Bree looked around at the others. "What do you mean?"

I stood up and walked to the center of the room. I stared into the eyes of first one vampire and then the next, taking their measure. "You have managed to steer clear of the dark lords by keeping your heads down, by keeping yourselves cloistered behind these walls for the most part, and by being discreet in your activities."

I knew these facts because I had kept in close contact with Algernon, who until his recent murder led the little coven of vampires. The city helped shield them while the old lords traditionally preferred the countryside.

"All that will change when we take on Hugo and his clan. Nothing draws out the old sires like conflict. The bloodier the better, as far as they're concerned. When we go in for Renee, it could be a bloodbath. Hugo will call for the darkest forces at his disposal. There is no predicting what we will face before all is said and done."

"So, you're saying we could face something more evil and powerful than Hugo?" Bree asked.

"Most certainly," I said. "We all know that the dark lords have been preparing something very bad for us. Their opening salvo was to send Hugo to the States to unleash the vampire plague. Since we were able to stop the spread of the contagion, they will hit us with something even more dangerous. If we start a war with Hugo's clan, it may cause the old sires to move up the timetable for their next attack on us. Especially since I'm here now."

"Why will that make a difference?" Donovan asked.

"They will probably interpret my arrival on European soil as an attempt to answer Hugo's attack, and they will expect me to have something up my sleeve as payback. They won't believe I am here simply to rescue a human child, even now that Hugo has undoubtedly told them about the voodoo blood. They just don't think that way."

"Are you sure Hugo would tell them about the voodoo blood?" Olivia said. "Maybe he would want to keep that to himself and his clan in case the dark ones wanted Renee for themselves."

"That's possible," I said. "It depends on how much he wants to ingratiate himself with them. For him to keep Renee for his own little family and not tell the dark ones about her would be the best that we could hope for. In either case, we 've got a serious battle on our hands."

The one called Bree spoke up again. "Why should we endanger ourselves by calling the attention of the dark lords to us?" She ignored the gasps of the other vampires in the room. "But for her magic blood, this human child is nothing to us," she said, looking around for signs of support. No one stepped forward.

Olivia, eyes fiery with rage, slapped Bree across the face with enough force to send her backward across the room into the arms of the vampire directly behind her. "How dare you defy my orders?" Olivia demanded. "Don't you understand the struggle we're in? The dark lords will come for us eventually. Even though he lives on another continent, William is our leader. He has been helping smuggle peace-loving vampires to the Americas for decades. Reedrek told us that the dark lords will attack us, so there's no time to move the rest of us in safety. Now that William is here he can help us plan our strategy, our defenses. Isn't that right, William?"

"Of course," I said, making my face a neutral mask.

Bree was on her feet again, a livid handprint visible on her pallid face. "But only a moment ago he was threatening to kill you!

And now you trust him with the well-being of us all?"

"William has been through h.e.l.l," Olivia said. "He's overcome his emotions. I know he has." She reached for my hand and held it tightly, as if to rea.s.sure herself. "We'll be prepared to fight for Renee, and then to do whatever is necessary to insure our survival after that."

She looked around the room at her vampires. She must have seen some skepticism in my face because she drew herself up to her full height and said finally, "Don't worry, William. We're tougher than we look."

"Good," I said, leaving out the natural conclusion to that thought: They'd have to be. For now at least, I let it go at that.

Jack I stood behind a cypress tree and focused on the cabin about seventy-five yards away. I'd parked my truck on the side of the road half a mile back and slogged through the swamp to get this far. The marsh water chilled me to the bone. I am, for all intents and purposes, a cold-blooded creature, like the frogs and toads hibernating in the muck all around me. Savannah never gets that cold in the wintertime-not to humans. But vampires can feel the cold, I can tell you. It feels like death putting its hand against the middle of your back and trying to steer you toward the grave. Reminding you that the warmth of the sun will never shine on you again.

As if the cold wasn't bad enough, the feeling came over me that I was being watched. The last time I felt like that was when dear old Granddad Reedrek was shadowing me around the city. I looked behind me and everything was stillness. There wasn't even a breeze to move the swamp gra.s.ses.

I heard things, though. There were unquiet souls around me. In the distance I could hear the chains rattling and that sent still more shivers up my spine. I wasn't far from one of the places where the slave ships landed with their human cargo from western Africa. The cries of the men and women as they were herded on sh.o.r.e, some of them sick or dying from their hard journey across the Atlantic, came to me out of the stillness. The abject sorrow, grief, and fear in those desperate cries made me want to cover my ears.

