“Well, I’m really curious what he’s going to write,” Lane said when Patterson finally left. He had promised to let them see the article before it went public in the morning. They would have to see if he kept his word.

“I just really want to get some lunch now,” David sighed. “Dinner. Food, at the very least.”

“You didn’t warn Greg, did you?”

“I didn’t plan to tell the press all this,” David admitted. “But Greg’s still at First Camp, everybody there knows what he is. If anything, we need to worry about father and Andrew. Don’t see who might bother them, though.”

“After you so carefully threw in Desmarais’s and George Louis’s names?” Lane said. “They’ll be fine.”

David nodded and pushed himself out of his chair.

They walked over to a restaurant across the street in silence, and David didn’t speak while they were waiting, or while they ate. He seemed to be chewing on more than just the food.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Lane said quietly.

She hated to see him like that, all closed-up suddenly, and she had a feeling that it wasn’t so much about the interview.

“What happened to Greg, I mean,” she added. “You couldn’t have prevented it.”

“I could have prevented him from being part of that hunt in the first place,” David gave back. “He shouldn’t have been there, you agreed, back then.”

Lane wasn’t sure what to say about that, because he was right. She had felt that only experienced hunters should have been at that hunt. It was one thing to have beaters green as grass when you were trying to flush out one single werewolf hiding in the forest. But going after six of them?

“Nothing was ideal that night,” she finally said. “And he wasn’t the only one too inexperienced for that pack.”

“Think they really were mad?” David asked.

“They must have been, with all the people they killed?” Lane said, but the words became a question as she spoke them.

“Did they really kill all those people, though,” David said. “All the reports we got, from the actual attacks, they said one werewolf, maybe two or three, and never any survivors. But nobody ever said anything about eight of them, did they? And then suddenly, a couple of carters see six of them in that forest, and they just walk away to tell the tale? Not even their oxen got killed.”

Lane nodded slowly. “You think we got the wrong pack.”

“I don’t know,” David sighed. “I don’t know. I just know that Greg is nothing like I thought werewolves are.”

He was quiet for a long minute and finally said: “I think there were a few mad ones, one, maybe two, in the area. There were several reports of werewolves killed in the area, but the attacks on livestock didn’t stop, and neither did the sightings, so naturally, we all thought that those hunters reporting their kills were exaggerating. But what if they hadn’t? What if they killed the mad ones, but because the pack was residing in the same area, people kept seeing werewolves?”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“But a pack that large surely would have driven out other werewolves,” Lane disagreed.

“I don’t think we can count on that,” David said. “Bernadette couldn’t warn those mad ones at First Camp away, Greg said. And she’s an elder.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Lane said. “But it still wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s not – I could have talked father out of letting Greg participate,” David said. “It wouldn’t have stretched the line of beaters that much further.”

He shook his head. “It’s not just Greg,” he said. “It’s – I used to tell myself that I only hunted down the mad ones and that that made it okay. But I didn’t, really, did I?”

He played with his knife. “It’s just weird, having to think of myself as a murderer, I guess.”

“Yeah, I know that feeling,” Lane said dryly.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” David asked, searching her face.

Lane huffed softly. “Bother isn’t the word I would use,” she said. “But I’ve got to live with it, don’t I? I never thought of myself as – as a particularly good person,” she added quietly. “Father – thought that there are much worse sins than murder, and in his eyes, just me liking women rather than men absolutely counted as one of them. He used to say that me wanting to kill werewolves was the only godly desire I ever expressed. The only – path towards redemption for me. And I still – I’m committed to what we’re doing, don’t get me wrong. I would never hurt Morgulon. Or Greg. But – are we really doing the right thing?”

She shrugged, and David nodded.

“We are,” he said with a conviction that Lane couldn’t help but envy. “Though it’s probably easier to say that as someone who never gave a damn about Mithras’s law in the first place.”

Lane smiled at that. “Yes, probably.”

After their meal, they found themselves a little adrift on the high street, which hadn’t yet filled up with the night crowd.

“There’s a bathhouse not far from here?” David ventured.

From the way he was saying it, Lane guessed that it wasn’t the kind of place where one went just to get clean.

“Visited it last time I came to Mannin,” he added, slightly embarrassed. “Full, uh, service.”

Lane couldn’t quite help grinning at his awkwardness.

“Sounds like a plan,” she said.

They were at Mannin mostly to enjoy themselves, after all, and kill some time.

Without really talking about it, they split up as soon as they stepped into the baths proper, wrapped in nothing but large towels.

“Devil’s lair,” whispered her father in her ear, talking over the moans coming from an alcove.

David clearly hadn’t been kidding about the “full service.” Mostly geared at men, though, from what she could tell.

She turned away a couple of guys who approached her with hopeful faces, and stepped into the large basin of warm water, half thinking that maybe she really would take just a bath. Which was fine, really. Soaking in the warm water was nice enough in itself.

But after she had turned away a few more guys – they were taking her no with far more grace than she had expected – a woman appeared up on the pool’s edge behind her.

“Hello, gorgeous,” she said. “I couldn’t help but watch you turning away those gentlemen, and wanted to try my luck.”

She dropped the sheet she had wrapped around herself just as Lane turned to look up at her. She was Valoisian, with sun-bronzed skin, and full, black hair, and a body like a sculpture, except for one long ridge of a scar running all the way from underneath her left breast to her thigh. The comfortable way she presented herself in the full, including that scar, only made her more attractive, and Lane smiled.

The woman understood that as an invitation and sat down onto the edge, gliding into the pool.

“I’m Nicolle,” she said.

Lane didn’t pull away when she leaned in for a kiss.