It wasn't easy to get down the stairs with my mother-in-law slung across my shoulders, but I could hardly leave her behind, could I? Her weight pressed down against my shoulder blades as I eased from step to step. I had to work twice as hard to get the air into my lungs, for some reason, and that only added to my exhaustion.

The blood dripping from my thigh left a twisting, splattered trail on the carpet. The whole leg was threatening to give way by the time I reached the bottom and eased Maggie into a sitting position against the wall. She would have to wait there. I'd need all my concentration to deal with the flockies outside.

Wiping my hands on my jeans, I padded down the hallway and stood in the doorway, looking out at the Silver Lake fighters. They were spread into a wide ring which doubtless stretched around the entire house by now. And standing directly opposite me was Vaughan, taller than his neighbours by half a head and smiling at me.

"I'm a fair man, Llewellyn. I'll give you one chance to come quietly," he told me, arms folded across his chest. When I just snorted, he spread his hands wide, gesturing at the circle. "Don't be stupid. You're injured, and you're surrounded."

"I am surrounded by men I want dead," I corrected quietly, "and you're about to give me an excuse to kill them."

Slowly, I stepped onto the driveway and put on my injured leg until I was standing square. It took half a thought to cast my mind around the circle, ripping through each of the fighters in turn, until I found memories of Llechi in one of the older men. Of children screaming and the taste of hot blood in a tunnel which stank of earth and mist.

I tore my way into his mind. It wasn't difficult, not even with several pints of my blood in the car footwell and soaking into the gravel beneath me. I found the part of his mind that kept his heart beating, the part that even he couldn't reach, and then I stamped out the little spark of life there.

He toppled over, his body limp and boneless, and he was dead before he hit the ground. The closest men scrambled to crouch over him, to check his pulse and to panic. I flicked my eyes back towards the Alpha and let a ghost of a smile cross my lips. His fighters were muttering amongst themselves. Only a few of them could shield their minds, and none of them wanted to be next. It wasn't a death you could see coming. It wasn't something you could fight.

"You should send them away, Vaughan," I said. My voice came out a little breathless because the mind games and the blood loss were taking their toll. "This is between you and me."

"You must think I'm really stupid," he laughed. "And while we're on the subject of stupid, what are you doing here?"

He didn't ask it like he wanted to know the answer. He asked it like he knew the answer already and was hoping to catch me in a lie. So I just stood there, staring at him with my head tipped slightly to one side and my eyes icy cold.

"I just can't think, you see. What on earth could have possessed you to walk onto my territory alone and unarmed?" An awful little smirk crept across his lips. "Are you ... perhaps ... missing something?"

Screw it. I didn't have time for this horseshit. He clearly wanted me to play along, so I'd have to try that instead. I cast one more wary look around me before taking a step closer to him. "Where are they?"

"Where are who?" Vaughan asked, his smirk only growing.

"I think you know."

"Come on, now. I want to hear you say it," he said softly. "Who was in the house, Llewellyn?"

The game was clearly up, so I didn't know I was still clinging to the deception. Perhaps it was part of some futile hope that everything could still go back to the way it had been, that the consequences of this afternoon wouldn't be permanent. Of course they would be permanent. Lee and Eira were already dead, and Alex wouldn't be far behind them if he didn't get medical attention soon.

"I'll tell you who was in the house," I said. "An elderly woman who's been a cornerstone of your pack for decades. A young woman who couldn't hurt a fly. A young man who has spent his adult life fighting for you. Not to mention the pregnant woman, the five-year-old boy and the two little babies. So I'll ask you again — where are they?"

He snorted aloud. "Put it how you like, Llewellyn. You'll excuse me if I didn't extend a warm welcome to the mate and son of a man who has slaughtered more pack wolves than anyone else alive."

With that, he took a folded photograph from his pocket and tossed it towards me. The wind caught it, sending it spiralling and drifting for a moment before it came to rest in the mud at my feet. I felt my throat bob as I stared down at the creased white paper. The tip of my boot nudged the near corner, and the photograph flipped over to show me three smiling figures.

I swore under my breath. It had been taken recently. Jess was halfway pregnant, and I was standing beside her, my arm around her shoulders. And just to make matters worse, Bran was standing in front of me. My other hand rested on his shoulder. That would have been damning enough even without that striking resemblance.

We were looking almost directly at whoever had taken the photo, but it was pretty obvious we hadn't seen them crouching in the bushes. I'd have remembered having my photo taken — it didn't happen very often at Lle o Dristwch, to say the least.

"I was all for killing that human piece of shit until he gave me this," he drawled. "You look very happy, don't you?"

