“Right. Clare, that’s not… It’s not that I don’t trust you, mind. Sasha and I have known you for years. It’s just if that generator goes, we’ll have to close up shop the next time the power goes out around here. I don’t think we can afford that.”

  They couldn’t. If she had the time, she would have gone through the entire shop to shield the wiring and make sure none of the surges fried their equipment. Max and Sasha’s place was one of the few that allowed her to hone her craft back when she was a half-pint who liked tinkering with stuff. She owed it to them to help keep the doors of their Trade-Ex Tech store open.

  She needed to charge them for the parts. Otherwise, she provided them with free labor.

  “How long have you been working with this old bag of bolts?” Clare asked. “I could find a newer version out by the dump and get it working for you. You know, one they made this century. It’ll use half the amount of fuel and last you three times as long between services.”

  “My great-grandfather put that one together from scrap. Don’t think I could bear to part with it.”

  Clare tilted her head as she finished the last bolt and pulled herself out from under the generator. “Wait, is that your great-grandfather or your grandfather who happened to be a great man?”

  “My great-grandfather. Who also happened to be a great man.”

  “You might want to consider having, I don’t know, an extra generator. So you could regularly work off a newer one and keep your great-great-grandfather’s generator on reserve in case the other needs work.”

  “My great-great-grandfather didn’t build anything.”

  Clare glared at the older man, but the grin from behind his thick mustache told her he was pulling her leg. Before either of them could continue, the soft bell rang to announce someone had come through the door. Maxwell raised a finger to signal they’d continue the conversation later and stepped out to the front.

  She rolled her eyes and wiped the grease from her hands. Thankfully, she hadn’t needed any extra pieces to fix the generator this time. All she’d done was open it and tighten everything down. The valves had been misfiring and killing the engine, thanks to antiquated kill switches meant to keep older, more explosive fuels from blowing things up.

  “What the hell do you think you’re trying to pull here, Max? Everyone needs to pay through to the end of the month.”

  That sounded like Cray. Mez’s pack sometimes worked with humans, but Cray wouldn’t have come alone. Not on a shakedown.

  “I’ve already paid Mez for this month. You were here for it last week.”

  “Yeah, well, Mez didn’t feel so well. His kid kicked him out, and that means everyone needs to renew their commitment to the pack.”

  That was bad news. Potentially. Mez had encouraged that type of thinking among his sons, so it was no surprise they’d kicked him out the moment they sensed weakness. Which son, though?

  “Was it Satey?” Clare asked as she emerged from the back of the shop. “Sounds like Satey. If it was, you can expect him to get rid of you before too long, Cray. He’s often said he wants fewer humans in his pack.”

  Cray wasn’t alone. Two hulking bouncers stood silently behind the human. Werewolves, from the thick smattering of golden flecks in their eyes. That was the clearest indicator…aside from when they turned into wolves.

  Cray laughed and shook his head. “What are you doing here, Clare?” It was a subtle way to check his position with the pair behind him. They ruined his subtlety by openly nodding. “Actually, it doesn’t matter. Rich wants to have a chat with you.”

  Rich. One of the younger and more aggressive of Mez’s pups, but he hadn’t been allowed enough time in the open for her to get a sense of what he’d be like as the pack leader.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” Clare crossed her arms. At least they’d stopped pushing Max for another dose of protection money. “I’m not part of your pack. Unless you want to start a fight you know you can’t win, you’re going to turn the fuck around and walk right back out.”

  “You shouldn’t piss a werewolf off. Especially when they know that you can’t turn,” Cray snapped back. He wasn’t angry, though. He looked terrified. If the two behind him needed to get involved, there was no guarantee he would be spared.

  “And you shouldn’t walk in on someone else’s territory. Ronald, Jenson, you both need to head back to Rich or whoever the fuck’s running that shitshow you call a pack. Tell them I’m not coming with.”

  This wasn’t the first time werewolves had tried to “claim” her for their pack, but she’d been raised by weres. She could handle herself. Which wasn’t to say she wouldn’t be happy for help from the family that raised her.

