“That doesn’t match the data we have on werewolves,” I said, a sick feeling starting to form in the pit of my stomach. “I think we’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“What’s that?” Shelby sounded weary. I turned to see her standing behind us. She had replaced her bloodstained shirt with one pilfered from the clothing we’d moved into my temporary room. It hung around her like a shroud, save where it caught on the slope of her breasts and became slightly, distractingly too small. She smelled like strawberry shampoo and industrial soap.

“How’s your father?” I asked.

“Stable. He’s kicked everyone out of the room except for Mum, and they’re having a serious talk. There’s going to be a flood of people through here as soon as everyone finishes regrouping. Raina’s locked herself in the hall toilet. I think Gabby wants to do the same, except there’s only one hall toilet. We still don’t know who sent us to the meadow, and now everyone’s so upset that I don’t see how I’ll be able to get them asking again, which puts it all on me.” Shelby shook her head. “It’s a mess, Alex, it’s a stupid, horrible mess, and I don’t know how we’re going to clean it up. What was the terrible mistake?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Just as I came out here you said that we’d made a terrible mistake, and I know you’re not as dumb as you sometimes want people to think you are, so whatever it was, it’s something you don’t want to say in front of me.” Shelby wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to ward off a chill, even though it was a pleasant, even balmy night. “What mistake? What did we get wrong?”

“Ah.” I put my ginger beer aside and stood, trying to collect my thoughts. I would have had to tell her what I’d realized eventually: that was the nature of both our work and our relationship. Secrets get people killed. But I’d been hoping, on some level, to have a few minutes to work things through on my own. “Remember when I said that most werewolves were killed within the first month after their infection, when we followed the trail of carnage back to their lairs and put them down for their own sake?”

Shelby’s expression hardened. “Yes,” she said coldly, and I immediately regretted my words. Until we knew whether Riley was going to successfully fight off the infection, talking about werewolves in such absolutist terms was going to be a minefield.

“Helen just pointed something out to me. Lycanthropy began as a therianthrope disease, and therianthropes aren’t beasts when transformed. They may have different instincts—the mind is to some degree a plaything of the body—but they’re still people.” What I was about to say went against everything I had been raised to believe, and I had to wonder on some level whether my grandfather had known. Grandma Alice always said Grandpa Thomas was the smartest man she’d ever met, and he was the one who’d written most of our response plans for werewolf attacks. He’d also known, by then, that we were morally opposed as a family to anything that smacked of killing people for the crime of being dangerous.

Had he understood that werewolves were too dangerous to coexist with humans, thanks to the disease that made them, and written his instructions accordingly? He’d married into the family. He’d helped to shape it, both with his genes and with his teachings. But he’d never quite embraced the Healy line’s odd form of pacifism.

“What are you saying?” asked Shelby slowly.

“I’m saying that therianthropes are people when they’re transformed because they were people to begin with. We’ve always believed that werewolves became animals when they transformed, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the problem is that we’ve always been dealing with new werewolves, who were still disoriented and panicked by their own transformations, and hence reacted like animals.” And then there were the actual animals to be considered. Turning into a wolf didn’t make a sheep or a cow any smarter—and once they had reached the stage of fully transforming, we wouldn’t be able to tell them from a werewolf that started out as a human being. All werewolves looked essentially the same in their lupine forms, and they didn’t change back after they were killed. So every infected animal reinforced the idea that werewolves were irrational killing machines, and meanwhile, we continued to ignore the threat of werewolves that had originally belonged to sapient species. Their heads might be muddled when they first got sick, but after . . .

After, they would be able to plan, if they lived long enough. They would be able to consider their actions, and adjust their tactics according to the way the people around them reacted. They would learn. And through it all, they would be motivated by two desires: to survive, and to spread. We knew from our interactions with lycanthropes of all kinds that they shared that much at least, regardless of their starting species or how long they had been infected. All lycanthropes wanted to spread the disease that had created them.

“Wait,” said Shelby. “I thought you said werewolves couldn’t think. That they were just dumb, violent animals. That’s what you said.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “We know the disease makes them short-tempered and angry, and we know they want to spread their infection—that’s one of the major goals of any disease, and the various strains of lycanthropy are no different. But I think we can safely say, looking at what the werewolves here in Australia have been doing, that they’re not just dumb animals. They’re still capable of at least some degree of planning and tactical thinking while they’re in their lupine forms.”

“I’d guess the initial confusion probably lasts for two transformation cycles, maybe three,” said Helen.

“That would account for eighty percent of the people infected with lycanthropy. Most werewolves don’t make it past their first full cycle, much less two more,” I said grimly. “We kill them when they’re at their most bestial, and we never realize they could remember how to think. We’ve been winnowing out the most primitive werewolves from outbreak after outbreak, for centuries. How long had the outbreak been going on before we got here?”

“At least a month,” said Shelby slowly. “We don’t know when it started. It’s not like the werewolves sent a card to let anyone know that they’d arrived in Australia.”