Werewolf, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of an evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a bestial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane and is consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.

–Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

chapter six

There was a wolf in the living room.

Dillion had gone to answer the front door some minutes before, and when he didn't return the occupants of the kitchen had simply assumed he was still engaged with the visitors. For Rory's sake, Casey struck up a conversation with her about the diner, and the two O'Connells bombarded her with questions, having never actually been inside the restaurant themselves. Put at ease by their efforts, the witch let Dillion and a whole host of other troubles nagging at her consciousness slip away.

But now there was the unmistakable click of nails on the hardwood floor. All three heads at the table turned, peach pie recipes forgotten.

Casey cast a wild glance at her younger brother, dark blue eyes gone wide. "Go get Papa. Now."

"But—" Ulf barely managed to open his mouth in protest before Casey cut through his reasoning.

"No," she barked the command with no space for patience. "Go, Ulf."

As Ulf scampered up the back staircase, Casey rose from her seat and laid a hand lightly on Rory's shoulder. Aurora sent her a questioning look, and the werewolf offered a comforting squeeze as well as a shake of her head. "Everything's fine. Just—just stay here, okay? It's a family matter." And then she padded into the living room at a restrained run.

Rory stared bewildered at the space that Casey had occupied. Her heart was pounding oddly. Something was wrong, so terribly wrong. She felt it, in a deep-down, gut-wrenching way. She knew in that steady, inflexible manner of hers that the situation was about to take a turn for the worse. A thought which was only reinforced when Ulf came bounding back down the stairs, a blank-faced and unreadable Liam stuck fast on his heels, and neither of them bothered to say a word to her.

She stood without thinking as they disappeared through the opening between the kitchen and the living room, the backs of her knees banging clumsily against the seat of her chair in a way that would surely leave bruises. The chair toppled to the tile floor, but she never heard it. Her whole world was strangely muffled and weirdly dim, like someone had thrown a blanket over her head. She circled the table by degrees, hands clutching at its edge to keep her legs steady, until it brought her near to the wall and to the doorway.

Liam's voice came to her from a long way off as he spoke in the next room—not the words but his tone: soft, soothing, commanding. Just the sound of it calmed her, opening space for rational thought—and that's when the true terror hit. She remembered with a stab of alarm that she didn't know where Dillion was.

Was Dillion in trouble?

She known him for less than a day, but suddenly that mattered very much. It mattered more than Casey's warning or her own sense of dread. It mattered so much that Rory bravely stuck her head around the doorframe to get a proper look at the situation. On the other side Ulf, Liam, and Casey stood like the three points of a triangle, and between their restraining presences paced a black wolf that rippled silver under the lights. Dillion.

Something almost tangible tugged at her heart. She had believed that thread between them had snapped earlier that morning when she'd dropped the guitar, but it seemed to have been waiting for exactly this moment to make it reappearance. Along that connection she could actually feel his rage, great and blinding. And deeper than that, fear and pain. The line tying them together drew tight, enticing her a step closer. She could almost hear his jumbled thoughts, feel them running with certainty across the surface of her own mind: He was scared for her. He had been looking for her. But they wouldn't let him leave this room, wouldn't let him be near her, and his frustration was making it harder to control the wolf's actions. He needed her, he needed her help.

"Dillion," she whispered without meaning to.

Casey, who was standing closest with her back to the kitchen, swiveled her head around at the sound. "Rory!" she snapped, then froze as if expecting lightning from heaven to strike her. The wolf turned its ears toward the sound and began to pace in the redhead's direction, a growl rumbling in the depths of his chest.

"Rory," Casey attempted again, far more softly. "Please, go back in the kitchen."

But Aurora was staring at her soulmate in his second form. Her awareness was swamped with unrestrained waves of his agony and confusion—but also there was his relief upon seeing her, a relaxing of that tension that was tearing apart his restraint. She couldn't leave him now. "What's wrong?" she asked breathlessly as she tried to piece together the chaos of information flooding her senses. "What's happening?"

Casey scooted a few wary steps in the other girl's direction, never removing her eyes from her brother. "We're not exactly sure. Something must have really upset him for it to have gotten this bad. He's more wolf than human right now. He's not thinking clearly, and it won't get any better until he has time to calm down."

"I can help with that," Rory offered softly, but unexpectedly resolute.

Casey shot her a puzzled look in response to her suggestion, but the werewolf's attention was too divided to venture an answer. Dillion had never veered from his steady course as he approached the two young women, and the less distance there was between them the more alarmed she became. Casey set one commanding foot forward and spread her arms to make herself appear larger. "Go!" she demanded, flapping her hands. "Get! You idiot!"

