Lover Beware

become Lu Nuntius?”
    She nodded slowly.
    “The outside world considers us promiscuous. In your terms, this is true. The need for children shapes us, defines us. We are seldom fertile with women of our own people, so we seek bed partners wherever we can. Not indiscriminately. We don’t want our children birthed or raised by a chance-met stranger in a bar. But our survival as a people depends on those of us who are fertile siring as many children as possible.”
    “And you’re fertile.” Lily was dazed, as she’d heard gunshot victims sometimes were in the first seconds—the blow registers, but isn’t real yet. Not real enough to hurt. She remembered the men at the childcare center arguing over who got to stay with the babies. The swarms of children everywhere.
    Not everyone gets to be a mommy, the little girl had told her. Not everyone—relatively few—got to be a daddy, either. “That’s why lupi don’t marry,” she whispered. “Because to be faithful to one woman would be to betray the needs of your people.”
    “Yes.”
    Abruptly the numbness was ripped away. Pain wrenched her around to face the water, hugging herself as if something vital was leaking out, like blood from a gut wound. “I can’t…I can’t do it, Rule. It wasn’t long ago I said you were going too fast, and maybe I’m doing that now. You haven’t…but for me, this has gone too far. I can’t share you.”
    “No!” He grabbed her shoulders, spun her around. “Lily, I didn’t mean—I thought you knew about mates!”
    “I thought so, too. At least, I’d made some guesses.” Her voice shook and her legs weren’t too steady, either. She held on to his arms. “But no one came right out and said what—”
    One second she was holding him and being held. The next she was rolling on the ground where he’d thrown her.
    Rule howled. The eerie, ululating cry had goose bumps popping out on her flesh even as she threw her arms out, stopping her skid toward the lake. She pushed up onto her hands and knees—and stared.
    He was Changing. Flickering—no, it was as if reality itself flickered, time bending in and out of itself like a Möbius strip on speed. Impossible not to watch. Impossible to say what she saw—a shoulder, furred, or was it bare? A paw; a muzzle that was also Rule’s face—a stretching, snapping disfocus, magic strobing its fancy over reality.
    And then there was a wolf. Huge, black and silver furred, snarling.
    And three other wolves racing at them from fifty feet up the shoreline.
    Lily’s gun was in her hand, though she didn’t remember drawing it. The wolves moved like streaks of pure speed, impossibly fast. She pushed to her knees, aimed, and fired—just as the black and silver wolf beside her launched himself at the one in the lead.
    She hit the one on the left in the haunches. It didn’t stop him—he still threw himself at the snarling tangle the other two wolves made. The third wolf veered toward her and leaped—huge, beautiful, and terrifying, jaws open.
    Lily shot him in that gaping mouth.
    The silver-alloy bullet went into the brain. The beast convulsed in midair. Lily scrambled back, but still it fell half on top of her, pinning her, smearing her with blood. And raised that bloody head and lunged for her throat.
    She rammed her gun against the wolf’s skull and squeezed the trigger. Blood and brains spattered, and the big body collapsed. Lily pushed out from under the wolf and scrambled to her feet.
    Ten feet away, three wolves fought. She saw them clearly in the moon-washed night. She knew which one was Rule. Though she’d only seen him in wolf form for a few seconds, she knew him. But they moved too fast, stayed too close. She circled, but couldn’t get a clear shot.
    Then one of the wolves—the one she’d wounded, she thought—staggered back, whimpering in pain. Blood, black in the moonlight, poured from what was left of its face. And the black and silver wolf’s jaws were clamped on the back of the neck of the other attacker. He shook the beast, then flung him away to fall, bloody and broken, one paw twitching.
    Then he turned, snarling, on the one left.
    “No, Rule!” Lily ran forward. “I need him alive to interrogate!”
    She stopped beside the black and silver wolf, who stood with his head lowered, hackles raised, teeth bared. His shoulders reached her hipbone. One of them was gashed and bleeding. More blood dripped from his muzzle, and a deep growl rumbled from his