“I try,” I said, and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see her looking at me like that—and if the moment came where concern turned to pity, I didn’t want to see that either. “I anticipated the possibility of cuts and burns during the manufacture of our remedy. If you look in my supplies, you’ll find some sealed vials of cuckoo blood. You can use those as a topical antibiotic.”

“Oh, brilliant. That makes things much easier.” Her lips brushed my cheek in a dry, almost perfunctory kiss, and she moved away. I listened to her footsteps, keeping my eyes closed. It would be better if I didn’t have to see her face.

My parents raised me with the idea that species didn’t matter: people were people, no matter what other attributes they possessed. It was a fine ideal to put forward, and for the most part, it managed to stick. It can be hard to get used to the idea that some people photosynthesize, while others eat their prey alive, but given enough time, the mind can adapt to anything. And it was easy for me to say all that, because at the end of the day, I was human: I was a member of the current dominant species, king of the trash heap, and apex predator to the stars. We’d killed off everything that might threaten our supremacy, and now we had the freedom to sit around saying that everybody was equal.

You want to talk true equality? Talk about a spillover virus with the power to change everything you’ve ever known or cared about. In the eyes of that virus, everything mammalian really was equal.

“This is going to sting,” cautioned Shelby. I hadn’t heard her come back.

“Okay,” I said, gripping the counter hard with both hands. “I’ll do my best not to scream.”

“I’ll still love you if you do,” she said, and got to work.

If the pain of the werewolf biting me had been unbelievable, the pain of my girlfriend trying to repair the damage was worse. She had produced a pair of tweezers from the first aid kit, and she used them to dig every scrap of cloth and piece of crushed aconite plant out of my wounds, setting me to bleeding again. I could feel it running down my arm, and I welcomed it. Part of what made lycanthropy-w so difficult to catch was the way victims of werewolf attacks tended to bleed all over everything. Our own bodies washed half of the danger away before it could get into our systems.

“Oh, my poor boy,” she murmured. There was a clink as she put the tweezers down, and the next thing I felt was a damp washcloth being pressed against my skin. That was nice, for half a second. Then the peroxide she’d used to soak the fabric reached my nerve endings, and I bit my lip with the effort of keeping silent.

Shelby must have known how much this was hurting me, but she kept working, not slowing down or allowing her hands to shake. I kept my eyes closed until I felt her thumb against my chin, and then I opened them, raising my head just enough to meet her worried gaze.

“This bite needs stitches,” she said. “Can I . . . ?”

“No stitches,” I replied. “Cuckoo blood and gauze, butterfly clasps if you have to, but no stitches. We’re going to want to cauterize the wounds with silver nitrate as soon as we’re ready for me to take the tincture, and stitches would just get in the way.”

Now she looked alarmed. “Cauterize—but Alex, that’s going to scar something awful.”

“Better scarred than a werewolf,” I said. “I never much liked wearing tank tops anyway. They make my shoulders look all funny. Can you stop the bleeding?”

“I already mostly have,” she said, alarm still evident. “I really don’t like this, Alex.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Neither do I.”

“What in the blue suffering fuck have you people done to the place?” demanded a female voice from the doorway.

Shelby winced. “Hi, Mum,” she called. “Sorry about all the blood.” She didn’t move away from me. I couldn’t tell whether that was because she was still concerned, or because she was trying to stay between me and her mother. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted it to be.

“This is worse than your father said it would be.” Charlotte Tanner strode quickly across the medical station to where Shelby and I were standing. She stomped through the puddles of blood in her path, not seeming to care about the fact that she was leaving bloody footprints across the very few swaths of clean floor remaining. “Cooper’s dead. How do you take a man on a basic forest recon and wind up bringing him home dead?” Her words were callous, but her tone wasn’t: she sounded like a woman who was grasping desperately for sense, because the alternatives were too terrible to be borne.

“It turns out to be pretty easy,” I said. “Hello, Ms. Tanner.”

“Hello, Alex,” she said, distracted momentarily by the instinct toward politeness. Her eyes went to my wounded shoulder. She grimaced. “That looks fairly awful. How does it feel?”

“Worse than it looks,” I said. “As for the elephant in the room, yes, it was a werewolf that killed Cooper, and it was the same werewolf that bit me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it had been waiting there for us.”

Charlotte nodded slowly. “Why do you know better?”

“What?”

“You said if you didn’t know better. Why do you know better? Kangaroos can lay ambushes. So can most predators. Why can’t werewolves?”

“Like I said before, the change makes most of them mentally unstable. They have impulse control issues, usually even when they return to their original forms. A fully transformed werewolf isn’t thinking like any creature that arises in nature. They can’t plan.” And that, right there, was the source of my terror. Becoming a cuckoo like Sarah, or a gorgon like Dee, was biologically impossible, but it wouldn’t have driven me into a quivering ball of fear. Lycanthropy was different. It not only stole your form, it stole your mind.

Science had been the one thing that got me through all the troubles and pains of my life. Science couldn’t save me when I no longer had the mind to understand that it existed.

Charlotte nodded once, before asking, “How are you so sure?”

“What?”

“How are you so sure? Have you been a werewolf? Interviewed one? ‘Excuse me, Mr. Big Bad Wolf, but when you ate all those people, were you in your right mind, or were you overcome with animal passions?’ Maybe werewolves are smarter than we give them credit for being, and just don’t want to tell you.”