“For some things,” I told him seriously. “You can trust me not to leave people helpless against a monster. A human monster or a werewolf monster. I don’t help bad guys—even if they are someone I thought I liked or felt some loyalty to. Bad guys need to be stopped.”

That, apparently, had been the right thing to say.

“Okay,” he said with sudden assurance. “Okay. Yes.” He turned on the car and pulled out with a squeal, switching on his lights but not his siren. “We need your help with something.”

And that’s all he said. But that “something” took us past the old Welch’s factory, past the WELCOME TO FINLEY sign, past the road to my house that used to only be Adam’s house and once was Adam and Christy’s house. The semirural cluster of houses grew momentarily denser near the high school, then thinned again. We followed the main road miles farther on, out to where croplands took over from small ranchettes, turned down a rutted dirt road, and pulled in next to five police cars and an ominously unlit ambulance gathered along the edge of a hayfield.

I got out slowly as an angry man in a suit broke away from where a group of police officers were gathered and boiled over to Tony’s car, glanced at me, and flushed even hotter with the rage that covered … fear and horror.

“What the hell are you thinking? Bringing her here?”

I didn’t know him, but he knew me. Adam was something of a local, if not a national, celebrity—good looks are not always a good thing. That meant that lots of people I’d never met knew who I was.

“We need her,” Tony told him. “If what you told me was right and this was something other than human. She can tell us what it was.”

I caught a scent that bothered me, but it wasn’t coming from the direction of the group of police officers. Frowning, I turned in a slow circle to pinpoint it. I glanced at Tony, but he was busy arguing with the other man, so I wandered off in the direction my nose told me to, away from the cluster of officials.

The ground was more uneven than I would have thought a hayfield would be, maybe because it was alfalfa and not grass hay. I had to watch my step as I walked along the edge of where grass had been cut. The growing crop of hay was only about five inches high—the length of a lawn that had been left a week too long. Off the cultivated field, I’d have been wading through the weeds that ruled where the ground was too rocky to be farmed.