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redhead was sitting in her chair, looking up at butterflies that shouldn’t exist. The next, that chair was empty.
    A lone butterfly landed on Kai’s arm.
    “Ouch!” Without thinking, she slapped it—then stared at her arm. Pink dust from the slaughtered butterfly smeared her skin. A bright bead of blood glistened amid the pink. The pretty little butterfly had
bit
her.
    The pink cloud descended.
    *   *   *
    N ATHAN moved to the free throw line, having been thoroughly fouled by a wiry fellow named Carl who could jump like a bullfrog.
    Nathan hadn’t played basketball until three weeks ago, but he’d watched the game often and thought he was catching on pretty well. For a very long time he’d avoided playing any sport because of the difficulty in holding himself to a human level of competence, but he no longer had to hide what he was. Since they arrived at Nokolai Clanhome he’d played pickup with his hosts several times. He liked it. Werewolves were as fast as he was and almost as strong.
    They were also highly competitive. Nathan grinned as the ball sailed smoothly through the hoop. So was he.
    Cheers and jeers rang out from both teams and from those who’d gathered to watch. There were several women among the watchers. None of them were werewolves, of course, that being a sex-linked inheritance.
    Lupi, not werewolves
, he corrected himself, using his T-shirt to mop his face. They preferred to be called lupi, and any people should be allowed to name themselves. But the habits of years are hard to break, and he’d thought of them as werewolves for roughly four centuries now. Avoided them for that long, too, since they could sniff out what he was—or at least that he wasn’t human—and passing for human had been important during his long stranding here. Plus his scent was inherently challenging to a lupus, which could cause trouble.
    But now he was here openly, no longer pretending to a humanity he didn’t possess, and the Nokolai leader—their Rho—had named him
ospi
. That meant clan-guest. These particular lupi seemed to be dealing well with the provocation of his scent.
    Turned out he really liked playing with werewolves.
    Over on the sidelines, his phone trilled. “It’s Kai,” he explained, and headed that way.
    “Hey, what about our game?” someone on the other team called. Another one jeered, “She calls, you come running?”
    Since that was self-evidently true, Nathan didn’t bother to answer. If the man didn’t understand that Kai was more important, words wouldn’t convince him.
    “Shut up, Harris,” a big man said.
    The big man was watching the game, not playing in it, mainly because no one wanted to be on the team that played against him. So Nathan had been told, and he believed it. Benedict Jones—whose Native American features didn’t go with the surname—was in charge of security and training at Nokolai Clanhome, and he was more than simply good at his job.
    The first time Nathan sparred with Benedict, he’d lost.
    That had gotten his attention. This form wasn’t as deadly as his original body, but he hadn’t been defeated in unarmed combat in nearly three hundred years. Then it had been a pair of Chinese monks, and he’d promptly joined their order so he could learn from them. He hadn’t had the opportunity to train with anyone who posed a challenge in a very long time, but hadn’t thought it mattered. One of his Gifts was what might be called perfect muscle memory. Once he learned how to do something, his body
knew
that move.
    He saw now that he’d been wrong. His body remembered everything he’d taught it, but training was about the mind as well as the body. His speed had suffered, too, from the lack of a real challenge.
    When Nathan and Benedict fought their second match, they’d used knives. Nathan won that one. It would have been amazing if he hadn’t. The long knife was his weapon, and he was very good with smaller knives, too. He knew of one person, a