It regarded me with the same disdain Val had shown in the Matrix. "Let me deal with everything, Longtooth. You need not these machine men or the witch of the thinking machine. You will not need your guns. My way is pure. You know I am correct. Why do you resist me so?"

I didn't want to go down that road of discussion because I knew what a dark and dangerous path it was.

"I need what I need."

The old wolf lay down to mock me. "I grant you what you need. It will not be long before you and I will have this conversation again."

I shook my head. "Seven days. I'll be clear of Seattle by then."

The wolf howled and the sound echoed through my head as I opened my eyes. I heard the hissed sizzle of the spells trail off and found Zag staring at me with new respect and a bit of apprehension in his eyes. I could smell his nervous sweat even over and above the tangy sea scent and musty mildew odor hanging over the dock area. I smiled and nodded.All set now. Let's hope La Plante hasn 't gotten stupid.

Zagswallowed hard. "Look, Mr. Kies, I'm sorry about any static I gave you before. With your rep and all, I figured you were like us." He held up his right hand, and the razor claws flicked out at the tips of his fingers. "I didn't realize you weren't chromed." I read the confusion in his eyes like a banner headline on a news service monitor. I was known to be quick and nasty in a firefight. I was the chummer who'd survived the most adventures with Dr. Raven-and that was no mean feat. To gillettes like Zig and Zag that meant I must be heavily cybered. The idea that I might be someone who used magic to augment his skills hadn't occurred to them. And, because they had chosen a route that virtually barred them from using magic, the magical arts baffled and scared them.

Zig handed me a small stick of black grease paint. He'd darkened his face all over, then erased out two downward-pointing triangles with dots in the middle. "Symbol of the Halloweeners over in the Green River District."

"I know." I put the face paint stick down on a crate. "I don't paint up."

That seemed to surprise them almost as much as my having used magic. After the Ghost Dances had worked and killed lots of folks, many people had traveled out to the reservations and swelled the population of what are now called the Native American Nations. Some later left because the lifestyle didn't suit them, but those who stayed contributed to the polyglot make-up of the tribes. Consequently it wasn't completely strange to find a white man who knew Indian magic, but it was weird to find one who didn't go the whole way and paint up before battle-though I saw going "native" like that too showy for my tastes.

Like the folks you scrag will care what you looked like while doing it.

I broke the tension. "I don't paint up for something I hope won't be a battle. I'll be out there getting the girl, so I'll be naked-nude anyway." I pointed to the Kalash-nikovs they carried. "Those AK-97s look like old friends."

Zig patted his automatic rifle affectionately. "Sighted at four hundred meters for close work like this.

Stood me in good stead during the Triad War out on the Strip." "Good." I gave both of them one of my I-have-confidence-in-you smiles. "The drill's the same as earlier today. You get Val and Moira out. La Plante uses his grunges for muscle. If things get nasty, pop one or two of them, then see-saw your way out of there. If you burn a clip, I expect all the shots to hit a grunge, or you'd best be shooting at me. Hit and move-a war of attrition we can't win."

Both of them gave me a thumb's-up so I turned to Val. "Sure you don't want a gun?"

She shook her head with disgust. "You've got me bundled up in kevlar so tight I can barely breathe. The last thing I want to do is make myself a target so they'll have cause to shoot me."

I chuckled lightly. "Okay. Moira is your charge. Things get nasty, you get her out of there. Zig and Zag will keep the beasts at bay."

Val nodded. "You got the chip?"

I patted the pocket of my jacket. "Check." I hefted my MP-9 and let it dangle by the strap over my right shoulder. "Let's do this clean and all go home healthy. Places, everyone." I filled my lungs with air and calmed my racing heart. "It's showtime."

I stepped from the warehouse into a dock area that had been cleared of anything approximating cover.

Lit by bright halogen lights that held the night's darkness at bay, the open arena was defined, on two sides, by crates and loading machinery and on my side by the warehouse I'd just left. The fourth wall, the one I faced as I slipped between some crates, had been formed by another warehouse. The large doors stood open and La Plante's limo had been parked in it so the hood and tail of the vehicle almost appeared to be holding the doors back.

A dozen grunges sporting various styles of submachine guns stood dutifully behind the limo and pointed their weapons in my direction. I held my hands away from my body and kept them open, but I knew my magically enhanced reflexes would allow me to shoulder the gun and snap off a half-dozen rounds before they even saw me move. In three seconds I could clear the clip and draw the Viper from my waistband to finish the job ...

Back off, Wolfgang. It's the Old One's meddling that's making you think that way.

The Chauffeur appeared in the middle of the line of grunges. "Drop the gun, Kies."