I looked up at him, fighting my wolf with every breath to keep myself from shifting and going for his throat there and then. It must have shown in my eyes — that constant, near-futile battle, because Vaughan's own dark irises swirled black.

He couldn't kill a pup without breaking pack law. He couldn't even kill Jess without giving her a fair trial. He could hold neither of them here without facing an onslaught of rogues like nothing his pack had ever seen. What he could do, though, was invite some humans onto his territory for a tour. And if they lost their guides and went and kidnapped a few of his pack members ... well, how could he have predicted such a thing? His only fault would be his kind, trusting nature.

Scott had known that, damn him. He must have spelt it out for Vaughan, who wasn't exactly renowned for his intelligence. I couldn't help the growl which pushed its way up my throat. "And the Saunders? They're gone, too, you know, and they had no idea who she was."

Vaughan raised his eyebrows. Another photo fluttered down to join the first, and once again my breath caught in my throat. This one was less recent because Jess wasn't visibly pregnant. It showed me and her and Alex and Evie in one big happy group outside Lle o Dristwch. We were laughing about something, although I couldn't remember what.

"Traitors, the both of them. The children ... well, they'd have that same rogue-loving blood running through their veins, wouldn't they?" the Alpha asked. "And besides, they were only girls. It's no skin off my back to lose them. They would have taken eighteen years of feeding just to run off and join another pack the second they found their mates."

I had to take a moment just to shut my eyes and wrestle my wolf into submission. This was too much. It would have been too much even if I hadn't watched my sister and closest friend die this afternoon. Even if my family had been safe at Lle o Dristwch. I'd wanted Vaughan dead from the moment Lee had told me about Llechi ... and this ... this was not helping to bury that urge.

"I'm nothing but fair, you know. There's no photo of Maggie Thompson, no proof she had any idea whose spawn was staying beneath her roof, so she'll live another day," Vaughan went on. "Although I would be lying if I said her talent for cooking hadn't influenced my decision in any way..."

At that point, he broke into a fit of laughter. A few of the other fighters laughed with him. I marked their faces for future reference, and in doing so, my eyes picked a certain Delta out of the circle. His face could have been carved out of stone, for all the emotion he was showing.

I stared at him, demanding to know if he was okay with giving children away to be tortured. If he was okay with any of this. Alex had worked under him for six years. They'd drunk together and fought together, and now his friend's entire family had been sent off to die for the crime of laughing with a rogue.

A muscle popped in his jaw, but John just avoided my eyes. He must have been ashamed of himself on some level, then. Good. I looked back to Vaughan and tried to decide on my next course of action.

I didn't have time for this shit. I didn't even have time to kill him. Every second that passed, Scott would be getting further away, and Goddess only knew what he'd do when he reached wherever he was taking them. I could remember most of his journal entries by heart, and it was memories of those twisted, merciless experiments that crashed through my mind now in sickening waves.

Without stopping to consider what I was doing, I reached for Vaughan's mind. He was a tapper and a strong one at that. I was weak from the blood-loss. By all rights, I should have run straight into his walls and probably knocked myself unconscious, but instead they parted like butter before a knife.

It was like I had slipped beneath them. Taken some kind of shortcut. And suddenly I was in the centre of his mind, with nothing to stop me making a grab for the controls. He was still in there, of course, but he was even more stunned than I was that I'd got inside so easily. It wasn't difficult to wrestle him into a little corner of his mind.

And then I started rooting through his memories. I wasn't careful about it. I didn't worry about damaging anything. It didn't take long to find Scott's smug, self-satisfied little face amongst the most recent ones. I reeled my way through the conversation at breakneck speed, filtering out all of Scott's bullshit posturing and Vaughan's evident delight.

Nothing. Not about where Scott was going or what he was planning to do with his prisoners. Vaughan hadn't even bothered to ask, so he didn't know jack shit. That meant this whole conversation had been a waste of time.

Vaughan hadn't tried fighting me. He hadn't even poked his head out of the corner I'd put him in. I wasn't sure whether that was cowardice or whether my rough search was hurting him, and it was safe to say that I couldn't have cared less. Making myself at home, I coughed a few times to get a feel for his body.

"Leave us," I made him say. When the fighters turned to frown at him, I let out a low, raspy growl from a throat I didn't know how to work properly. "Are you deaf? Go."

Most of them jumped into motion, heading off into the trees with no shortage of backwards glances. None of them were close enough to see that their Alpha's eyes had turned hazel. The only one who hesitated was a young man with dark eyes. "Back to the pack house?"

