The oven beeped to tell me it was at temperature, and I found all four cookie sheets in the narrow cabinet that they belonged in—a minor miracle. I wasn’t the only one who got KP duty in the house, but I seemed to be the only one who could put things in the same place (where they belonged) on a regular basis. The baking pans, in particular, got shoved all sorts of odd places. I had once found one of them in the downstairs bathroom. I didn’t ask—but I washed that motherhumper with bleach before I used it to bake on again.

“Motherhumper” was a word that was catching on in the pack with horrible efficiency after “Sodding Bart” Ben had started using it in his pirate role. I wasn’t quite sure whether it was a real swearword that no one had thought up yet, one of those swearwords that were real swearwords in Ben’s home country of Great Britain (like “fanny,” which meant something very different in the UK than it did here), or a replacement swearword like “darn” or “shoot.” In any case, I’d found myself using it on occasions when “dang” wasn’t quite strong enough—like finding cookware in bathrooms.

I thought I was good to go when I found the baking pans. But when I opened the cupboard where there should have been ten bags of chocolate chips, there were only six. I searched the kitchen and came up with another one (open and half-gone) in the top cupboard behind the spaghetti noodles, which made six and a half, leaner than I liked for a double-quadruple batch, but it would do.

What would not do was no eggs. And there were no eggs.

I scrounged through the fridge for the second time, checking out the back corners and behind the milk, where things liked to hide. But even though I’d gotten four dozen eggs two days ago, there was not an egg to be had.

There were perils in living in the de facto clubhouse of a werewolf pack. Thawing roasts in the fridge required the concealment skills of a World War II French Underground spy working in Nazi headquarters. I hadn’t hidden the eggs because, since they were neither sweet nor bleeding, I’d thought they were safe. I’d been wrong.

The majority of the egg-and-roast-stealing werewolf pack was currently downstairs, enthralled in games of piracy on the high seas of the computer screen. There was irony in how much they loved the pirate computer game—werewolves are too dense to swim. Coyotes, even coyote shifters like me, can swim just fine—except, apparently, in The Dread Pirate’s Booty scenarios, because I’d drowned four times this month.

I hadn’t drowned this time, though. This time, I’d died with my stepdaughter’s knife in my back. Barbary Belle was highly skilled with knives.

“I’m headed to the Stop and Rob,” I called downstairs. “Does anyone need anything?”

The store wasn’t really called that, of course; it had a perfectly normal name that I couldn’t remember. “Stop and Rob” was more of a general term for a twenty-four-hour gas station and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night-shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars. Technology—cameras, quick-drop safes that didn’t open until daylight, and silent alarms—had made working the night shift safer, but they’d always be Stop and Robs to me.