What's Bryn up to, lads? You'll never guess. No, really. You won't.

I drowned my phone during The Flu Part 4, so I have to check my notifications on the laptop like an animal and you'll have to forgive me if I miss one. Hello Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and the Philippines.

(Also if you're not British and you're confused later come back and take a peek at this: )

I made Bryn a sandwich. Well, technically, I made him two sandwiches, but one of them didn't survive the trip to the ward. They were marmite and cheese, which was Bryn's second favourite sandwich filling. His actual favourite was fish fingers and mayo, but I disagreed with that ... abomination on moral grounds.

The ward was an extension of the original cabin. Six years ago, it had only been used for patching up our raiders. Now it was fast becoming Eira's bedroom, because she spent more nights in here than she did in the loft with the rest of us.

I peered through the window, shading my eyes with one hand. My sister was fast asleep on the bed, a drip in her arm and her honey-blonde hair plastered to her forehead. She'd always had trouble keeping weight on, but she seemed to have lost half a stone in the last two months alone.

Bryn was slouching in the old, moth-eaten armchair by the fireplace, his legs tucked against his chest. He was sixteen years old, and he'd nearly finished growing, but he still had some filling out to do. I'd rather he stayed skinny, to be honest — I was already having trouble putting him on his arse.

I knocked on the door softly and beckoned with a finger. He looked up sharply, his hazel eyes widened, and he started grinning. He crept past Eira and came out into the corridor. I braced myself to collide with seventy kilos of awkward, gangly muscle, but the impact never came.

"Thank the Goddess," he breathed, pushing straight past me. "I need a piss."

"What, no hello? No hug?" I demanded.

"I really need to piss," Bryn said by way of explanation. He jogged towards the forest, nearly disappearing into the trees before he glanced over his shoulder and changed direction completely, circling towards the front of the cabin.

"I saw that, Bryn, you absolute walnut," I called after him. "If you're going to lie to me, at least do it right."

"Sorry," he laughed. "That's my bad."

Idiot. He was up to something, of course, but he was always up to something. If a day ever came when he was just sitting around minding his own business, all innocent like, then I'd worry.

I opened the ward door and settled in the arm chair. I kept one eye on Eira's midriff to make sure she was breathing, as always. She was still fast asleep, but it didn't look like a restful sleep. Her eyelids were twitching and her mouth was stretched thin, like she was in pain, and that wouldn't surprise me. Eira was nearly always in pain.

Twenty minutes later, the ward door opened, and Bryn crept back in. This time, he did hug me, and it was a bruising, rib-cracking hug. He smelt like cheap air-freshener with a trace of ... grapes? He squeezed into the armchair beside me, and we were crushed together like sardines.

"How are you, little cousin?" I asked. We used the link to avoid disturbing Eira.

"Bloody starving," he replied, staring wolfishly at the sandwich.

"Well, it's your lucky day," I said.

He didn't need any further encouragement to grab it and start scoffing. "Thank you."

The brilliant thing about the mind-link was that you could eat and talk at the same time ... in theory, at least. Unfortunately, it was so second-nature to swallow your food before speaking that Bryn had to keep stopping and starting and stopping and starting.

"You're allowed to go and get food, you know," I told him. "And to piss."

"I didn't want her to wake up alone," Bryn mumbled. "It was a rough night."

I didn't doubt it. Eira was shaking a little bit now, and I reached forwards to tug the blanket over her shoulders properly. By the time I sat back, the marmite sandwich was gone. We had a minute of silence — a rare luxury when my cousin was around — and it was brought to an abrupt end when the drip started that horrible monotone beeping which made you want to claw your own ears off.

Boop-beep-boop.

And then, after an uncomfortable pause...

Boop-beep-boop, again and again, until I was grinding my teeth together. Air in line, the little screen declared, and while Bryn and I both knew how to fix that, we weren't allowed to touch the drip, so I summoned Auntie Fion with a flick of the mind-link.

"I reckon I'll train as a nurse," Bryn told me. "You know, like Ellie."

Ellie had trained as a nurse because she was human, and there weren't many ways for a human to make themselves useful in a war between shifters. But Bryn? True, he was one of the happiest, bubbliest people I knew, but ... he'd get bored in five seconds flat.

I didn't say that outright, of course. "Thought you wanted to be a raider?"

"Well, yeah, but I can do both."

"It's a lot of work, pup. A lot of things to learn..."

