Well, shit.

Cooper recovered first. “Don’t kill him!” he barked, directing his words to the girl behind me. I raised my knives, preparing to throw, and stopped as clawed hands seized my arms and yanked them painfully behind my back. “Disarm,” Cooper snarled.

The hands tightened, compressing until I could no longer keep my right hand closed against the pain. The knives clattered to the ground.

“He put one of those in Albert’s throat,” said the unnamed female werewolf, her words garbled by her mouthful of lupine teeth but still intelligible. “Albert’s not getting better.”

“Silver throwing knives?” asked Cooper, looking back to my face. I didn’t answer him. He smiled. “Clever. I’m assuming Blithe is dead?”

“You’re next,” I said. “Shelby—”

“Not bitten yet. Thought I’d show you I mean business and give you one more chance to come along willingly. That way you can bite her yourself, once you understand what we’re offering you.” Cooper’s smile was full of teeth, but they still looked mostly human. He was keeping himself under control, for now. “And before you start thinking that we’re easily fooled, remember, I left Blithe with you for a reason.”

I stared at him. It had seemed awfully convenient, me left alone with a single werewolf, especially one who was so cocky that she’d let herself get into range. “You set her up.”

“She thought she was in charge. I thought you might have something up your sleeve.” Cooper shrugged. “Guess I was right and she was wrong. Thanks for cleaning up that little mess for me. Now we have a better understanding of how far you’ll go, and I don’t have to kill her myself.”

“Albert,” whined the werewolf who was holding me.

“He should’ve known better than to go investigate a strange noise—I’m assuming that’s what happened, yeah?” Cooper didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed past us, carrying Shelby inside. The door remained open, but there was no way I was making a break for it: not now, not with Shelby in his control. He might be willing to refrain from biting me until I consented. I knew he wasn’t going to offer her the same courtesy.

Besides, Chloe and Trigby appeared on the porch almost as soon as he’d vacated it, prowling out of the darkness as naked as the day they’d been born. Chloe smirked at me when she saw me. “Like what you see?” she purred. “Tanner girls don’t know how to have fun. Maybe once you’re properly one of us, you and I can play a little chase-the-rabbit around the meadow, hmm?”

“Business first, pleasure later,” snapped Cooper. “Deb, keep hold of him. Chloe, come help me tie her down.”

“You’re no fun at all,” complained Chloe. She stepped past me. “Ew, what happened to Albert? Is he dead?”

“He will be soon,” said Cooper, sounding unconcerned. “Deb, come on. Kitchen, now.”

Deb growled, apparently too upset to continue using words. Her claws were breaking the skin on my arms. I winced, but did my best not to struggle. She was on the verge of losing control, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to disobey Cooper.

“Better move, Deb,” said Trigby, not unkindly. “You know the boss doesn’t like being kept waiting.”

“Hate him,” spat Deb, her voice now so distorted that it was virtually incomprehensible. She turned, yanking me along with her. I caught a glimpse of Albert, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor—and apparently quite dead—and then I was being shoved across the room and down a short hallway that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see before. It ended in a small, homey kitchen with a tile floor and floral wallpaper. A dining set took up a large portion of the available floor space. Shelby, still unconscious, had been dumped into one of the chairs, and Cooper was in the process of tying her hands behind her.

“Put him down,” he said, jerking his chin toward an open chair.

Deb shoved me into the seat, harder than she had to, ripping my arms even more in the process. This time, I didn’t bother to conceal my wince. Cooper was watching. The more hurt he thought I was, the better my situation was going to be.

“You’ve killed two of my people,” he said. “I hope you understand that you’re going to replace them. I am a fair man. I know you may have had other plans for your life. At the same time, I can’t allow you to weaken us like this.”

I stared at him. “You put me in a situation where it was her or me.”

“Yes, and you could have chosen to let her kill you and thus spare yourself a lifetime on all fours. You elected to live. That’s good for me—I wanted you to make that choice—but it’s not necessarily best for you.” Cooper smiled. “At least you’ll still be together.”

“It didn’t have to be like this,” I said. “It still doesn’t.”

“I think you’ll find that we’re well past the point of no return,” said Cooper. He moved to stand behind Shelby, licking his lips once, and then bent forward, like he was going to kiss her neck.

I couldn’t help it. I jerked against Deb’s hands, cutting myself worse in the process, to no avail. Her grip was too tight. I wasn’t breaking free.

Someone rang the doorbell.

The entire room went still. Cooper snarled, straightening again, and looked first to Chloe and Trigby—who were naked—and then to Deb, who was half-transformed and had shredded much of her clothing. Seeing no useful flunkies, he lowered his voice and said, “Be quiet. I don’t know who followed us here, but they don’t know for sure that anyone’s inside.”

The doorbell rang again. Shelby groaned, beginning to stir. Cooper checked the knots on her hands, looking flustered for the first time. Too much was happening at once; his plans might be elaborate, but they didn’t cover anything like this.

“We can kill whoever it is,” said Chloe, in a mild, almost disinterested tone.

“And then we have one more body on our hands,” snapped Cooper. “How many of those do you think we can feed to the bunyips before somebody notices that the locals have started disappearing? We need to be careful, until we’re the dominant species.”

“As I told your former boss back at the Society, the Covenant is not going to tolerate an entire continent of werewolves,” I said. “They’re going to find out, and they’re going to stop you.” And even more people were going to die. No matter how we sliced things, a lot of lives were going to end if this fight continued.