Derek woke on his back in the dirt, morning sun past the horizon, cane stalks pressing in from both sides of the narrow space where he’d come to rest. His skin was damp from field moisture and last night’s exertion, and the shredded blue khakis were all he wore. Both forearms had healed from Michelle’s claw work during the night, the skin smooth where deep lacerations had been. He lay there, took stock of his body, then pushed himself upright and got his bearings.

  The dirt road cutting through the cane was twenty feet to his left. He walked to it and started north, barefoot, the packed earth warm and rutted beneath his feet.

  A rusted Ford pickup slowed behind him. The driver, an older man with sunburned skin and a straw hat, squinted at Derek through the open window with the look of someone who’d seen farm equipment wreck clothes before, but not like this.

  “Son, you look like you went twelve rounds with a combine harvester,” Jessie said, pulling over. “Need a lift?”

  Derek looked at him. “Yeah, I could use one.”

  Jessie looked him over slowly, noting the missing shirt and shoes, and the pants shredded by something industrial. “Where’s your shirt? Shoes? And why do your pants look like a bear had dinner with ‘em?” Derek managed a weak smile, trying to sound casual despite the worry in his eyes. “Long story. I got hammered last night, must’ve gotten into a fight or something. I barely remember.”

  The old farmer chuckled. “Well, you sure look like you lost.” He motioned toward the passenger seat. “Hop in, city boy. Closest shower’s your own.”

  Derek climbed in, watching fields pass as the truck rattled north, each pothole jarring his still-recovering spine.

  Meanwhile, several miles away, Sheryl was midway through her morning rounds when her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She stepped into the hallway between two rooms, concern already touching her brow as she answered it.

  “Hey, Mom,” Derek said, his voice low and rough at the edges, weighted with uncertainty.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “On my way home. Listen, we've got a serious problem.”

  Sheryl kept her voice even. “What happened?”

  Derek took a breath. “Last night, I got a text from Olivia, telling me to meet her at that old sugar cane mill off Dungy Road. When I got there, something was off. She had her back turned the whole time. Then she turned around and, Mom, her eyes were green.”

  Sheryl stopped walking. “What do you mean by green?”

  “I mean, she’s one of them now. She’s a werewolf. It must have happened recently, because just a day before, we had breakfast together. She looked fine.” He paused. “No signs. No symptoms. Nothing.”

  Sheryl pressed two fingers against her temple. “That’s impossible. Even if she was infected, it should’ve taken time for the virus to rewrite her system.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Derek said. “But she changed fast, too fast. I fired two silver rounds at her. Neck shots. She went down but didn’t stay down.”

  “What?” Sheryl said. “She survived silver?”

  “She did. That’s not all. When I tried to get away, I ran into Michelle, Karen’s old friend. She was just standing in the road like she was waiting for me. I hit her with silver too, but she changed, right there in front of me.”

  “Michelle?” Sheryl whispered. “Oh no.”

  “Yeah. She’s turned into one of them.” Derek’s voice went heavier, regret and weariness making each word land hard. “I didn’t have a choice, Mom. It was me versus both of them.”

  Sheryl exhaled. “And?”

  “Then it got weird. We just stopped fighting. We circled each other, growling. I don’t know why; it’s like something froze us. Then out of nowhere, this green portal opened behind them, and Lycara stepped through. She was in human form, looked like Karen, but was different. Taller. Black leather armor, almost like some kind of Amazon queen. She didn’t attack. She just watched us for a few seconds, then turned back into the portal. Michelle and Olivia followed.”

  Silence ran on the line. Sheryl squeezed her eyes shut, frustration tightening her features. “She’s testing you. She’s toying with all of us.”

  “Yeah,” Derek said. “And my truck didn’t survive the fight, either.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Sheryl said. “Take my Mustang. It’s parked in the garage. The keys are in the drawer by the sink.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Derek,” she said, her voice thick with pride and sorrow, “I’m proud of how you handled it. I just wish it didn’t have to come to this.”

  Derek exhaled. “Me too. I’m gonna shower, get cleaned up, and clear my head.”

  “Do that. We’ll figure this out, together.”

  Elsewhere in the mid-district, Karen’s house on the residential street looked exactly as it had before the storm: brick facade, trimmed hedge line, the new fence catching what morning light reached it between the oaks on the east side. Nothing from the street gave away what had been done to the interior.

  Inside, the walls gleamed with a dark, polished finish that absorbed light. There were no personal effects, no old furniture, since Lycara rebuilt the house.

  In the chamber at the back of the structure, which extended dimensionally well beyond the house’s exterior footprint, Lycara stood at the floor-length mirror and ran two fingers along her jawline. Her straight black hair fell to her shoulders, and the black leather bodysuit sat on her frame with its gold chevron studs running down the torso, the hammered chain at her hips, the black cuffs at her forearms. The green in her eyes was at its steady, full-saturation level, throwing color into the mirror’s surface around her reflection.

  The sound of heels crossing the marble came from the corridor, and Lycara kept her eyes on her own reflection.

  “Enter,” she said.

  Olivia entered in close-fitted black leather with steel-threaded seams catching green light at each joint. Her nails were darkened and pointed, her hair pulled back. Her eyes matched Lycara’s green in depth if not in authority.

  She crossed the marble floor and went down on one knee six feet from the mirror, her head angled forward. “My queen.”

  Lycara extended her right hand without turning from the mirror. Olivia rose, stepped forward, and pressed her lips to the back of the goddess’s forearm, then stepped back.