"I know," he said, and that was a brave thing to say, because my cousin had always struggled with our lessons. Like Rhodri and like his father, he was sharp as anything in a conversation, but things got messy when pens and paper came into the equation.

"Then go for it," I told him.

Fion bustled into the ward with her arms full of dressing packs. She dumped them all in my lap, jerked a finger at the drawers, then went to fiddle with the drip. I pried myself out of the chair, slowly, excruciatingly. Bryn decided to help me by prodding me with his cold toes. In my absence, he grinned and stretched out in the chair like a cat.

By the time I'd finished putting away the dressings, the beeping had stopped. Fion was washing her hands with alcohol gel. It made the whole room stink, of course, and my wolf hated that smell. It was associated with the burning sensation of antiseptic on an open wound.

"While I've got you both here, can I have some blood?" Fion asked us in an undertone.

Bryn and I looked at each other. It was not an unusual request now that she had started experimenting with shifter biology.

"Sure."

"Alright."

So she stuck both of us with butterfly needles and took several syringes of blood.

"Is this for the healing thing?" Bryn asked, already peeling the cotton wool and tape away from his elbow. He had the nerve to look confused that it was still bleeding.

"Yes, as a matter of fact," Fion said. I made a face, and it didn't get past her. "Here, I can show you, Eva."

I made another face. Normally, Fion's experiments involved a bunch of scarily long words and fast-paced explanations.

"No, it's cool," Bryn assured me. "Go look, honest."

His standards for 'cool' were very high, so I followed my aunt to the far side of the room, where the microscope and the centrifuge and other pieces of equipment we'd nicked from flockie doctors were set up. She set our blood samples on the counter and held up another two tubes of blood. One was crimson, and one was dark maroon.

"See these?" Fion asked. "The lighter one is Cassie's blood. The darker one is mine."

"Human and shifter," I said.

She beamed at me. "Exactly! The question is — why the colour difference...?"

"I have the weirdest feeling you're about to tell me," I drawled, because her excitement was a teeny-tiny bit infectious.

"Tell you? No. Look down the microscope," she said.

I did look down the microscope. Fion helped me focus it until I could see a bunch of little red circles.

"Those are erythrocytes — red blood cells," she explained. "They're like taxis for oxygen. Do you see any white and purple blobs? They're bigger than the red ones..."

"One or two, maybe," I murmured.

"Leukocytes, or white blood cells, which fight off infection. And last but not least, the tiny little grey things around them are thrombocytes. Platelets. They do the clotting. Got all of that?"

"Nope," I sighed.

"Well, you got the gist, right?" Fion asked, and this time I shrugged. "Brilliant. That was human blood. This is shifter."

She swapped out the slides and helped me focus it again. Most of it looked the same, but there was a new type of blob. They were pitch black and about half the size of the red ones. I looked away from the microscope and blinked a few times.

Fion was waiting expectantly. "See those? They're like stem cells — they can become any other type of cell, as far as I can tell. What do you reckon they do?"

"Dunno," I said cheerfully.

"I'll show you, then," she said. She fetched a vial of black, gloopy fluid which reminded me of tar. "These are some of my black blood cells. It took me a few weeks to work out how to separate them."

First, she filled a syringe with some of the black liquid and injected it into the crook of her elbow. Then she took a scalpel and traced a line on her thumb, splitting an existing scar. Normally, a cut like that would take five minutes to heal. But even as I watched, the flesh knitted together and sealed itself, all in the span of about five seconds.

"Whoa," I breathed. "Can I try?"

"Not with my cells. It doesn't work — your antigens are different."

"Boo," I jeered, although I had absolutely no idea what that meant. "So the more of these things you've got, the faster you heal?"

She nodded. "Hence the Llewellyn family's fibre-optic healing. They have more black blood cells. It's genetic, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure it comes from the Shadowcats, but I'd need a blood sample to confirm that, and ... that's tricky."

Tricky because all the Shadowcats lived on Anglesey, and Anglesey wasn't very close. We'd visited a few times, since the Llewellyns had cousins there, but the packs had wised up to that and put a watch on the bridge. They had yet to visit us, and I didn't blame them, really — the north was a hellscape compared to Anglesey's quiet, cookie-cutter neighbourhood.

"I wanted to call them melanocytes, obviously," Fion sighed.

