Ru paused in stripping the sterile wrapper from an oversize bandage. "Is this a 'we should get a life and go on vacation' speech?"

"What?"

Ru shrugged and gingerly pressed the bandage in place. "The line of reasoning usually goes: He let a petty criminal define his life, he should have moved on, all that money and he never kicks back and enjoys it, let's go to Bermuda."

"You missed that he should at least have bought a few politicians and pushed through stronger gun-control laws and three-strikes-you're-out programs."

"Oh, yeah, that too."

Atticus considered the battered neighborhood around the Alewife train station's parking garage, bleak and cold with autumn rain. "Yeah, Bermuda might be a good idea, but that wasn't the point I was trying to get to."

"It wasn't?"

"No. I never told you this, but I've always hated Batman because he's racist. At least in the new canon."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he distrusts Superman because he's not human. Sure, he'll fuck Catwoman, a cheap petty criminal, but trust an alien that has done nothing but risk his life for others, nope, nope, can't do it."

"Sooo?"

"Well, it doesn't stop him from joining the Justice League and fighting with Superman."

"And this relates how?" Ru asked.

"I don't trust Zheng to tell me the truth. Superman, when he needed to know about who he really was, he retreated to Fortress of Solitude and sought knowledge from the source."

Ru busied himself putting away the bandages, radiating unease.

"What?"

"Atty . . . you know . . . sometimes it worries me that you get your moral guidance from comic books."

"Where else am I going to go? Everything else assumes you're human."

" Sou desu." It was a Japanese phrase meaning "that is so," which neither agreed or disagreed with the speaker, just confirmed the facts.

"I need to talk to the Dog Warriors."

"They know you're a DEA agent."

"Yeah, but there's a bigger picture here that I'm not seeing, and I think not knowing is going to get me killed."

***

Ponkapoag Camp—once they figured out how to spell it—proved to be an eighty-five-hundred-acre wildlife reservation just fifteen miles from Boston. Its Web site claimed that the campground was a collection of twenty rustic cabins dotting the shore of Ponkapoag Pond.

As he drew close to the reservation, he could feel the Dog Warriors, a hard, angry knot of Pack presence. There were motorcycles lining the campground's road, dozens of them, and an occasional pickup truck. Men walked the road, reluctantly moving to the edge to let him pass. They wore leather jackets, and the club badges identified them as various New England motorcycle clubs, from Gold Wing Riders to Hell's Angels.

The Pack was having a party.

The partygoers had built a bonfire on the edge of Ponkapoag Pond, the flames reflecting in the dark water. The bikers had brought a portable stereo, and it thumped out, ironically enough, "Smoke on the Water."

Atticus pulled in and got out of the Jaguar. Coming now felt like a mistake. He was glad, though, that he'd been able to talk Ru into staying with Kyle, playing his backup instead of his voice. He wanted to be alone when he heard all the dark secrets the Pack might tell him.

"Hey." Someone—a regular human—shone a flashlight onto the Jaguar, seeking him out. "This is a private party."

"And he's invited," a voice rumbled out of the dark. The flashlight flicked to the speaker, and hit Rennie Shaw as he drifted out of the shadows. The light reflected in his eyes with the greenish gleam of a wild dog's. There was a bullet hole in Shaw's leather jacket—a reminder of the Dog Warrior's intervention that afternoon. "This is our Boy."

The light jumped back to Atticus, finding his face. He squinted against the glare, as his eyes had been getting accustomed to the dark.

"Oh, I see," the wielder of the flashlight said, and the light snapped off.

The hairs on the back of Atticus's neck rose. Am I that much like them?

"Mouthpiece said you might be coming around, Boy." Shaw motioned that Atticus was to follow.

"You're having a party?" Atticus covered his disquiet.

"We're having a Gathering of the clans." To the bikers, Shaw called back. "Nothing happens to the car, or you'll be the ones we track down."

"Does that mean we have to stand here and guard it?" One of them whined, and was immediately cuffed by the man standing beside him.

"Okay, Rennie," the wielder of the flashlight said. "You can count on us—sir."

"Hell's Angels calling you sir." Atticus murmured as he and Shaw moved into the woods. "That's pathetic."

"They have their uses. Mostly that the cops have to wade through them to get to us."

There were knots of parties scattered through the campground; the largest concentration of people being down by the bonfire. He could feelsolitary Pack members moving through the crowds like herd dogs. It surprised him that he recognized some as they brushed against his awareness.

The humans carried flashlights, or stumbled through darkness. He and Shaw moved quietly through the trees, eyes growing accustomed to the dark, the night becoming vivid grays.

Atticus eyed the bullet hole in Shaw's jacket, the leather scorched by the muzzle flare, tainted slightly by burned blood. Shaw showed no sign, though, of being wounded. The Dog Warriors must heal as readily as himself—or perhaps faster, like the Ontongard. Still, it had to hurt. "Thanks for the save."

"We're your family. You're our Boy."

Another time, Atticus would have snapped a denial to that, but now . . . what did he know? "Am I?"

"Here. Take my hand." Shaw paused to hold out his right hand, as if to shake. "Go on. I don't bite—much."

Atticus reluctantly reached out and took Shaw's hand. The fingers closed like a steel trap on his, holding him tight.

"Do you know how to use those senses of yours?" Shaw asked. "Can you feel down deep to the pattern of life?"

During their fight on the beach, Atticus had sensed that Shaw wasn't human, but hadn't focused on how. Now, without distraction, he could study Shaw's genetic pattern. Whereas his own DNA was one smooth pattern, alien as it was, Shaw's was a mass of confusion. There was a scant human part—like a veneer—of a tall, lean, Anglo-Saxon man. Under the man, though, ran a thread of wolf and mouse, and then, like a raging river under it all, was something fully alien. Yet he could find familiar landmarks, similarities that lay in himself.

His family.

"So what are you to me? Uncle? Cousin? Brother?"

"The answer isn't that simple."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't reproduce like humans." Shaw started to walk again.

"How do you reproduce?"

"Actually, as little as possible."

After a minute of silence, it became obvious that Shaw wasn't going to elaborate. He tried another line of questions. "What happened after you put me on the train?"

"Do you really want to know? It's a grisly tale."

"Yes, I do."

"We had the advantage of numbers. Eighteen to four."

Eighteen? Then the Dog Warriors weren't there in full force. Zheng must still have her Pack backup. And four was wrong too.

"There were six." Though Atticus did leave the one drugged, possibly dead, on the docks.