We went through two slabs before either one of us decided to slow down enough to talk.

“Can I assssk a bad quessshtion?” Ascanio asked.

I thought of reminding him that he’d promised to be good, but after everything he’d been through today, he had earned some leeway. “Shoot.”

“How come you’re beasssshtin?”

He would have to ask that question, wouldn’t he? I sucked on a bone, buying time. Telling the kid I was too chicken to talk about it wasn’t an option. “Let’s take the Atlanta Pack. Seven clans, each grouped by the beast. Within the clans you have structure. At the top of it are the alphas, then the betas, then other people in charge of different things appointed by the alphas. The alphas themselves make up the Council, which is led by the Beast Lord and the Consort. For the individual shapeshifter, there are all sorts of safeguards in place. If you have a problem with someone or someone is abusing you, you can take it up the chain of command all the way to Curran and you will be treated fairly. You may not like the decision, but it will be just.”

Ascanio nodded.

“Kids like you don’t realize it, but this sort of structure is pretty new. Curran has only been in power for about fifteen years. Before that, each clan was on its own, and some, like Clan Wolf or Clan Rat, were broken up into individual little packs. Each pack was only as good as its alpha. If the alpha was an abusive asshole, you couldn’t do much about it.”

I handed him another chunk of ribs. “My mother was a first generation shapeshifter. She grew up on a small ranch in southern Oklahoma with her mom and dad. One day a loup bouda got into their farm. He slaughtered the horses, killed my grandfather, and attacked my mom and my grandmother. My mother was fourteen years old and she had never seen a hyena before, let alone a shapeshifter. My grandmother killed the loup, but then went loup herself. My mother hid in the storm shelter underground. By the time the sheriffs made it out to the farm, my grandmother had dug a hole almost six feet deep, trying to get my mother out to kill her. They put silver bullets through her brain real fast.

“So my mom was fourteen, all alone, a shapeshifter, and not knowing a thing about being one. The sheriffs made some calls and found out that there was a small bouda pack in Eastern Texas. The alpha was female and oh so nice on the phone. She even offered to meet them halfway to take the poor girl off their hands. So they drove out and handed my mother and the twenty thousand dollars left over from my grandparents’ life insurance over to Clarissa. Bypassed the whole Child Services mess and delivered her right to her own people. They thought it would be better for everyone that way.”

I dropped my bones into the pan. “Clarissa was a sadistic bitch. She wasn’t loup but she was damn close. She loved torture. Got off on it. Her own life turned out to be shit, so she made everyone else’s miserable. She and her two daughters, Crystal and Candy, ran the pack of two dozen boudas. My mom was small like me. The first day she arrived, Crystal beat the shit out of her and then urinated on her face. It went downhill from there.”

Ascanio stared at me, the ribs forgotten in his hands.

“The best we can figure out, my father was an exotic pet. The pack heard rumors of a drug dealer compound where a lot of large predators were being kept for show. Eventually law enforcement got around to raiding it, and three days later my father walked out of the brush. Lyc-V steals pieces of its host DNA and most of the time the transfer is from animal to human. For my father to exist, the virus had to have infected a human, and then passed from the human back to my father. This almost never happens because people don’t run around the wilderness biting animals.”

Even when shapeshifters encountered their natural counterparts while in beast form, most wildlife gave us a wide berth. A hundred-pound wolf looked at a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound werewolf and pretty quickly decided to run for the hills.

“Nobody could ever figure out how my father managed to get himself infected. He didn’t have enough brain power to explain what happened to him. Clarissa thought that my father was the funniest thing ever. They put a spiked collar on him and would lead him on a leash while he was in his human form. He couldn’t really talk, except for a handful of words like ‘no’ and ‘hungry.’ He was mentally deficient. Clarissa thought it would be oh so hilarious to have him rape my mother. He didn’t know what he was doing. He just knew that there was a female provided for him, so he mated. My mother was barely sixteen. I was born nine months later and they started beating me when I was still a toddler. For my mother, her chief tormentor was Crystal. For me, it was Candy, Clarissa’s younger daughter.”

“Didn’t your mom trrrry to prrrotect you?”

“She tried, but they would gang up on her. She used to bait them when they would start on me, because they would switch over to her instead. They told her that if she left, humans would kill her and me. She had no money and nowhere to go. On my eleventh birthday Candy and her flunkies set me on fire. My mother realized that sooner or later they would kill me. As soon as I healed enough to move, my mother grabbed me and ran. We ran clear across the country. They never came after us.”

