CHAPTER 63

The doors were locked and guarded, the windows secured and alarmed there was no way that I could see into the ranch house. I sat back on my heels beneath the leaves of a large beach plum and glared at the building, frustration vibrating through my limbs. I needed to get in there, and figure out what Leanne was up to, and I was stymied by locks and alarms. I wished I had Darius' disrupter, but the only tools I'd managed to save, other than the little bugs, were the grappling hook and gloves, which I thought I needed to escape the yard once I'd finished. Even my communicator was screwed, I'd tried lamenting my troubles to Aiden earlier and got nothing in return. I supposed Hoventech hadn't planned on it being dunked in a pond. For that matter the temperature masking device Caroline had come up with was likely dead as well. I fingered the thin chain around my neck that looked rather like a hip choker.

*No signal at all. You're right, it's fried too*. My wolf huffed.

*Well, then let's hope Aiden's theory was right and those last vampires only found me out of coincidence or this night is going to go to shit. Even more shit, since we can't get inside without our tools.
*
*I'd even checked the pond with my senses, thinking I might retrieve one or two of the extra items Aiden had sent with me that could possibly still be functional. But Chase still paced the water's edge, his movements still tense and alert.*

*You've forgotten that we have natural tools*, my wolf interrupted my thoughts. She forced an image into my mind, the moment in the forest outside of Newcomb when we'd been trapped by the werejaguar's roots. When our arms had been bound tightly and we couldn't reach a weapon...we'd done a partial change, just like the jaguar could. Our snout.

*There's nothing to bite through here*, I frowned.

She didn't respond. Not because she was ignoring me, but because she was focused intensely. My fingers felt funny, and then they changed, elongating and curving into paws. The tools I'd been clutching fell to the ground.

*Very cool,* I encouraged, *now what*?

*Just wait*, she gritted, her concentration almost painful. I helped her by closing my eyes, taking away our visual distractions, and tried to clear the racing thoughts from my mind as well, focusing on my breathing.

My wolf sent a quick wave of gratefulness and doubled her efforts. I could feel my paws changing, the stretching and relaxing of muscles becoming more strained, almost to the point of painfulness. Still I focused on my breathing letting go of the control we shared to give her more space to work.

*It should be enough*, she told me at last.

I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands. What the hell was this?

*It's a...melding*.

*Melding*?

*Of your traits and mine, I mashed them together and kept what we could use. When the jaguar attacked us the first time he did the same thing, that claw in our side wasn't fully jaguar or human.
*

*But the claw*...I began because my hands looked like a hairier knobbier version of their usual selves, with thick pads on each of my digits and one single curved claw very much unlike that of a wolf.

*Well, that's the thing, my wolf started. We were able to partially transform to get free of those roots, and I remembered what the werejaguar had done and I started thinking. How different, really is a sharp cat's claw, or eagle's talon from a wolves blunt ones?*

Holy shit.

*It turns out they aren't that different, actually, it just requires different ratios of claw material in different parts.*

The curved claw gleamed at me, black in the little bit of light cast down from the cloud covered moon. It looked deadly sharp. Impossibly so.

*I think we can get around the window alarms by cutting out the glass. That way the frame doesn't move at all, and that is where I'm sensing the electronic field.*

I swallowed the questions that wanted to fly from my mouth and raised my left hand, letting one of my almost normal digits scrape along the claw's edge.

Blood welled up where I'd brushed against it.

*Careful, it's sharp*. My wolf said dryly.

*Right, it's just...I didn't know we could do that*.

She sent me a picture of the root ball. *I think there are quite a few things that we don't know we can do. And if there are others like that jaguar out there then we're going to have to learn quickly.
*
*I supposed that much was true, yet it seemed ridiculous that we'd never even tried such things before.*

*And why would we? As far as we knew we were mostly a normal wolf. She explained. We didn't try because we were limited by our own understanding of what was impossible*.

*Alright, but we've got this now, are you sure it will cut through glass?*

*Not through glass, no. But there's another material around the edges, that holds the glass to the frame, I can smell the difference in materials. I think our claw can cut through that.*

I pondered her explanation. Really she was getting smarter and smarter and it was a little unnerving. Popping the glass from the frame would be nearly impossible for a normal wolf, but if we were delicate enough and precise enough we might be able to do it without disrupting the frame and setting off the alarm.

Possibly.

*What choice do we have?* She wanted to know.

*Since when do you care about all these human creations? Phones and devices and windows, you never used to pay attention to any of it.*

*And look where that's gotten us. If we were...she hesitated...created, like the jaguar said, then we are not creatures of the just the natural world or the human world, but of both. I was foolish to focus on one over the other.*

She was right, and now we were up against something much bigger than both of us. We needed all of the advantages we could get.

I looked up at the second story, judging which of the darkened windows would be easiest to try on. They all looked the same to me. In the end we chose the one farthest away from anyone, in case we made a mistake.

The climb was easy, old houses weren't really built with outer security in mind, and the house had a covered porch along the back, the supports of which were easy to scramble up. Then we crept along the gable until we got to the window.

I sat there for a moment, studying the window in the low light. It was a beautiful window, with munton bars and false shutters. And at the edges, in a paper thin line was the sealant my wolf had smelled. I glanced from it to my claw, uncertainly.

*Well, here goes nothing.*