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Reuben said.
    “Take me there.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, of course.”
    And then they were going to burn these bastards to the ground.
    Maybe it was going to be a good new moon after all.

—II—

    Deirdre Tombs dragged the guard behind her, cursing every dead god for the luck that had landed her with such a sorry excuse for a witch.
    Surely she was due good karma for trying to prevent a massive jailbreak. It was the latest in her string of attempted good deeds: saving the werewolf Alpha from assassination, trying to save her would-be boyfriend from himself, getting herself in good with a terrorist so she could bring him down.
    But she’d been failing hard at life, so getting saddled with Reuben probably was karma.
    Silver-suckers .
    He’d actually said those words to her face.
    A few years earlier, some werewolves had been found strung up in trees with silver ben-wa balls jammed in their throats. They’d suffocated from the swelling and nobody had ever been prosecuted for the hate crimes. The only people who called shifters silver-suckers were the ones who thought that it was right to kill werewolves like that.
    It had been so long since Deirdre had spent time around non-shifters that she’d almost forgotten some people felt that way.
    But here was living proof that people really were that ignorant. He was dripping blood and piss as Deirdre carted his wimpy butt up the hallway, and he’d still said that to her face. He probably hadn’t been thinking about what she was when he said it, but he’d certainly been thinking about the prisoners he guarded.
    How many times had he flung those words like daggers into the hearts of the prisoners?
    Silver-suckers .
    What a scumbag.
    “In here,” Reuben said, swiping a keycard through a reader on the wall. It beeped and blinked.
    Deirdre tried the lock. The door wouldn’t open.
    “Why is this stuck?” she asked.
    Reuben slapped a hand to his sweat-soaked forehead. “Double verification. Need two key cards, and one of them with supervisor access. I’ve got the highest level access, but we still need a second card.”
    She pulled a key card out of her back pocket.
    “Like this?”
    He paled. “Where’d you get that?”
    Stark had entered the detention center with guns blazing. The end result had been a lot of dead security guards. She’d had her pick of keycards.
    Deirdre swiped it without answering Reuben.
    The lock beeped, blinked, and unlocked.
    Reuben leaned his weight against the door to shove it open. He winced at the movement.
    The second security room was on the other side of the underground compound, overlooking one of the cellblocks with a reinforced window. Deirdre could watch all the way up the row of cells and see dozens of hands thrusting through the bars. Everyone was antsy, ready to erupt with the moon.
    “No staff in here?” Deirdre asked.
    “No point during night shift,” Reuben said. “Nobody’s supposed to be let out of their cells after lockdown. We only use the master control security room to let people out during the day for mealtimes, labor hours—that kind of thing.”
    “Okay. So how do I open the interior doors?” Deirdre asked. “Not the cells. Just the ones in the hallways.” If she didn’t let Stark into the cellblock, he’d get suspicious and come looking for her.
    Reuben’s eyes were wild. “Why?”
    “Because I told you to,” she snapped. “You going to question everything I do?”
    “You came in with Everton Stark!”
    It did make her kind of look bad. “Just show me.”
    He took her to a row of switches. “These ones along the top do the interior doors. You can tell which ones because they’re numbered to match the icons on the map.” He pointed to the blueprint of the detention center above the panel.
    The numbers did match. It was a very neat system. Easy to figure out.
    “What about these doors?” she asked, touching a part of the map without any lights.
    “Solitary confinement. Those have to be