He broke into a run, club swinging over his head. At the same moment, bird-man flew at me again. I wheeled out of bird-man’s path, and front-kicked club-man. My foot caught him square in the groin…and a blow that would have sent most men to their knees barely tottered him back a step. Obviously that particular vulnerability no longer worked here. Damn.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw bird-man coming again. I side-kicked him out of the way, then drove my fist into club-man’s gut. As he doubled over, I wrenched the club from his hand and whipped it aside.

“You use weapons and I will, too,” I said. “And you won’t like the ones I’ve got.”

As club-man recovered, I saw a shape move to my left and wheeled to see another man circling us, head cocked to the side, frowning as he watched me, trying to figure out what I was. I turned on club-man…and an arm grabbed me from behind. I flew off my feet. Teeth clamped into my right shoulder. I yelped, more from the shock of feeling pain than from the pain itself.

The teeth dug in harder. I slammed my fist into my attacker’s face. His head flew back, taking a chunk of my shoulder with it. As pain coursed through me, my attacker leapt at me again. I grabbed him and flipped him off me. It was the man from inside the cottage—the young one with the sharpened teeth.

I quickstepped back against the door, keeping my opponents where I could see them. Four now…and a fifth was slowly approaching from the far end of the road.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” asked the man who’d been circling us. “And what can we do with it?”

“That noise,” the club-man said, licking his lips. “The loud noise. Make it do that again.”

The fourth man’s mouth stretched in a thin smile and he slid something from the back of his waistband…a blade lashed with a dried vine onto a wooden handle. The blade was stone, chiseled into a knifepoint, like something an archeologist would dig up. How deeply did the need have to go to fashion such a weapon?

The young man with the sharpened canines growled. The werewolf—I knew that now. Unable to change forms, but the wolf’s instinct still running so deep that he slept in a dog’s bed and sharpened his teeth to fangs, making the brand of weapon he understood. What supernatural instincts had the others retained?