I barked out a sharp laugh. "Dream on. You've got me covered a dozen ways to Sunday."

The grunges La Plante had hired began to hoot and twitter like the half-witted beasts they were. Ugly as sin and more stupid than even Ronnie, they were drawn from the ranks of those who didn't take their "goblin-ization" at all well. After their hormones kick in they start thinking a lot less and make perfect little automatons for someone like La Plante to exploit. Of course, that's not to suggest they couldn't be cunning little beggars and get themselves into plenty of trouble, but it generally takes someone with an IQ in at least the low eighties to whip them into a destructive frenzy. The ork community tried to do all it could to save their less fortunate brethren from connivers like La Plante, but a helping hand isn't as attractive as a hand filled with nuyen.

I pointed to myself. "I'm going to walk out to the middle of this area and you'll send the girl to me. I'll turn over the chip to you. Keep your fingers off the triggers and this might just go down well."

I didn't hear what The Chauffeur said to the grunges, but their gibbering stopped. I crossed to the center of the arena, using my magically enhanced senses as best I could to see if I'd just walked into a ma.s.sive trap. The halogen lights were a problem because they left the tops of the warehouses in an impenetrable darkness that did nothing to make me feel at ease. I had to a.s.sume La Plante had people up there securing the high ground, but the fact that the only grunges I saw were leaning on his ride did not rea.s.sure me. When I reached the middle I stopped. The pa.s.senger door of the limo opened and a slender woman of indeterminate age left it to stand beside the vehicle. She didn't look like the simsense I'd seen of her-yeah, everyone says that about sim shot of them-but I knew instantly that she had to be Moira Alianha. The pale dress she wore was fashionably short and revealed legs I was almost willing to die for, but she quickly cloaked herself with a dark wool blanket to ward off the chill air.

With her head up, and just the tips of her ears peeking out through the long veil of her midnight hair, she walked toward me. I gave her a smile intended to inspire hope and confidence, but she ignored me and only saw the black and red raven patch on the shoulder of my jacket. She blinked twice and then I thought she was going to faint.

I reached out and steadied her. "Easy now, Ms. Alianha. We're almost home."

She touched the patch with incredibly slender fingers. "My husband sent you?"

I frowned and figured she was confused. "I work for Richard Raven."

Moira smiled. "Yes, my husband to be.6"

I almost swallowed my tongue. "Huh? Say what?"

She just looked at me with vibrant green eyes.

Suddenly everything seemed to run to chaos in my head. "Does anyone else know who you are to Raven?"

Moira shook her head. "No, not here, why?"

I let her question drift by unanswered. "Don't tell anyone, period."If anyone finds out that she's close to Raven, her life won't be worth a melted sim and she could be used against Raven when dealing with sc.u.m like La Plante. His aides, folks like me and Val, accept the dangers connected with belonging to Raven's group. Moira was lucky that La Plante had no idea of her true value, or this little exchange would be lots more rude.

6This was a shocker. I didn't even know Doc was dating. Turns out he wasn't, but that's a story for another time.

The Chauffeur shouted at me. "Let's save the tea party and true confessions for later. We want the chip, now!"

Carefully, slowly, I reached into my jacket pocket. I withdrew from it a white piece of plastic about three centimeters square. The chip itself showed up in sharp contrast to the snowy plastic wafer to which it had been mounted. "I'll just put it down here . . ."

I felt the plastic quiver and the chip explode as the bullet shot through it at Mach 4. The booming, rolling echo of the gunshot followed the bullet by a split-second, but I'd already turned and started to push Moira to safety. My right hand dropped the piece of plastic and enfolded the MP-9's pistol grip. I swept the gun around and snapped off two shots, one of which sent a headless grunge pitching back to the warehouse floor. I heard the staccato roar of Zig and Zag's AK-97s and saw three more grunges drop out of sight amid sparks lancing from the limo's armored frame.

Gunmen hidden on the rooftops slowly stood and their weapons lipped flame as I dragged and pushed Moira out of the killing zone. With so many people concentrating on just the pair of us I was sure we'd be blasted to ribbons before we'd gone a half-dozen steps, but the men on the roof started shooting at La Plante's grunges. The confused orks returned the fire, but did so ineffectively because of the wealth of targets and the babel of orders being shouted by The Chauffeur.

I'd just propelled Moira through the narrow warehouse doorway when a bullet finally caught me. It blew into the back of my left thigh and ricocheted off to the left after it shattered my femur. It ripped free of my leg five centimeters left and seven below the entry point, tearing a chunk out of my femoral artery as it went.

I screamed, but as the echoes of the scream died in my head I heard the howl of a wolf rise in their place. Stumbling forward, I spilled onto the warehouse floor. My left knee hit hard and sent another shock wave of pain through my leg. I tried to choke back another cry, but it came out as a lupine yelp.