It was times like this when I wished I could give back my powers of communication with the dead. William always said it was a gift and that I was lucky to have it. He seemed to think it would stand me in good stead one day. Problem was, this little gift that kept on giving reminded me over and over of my former fellow humans ' inhumanity to one another. Where presents are concerned, I'd rather have a tacky necktie.

To get the voices out of my head I turned my attention back to the business at hand. There was no activity around the cabin, but there was a light on, and I could see shapes moving around behind the thin curtains. I was tempted to sneak up on the place and just burn it to the ground, scattering werewolves to the four winds. And if a few were killed, let G.o.d sort them out.

The authorities would just figure the house went up like so many places where meth was being cooked. The chemicals used were so volatile that fires and even explosions were common. But I couldn't take the chance that there were innocents in there with the bad guys. What if there were puppies-er, kids-around? I had to be sure, and the easiest way to find out and not tip my hand by asking questions was to just wait and watch.

There was that feeling again, like a warm breath on my neck. It was downright creepy, made my skin crawl and the hairs at my nape stand at attention. I took a deep breath and smelled something that touched a chord of recognition in my memory. It was a wild, musky animal smell. Then I heard a noise, starting with a faint, vibrating rumble and building to a full -throated growl.

Something wily enough to get the drop on a vampire had managed to sneak up behind me.

Something like a werewolf. s.h.i.t. I whirled just in time to look into the yellow-green eyes of a wolf as tall as me, reared up on his hind legs and ready to strike. I saw the intelligence in those eyes as well as some supernatural element that only another cursed creature could identify.

He launched himself and hit me full in the chest, knocking me to the ground. With a roar, the beast came at my throat with a ma.s.sive display of powerful jaws and razor-sharp canines. I put my hand against his throat and shoved as hard as I could, sending the wolf sprawling backward just long enough for me to get back on my feet.

The wolf righted itself and when he saw my fangs extend to full -length he hesitated a moment-but only a moment-before he hurled himself toward me again. In the meantime I realized why the scent of this wolf was familiar. As I did, I saw something in his own eyes change.

He leapt at me, knocking me on my back again. I could feel his incredible power as he came at my face. His head seemed as big as a tree stump, and his ma.s.sive maw opened an inch from my face, bringing us eye to eye and fang to fang.

His body began to sway with the force of his wagging tail, and his tongue lolled out and licked my cheek wetly.

"Get off me, you mangy, flea-bitten b.a.s.t.a.r.d. If I wanted a kiss from the likes of you, I'd ask for it." I shoved the wolf away from me again, and this time when he landed on his back he stayed put, grinning a goofy doggie grin at me, his still -wagging tail thumping happily against the soggy ground.

Before my eyes, the wolf began to do his morphing routine. I'd seen Reyha and Deylaud do it once before, only in the opposite direction-that is, turning from humans into canines. I'd never seen the reverse, but it was just as awe-inspiring and horrifying. The sound of the bones crunching was the worst, but the creature didn't seem to mind. I gritted my teeth at the sight and sound of his long bones re-forming.

When it was finished, Seth Walker lay naked in the gra.s.s and stretched like a guy just waking up after a long nap in the sun.

Finally he propped himself on his elbows and said, "I thought you'd never recognize me, you toothy sonofab.i.t.c.h. I always said that vampire sense of smell ain't all it's cracked up to be."

"Bulls.h.i.t. It's better than yours. h.e.l.l, I'd know your sorry hide in a tan yard," I said. I wiped at the place where he'd licked me.

"Sorry about the s...o...b..r. Sometimes my wolf acts like a pup around old friends."

"Just don't let it happen again. People might get the wrong idea, what with you nekkid and all."

"Hey, it's not like when you shape-shift the Fruit-of-the-Looms can come with you."

"Whatever, just keep your fruits to yourself."

He laughed. "My clothes are stashed behind some rocks about a mile from here. I'll tell you what, meet me at that juke joint down by the highway and I'll buy you a beer, you old bloodsucker, and we'll tell each other what we're doing here."

Seth Walker, also known as Skinwalker, squeezed the juice from a lime quarter into a Corona and then stuffed it into the long- neck bottle. "So what are you doing here?"

