Derek and Olivia had a standing arrangement at Lionel’s that wasn’t technically a standing arrangement: they would text when a week had gone too long without a debrief, and whoever suggested it first paid for the coffee. Olivia had texted first this time.

  She was already in the corner booth when he arrived, her badge clipped below her jacket’s lapel, her cup half empty, and her eyes already tracking the room out of occupational habit. Derek slid in across from her and flagged the waitress.

  “So,” Olivia said, smirking over her cup. “Your mom’s got herself a boyfriend now?”

  Derek laughed under his breath. “Yeah, I guess. She’s trying to play it cool, though. Pretending it’s nothing.”

  “That’s good,” Olivia said. “After everything she’s been through, she deserves to exhale a little.”

  “Honestly,” Derek said, leaning back in the booth, “we all do.”

  The diner ran its usual morning churn: the counter seats turning over, the waitress refilling coffee down the row, the flat-screen above the register cycling between local news and a sports recap nobody was watching. Outside, the sky had gone grey before nine.

  “Anything new on Wild Dogs?” he asked.

  Olivia shook her head. “Not a damn thing. They’re keeping it tight. I’m off the case, but my contacts say the bodies were bad. Unrecognizable.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Derek muttered.

  “Yeah,” Olivia said. “Too familiar.”

  She set her fork down and looked at him across the table. “Do you think it’s starting again?”

  “I don’t think,” Derek said quietly. “I know. Karen’s gone. It’s Lycara now. And she’s building something.”

  Olivia exhaled and pushed her plate back a few inches. “Then we can’t make the same mistakes. We play this smart.”

  “Already loaded with silver?” he asked.

  Olivia patted her sidearm beneath her jacket. “Always.”

  Derek smirked. “Good. Keep it that way.”

  Olivia got home at four-thirty, poured herself a drink over ice, and pulled off her shoes at the door. The apartment ran two rooms and a kitchen, decorated in the minimalist style of someone who owned things for function rather than comfort: a couch she’d had since Baton Rouge, a television she’d mounted herself, bookshelves along the east wall with the cases lined in no particular order. She found an old sitcom on cable, let the laugh track run, and sat with her feet up, her drink slowly warming in her hand.

  She heard the hiss from the ceiling vent at a quarter past nine.

  She reached for the remote and muted the television. The hiss continued, then grew, and a thin column of black vapor pushed through the vent slats and curled into the room, moving against the air current instead of with it. Olivia was off the couch and had her gun off the table and up before the vapor had finished thickening.

  The smoke gathered in the center of the room, rotating inward on itself, building mass and dimension, and then it resolved into a figure: tall, straight-backed, black leather fitted close across the frame, gold banding running along the ribs and shoulders in geometric lines, green eyes burning in a face that used to belong to Karen Stewart.

  “Karen,” Olivia said, her aim squared on the figure’s chest. “Don’t take another step.”

  The figure smiled, small and measured. “Karen?” she said.

  “Whatever you are,” Olivia said, “you picked the wrong house.”

  Lycara tilted her head slightly, drawing a slow breath through her nose. “Silver?” she said. “Clever.”

  “I’m warning you,” Olivia said.

  “It will take more than silver to stop a god.”

  Olivia fired.

  The muzzle flash lit the walls white, and the gun went red-hot in her grip in the same instant, the heat building from the frame through the trigger guard to her palm faster than a heated metal bar, and she dropped it on reflex, and the gun hit the floor still trailing heat distortion above it.

  Lycara raised her right hand with the palm open, her fingers extended, and invisible pressure closed around Olivia’s throat and took her off the floor entirely. Olivia’s hands went to her neck, fingers finding nothing to grip, her feet cycling in open air eight inches above the carpet.

  “Last time,” Lycara said, her voice carrying through the room at conversational volume, “you escaped me. That won’t happen again.”

  The pressure built. Olivia’s vision went gray at the periphery and then gray at the center, and then she was on the floor, and the lights in the room were off, and the television was still running its muted laugh track, and her gun was on the floor three feet from her hand.

  Lycara knelt beside her. She opened her mouth and exhaled a sustained breath of green-tinged vapor directly across Olivia’s face, and the vapor moved into Olivia’s nose and mouth and through her skin at the cheeks and temples in thin, branching currents that were visible for three seconds before they absorbed fully. When Lycara stood, the room had settled into a silence that the television couldn’t touch.