"Be gentle," Liam warned too late.

Dillion lost his patience with his sister. She was standing in the path between him and Rory, and that thought was driving him crazy. Being incapable of speech, he settled a little irrationally on slightly more drastic measures to convince her to move. The wolf feigned a warning snap of its powerful jaws in the sixteen-year-old's direction, one which was never meant to make contact. He only meant to startle her some, and the other werewolf was fully aware of that fact having been on the receiving end of many such cautionary displays. He completely expected only to sink his teeth into a swath of the air, but the universe had other intentions.

The rapidity of the action precluded any thought, and that was Rory's undoing. When allowed time to reflect, when she stared into danger's face as it came barreling towards her, she would always choose to back down. But without the luxury of deliberation, she acted reflexively.

Rory threw herself into Casey's side to knock her out of striking range, not knowing the lunge was meant to be harmless. The movement placed the witch directly in intersection with the path of Dillion's momentum. Too late to completely pull up, the wolf's teeth scraped along her forearm as he frantically strained to divert the course of his attack.

Casey fell. So did the wolf, upending on its side from the force of its effort. Rory stumbled back against the wall, arm instinctively cradled to her chest. It tingled oddly, and she peeled it away from her shirt to examine it. Dillion's teeth had broken the skin in a shallow cut, and blood was beginning to bead up through the thin opening. "It's not bad," she murmured, but her voice sounded peculiar to her ears. Or maybe it was just the deathly quiet of the room her words had fallen into. Baffled by the silence, she looked up into several immobile faces.

The clouds in Dillion's pale eyes had been swept away by his impact, and he was now staring at her in a way that drove a chilly knife into her gut. His muzzle began to recede, his paws lengthening into fingers, his ears rounding. Rory's head was mysteriously fuzzy, like someone had stuffed cotton between her ears; she blinked a few times and abruptly there was a naked teenager on the floor.

"Aurora." Liam. She glanced in his direction, and the world tottered on end. There was something laced into his voice, into his eyes that she had never expected. Terror. Cool, composed, unmovable Liam was afraid. Of what? "Stay very still."

Her legs were trembling too much to obey. The bleeding was getting worse, much worse than the superficial injury warranted, streaming over her arm. A drop of blood plummeted to the floor. Rory tumbled after it, falling, plunging into the black hole that had unexpectedly sprung up beneath her feet.

°°°

There is a reason that werewolves only hunt to kill. And there was a reason Dillion had just inadvertently broken half a dozen laws.

Unlike shapeshifter wolves, being a werewolf is not genetic—it is a disease, passed from mother to child through the placenta. Or by a bite, the entry of a werewolf's saliva into the victim's bloodstream.

Unlike becoming a vampire, lycanthropy does not stop the victim's vital functions. The new werewolf lives through every agonizing moment of the transformation. That is—if he lives. As difficult as it is to endure the transition into becoming a vampire, that many fewer survive a werewolf's bite.

°°°

Time fractured. Hours and minutes and seconds played out in a brilliant array of splintered moments, sights and sounds and smells, all tinged with a hazily sharp sheen of crimson. Red like blood. But mostly, there was blackness, blessed blackness, a dark space where nothing entered and nothing left. A place to disappear, to rest, to forget the anguish decimating her physical form.

Liam's voice came to her first. "…The first day is the most critical. If she survives this, everything else will only hurt."

"But she will live, won't she, Papa?" Dillion. Her heart, her downfall.

"Yes. She's…perfect." Strange that he sounded almost awed. "Her own natural abilities are speeding the recovery process. A full-blooded witch would have fought the infection off entirely after a few days, but with her ancestry…she's facilitating the change."

She strained her ears, tried to flutter the leaden weight of her eyelids, desperate to hear more, but the effort sent the world into a tailspin. She floated in the empty void for a seeming eternity before finally resurfacing like a drowning swimmer gasping for air.

Ulf was next. She caught his scent before she heard his voice. It was thick, strong, cloying. Nothing her in life had ever smelled like that. "Dillion." His tone was muffled like it was echoing from another room, or maybe like he had been crying. "You can't—"

"I am. Papa's right. If I were the first thing she saw…I have to go."

"How long?"

"I don't know. Maybe…maybe a long time, Ulf."

"We're a family—pack. We can't do this without you."

"You will. You are going to take good care of her, Ulf. You're going to protect her."

"I can't—"

"You are going to take good care of her."

