I settled for my usual braid.

Having rebraided my hair, I paused, considered the arsenal available to me, put on thin wristbands loaded with silver needles, and took nothing else except Slayer. To get clear of two hundred enraged shapechangers I’d need a case of grenades and air support. There was no reason to weigh myself down with extra weapons. Then again, maybe I should take a knife. One knife, as a backup. Okay, two. And that’s it.

Armed and dressed to kill—or rather to die quickly but in style—I went to get the wolf-man and together we took the gloomy staircase down to the street. I held Betsi’s back door open for my guide and he slid into the backseat. As we started out of the parking lot, his claw tapped me on the back and pointed to the left. I took the hint and turned in that direction.

The traffic was light, almost nonexistent. Deserted streets, flooded with a yellow electric radiance, stretched before us. Few people owned cars that ran during tech. There was no need to invest in them, since it was plain that magic was gaining the upper hand.

An ancient blue Honda came to a stoplight in the left turn lane next to us. A man and a woman in the front seat were talking. I couldn’t see the man except for his darkened profile, but the woman’s face wore a blissful, slightly dreamy look as if she was remembering some happy moment. A small brown-haired boy sat in the backseat.

In a moment he would see the monster in my car. I braced myself for a scream.

The boy squinted and grinned. I glanced in the rearview window. The wolf-man was pretending to pant, black lips stretched in a happy canine smile. The gloom of the car hid most of his face and only the muzzle, illuminated by the outside light, and the glowing eyes were visible.

The boy mouthed something that might have been “Good dog.” The light changed and the Honda drove on, vanishing into the night and carrying away the child and his parents, their reminiscing undisturbed.

We drove on, winding our way northeast toward Suwanee. It took us nearly an hour to reach the shapechanger compound and we had to leave the city behind to get there. All but invisible from the highway, the fortress sat in the middle of a clearing, defined by a dense wall of brush and oaks that looked decades older than they had any right to be. The only sign of its existence was a single-lane dirt road that veered so abruptly from the highway that I missed it despite my guide and had to double back.