Handshake had opened with a threat, one that succeeded in making her come here. Now he was trying to position her in such a way that she . . . what? Had to rely on him? Had to do favors for him, or else he would sell her out to some Heroes and watch from the side as she was arrested for maybe being bad?

She hadn’t told him that her morality was set at Villain from the start. She had thought that it was only a bit of bad luck, but increasingly, she was beginning to think that it was a lot worse than she had imagined.

Emily opened her eyes.

“Mister Handshake, are you threatening me?” she asked.

The man’s smile turned ugly. “My, Miss Wright, I’m a businessman. I only want what’s best for both of us.”

“Boss?” Teddy asked.

Emily didn’t know what her . . . companion, summon . . . sister? was asking. But she imagined that Teddy saw the trap just as much as she did. She had to leave, to find a place to think, and maybe find another source of information.

She nodded.

Teddy grinned.

Emily realized that maybe she had made a small mistake at about the same time as Teddy jumped to her feet, and her chair went flying backward.

Between one second and the next, fur bristled all across Teddy’s body, her clothes disappearing into the thick fluff of brown growing out of her. Then Teddy grew, and grew, and kept growing bigger.

An arm as thick around as Emily’s torso shot forward and shoved Handshake into his sofa.

A paw came down on the nearest laptop, four-inch-long nails digging into and through the machine with a spittle of electronics being torn apart.

Emily froze as she took in the massive form of a grizzly bear leaning all the way across the table.

The paw on Handshake’s torso twisted a little, and long white nails poked out and pressed into his button-up shirt.

The bear moved closer to him. “Did you threaten the Boss?” it asked with a voice that sounded like gravel being poured into a tumble dryer.

Emily’s mind returned from its vacation in the little room at the back of her head, where she could scream as loud as she wanted, and snapped back into place. She took in the situation as quickly as she could and drew up a neat little list. At the top was the fact that Teddy was more bearlike than she had imagined.

“Teddy,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm, like her mother when she’d found out her dad had purchased two-hundred-dollar hockey tickets using the family credit card.

The bear turned a head that had to outweigh Emily toward her. The face was huge, with canines longer than Emily’s entire hand, but the eyes—those were Teddy’s placid brown eyes. “Yeah, Boss?”

“Please don’t kill Mister Handshake. This place has rules.”