  Lycara turned from the mirror and looked at her.

  “Tell me what you felt last night,” she said. “When you were with him.”

  Olivia held her gaze. “I felt the pull between what I was told to do and what I wanted to do. They weren’t the same thing.”

  “And which won?”

  “You did,” Olivia said.

  Lycara tilted her head. “That was a test. Not of loyalty, of restraint. You could have killed him. You chose not to.”

  “You didn’t tell me to kill him.”

  “I didn’t tell you not to, either.” Lycara walked past her toward the center of the chamber and turned. “That was the test. You understood the objective without being given a ceiling. That is the difference between an instrument and a soldier. I don’t use instruments.”

  Olivia said nothing, waiting.

  “You and Michelle will be my enforcers,” Lycara said. “You carry my law in blood. You kill when I say kill, and you stop when I say stop, and between those two commands, you have complete authority over how the work gets done.” She paused, her eyes steady on Olivia’s face. “Derek Brown saw you last night. The version you’ve been carrying for two years, the badge and the protocol, that version performed for him. I need to know if she’s gone.”

  Olivia looked back at her without flinching. “She’s gone.”

  “Convince me,” Lycara said.

  “I put two officers down last night without hesitation,” Olivia said. “Because they were in my path. If the detective I used to be had been making that call, I’d have talked both of them back to their units. I didn’t talk. I moved.” She let the statement sit for a moment. “She’s gone.”

  Lycara held her eyes for a long beat. “There is another side of you that Derek has never seen,” she said. “I saw it the moment I touched your mind. The part that has been sitting behind the badge since the academy, waiting for a context where it was allowed to operate.” She crossed her arms. “I gave it that context. Now I need you to make sure it doesn’t go back to sleep.”

  Olivia nodded once. “Understood.”

  “You’ll have more joining the pack soon,” Lycara said. “A new world requires order, and order requires enforcers who don’t require persuasion every time a decision needs to be made. I need you operational, not ceremonial. You are not here to kneel. You are here to work.”

  “Then tell me where to start,” Olivia said.

  “Michelle will brief you on the recruitment schedule,” Lycara said. “There are three candidates in Bayou Mounds carrying suppressed Lycan exposure from the outbreak. Marsh’s compound slowed the virus but didn’t finish it. I want those three found and brought through before Sheryl Brown understands what she’s losing.” She turned back to the mirror. “You have forty-eight hours.”

  Olivia turned and walked out, her heels tracking back across the marble and diminishing through the corridor.

  Joseph Turner from Foxwood Furniture rang the doorbell at eleven-fifteen with a dolly loaded with a boxed washing machine that Karen Stewart had ordered three weeks prior. He rang twice and got no response, then a third time, and a calm female voice came through the intercom.

  “Enter.”

  The front door opened inward on its own.

  Joseph stepped through the threshold and stopped walking.

  The ceiling was forty feet above him. The floor beneath his boots was polished marble running in a continuous expanse to walls that glowed faintly at the joints where floor met wall. Crescent chandeliers hung overhead, throwing green light down across the marble surface. He stood in the entry and turned a slow half-circle, trying to reconcile what he was looking at with the brick-facade house he’d pulled up to outside.

  Lycara walked into the entry from the main corridor. She wore the black leather bodysuit with its gold studs and chain, and her green eyes were on him, focused and interested.

  “Hey, you’re here to drop off the machine, right?” she asked, and her voice carried Karen’s warmth, the inflection recognizable if you’d ever met Karen Stewart in a professional context.

  “Y-yes, ma’am,” Joseph said, pulling his work order from his back pocket and looking at it and then at the room again.

  “Where do you want it?” he asked.

  Lycara tilted her head and stepped toward him. “Right here is fine,” she said softly. “Closer.”

  Joseph’s face turned red, and he set the box down on the dolly, then straightened up. Then the lights went out across the entire interior, every chandelier extinguishing at the same instant, and a single white spotlight opened around them from a source he couldn’t locate.

  “Uh, is the power out?” he asked.

  Lycara’s smile did not move. “No,” she said. “But soon, your power will be.”

  Joseph blinked. “What?”

  Behind him, from the dark outside the spotlight, came a low, continuous growl, vibrating through the marble floor and up through the soles of his boots. He turned slowly.

  Four pairs of green eyes burned in the dark. When the lights came back up, Olivia, Michelle, Carl, Gwendolyn, and Paul were standing behind him in a loose arc, each of them in partial shift: jaws forward, claws extended, eyes running full green, their breathing audible and measured. Paul’s forearms had the fur across them already. Michelle’s jawline had extended past its human configuration.

  Joseph stepped back into Lycara. “Ms. Stewart,” he said, his voice coming out thin. “Is this a joke?”

  Lycara laughed.

  The sound of it moved through the chamber from the marble floor to the vaulted ceiling and back, full and unhurried.

  She looked past him at the pack. “Do your thing.”

  Gwendolyn moved first. She covered the distance between herself and Joseph in two strides and lifted him off the marble with both hands at his throat, his boots leaving the floor and his hands going to her forearms and finding no purchase there. The others moved around them toward the corridor, and Gwendolyn carried him with them through the door at the hall’s end.

  The door closed.

  Lycara stood in the entry chamber, her back to the corridor and her eyes on the marble floor, listening to the sounds from the closed door, her expression settled and patient. When the sounds stopped, she looked up at the crescent chandeliers overhead.

  “Let them eat,” she murmured. “A kingdom must be fed before it can rise.”