You know it’s going to be a bad scene when your most fervent hope is that your opponents devolve into a mindless, primal, killing-machine state as quickly as possible.

“My folks have called my sisters in from the field. Raina’s going to meet us at the airport,” said Shelby, sipping from her own coffee before putting it down on the plate and leaning over to rest her head against the curve of my shoulder. “Everyone’s coming to help with this one. Even Gabby, and getting her away from school is a bit like pulling a crocodile’s teeth—borderline impossible and pretty damn dangerous.”

“What are people pulled off of?”

“Everything. Dad’s even bringing his head of security out of the field, and Cooper doesn’t come out of the field for anything. Thankfully. Man’s got the manners of a black snake.” She tilted her head back, looking up at me. “We’re leaving the rest of Australia defenseless to stop this. We can’t let lycanthropy get well and truly established on the island. We just can’t. Not if we want to stand a chance.”

Australia was an island: that meant we might still be able to wipe the virus out, the way we had in England, Japan, and Hawaii. No shared borders meant no place to hide. But no shared borders also meant no place to run. If the virus was able to become successfully established, it could finally turn Australia into the unwelcoming wasteland so many people already believed it to be.

I kissed Shelby’s forehead. It was the only thing I could think of to do. “It’s not going to happen,” I said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

“Are you lying to me?” The question was mildly asked, and there was no blame behind it: she clearly understood the impulse. She just wanted to know.

“I hope not,” I said, and put my arms around her, as much as the airline seats allowed. “I really do.”

The rest of the flight passed quickly, or as quickly as is possible for a fourteen-hour stretch spent confined in the belly of a single moving vehicle. We read, slept, researched, denuded the kitchenette, and enjoyed our surprisingly well-prepared business class food. And all the while, Australia grew closer, like a great beast lurking out of the west.

Shelby caught me staring pensively out the window as the flight attendants were moving through our cabin with customs forms. “It’s not that bad, you know,” she said, pressing a pencil into my hand. “Almost no one gets killed unless they do something stupid. You have to provoke the wildlife into taking you out. Or step on a funnelweb, but they’re mostly down in Sydney. We’ll have a whole different assortment of deadly things where we’re going.”

“It’s not the wildlife I’m worried about,” I admitted, twisting to face front and reaching for my customs form. “The werewolves scare the crap out of me, but they’re something I’m trained for. I can handle snakes, spiders, and soda made with sugar instead of corn syrup.”

There was a pause while Shelby cocked her head and squinted at me. Finally, she asked, “Is this about the part where my family is a little bigger than your average snake, spider, or can of Coke?”

“That would be the issue,” I said, and bent forward, trying to look like I was focusing hard on the difficult matter of falsifying my customs form. (I don’t recommend falsifying customs forms when traveling. For one thing, it’s illegal. For another thing, most of the “are you trying to smuggle this into our country?” questions are rooted in sound ecological reasons—no one really wants to be responsible for crashing the local ecosystem with an invasive weed or beetle. At the same time, since I was on the way to Australia to help keep them all from being eaten by werewolves, I felt like fudging the details of what I had in my bag was reasonable.)

“They’re really friendly, Alex.”

“I believe you.”

“They’re quite harmless, too.”

I put down my pencil and slowly turned to stare at her. Shelby had the good grace to look abashed. “Your family. Harmless. Shelby, I love you, but if you’re going to tell me lies, can you at least make them believable ones? I always try to sound believable when I lie to you.”

“See, this is the trouble with a relationship founded on lies,” she said. “Eventually, we stop believing each other.”

When Shelby and I first met, I didn’t tell her I was a Price, and she didn’t tell me she was a Thirty-Sixer. I guess I thought there had to be something wrong with her; that was the only way someone as amazing as Shelby Tanner would be interested in the bespectacled geek from the reptile house. Since “secretly a cryptozoologist who will understand everything about me, and actually appreciate the work I’ve dedicated my life to doing” was too good to be true, it never even occurred to me as a possibility—at least not until she came into my home and tried to shoot my cousin. To be fair, Sarah is a cuckoo, and cuckoos are incredibly dangerous, generically speaking. It’s not Shelby’s fault she tried to kill one of the only cuckoos in the world who would actually be missed.

I found out who Shelby really was. Shelby found out who I really was. Sarah didn’t get shot in the head. And we started over, trying to reconstruct an admittedly flawed relationship on a base of facts instead of fictions. It was still a work in progress. It might always be a work in progress. It was work that I was quite happy to spend the rest of my life doing, as long as that meant I got to spend the rest of my life with her.

Shelby was still looking at me, waiting for me to comment on the subject of her family. I sighed, checked the box on my form that indicated I wasn’t carrying any plants or plant products—lying again—and said, “I’m sure they’re nice, and I’m also sure that my current status as visiting werewolf expert means they probably won’t shoot me without good reason. It’s just that if they’re anything like my family, ‘he breathed’ might be considered a good reason.”

“Don’t worry so much.” She elbowed me amiably before going back to filling out her own customs form. “Besides, if they really get to be too much, you can always hide behind Gabby. She’s as bewildered by the lot of us as you are.”

“She’s the one who’s going to school to be an opera singer, right?”

Shelby nodded. “Right. See? You have a sister who’s a dancer, I have one who plans to be a singer. It’s going to be just like taking a nice long trip home.”