We moved past a bright yellow bus just as a woman reached up to close the cargo area but paused as something caught her attention. It was too good a chance to miss. I broke smoothly away from the man I’d been trailing and slipped unseen into the luggage compartment. I found a pair of big beige duffel bags and stretched out between them, just another beige lump to human eyes. The luggage-bay doors closed.

I stayed still until the bus was moving, then stayed still some more as it turned a corner and picked up speed. I had to stay still, or I was afraid I would lose my battle with panic.

I’d assumed that the Lord of Night had taken me to Yakima or Walla Walla. Both were within a reasonable travel distance of the Tri-Cities, and both had gently rolling hills and vineyards. When I’d been running my hardest to stay ahead of the werewolf, I hadn’t been paying attention to much beyond generalities.

But the voices at the bus station hadn’t been speaking English. They’d been speaking Italian.

I wasn’t in Yakima or Walla Walla; I wasn’t in Washington or even in the US. The Lord of Night had taken me to Italy, and that was the reason I couldn’t reach Adam or the pack through the various bonds I had to them as soon as I was free of Bonarata’s magic circle.

I wasn’t sure how far Italy was from my home, but my liberal arts education told me that the world was roughly twenty-five thousand miles around and that Italy was about a quarter of the world away. I called it six thousand miles, give or take a thousand miles.

I was in the belly of a bus in Italy, alone, naked, and penniless.

Also without a passport.

In a place that a coyote was likely to be noticed because coyotes aren’t exactly native to Europe.

I thought a little more and added “can’t speak the language” to my woes. I’d never traveled out of the country—except that summer road trip to Mexico with Char, my college roommate. Char spoke fluent Spanish, so my bits and pieces hadn’t made me completely helpless. I put my head down and felt sorry for myself for a long while.

Then I pulled on my big-girl pants (which were figurative at this point) and started dealing with the situation as it stood. In front of me and behind me was the solution to my nakedness problem, and I had no room to be squeamish.

I shifted back to my human self and started opening luggage.

It took me a while to find someone who was reasonably close to me in size. I didn’t want to strand her with not enough clothes, so I took the bare minimum. I’d found a notebook and pen in someone else’s duffel bag and left a note and the address and phone number of Adam’s business as well as a detailed list of what I’d taken from the suitcase—a copy of which I kept. I found a pair of tennis shoes that fit in another suitcase, along with twenty euros. There had been maybe two hundred euros in the suitcase, but my conscience, already pushed to the brink, could only deal with twenty. I left a note for her, too.