She couldn't stay long. The abyss was jealous, hungry, swallowing her up in its shadowy jaws.

"She's been calling your name." Soft, feminine. It fell gently on her abnormally sensitive ears.

"She's been saying a lot of things. She's delirious. There's a lot of pain."

"But you come running every time she calls, just like a good puppy."

"This is the last time. Everything's ready. I should be gone in a few minutes."

Silence engulfed her so long that she thought the darkness had come back to liberate her from the unbearable prison of her body. Then his voice rose up again, assuring her that she had never left.

"Casey?"

"Mmm?"

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not the one who needs your apology."

Dark tendrils reached for her, and she reached back, letting herself sink into them. But his words followed her, spoken to no one but her.

"I'm sorry."

°°°

It was nearly midnight and the entire street was dark, but in the window of the tiny diner was a neon orange sign that boisterously declared it to be open. The door swung inwards with only the slightest whine of warning. Alma Dustin looked up expectantly at the ribbon of night that had just entered her restaurant.

The teenager on the threshold swept his blue eyes over her face. They had never met, but they knew each other on sight. "I didn't expect—" he fumbled. "I mean, I didn't know where else to go."

"You did the right thing." Her rough, crackling voice was uncommonly tender. "Come in. Sit down." She gestured, ushering him into the artificial light illuminating the room. "I've made you some tea. It will calm your nerves."

His feet obeyed without his mind interfering. It never occurred to him to ask how Alma had known he was coming. There were simply some things that everyone should know better than to ask a witch unless they were prepared for the answer. He set the guitar strapped to his back against the edge of the table and dropped an old duffel bag beside it before he pulled out the chair across from the old woman, settling his long frame into it and leaning forward to wrap his hands around the mug being offered to him. He took a deep sip, then another, as if endeavoring to find the rights words at the bottom of the cup.

Alma scrutinized him all the while with her bright eyes, and before he could wrap his tongue around a rational sentence, she announced, "Well, you're not so bad."

He sputtered, choking on a mouthful of liquid, and blinked incredulously at her. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," she admonished defensively. "I was mistaken about your kind and you in particular—an old woman has her prejudices. But this past day has brought about so many changes…" Her sharp eyes focused inwardly for a moment, and she shook her head to clear them. "I don't know what I was expecting of you—certainly not someone so young." She smiled crookedly at him, but it wasn't entirely unpleasant. "And handsome too. Yes, you'll do just fine."

A few short hours from morning and suddenly his whole world had gone mad. "I'm afraid I don't understand," he drawled as slowly and patiently as he could manage.

"Now's no time for that," she evaded him cryptically again and caught him with a sideways glance. "Do you love her?" she asked abruptly.

His grasp on this conversation was loosening by the moment. "I—you—but…"

"No buts," she insisted. "The simple answer is yes or no."

"Yes," he said, but a whole world of emotion rattled in that single syllable.

"Excellent," Alma accepted all this as completely natural. "Then stop looking so worried. All will end as it should."

He gazed, transfixed, into that old face with its even older, wiser eyes that saw straight through him into things she should never have known. He suddenly felt like he was three years old again, and when he spoke his voice was equally as young and unsure, "I didn't mean to."

"Of course, but that hardly matters now. What's done is done. We have to move on from there."

"She's going to live," he frantically clung to the conviction, offered it to older woman for comfort.

A hint of a smile curved Alma's lips, lending to her air of mystery. "Did you think I didn't know that, child?"

"I—" he stumbled. He was completely out of his depth here, and he found himself at an overwhelming loss for words. "Are you sure?" he asked at last because he had never really believed himself.

"You shouldn't question things that are out of your hands, boyo. You have played your part well. It is time for you to go to bed, get some rest. Everything else will fall into place without us."

She stood slowly and creakily, her old body betraying her nimble mind. He quickly followed suit, bounding to her side so he could take hold of her elbow. "Bed?" he parroted, looking numbly down into her indigo eyes.

"That's a nice boy," she murmured as she accepted the support of his arm. "Yes, bed. Or as close to it as I can offer you. I'm afraid I have a sudden infestation of teenagers, and the only comfortable surface I have left is the couch."

Incapable of a coherent thought, he grabbed his luggage with his free hand and wordlessly escorted her to the door and outside to the exterior staircase leading up to her apartment. At the top of the stairs she paused, shuffling with her keys. It was only there that it struck him to put a voice to the one thing that tramped endlessly across his mind: "I'm sorry."

Her eyes darted to his face, startled for the first time. "Why would you say that, child? Indeed, you may have just saved the world."