  She raised both arms with her palms toward the ceiling and opened her throat and the roar she sent through the apartment rattled the shelves on the east wall and shook the mounted television on its bracket and pushed out through the windows into the street below, where three dogs on the block started barking simultaneously and the birds on the utility line outside scattered and didn’t come back.

  Olivia lay on the floor, her chest rising and falling at shallow intervals.

  Lycara looked at the window, then at the body on the floor. “Another one for the pack,” she said, and dissolved back into black smoke and moved upward through the vent.

  Derek arrived at his mother’s house at six and found her at the stove. She had the spaghetti going and the meatballs already in the pan, the garlic and tomato coming off the range and moving through the kitchen in a warm, dense layer that settled across the whole room. He sat at the table and watched her work.

  “So,” he said, smiling. “How’d it go with the doctor?”

  Sheryl gave a short laugh and stirred the pot without turning around. “It was nice. The food, the wine, even the conversation. It’s been a while since I’ve had that kind of night.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Derek said. “You deserve that.”

  She set two plates on the counter and turned to look at him. “What about you and Olivia?”

  “Mom, please. We’re just friends.”

  Sheryl chuckled softly, spooning sauce. “You start as friends, then lunch, then dinner, and before you know it—”

  “Whatever,” Derek said. “It’s not like that.”

  They both laughed, and then they ate. When the plates were mostly clear, Sheryl leaned back in her chair and looked at the middle distance past his shoulder.

  “I’ve been thinking about Karen’s house,” she said. “Maybe it’s time I pay her a visit.”

  Derek’s fork stopped. He looked at her. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” Sheryl said. “I’ve got silver rounds, and I know how to use them.”

  “Mom, that’s suicide,” Derek said, leaning forward. “You don’t know what you’re walking into. She might have a pack by now.”

  “Then maybe I should remind her who she’s dealing with.”

  Derek sat back and exhaled. “Let’s talk to Marsh first. We don’t even know if silver works on Lycara the same way.”

  “Maybe not,” she said quietly. “But I have to believe there’s a way to get Karen back.”

  His phone buzzed on the table. He picked it up and looked at the screen. Olivia.

  Hey Derek, meet me at the abandoned sugar mill near Dungy Road. 7 p.m. sharp. Got something important.

  “That’s strange,” he muttered. “She wants to meet at the old sugar mill.”

  Sheryl looked at the phone, then at him. “That’s out by the bayou. Be careful.”

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Derek looked at the text again. Olivia never texted the meeting coordinates. She called, told him in person, or said, “Come to the precinct.” She didn’t send GPS-adjacent directions to a decommissioned industrial property on a bayou road at seven at night.

  He looked at his mother. “I know,” he said.

  He went anyway.

  The road to Dungy was a single-lane, cracked-asphalt strip that ran between two walls of overgrown cane, the stalks pressing against both shoulders in the damp, dark. Derek drove with his high beams on, and his window was cracked to listen to the engine. The mill appeared a quarter mile before the road ended: a corrugated iron structure with most of its roof intact, two silos rising at the east end, the ground-floor windows broken out evenly all the way around at a height that suggested the same instrument had been used on each one.

  Olivia’s charcoal Charger was parked thirty feet from the main structure, engine off, driver’s door open. She stood on the driver’s side with her back to him, her jacket on, her arms at her sides.

  Derek stopped his truck thirty feet behind the Charger and got out. “Olivia?” he called across the distance. “What’s up?”

  She didn’t move.

  He walked toward her, the ground was wet from the afternoon’s rain, and the gravel around the mill’s base crunched under his boots. “You gonna turn around and tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’m here to tell you our partnership has ended,” she said.

  Her voice was flat and forward, stripped of every inflection she normally carried. Derek stopped walking.

  She turned around.

  Her eyes were green, fully saturated, running edge to edge. He held her gaze, and she held his, and the face was Olivia’s in every structural detail, and the person behind it was not.

  “Olivia,” he said quietly.

  She started walking toward him, and her posture had changed from the back-turned stillness into a forward, loose-limbed approach that she had never used in the two years he’d known her. She came up close and put her hand flat against his chest and looked up at him.

  “You know,” she said, “I have been waiting a long time for this.”

  Derek kept his hand near his holster. “Waiting for what, exactly?”

  “For you to stop pretending you don’t want this.” Her hand moved from his chest to his jacket collar, and she leaned in, her chin tilted up. “We’ve been doing this dance for two years, Derek. I’m tired of the dance.”

