Three nights ago…

  The basement smelled like sweat, silver polish, and wet dog.

  Zorka crouched on the concrete, bare feet splayed, back arched, hair clinging to her shoulders in damp curls. Every breath steamed the air. Her skin glistened with a sheen that caught the dim bulb’s light like a predator’s coat—beautiful and terrifying.

  Each shift cracked through her body like breaking glass under pressure. The first one made her scream. The third made her laugh.

  Lily sat on a crate nearby, clipboard balanced on her knee, scribing notes and pretending she wasn’t impressed. “Again.”

  Zorka spat onto the floor and flexed her fingers, half-shifted claws fading back to human nails. “You think this is easy? Or fun?”

  “No.” Lily twirled her pen. “Therapeutic? Absolutely. The Curator broke you once. That’s as good as tagging you, so far as we can tell, and you need to prove you can break his pattern mid-shift. Otherwise, he’ll file you again the second he touches you.”

  She didn’t say, “Like Elly,” but we all heard it.

  Zorka rolled her shoulders. Her lithe muscles looked sculpted by conflict, long and lean, the kind of strength that came from fighting her own limits. “So, I turn my body into a broken machine...”

  “Exactly.”

  “Got it.” Zorka inhaled deeply. She braced herself, jaw set, eyes sharp.

  Then came the sound—the crack and pop of bones arguing with flesh, the wet slide of muscle rearranging. Her back bowed as fur tore through skin, dark and silver at the edges. Her breath hitched, and for a heartbeat, she was half-wolf, half-woman, all trembling and radiant in the flickering light.

  Then her leg locked. The knee twisted wrong. She collapsed onto one elbow, snarling, pain flashing across her face like lightning. And still—she laughed through it, a low, hoarse sound that wasn’t quite sane.

  “Still hurts like a bitch,” she managed between breaths.

  “Good,” Lily said softly. “That means it’s real.”

  Zorka lay there, chest rising and falling, teeth bared and then slammed her head back against the wall hard enough to leave a mark. The echo filled the room. She drew in one deep, trembling breath… and howled.

  It wasn’t human. It was defiance made into sound. The walls quivered. Dust snowed from the ceiling. Somewhere in the pipes, water shuddered like it was listening.

  When she stood, her limbs were steady. Her shape held. Her pupils gleamed like coins caught in moonlight.

  “See?” she rasped, blood smeared across her lips but smiling anyway. “Bit it ‘til it listened.”

  Lily’s clipboard lowered. For once, she didn’t have a quip ready. She just watched, something like pride flickering in her eyes. “Then make sure it remembers your voice.”

  Zorka grinned, wild and brilliant. “Oh, it will.”

  Now…

  After the flash of light, I found myself separated from the Curator by an infield of creatures. I picked myself up from the ground and noted I still owned the same number of limbs.

  Not bad so far…

  Either I’d been knocked back unknowingly or teleported. My eyes felt like I’d just stared at the sun and my whole body tingled like it’d all fallen asleep and just tried to wake up again at the same exact second.

  The rain started as a drizzle. The field lights fought to stay alive, buzzing against the dark. The smell of ozone still clung to the air from the lightning I’d sent down earlier.

  We’d hit the Collectors hard with that first strike, cracking their neat little lines. They were trying to re-form—cold, metal, bureaucratic precision wrapped in suits of metal and ink—but we weren’t going to give them the chance.

  Zorka had vanished after the initial charge, slipping into the dark like smoke with teeth. I’d lost track of her for maybe thirty seconds. Then I heard it.

  Her howl.

  It rolled across the diamond, low and fierce, vibrating in my ribs. Not a cry for help. A declaration. The kind of sound that made something feral stir inside every Alterkind in earshot.

  The Collectors froze, heads tilting toward the noise like dogs catching a scent they couldn’t place. And that’s when the shadows started moving.

  They came out of the tree line—dozens of them—shapes that shifted between fur and skin and both. Men, women, things halfway in-between. Their eyes caught the floodlights and flashed silver. The whole pack moved like a tide, drawn by Zorka’s call, and I realized she wasn’t just fighting—she was leading.

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  Lily gave a low whistle beside me. “Guess the boys heard her. That’s quite a milkshake.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “She’s got one hell of a social network.”

  “Females are fairly rare in were-circles, so she brings all the boys to the yard.”

  “You couldn’t not finish the song reference?”

  Lily shook her head. “Nope.”

  Then Zorka grinned, sharp as ever, and lit a hag’s herb bundle, a gift from an Alterkind den. The smoke that came off it wasn’t natural. It shimmered green-gold, curling through the air like liquid light, weaving between raindrops. The smell was sweet and strange—earthy, wet, and sharp enough to sting the back of my throat.

  The Collectors twitched the moment it touched them. Their lenses fogged, movements stuttering like corrupted files. Combined with the pheromonal wave Lily pushed outward, the smoke was doing its job—scrambling their recognition. They couldn’t tell who was magic and who wasn’t anymore.

  “Nice,” I said. “They can’t catalogue what they can’t define.”

  “That’s the idea,” Lily said, eyes glinting with effort. “Let them drown in ambiguity.”

  In the infield, Zorka tore through their flank, half-shifted, bloody, radiant. Her claws shredded through a Collector’s arm, scattering pages that burst into flame as they hit the wet grass. She kicked another in the chest, sent it flying into the dugout, where smaller, toothier allies saw to its grisly end.

  When lightning overhead flared again, I saw her silhouette for just a heartbeat—hair wild, muscles corded and slick, grin splitting her face wide enough to scare the gods.

  And that’s when the rest of the pack hit.

