“So you’re saying she’s taking herself away from me.”

“No, I’m saying that you’re shoving her.” I tied a last loop of gauze in place and stood, moving away from him. “I’m going to marry your daughter, Mr. Tanner. I’m going to work very hard to be a good husband, and to give her the life she deserves. If you want to be a part of that life, maybe you should stop pushing, and start listening.”

Riley opened his mouth to answer, and was cut off as Charlotte, Raina, and six other Thirty-Sixers hurled themselves through the doorway and into the room. They stopped shy of running into the bloody puddle, proving that they understood contagion. “Riley!” cried Charlotte, and the sound of her voice nearly broke my heart.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, mustering a wan smile.

I moved around the puddle to the other side, where I caught the eye of one of the men—North, I realized—and said quietly, “You need to move him to the quarantine building, and then you need to search this whole room. The werewolf was waiting in here for us. I don’t think there are any more unpleasant surprises, but there’s only one way to know for sure.”

“On it,” said North, with a quick, decisive nod.

“Thank you,” I said, and walked past him, out into the hall, and away.

I found Shelby in the downstairs bathroom of the small house being used for quarantine. She was sitting, still fully-clothed, next to the tub, her head in her hands. She raised it when she heard my footsteps, just enough to see that it was me, and then dropped it back down. “Is he alive?” she asked.

“He is,” I confirmed. I had removed my bloody shoes when I got out of the already-contaminated basement hall. I tossed them into the bathtub, and followed them with my shirt, which needed to be either sterilized or burnt, depending on what our resources looked like. I moved to the sink to start washing my hands. The latex gloves had protected me from the majority of the biohazard risk, but it was better to be safe than sorry. “I managed to stop the bleeding, and your mother’s with him now. Did you reach Dr. Jalali?”

“I did,” she said. “She’s going to meet us here.”

“Good. How are your elbows?” I tried to make the question as light as possible, but it fell into the space between us like a lead balloon, heavy with meaning and with weight I didn’t want it to have. Some things are unavoidable.

“I didn’t break the skin, if that’s what you’re asking.” Shelby finally raised her head. She leaned against the side of the tub, looking at me dully. There was a bloodstain over her left breast. “Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.” I shook the water off my hands and moved to crouch next to her. “You need to take that shirt off. Please.”

Shelby looked down, saw the blood, and sighed before pulling her shirt off over her head. It joined mine in the bathtub. “Can she check me, too?”

“Once we’re finished examining and treating your father, I think that would be a good idea.” It wasn’t a good idea for me to touch her, under the circumstances; we still didn’t know whether she’d been exposed, or whether a few specks of infected blood might have somehow made their way under my bandages. I still reached out and rested the back of my hand against her cheek for a moment. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Shelby admitted in a small voice. “I’m really not. He’s my daddy, Alex. He’s not supposed to get ripped up by werewolves right in front of me. That’s not . . . this isn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. Why is everything happening like this?”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I think sometimes the world doesn’t really care about how we feel. It just keeps on turning, and we’re expected to do whatever we have to in order to keep up.”

“Fuck the world,” Shelby said, and buried her face in her hands again.

For once, I didn’t have anything to say, and so I didn’t say anything. I just stayed in the bathroom while she stripped down and showered, washing the chance of infection away. I kept the door open just a crack, waiting for the sound of Riley and the others arriving. Then we changed places, letting me get cleaned up while Shelby went and got me a change of clothes.

We had so much work to do, and we still didn’t fully understand what the enemy wanted. We just had to hope that we could figure it out in time.

Thirteen

“There is evil in the world. Things might be easier if there wasn’t, if good and evil were just concepts men invented to justify themselves; we could ignore them, then. Sadly, good and evil are both very real, and very inconvenient.”

—Martin Baker

Sitting on the front porch of a secluded guesthouse in Queensland, Australia

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL night. I could see the lights on in the main house from where I sat on the guesthouse porch. Jett was stretched out next to me with her head down on her paws, while my hands rested limply on my knees. The front door was open, and noises drifted down the stairs as Riley and his various companions dealt with their own issues. Technically, since it was full dark and the moon was up, I should have been locked in my own room, waiting for morning to prove that I wasn’t a werewolf yet: that was the deal I’d agreed to in order to buy my own transitory freedom. Deals seemed to have fallen by the wayside, under the circumstances.

Someone stepped on the porch beside me. I held up my hand, and was rewarded with a cool glass bottle being pressed into my palm. I lowered my arm and took a swig. Ginger beer. Sharp, sweet and bitter at the same time, and nonalcoholic. A good choice.

“All right, now you need to explain yourself.” Dr. Helen Jalali sat next to me, giving me a quizzical sidelong look. She had a ginger beer of her own, and her lab coat was pristinely white, serving as a symbol of her office and a “do not shoot the person wearing me” at the same time. “How did you know it was me, and how did you know I was bringing you a drink?”

“Wadjet have a very specific stride,” I said. “It took me a while to figure out how you distribute your weight, but after spending a year dealing with Chandi and her constant demands to see her fiancé, I caught on. There’s only one wadjet here, so it had to be you.”

“And the drink?”

“Lucky guess.” I took another swig. “What did the mice say?”