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hadn’t had a chance yet to replace it.
    “Something came up.”
    Something in my tone alerted him. He stiffened, then almost dragged me into the hall, his nostrils flaring.
    “Whose blood is that? Are you hurt?”
    Normally he would have noticed it the minute I came in. Werewolf noses were very sensitive. Too busy telling me off to listen to his senses.
    “Not mine, and no.” I laid a calming hand on his arm. “Chill, Garth. It’s okay. Come downstairs and I’ll tell you all about it.”
    The front door opened as we reached the bottom of the stairs, and Steve came back in. We joined Ben in the lounge room, where he’d subsided into an armchair. The room was small by Leandra’s standards—she’d always preferred the country property—but in the old part of The Rocks nothing was newer than a hundred years old, and all the buildings were crammed in, rubbing shoulders with their neighbours. Nobody had big lounge rooms around here. She’d done it up nicely, though, with plenty of antique furniture and expensive-looking paintings on the walls. No one who saw the room would be surprised to discover her favourite colour was red—the chairs were covered in red velvet, and their wooden arms were stained a deep rose that matched the dominant colour in the rug that covered the floor.
    “And what’s the one-armed wonder doing here? Thought he had a few more days in hospital?”
    “Hospital got a bit too lively,” Ben said without opening his eyes. “Hello, Garth. Nice to see you too.”
    Steve and I sat down side by side on a velvet-covered lounge, which creaked as it took Steve’s muscled weight. He was half-Maori and built like a tank. Garth prowled back and forth across the Persian rug, unsettled, while I gave them a brief rundown of the events at the hospital and our visit to the police station. His aura flared with bright orange streaks, and his normally grey eyes were ringed with yellow, sure signs of the inner wolf’s distress.
    “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go without me,” he said.
    “You can’t tag along everywhere I go. We were fine.”
    “We need more men,” Steve said, in his deep, slow voice. “We can barely protect you here, much less when you go out.”
    I huffed out a frustrated breath. He was right, of course. The problem was how to find them.
    “Oh, for God’s sake sit down, Garth. You’re going to wear a hole in the carpet.”
    The werewolf sank into a chair with bad grace. Its delicate lines had been built for smaller people, and he looked enormous in it. Enormous and grumpy. “Anyone we recruit now is suspect. Alicia or Elizabeth could plant someone on us.”
    But if we couldn’t find allies they’d have little trouble finishing us off. Catch-22.
    “Unless we take people we already know,” Steve said. “What about the rest of the old team?”
    Only six of Leandra’s eleven thralls had signed on again. Two Garth hadn’t been able to locate and the other three obviously didn’t like my chances, as they’d refused to have anything to do with me. I’d offered bucket loads of cash, but money could only buy so much. Since I’d refused to enthral them, I couldn’t force them to change their minds. They were lucky they’d only been enthralled by Leandra for a few months, or they would have been left comatose when she died.
    Apart from them, the old team had consisted of Jason, now playing for the other team, and Luce, ditto. Oh, and the werewolf pack whose alpha had already refused to help me last week.
    Garth shook his head. “No go.”
    Steve hesitated. “Maybe … some more thralls?”
    “Seriously?” He knew how I felt about thralls. The world looked very different when you’d been on the other end of a dragon’s mental powers, and I was a changed woman. No more thralls for this dragon. “You’ve been a thrall. You think that’s any way to live? Unable to do anything except follow orders? Barely able to think for yourself?”
    He shifted in his seat, clearly