“Okay,” I said. Then I paused. “What’s damper?”

Shelby rolled her eyes and pointed to the soda bread. “Damper,” she explained. “Eat.”

“Okay,” I said again, and ate.

Meals with large groups of people are always essentially the same. No one wants to do any serious strategizing until the food is done, but everyone wants to get it over with before dessert, if possible. What felt like the entire Thirty-Six Society stopped talking and bent to the all-important task of cramming stew, soda bread, and semi-identifiable tubers into their mouths.

The break was welcome. I hadn’t been expecting quite this large a crowd when I arrived; Shelby’s family, yes, and probably a few more of their colleagues, but not everyone they’d ever met. I do reasonably well with groups—better than Antimony, who never met a congregation outside of a comic convention or roller derby bout that she didn’t immediately want to set on fire, not as well as Verity, who thinks an auditorium full of people is another word for “Heaven,” as long as they’re all there to see her dance—but I have my limits. Being put on display in front of the entire Thirty-Six Society was pushing them.

At least it was making me focus on my table manners with an intensity that my mother would have been impressed to see.

I scanned the room as I ate, trying to get an idea of the internal hierarchy of the place. Family groups seemed to be seated together, and the Tanners weren’t the only multigenerational family in evidence. The people seemed to come from all races and walks of life; there was a woman in blue doctor’s scrubs, and a man dressed in overalls who looked like he’d just come from a sheep farm. A census of the room might well have produced an accurate racial map of the country, and the gender balance was split roughly down the middle, maybe trending slightly male in the older members, but rebalancing in the younger generation. It was odd. And it was, in its own way, alienating. Thanks to my family’s schism from the Covenant of St. George, I had grown up almost like a member of some fictional order of chosen heroes, Jedi or Knights of the Round Table or something equally silly. We were few, we supported each other, and if we fell, no one would do the job we had been tasked with.

Well, there were over a hundred people in this room who would be quite happy to do the job I’d been tasked with, thanks; the Thirty-Six Society was large and thriving, and wouldn’t have known that I had ever lived or died on the other side of the world if not for Shelby. “Humbling” was the good way to look at it. “Terrifying” was equally valid.

Shelby pushed her bowl aside. I looked down at my own, and realized it was empty; I’d been eating air for the past thirty seconds. Cheeks hot, I put down my spoon. That seemed to be the cue the rest of the table had been waiting for, like civility said that no one could talk about the werewolves until the company was finished eating.

“I’ve heard worse house rules,” I muttered. Shelby gave me a curious look. I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“Good, because my dad’s about to get started,” she said. I followed her gaze to see Riley stand and walk across the room to a low podium. There was even a microphone mounted there, Toastmaster-style.

He tapped it once with his forefinger, sending a hollow thumping noise through the room. The expected wave of faintly nervous laughter followed. I guess some things are universal. Leaning closer, he said, “Good evening, everyone. I’m Riley Tanner, and I’m one of the people who organized this meeting, since it strikes me that werewolves in Queensland aren’t a good thing for either long-term survival or the tourist trade.”

More laughter this time, less nervous and more understanding. He was drawing them into a sense of shared camaraderie, and I envied the ease with which he seemed to be handling the crowd. Much like Shelby, who never met a zoo audience she didn’t want to show off for, he was genuinely charismatic and interesting to watch. Whereas I had one of my thesis advisers take a phone call during my defense.

The laughter faded. Riley’s expression turned serious. “I’ll be level with you, everyone: Lottie has been doing some research, and if we don’t get this dealt with soon, the buggers have the potential to infect half the people in Queensland. This could become a pandemic while we’re sitting around here drinking coffee and trying to sort out the quarantine procedures.

“We all know about the four members of our Society who have been bitten. I am sorry to report that Trevor McConnell’s body was found earlier today. He had removed himself to an isolated patch of land, and did what he had to do. There’s been no sign of Isaac Wall since he was bitten. If you see him, do not approach, do not engage; withdraw, but mark his position, and contact support as soon as you can. We don’t know whether he’s been infected, and more, we don’t know how long it takes after infection for a new werewolf to be capable of passing that infection to others.”

“The average incubation period is twenty-eight days; they’re not infectious until first transformation,” I said quietly, almost without realizing I was going to speak. Shelby shot me a warning look.

Her father was still talking. “Pamela and Jeffrey Cornish remain in quarantine. We wish them the best, and are hopeful that they’ll be able to avoid this infection. In addition to these members of our Society, we have confirmed fifteen bites in the general local population. We can’t place them under quarantine, for obvious reasons, but we’re in contact with local hospitals, and we’ve placed teams on their homes. If anyone shows signs of becoming symptomatic, we should know.”

It was a calm, reasonable, fair way of dealing with a lycanthropy-w outbreak, and the fact that the Thirty-Six Society was adopting it made it clear all over again how little experience they had with therianthropic disease. There was no need for quarantine, just care, and constant monitoring. If the victims couldn’t be restrained on a moment’s notice—if they couldn’t be put down without causing a riot—they should have been destined for shallow graves where their bodies would never be found. It was horrible. It was heartless. It was almost directly contrary to family policy under any other circumstances. The mere fact that it was policy for circumstances like these highlighted the dangerous nature of the situation.

“We’re still working on finding the means by which the original werewolf entered the country. Since we don’t know the identity of our patient zero, it’s been slow going. We have people at the airports and the cruise ship landings, checking manifests, looking for anything out of order. Hopefully we’ll have a breakthrough soon, and can isolate our original carrier, which will help us figure out who else may have been exposed. It’d be faster if we had a virologist—I’ll be sure to order one from the next catalog that comes along.”