“How did you steal—” said Guayota—and then Adam was there, a great blue-silver wolf. Adam and Warren and Honey, who landed on Guayota at the same time, their fury as bright and shining as Guayota had ever been.

“Screw me and stake me out.” Gary’s voice was in my ear. “I think she’s dead. How could she be burned this badly and not be dead?” He was talking about me, I realized, but I didn’t remember getting burned. Coyote had told me my neck was broken. Gary was still talking. “I’ve sent back steaks that were this overdone. Mercy?”

There were other noises in the background: growls and howls and cries of pain.

“Not dead yet,” I told Gary. I had to say it again before he understood me.

He huffed half a laugh. “Finally found a sibling I could stand to talk to for more than ten minutes, and…” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I gotta tell you, you look bad, Mercy.”

I licked my lips. They cracked, but I talked anyway. “Got here sooner than expected. You did, I mean. Did you get a call?” Is Adam here? I’d be safe if Adam was really here. But that wasn’t true, was it? Coyote had told me I was dying.

“No, but someone’s phone was going off every two minutes until one of the werewolves killed it. Please save me from being trapped in a car with that many angry werewolves ever again. They were all mostly changed to wolf, barely, when I had another Seeing, one of the big ones. Saw you and a couple of werewolves fighting Guayota on Honey’s front lawn and realized why I had to go with the wolves. Took me a while to get them to understand. And once they did, I had to drive because they were all too much werewolf already—and let me tell you, oncoming headlights when you have a migraine are no kind of fun.”

A cry, the same kind of bone-chilling cry that Gary and I had heard once before, cut through the sounds of battle and Gary’s soothing voice like a knife.

Gary turned to look, and that let me see one of the tibicenas bite deep into the other and shake it until it turned into a much smaller thing. I recognized the mutated woman that the walking stick had once shown me. Joel, the tibicena who was Joel, dropped her to the ground. She writhed once, then was still.

“Look,” Auriele said, and I was happy to know she wasn’t dead. “Look at Guayota.” I strained my eyes to the side until I could see the wolves fall away from the thing that had been Guayota. One of those wolves was Adam. Something inside me loosened. Adam was alive.

Guayota’s dog form dissolved around the man whom Christy had known as Juan Flores.