The net should have stunned the woman into a mild coma. Instead, it seemed to just piss her off. She glared at me like I was everything that was wrong with her life. I leaned closer. A faint golden sheen rolled over her irises.

A werewolf. Made sense.

“Where did you find her?”

Marais nodded at the car. “I’ll show you.”

I nudged the inn. A thin wooden tendril slipped from the floor and brushed against the hood of the vehicle, accepting the transmission from the cruiser. Gertrude Hunt produced another screen showing the view from Marais’ dashcam camera. He had two sets in his car, one the standard issue from Red Deer PD and the other bootleg from us.

The street looked familiar. He was on Rattlesnake Trail, by the high school, heading east, with the walled subdivision on one side and the school’s baseball diamond on the other. Bright summer sunshine flooded the mostly empty road. The record temperatures chased the kids inside or to the pools, and their parents were still at work.

A dark humanoid shape shot past the car. Marais was going at least 35. Top human speed was 28 miles per hour and whatever that was blew by his vehicle like it was standing still.

“Someone was running at superhuman speeds in broad daylight for all the honest world to see,” Marais said. “Apparently, she thinks the Earth Treaty doesn’t apply to her.”

The Treaty applied to everyone.

I motioned to Gertrude Hunt. A much thicker tendril emerged from the ceiling and plucked the woman out of the trunk. The stun net dropped to the floor. The inn’s tendril split into smaller branches, wrapping around the woman, and spun her in the air, rifling through her clothes. Weapons rained to the floor of the garage: a short-range energy sidearm, two knives, a monomolecular cleaver short sword, and three small sticky bombs, each the size of a large grape. When attached to a door and detonated, they could blow a hole through the strongest terrestrial safe.

Nice.

The tendrils twisted my captive upright and lowered her to the floor, anchoring themselves through the floorboards. She glowered at me and snarled.

Beast snarled back by my feet.

The werewolf woman didn’t seem impressed. In her place, I wouldn’t have taken the seven-pound shih tzu seriously either. It was a potentially deadly mistake.

“You are in violation of the Earth Treaty,” I told her. “Do you know what that means?”

She didn’t answer.

“The Treaty expressly forbids exposing the human population to the existence of extraterrestrial life. Any traveler wishing to visit Earth must make arrangements with an inn like this one. Have you made such arrangements?”

No answer.

“She knows,” Marais said. “I read her the rights on the way. She was heading this way when I apprehended her. Probably to see you.”

“Not you.” The woman sneered.

Oh. Another one.