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know. More than two.”
    It was going to be a long night and a longer week ahead.
    “Yeah, which means either we missed a few . . . or we’re dealing with a new strain.”
     
     

Chapter Three
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    THE SUN WAS setting behind the expansive log house near the Varco Valley gas station, when the phone rang. On the first ring, Ishmael thought, The tribunal has convened. He sat back, staring out the dewy window at the frosty grass and the highway beyond. He’d just sunken deep into the body-hugging office chair, he’d barely sipped his espresso, and he knew that time was officially up. The phone rang a second time, and he thought, Time to pay the piper. Holly shut off the shower; by then, every window had steamed up with shampoo-scented clouds. She hated closed doors, except for those that kept out the encroaching winter. On the third ring, Ishmael uncurled his middle finger from his fist and showed it to the handset, and on the fourth ring, he finally picked up the phone.
    “Varco Valley Station, how can I help you?” Ishmael answered, in case it was an outside call. It wasn’t. It was Angie Burley, the Wyrd senior field assignment handler. She was one of the less obnoxious Council members, but she could complain as proficiently as the rest of them. She’d been promoted a year and a half earlier, and she hated the job, primarily because it meant quitting her home in South Carolina and relocating to “The Devil’s Frozen Ass Boil, Purgatory State, Canuckistan”.
    “Ishmael?” Burley asked.
    “Yeah, it’s me,” he answered.
    “Can y’all come on up to the main house?” Burley asked. “Got a job for you.”
    “Uh . . . what?”
    “We’ve got a job, you’re the best qualified, and I’m low on personnel.”
    “Does Haberman know?”
    “Jess git yer ass on up here, Ish, so we all can talk about it face to face, all right? Can’t stand that dayummed static on the line. Gawd, tired of all this backwater bullshit—” She hung up.
    Ishmael sat at his computer, feeling numb, worn out, terrified, and a little amused.
    Holly stood in the doorway, rubbing a towel across her hair. “Who was that?”
    “Burley,” he answered. “I have to go up to the main house. You want to go up there with me?”
    She was staring out one of the picture windows. The sun had gone behind the hills. Sky and lake both glowed in shades of rust and fire. She moved like a figure skater on dry land, smoothly and silently, mastered by graceful self-control. “No,” she said softly. Even her voice had an edge-free quality to it. She slid her hand across his shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. “But you can drop me off at the Hollow.”
    He didn’t want to go to the Hollow. Mary Anne was there. So was Dep, who had in his veins the same backfired vaccine that had turned Digger into a long-horned wendigo. Whether Ishmael’s virus had helped to counteract Digger’s less attractive qualities or not still remained to be seen.
    Helen was out there too. Little Helen, who’d entered quarantine at age seven. When she was nine, there’d been an explosion and fire at the abandoned hotel where she and dozens of families had taken shelter. While other parents held their children to the flames, Helen was rescued, disfigured but alive. Until she turned twelve, she spent every day and night hiding from lycanthropes, including her own mother. Then one day, Ishmael arrived. Not a week later, Jay flew over and dropped huge incendiary bombs on the quarantine, Helen’s mother was murdered before her eyes, and then Ishmael dragged Helen through a firefight and dumped her into this new morass of frontier justice. Cross-infected, mute with despair, she now had to adapt to life as a lycanthrope, reviled and under suspicion, at Varco Lake.
    The last time Ishmael had seen Helen, she was sitting in a corner in Ferox’s dormitory room, knees pulled up to her chin, hands lifeless on the floor beside her, mouth open, eyes