  She pulled his collar forward and kissed him.

  Derek’s hands came up to push her back and then they didn’t, because for one disorienting second the physical reality of it overrode the alarm running in his chest, and she pressed forward and he stood there with his hands at her ribs and the night air around them and the mill behind her, and he lifted her and set her on the hood of the Charger.

  She pulled him forward by the collar and kissed him again, harder, and he had both hands on the hood on either side of her and was leaning in when he opened his eyes.

  Her eyes were open too. And they were green, the green fully established from edge to edge with no brown remaining, the pupils narrowed to vertical slits. Her upper lip had pulled back from the left canine tooth, which was extending past the gum line, the enamel whitening and lengthening toward a curved point as he watched.

  Derek pulled back from the kiss and drew in the same motion, the Glock coming up between them, and fired twice at close range.

  Both silver rounds entered her upper chest. She went back hard onto the Charger’s hood, her shoulders hitting the metal and her head snapping back, and she lay there with her arms out and the two entry wounds running dark against her shirt.

  Derek stepped back, breathing hard, the gun still up. The green in her eyes had not gone out. He watched her chest. It was moving.

  He backed up to his truck, got in, reversed off the mill property and onto Dungy Road, and accelerated north toward the main highway.

  Deputy Ray Tate heard the shots on his radio scanner two miles north of Dungy Road, the pop-pop carrying thin but clear through his open window. He called it in, made his turn, and had his cruiser rolling the dirt access track in four minutes. Deputy Leon Marsh, running a parallel road two blocks east, cut through a service access and arrived at the mill property thirty seconds behind Tate.

  Both cruisers pulled in with their lights running. Tate’s headlights swept the scene and landed on the Charger with Olivia’s body on the hood, arms at her sides, two dark stains spreading on her shirt. Tate keyed his radio and called for EMS as he climbed out and crossed the gravel toward her.

  “Detective?” he called. “Detective Hale, can you hear me?”

  He reached the Charger and leaned down to put two fingers against her neck, pressing into the carotid below the jaw.

  Olivia’s hand closed around his wrist.

  He had time to register the grip and to begin pulling his arm back before she sat upright on the hood in a single motion and turned toward him and opened her mouth across his throat. The sound of it reached Leon Marsh before the sight did, and Marsh had his weapon drawn and leveled across the roof of his cruiser before Tate’s body hit the gravel.

  “Hale!” Marsh shouted. “Don’t move! Get on the ground!”

  Olivia stood on the gravel beside the Charger and looked at him across the distance, the green running full in her eyes under his headlights. She was covered in Tate’s blood from the collar down.

  Marsh fired three times, center mass.

  The first round struck. The second. The third. She absorbed all three without going down, her body rocking back with each impact and then righting itself, and on the third shot she broke into a sprint toward his cruiser. Marsh fired twice more, and she was already past the cruiser’s front corner, and he was turning to track her when she came over the hood and took him off his feet, and they went into the gravel together, and the gun went skidding across the lot.

  Marsh’s voice cut off.

  The lot went quiet except for the idling engines of both cruisers and the radio in Tate’s unit calling for a status update that was not coming.

  Olivia stood up in the middle of the lot and rolled her shoulders back, the wounds in her chest already pushing the silver rounds forward through her skin and dropping them to the gravel at her feet in a sequence of small, ringing sounds. She looked at her own hands, at the lengthening of each finger, the darkening of the nails as they curved away from the skin and kept going, extending into claws that caught the cruiser’s headlight on their surface.

  The change moved through her from the hands upward, the forearms thickening as the muscle restructured itself beneath the skin, the fur rising from every surface in a dense black wave that moved across her shoulders, up her neck, and down her back simultaneously. Her spine extended, the lower vertebrae pushing the new tail structure outward as her frame expanded to its full height: eight feet, black-furred, broad across the chest and shoulders, the jaw forward and long with the full display of fangs running past the lower lip. The badge she’d been wearing had fallen somewhere in the gravel.

  Her eyes burned green under the cruiser’s headlights, and she turned toward the tree line at the lot’s south edge and moved into it, the cane stalks closing behind her, and the two cruisers sat with their engines running and their radios calling out unanswered status checks into the empty lot.

  Derek had made it half a mile up Dungy Road before he heard the second set of roars rolling out of the dark behind him. He pulled over, killed the engine, and sat in the cab listening to the cane move in the wind on both sides of the road.

  His phone showed no signal.

  He got out.