"I live here," I said, taking a pull on my own brew. "Which is more than I can say for you." Seth was police chief of a small town in north Georgia. The citizens he served just thought he was a d.a.m.ned fine lawman, not something out of a Lon Chaney Jr.

movie.

He was also a self-styled naturalist and folklore expert. He could entertain you for hours with stories of native American skinwalker lore and shape-shifter myths from around the world. He told me once that every culture on earth had a shape-shifter myth. What does that tell you? Where there's smoke, there's fire, as the saying goes. Just because a story is called a myth doesn't mean it's not true.

"I know you live in Savannah," he said. "I mean, what are you doing here in the marsh? Do you have some unfinished business with the Thrashers that I don't know about?"

"Ain't it just like a lawman to ask so many questions that aren't any of his business," I observed.

He grinned at me. "I just know that you wouldn't be caught dead-if you'll pardon the expression-within spitting distance of these poor, furry trash unless something was up, that's all."

"You got that right." I took another gulp of my beer and paused long enough to watch a shapely barmaid's rear wiggle as she sashayed by us. "Here's the story: I have reason to believe the Thrashers are cooking meth and selling it to someone I 'm supposed to be taking care of. That's it in a nutsh.e.l.l."

Seth grew serious and took a bite of a steak so rare I'd half-expected it to moo when he'd first cut into it. "That's pretty much why I'm here, too. One of the Thrasher cousins tried to set up an operation in the north Georgia mountains."

"What happened to him?" As if I didn't know.

"Ate him."

"Good for you."

Seth burped and held up his empty bottle to signal the barmaid that he wanted another. "But not before I made him tell me about the rest of the family operation. There's nothing like baring a good set of fangs to loosen somebody's lips, not to mention his bowels. Am I right?"

"I've scared the s.h.i.t out of a few old boys myself," I agreed. The barmaid handed him another Corona over the bar, and we clinked bottles.

"So I came on down here to check things out," he said.

"And just when were you going to tell me you were in town?" I asked.

He turned serious again. "There were a couple of things I had to figure out first."

"Such as?"

"Such as why one of the Thrashers hangs out at your garage most nights."

"Who are you talking about?"

Seth sawed at the b.l.o.o.d.y steak with a dull steak knife. "The one named Jerry. He's a Thrasher on his mother's side."

"You're s.h.i.tting me." I had always known that a couple of the old boys who liked to hang out at my auto repair business were not 100 percent human, but I never made it my business to find out what they were exactly. Not to mention who their people were. If people was the right word.

Jerry and Rufus smelled like shape-shifters, and I was always pretty sure Jerry was a werewolf. Us boys who have what you'd call inhuman tendencies can usually recognize one another, vampires and shifters (especially the canines and felines) by smell.

Other kinds of creatures had other means.

Anyway, the boys who hung out at the garage had the good manners not to ask me what I was and, being a good southern host, I returned the favor. I guess you could call it a don't-ask-don't-tell policy, although I'm pretty sure they always knew I was a vampire. If they'd had any doubt, it had been shot all to h.e.l.l when Reedrek came to town and murdered Huey, one of my employees and a good friend of my irregulars, as I called them.

"So I take it you didn't know Jerry was part of the Thrasher pack?"

"h.e.l.l, no, and how do you know what goes on at my garage anyway?"

"Because I've been casing the place when you haven't been there." He grinned at me, flashing a row of perfect, white, human- looking teeth. "And sometimes when you have been."

I opened my mouth to express my doubt that a werewolf could catch a vampire unawares but remembered he had done just that in his animal form an hour ago. I didn't feel too bad about it, though. Seth was no ordinary werewolf.

He was the baddest shape-shifter in the south.

I first met him years ago when William had sent word through the unhuman grapevine for him to come down to Savannah and help us with a little problem. A local werewolf was chowing down on the citizenry and leaving half-eaten bodies out in the open in front of G.o.d and everybody. It wouldn't do. An in-depth police investigation could lead to all kinds of discoveries that would cause a general panic among the human population.

William, through his network of informants in the undead and otherwise unhuman world, knew that Seth had a reputation much like William's own in the vampire world. Seth was a lawman and didn't put up with any mess, and he liked to help maintain the secrecy of the existence of shape-shifters, as well as vampires and other things that go b.u.mp or growl or purr in the night. His philosophy and approach were also like William's: If you were a shape-shifter and didn't behave yourself and help maintain the status quo, he would eat you. Simple as that.

