Cooper nodded. “That’s something I can understand. Come on, boy. Let’s get back to work.” He turned to head back into the woods, and toward the safety of the medical station on the other side. I moved to follow.

Something slammed into me from behind, so fast and hard that I didn’t have the chance to turn and see what it was before I landed face-first in the aconite, so hard that the air was knocked out of me. Then teeth like knives were driven into my upper arm, the impact slamming my head against the dirt, and a wave of pain and agonized understanding took everything else away.

Seven

“We can plan and plan, we can scheme and scheme, but in the end, a single second has the power to change everything.”

—Alexander Healy

Facedown in a field of aconite in Queensland, Australia, in one hell of a lot of trouble

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED RELUCTANTLY, like a student creeping into class on the first day of finals. I allowed it in with equal reluctance. If the world was the student afraid of being graded, I was the grad student terrified of being trusted with the responsibility of giving the grades. Or maybe I was the professor overseeing the class, or the classroom, or . . . the metaphor began to crumble, taking the last comforting shards of nothingness with it. It was time for me to wake up.

It was time for me to wake up.

It was time—

I opened my eyes with a gasp, and discovered that I was sprawled face down in a muddy field of trampled aconite flowers. Everything smelled of blood. I pushed myself upright, spitting and clawing the muck from my glasses. The motion pulled at the bite wound, sending pain shooting through my entire body. I convulsed but didn’t scream. Not screaming was one of the first lessons I’d learned as a child, when it became evident that dangerous situations would be a part of my life until they inevitably brought it to an end. If you scream, whatever caused your injuries might come back for a second helping. Swallow the pain, swallow the fear that comes with it, and keep moving. Movement is the only thing that can save you.

Movement was complicated by the fact that everything was slippery with mud and water and crushed flowers, which added a nasty, sludgy sliminess to the whole situation. I couldn’t put any weight on my left arm, either; even the slightest flex of my triceps sent another wave of pain crashing through me. Eventually, I managed to half roll, half stagger to my feet, looking around the decimated field with dazed eyes.

The mud on my glasses gave everything a brownish cast, making it impossible to make out any details. I made the tactical decision to risk another attack in my moment of blindness and took them off, wiping them as clean as possible on the inside of my shirt, where the mud hadn’t quite penetrated. Putting them back on, I took another look around the field. Nothing moved except the flowers, which swayed in the breeze that was blowing across the water.

Nothing—oh, fuck. “Cooper?” There was no response. I pitched my voice a little louder, not quite shouting, and called again, “Cooper? Cooper, can you hear me? Answer if you can hear me.”

There was no response. I took a deep breath through my nose, held it for a few counts, and started scanning the field for signs of a struggle. The purple aconite flowers did a good job of camouflaging the blood, but it stood out well against the leaves. There; that was where I’d fallen, and the drag marks showed where the—where the thing had dragged me through the field like an old rag doll. I knew what had bitten me, I had seen it, but my mind still shied away from forming the word, like thinking it would grant it a reality that it otherwise wouldn’t possess.

Wishing a thing away doesn’t make it not have happened, I thought, half-nonsensically, and started wading through the wreckage of the flowers toward the place where I’d been attacked. That was where I found Cooper, sprawled among the crushed vegetation with his eyes closed and his face turned toward the empty sky. The—the thing had bitten him several times, once on the shoulder, twice on the right arm. All three wounds were still leaking blood. I crouched down, reaching out to feel for a pulse.

It was there. Weak and thready, but there. He wasn’t gone yet, although he would be soon if I didn’t get him some medical care—and that didn’t even touch on the fact that he’d been bitten. He could be a dead man walking.

That could be true for both of us.

“Time to move.” The sound of my own voice startled me. I shied away from it, looking anxiously around to see whether I had attracted any unwanted attention. As before, nothing moved, and I finally realized what else was wrong with this scene:

The thing, the werewolf—I couldn’t avoid the word forever, no matter how much I desperately wanted to—was gone. There was a crushed patch in the aconite where its body had landed, but there was no sign of the body itself. Massive footprints that were half human and half lupine led away from the crushed flowers. Which meant that either a) the werewolf hadn’t been dead, which seemed unlikely, given how many bullets I had put into its head; or b) the thing that bit us had been a second werewolf, and it had been large enough to pick up its pack mate and carry it away.

Either way, there was a live werewolf in the area. I didn’t want to be here anymore, and Cooper couldn’t afford to be. That didn’t mean I could run off without the things I needed to finish my work.

I moved away from Cooper, scanning the ground until I spotted the strap of my work bag. I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder before I resumed scanning. My pistol was harder to find, being small and darkly colored, but I eventually found the stock poking out from under a thick tangle of aconite flowers. I wiped the mud off the stock and jammed the barrel into my belt, and only then did I go back to hoist Cooper off the ground, bracing him into a fireman’s carry despite the pain the action awoke in my injured arm.

“I’m really glad you’re not Riley’s size,” I muttered, through gritted teeth. “I think I’d have to leave you here to bleed out.” That wasn’t true: I would at least try to improvise a travois before I’d leave a man behind. But the image was ludicrous enough to take my mind off the pain for an instant, and that was all I really wanted. This was going to be difficult. Anything that made it the slightest bit easier was to be grasped and clung to with both hands.

Cooper was a dead weight as I shuffled out of the meadow and into the woods. I must have looked like I was drunk, staggering from side to side, unbalanced and uncertain of myself. Every sound I heard signaled danger to my shock-addled mind, until I found myself flinching at birdsong. I didn’t know the environment here. I didn’t know what to listen for.