The remaining Draziri leapt off the fence and dashed across the street. The night lit up with orange flashes of light as they discharged their energy rifles. Sean landed in the middle of them, fast, so shockingly fast. He gutted the third Draziri with a short precise slash, reversed the blade, and sliced the fourth attacker’s throat. Blood sprayed.

The surviving Draziri spun, revealing short blades of bright pale metal. They attacked, twisting and leaping as if dancing, and Sean sliced through them, cutting a path as if he knew where they would be before they decided to move there.

Two Draziri peeled from the group on the left and dashed toward the fight right through my kill zone. Oh no, you don’t. The short-range pulse cannon fired once, its invisible beam slicing through the area. Two smoking corpses crumpled to the ground.

Sean’s attackers were down to one, but that last Draziri moved as if he were weightless, launching into a whirlwind of slashes and cuts and dancing away from Sean before the green blade could find him.

The phone rang. Arland’s voice filled the room. “Three streets out.”

Eighty seconds.

On the screen a Draziri blade caught Sean’s side. My heart jumped into my throat.

Sean buried his knife in the Draziri’s chest, freed it with a sharp tug, and leapt into the scraggly Texas woods bordering the inn.

“Clear,” I said and hurled the tunnel down the street. It caught the car. Maud drove into the garage, the car screeching to a halt. The Archivarian stumbled out. A cylindrical vat shot out of the ground, enclosing him. The top of the vat clanged closed. Argon filled the inside.

Ten seconds.

Nine.

Five.

Three.

Two...

One.

The Archivarian looked at my sister from the inside of the vat, still humanoid.

We made it.

Sean.

I ran out of the war room and through the lawn and the woods to the east.

Be okay. Please be okay.

He crossed the boundary and I saw him running toward me. We collided and I threw my arms around him. For a second he stood there, as if not sure what to do and then he hugged me to him.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.

“I am now,” he said.

* * *

The problem with all men, and werewolves in particular, was their odd perspective. Sean viewed the gash across his ribs as a scratch. I viewed it as an open wound made by a monomolecular blade able to cut through the werewolf armor and contaminate his body with extraterrestrial microorganisms and possibly poison. We agreed to meet somewhere in the middle. He allowed me to sterilize and seal the wound, and I promised to stop threatening to restrain him.

“I’m curious,” Maud said, when I was finished. “Do you always threaten people who try to help you or is he special?”

“He isn’t,” Arland volunteered. “She threatened to drown me in sewage once.”

“The Lord Marshal deserved it.” I put down the surgical tool and examined my handiwork. The wound was reduced to a hair-thin red scar. Considering how well werewolves had been bioengineered, it would likely heal fast. In a few days, you wouldn’t even be able to tell that someone tried to kill him.

We were in the front room. It had enough seating for everyone and I had formed three different screens to watch the surroundings. On the front screen, the six remaining Draziri were carefully retrieving the bodies of their dead. They had given the inn a wide berth, using back streets to skirt it and stay out of the range of my guns. They shouldn’t have bothered. As an innkeeper, my job was to respond to threats, not to initiate an attack. Once the skirmish ended, they were safe. As long as they didn’t try to shoot at the inn, they could parade in front of it all day long.

Sean pulled his T-shirt back on. I wouldn’t have minded if he had kept it off a few minutes longer, but with my sister here, there would be hell to pay later if I looked at him too long or noticed how muscular his back was. Or noticed his abs. I had taken a close look at his stomach while working on the gash, but it wouldn’t hurt to give it a second glance.

“Did you find what you were looking for at Baha-char?” I asked.

“Yes.” Sean pulled a small square of a data chip from his pocket and offered it to me. I took it off his finger, called up a terminal from the wall, and deposited the chip onto it. The terminal’s surface swallowed the chip. The face of the Draziri who’d come to talk to me appeared on the center screen.

I rose. “Let me get the Hiru for this.”

I walked into the depths of the inn past the Hiru’s quarters to a narrow chamber protected by a door. A series of recesses waited in the wall, the first filled with an argon tank. The Hiru stood by it, looking at the humanoid creature inside.

I fought a valiant battle against the smell. The human nose was supposed to stop recognizing an odor when exposed to it for several minutes, but the scent of the Hiru pretty much destroyed that rule. Only sheer willpower prevented me from gagging. The Hiru didn’t notice, absorbed in watching the tank.

“What do you see?” I asked.

The awkward alien sighed, his voice sad. “The future.”

We watched the first member of the Archivarius rest on the floor in a trance. I had asked if it required anything, but the Hiru told me the tank was sufficient.

“There are too many spaces,” the Hiru said, pointing at the wall. “There are ten.”

“How many should there be?”

“Nine.”

That meant we still had to retrieve eight members of the hive. I had hoped for two or three.