“Someone needs to bring the body to my room,” I said quietly. “The mice will have funeral arrangements to make, and rituals to observe. Now, if you will all excuse me, I need to go and explain to my colony’s head priest how I’ve failed them.”

Shelby dropped her hands. “Alex—” she began.

I shook my head. She stopped. “I failed them,” I repeated, and walked through the open front door, the remaining Aeslin mice a small, shivering weight in my palm.

The door to my room was open when I reached the second floor. The mice were nowhere to be seen. I stepped fully inside, took a deep breath, and said, “I need to see you, please. Come out. It’s important.”

“All right, mate,” said Cooper, in an exaggerated Australian drawl. I had time to turn toward his voice, a look of horror spreading across my face. Then something was clapped over my nose and mouth, and the smell of chloroform obscured everything else. The last thing I saw was Cooper’s smile, broad as a Cheshire cat’s, and twice as dangerous. Then my vision went black, and Cooper, along with everything else, was gone.

Sixteen

“Ah, ambushes. Those take me back. The best ones are the ones that start with chloroform and handcuffs, and end with death threats and knives. And by ‘best’ I mean ‘most irritating,’ you understand.”

—Thomas Price

Waking up in an unknown location that is hopefully still in Queensland, Australia, but might as well be on the moon

WAKING UP WITH A chloroform headache wasn’t a new experience for me, and hadn’t been since I was eight years old and my father spent the better part of a summer ambushing me at various points around the property. (When I got good enough at avoiding him to go a week without being knocked unconscious through some mechanism or another, he called his mother to come spend the rest of the summer with us. Waking up to the sight of Grandma Alice grinning maniacally while she cleaned her guns was sobering, and more than a little disturbing, in a “maybe my parents should not have been allowed to have children” sort of way.)

After taking a few shallow breaths to be sure my head wasn’t going to explode at the slightest provocation, I dared to sit up a little straighter. The motion betrayed the fact that I was strapped to whatever it was I was sitting on; my wrists and ankles were no doubt restrained as well, if the numbness in my extremities meant anything. People who weren’t in the habit of taking hostages always made things too tight, at least at first. It was like they didn’t care about loss of circulation and gangrene.

Oh, wait. They probably didn’t care.

“Are you awake, or are you just having a dream about your pretty girlfriend? It’s been three hours. That’s long enough for a sleep.” The voice was Cooper’s; judging by his calm, conversational tone, he was no more than five feet away. Something nudged my calf, causing my numb ankle to rub painfully against something that felt like a length of twine. They definitely weren’t worrying about my losing circulation. Either they weren’t planning to keep me for long, or they didn’t care whether I ever walked again.

It’s a sad fact of my line of work—cryptozoology, not herpetology—that waking up tied to an unidentified piece of furniture, being held captive by a werewolf, was nowhere near as upsetting as the idea that I could have been unconscious long enough to need medical attention before I’d be able to stand unassisted. That was just disrespectful.

“Hey.” My calf was nudged again. I adjusted my thoughts on where Cooper was in the room. Since he was apparently kicking me, he was probably a lot closer than five feet. “Now I know chloroform doesn’t last this long, and I know you’ve probably built up some sort of resistance to the stuff, so why don’t you go ahead and stop playing dead? Unless you’d like me to start taking off fingers as an incentive to opening your eyes.”

“Did you jump to violence this fast before you became a werewolf, or is it a side effect of the infection?” My voice came out slightly slurred. I swallowed hard to try to get the dry, cottony feeling out of my mouth, licked my lips, and continued more clearly, “I am genuinely interested. For science, if nothing else.”

“I think it’s a side effect. But it’s one I’m capable of controlling, as long as I’m given a good reason to. You’re not giving me very many good reasons, Covenant boy. I’d start, if I were you.”

I opened my eyes. As expected, Cooper was standing in front of me, a frown on his face. He did not, it seemed, care for my continued disrespect. Poor him. My parents raised me to be polite and considerate of others. They did not, however, raise me to be particularly respectful of people who thought that drugging me and tying me to a—I took a quick glance to the side—to a chair was a good way to start a conversation.

Cooper was expected. The four people standing behind him were somewhat less so. Chloe Bryant—the woman with the face of a swimsuit model, and the attitude of a pissed-off bus driver—was one of them. That wasn’t a surprise. I vaguely recognized two of the remaining three; they’d been around the Thirty-Six Society compound, although neither of them had done anything to really stand out. They had been backgrounders, extras in the great adventure that had been my time in Australia. The fourth . . .

My eyes focused on him for almost a second before they processed what they were seeing and transmitted that information to my brain, which really didn’t want to accept it. Sadly, denial is not a strong suit of mine. I lunged against the ropes that held me, sending the chair rocking forward before it thudded back to the floor. The twine dug into my ankles, and the thicker rope that was tied around my waist and throat threatened to knock the wind out of me.

The tall, broad-shouldered man with the obviously broken nose took a step backward, eyes going wide, before he realized I wasn’t magically breaking free of my bonds and coming after him. Then he grinned, the slow, sly smile of a man who suddenly felt like nothing could threaten him. “Yeah, I thought not,” he said. “Not so tough now, are you?”

“Mick, you idiot.” Chloe smacked him in the back of the head. He flinched away, sulking at her. I made a note of his mulish expression. He was the low man on their totem pole, then, the one who was most likely to yield to pressure. That was good to know, even as I still felt the burning desire to slit his throat for what he’d done to my mouse.