I rolled over onto my back and pulled the MP-9 to me. "Move it, campers. Get Moira out of here."

Val stared at the hole in my leg. "You're hit!"

I bit back the pain. "Yeah, my days in the big league are over. Maybe you can retire my uniform." I looked up at Zig and Zag. "Move it! I'll hold them off if I can. It's got to be Fujiwara yaks out there shooting the granges up. That'll buy you some time, and I'll buy you more. Go!"

Zig made for the back door, but Moira shook her head and knelt beside me. "No, I'm not going. You need help."

She started making all the hand motions for a spell, but I closed a b.l.o.o.d.y hand around her fingers. "Save it, sister. You'll need all the magic you can muster to get the h.e.l.l out of Seattle. Val, get her out of here."

Valerie crossed to Moira and rested her hands on her shoulders, but the elf shrugged her off. "No. I can save you. I can fix your leg."

Inside my head the Old One growled seductively. "Let her fix you. Let her fill you with magic. Do as she asks and I a.s.sure you the others will not follow."

"No!" I shouted at both of them.

Her eyes flashed with an anger that told me my stay of execution had been denied. "Wait." I pulled the Viper from my belt and tossed it to Val.

She stared at it as if it were commercial software. "I don't want this."

I swallowed hard. "You might." I reached down and dipped the fingers of my left hand in my blood and painted twin parallel lines beneath each eye and across my forehead. "Do this, Moira, and then leave. All of you, get out of here. Don't look back, no matter what. Don't go looking for me. I'll find you, when I can."

Zig and Zag stared at me as if I'd gone mad and Val shivered. Moira ripped my pants away from the wound and pressed her hands to it. She subvocalized a chant, but I felt warmth and a tingling flow from her hands into my leg. Almost instantly it nibbled the pain away. The energy continued to build and tissue began to heal, my body motivated to restructure itself at a rate that should have taken months. Even so, I knew the spell she'd cast was more than I needed.

And it was more than I could control.

I grit my teeth and shoved her away. "Go, go!" I snapped at them. "Run!"

They vanished from sight just as the first tremor hit me. I shrieked as fire filled my ribs with molten agony. I heard the crack as my breastbone parted down the middle, thickened and broadened to accept the new angle of my expanded rib cage. I gnashed my teeth at the pain and the growing canine teeth split my lower lip.

"Don't fight it, Longtooth. It won't hurt so much," the Old One whispered.

Gotta retain some control! Can't let you run wild!

My long bones telescoped back down, shortening but strengthening my limbs. The muscles flowed into protoplasm as the transformation continued, then congealed into new muscles with new insertions able to exert more powerful pressure and leverage than before. My fingers and toes likewise shrank-the latter far more than the former-and organic claws grew to give me some new weaponry.

My head felt as if it were exploding when my jaw and facial bones broke. My whole face grew into a muzzle and my tongue lengthened along with it. The top of my head flattened somewhat and my eye sockets sank back to a more protective position. According to the only person to watch me go through this lunacy, my eyes do not lose their silver color or the Killer Rings.

The bodily transformation almost complete as my pelt thickened and ears lengthened, I felt the Old One begin to gnaw on my resolve and humanity. I clung to the image of Dr. Raven sitting across from me as I changed and the sound of his voice telling me how to concentrate so I would not surrender to the beast inside me. "You have been blessed by Wolf, greatly blessed, but that blessing will be a curse if you surrender yourself to him."

The Old One whimpered with disgust. "Someday Raven will fail you and you will become mine."

Stuff it, you mangy mutt. I've won this round.

The advent of three grunges storming through the warehouse door precluded any remark the Old One might have made. I gave them a toothy grin from the shadows. "My, my," I growled in a voice that even grunges knew to fear. "What fine little piggies we have here.?"

It took a bit more than a fairy-tale huffing and puffing to blow them all down, but the grunges didn't offer much more than that for a fight. They've never been much for hitting a moving target, and in my more compact wolf form I don't stay in one place very long. I left them in a broken heap on the warehouse floor, then dashed out into the killzone, doing my best to spit out grunge blood.

I couldn't have been much more than a gray blur as I streaked across the opening, but I felt The Chauffeur's eyes on me the whole time. I paused for a second at the place from where the rifle shot had come, but a yakuza forced me to tear out his throat before I had finished nosing around. I almost lost control with that kill, but, fortunately, the yak had some sort of augmentation that meant I got hydraulic fluid in addition to blood when I took him down.