"Oh, obviously," I agreed, nodding vigorously. Bryn started sniggering from the armchair.

"But that's already a thing, so I had to settle with sanocytes, which means 'healing cells,'" she finished, scratching at the new pink scar on her thumb. "Cool as it is, there aren't many clinical implications yet. I can't store them for more than a few days. I need to work out if close relations can donate."

I snapped my head up. "Would that work on Eira?"

"I don't think so, somehow," she said gently. "In fact, I think the sanocytes might be doing the damage. It would explain why there's no human equivalent."

Epilepsy crossed with multiple sclerosis: that was the best way to describe Eira's illness. She'd had her first seizure when she was eleven, and in the years since they had gotten worse and more frequent. Without access to a hospital, we couldn't work out what was wrong, let alone treat her. It was frustrating, to say the least.

"Anyway, I'll be back when her saline is finished," Fion said. "There are cards beside the bed."

And so we played cards for a few hours and I Spy when that eventually fizzled out. Bryn was distracted — he was even more restless than usual, and he disappeared for another ten minutes and came back smelling of bleach and sawdust. I didn't ask what he was doing. There was no bloody point. He wasn't very good at hiding his evil schemes, so I'd find out sooner or later.

When the drip went off again, it was Sam who poked his head through the door. His blonde hair was soaked through, so it was probably raining for the hundredth time this week.

"Up you get, kids," he said. "Fion's going to relieve you for a few hours."

Suspicion and doubt — those were my first instincts, and for good reason.

"Why?" I demanded.

Sam made a face. "I'm taking you both to Tesco."

"Oh no," Bryn breathed. "Oh no."

"And yes, before you ask, we've got to bring the little ones," he sighed. "It was this or covering the old latrine pit. Count yourself lucky."

"Lucky? I'd prefer the pit," I spluttered, and Bryn nodded his agreement vigorously.

"Well, that's bloody tough, isn't it? I want you outside and ready to go in two minutes."

And with that, he turned and left, the ward door sliding closed, and Bryn and I were left to stare at each other with abject horror. Eira was still asleep, somehow.

"Shotgun," my cousin whispered.

I swore at him.

***

My ears were ringing, and we weren't even in the supermarket yet. I was sat between Matty and Ahmed to separate them. They'd treated me to an off-key rendition of 'I Know A Song That Will Get On Your Nerves,' and it had, in fact, got on my nerves. In the back seat, Jess was teaching Poppy every swearword she knew, and we'd long since given up on trying to stop her.

"How did you stay sane," I asked Sam as we were getting out, "when eight of us were little at the same time?"

"Honestly? I didn't," he laughed. "Nia was too smart for her own good. Bryn would never stop yakking and Rhodri picked fights with everyone. You were a piece of shit. Eira was worse. Ellis ... well, Ellis was okay, actually."

I snorted. "We haven't changed much, have we?"

"I'm not convinced you've changed at all, to be honest."

"Eva's chill now," Bryn pointed out.

Sam thought about it for a moment. "That's true. Eva's chill, and Nia grew up."

The truth was, I had to be chill. Someone had to be. Before Liam had joined the equation, I'd been the ringleader in every hairbrained scheme. There had been a good few years afterwards when we'd all wreaked havoc together, but then I'd hit seventeen and decided that I just couldn't be bothered anymore. It was so much more fun sitting back with some popcorn and watching everyone else struggle, and I wasn't sure how it had taken me so long to realise that.

"Your sister's about to slash that man's tyres, Bryn," Sam sighed.

We all turned our heads to see the six-year-old crouching near the back of a Mercedes. There was something shiny clutched in her tiny fingers.

"Yeah, she is," he agreed. "Where do you reckon she got the knife?"

"I don't care, to be honest. Can you stop her?"

Bryn's eyes widened. "Oh. Right, gotcha."

He jogged over to snatch her up. Sam, whose own arms were full of wriggling toddler, let his eyes take a lap. We both knew this was only the beginning. By the time we'd reached the trolleys, Matty had almost been hit by a car, Ahmed had stolen an entire box of cereal out of someone's bags, and Poppy had called some poor old lady a 'cow arse,' whatever the hell that meant.

We were buying for fourteen people, so we needed a trolley each. The only way to get the shopping done in a reasonable amount of time was to split up. Sam headed for fruits and vegetables with little Poppy, Bryn took his sister to the meats and chilled aisles, and I made the trek over to the longer-life stuff.