It was Vaughan's son, I realised. Approaching eighteen and just as tall as his father. And oh, that was tempting. So horribly, horribly tempting. I knew from Evie that he was a little prick who liked to beat on younger kids and grope the unmated girls. I'd be doing the world a favour, really...

No. There wasn't time.

"Yes. Back to the pack house. I won't be long."

He looked from me to my real body, which was stiller than a statue, and back again. "Dad..."

"I'm not asking you again," I snapped.

Once again, it wasn't quite as sharp as I had intended, but the boy turned around and followed the others anyway. I could feel his wolf pushing against Vaughan's, who was powerless to respond in any way, and that was a strange sensation for me, caught in the middle as I was.

I waited for nearly ten minutes. It was an excruciating length of time to keep hold of someone's mind while my real body slowly bled out, but I didn't have much choice, really. By the time I finally withdrew, I didn't even have the strength to knock him unconscious, let alone kill him. It was a good thing that he didn't know that.

I could feel him mind-linking his friends even as I was leaving, summoning them back to kill me. He should have attacked me then. Injured as I was, he might even have won. And yet he just stood there, hands curled into fists at his sides and his lips pressed thin.

"What's the matter?" I asked him. "Scared?"

Muscles popped and writhed in his jaw, but he stayed exactly where he was now that his back-up was out of reach. Why was I not surprised?

I stooped down to collect the photographs. It was the ultimate act of disregard — showing him my back and making myself vulnerable to attack all at once. And still Vaughan did nothing but stand there. When I straightened up again, I could have sworn he flinched.

"This isn't over," I told him in a voice that was far too quiet. "The second they're safe, I'll be back for you."

Vaughan spat on the ground.

I went back into the house then, because it would have been unfortunate for me to forget Maggie. She had since woken up, but she hadn't managed to stand yet. There was something about her eyes which was both frantic and fragile, like she was a pot about to boil over.

"I need you to drive me to the castle," I told her. I would have done it myself, but I was so light-headed at that point that I would have passed out behind the wheel and got us both killed.

"I'm not driving you anywhere," she spat. "Where's my daughter?"

I didn't have the patience to be tactful about it. "Gone, evidently. I'm going to find her — find all of them — but first I need to get back to the castle and get some help. And you're going to drive me if you ever want to see her again."

Maggie rose to her feet, slowly and shakily. She slapped my arm when I tried to help her and then stepped back to put some distance between us. The look in her eyes was about as hateful as the one I'd seen from Vaughan. "You're a nasty piece of work, Rhodric."

I acknowledged her with a shrug. "You might be glad of that soon."

She choked on a sob. There were no tears, no quiver in her voice, but it was an unmistakable sound. "Glad of it?"

"Yes. I'll stand a chance of getting them back alive," I said.

Once again, I tried to step towards her, and Maggie slapped me with all of her desperate, furious strength. I had to take a step backwards and swore as my injured leg twisted and threatened to give out.

"You're the reason they're gone," she said viciously. "So tell me what I'm supposed to be glad of, why don't you?"

I didn't have an answer for that. The words bit deeper than they should have. Swallowing, I cast an impatient look outside, where Vaughan was pacing near the treeline while he waited for his back-up. "I could give a shit what you think of me right now, okay? We need to go."

Maggie's eyes followed mine. This time, when I offered her an arm, she accepted it. By the time we were halfway across the driveway, I was leaning on her as much as she was leaning on me. We made unlikely allies, it was true, but what choice did we have? Bickering like children wasn't going to help Jess and Bran.

The sight of Lee lying sprawled on the gravel was like a knife twisting in my gut. I measured the distance between his body and the car. There was no way in hell I could carry him there, not with my head swimming and Maggie's weight as well. And yet still I found myself hesitating.

I knew Lee would end up on the bone fence, and I knew how much he would have hated that. But already I could hear shouts through the trees as the fighters were returning. There wasn't time. They wouldn't fall for the dismissal trick a second time.

Sorry, Lee. I'll be back for you, too.

"That's the boy who was guarding us," Maggie said, and now there was a definite shake in her voice.

"Yes," I said. With some effort, I helped her into the car and then limped around to reach the passenger seat.

"Oh, Goddess," she breathed. "They killed him, just like that? And that's the people who have my daughter and my grandson?"

"Yes."

Maggie closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the fear and the misery had been replaced by something steelier. Somehow, it was still directed entirely at me. I closed the car door and slumped in my seat, trying to blink the dark haze from my vision.

"If they die," Maggie told me coldly, "you'd better hope the humans get to you before I do."