pistol at me as she snatched mine out of my hands and unloaded two rounds into the nearest werewolf, sending it sprawling. There was a momentary pause as she stared at the weapon in her hands, stunned by what had just happened. Then she whooped and opened fire again.
Her family did the same, but I was unsurprised when only Shelby’s shots seemed to have any effect. I opened the chamber on her pistol. The bullets inside gleamed in the moonlight with the uniquely heavy shine that one gets from weapons-grade silver. I shook them into my hand, allowing Shelby and the others to keep up the suppressing fire as I scratched at the surface of one bullet with my thumbnail. The dull silver sheen came away easily, revealing cleaner steel underneath.
“Motherfucker,” I swore. “Shelby! Someone switched your bullets!”
“What?” Her gun clicked empty. She glanced at me, and I lobbed the box containing my remaining silver bullets at her underhand. She caught it, beginning to reload even as she asked, “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m the only one here who actually brought silver bullets to the werewolf fight, and you don’t have enough firepower without it! All you’re doing with the lead is slowing them down and pissing them off!” I shoved Shelby’s gun into my coat and pulled out a knife. It was a silly weapon, under the circumstances, but it was better than nothing. Much, much better than nothing.
There were only two werewolves still standing, and their ovine origins were almost completely obscured by the newly lupine lines of their bodies. One of them was still somewhat woolly, with a tail that hung between its legs like a fat white fruit. The other had a more sheep-like skull, but as it was filled with sharp predator’s teeth and covered in thick gray fur, the shape of its skull didn’t matter as much as the thought of what that skull might do.
“Alex?” said Shelby, seeing me measuring the space between myself and the lead werewolf. “Don’t do anything—”
The werewolf leaped. So did I.
Werewolves are, thankfully, creatures of instinct: with the exception of the ones that had attacked me and Cooper near the meadow earlier, I had never heard of a werewolf making a strategy or following a plan once it was transformed. These werewolves had begun life as sheep, bred for obedience and stupidity over the course of generations. It was jumping for a man my height, not for a person who was suddenly sliding on his knees under the arc of the werewolf’s trajectory. I jammed my knife upward, turning my face away and screwing my mouth and eyes as tightly closed as I could. It wasn’t squeamishness. I wanted to avoid fluid contact as much as possible.
My knife slammed into the werewolf’s belly just below the rib cage. The creature gave a yelp of strangled pain and kept going, driven forward by its own momentum. A hot rush of stinking blood exploded over my arm, like a water balloon being popped, and the heavy, horrible feeling of the werewolf’s viscera slammed down on me, landing on my head, chest, and shoulders like nothing I had ever experienced before. There was a yelp as the werewolf finally passed fully over me and impacted with the ground.
I didn’t know whether having the majority of its internal organs removed would be enough to kill a leaping werewolf, but I was damn sure that it would slow the bastard down.
The gunfire continued as I lay there in the grass, covered in werewolf offal and stinking of blood. I heard someone scream. I didn’t know who. I didn’t think it was Riley or Shelby, but the other three were still basically indistinguishable to me in their distress: I hadn’t yet had the time to learn what they sounded like when their lives were endangered. Then a foot hit me in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. I made a small noise of protest, without opening my mouth.
“You asshole!” Shelby sounded furious. That was good: a furious Shelby was a breathing Shelby. Something soft and clean was dropped on my face. I sat up, scrubbing the worst of the blood away as she continued to rant. “You can’t tell me I’m the only one with a working gun and then—argh, and then unzip a fucking werewolf everywhere like you’re some sort of deranged action hero! You could have given me a heart attack!”
She kicked me again, this time in the hip. I finished scrubbing the blood off my mouth, coughed, and asked, “Can you stop kicking me long enough to get the blood out of my eyes? I’m afraid I’ll just grind it in if I try, and I really don’t want to increase the mucus membrane exposure.”
“You’re marrying a man who thinks ‘mucus membrane exposure’ is a thing to say right after you’ve got werewolf liver in your ha
ir,” said Raina sourly. “Oh, yeah, Shelly, you’ve got yourself a winner here. Can I be your maid of honor?”
