The man was on the floor, blood pouring from a bullet wound—either Jones’s gun had been a bigger caliber and gone through the door, or it had gone through the wall. His gun lay on the floor beside him, and his hand couldn’t get a grip on it.

“Tiger, tiger burning bright,” he stuttered, looking at Adam as he choked on his own blood. “In the forest … in the forest.” He drew in a breath, looked Adam in the eye, and said again, quite clearly, “Forest.” His body convulsed once more, then he lay still.

Did He who made the lamb make thee? Adam responded silently with the appropriate line. It was a question that he held dearly: Had God made werewolves? How could He have done so and still be benevolent?

Adam stared at the man until a stray sound reminded him that, William Blake’s poetry aside, all of the Cantrip agents weren’t dead yet.

He called out to his pack, summoning them to the last of the hunt. They came, stumbling and slow, and mostly in wolf form now. The change would help them fight off the effects of the drugs. Warren, Darryl, and a couple of others held on to their humanity. They stopped when they saw him waiting at the top of the stairs.

Warren’s nostril’s flared, and Darryl ran a hand over his mouth. Adam looked at Honey, and the golden wolf swayed a little. He caught her eye, then glanced behind him to send her hunting.

Only when her impassioned snarl behind him signaled that she’d found what he’d sent her after, did he step aside and motion the rest of the pack on by. When the last of them had passed him, he started his change back to human. There had been a landline in the planning office. His change was faster than usual—whether due to Mercy’s meddling or the killing field he’d made of the ground floor of the winery, he didn’t care to speculate.

The phone worked, which was nice, because otherwise he’d have had to use one of the Cantrip agents’ phones, and with the taste of the hunt on his tongue, that would have been unwise.

He called Mercy first. He needed to hear her voice to remind him that he was not entirely a killer, not entirely a monster. But her cell rang three times. And then a recorded voice informed him that her line was unavailable. He fought down instinctive panic.

She was smart, she would have destroyed her phone to keep them from tracking her. If she were dead, he would know.

Human form or not, he was still too close to the monster who had ripped a door apart for being a door, and that monster needed to hear his mate. He took a deep breath and thought human thoughts for a few minutes.