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wings, and it fell upon the younger of the two clients. He gave a choked shriek, and then there was a horrible noise of ripping, and his crossbow fell over the railing with part of his arm still attached to it. The rest of him subsided, groaning, on the walkway, and the thing stood up. It had long claws that caught the moonlight. It leapt over the railing and took down the second client. It evidently had teeth, too. It stood up again, wiping its mouth on the back of its hand. Laurence was feverishly pumping crossbow bolts at it, but they melted into blue flame in the air as they approached.
    The thing looked at Laurence, then down at Jake and Clare. It had fiercely yellow eyes, the pupils closed to slits even in the moonlight. Blood dripped from its claws, and it licked its fangs. It was barefoot in the snow, and what had fluttered as it leapt from the top of the sculpture was its long black hair and the black-and-white kimono thing that it was wearing.
    “You should have hunted me,” it said, in a deep voice with a Japanese accent. “I make a good prey for stupid humans. You could have chased me for a very long time. But not now. You hunted my friend. You will not hunt again.”
    He sprang at Laurence, batting his crossbow aside as if it were a toy, and caught him by the throat, lifting him off his feet. He drove two claws of his other hand into one eye and then the other, and he dropped Laurence in a heap in the snow. He sprang down the length of the fake tundra to land in front of Jake. He fanned out his fingers in a delicate motion in front of Jake’s face. Blue flame sprang out of his palm, and Jake screamed and fell, clutching his eyes.
    Takehiko—who was still somehow, horribly, the beautiful teenager from Seven C—looked at Clare.
    “I did not trust you to begin with,” he said. “But I did not think you are so stupid. Do you think that anyone would go to the trouble to seal up a harmless human in a painting for four hundred years?”
    And suddenly she understood something about him.
    “I know you want to kill me,” she said rapidly. Her voice sounded low and husky and not like her voice at all. “And you’re right—I’m pretty sure I deserve it. But I think you’re going to leave me alive. I think you’re going to let me call an ambulance for the others so they don’t bleed to death, either. I think you’re going to do it because you’ve got used to living with harmless humans, and you don’t want to go back to being what you were before. I think you want to be like them.”
    Them , she’d said. Them. Not us .
    He looked at her a moment longer, and then he flashed his teeth in a snarl, and turned away.

    •   •   •

    In the hospital waiting room, Clare listened to Seevers, who had arrived not long after the ambulance, gabbling into his phone about waivers and insurance premiums. This was going to be a disaster for Stake, and she was going to be held responsible. It wasn’t fair. She had only ever gone along with the others. She had just been trying to get ahead. It wasn’t as if any of this had ever really been her idea. If people wanted to hunt innocent kids who turned into wolves, that wasn’t her fault.
    She fell asleep in a waiting-room chair, and woke cramped and hungry. She had dreamt of something unsettling, and tried to remember what it was. But no, it hadn’t been a dream. She had really done that. She had stood there and waited for Nick to be dead.
    But what else was she supposed to have done? If she hadn’t been going to do that, why had she done all the work leading up to that hunt? Why had she taken the job with Stake at all?
    Threats , she’d said. Supernatural Threats . Nick wasn’t a Threat, but Takehiko was, that was for damn sure. Compared to him, the vampires that Stake’s customers usually hunted were just a minor nuisance, about as dangerous as racoons.
    And Nick lived with that thing. Nick made fun of his accent and called him Tacky; Nick had tried to smother