“I never was in competition with you.”

She looked away.

“What’s wrong with your ossai?” I asked.

She gave me a dark look.

“You didn’t go into a wetwork form during the fight,” I told her. “And your rate of regeneration is lower than that of a typical werewolf.”

The ossai were a marvel of bioengineering. A programmable synthetic virus, it was the reason werewolves could bounce up tall trees, murder their opponents with insane speed and accuracy, and change shape. The werewolves had three forms: the human form they called OPS; the OM form, a quadrupedal animal shape they used for scouting and covert action; and the wetwork form, a huge human-wolf monster, which they used in combat.

Werewolves changed forms without thinking. It was instinctual like breathing. Sean had shifted into the wetwork shape when he’d attacked the cruiser and then shifted back, probably without conscious effort.

She didn’t. The corrupted ad-hal nearly killed her, but she had stayed human.

“What’s wrong?” I repeated.

The werewolf sucked the air in and let it out slowly. “Activation failure. In your boyfriend, the ossai are linked into a single bionet. They communicate with each other. My ossai don’t. Sometimes chunks of them link up, and I get a boost, but most of the time they fail.”

Oh. Like a faulty fluorescent light. When Sean flipped the switch, the light came on instantly and was blindingly bright. When she flipped the switch, it pulsed and flickered.

“Can your ossai be fixed?”

She shook her head. “I hoped so, but Wilmos said no.”

Sean was right. She had a problem, and she went to see Wilmos. Except this time he couldn’t help.

The werewolf shrugged. “It took me three years to make my way to him, and in the end, it was for nothing. My parents are normal. Apparently, this just happens sometimes during fetal development.”

“You fight well.”

She gave me a bitter smile. “I like how you didn’t say the second part out loud. I fight well—for a defective werewolf.”

“Only things can be defective, not people.”

“Spare me.”

There was a lot of self-loathing there. Arguing with her would only provoke hostility.

“Wilmos said that if I find a strong werewolf, the kids would be normal. If at least one parent is fully active, and the fetus is monitored and treated in the womb, the activation failure usually doesn’t reoccur,” she said.

“Is that why you fixated on Sean?”

“I asked Wilmos who the strongest werewolf was. He said Sean but he was taken. I never run away from a fight.”

“No, you just run into it without thinking.”

She glared at me.

“I was talking to the thing that took Wilmos, and you attacked it before I got anywhere.”

It took a few seconds to sink in. She slumped against her pillow.

“You know where Wilmos is,” she finally said. “What’s there to talk about?”