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Billy stared at me a few long seconds, then, in a very steady even voice, said, “Let’s bust down some doors and get our faces eaten off.”

Tia leaped out of the wrong door and tried to eat our faces off.

She landed on Rita,who was smallest and closest, and who screamed like—well, like she was being crushed by a gigantic wolf. This time I reacted the way I should have when Patty Raleigh came after Billy: shields spun across the room, not just springing up around Rita so Tia’s enormous jaws snapped and skidded against them, but then slamming into the wolf, knocking it back. It was the most integrated defense-and-attack I’d ever pulled off, a hint of how my power was going to respond in familiar territory. Premature triumph bloomed in me, though at least for once I appreciated itwaspremature.

Tia whipped around behind the shield, snarling and searching for a way out. There wasn’t one: between Raleigh and Morrison in the past thirty-six hours, I at least had the sense to pin the shields up against the wall. “Rita, you okay?”

Her high-pitched, gibbered response indicated I’d asked a stupid question. Billy, though, gave her a brief once-over and reported, “She’s all right,” which I took to mean she hadn’t been bitten or otherwise scathed. I wasn’t sure anybody could be mentally all right after that, but one thing at a time. I inched toward the captured wolf, then, in a fit of brilliance, whispered a sword into my handbeforea crisis demanded I have it.

The blade was a silver rapier, and I did mean silver, as in the precious metal, not just the color, that I’d taken off a god thevery first day I’d been a shaman. The weapon had become part of my armament—I’d been taking fencing lessons for the past year so I could use it properly—but nobody in their right mind carried a four-foot-long rapier around Seattle. Most of the time it lived beneath my bed, where despite my utter lack of attention to it, it refused to tarnish. Neither did my necklace tarnish, now that I thought about it, so the maker they had in common had probably done something to the metal.

It was equally likely that its maker had invested it with the willingness to be called across a breach of space, since I didn’t think bending space was generally within a shaman’s purview. Whether it was my magic or its, though, the sword could be pulled from under my bed and into my hand from a range of up to tens of miles, maybe more, and that let me have it in my repertoire without garnering a reputation as a freak.

Well. Without garnering a reputation as a sword-carrying freak, anyway. I pointed the thing at the wolf as dramatically as I could, and with my best Errol Flynn sneer, demanded, “Show yourself!”

Wolves perhaps didn’t respond well to human language commands. She jumped at me, bounced off the shield and snarled again, showing impressively large canines. Big brave me shrieked like a little girl and cowered back a step before remembering I was the one with the sword, the shields and the human brain. In theory, I had the upper hand. “That’s not going to work. Look, I mostly want to know what happened to you. Were you at the dance concert last night? Did you accidentally get transformed during the shapeshifter dances?”

Truthfully, I doubted it. Billy’s point about the woman’s ability to shift freely made too much sense. Still, there was a passing chance that Tia was a victim, and there was some important law of the land about innocent until proven guilty. Maybe the fact that she remained a wolf now supported that:presumably an in-control human shapeshifter would switch to the form which would permit communication. My sword wavered a bit. I didn’t want to stab Tia.

With the unerring sense of a predator recognizing weakness, she leaped again. This time, though, she did transform, lupine body surging to human in a ripple that passed through my shields without a whisper of protest. Rita screamed, but before the leaping woman hit the floor she shifted a second time, front paws catching her weight. She wheeled toward the door she’d come from, and disappeared from sight in an instant.

Rita’s scream cut off in astonishment. Billy and I both took a few steps toward the door the wolf had exited through, then stopped, staring at one another. He didn’t have to ask: after a few seconds of slow brain-grinding, I said, “God damn it, she’s like the goddamned wendigo.”

Billy, who hadn’t been there for that, only elevated his eyebrows and waited. I transferred my sword to my left hand and rubbed my face until it burned with warmth. “Sort of like the wendigo, anyway. The shields don’t work very well on things that are pure or active magic, and the Lower World is all about the magic. Every time the wendigo went there, I lost my grip. And it could slip back and forth with out any effort, so basically it was like trying to catch a live fish with bare hands.”

“I thought the wendigo was…” Billy trailed off, obviously looking for the right phrasing. “Less human than that.”

“Yeah, no, it was. I don’t know what she is.” I did. I just didn’t want to say it, because there was no such thing as a werewolf. Why banshees and thunderbirds and spirit animals were okay and werewolves weren’t, I didn’t know, but I was determined that there should be no such thing as werewolves. They were too Hollywood, or something. “It’s just the principle’s the same. The shields don’t work well on pure magic, and if shapeshiftingbetween one form and another isn’t pure magic, I don’t know what is.”

Rita, who had a more practical grasp on the situation, said, “Is she going to come back?” which made us all edge into the center of the room, creating a back-to-back tri angle. Rita scooped up the flashlight I’d dropped when I’d called the sword and shone her two lights at both doors, then twisted a little to shine one of them at me. “You have a sword.”

It was obviously a question. It was equally obvious that an explanation would take all night, so I shrugged. “It’s a magic sword.”

“People,” Rita said, sounding very much like I had not all that long ago, “don’t have magic swords.”

“They don’t shapeshift into wolves, either,” I pointed out as nicely as I could. Billy coughed suddenly, and I suspected I’d sounded a lot like he had once upon a time, tolerating my utter refusal to believe what he knew was true. I said, “Sorry,” to him, and his cough turned into a guffaw.

“Water under the bridge, Joanie. Water under the bridge. Are we going to stand here all night waiting to see if she comes back?”

It sounded like a good plan to me, but it wasn’t actually going to get the job done. “Just give me a minute to at least be damned good and sure she’s not lurking around the corner.”

“Be my guest.”

The Sight flashed on, a burst of white that unexpectedly faded into normality. Well, normality in terms of being able to See beyond the physical walls of the world. I didn’t know if it was necessity forcing me to get my act together, or if I was adjusting to the new power level, but either way, the walls around us turned a shadowy gray-green. Most buildings blazed green, a sentry color of certainty in their duty, but these ones were too old and neglected; they’d forgotten their purpose. I felt sorryfor them, and like my emotional state affected my magic, white surged up again. I said “Stop that” aloud to myself, and hauled my emotions into as steady a line as I could get them.

The doors on either side of us led into alleys that looped around, explaining how the wolf had come at us so easily from the evidently-wrong direction. Another path led away from that looped hall, and I saw a rush-and-tumble maze of twisty little passages, all alike, leading into stretches of underground that I suddenly, seriously doubted were Underground at all. “Seattle’s not built on a bunch of cave systems, is it?”

“No. It’s volcanic sediment and sandstones,” Billy said with utter confidence. Rita and I both turned to look at him and he spread his hands. “Robert just did a science fair project on Puget Sound geology. Why?”

I reeled the Sight back in and squinched my face up. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m seeing things. It just looks like this direction is riddled with caves and tunnels.”

After a long, cautious silence, Billy said, “It was a pretty big earthquake….”

“No. Absolutely not. No fricking way. I do not accept that as a possibility.” In order to prevent myself from considering it—because the idea had leaked into my mind, too, and I wanted it far, far away—I took my flashlight from Rita, whispered the sword back to its hiding place beneath my bed and boldly strode through the closest doorway.

Rita, following me, said, “Earthquake?” to Billy in an appropriately hushed voice, but there wasn’t anywhere I could escape overhearing her.

“Last July, remember the one that tore up Lake Washington and made Thunderbird Falls? That was Detective Walker.”