“Regina Luporum is awake,” said the were-lion, Sakhmet.

They fell silent, listening. I imagined us, me on one side of the door, them on the other, listening close. Waiting for somebody to do something.

I called, “My name’s Kitty.”

“You see? She’s not ready,” hissed the magician, as if I couldn’t hear.

“We can’t wait forever,” Enkidu hissed back. “She has friends, and she’ll be missed.”

Damn straight. But if I could get out of here without dragging them into this mess, I’d do it. Just open that door …

I heard movement, and Sakhmet stepped close to the door—I could smell her. Inches from me now, she said, “Regina Luporum, are you hungry?”

“Kitty,” I murmured, on principle. I knew what this was—they’d keep calling me Regina Luporum until I answered. I wouldn’t play along.

But I really needed some water.

I backed away from the door. A bolt slid open, and the door pushed inward. I was a good girl and didn’t do anything crazy—all three of them were there, blocking the way out.

Sakhmet crouched and offered me a bottle of water. I took it and smiled a thanks. Probably drank it down a little too eagerly and with less dignity than I would have liked. Dignity, ha. These people had all seen me naked, who was I kidding? My hair itched. I scratched it back, trying to brush it out with my fingers as well as I could.

The three of them watched me apprehensively, waiting to see which way I would jump. So I didn’t jump. I sat quietly, clutching my bottle of water, and gazed up at them with big, harmless eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here talking to her like this,” Zora muttered at Enkidu. “You’ll ruin everything.” He glared at her, but didn’t argue. Even in the faint light, I could see the lines of indecision marking his face.

I focused on Sakhmet, who was closest to me, at my eye level, and regarding me with something like pity. She would talk to me, I bet.

“How did you all meet?” I asked softly, nonthreateningly. I was doing the show, trying to coax a story from a reluctant interview subject. Invite her to tell me her story, assume that she secretly wanted to tell me her story. Most people only needed a sympathetic ear to start talking about themselves. “You and Enkidu—you’ve known each other awhile, I can tell. How did you two meet?”

She didn’t talk, not right away, so I shrugged, played gee-whiz naïve. “It’s just you’re an interesting group of people, you know? People usually stick to their packs, but here you all are, working together.”

Sakhmet gave a thin smile, glancing over her shoulder at the others. “I met … Enkidu, first. When we were younger. I was a college student in Cairo.” She seemed about thirty—my age. Enkidu was probably a few years older. So this might have been ten years ago, maybe less.

“Were you already a lycanthrope?” I asked gently.

“Yes, but not for long. I was attacked. It was stupid, being out by the river after dark,” she said, wincing at the memory. “I survived, and there were those who took care of me—”

“Sakhmet, come away from her, we should not be talking to her!” Zora hissed.

“We’re just talking, we’re not hurting anything,” Sakhmet shot back.

“What about you, Zora? How’d you hook up with this crowd?” I asked.

“It’s not important,” Zora said. “Our stories—irrelevant.” She stomped toward the door, sat on the floor with a huff, crossed her arms, and stared at us. Baby-sitting, it seemed like. Zora was a bit of a freak, wasn’t she?

Sakhmet sat with her legs folded, graceful, her skirt splayed around her. Her smile was thin, serene. “What happened to me, what you call lycanthropy—it isn’t a curse, I came to realize. It’s a blessing. Thousands of years ago, my people worshipped gods and goddesses with the faces of animals. Those of us who are both human and animal—who is to say we’re not messengers of those gods? We share their images, we are part of them.”

Easy to persuade her then that she was an avatar of the lion-headed goddess Sakhmet. She was Egyptian, and in ancient Egypt she might have been a priestess, draped in fine cloth and jewels. I wondered where those animal-headed gods had come from. Had the ancient Egyptians known about lycanthropes?

Had everyone known, once upon a time, and then just forgotten? People stopped believing the stories were true.

If Zora was baby-sitting, Enkidu was standing guard, lurking near Sakhmet, shoulders stiff like raised hackles. As if he expected me to leap at her, snarling, even though I was acting as unthreatening as I knew how, without going so far as to roll onto my back and show my belly. My gaze was lowered, I sat with my knees to my chest. Just people telling stories.

“What about you?” I said, nodding at him. “Where are you from?”

He wouldn’t stop staring at me, which made me nervous. But not any more nervous than I already was, so I ignored him. He waited so long I didn’t think he was going to answer, when he finally said, “Kashmir.”

“And how did you two meet?”

He glanced at Sakhmet sidelong, and she won a smile from him. Ah, that was a good memory, then. “I wandered for a long time,” he said. “Then I found her.”

Even in the dire setting, they produced a glow of affection. Whose heart wouldn’t melt? If we’d been anywhere else—New Moon, maybe, sharing a pitcher of beer—I’d have basked in it. If I could just get these two away from everyone else …

“How’d you meet her?” I said, nodding at Zora.

No smiles for the magician. “Kumarbis found her,” Enkidu said. “Before he found us.”

The vampire had recruited them all, then. What did he know that had started all this? Did he really have the power to stop Roman?

From a certain point of view, I couldn’t fault them. They were allies banding together, just like me, Rick, Alette, and all the others. They just had a different set of tactics. I kept bugging Cormac to learn the secret of Dux Bellorum’s coins because I wanted a magical weapon. A silver bullet, if you will. If he’d come to me and said, “All we need to do is kidnap various avatars of various powerful mythological figures,” I’d have thought he was crazy. He would have thought he was crazy. But if that was what I’d have to do to stop Roman, could I do it? No. I would have called them all up on the phone and talked them into it. Why couldn’t they have just called me?