Wilmos pulled a translucent datapad off the wall. His fingers danced across it.
A loud, insistent beat tore from some hidden speakers, the melody wild and frightening. A male and female chorus joined the music, singing wordlessly, their voices blending into a single powerful howl. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
Wilmos’ mercenaries bared their teeth. The dark-skinned werewolf raised his head and howled. To my left, the older female mercenary howled too. All around me eyes turned amber, gold, and green.
The terraced walls on both sides of the fight rained Draziri. The reinforcements had arrived.
The werewolves blurred, shifting into their wetwork shape, and charged. I caught a glimpse of Wilmos, his eyes on fire, his fangs bared, his face human one moment and grizzled monster the next. His wolflike pet snarled and ran into the melee next to him.
They fell onto the Draziri, while the battle hymn of a dead planet howled in triumph.
Eventually there were no Draziri left to kill. The injured survivors fled. Nobody chased them. It had felt like an eternity, but my phone told me only five minutes had passed since Sean and I entered the store again.
Sean walked over to me, hulking and soaked in blood. I put my arms around his wet furry shoulders and hugged him. He sighed quietly.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
“I will come too,” Wilmos said.
“We’ll hold the shop,” the female mercenary said.
The four of us, Sean, Wilmos, the Archivarian, and I weaved through the streets of Baha-char. Nobody assaulted us. We reached the door to the inn, I opened it, and we slipped inside.
A stasis tank rose from the floor, swallowing the Archivarian and carrying him to join the rest of its parts and I stood alone in the hallway with two werewolves in wetwork shape, Wimos with a graying muzzle and Sean, a full head taller. A few months ago, I’d have been mildly alarmed. Now it was just business as usual. I sighed and snapped the void field in place. When I first started, it was like slipping on a jacket. Now it felt like a car settled on my chest. Maintaining it was draining me so much, I felt the weariness all the way in my bones.
It would end eventually and then I would rest.
I started moving. I needed to get them both into showers.
“Dina!” A screen popped open in the wall and slid, matching my pace. Maud’s eyes were the size of saucers. “We have a problem.”
Damn it, can I just catch a tiny break? Just one? Please for the love of all that is holy in this infinite universe. “What problem?”
“A big one,” my sister hissed. “Get over here.”
There were strangers in my inn. In my front room. Coming through my door.
I sped up. The werewolves followed me. We burst into the front room.
Two people stood in my front room, a man and a woman, both middle-aged. There was something vaguely familiar about their faces. My sister waited on the left with a carefully neutral expression on her face. Arland stood next to her, clearly torn between pulling his weapon out and trying to remain polite.
The man and the woman looked at me, and then at the two werewolves behind me.
The man squinted. “Wilmos?”
The woman peered at Wilmos, then her gaze slid to the left. Her voice was a whisper. “Sean?”
The hulking monster unhinged his jaws. “Mom? Dad? What are you doing here?”
Oh crap.
* * *
Sean’s mother was slightly plump, short, and blond. If I bumped into her during a grocery run, I would’ve smiled, said excuse me, and never thought of it twice. She was looking at Wilmos now, and there was a wolf in her eyes, a frightening, mad she-wolf. When she opened her mouth, her voice froze the air in the room.
“Wilmos, how do you know our son and why does he smell like blood?”
“Uh…” Wilmos said.
Sean’s father dropped his bags. He looked a lot like Sean, athletic, broad-shouldered, his brown hair cut short. His gaze pinned Wilmos like a dagger.
“Four months ago Agran called me and said that there was a war on Nexus and that you’ve been supplying the Merchants with a general every time one of theirs took a dive. He said that the last one they got was off the charts and rumor was that the guy was an alpha-strain werewolf. I dismissed it, because every time some phantom fighter shows up, our people take credit.”
Wilmos took a careful step back.
“Did you send my son to Nexus?” Sean’s father growled. Black ink crept up his neck.
Oh no. No, I didn’t want to do this. This wouldn’t make a good impression.
Wilmos opened his mouth.
“Corwin,” Sean’s mother said softly. “Sean’s wearing Auroon Twelve.”
“Wilmos?” Sean’s father snarled.
The old werewolf sighed. “Yes.”
“How dare you!” Rage shivered in Sean’s mother’s face. “We survived. We escaped. We built a life, so our child would never have to fight the way we did. And you, you obsessive asshole, you worm, you … you sent him to Nexus!”
Sean’s father blurred. A massive dark werewolf spilled out and leapt at Wilmos. I let his feet leave the ground and then the inn snatched him out of the air in mid-leap. Strong. Really strong.
A second werewolf lunged across the floor. Sean stepped forward smoothly and caught her. She snarled.
“Mom,” Sean said gently. “You’re not making a good first impression.”
“Sean William, let go of me this instant!”
“I can’t do that.”