“ ‘The Code is the Way,’ ” I quoted the Code of Thought. “ ‘It is Order among Chaos; it is sanity amidst the oblivion. ’ ” He glanced in my direction. Surprised, Your Majesty? Yes, I did read it. Many times over. “Without the Code, the shapechangers lose their balance. The Beast overwhelms them, compelling them to murder and cannibalize their victims. Consumption of human flesh triggers a cataclysmic hormonal response. Violent tendencies, paranoia, and sexual urge shoot into overdrive, and a shapechanger degenerates into a loup—a psychopath that engages in every perversion involving blood and sex that a human mind can imagine. A human mind can imagine quite a bit.”

I was definitely tired now. Slowly I slid down and sat on the floor. Screw him, if he wanted to stand over me, so be it. “I was at Moses Creek when the Guild busted Sam Buchanan’s compound of horrors,” I said.

Like a servant overly eager to please, my mind thrust a memory before me. The front yard of Buchanan’s holdout, past the trenches and the mud wall from which his deranged pack had sprayed shotgun blasts at us. Fall grass strewn with bodies of dead loups, a kiddy inflatable pool—blue with yellow ducks—full of blood and clumpy pale strings of entrails, and a woman, naked and bloody, black holes gaping where her eyes once were. Her hands spread before her, she stumbles on the corpses, searching blindly, grabbing the trunk of a pine for support, and calling, her voice barely above a whisper, “Megan! Megan!” And us, two dozen mercs in battle gear, unable to tell her of the tiny dark-haired body hanging from a noose in the branches of the tree to which she clings.

I clenched my teeth.

“Bad memories?” Curran asked.

“You have no idea,” I said hoarsely and remembered whom I was talking to. “But then you probably do.”

I shook my head, flinging the memories from me like a wet dog shakes off water. That was my third job with the Guild. I was nineteen and the nightmares were still vivid. And Buchanan had gotten away, ran into the woods while we pounded his berserk loups into wet mush. We never caught him. Knowing that was worse than any nightmare.

Curran was watching me. I opened my mouth to ask him why hadn’t he done something about that rabid loup and then remembered that Jackson County had barred the Pack from interfering. That was six years ago. Today they would not dare.

My mouth was open so I said, “What does any of it have to do with Derek?”

“Derek’s parents were Southern Baptist separatists. He was the oldest son and allowed to attend school. For a while at least, until his father had gone deeper into religion. He remembers burning books in the front yard, Dr. Seuss and Sendak.”