Description: 1. Threatened with extinction or immediate harm. 1. The world''s smallest continent. 2. Home of some of the most unique and varied animal life known to mainstream science. 3. A good place to become endangered. Prologue "Adversity doesn''t exist to make us stronger. Adversity exists because this world is a damn hard place to live. Prove that you''re better than the things it throws at you. Live." --Thomas Price A privately owned family farm near Vancouver, Canada Seven years ago ALEX EASED HIMSELF AROUND the open stable door, his heart beating so hard that it felt like it was going to break in two. The sweat dripping from his palms was making it hard to keep his hand positioned correctly on the grip of his pistol. Everything was silent. His parents and Aunt Jane were inside the house, looking for signs that could possibly lead them to the werewolf''s hiding place. Elsie was outside, watching the road to see if anyone else was inclined to come looking. The farm was isolated enough that the screams wouldn''t have carried very far--but they had carried far enough for one of the local Sasquatches to notice. This was the area''s second werewolf outbreak in a little under a month. The first had been handled by amateur monster hunters who didn''t finish the job. When the werewolves came back, the locals got frightened for their own safety, and called in the closest thing they could find to professionals: the Prices. Alex and Elsie wouldn''t even have been there if Uncle Mike had been available. Alex had turned nineteen two months before, making him officially old enough for dangerous field assignments. Elsie was still eighteen. The fact that she had been allowed to come along had been the cause of much shouting at home when Alex''s sixteen-year-old little sister, Verity, had learned that the rules weren''t going to bend far enough to let her join the party. As loud as she could yell, she should have been a singer, not a dancer. As he inched farther into the dark barn, Alex found himself wishing their ages had been reversed. Verity wouldn''t have enjoyed the current situation any more than he did, he was sure, but at least she''d wanted to be there. He''d wanted to stay home with his books and his terrariums and keep studying for next week''s midterms. Even if most of his research was going to be done under false identities, he needed to have a real degree to have any credibility within the cryptozoological community. And none of that was going to matter if he wound up as werewolf chow. He took a deep, shaky breath, forcing his hands to stop shaking, and swung around the corner into the main part of the stable. There were still bloodstains on the walls from the first outbreak. Alex looked at them and swallowed hard. Lycanthropy-w was a relative of rabies. It was primarily blood borne, but it couldn''t spread through dry contact. He''d need to lick the walls to be in danger, and even then, the odds of infection were so low as to be nonexistent. He knew that, just like he knew that he''d been sent to search the stables because there was less of a chance he''d run into danger out here. He still gave the first of the stains a wide berth, and made a mental note to tell his father that they needed to put a call out for Aunt Mary. She could come and scan the ghost side of things to make sure the dead horses weren''t haunting the place. Everyone had their own set of skills and talents to bring to the table. Alex just wasn''t sure that his included this particular kind of fieldwork. Something rustled at the back of an open stall. Alex held his breath, counting to five as he listened. The sound didn''t repeat, and he inched forward, scanning all the while for movement. It was probably a raccoon, or a barn cat, or something else native to the farm. Why would a werewolf have come out to the stables when there was so much untouched meat strewn around the house? The family that had owned this farm was dead, all of them, their throats ripped out and their blood left to pool on the floor. Werewolves were territorial, and they didn''t like to be exposed. The creature had most likely made its den somewhere inside the house--an attic, a basement, an overlooked room. Unless it considered the stable its territory. As Alex moved toward the open stall the creature, which had been huddled down in the straw, rose on strong, twisted legs that were somewhere between equine and lupine, yet still somehow managed to grant it a bipedal stance. Alex froze, feeling like his feet were suddenly locked to the floor. He couldn''t move. He couldn''t move . The werewolf had no such restrictions. It stalked toward him, snapping and snarling at the air. Its mouth was a crowded jumble of herbivore and carnivore teeth, and its half-hoven claws were splayed as wide as its warping bone structure would allow. The claws were what finally did it. Alex''s paralysis broke, and he turned and ran, heading for the rear of the stable as fast as his legs could carry him. He could hear the werewolf crashing along behind him, but as he had hoped, the creature''s twisted skeletal structure was slowing it down, preventing it from matching his speed. No human could outrun a horse over a short distance, or a wolf for that matter. This thing was a combination of the two, along with the unique bone structure granted to its interstitial form by the lycanthropy-w virus. It had to be a newish werewolf. If it had been more accustomed to its new reality, it would have changed forms and gone for him as either a wolf or a horse by now, not this horrifying combination of the two. He was almost to cover. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the werewolf less than eight feet behind, froth dripping from its jaws, eyes red with burst capillaries. Adrenaline lanced through his veins, propelling him the rest of the way to the back wall, where he spun around, whipping himself behind a pile of hay bales, and opened fire. His pistol was small: it held only six bullets, but all of them were silver-coated and treated with aconite. The werewolf screamed when the first one hit it. It wasn''t a sound Alex had ever heard before, and it wasn''t a sound he ever wanted to hear again. Like everything else about the creature, that scream was a hybridized horror, neither wolf nor horse, and somehow wrong in a way he couldn''t put into words. It made his blood run cold and his teeth ache, and so he kept firing, again and again, until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and the werewolf was sprawled on the stable floor, no longer moving. Its anatomy was so twisted that it was impossible to tell whether or not the thing was dead, and Alex had seen too many horror movies to risk walking over to check. That was the sort of decision that got people gutted or, worse, infected. He sank slowly to the floor, his useless weapon dangling from his fingers, and stared at the unmoving bulk of the creature. He knew that he should run, but he couldn''t get his legs to work. So he just sat there. He was still sitting there, crying silently, when his family came running to investigate the gunshots. He didn''t know what else to do. One "Adventure is a tricky beast that will sneak up on you when you least expect it, laying ambushes and forcing you down avenues that you would never have chosen to walk on your own. After a certain point, it''s better just to go along with it. You do see the most interesting things that way." --Alexander Healy An unnamed stretch of marshland near Columbus, Ohio Now EARLY FALL HAD TURNED the leaves on the trees around us into a flaming corona of red, gold, and pale brown. The few remaining patches of green looked almost out of place: their season was over, and they no longer belonged here. Crow seemed to share my feelings. The black-feathered Church Griffin was flying from tree to tree, crashing through the green patches like a self-aiming arrow and sending explosions of foliage to the ground. He cawed with delight every time he slammed into a branch. I had long since given up on worrying about him injuring himself; his head was incredibly hard, and he rarely collided with anything he wasn''t aiming to hit. Of the two of us, he was much less likely to be injured than I was. "You know, I can stay home if I want to see scrubland and dead leaves," said Dee. She was struggling to match my trail through the patchy marsh, hampered by her sensible pumps, which weren''t so sensible in her current environment. I was aiming my steps expertly for the patches of solid ground between the puddles and the mud flats. Despite having grown up in the forest not far from here, Dee wasn''t very practiced at walking in swamps. That either showed a great failing or a great advantage in her upbringing. "Yes, but can you see the screaming yams as they prepare to migrate to land that''s less likely to freeze solid enough to damage their roots?" I kept walking. Dee, on the other hand, stopped dead. I turned around after a few feet, beaming a sunny smile in her direction. Dee, her eyes narrowed with suspicion behind the smoked yellow lenses of her glasses, did not match the expression. "What," she said. "I told you we were coming out here to witness a migration," I said. "Yes, Alex. You said ''a migration.'' You know what migrates? Things with the capacity for independent movement. You know what doesn''t migrate? Yams ." Dee shook her head hard enough that her wig--a sleek blonde beehive--slipped a little. "Yams are plants. I realize there''s some hazing involved in doing this job. I''ve managed to resign myself to the fact that you''re a mammal and hence by definition, insane. But that doesn''t mean you''re going to convince me that we''re out he

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