  The change came on him without him resisting it, which was the only way it had ever worked cleanly: let it start, step out of its path, let the body do what it knew how to do. The convulsions hit his shoulders first, the muscle seizing and expanding, the bones of his upper back widening against his shirt until the fabric split at the seams down his spine. His jaw stretched forward and down, the teeth pushing through in two rows, and his hands hit the road surface as the shift moved through his legs and brought him down to all fours before bringing him back up at the new height.

  The yellow built in his irises from the pupil outward, the gold filling every part of both eyes, and the roar that came out of his chest when he opened his throat was the sound his biology had never stopped carrying, the deep lion-bass resonance that was as much felt as heard, rolling out across the cane fields and through the night air.

  Michelle came through the cane on the left side of the road at a dead sprint, the green burning in her eyes, her claws throwing up gravel as she closed the distance. Derek turned and met her charge at full speed, and the collision was two tons of mass hitting each other at a combined velocity that compressed the air between them into an audible concussion and sent them both through the cane stalks on the road’s right shoulder and into the dark field beyond.

  They came apart in the cane and circled, both low, both reading the other’s stance. Michelle lunged, and Derek dropped under her arm and came up inside her reach and drove his claws into her ribcage on the left side, burying them to the second knuckle. She brought her right elbow down across the back of his neck, and they went into the dirt together, rolling through the crushed cane, claws and fangs and the green and gold of their eyes strobing in the dark.

  Derek got his teeth into the back of her neck, his fangs going deep through the fur and into the muscle below it, and held. Michelle thrashed, her claws raking across his forearms and tearing through the fur and into the skin below, and the blood ran dark down his arms and dripped into the field soil.

  Behind him, from the direction of the road, the heavier roar hit the air.

  Olivia came through the cane in her full shifted form, eight feet and black-furred, and moving at a speed that the cane field only slowed slightly. She hit Derek from behind with both hands on his shoulders, and the impact drove him off Michelle and into the dirt face-first. He rolled, came up on one knee, and had a half-second before she was on top of him and had his shoulders in both hands and threw him upward and backward in a full arc over her head.

  He came down on the road surface, the asphalt cracking under the impact. He lay there for two seconds with the night sky above him and both arms taking stock of the damage, then pushed himself upright.

  Olivia came off the road’s shoulder at him, and he took the charge, absorbed it, got both claws under her arms, rotated, and drove her into the hood of his pickup truck. The hood buckled, the metal compressing inward under the impact with a groan that ran through the truck’s frame. He pulled her off it and threw her sideways toward the cane field edge, and she landed in the shoulder of the road and rolled and came up already snarling.

  Michelle emerged from the field on the right, and they spread wide, one on each side of the road, both with their chests running deep growls, the green of their eyes bracketing him from left and right while his own gold held steady between them.

  The air changed.

  A pressure shift ran through the road in a visible wave, moving the loose gravel across the asphalt, and the green portal opened between Olivia and Michelle: a vertical oval of concentrated emerald light, the edges rotating and the interior running deep and bright like lit water. The heat off it was noticeable at fifteen feet.

  Lycara stepped through it.

  She wore the black leather bodysuit with the gold chevron studs running in paired rows down the torso, the hammered gold chain at her hips, the black cuffs at her forearms, and the heeled boots. Her straight black hair fell loose at her shoulders, and the portal light behind her ran green across the gold banding at her ribs and collar. Her eyes were at full saturation, running their green across the entire iris and throwing it four feet across the road surface in front of her.

  She looked at Derek across the distance. He looked back. His chest was still running the residual vibration of the lion-bass register from his earlier roar, and he held his stance with the gold burning in his eyes and his claws still out and both forearms still running blood down into the fur.

  She said nothing. She stood in the portal’s light and studied him for a full five seconds with her head at a slight forward angle, reading something in his biology that she had apparently needed to confirm in person. Then she turned and stepped back through the portal, and the oval contracted behind her, and the green light went out, and the road was dark again.

  Olivia and Michelle stood on either side of him in their full shifted forms, their chests falling and rising in slow intervals, the fight gone out of both of them the moment Lycara left. They looked at each other across Derek, and then they turned and walked into the canyon on opposite sides of the road, and the stalks closed behind them.

  Derek stood in the middle of Dungy Road with the crumpled hood of his truck behind him and blood running down both forearms and the night pressing in from all sides, and the only sound was his own breathing slowing back to normal.

  It is about inheritance.