‘That was cool!’ whooped Rico. ‘You’re, like, famous!’

Tom turned to Kate. ‘Jesus! What the hell do we do now?’

Deathly pale, Kate looked at him. Her eyes were glassy with tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, her voice coming out brittle and high. ‘I don’t know what we do now.’

‘Mom and Dad thinking I was dead was bad enough, but – a murderer …?’ Tom paused, too choked up to continue.

Ramone looked at him hard. ‘Did you really waste those guys?’

‘No!’ Tom shouted. ‘They were trying to kill me! One was a ’wolf, the other was some maniac trying to cut me open—’

Kate crossed over to him and put her hands on his shoulders, trying to calm him down. ‘It’s OK, Tom. It’s OK. We have to think why she’s done this.’

‘She’s gonna kill my family,’ Tom whispered. He felt like he might puke. ‘It’s a revenge thing, it must be.’

Kate tried to lose the tremor from her voice. ‘She won’t kill them. Not yet. She’s using them, trying to scare you into coming out in the open.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Mom must’ve gotten tired of chasing us. Why waste time tracking us down when she can bring us scurrying out?’

‘She wants you to go running to the cops?’ Jasmine clearly didn’t buy it. ‘Why? How would she get you then?’

‘The cops don’t just know about the ’wolves,’ Kate told her sharply, ‘some of them are ’wolves. The lupine community can only survive if blind eyes are turned in some pretty high places –so a whole lot of ’wolves make it their duty to climb to the top of the career ladder of all the useful professions. Police, politics, medicine …’

Jasmine nodded slowly. ‘So if you give yourselves up to the cops, what happens?’

‘We’ll meet with some kind of accident,’ Tom assured her. ‘Or maybe we’ll “escape” and never be found again. Get my drift?’

‘Well, whatever,’ said Ramone. ‘You two are trouble. And we got enough crap going down here without you two bringing your own.’

Kate glared at him. ‘This is the thanks we get for saving your life?’

‘It’s OK, Kate,’ Tom said quietly. ‘They’re just scared. We can’t blame them for that.’

‘Yo, Ramone,’ drawled Cicero, from where he lay stretched out on the floor. ‘Seems to me we’re missin’ a trick. We could buy us some favours –let Takapa have ’em if the howlers want them so bad.’

There was a heavy pause. Tom glanced around the room, steeling himself for fight or flight. All eyes were on him and Kate.