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nostrils quiver. “You speak out of turn one more time, I’ll let her kill you.”
    “Sorry, Scud.”
    He tilted his head and held out his hand, palm up. “Why don’t you hand that over?”
    Teresa looked from Scud, to the giant O of the barrel staring at her, to Hensha. Sure, she could kill Hensha first, but the suit would waste Teresa a half-second later. For what? The Alpha had agreed to deal. He just had a…stipulation.
    Did you think you could do this without having to give something up?
    Actually, she had expected to die. She realized this plan had more suicide to it than sense. Only this way she could have gone down at least trying to do the right thing. But Scud here was offering a real chance. All she had to do was surrender her mortality. Become one of the beasts she’d spent most her life fighting.
    In a way, it made a twisted sense.
    She lowered her weapon and handed it over.
    The man in the suit slipped his revolver under his jacket.
    Scud’s grin widened as he tucked Teresa’s pistol into his waistband. “Good girl.”
    “So how does this work? You gonna have Hensha here bite me?”
    Scud scrunched up his face as if he’d puked a little in his mouth. “We ain’t fucking vamps. No. You need to get initiated. Learn to respect the pack. Cage is getting some boys together for that.”
    She remembered him mention the honeymoon suite and her throat narrowed. Bile ran up the back of her tongue, leaving an acidic and sour taste in her mouth. Some of her horror must have shown on her face. Hensha giggled.
    “Don’t worry,” Scud said. “Every member of the pack has to go through the same thing. Ain’t that right, Will and Freddy?”
    One of the men still at the poker table cleared his throat. The other grunted.
    “See? Everybody who comes in’s got to know how it feels to be a bitch.”

Chapter Eight
    Lockman took another fist to the gut, then a right cross to the chin. He staggered backward against the brick wall in the alley behind Chopper Haven , which smelled of rotten trash and kudzu. Thick vines of the stuff covered the face of the wall he leaned on. He grabbed at the vines to steady himself, ripping some free in the process.
    The four guys that took to beating him for asking the wrong questions closed in on him in a half-circle. Three of the four had meaty arms exposed by the leather vests they wore, more flab than muscle under their matching eagle and American flag tattoos. The fourth had real muscle coiled around his wiry frame. The smallest of the crew, his hits hurt the most.
    He came up on Lockman’s left and tried to take a kidney shot.
    Lockman deflected the blow with a forearm, but before he could follow up with a counter punch, the other three started hammering him with their fat knuckles, forcing Lockman to curl up, elbows tucked as low as possible while keeping his fists up to protect his face.
    They started adding kicks with their heavy boots to the punching.
    The wiry one threw in some precise jabs to Lockman’s softest parts in between the random pummeling from his buddies. The guy boxed like an Irishman, but Lockman knew from before they dragged him out into the alley that he had a Cajun accent.
    The only light in the alley came from a buzzing fluorescent bulb under a cage mounted to the wall beside the bar’s back door. Lockman’s attackers’ shadows leaped and lurched across the pavement. From the corner of his eye, Lockman thought one of those shadows didn’t move the same as the others.
    A second later, one of the beefy assailants flew off of his feet, crying out in surprise as he sailed through the air in a wide arc and landed on the closed lid of a Dumpster twenty yards down the alley. The plastic lid collapsed under his weight and he sank out of site into the bin.
    Too caught up in their assault on Lockman, the others didn’t notice their missing friend until another of them went flying in the opposite direction down the alley. Only the shiny wet pavement was there