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in her ears. And she heard her grandmother’s warning: Be on your guard. Had she brought this evil to the station? A sick, guilt-ridden feeling swirled in her gut. Was anyone left alive here?
    Her stomach clenched hard at the thought, then she felt the amulet vibrating against her skin.
    Tumseneha was here.
    Had he come for her? All the horrible images of him from her numerous nightmares flashed in her mind: a shifting, faceless shadow that fed off fear, a beast with four heads and fanged teeth; the one she dreaded the most was the normal male faces. He had sneaked up onher in those dreams, stepped out of crowds to grab her by the neck or plunge a knife in her back. He was, after all, a shape-shifter, and unlike her he could change his physical appearance into anything his heart desired. Her white magic was limited only to the bear totem. What form had he assumed at the park when he’d killed the girl? Was it the same one at the station now? She recalled the missing girl’s body and shuddered.
    A crash sounded in Processing. Screams followed. At least people were alive.
    A growl rumbled through the station, so menacing and so guttural it vibrated along her nerves. She had heard the howl of many beasts, natural and supernatural, but never one that sent dread through every nerve in her body like this one.
    She crept down the hall, her temples throbbing, a knot in her throat.
    As she drew closer to Processing, she saw the five-hundred-pound solid metal door, ripped clean from its hinges, the edge of it sticking out through the jamb. It was one of those “proof” doors, bulletproof, atomic-bomb proof, 9/11-afterthought proof. Too bad it wasn’t evil-sorcerer proof.
    She paused at the glass windows that ran along the wall separating Processing from the hallway. Her keen senses detected the sporadic thumping of human hearts inside, their fear jack hammering the air.
    Another crash and more shrieks as she peeked inside.
    Utter chaos. Desk and filing cabinets overturned. Civilians, cops and what looked like everyone in the building had hit the floor, some pretending death,some not pretending. Mannie was among them, pinned beneath an overturned desk, his cell phone still in hand. She zeroed in on his heartbeat. Still alive, but barely. Tumseneha had attacked him with ruthless accuracy.
    At the front of the room she spotted Detective Brower cornered by a lycanthrope. A werewolf, a ravehai in Patomani lingo. And right now this thing conjured from the underworld’s darkest reaches looked like the embodiment of pure brute force and viciousness. Sinewy strength bulged from its muscles. Gray, matted hair covered its body. Five-inch claws curled along its gnarled half-human, half-wolf hands. She could see the life-force aura the beast emitted, a nexus of pulsing, deep burgundy and black demon light.
    Hollywood had perpetrated a lot of contemporary myths regarding werewolves. The one that angered Fala the most was that werewolves didn’t know they were killing while in wolf form. Heck, yeah, they knew what they were doing. They reveled in carnage.
    The whole biting thing and silver-bullet hoax were just as laughable. Werewolves didn’t just walk the earth, biting and propagating its kind. They had to be conjured from the underworld like any parasitic demon that inhabited human bodies. A sorcerer powerful enough to call forth a werewolf spirit was also powerful enough to control it and protect it. Killing the host human never destroyed it, and an innocent life was always lost in the process. But the werewolf spirit could always slip into another human until the cycle was broken, either by destroying its master or by an incantation that could command it to leave the human vessel and return to the underworld, to await another resurrection. Fala had lost count of thenumber of werewolf spirits she’d dispatched to hell. So much for getting the facts straight.
    The difference here was Tumseneha had not only