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Again. The sound isn't wood or glass or stone. It's the sound of something that was never going to move.

"Boss." Cass has both palms flat beside mine. "Boss, your arm."

My arm is fine. My arm is doing exactly what I need it to do, which is hit this until it stops.

"Perry," I say. "Get the piano."

We put four hundred pounds of upright piano into it at a run.

The piano breaks.

That's when the wall starts to move.

Seven of them. They've been standing along the north side all night in black feathered masks and good coats, not drinking, not talking, one hand each on the ledge behind them. I walked past every one of them at seven o'clock and smelled beeswax and cold stone and nothing else.

They come off the paneling at the same moment, and the way they move is just wrong.

One of them is bigger through the shoulders. Slower.

New at having a body.

They've been getting better at it. Someone has been practicing.

I shift out of a dead stop and take the first one before it clears the mask.

After that it's simple, and simple is the only mercy I get tonight. Teeth and floor and the smell of rot under expensive wool. Cass takes one down at the knee and Perry finishes it. Someone screams behind a beaked mask and keeps screaming. The quartet's cellist is under the piano bench with his arms over his head.

The third one gets low and comes up under Cass.

She doesn't make a sound. She goes down on one knee with her hand pressed under her ribs and her face gone gray. She stands back up, because she is the only person in this pack who has never once needed to be asked.

"Stay down," I tell her.

"No," she says.

Across the ballroom, Ansel is in the doorway of the back hall with a dozen children behind him and a blue mask pushed up on his head, and one of them goes for that door, and Ansel puts it into the frame hard enough to crack plaster and holds it there with his forearm across its throat until Perry gets to him.

He never looks at me. I never look at him.

That's the whole conversation and it's enough.

The last one dissolves into smoke over the parquet, and my wolf is still up, still ready, still certain.

More.

There is no more. That's the issue.

I turn around with black blood in my mouth and seven of them gone and the barrier is exactly where it was. Maren is still fifteen feet away on the other side of the barrier. I've just won the only kind of fight I know how to win and it bought her nothing at all.

Cass sits down on the bottom stair with her back against the newel post and her hand still under her ribs, and when she takes it away to look, she puts it straight back.

"Don't," she says, before I can say anything.

Three hundred people are pressed against the walls of this ballroom and every one of them just watched me shift into a wolf with teeth. Some of them are filming. The woman who runs the pharmacy has her gold cat mask in her hand and she is looking at me the way you look at a tornado coming.

Years of hiding this, spent in about nine seconds.

I find I don't care, and that's how I know how far gone I am.