°°°

Aurora opened her eyes, blinked sluggishly. Then memory landed square in her chest: the bite, the look on Liam's face, and the blackness that had devoured her. Panic swamped her misty mind, and she promptly fell out of bed. She lay on the dreadfully solid wooden floor for a long moment, moaning incomprehensively.

Everything hurt.

Her stomach heaved in protest, inspiring her to life again. She attempted to wobble to her feet, but she had an awful time finding them, as if her center of gravity had shifted. Failing that, she drug herself on her hands and knees into the adjoining bathroom. She pressed her cheek into the icy cool tile, hoping for the sensation to jolt her limp brain back into motion, while she turned her attention inward. Desperately, she reached for that small ball of witchfire that existed at her core, the little spring of energy that had hitherto always served as her grounding force in the world.

She reached for it…and found nothing.

Or not exactly nothing. In place of that symbol that had always marked her, however indistinctly, as a witch was something entirely else. In her mind's eye it appeared like an orb of coal, and as she focused on it seemed to glow red like it were being heated in a fire. She touched it, and the world exploded in misery.

Hair sprung up from every pore. Her limbs lengthened and contracted simultaneously, wrenching her in countless different directions. She felt like a rag doll in the hands of a giant child who was persistently and skillfully attempting to turn her inside out in order to expose her entrails to the world. Her body rebelled, writhing rhythmically across the floor, as she screamed in mindless terror. She screamed, screamed until her throat closed over, screamed until her screams became howls.

Four legs scrambled on the slick surface, claws trying to find purchase. Those legs were covered in mottled blond fur, and so was the body they were attached to. Rory yelped in surprise when this registered, and the body attempted to leap to its feet and make an escape from this strange reality. But its muscles, so new and untrained, betrayed her and she collapsed back into a motionless heap of ears and paws and tail and teeth. Stunned, Rory let go.

And so did the giant force that was toying with her. Everything receded, falling back into her human form with a sickening lurch, leaving her naked and exhausted next to the tattered rags of her clothes. Barely conscious, she only had enough presence of mind to haul herself up to the level of the toilet before she was suddenly and violently ill, and when she had rejected all the contents of her stomach, she allowed her head to fall insensibly onto the porcelain seat.

A blanket dropped around her. A pair of hands lifted her shoulders, gently scooting her back from the toilet bowl. While one held her steady, the other hand appeared briefly in front of her eyes, gingerly pushing back the hair that had fallen over her face.

"Dillion?" she whispered huskily.

"No," Ulf answered quietly but firmly—and maybe a little sorrowfully. "He's not here. I'm sorry."

"Ulf," the words tore at her raw, aching throat, "what's happening to me?"

The redhead wrapped his arms around her, burying her in the broad expanse of his unyielding chest. "It's okay. Everything's going to be okay. It gets easier, I promise—the change does. It only hurts because you're fighting it."

Frustration and confusion were a complicated mix, too complicated for her fever-fogged brain to sort through. "How can I stop if I don't know what I'm fighting?"

His hand stroked her hair, calmly, peacefully. She could sense his concern, and it was beginning to settle the waves of chaos inside her. "You're going to love it. You'll see, Rory," he soothed as if he hadn't heard her question. Maybe she'd only thought she had spoken aloud. "You're going to love being a wolf."

°°°

Keller opened her eyes and sat up in one seamless motion. The lump of flesh curled in the other bed made a wordless, sleepy protest against the disruption.

"Galen?"

"Mmmhmm."

"Do you know what a synonym for dusk is?"

"Keller," the shapeshifter's heir had stirred enough to recover his powers of speech. "I'm most of the way asleep. My brain is sludge."

"Twilight, Galen. Twilight."

Two green eyes popped open in the semi-darkness. "As in…" he breathed but couldn't seem to put the enormity of this discovery into words.

She nodded decisively. "Yes. 'One from the twilight to be one with the dark.'"

"Aurora Dusk-Keeper." He sat up, now entirely awake, and ran a hand through his ruffled golden hair. "That certainly explains a lot. The Council, especially. But…" His brow furrowed. "What about the second half, the part about being one with the dark—what does that mean?"

Keller opened her mouth and swiftly shut it again. What did it mean The dark. What was another synonym for dark? Night. But even the night wasn't entirely dark because there were stars when you weren't in the city, and there was the moon except for when the dark side was facing the earth—The moon. Her heart thudded against her breastbone. Oh Goddess.

"The werewolf," the sometime-panther hissed. "I'm going to kill him."