A memory flashed before me, my mother and I huddling in the bathroom in some hotel room, wrapped in a blanket, both of us shivering because some stray noise outside reminded us of Clarissa’s voice.

“I didn’t mean to upsshet you.”

“I know. Finish your food.”

He looked at the ribs. “Not hungrrry anymorre.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Don’t let it go to waste.”

He bit into the rib. “Did you ever go back?”

I smiled at him. “What do you think?”

He blinked.

“Funny thing about that pack,” I said. “A few years ago someone went over there and wiped them out. Must’ve been some sort of marksman, because most of them had been shot from a distance. Very clean shots, with silver bullets.” I leaned over and touched a spot at the base of his skull about half an inch below his earlobe. “Apricot. Also known as medulla oblongata. It’s an area of the brain that controls involuntary functions: breathing, heart rate, digestion. It is the only place in the shapeshifter body that guarantees instant death when hit by a silver bullet. Very small target.” I held my fingers a little over an inch apart. “Tiny. Takes a lot of practice.”

Ascanio’s eyes were huge on his bouda face.

Not everyone got a clean death. Some were more up close and personal. Not everyone died either. There were four children—all boys—and three adolescents—two girls and a boy—in chains. The next generation, new victims of Clarissa’s tender love and care. They made it.

“What happened to yourrr dad?”

“He died about two years after we ran away. He was a hyena and they only live about twelve years or so in the wild. He probably lived twice that. If you’re done eating, we need to get a move on.”

He hopped off the wall.

We wiped our faces with the towel from the Jeep, returned the pan, and drove out.

“Whereee to now?” Ascanio asked.

“Garcia Construction.” I highly doubted that we would even be allowed to enter Anapa’s HQ in our current shapes.

Garcia Construction had an address on the east side of the city, in the tangle of newly renamed streets, and it took us a good hour and a half to find it. The building sat in the back of a lot behind a chain-link fence, but the gate stood wide open. We parked on the street and breezed right in. Gravel crunched under my paw-feet. I really hated gravel. It was sharp, it got stuck between your toes, and it didn’t exactly provide a stable surface.

Random dirt and refuse littered the gravel lot before the structure. The building itself was nothing special: built post-Shift, with magic in mind. Just a brick box, with barred dusty windows and a barred door, a standard house for a world where monsters spawned out of thin air and tried to break into your house to eat you. Another chain-link gate, on the right of the building and also wide open, led to the back lot.

The place smelled abandoned: squirrels, the musk of a tomcat on the prowl, dog excrement decomposing in the sun, tree rats. No human odors. Odd.

I ran my fingers along the wooden board nailed tight across the double door. Dirt.

“They arrrre closshed,” Ascanio observed.

“It looks that way. Either the Heron building was supposed to be their big comeback and they didn’t rehire anyone until they got a contract, or…”

“Orrr?”

“Or someone hired them specifically to reclaim the Heron Building and when the deal fell through, the client abandoned them. Come on, we’re going to dig in their garbage.”

“Oh boy!”

Smartass.

The Dumpster by the fence didn’t yield any new information. It wasn’t exactly empty either. The moment we lifted the lid, a very upset mama skunk aimed her butt at us, and we dropped the lid pronto. Stupid May, everybody was having babies.

I went to check the mailbox, while Ascanio trotted off to the back.

The metal box was empty. No mail. Hmm.

“I found shomeshing!” Ascanio called.

I made my way to the back. The narrow space between the building and the fence opened into an enormous back lot, filled with random metal junk. Tiny creatures, fuzzy and quick, with long chinchilla tails, skittered over the refuse. The gravel lay unevenly. It looked like something had been dragged out.

Ascanio greeted me in the back, holding up a flat tire, with a jagged chunk of metal embedded in it. He stuck the tire under my nose. The scent of automotive lubricant wafted up. Fresh. Car grease changed its scent in the open. This was a recent blowout.

Someone had driven into this lot probably during the last week, no more than ten days ago for sure. I held up the tire. It wasn’t just flat, it must’ve exploded. The vehicle to which that tire belonged couldn’t have gotten very far. I looked back at the drag marks. Someone had been towed out. That was the most likely explanation.

The dirt on the board blocking the door was months old. Magic had killed most of the cell phones—if you had a working one, you were likely in the military. So how did this person get themselves out of their blown tire predicament?