I had to ask: Was this supposed to be literal? Did this really happen at the dawn of civilization, inhuman demons lumbering across the landscape, doing battle? Or was it a metaphor, and if so, a metaphor for what? I’d spent a lot of time discovering how many of those old stories of gods, demons, witches, vampires—werewolves—and magic were true. Not all the stories were. So much of an ancient myth like this was metaphor that was repeated across stories and cultures. What metaphor was the Tiamat cult worshipping? How far would they go to get me?

I had to get my mind off this or I’d completely freeze up. I pulled out my cell phone and hit speed dial.

“What’s wrong?” Ben said, before hello, even. Just the sound of his voice made my shoulders relax a notch. He was okay, no one had gotten him.

Smiling, I said, “You always assume something’s wrong.”

He chuckled. “Because it usually is.”

“Nothing’s wrong. This time,” I said, hating the whine in my voice. “At least, I don’t think it’s anything. It’s dark. I got lonely.”

“Are you on the way home?”

“Yeah.” Finally, I reached my car. I took one last look around, up and down the street, at parked cars, hunched buildings, and weird shadows cast by old streetlamps. Anything could be hiding here. Rick’s patterns, waiting to strike. My nose wasn’t helping. All I smelled was oil, concrete, city.

“Nothing’s gone after you yet, it probably won’t start right this minute,” Ben said. He was a lawyer, always the practical one, able to rationalize just about anything.

“It’s waiting for me to let my guard down.”

“Is your guard down?”

Safe in my car, I said, “How would I know? Though if my guard was down, I suppose I’d stop thinking about it. I kind of like that idea.”

“Just hurry home. I haven’t seen you all day.” I heard the twinge in his voice. He couldn’t hide it. He was nervous, too.

“Roger,” I said and waited for him to hang up before I did.

We were a pack, and we needed to be together, so I raced home, maybe a little faster than was safe. Wolf needed her pack, after all.

Chapter 3

A couple of days before my next show, when I would tag along with the Paradox PI team, we had a full moon to get through.

I stood at the front door and called back to Ben. “Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Stop nagging, I’m coming.” He marched from the bedroom, with no revealing evidence of what had delayed him.

“I’m not nagging,” I complained. Nagged, actually. We were late. The sun was setting. We were due in the mountains soon. With my luck, we’d get stuck in traffic on the way there. Shift into wolves behind the dash of my hatchback. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

“Yes, you are.” Ben joined me and dropped a kiss on my forehead.

“You think that makes everything better?” But the warm flush in my gut said that yes, it did make things quite a bit better.

What all the stories and romances don’t say is that happily ever after doesn’t just happen. You have to work at it. You have to keep working at it.

We still argued.

“I don’t want to do this,” he said as we made our way to the car. By “this” he meant the full-moon ritual that drew our werewolf pack together, to Change, to run, to hunt. To stop being human.

“You say that every time.”

“And it’s true every time.”

“But do you have to keep saying it?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like it,” he said, almost cutting.

“So do you, and that’s why you insist on saying you hate it.”

“Ah, in with the pop psychology.”

“That’s me,” I said happily. He grumbled wordlessly.

We drove in a stretch of silence until we reached I-70.

“I miss the old days,” Ben said suddenly. “When it was just the two of us.”

The old days. Our pack of two. We’d Change, run, hunt together as a pair. Sleep curled together, wake human, naked, in the great outdoors. Aroused, inhibitions lowered to nothing—we’d spent some very nice mornings together, after full-moon nights.

“Maybe we can sneak off for a little while. The rest of the pack won’t miss us.” I smiled thinking of it.

Ben wore the same dreamy smile. “Hmm. Makes me almost look forward to it.”

On the drive into the mountains, I watched the rearview mirror, waiting to see someone following us. No one did, and we arrived at our destination. One of these days someone in a uniform was going to discover this wooded field at the end of a remote dirt track filled with cars at midnight on full-moon nights. I hadn’t figured out a better way to get the pack to wilderness. Charter a bus, maybe?

My skin itched, every square millimeter, every pore. The car parked and silent, the world dark around us, I sat in the driver’s seat. Ben sat beside me. Outside, people lingered at the edges of the field, waiting for us.

“I don’t like this,” I said. This was the first full moon since we found the word Tiamat defacing New Moon’s door. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that someone’s watching us.”

Ben shook his head. “We’re a pack. Nothing can get to us if we stick together.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. “You’re supposed to tell me that nothing’s out there, that I’m being paranoid and everything’s going to be fine.”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he said unconvincingly.

Sighing, I got out of the car.

“Hey,” Shaun called to us from the trees. Shaun was, for lack of a better word, our lieutenant, our right-hand wolf. He also managed New Moon for us. Brown-skinned, dark-eyed, he wore a T-shirt and jeans and went barefoot. He was rubbing his arms like he was nervous.

“Is everything okay?” I said. “You see anything, smell anything?”

“Seems clear.” But he shook his head and sounded uncertain.

The forest didn’t look any different. The conifers stood tall and black against a sky painted deep, deep blue by moonlight. The moon sang to my sensitive ears. It’s time. Maybe it was a matter of expectation. We were expecting something to happen, something wrong and dangerous, and so we looked through the trees and saw more danger than was really there.