“Is everyone all right?” I asked. “I missed the end of the fight.” Ignoring Raina seemed like the best approach, under the circumstances.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. “No one was bitten or scratched,” said Riley roughly. “Thanks for the bullets, Price.”
“How did you know?” I heard Shelby kneel beside me. She lifted my glasses off my face. “All right, you don’t have much blood actually on you—good thing you need corrective lenses, or this might be a much bigger problem. Keep your eyes closed, all right?” Something damp touched my eyelid.
Asking what it was seemed like a dangerous course of action, and so I focused on the question at hand. “Too many shots were being fired without any of the wolves going down. If we were all packing silver, that would have been a much shorter fight. Something had to be wrong.”
“So why did you still have silver bullets?” demanded Riley. The momentary gratitude I had heard in his voice was gone. That was a disappointment, but not really a surprise.
“Because I never let my weapons out of my possession,” I said. It was hard to keep my face still while I spoke, but it was also necessary: Shelby was dabbing at the area around my eyes, making it clear that the blood had not yet been totally removed. I was going to bathe in hand sanitizer when we got back to the house. “In order for someone to have switched my silver bullets for lead, they would have needed to knock me out, distract the mice, and manage the exchange without leaving anything out of place. I’m assuming you have a more centralized means of storing your weapons?”
Riley’s silence was all the answer I needed.
“You should be able to open your eyes now,” said Shelby, slipping my glasses back onto my face before she pulled away. “Just try not to wipe at them until you’ve had access to better sterilization tools, all right?”
“All right; thank you,” I said, and opened my eyes, blinking at the suddenly bright world around me. Even moonlight can seem blinding if you’ve been in total darkness for long enough. “We came out here alone, a family group and a visiting cryptozoologist who had already been exposed once. That seemed a little strange to me, but I’m not native, I don’t know how you do things. Was it strange?”
“Yes and no,” said Charlotte. Riley shot her a sharp look. She rolled her eyes and spread her hands, indicating the abattoir that the meadow around us had become. “For God’s sake, Riley, there’s no harm in telling the man how operations are usually managed, given the circumstances. Can you really look at him and say he’s not at least trying to keep us all among the living? No, Alex, this is not unusual: the Society is very wide-spread under normal circumstances, so most families or local groups survey and hunt alone. Waiting for backup to arrive from another city or state could mean someone gets killed.”
“But when we’re all together, we usually work together,” chimed in Raina, not to be left out. “So it’s weird that only five of us came out, instead of everyone.”
“It was your mother’s idea,” said Riley, sounding suddenly defensive.
Charlotte went still. It was a trick I’d seen her daughter pull more than once: all animation drained out of her, taking the sparkle from her eye and the tension from her lips as she slowly turned to stare at her husband. “What did you say?” she asked dangerously.
“I got your text,” said Riley. “You’re the one who proposed we spend some time with the family and the boyfriend,” here he indicated me with a sweep of his hand that somehow managed to imply his disgust, even though his facial expression didn’t change, “before things got really out of hand.”
“Yes, and I got your text, saying you wanted to observe Alex in the field so that we could convince Shelby to end her association with someone who was so clearly unsuitable for her—no offense, Alex,” Charlotte added hastily.
“None taken,” I said. “It’s almost a relief to know that neither one of Shelby’s parents likes me. It puts me on level ground.”
“I didn’t send that text,” said Riley.
“Well, I didn’t send the text you’re describing either,” said Charlotte.
“I didn’t text anyone; you can check my phone,” said Raina. Gabby didn’t say anything. She stood close by her sister, looking distressed—and more, looking like she understood what was going on, which put her ahead of the rest of the family. She had been away at school before the werewolves came. She had something the rest of them couldn’t get for love nor money. She had perspective.
“No one here sent any texts,” I said. “Someone’s playing you. The same someone who swapped your silver bullets for regular bullets that had been spray-painted the color you expected to see when you checked your ammunition. I really hate to be the one who says this, because God knows I can’t afford to lose any more credibility with you people, but you have a traitor in your midst.
