“You don’t sound too torn up about it.” “Hunts forever” was the werewolf polite way of saying “He’s passed on” rather than “He’s deader than a rat in a university bio lab.”

“He lost breeding equipment. Speaks not much of his fighting skills. Truth… to me, no difference before he had them than after. Have had better lovers.” I could almost hear her shrug. “Not why I call. They know. Grey found out-you and me. He told Kin… They know.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” The revenant with the loose lips had turned out to be a reliable source. It was gratifying to know that I’d killed him for more than simply the practice and exercise. And I’d known there would be consequences for the Kin’s knowing about Delilah and me. Kin were for Kin. Wolves were for Wolves. Having sex outside your species was damn near anathema for a Wolf. Sleeping with a human was bad enough, but sleeping with a half Auphe was an abomination not to be tolerated.

Someone would have to die for it; at least the Kin would think so. There was no way around it.

“We’re leaving the city on a case, so I don’t think I’ll be much help.” Not that it mattered whether I was in town or out. While I was good, I wasn’t good enough to take on the entire Kin. With thousands of criminal Wolves in NYC alone, who knew how many all over the country, there weren’t enough pepper-spray-wielding mailmen in the entire world to take them all out. Delilah’s brother, Flay, had come up on the bad side of the Kin sometime ago and he’d done the only thing a Wolf could do and survive that.

He ran.

“You going to run? Meet up with Flay?” I didn’t love Delilah. Going with her and living another life on the run, again, wasn’t an option. But if she was gone, I’d miss her sharp humor, her carelessness in the face of violence… because she knew she excelled in that field-Delilah with her masses of white-blond hair, her amber wolf eyes, her softer amber skin. I’d miss her intelligence and ambition, her fearlessness in the face of my Auphe blood, and her willingness to jump me anytime anywhere.

Hey, I was a guy. Grey might have lost his equipment, but I hadn’t lost mine. The jumping part was going to figure into the equation somewhere. It didn’t mean I wouldn’t miss her for the other reasons too.

“No running,” she replied, not sounding as worried as she should have. That was Delilah. There wasn’t a situation she didn’t think she could turn to her advantage or a creature she imagined capable of taking her down. And mostly she was right, but there was also a part of her that was crazy as hell.

“The Kin aren’t going to let this go, Delilah,” I said. She had to know that as well as I did.

She dismissed the grim warning. “I have friends. In many packs. This can be fixed, but good idea to get out of town for a while. Where do you go? I’ll meet you. Help with job, for free even.”

I paused, thinking, then answered, “ Canton, Ohio. An IHOP on Cleveland Avenue. It’s a little more than four hundred miles. We’ll be there in hopefully less than seven hours, depending on Niko’s excuse for a car. Call me when you get there.”

“Seven hours,” she laughed, sounding like rough velvet. “I’ll have meal and five beers by time you come. Little boys riding tricycle.” Still laughing, she disconnected.

I closed my eyes as I leaned my head back against the seat and folded up my phone, feeling Niko’s gaze on me. “You’re looking at me, aren’t you?”

“I am.” His voice was definitely not rough velvet, but unyielding granite.

“Is it a sympathetic look full of brotherly love? You know, the kind that says I have your back? Behind you all the way?” I asked without much optimism.

“No, it is not,” he said evenly.

I kept my eyes shut. The sun-tinged pink-black was preferable to one of Niko’s glacial glares. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t suspicious. I was damn suspicious. Delilah helping on a job for free? That would happen about the same time I caught the Easter Bunny hiding eggs in our loft, but… after all we’d been through, she deserved a chance to prove herself. “But I’m a man now,” I said, “and able to deal with the consequences of my actions. You said so yourself.”

“It appears I was wrong in that respect. Your bringing Kin business, especially this business, along on a job is not the wisest or most mature of moves. In fact, I can’t offhand think of a more dangerous one. I revoke your pretend bar mitzvah. The bris is looking more likely, however.” He started the car and we took off as if there were a jet engine under the hood instead of a thirty-year-old V-8. I felt the two thumps in rapid succession. One was the curb; one wasn’t.

“The werewolf under the car?” I asked.

Robin would’ve seen the wolf slither under there, but would’ve known we would figure it out on our own and not bothered with a warning. I’d smelled it as soon as we’d gotten out of the taxi. Niko would’ve seen a stray strand of fur, a flicker of movement, or tracked a flight of birds across the sky and somehow read in their movements “potential roadkill below.” With my brother, it didn’t matter how. All you had to realize was that he would know.

“Yes, the Wolf under the car,” he confirmed matter-of-factly, “and now you know why I drive big, old cars. A werewolf does very little damage to it when you run one down.” I opened my eyes and turned to see what we’d left on the curb of Robin’s car lot. The car might not have suffered any damage, but the Kin Wolf couldn’t say the same.

The street sweeper was going to have a helluva time with that.

“More than a day for the coffin thief to make it to Canton from the Catskills.” The evening before last the meningitis outbreak had taken place-bacterial meningitis, the bad kind; the kind that tended to kill teenagers in a day, maybe two. “That’s not exactly making good time,” I observed. It should’ve been about an eight-hour drive. “Maybe whoever hired the guys to steal Suyolak came along with them, dumped the muscle when he had the coffin in the truck, and is doing the driving alone.” But still… eight hours a day? If it was as Niko and I had discussed and this guy was hoping to use Suyolak to heal a critically ill relative, he should be in more of a hurry than that.

“If Suyolak started ten or so cases of meningitis here, there’s no telling what he’s done to the men in the truck. They could have deserted. They might be in the hospital here. They might be in the morgue. This is not good news. He’s not out of the coffin; if he were, a few cases of meningitis are the very least of what he could do. But in the coffin… he shouldn’t be able to do anything at all,” Niko said, parking in front of the Canton equivalent of IHOP. Not that Nik would normally ever consider eating at a genuine IHOP, but it was a good central location for Abelia and her own muscle, Delilah, and us all to meet.

“We need to have a chat with the Wicked Bitch of the East then, huh? See what’s up with Suyolak.” I got out of the car. “I’ll go inside and get a paper while you call Abelia and find out where her wrinkled ass is. Call Delilah too, would you? She should’ve been here a long time ago.” It was two. Niko had shaved an hour off the estimate. Maybe he’d been tinkering with the engine, because while the car looked like shit, the thing could move. I patted a growling stomach. It wasn’t only a paper I was going to pick up.

“And when you return with your lard pancakes coated with diabetes-inducing syrup and chemically created whipped cream, perhaps I might give you a foot massage while you dine. We could see what kind of time you make chasing Suyolak on two broken feet,” he offered in a tone so pleasant even the Dalai Lama couldn’t have carried it off. When Niko was pleasant, it was a good idea to look for a safe place to ride out his irritation… I wondered whether they still had bomb shelters.

Niko’s opinion and mood over my inviting Delilah along or allowing her to invite herself had not improved, and that didn’t look like it was going to change any time soon. He had every reason to be pissed. There wasn’t any way this couldn’t end in trouble no matter what Delilah said. But whether it was trouble in New York or trouble wherever we happened to be, it was the same. I wanted it over with. Keeping it hanging over my head only messed with my head. It was almost poetry there and true. I’d learned that lesson more than once.