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his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.
    Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they’d used, but prowled around the side, where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards; one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.
    The interior of the barn was dark, and the stall’s half walls blocked his view of the main section, where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.
    “Killing things again, Father?” said Moira’s cool disapproving voice, cutting though Jon’s soliloquy.
    And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They’d found her somehow, Samhain’s Coven had, but she wasn’t one of them.
    “So judgmental.” Tom had expected something… bigger from the man’s voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.
    “Kill her. You have to kill her before she destroys us—I have seen it.” It was Molly, the girl from Jon’s message.
    “You couldn’t see your way out of a paper bag, Molly,” said Moira. “Not that you’re wrong, of course.”
    There were other people in the barn, Tom could smell them, but they stayed quiet.
    “You aren’t going to kill me,” said Kouros. “If you could have done that, you’d have done it before now. Which brings me to my point: Why are you here?”
    “To stop you from killing this man,” Moira told him. “I’ve killed men before—and you haven’t stopped me. What is so special about this one?”
     
    Moira felt the burden of all those deaths upon her shoulders. He was right. She could have killed him before—before he’d killed anyone else.
    “This one has a brother,” she said.
    She felt Tom’s presence in the barn, but her look-past-me spell must still have been working, because no one seemed to notice the werewolf. And any witch with a modicum of sensitivity to auras would have felt him. His brother was a faint trace to her left—something his constant stream of words made far more clear than her magic was able to.
    Her father she could follow only from his voice.
    There were other people in the structure—she hadn’t quite decided what the cavernous building was: probably a barn, given the dirt floor and faint odor of cow—but she couldn’t pinpoint them either. She knew where Molly was, though. And Molly was the important one, Kouros’s right hand.
    “Someone paid you to go up against me?” Her father’s voice was faintly incredulous. “Against us?”
    Then he did something, made some gesture. She wouldn’t have known except for Molly’s sigh of relief. So she didn’t feel too bad when she tied Molly’s essence, through the gum she still held, into her shield.
    When the coven’s magic hit the shield, it was Molly who took the damage. Who died. Molly, her little sister, whose presence she could no longer feel.
    Someone, a young man, screamed Molly’s coven name—Wintergreen. And there was a flurry of movement where Moira had last sensed her.
    Moira dropped the now-useless bit of gum on the ground.
    “Oh, you’ll pay for that,” breathed her father. “Pay in pain and power until there is nothing left of you.”
    Someone sent power her way, but it wasn’t a concerted spell from the coven, and it slid off her protections without harm. Unlike the fist that struck her in the face, driving her glasses into her nose and knocking her to the ground—her father’s fist. She’d recognize the weight of it anywhere.
    Unsure of where her enemies were, she stayed where she was, listening. But she didn’t hear Tom; he was just suddenly there. And the circle