Once again on the front porch of a secluded guesthouse in Queensland, Australia, really wishing there were some excuse to make all parties involved take a nap

CHARLOTTE HAD LIT WHATEVER version of the Bat Signal the Thirty-Six Society used because when I stepped back onto the porch, I was greeted by yet another sea of Australian cryptozoologists. It was becoming a common enough occurrence that their sheer numbers didn’t throw me—I was more amazed by the fact that she’d managed to rouse this many people at two o’clock in the morning.

It helped that most of the Thirty-Sixers were standing very still, casting nervous glances at their neighbors and looking like they didn’t know whether they should be declaring their own uninfected status or avoiding contact with everyone they couldn’t be sure of. I scanned the front lines, looking for familiar faces. I hadn’t been in Australia long enough to learn everyone’s names, but I had been there long enough that at least a few people had started standing out to me.

I found about half of them. The rest were either farther back in the crowd, protected from casual observation by the surrounding bodies . . . or they weren’t here. And if they weren’t here, there was every chance they were with Cooper.

This was going to be harder than I’d thought.

Charlotte turned when she heard me step onto the porch, a spark of animation coming into her otherwise empty eyes. “There you are,” she said. “Good. You can explain the plan from here.” And then she stepped to the side. Charlotte Tanner—who already looked like she’d been widowed, even though her husband was alive upstairs, waiting to see what the end of his incubation period would bring—stepped to the side, indicating that I should move forward. Raina put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, bolstering her up.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, Shelby made a small beckoning gesture. Her gun had been holstered, and Chloe was gone. I swallowed the urge to turn and bolt for the safety of the upstairs as I squared my shoulders and walked to stand between them. The eerily silent crowd turned its many eyes on me. The urge to run rose again. I swallowed it back down.

“Where’s Chloe?” I murmured, as I stepped into position.

“Mum wanted us to form a line, so I asked Gabby to take Chloe inside and lock her in one of the quarantine rooms,” said Shelby. “We can question her when this is done, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I kissed her on the temple before turning my attention to the crowd. “This is what we know,” I began.

It took about fifteen minutes to explain the situation, from what we had found (or hadn’t found) in the tin shed that was not a suitable substitute for a morgue to all the reasons that the werewolf in the basement’s behavior was abnormal. Gabby returned somewhere in the middle of my explanation. I stressed, several times, how important Helen Jalali was going to be to the Society’s recovery, since she was the only doctor we knew of who didn’t have to worry about potential infection, and who could thus treat anyone who had been exposed. And then I stopped talking, and I waited for the inevitable questions.

The first one was something I hadn’t been expecting, although I probably should have been. A man shouldered his way to the front of the crowd and demanded, “Well, how do we know if we’ve been exposed? Cooper helped with dinner the other night! Maybe he put something in the soup!”

The people around him erupted in anxious mutters. I put my hands up, waiting for silence. Inch by slow inch, it fell. I lowered my hands.

“Lycanthropy is spread via fluid transfer,” I said. “You can’t catch it from a toilet seat or by sharing a glass. It can’t be cooked into food without denaturing the virus and making it ineffective.” Technically, Cooper could have drooled or bled into something cool, like salad dressing, but even then, there would only have been a risk if the people who consumed his “specialty dishes” had had open sores or wounds in their mouths, throats, or stomachs. The odds of an infection via that route were perishingly small, and I decided quickly that it was better not to mention them at all. I was already struggling not to start a panic.

Shelby stepped up next to me. The crowd, which had been starting to mutter again, calmed, looking to her with a degree of trust that they would never show to me. I was an unknown quantity. She was the daughter of their current leaders, the heir apparent, and even if she’d been away for a long time, she was still someone they knew had their best interests at heart.

“We have a test for lycanthropy,” she said. “It doesn’t require bleeding, which is good, since we’ve seen enough blood shed in the last few days, yeah? It just needs you to come over here and let the talking mice get a whiff. If they say you’re clean, you’re clean. If they say you’re not, well. We have plenty of space in the quarantine house,” she nodded over her shoulder to the building behind us, “and we’ll be offering the best possible care. We want to help you get better.”

There was no “getting better” for someone who’d been infected long enough to have experienced their first transformation. The body the new-minted werewolf returned to was no longer fully human, having grown the necessary circulatory backups and additional nerves to survive repeated changes. There was no point in going into any of that under the circumstances. We wanted anyone who had been infected—or suspected they might have been—to come to us willingly, not turn and bolt for the hills.

“Why do we trust a bunch of talking mice?” shouted someone.

To my surprise, it was Gabby who stepped forward and said hotly, “Because they’re Aeslin mice, and Aeslin mice can’t lie! Unlike you, Patrick Hester. Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you trying to catch that drop bear last year.” The target of her rage was a large, towheaded man. The people around him stepped away, creating a bubble of open space that was extremely visible in the middle of the otherwise packed crowd. “You were going to sell that poor thing to a private collector, and for what? A little money? You should be ashamed of yourself. We trust the talking mice because they’re talking mice, just like we mistrust you because you’re an arsehole.”

“That’s my sister,” said Shelby, looking amused.

Raina didn’t look so amused. “That’s not right,” she said. She reached forward, putting a hand on Gabby’s shoulder. “Hey. I’m the angry one, remember? Dial it back a little, we need to keep these people on our side.”