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moment's notice. Always angry, always hungry, always aroused—the first two he was letting me help him with. It was the third that made me want to whack him in the head with a solid object on a very regular basis. Lupa were apparently very sexual creatures, and they also mated for life. For complex reasons, Wyatt had declared me his mate to the Assembly several months ago, around the same time that we finally had the best sex ever.
    Long story short: he wanted me, I wanted him, but he was still worried about controlling himself. I've been abused by a lot of people in the last couple of months. I was raped by a goblin. My pinkie finger was chopped off in the name of science. I was strapped to a table and tortured for three weeks. And the very last thing he wanted to do, Wyatt said over and over again, was to be another person who hurt me. Which was why every time we seemed to inch past the kissing and light petting stage, he shut back down.
    It was also why I had a plan for later today; it was about damned time he stopped being so careful and let me take some control of our relationship. Maybe the timing wasn't ideal, given everything we were currently dealing with, but our lives never slowed down. There was no such thing as the perfect moment. We didn't get breaks for romance. I had to make this happen.
    But first, teenager hunting.
    Not as easy as it might seem, since the only information we had to go on were general descriptions (appeared between fifteen and seventeen years old, red hair, pale skin, tall and lanky) and names: John, Mark and Peter. The good news was that in the last five weeks, there had been no reports of animal attacks linked back to the Lupa pups. The bad news was that we had no reports of animal attacks linked back to the Lupa pups—no reports meant no leads. Our usual informants had nothing for us. The pups simply have not been seen.
    And the disappearing act made me nervous. The man who raised them was dead. Half of their brothers were dead. The fact that they were given to a human by the Fey suggested they'd gone back to the Fey (or were taken by the Fey), but we had no way to verify that. So we were stuck driving around Mercy's Lot and hoping Wyatt's mental werewolf detector went off—some sort of telepathic link that exists among the Lupa packs. So far, no dice.
    I turned onto Cottage Place and slowed a bit as we passed the empty storefront that had once been Old World Teas. Last month we'd busted the mage who ran the shop and given him a non-choice about getting the hell out of town. Brutus was a freelance magic worker who did spells and enchanted crystals, and he'd taken work from Wyatt on occasion. He'd also taken work from Walter Thackery and the Fey, and we were sympathetic enough to his sense of capitalism and the need to make a living that we didn't kill him outright.
    The shop has been empty ever since.
    A few blocks down, I spotted the familiar shape of my old residence. The building housed a couple of businesses, including a kitschy jewelry store, as well as the walk-up apartments on the second and third floors. I'd lived in one for four years with my old Triad partners Jesse and Ash. We'd abandoned it for good several months ago, but I couldn't stop a pang of guilt as I thought of my dead partners. And grief, too.
    "Ash's birthday is next week," Wyatt said suddenly.
    "Is it?" I was never good at remembering things like that, and our random birthday celebrations usually involved cheap cake and cheaper liquor, followed by maudlin comments about being happy to have made it to another birthday.
    "Yeah. She'd have been twenty-eight."
    It was a good age, since few Triad Hunters ever lived past twenty-two—kind of ironic, since that's how old I was when I died my first death. My new body was twenty-seven, and I had no idea when her (my?) birthday was.
    "What's that face for?" Wyatt asked.
    "Huh?" Had I been pulling a face?
    "You looked confused for a second."
    "Just wondering which birthday