“These weren’t here yesterday—they’ve got the wrong markings. This is a different flock of sheep,” he said. I heard the click of his own chamber being slotted back into place. “Someone’s setting us up.”

“Oh, that’s splendid.” I aimed, fired, and sent the smallest of the ewes sprawling. In the aftermath of my shot, two more guns went off. I wasn’t sure who they belonged to, but I was sure there was something wrong: while a bloody patch blossomed on the shoulder of the lead ewe, she didn’t fall. She didn’t even stagger.

As she approached, her skull began to warp and twist into a new shape, canine teeth pushing their way through her jaw and piercing her lower lip. She snarled, saliva dripping all around that newly terrible maw.

A sudden, horrifying comprehension seized me. I put the safety back on my pistol, flipped it around, and offered the butt to Shelby. “Trade me guns.”

“What?” She stared at me like I was saying something completely unreasonable. She wasn’t too far off with that.

“I need you to trade me guns.” The werewolves were still stalking toward us, their short sheep’s legs and ongoing transformations slowing them down. That wasn’t going to last much longer. As soon as they were changed enough to break into a proper run, we were going to find ourselves rushed by a small pack of hungry, ruthless predators. The fact that they had started out as herbivores wasn’t going to make any difference. Hell, it might just make them hungrier.

Shelby kept staring at me. I gestured at her with the butt of my pistol, not withdrawing it. If she didn’t make up her mind soon, we were going to be in even more trouble, as I had just effectively removed two of us from the fight. If my left arm had been fully functional . . . but it wasn’t, and introducing throwing knives into a gun fight was just asking for trouble, even if they were tipped in silver.

“Oh, you asshole,” she finally snarled, and thrust her own pistol at me as she snatched mine out of my hands and unloaded two rounds into the nearest werewolf, sending it sprawling. There was a momentary pause as she stared at the weapon in her hands, stunned by what had just happened. Then she whooped and opened fire again.

Her family did the same, but I was unsurprised when only Shelby’s shots seemed to have any effect. I opened the chamber on her pistol. The bullets inside gleamed in the moonlight with the uniquely heavy shine that one gets from weapons-grade silver. I shook them into my hand, allowing Shelby and the others to keep up the suppressing fire as I scratched at the surface of one bullet with my thumbnail. The dull silver sheen came away easily, revealing cleaner steel underneath.

“Motherfucker,” I swore. “Shelby! Someone switched your bullets!”

“What?” Her gun clicked empty. She glanced at me, and I lobbed the box containing my remaining silver bullets at her underhand. She caught it, beginning to reload even as she asked, “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’m the only one here who actually brought silver bullets to the werewolf fight, and you don’t have enough firepower without it! All you’re doing with the lead is slowing them down and pissing them off!” I shoved Shelby’s gun into my coat and pulled out a knife. It was a silly weapon, under the circumstances, but it was better than nothing. Much, much better than nothing.

There were only two werewolves still standing, and their ovine origins were almost completely obscured by the newly lupine lines of their bodies. One of them was still somewhat woolly, with a tail that hung between its legs like a fat white fruit. The other had a more sheep-like skull, but as it was filled with sharp predator’s teeth and covered in thick gray fur, the shape of its skull didn’t matter as much as the thought of what that skull might do.

“Alex?” said Shelby, seeing me measuring the space between myself and the lead werewolf. “Don’t do anything—”

The werewolf leaped. So did I.

Werewolves are, thankfully, creatures of instinct: with the exception of the ones that had attacked me and Cooper near the meadow earlier, I had never heard of a werewolf making a strategy or following a plan once it was transformed. These werewolves had begun life as sheep, bred for obedience and stupidity over the course of generations. It was jumping for a man my height, not for a person who was suddenly sliding on his knees under the arc of the werewolf’s trajectory. I jammed my knife upward, turning my face away and screwing my mouth and eyes as tightly closed as I could. It wasn’t squeamishness. I wanted to avoid fluid contact as much as possible.

My knife slammed into the werewolf’s belly just below the rib cage. The creature gave a yelp of strangled pain and kept going, driven forward by its own momentum. A hot rush of stinking blood exploded over my arm, like a water balloon being popped, and the heavy, horrible feeling of the werewolf’s viscera slammed down on me, landing on my head, chest, and shoulders like nothing I had ever experienced before. There was a yelp as the werewolf finally passed fully over me and impacted with the ground.

I didn’t know whether having the majority of its internal organs removed would be enough to kill a leaping werewolf, but I was damn sure that it would slow the bastard down.

The gunfire continued as I lay there in the grass, covered in werewolf offal and stinking of blood. I heard someone scream. I didn’t know who. I didn’t think it was Riley or Shelby, but the other three were still basically indistinguishable to me in their distress: I hadn’t yet had the time to learn what they sounded like when their lives were endangered. Then a foot hit me in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. I made a small noise of protest, without opening my mouth.

“You asshole!” Shelby sounded furious. That was good: a furious Shelby was a breathing Shelby. Something soft and clean was dropped on my face. I sat up, scrubbing the worst of the blood away as she continued to rant. “You can’t tell me I’m the only one with a working gun and then—argh, and then unzip a fucking werewolf everywhere like you’re some sort of deranged action hero! You could have given me a heart attack!”

She kicked me again, this time in the hip. I finished scrubbing the blood off my mouth, coughed, and asked, “Can you stop kicking me long enough to get the blood out of my eyes? I’m afraid I’ll just grind it in if I try, and I really don’t want to increase the mucus membrane exposure.”

“You’re marrying a man who thinks ‘mucus membrane exposure’ is a thing to say right after you’ve got werewolf liver in your hair,” said Raina sourly. “Oh, yeah, Shelly, you’ve got yourself a winner here. Can I be your maid of honor?”