A slow, sick certainty was beginning to gather in the pit of my stomach, too concentrated—too right—to be ignored. “The infection had time to become established, even if it didn’t have time to spread very far,” I said. “Members of the Society are trained to deal with various types of bite. You told me so yourself. What happens if someone gets bitten by something they don’t believe is venomous?”

“Flush the wound, monitor it for signs of infection,” said Shelby. “Most wouldn’t even seek medical care. That’s a silly thing to involve anyone else over.”

“Which means a member of the Society could easily have been bitten and infected before anyone even knew that was a risk. Werewolves are infectious even when not transformed. Whoever it was treated their own wound and didn’t tell anyone, because who wants to report being nipped by a sheep or a collie when they have bigger things to worry about?” The more I talked, the more reasonable this all felt, like this was exactly what had happened. It made sense; it matched up with all the facts we had. “Then, when their twenty-eight-day incubation was up . . .”

“If they were on patrol, they might not have been near anyone when they turned,” said Shelby. “There’s a lot of unpopulated land in Australia. If something got into the sheep, everyone would assume it was a dingo or a wild dog. Nobody jumps straight to ‘werewolf.’ That would just be silly.”

“So our werewolf turned for the first time where there was no one around to hurt, woke up the next morning and . . . what? Just decided to keep it a secret?” I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Of course it doesn’t make sense to you, Alex. You were raised to think of monsters as if they were people,” said Shelby, sounding frustrated. She glanced to Helen. “Sorry. No offense meant.”

“Offense taken,” said Helen, in unknowing echo of myself right after the incident in the sheep meadow. It would have been amusing under other circumstances. In the moment, it was just one more layer of tension on what was already an unbearable mound of discomfort and dismay. “I am not a monster. I am not a mammal, and maybe that’s a problem for some people, but it doesn’t make me a monster.”

“I know,” said Shelby. “I’m sorry, I’m a little stressed right now. Things aren’t coming out like I mean them. I know you’re not a monster. I’ve met your cousin, and her daughter, and they’re very nice people. I’ve even met her husband, and while it’s a little harder for me to think of him as a person—what with him being a giant snake and all—he was perfectly pleasant and didn’t pump me full of hemolytic venom even a little bit. But I was raised with the word ‘monster’ on heavy rotation, and it’s difficult to just cut it from my vocabulary overnight.”

“Try,” suggested Helen pleasantly.

“I will,” said Shelby. She looked back to me. “If you got bit and turned into a werewolf, you’d go to your family, right? Tell them ‘we have a problem,’ and set up some sort of containment plan, something to keep you safe. They’d still look at you as if you were a person, because you’d still be a person to them. Your essential personhood isn’t tied up in what species you are.”

“But it doesn’t work that way here,” I said. More pieces were falling into place. “Someone gets bitten, not knowing they’ve been exposed to lycanthropy-w, transforms for the first time under conditions that don’t lead to any homicides, turns back, and says ‘well, I’m still the same person. I can’t let those assholes back at home put a silver bullet in my head just because I went and caught a therianthropic cold.’”

“Lycanthropy acts on the brain the same way rabies does,” said Helen. “They’d become paranoid, suspicious, violent, all without losing their original intelligence.”

“All while surrounded by people who throw around the word ‘monster’ like it isn’t a racial slur,” I said. “That’s basically a recipe for convincing a werewolf not to turn him or herself in.”

“I’ll take it one step worse for you,” said Charlotte, emerging from the quarantine house. It wasn’t clear how long she’d been standing inside and listening to our conversation. Long enough, judging by the pinched expression on her face. “If I were bitten by a werewolf, and I wanted to be able to keep myself safe from the people who’d been my allies, I’d start recruiting. After all, I’d know the selling points of the infection—all assuming I’d need them. Once someone’s been bitten, they’re probably a lot more willing to listen to a sales pitch that doesn’t end in a shallow grave.”

Graves. I stiffened, looking from Charlotte to Shelby and back again before I asked the question that was going to make me the least popular person on the porch—and that included Helen, who was still viewed as less than a person by most of the Society. “What did we do with Cooper’s body?”

Charlotte stared at me, an expression of dawning horror on her face. “This way,” she said, and started for the steps. The rest of us followed her, again, including Helen. Under the circumstances, she may have thought that staying with the group was the best way to stay alive. Honestly, I couldn’t have advised her one way or another.

Given everything else the Thirty-Six Society had on the property, I had halfway been expecting them to have a proper morgue, complete with stainless steel storage drawers for the bodies of their fallen comrades and a convenient drain in the middle of the floor. It was almost a relief when Charlotte led our makeshift posse to a tin storage shed that looked like it had been purchased from a mail order catalog.

Helen was less reassured. “You keep dead bodies in here?” she demanded, gesturing to the shed doors with a sweep of one hand. “Actual dead humans? The sort you’re not intending to eat later?”

“See, things like that are why some people have a less than positive view of nonhumans,” said Shelby. Helen glared at her. Shelby shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

“We can’t afford the sort of refrigeration units that would keep bodies better preserved, and it’s not like we ever keep them for long anyway,” said Charlotte, undoing the padlock on the door. “As soon as we’re sure the coast is clear, we’ll take him out into the nearest billabong and feed him to the crocs.” She was clearly hoping the body was still there. I shared the sentiment.