“Let them come,” said Cooper. “They’re only men, by their own design, and we’ll be something so much more that they won’t stand a chance.”

Someone knocked on the back door.

Every head in the kitchen swung toward the sound, except for Shelby’s; she was still unconscious, slumped forward in her chair to the limits of the ropes that bound her hands behind her. Everyone was silent, even me. Crying for help would endanger Shelby, and might get whoever was standing outside killed.

The knock came again. And then, to my surprise, the doorknob turned.

“You didn’t lock the door,” said Chloe, in a surprised tone that would have sounded more natural coming from the ingénue in a horror movie than it did from a naked werewolf. “We’re hiding in the middle of nowhere, and you didn’t lock the door.”

There wasn’t time for Deb to answer. The door swung open to reveal Helen Jalali, dressed in tan slacks and a cream-colored sweater, holding what looked like a Bible against her chest. She smiled pleasantly as she looked around the room at the stunned werewolves, unperturbed by the blood and nudity. “Hello,” she said. “Have you heard the good word of Wadjet, Protector of Egypt and great snake of the Milky Way?”

The stunned silence stretched on. Pagan missionaries were not, it seemed, on Cooper’s docket for the evening.

“I have some pamphlets, if this is a bad time,” Helen continued. “I think you’ll find that when you’re looking for a patron goddess to consume your eternal soul and save you from the fires of your current religion’s afterlife, Wadjet is absolutely the best choice available.”

“Get out,” growled Cooper.

Helen’s expression cooled as she looked at him. “That isn’t a very charitable reaction to a neighbor expressing her religious freedom,” she said.

“Get out!” Cooper shouted, and stepped toward her, menace evident in his posture.

“Oh, if you’re going to be like that—Alex, cover your eyes!” Helen whirled, throwing her book as hard as she could at Deb’s face. The cover came open on impact, and a glass jar full of my lycanthropy treatment fell out, shattering as it hit the edge of the table. Aconite and silver nitrate sprayed everywhere. Deb howled and fell back, clutching at her arms where the liquid had hit. Chloe danced away from the spill.

Cooper growled. So did Trigby, who stalked forward, the bones of his spine beginning to distort. Helen hissed, her fangs descending from the roof of her mouth and gleaming with amber beads of poison. Trigby and Cooper were both Australian; they knew better than to mess with a snake that was determined to stand its ground. They stopped where they were, apparently too perplexed to continue.

That was the pause I needed. I jumped to my feet before Deb could grab me, pulling another knife from my belt and whirling to jam it into her chest. Throwing knives aren’t designed for stabbing people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use them that way, if you have to. Deb’s eyes went wide, and she clawed at me before she collapsed, fingers scrabbling for the knife.

I have an excellent grasp of human and demi-human anatomy. She wasn’t transformed enough to have moved her lungs. Whether she died of silver poisoning or oxygen deprivation didn’t matter to me; what mattered was that she stopped moving in a matter of seconds, leaving me with only three werewolves to contend with.

Three werewolves, and an immobilized girlfriend. Chloe jumped up on the table before I could move, grabbing Shelby by the hair and snarling, “I’ll break her neck, don’t you push it. I will kill the little bitch!”

Her declaration appeared to be what Cooper and Trigby needed to hear. They started moving again, stalking toward Helen with the calm, practiced precision of wolves going for their prey. For Helen’s part, she smiled, the expression only slightly twisted by her fangs, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “THAT’S A GO!”

The shout preceded the front door being kicked open by less than a second. “Get the fuck away from my sister, you asshole!” Raina was the first Thirty-Sixer into the kitchen. When she saw me standing, she yanked a pistol out of her belt and lobbed it at me, yelling, “Think fast!”

I caught the gun without thinking about it. The safety was on, thank God. Raina might be a little more cavalier about safety than I liked, but she wasn’t trying to get us all killed.

Charlotte was the next into the room, followed by three men I didn’t recognize. One of them shot Trigby in the face as he was turning, and he went down. Cooper tried to lunge for Helen, but she was already dancing backward, out of the doorway, and slamming the door behind herself. He was too slowed by shock and confusion to stop her. I was glad of that. She was an ally, and a good person, and she didn’t deserve to get caught in this crossfire.

Chloe howled in dismay when she saw Trigby fall. She lunged for the man who had shot him, and three of us shot her. She went down with a perfect trio of holes in her breast above her heart, hitting the ground like a sack of dead meat. In a matter of seconds, we had gone from three werewolves to one.

Cooper turned, snarling, and froze when he realized that every gun in the room was aimed at him. “How . . . ?”

“Turns out it’s pretty hard to hide a god,” said Raina. She dipped her hand into the pocket of her coat, pulling out the priest of my Aeslin colony, who sat on her palm and glared with tiny black eyes at Cooper. “Shouldn’t have started taking hostages.”

“It’s over, Cooper.” Charlotte sounded exhausted. “Give up, and maybe we’ll let you live.”

“In quarantine? In captivity? Never.” He bared his teeth. “You’ll have to kill me—and if you’re going to kill me, I think I’ll make sure you’ve got something to remember me by.”

I knew what he was going to do even before he moved. That was why, when he threw himself at Shelby, my gun was already aimed at the space above her head. My shot caught him cleanly in the neck, and he had time for one startled glance in my direction before four more bullets hit him, and he went down.

Silence, and the smell of blood and gunpowder, fell over the room. It stretched on for almost a minute, none of us quite sure what to say, no one wanting to be the first one to move. Then Shelby lifted her head and blinked at the rest of us, eyes bleary and unfocused in that “I just woke up after being hit with chloroform” way.