Despite that hardship, I learned what I wanted to 7Okay, right, everyone knows there's no such thing as a werewolf. And a hundred years ago there was no such thing as a dragon, too. Raven's explained it all to me, that the Wolf spirit picked me special to grace me with abilities and all. Doc's smart, but he's never been through this transformation and even Native American traditions tell of skinwalkers. The Old One and I know what I am, which means you don't want to invite me to any Full Moon parties you'll be having.

know and took keen delight in watching The Chauffeur shudder when my joyous howl filled the warehouse district like the fog rolling in from the coast.

IV.

Ronnie Killstar's eyes grew as wide as the hole in my leg had been when he heard me release the charging lever on the MP-9. Seated in his favorite chair, nestled deep in the shadows of his unlit living room, I spoke to him in a husky whisper. "Close the door. Sit down at the table."

"What's this?" He stared blankly at the little repast I'd prepared him while I waited.

I smiled at him. "That's your last meal."

The punk stared at me. "Milk and cookies?"

I shrugged. "It's the perfect thing for a little boy who doesn't know when he's not supposed to play adult games. If you'd have been content to just sell us out to Fujiwara, that would have worked fine."

He tried to look offended, but his nervousness betrayed him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Can it, joeboy. Val and I cracked your personnel file and it concluded with the last telecom number you called. Later, when we broke into Fujiwara I recognized the number. There was a connection."

Ronnie straightened up in his chair. "Circ.u.mstantial evidence."

I shook my head. "It would have been if you could have kept your ego in check. In the Weed you told me you could 'bull's-eye a rat's a.s.s' at a klick in the dark. A chip's got to be four times the size of your average rat's a.s.s, and the range wasn't nearly that long." I sighed. "And to top it off, you were still wearing that cologne of yours."

It suddenly dawned on him that I was going to kill him. The color drained from his face and he looked at me with big puppy-dog eyes. Yet before they could have their full sympathetic effect on me, his features sharpened and a bit of the old defiant fire returned. "Wait a minute. I destroyed the chip you never really wanted to give to La Plante anyway. That's gotta count for something!"

I hesitated for a second and hope blossomed on his face. Then I shook my head. "No, it doesn't. Dr.

Raven had tipped Fujiwara about what we were going to do anyway. Fuji's programmers put a Trojan horse carrying a nasty virus in that chip that would have destroyed La Plante's computer system. The ambush, which didn't include your shooting of the chip, was just to make sure La Plante bought the whole thing as genuine."

Ronnie sank his head in his hands. "Go ahead, shoot me. I deserve it."

I lifted the MP-9's muzzle to the ceiling. "No, I think I prefer letting you wallow in your own mortification. Word to the wise, kid," I shot back over my shoulder as I crossed to the door. "Remember that you're not as tough as you think. Don't let your delusions of adequacy get you in over your head . . .

again."

On the way out I stopped The Chauffeur from going in. "Don't bother."

The plastic-faced man stared hard at me. "I didn't hear a shot."

I gave him a wolfish grin and licked my lips. "You never do." I patted his cheek. "Ciao-no pun intended. Until it's just you and me."

Quicksilver Sayonara I normally define a "rude awakening" as any that takes place before noon, but Kid Stealth gave that phrase a new depth of meaning. Stealth would maintain it was my fault because I was the one dreaming about cuckolding a chrome-fisted underworld kingpin when the Kid clapped his own steel hand over my mouth. The kiss of cold steel against my lips is not something I enjoy at the best of times, and two hours before dawn is seldom one of those.

My eyes focused on Stealth, and his ident.i.ty registered in my brain a half-second before my finger tightened on the trigger of the Beretta Viper1I'd snaked from beneath my pillow and pressed to his side.

Stealth gave me a satisfied grunt and dangled the gun's clip from his flesh and blood right hand. He pulled his metal hand away from my mouth and flipped the clip back to me. "Good instincts."

I pulled myself up into a sitting position, letting the sheets slip down from chest to waist. I pulled the slide back on the pistol, and one bullet popped out into the bed. "I keep one in the chamber."

Stealth nodded in the half-light, the laser sight built into his right eye making a small cross on his pupil. "I know. Nine-millimeter, silver bullet with inertial silver-nitrate explosive tip."

1Thing I like most about the Viper, as old as it is, is that I get fourteen in the clip and one in the chamber.

Not that I need that many shots, mind you, but you never can tell when something will just be too stupid to die.

The matter-of-fact tone with which he delivered his a.s.sessment of the bullet that had been aimed at his stomach somehow robbed it of all its deadliness.I'd survived six years with Doctor Richard Raven, and I'd seen aides come and go, but Stealth had to be the strangest of them all. The bullet in my gun, he had decided, could not punch through the kevlar clothes he wore, nor get through the dermal plating that protected his body.