“That’s sort of encapsulated in the question, isn’t it?” She frowned. “Are you all right? You look shaken.”

“When my girlfriend comes to my office asking about werewolves, I get a little anxious.” I folded my hands on my knees to keep myself from fidgeting. “What’s going on?”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about werewolves,” said Shelby gravely.

I wanted to ask if there had been a local sighting, but I put the question out of my mind: there was no way she would be this calm if the danger were that close. Instead, I took a deep breath and said, “All right. First off, werewolves don’t exist as a species. They’re individuals infected with the lycanthropy-w virus, which we believe started as a therianthrope-specific form of rabies before jumping back into a nonshapeshifting population. Anything mammalian can be infected with lycanthropy-w, although it’s extremely rare for anything or anyone weighing less than ninety pounds to survive the first transformation, which tends to limit its living victims to humans, humanoids, and large mammals like horses or bears. Nonmammalian cryptids, like wadjet or cuckoos, can’t be infected; their biology isn’t compatible with the virus.”

Thank God for that. The idea of telepathic werewolves was terrifying enough to make me never want to sleep again.

Shelby’s frown deepened. “What do you mean, ‘anything mammalian’?”

“I mean it doesn’t just infect humans. Any mammal can catch it.”

“That’s—seriously? Oh, that’s just great. How deadly is it?”

“Lycanthropy-w is pretty hard to catch. It’s spread through direct fluid transfer only, so bites, blood, or saliva. And that’s a damn good thing, because every confirmed infection has eventually led to death—either through natural causes, when the strain of the transformations cause organ failure in the victim, or within a month of first change, when someone follows the trail back to the werewolf’s den and puts them out of their misery.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say.” Shelby slouched, rubbing her forehead with one hand. “You got a valid passport?”

I frowned as the sense of dread grew. “I’ve got a few. Why?” Having multiple ways out of the country at all times was just common sense. It was unlikely that the Covenant of St. George would show up and chase me to Canada, but I needed to keep the option to run as open as I could.

“Good. We need to leave for Australia as soon as we can. My folks have said that cost isn’t an issue, which means they’re fronting the tickets for the both of us. They need me, and I need someone who’s got some idea of what we’re dealing with.” Shelby paused. “I didn’t ask if you’d come. Will you come?”

The words “what we’re dealing with” seemed to freeze the air around them, making the situation perfectly clear. I still raised a hand, gesturing for her to slow down, and said, “Hang on. Why, exactly, are we going to Australia?”

I knew what she was going to say. I still needed to hear the words. If there was any chance that I was wrong . . .

Shelby grimaced before she said weakly, “I suppose I didn’t say that either. We’re going to Australia because there’s an outbreak near Brisbane. Werewolves, Alex. Werewolves in Australia, which is not a place werewolves are meant to be. We’re an island ecosystem, we can’t handle that sort of thing as easily as a place that has more resiliency to its biosphere.”

I wasn’t wrong. “The biosphere of Australia can kick most other biospheres right out of the party,” I said. “Still, you’re right. The lycanthropy virus isn’t supposed to be there.” The thought was enough to make my stomach sour and my head spin. Rabies and lycanthropy had been kept out of Australia for centuries, thanks to careful border maintenance. If those borders were starting to fail, the whole continent could be at risk.

But that didn’t mean I had to be the one who took care of it. Werewolves terrified me, had terrified me since the one time I’d been forced to deal with a pack of them. They were worse than anything else I could think of in the cryptid world—worse even than petrifactors, like my basilisks, or telepathic predators, like my cousin and grandmother. All a cuckoo could do was twist you to their will and then kill you. All a basilisk or gorgon could do was turn you into lawn statuary.

Werewolves would unmake you, and make you over again in their own image. It was the ultimate loss of self, and the thought made my blood go cold.

Shelby looked at me anxiously. “So you’ll come? You’ll come to Australia?”

“Shelby, I don’t think—”

“Because it’s my family, you see, and they’re in danger. It’s not like we can evacuate the continent, and I’m not going to say ‘sorry, you’re on your own’ when they’re calling me for help. But I don’t want to go alone, Alex. Please don’t make me go alone.”

She looked at me pleadingly. I looked back, every inch of me screaming that this was a terrible idea. Then I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to nod.

“We’ll need to set it up with zoo management. After that, I’ll have to make some calls. We’re going to want people in customs who can look the other way about our bags, and we’re going to want them on both ends.” Neither of us liked to travel unarmed. More importantly, there’s no vaccine for lycanthropy-w, and I wasn’t going into a known outbreak without the herbal and chemical remedies that we knew could make a difference in preventing infection. Australia had good reasons for their strict bans on carrying fruit and dairy products into the country. We were going to have to find a way around them, at least where powdered aconite and dried mistletoe berries were concerned. Better safe than sorry, especially in a situation like this.

“I can handle the Australian end if you can manage the US end,” Shelby said.

“As long as we fly out of New York, I can manage things here,” I said. “Verity made a lot of contacts in the area who will help us out.”

“You still haven’t said. Does this mean you’ll come?”

Maybe she was like me: maybe she needed to hear the words. I nodded again, this time slowly, as if my head had become too heavy to hold upright. “It means I think I have to.”

Werewolves both do and don’t exist. They’re one of the great conundrums of the cryptid world, and one of the greatest failures of the Covenant of St. George, which may have—accidentally—created them.