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“Which is full tonight,” Billy said. I wanted to kick him. “And if that woman wasn’t a werewolf,” he continued, “what was she?”

“Well, whatever she is, Morrison’s not, okay? She could shift back and forth and he can’t.” They were right. Tia was a werewolf. And she was probably the dance theater killer, because if legend was right and werewolves were tied to phases of the moon, she probably had some kind of major power suck going down around the full moon, and I was pretty damned certain the murder’s timing wasn’t coincidental. Moreover, tonight,Sundaynight, not Saturday which I suspected Billy had meant, was the actual full moon, which probably meant if we didn’t stop the bitch—no pun intended—she’d attack the dancers one more time.

I did not want to fight a werewolf. It was up there with zombies. Traditional creatures of the night were just not mything, damn it, not that anybody had asked me what my thing was. I said, “Shit,” under my breath, and more clearly said, “Rita, this is probably a good time for you to cut loose, too. If she’s a werewolf, hell, I don’t know what happens if you get bitten by a real werewolf, but it can’t be good.”

“No,” Rita said in a small voice. “I got you into this. I’d like to see it through.”

“You…” Had gotten me into it, actually, what with giving me the dance concert tickets in the first place, but even so, I shook my head. “This is what I do, Rita. It’s my job.”

“You’re a police officer,” she said incredulously. “Werewolves aren’t your job.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “My duties encompass a lot more than your average cop’s. Trust me. This is what I do. You didn’t get me into anything I wouldn’t have ended up in one way or another.”

Morrison cocked his head, curious motion, but Rita remained unconvinced. “I’d still like to help if I can.”

Feeling completely absurd, I said, “Morrison?”

He looked between us, then pulled his lips back from his teeth, indicating what he thought of the idea. Billy snorted and Rita scowled, obviously afraid we were making fun of her. Feeling even more absurd, I said, “Rita, this is our boss.

Captain Morrison of the Seattle Police Department. I sort of have to do what he wants in this situation.”

“…your boss is a werewolf?”

I was going to personally hunt down and bludgeon whoever it was who was responsible for werewolf legends. Never mind that it would no doubt require time travel and knowledge of languages which had long since slipped out of human memory. It would be worth it. While I worked up a response that wasn’t “Arrrrgh!” Morrison got up, walked to Rita and sat down in front of her. He was nearly as tall as she was, which made making eyecontact easy before he slowly, deliberately, swung his head back and forth in an emphaticno.

“Holy shit, he understood me! You understood me?”

Morrison nodded this time, big heavy bob of his head. Rita squeaked, “You’re a cop? You’re acaptain?” and he nodded each time, showing infinitely more patience than I would have expected. Rita goggled at him, then at me, then wrenched her jaw up and said, much more quietly, “Do I really have to leave? It’s my friends who are missing.”

Morrison put his head to one side, sympathy in the motion, but nodded again, then gave me a gimlet stare. I stepped up, knowing exactly what he wanted me to say. “A few months ago a civilian got invo—” No. That was wrong. I backed up and started again. “I got a civilian involved in one of my cases, and she nearly got killed. Pulling that kind of stunt again will lose me my job. She volunteered, too,” I said to Rita’s unspoken protest. “But from where I’m sitting, where the captain’s sitting, that doesn’t make a lot of difference. You understand?”

She wasn’t a big woman, but she got smaller, shoulders curving in and head lowering. “I understand. You’ll find them, though, right? You’ll all come back?”

“We’ll do our best. And Rita? Thank you for bringing us down here. I know that made you nervous. You’ve been a lot of help.”

She gave me a wavering smile, not one of the ones that took years off her age. “You’re welcome.” She looked at Morrison a moment, shrugged and said, “Nice to meet you, Captain,” in a voice that suggested she’d probably lost her mind, but at this point was just going with it.

Morrison lifted his right front paw, quite solemnly, in an offer to shake. Rita’s expression transformed, laughter running through her, and she shook his paw before climbing the rope ladder with more lightness than I’d expected twenty seconds earlier.

“Well,” I said when she was gone. “Anybody bring any silver bullets?”

Billy and Morrison turned identical glowers of exasperation on me and, chastised once more, I led the way through the tunnels in search of a werewolf.

The Sight hadn’t burnedout my visual receptors or my brain when I’d used it in the Market, so I was cautiously willing to press it ahead of where we crawled and walked, hoping I’d get some sense of what lay ahead. Mostly I got a sense of open spaces beneath the city that I was sure no geological survey could be aware of. Or maybe all earth was riddled with pockets of emptiness and tunnels that sometimes went nowhere and sometimes connected; I had no idea. Unless given some kind of extenuating reason not to, like a sinkhole suddenly opening up, I tended to think of ground as solid. Still, apparently Robert Holliday’s science report hadn’t mentioned anything about tunnel-riddled bedrock beneath Seattle, so the fact we were working our way through non-old-city tunnels boded peculiar, if not ill. “Hey, Morrison, can you smell anything down here that isn’t us?”

I peered over my shoulder as I asked, and got his nose-wrinkled expression of distaste in exchange. I took that as a yes. “Anything female?”

Morrison stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel, giving me an excellent wolfish glare. Billy backpedaled, trying not to trip over him as I spread my hands in self-defense. “What? Are you telling me you don’t know what girls smell like?”

His nose wrinkled again, this time so delicately it looked like deliberate refrain from commentary on the smell of one particular girl, i.e., me. I turned back to the path, muttering, “I had no idea dogs were so expressive,” and actually felt the snapof his teeth as he just narrowly missed biting me on the ass. I bet anything that meant “Wolves aren’t dogs.”

Evidently I’d put an idea in his head, though, because he pushed past me, head extended long and low as he scented the air. His ruff fluffed up and he glanced at me, then paced forward just slowly enough that we could keep up. I ducked through stretches of tunnel that Morrison fit through more tidily, Billy a few steps behind me, and we caught up to our boss at the mouth to a narrow natural cave dripping with water.

The brindle wolf stood at its far end, one paw lifted in a classic attentive pose. Morrison stood in exactly the same position, neither of them looking certain as to what to do next. I felt like a wildlife photographer who’d accidentally come across the shot of a lifetime, gold wolf and silver examining one another in a primal size-up. Then Tia wagged her tail in a blatantly come-hither sweep and leaped into the darkness at the cavern’s far end.

Morrisonwhurrfed,a noise that was nothing at all like a human response to anything, and my stomach turned to lead. “Oh my God, Morrison, don’t you dare.”

Hewhurrfedagain, then darted forward at a pace we measly humans couldn’t hope to match, disappearing after the werewolf.