  They hit like a stormfront, all fur and claws and teeth, crashing through the Collectors’ lines. The trolls redoubled their efforts, following close behind, swinging Axemaster’s cold-forged weapons that hummed with barely contained fury. His handiwork shone even through the chaos; the metal sparked against the Collectors’ armor but didn’t shatter.

  From somewhere behind me I heard his voice bellow over the thunder: “This is how you run a raid, Dumps! Frontline smashes, ranged support nukes, and the healers don’t die first!”

  “I don’t even have healers!” I shouted back.

  “Then don’t get hit!” Axemaster screamed back.

  Solid advice, honestly.

  Axemaster saluted to me and gave me a dangerous look. “Alright, screw it—LEEROY JEEEEENKINS!”

  “You don’t even play World of Warcraft!” I protested.

  “Nerds.” Eury grunted.

  Still, there must have been some fans, because our side redoubled its efforts, and the enemy line faltered. In the face of that, I wished I could do something to turn the tide fully in our favor. Collectors didn’t know what to do with prey that didn’t register on their metaphysical radars.

  I tried to keep up, batting away paper-thin claws and staving off exhaustion. The last shock from Mjolnir II had taken it all out of me. The bat was warped, blackened—half weapon, half charred memory. But I wasn’t about to drop it.

  Troll-blooded fighters surged through the gap, roaring. Gargoyles dove from the bleachers, their stone wings cracking against the rain as they slammed into the second wave. Their skin glowed faintly—still nullified by my earlier “blessing”—and the Collectors couldn’t touch them. Every swing, every hit was permanent.

  For a heartbeat, it felt like we might actually win. It was chaos. Beautiful, ugly chaos.

  Zorka darted between them all, faster than I could track. She’d go down on one knee, shift just enough to tear a mechanical throat out, then twist back into her human shape before the next blow could land. Every time she did it, I winced—her bones shouldn’t have been able to take that kind of punishment—but she kept moving. The grin never left her face.

  “She’s going to kill herself,” I muttered.

  “Not before she kills everything else first,” Lily replied, tossing a handful of Elly’s leftover wards that burst into blue flame where they landed.

  The rain thickened, turning the dirt to mud. Somewhere, a Collector tried to raise its arm, and a gargoyle ripped it away, smashing it underfoot. Sparks burst out. The creature screamed and crumpled like a burned file.

  I waded through the chaos toward the pitcher’s mound, to the center of things once more. The Curator’s voice carried even through the thunder—smooth, unbothered, infuriating. “Such passion,” he said. “Such waste.”

  I spun the bat in my hand. “You’re not collecting anyone today.”

  Then I noticed the air. The hair on my arms stood up. Every breath tasted like copper and rain.

  He smiled faintly. “No, Daniel Mercer. Not today. Today, I study.”

  “Yeah? Study this.” I swung again, burned and discharged bat or not, and the sky answered. Lightning leaped from the bat to a midpoint between us, joining the sky, and then it continued its path.

  The lightning didn’t just hit him—it hit the sky. The bolt ripped upward, detonating the clouds like a bomb. For a second, everything went white. When my vision cleared, the storm had changed. The clouds churned darker, lower, angrier.

  “Huh,” I muttered. “Guess Thorvald doesn’t do half-measures.”

  Lily looked up. “You broke the atmosphere, Daniel.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Maybe it’ll catch on.” And then I saw them.

  Out of the false night, the vampires came.

  Lily saw them too, and her mouth curved into something feral. “Guess the night shift just clocked in.”

  They poured from the edges of the field—eyes like dying embers, skin glowing faintly in the dark. Lily’s poker contacts, no doubt, the ones she’d charmed into owing her favors. They hit the flanks with surgical precision, fangs flashing, movements blurring too fast for human sight.

  They swept in like dancers, moving through the Collectors’ rearguard with predatory precision. Steel flashed, blood hissed where it touched magic. The whole field became a blur of motion—wolf and troll and vampire, fighting shoulder to shoulder under lightning and rain.

  I laughed, loud and manic.

  Zorka howled again, somewhere near third base. Her pack echoed her, the sound rolling through the storm like a drumbeat. It wasn’t music. It was math—the heartbeat rhythm of a thousand wronged creatures syncing to one fight.

  And over that noise, Axemaster’s voice boomed again: “Boss phase incoming, Dumps! Keep aggro!”

  “Working on it!” I yelled back, raising my bat as the runes glowed brighter. It was starting to smoke—Thorvald’s warning about melting wasn’t exaggeration—but I wasn’t about to quit now.

  The Curator watched me from home plate, unfazed. “How interesting,” he said, stepping forward. “You’ve learned to weaponize your nothingness. It will not be enough.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, lightning crawling up my arms. “But it’s going to hurt.”

  I swung.

  The field exploded into a wave of sound as the bat vaporized in my hands.

  For a moment, I couldn’t tell where the thunder ended and the howling began. All I knew was that we were still standing, and the Curator’s perfect order was burning down around him.

  And right in the middle of it, Zorka, blood-slick and grinning, caught my eye, lifted her hand, and flipped me off with the most beautiful middle finger I’d ever seen.

  I grinned back and drew my backup weapon, a square-ended Warhammer with a pointy spike on the back that AxeMaster had given me for this very reason, aptly named The Debt Collector. I missed my bat already, but it was nice to know this thing hadn’t been jangling on my hip and bruising my thigh all through this for no reason. Plus, it made a hell of a can opener.

  The battle wasn’t over, but for the first time since Elly was taken, I felt like the ledger might not be able to write us out after all. Take that, accountants.