Matty and Ahmed trailed behind me. In all fairness, they managed to behave themselves for a full two minutes. They even helped me haul ten kilo bags of rice into the trolley. But while I was working out which baked beans were cheapest, they started to lose interest. When we reached the tinned sweetcorn, they were bouncing on the spot. Finally, somewhere near the chopped tomatoes, they snapped.

"Bogies," Ahmed whispered.

"You aren't allowed to play that game in public," I reminded him.

"Bogies," Matty replied, a little louder.

"What did I just say?"

Ahmed smirked. "Bogies!"

I collared both of them. "Not. Allowed."

"Alright, alright," he said. "Can we go look at the video games?"

Well, that was strange. Normally, they'd just pretend they couldn't hear me. I was too busy congratulating myself on my babysitting skills to be suspicious. "As long as you don't touch anything, I don't see why not."

And they nodded their innocent little heads, and I released them, fool that I was, and went back to browsing the noodle selection.

I managed a full ten minutes of undisturbed shopping before I heard someone shout the word 'Bogies' from the other side of the store. And it was a large store. I closed my eyes and took a deep, calming breath. The shoppers around me were looking over their shoulders, some with amusement and some with confusion.

It was a race to find them as they got progressively louder. The video game aisle had been a decoy, because they were clever little buggers. By the time I'd tracked the sound to the book section — the very last place I'd think to look — they were practically screaming.

And then everything went quiet all of a sudden, and that was worse, somehow. I rounded the last corner to see a Tesco employee giving the boys a stern talking to. They were sniggering. I parked my shopping cart beside them and watched fear replace the boys' amusement faster than a flash flood.

"Are you responsible for these children?" the employee asked me in a gravelly, sneering voice.

"Oh, I'm not responsible about anything," I assured him. "But they are my brothers, yeah."

He frowned, and that was fair, because we looked nothing like each other. Matty and Ahmed were both orphans we'd picked up from Riverside Pack when they were toddlers. Our eye, hair and skin colours were all different.

"Is that true?" he asked the boys.

They stared me right in the eye, and they had the nerve to shake their heads.

"I've never seen her before in my life," Ahmed said.

Matty chewed on his lip. "You're not going to let her take us, are you?"

"Tell him the truth, shitheads, or I'll beat your asses halfway to—"

"I'm going to have to ask you to step away, ma'am," the clerk said hurriedly, stepping between us. The boys were huddled together, practically cowering. Matty made a whimpering noise. The fear was all very convincing, unfortunately, and the Tesco guy was practically eating that shit up.

I groaned. "Don't fall for it. They're the spawn of Satan, and they need a good smack upside their heads, not sympathy."

"Ma'am," the man hissed. "I'm calling the police."

"I'll leave you here," I went on, completely ignoring him. "Don't think I won't. We'll see how you like social services."

It had better not come to that, because they would probably love social services. A whole organisation of adults who weren't wised up to their nonsense? The boys exchanged shit-eating grins, and I growled at them deep in my chest.

The employee was clutching an iPhone now. "Last warning..."

"Alright, alright. No need for that," I assured him, taking a sarcastic step backwards. I summoned Sam with a mental flick. He didn't look anything like the boys either, but he was twenty-four and he had one of those generically trustworthy faces.

"I smell me some sheep," Bryn announced through the link. "A whole stinking flock of them."

He didn't mean actual sheep. At least, I didn't think so. We liked to call the pack wolves sheep because it pissed the living daylights out of them.

"How many and where?" I demanded. This could be really, really bad. We were in Wyst, which was a human town and should have been no man's land, but the flockies had always reckoned it belonged to them. And these days, flockies rarely ventured far from home alone, so we'd be outnumbered for sure.

"Dunno and dunno. I'm gonna try and circle around to you guys."

"Good idea," Sam told him. There were a few seconds of radio silence, and I moved enough of my attention back into the real world to glower at the boys. Through no fault of their own, they'd picked the wrong time to screw around.

"Ah, scratch that. They found me," Bryn said. And because his little sister was with him, I could hear the tiniest drop of worry in his voice. "There's five of them, and they're in a mood. We're in the cheese aisle, so if you could start hustling, that'd be fab..."

I looked at the Tesco employee, his finger still hovering on the emergency call button, and I swore under my breath. "Can you stall for five?"

"I can try."

He didn't sound hopeful.