“Someone sent you out here tonight to get the entire Tanner family killed.”
Riley and Charlotte exchanged a glance. In the distance, a wolf howled. And none of us said a word.
Eleven
“Ah, traitors. Like taxes, politics, and discussions of the weather, they remain an unavoidable, unwanted part of the human condition.”
—Thomas Price
Back in the SUV, which is a major improvement on the meadow full of dead werewolves, no question about it
WE WEREN’T MOVING.
That wouldn’t have been so frustrating if we hadn’t been sitting in the family SUV, parked off behind a stand of trees where passing motorists would be less likely to see us and wonder what we were doing out in the middle of nowhere. Even worse, we’d been parked there for the better part of an hour, which meant I’d been in an enclosed space with Shelby’s entire family for the better part of an hour. I was beginning to wonder how she’d feel about being an orphan. From the way her lip had started to twitch, I suspected she’d feel pretty good about it.
Sadly, the logic behind our temporary hold was sound. By the time we’d hiked out of the bloody meadow and back to the car, the noise would have attracted one of the local shepherds; even if they didn’t bring their flocks in at night, they had to have been monitoring them somehow, just due to the density of local predators. Once a shepherd showed up, we could count on the local authorities being called—the real authorities, not all of whom were aware of the Thirty-Six Society’s existence. We’d barely had time to move the SUV to a more well-hidden location before the emergency response vehicles came blasting down the road, their sirens running and their lights flashing, just like emergency response vehicles anywhere in the world.
“Well, that tears it,” Charlotte had said, with no real surprise in her voice. “We’ve got too much blood on us to risk the road until we see them go by again. Relax, you lot, we’re here for the haul.”
It might not have been so bad if the elder Tanners had been willing to discuss the traitor in their organization while we waited. At least then we would have been doing something. But they had shut down all attempts to raise the topic, until I became frustrated and sank back in my seat, not saying anything. Shelby had put a hand on my arm, shooting me a look of resigned understanding. No wonder she’d been so amazed when she met my family and learned that we believed in talking things out—a necessity, when your immediate family includes two telepaths and two empaths, not to mention Antimony, who wasn’t psychic, but was easily irritated enough that she was practically the next best thing.
When I’d first arrived in Australia, I had looked at the Tanners and seen only their similarities to the people I knew and counted on back home—and there were plenty of similarities, don’t get me wrong. Now that I’d been here long enough to see how they responded to crisis situations, the differences were looming larger all the time.
“Are you really marrying Shelby?”
Raina’s question would have been abrupt under the best of circumstances. In the dark, silent SUV, it sounded like the start of an interrogation.
I looked up at her. She was just an outline in the gloom. That actually made things a little easier, since I didn’t have to see her face when I said, “I was hoping to, yes. I did propose, and it seems polite to go through with it.”
“Aren’t you supposed to ask her father for his consent?”
“No, he’s not,” said Shelby. There was steel in her tone. “That would imply that I was property, and that someone could give me away to someone else. That’s not true. That’s never been true. Only person Alex needed to ask was me, and you know what my answer was.”
“Could’ve told us.” Gabby’s comment was much softer; I might not have heard it, if we hadn’t all been shut in the car. “You’ve emailed me at least once a week since you left, and you never said you were getting married.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” said Shelby. “So . . . surprise, I guess. I’m getting married.”
“Will the ceremony be here or in the United States?” asked Charlotte. Then, as calm as an assassin sliding a knife between someone’s ribs, she added the question I’d barely started formulating: “Where are you intending to live? Alex could apply for Australian citizenship. It’s a difficult process, but being married will make it easier, and it would keep you near your family.”
Riley hadn’t said a word, but I saw his hands tighten on the wheel, and imagined I could hear his teeth grinding.
“I’m going to get murdered and dumped in a bog before I even have this conversation with my parents,” I said, tilting my head up so that I was staring at the ceiling, and not the vaguely menacing shapes of Shelby’s family.
“They probably already know, you know,” said Shelby. “Sarah’s no doubt told them—and Mum, I don’t know yet where we’re going to live. We haven’t started having those conversations yet.”