“Are you home for good or not?”

The question seemed to come completely out of left field. Shelby blinked at her sister. I did much the same. Raina looked at us both and groaned, shaking her head.

“You don’t even get it a little, do you? She—” She stabbed a finger at Shelby, whose look of profound confusion deepened, “—was supposed to go to America, learn about manticores, and head straight back here. Instead, she sent a bunch of notes explaining how to deal with the problem, and she stayed gone. It took werewolves to bring her home, and she hasn’t said word one about whether it’s for keeps. You weren’t supposed to leave us!” She whirled to her sister on the last sentence, making it clear that she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Jack left, and he was going to be Dad’s replacement one day, so with him gone, all that fell to you. But you just had to go, too, didn’t you? You weren’t supposed to go.”

“Oh, Raina.” Shelby pulled her hand from mine. I let her go without hesitation, and even took a step back to place myself firmly out of the scene as the sisters embraced, holding each other so tightly that there was no space between them.

Something nudged my hip. I looked down to see Jett pressed against my leg, her ears forward, watching the two. I rested my hand on the top of her head, and we stood there silently, four lost souls, waiting for the future to arrive.

Ten

“A life that is lived carefully, calmly, with thorough preparation and sufficient resources, is likely to be healthy, long, and incredibly boring. Fortunately, I have never been in danger of living that particular life.”

—Jonathan Healy

Tromping through the brush in Queensland, Australia, looking for signs of werewolves, which is a genuinely terrible idea

ONCE THE THIRTY-SIX SOCIETY decided on something, they didn’t stand around talking about whether or not they’d made the right call. They barreled forward with little concern for the potential damage; it was like meeting a group with an institutional policy of “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” And that explains how, less than two hours after I’d been cleared to return to the field, on the same day I’d been bitten by a werewolf, and less than an hour after putting in a call in to Helen to ask her to come back and begin treating the Thirty-Sixers, I found myself walking into yet another unfamiliar forest.

Shelby was nearby, tromping gamely through the brush and offering helpful tips like, “Don’t step on the anthill,” and “There may have been a snake just now, I’m not sure, but if there is, try not to piss it off.” Raina was a little farther ahead, with Jett tagging at her heels like a small black shadow. There had been no discussion of leaving the dog behind when we took off on this latest fool’s errand: she was trained to help Cooper in the field, and that made her useful for our purposes, as long as we didn’t mind the fact that she’d take off running if she saw a bat that needed snapping at.

I had asked why, if Jett was field-trained, Cooper had left her behind when we went to gather aconite. No one had been able to give me an answer for that.

Charlotte, Riley, and Gabby were farther along, having driven another two miles up the road before getting out and starting through the wood. We were all supposed to wind up in the same place: a sheep meadow that had already been the site of two suspected werewolf attacks. The hope was that we would arrive right around the time the moon finished rising, and—if the werewolves were really responsible for the carnage the shepherds had been reporting—catch the werewolves in the act. Their transformations weren’t actually tied to the moonrise, but as most human werewolves believed that they were, they were more likely to subconsciously trigger the change when they saw the moon. The mind was a powerful thing. Sometimes dismayingly so.

(I had attempted to point out, several times, that this plan was predicated in part on our sharing a meadow with multiple werewolves, after just one had managed to wound me and kill Cooper. Of the Tanners, only Gabby seemed inclined to see this as a bad thing, and she had been voted down by the rest of her family. Of such democracies are horror movies born. Suggesting that we not split the party had been met with even more disdain. Two groups covered twice as much ground, and we were all armed. Discussion over. I would have stayed home and skipped the whole thing, but Shelby was going, and I’d be damned if I was going to let her walk into a massacre without me.)

Shelby fell into step beside me. “Raina’s up ahead,” she said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It’s always nice to get torn apart in the open, as opposed to getting torn apart in the shelter of the trees.”

“That’s the spirit.” She bumped me gently with her shoulder. “It’ll be all right. There’s more of us this time. You’re not getting bit again on my watch.”

“The last werewolf kept coming until I’d almost run out of bullets,” I said.

“You weren’t packing silver then,” said Shelby, entirely too reasonably. “You are now. It’ll be fine, as long as you don’t switch back to lead ammunition for a laugh.”

“Right,” I grumbled. Then I paused, giving her a sidelong look. “You know, I’d been hoping for the chance to talk to you without the rest of your family around.”

“Yeah?” She sounded innocent, which meant that—knowing Shelby—she knew what I was about to ask.

“Why are you telling your father I’m your fiancé? I sort of thought one of us had to propose for that.”

“Well, first, because he needed to see you as something I was properly attached to, not some summer fling. ‘Fiancé’ has more weight than ‘boyfriend’ when you’re asking someone not be put down for the crime of getting bit by a werewolf,” she said, again sounding entirely too reasonable. “Aside from that, you did propose. It just took me a while to sort out what my answer was going to be. Once I did, I figured I could go ahead and jump straight to fiancé. Was that wrong?”

“What?” I sputtered. “I didn’t propose.”

“Did so,” she said. “In the woods, between the gorgon encampment and their farming community, after I killed that poor lindworm. You said ‘marry me.’ I’m saying yes.”

I stopped walking. Shelby continued for a few more feet before she stopped and looked over her shoulder at me, raising her eyebrows.