Niko didn’t pause to consider. Suspicion, distrust, it made her unworthy of sparring or conversation. And he was done with pretending. “ Cal.”

I went. He was right. The Plague of the World came first. Chances, for Delilah and me, came second.

When I made it back to the car, I had hair wet from water from a bathroom sink and smelled of industrial-strength soap good for ridding the restaurant workers of E. coli. It was good for sweat too. As I climbed into the back of the car, Catcher regarded me with a horror that had him nearly climbing into his cousin’s lap. Auphe combined with the smell of twenty lemon groves mixed with bleach must’ve been worse than straight Auphe. Before Rafferty could complain about it, I put out a hand to Robin and said disgruntledly, “Give me the spray. I can’t take the bitching.”

“Speaking of bitching”-Rafferty elbowed his cousin off him and back between us-“your friend Delilah, if you can call any Kin a friend, is getting on my last goddamn nerve. Our families cut ties with our Kin relatives before we were born. We don’t deal with the criminal trash we’re related to. Having to listen to one we don’t even share blood with is more of a pain in the ass than I’m willing to deal with. And I won’t have anything to do with her and her freak All Wolf.”

It was rare I heard the name of the cult, the All Wolf, the Wolves who bred for the recessive traits, hoping someday to get their descendants back to the very beginning. All wolf all the time, even in thought-wanting what Catcher was trying so desperately to get rid of. Up until Catcher in fact, Delilah had been sort of the equivalent of a lapsed Catholic when it came to the All Wolf. She might have had partial wolf vocal cords and who knew what else inside, but she was pure human on the outside. Her faith in the All Wolf was limited until she met Catcher. Then she was born again, raise your paws high, brothers and sisters.

“So get her to back off,” Rafferty added curtly, “or I’ll put her ass in a coma until this is all over with. Got it?” He was sounding more and more like Suyolak all the time… and, hell, maybe that was the way it had to be for him to win.

Catcher didn’t seem to agree, giving a mournful-sounding moan, but, yeah, I got it. Rafferty had enough to deal with. So did I, but I’d created the problem by letting Delilah come along, and I’d deal with it. I watched as Delilah rode out of the parking lot ahead of us. Later. I’d deal with it later.

But later turned out to be a little inconvenient.

It was around seven when Rafferty came out of another light doze. I was driving by now, spelling Nik. Robin and Salome were still up front. Everybody thought it best to avoid another Salome/Catcher throw down. Goodfellow, on the other hand, was in the middle of what looked like a mental meltdown. “She was comely,” he’d been muttering over and over, so many times I was tempted to slam my head against the steering wheel to knock myself unconscious. “Why did I deny her? Deny myself?” Then he would focus on me. “She was comely, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, her hair was nice, neat; she combed it a lot, but that wasn’t what I was really looking at,” I responded.

He’d regarded me with disbelief and turned his need for psychotherapy on Niko as I’d planned. I wasn’t going to make any great breakthroughs in science or literature or even in the field of hangman obviously, but I’d been homeschooled by Niko. I knew what the word “comely” meant. I just didn’t have to admit it. I was thinking how it was worth the revenge Nik was bound to visit upon me, when Rafferty woke up and said sharply, “The next exit. Take the next exit.”

“What? Our Suyolak- napper go off the beaten path?” I asked.

“Yes, damn it. Now take the exit!”

It was getting more than a little weird not being the only foulmouthed, grouchy ass around. Maybe that was a reminder to me not to travel, to build no more gates-so I could retain my title as chief asshole on this cross-country trek. No more good moods for me if I wanted to retain my title. “Taking it already, Fluffy. Don’t go frothing at the mouth. They shoot your type for that, you know.”

The next exit happened to be yet another tiny town over the state line into Wyoming. It had a four-way stop, a post office, and a Dairy Queen coming soon-the big time. I didn’t see a single reason for making a pit stop or detouring here unless your rent payment was massively overdue and you needed stamps. Or you were a vegan witch who wanted to salt the earth of the junk- food giant before it was built. Curse the land and save some cows.

But I didn’t believe in magic or that Suyolak and his driver were that desperate to mail anything. Neither did Niko. “Why here?” he said from the seat behind me. “It’s early to stop for the night. Even if Suyolak is draining his kidnapper of life bit by bit, I can’t see him stopping this soon.”

“I don’t know. All I do know is they came this way and I can smell the sickness ahead. Somewhere is Suyolak’s taint, and people are either dead or dying. The son of a bitch is here.”

He was the healer. “Which way?” I demanded.

It was left and through the four-way stop, the adrenaline of that world-drawing tourist attraction was killing me there. We then turned onto another road, another, and finally onto gravel followed by dirt. It had taken a good half hour, if not longer.

The rearview mirror was empty. Abelia and her buddies had stopped on the gravel at least a mile back, not that they couldn’t have gotten farther. They could have, but after the zombie amoebas, they were giving us more space. Abelia might have the biggest baddest ovaries around-probably shot them at her enemies like cannon balls, but her clan members weren’t as tough as she was, and if anyone died a gruesome death, she would most definitely prefer it was us. And Delilah was annoyed enough that she’d kept going when we’d gotten off the interstate. But that didn’t bother me. Just as her possibly trying to kill me didn’t bother me. She was Kin, doing what Kin did. I’d gone into this whole thing-sex, part-time relationship-with open eyes. I didn’t have much right to bitch, and I didn’t have to feel anything I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t. That was that. My story, write it down.

I parked the car in front of a house surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere. The driveway was packed dirt and longer than two city blocks. The whole thing should’ve been run-down and creepy, with broken windows, holes in the roof, a rotting clapboard, Halloween-style haunted house with a skeletal body or two down an abandoned well out back. It wasn’t. It was painted cheery yellow with pristine white shutters and some kind of flowers, blue and purple, surrounding the porch. There was even a rocking chair as immaculately painted as the shutters. I did not want to see Suyolak here, not in this impossibly cheerful house under an equally impossibly blue sky. I’d never be able to watch a Hallmark commercial again… because I spent so much time doing that anyway, but still. Nobody should be sick here. They should be gardening or some such shit. Playing with their golden retriever. Baking cookies. Washing their car. Not dying among the scent of blue and purple flowers.

But as grim as that might be, it wasn’t actually the point. “I don’t see a truck and I don’t see a coffin,” I said. As harsh as it was, we couldn’t stop every time Suyolak took a civilian down. If we did, we could lose him. If we did, he’d know, and he’d make sure we lost him by dropping everyone he could.

There was a rumbling growl behind me, throat vibrating and air ripping, and it wasn’t Catcher. “He’s here.” Rafferty vaulted over the door with wolf speed, but still in human form. Catcher was right behind him. Both hit the door at the same time and it went down in a shattered mess of wood and safety glass.

Salome was moving too-out of the car and then under it. Considering the number of revenants she’d taken down, that was not a good sign. I ignored it, though, and, with Niko and Robin, was on the porch and inside the house in seconds.