Since werewolves like to take care of werewolf business, just as vampires like to keep their own troubles within the bloodsucking ranks, William called Seth as a courtesy before he took it upon himself to go out and bag himself a big, bad wolf.

Seth came down to Savannah and dispatched the bad guy with nary a trace of blood or fur before you could say Jack Robinson. No muss, no fuss. All nice and tidy, just the way William liked things to be done. William liked him immediately. Even the Rin Tin Twins took to him, and things could get dicey whenever you introduced them to other folks with, let 's say, canine tendencies. The twins' judgment of character was almost never wrong, and that was good enough for me.

Seth stayed on a couple of days and nights to see the sights and that's how we got to be buddies. Since then he came down to Savannah every year to go hunting and drinking with me and just hang out. He would raise h.e.l.l with me by night and play golf with the polo-shirted, former frat boy crowd by day. To look at him in a pair of khakis, you'd think he stepped right out of the Kappa Alpha house. But he was just as comfortable roaming through the woods hunting deer with me, his fangs and claws his only weapons.

I think he also liked to use his time in Savannah to maintain his stable of contacts among other shifters, particularly werewolves, in south Georgia. I wondered sometimes if one or two of those country club boys he hung out with in the daytime might be werewolves who could come and fight with us, but outing a nonhuman was serious business and I knew Seth wouldn 't have asked.

I had no idea what Seth's real age was. Shape-shifters aren't immortal like vampires, but they live longer than humans, don't show their age much, and are a b.i.t.c.h to kill. The only things that would do the job was a silver (you guessed it) bullet or silver stake to the heart, fire, or decapitation. Seth, who looked like a thirty-year-old human, could be fifty or a hundred. I couldn't tell; I don't even think other werewolves could necessarily tell.

I also had no idea how he had established himself as the foremost furbearing bada.s.s in the south. I tried to ask him about it a time or two, but he always deflected my questions. So I decided I 'd better extend him the same "don't ask" courtesy as I did everybody else. What he did like to talk about was his work as an amateur naturalist and ecologist. He'd raised a lot of green in and around Atlanta for green causes and had a lot of interesting stories to tell about how he went after the more notorious polluters of the Chattahoochee and public lands. He was not above putting someone in their place with teeth and claws if he could do it discreetly.

There was one particularly unlucky politician locked up in the state mental hospital in Milledgeville who as far as I know is still babbling to anyone who will listen about seeing a man change into a wolf and come at his throat. I don't imagine he's ever made the connection between that incident and the bribe he took from a chemical plant to excuse them from dumping enough poison into the Hooch for a gigantic fish kill. No matter. He'll never murder another trout again.

Seth was roughly my height, more than six feet, and your typical-for this part of the world, at least-mixture of Native American and Scots-Irish blood. His brown hair was cut preppy short and those green-yellow eyes looked almost exactly like they did in his wolf form, except for the shape, of course.

Women must have found him handsome because between the two of us-I don't mean to brag, but I'm not exactly chopped liver myself-we commanded the attention of pretty much every female in the room. Their reactions ranged from sly sidelong glances to out-and-out ogling. They were checking us out in a big way.

"I must be getting sloppy in my old age," I said. "I couldn't tell you were even around the garage."

Seth grinned. "In vampire years, you're just a tyke."

"So what was the other reason you didn't let me know you were in town?" I asked him.

"You know how I like to keep things on the down-low, especially when I'm dealing with other supernaturals," he said. "I was going to come and say howdy eventually. I just wanted to get this business with the Thrashers finished and keep you from getting involved. Whenever you get mixed up with them, nothing good ever comes from it."

"I can't argue with that," I said. "But now that I am involved, how do you suggest we go after them?"

Seth sighed. "I don't suppose I can convince you to just stay out of this and leave it to me?"

"Nope."

"Didn't think so. Okay, then, why don't you shake down that Jerry guy and make him tell you anything and everything he knows about the meth operation over at the cabin. Then we'll compare notes and decide what to do from there."

"Sounds like a plan," I said, throwing a wad of cash on the bar. "Come on, fur-for-brains, you can bunk at my place for the rest of the time you're here. I'm staying over at William's for a while anyway."

"That's mighty neighborly of you. You still sleep in that coffin painted up like Dale Earnhardt's number three?"

"Sure do."

"You're a true son of the south, my friend," Seth said as we made our way to the door.

"And don't you forget it," I said. One of these days I'd get Seth to tell me about his origins. His real ones. That should be quite a tale.

Three.