  If she had to defend herself and they weren’t close enough to help, they’d prepared her to handle any problems on her own. Most problems, anyway.

  Interestingly, the werewolves behind Cray looked uneasy. Clearly, they had orders regarding her, but they weren’t sure what to do if she invoked her family’s protection.

  One of them pulled a comm from his pocket and dialed a pre-saved number. If the orders changed and they were forced to retreat, consequences would follow. Max and Sasha’s place would be forgotten, if not actively erased. The other packs wouldn’t let them live it down if they found out a human had forced their hand.

  Even if they were in a neutral city, that shit ended packs. A sign of weakness.

  The conversation was short and to the point. Clare thought she heard shouting on the other end, and the werewolf shut the line down as soon as he was able.

  “We take her. Alive.”

  “The fuck you will.” She smirked and nodded to Max. “You’ll want to go in the back.”

  It wasn’t the first time a fight had broken out in his shop, and it wouldn’t be the last. Glass windows had been replaced with self-repairing plastic ones, the cheap stuff that had to be pressed together first. Nothing expensive was anywhere near the front of the shop. Still, Maxwell rolled his eyes and vanished into the back.

  “You’re coming with us.” A werewolf stepped forward and wagged a finger in her face. “It’ll be your call whether you’re conscious or not.”

  “That so?” Clare wondered how many times she would have to teach them this lesson before they realized she wasn’t an ordinary human in New Houston. Unlike them, she’d been taught to fight for herself against those who were stronger, faster, and more powerful.

  It was almost like they didn’t think someone like her could level the playing field when she needed to throw fists. Most of her family had contributed to her skills, helping her come up with a variety of tricks to even a fight. She was happy to note her biggest advantage was one of surprise. No were wanted to talk about having a human girl hand their asses to them.

  The first werewolf rushed at her. He probably intended to vault the counter and take her down, but she beat him to it. She was the first one over, twisting her body to slam her heel into the were’s chest. The impact triggered the mechanism she’d built into the boot. A magnetic drive kicked in and shot her heel spike out to hammer her attacker with a second strike. This one was hard enough to snap him into the path of the second.

  Clare thought she felt a rib or two snap, but it wouldn’t take long for the weres to heal. Another disadvantage she’d had when fighting them all her life.

  A human could beat an untransformed were if they finished the fight quickly. If not, she would be outlasted.

  She settled back on the counter, kept herself low, and snuck her right hand into her pocket. The second were untangled from his partner and tried to close on her, leaving Clare a second to react.

  She used it. She jumped from her spot atop the counter and brought her fist across the were’s skull when he tried to catch her. Orders to bring her in alive meant they couldn’t use their full strength and speed, or they would risk killing her. She faced no such problems.

  The steel knuckle dusters transferred the power of the strike away from her knuckles to the palm of her hand. The were crumpled under the force of her entire body’s weight transferred into his skull. His knees turned to jelly, and he slumped back without so much as a grunt.

  Clare didn’t know if she’d killed him. It was entirely possible. If she hadn’t, she’d know quickly.

  As if to prove her thought correct, the first one climbed to his feet with an enraged look in his eyes. Clare settled back on her feet and rolled her neck as she raised her hands in a classic boxer’s stance.

  “Weapons, huh?”

  She smirked. “What? You want me, a human, to fight you, a werewolf, fairly? Even if you were a human, you’ve got head and shoulders on me. I’m taking all the help I can get against your sorry ass. Case in point.”

  Announcing an attack was never a good idea, but she liked to use that trick. When she broke the knuckles out, most of them focused their attention on those. They forgot about the fun she could have when her boots connected, too.

  He jumped forward and tried to grab her, only to be met with a hard hook to the ribs she’d kicked in a second ago. It backed him up a step and knocked the breath from his lungs. Clare contributed by retreating and angling a kick with her steel-tipped boots into his groin. She probably should have warned him the two copper bits drilled into the steel were connected to a small yet shockingly potent battery.

  She’d always wondered what it felt like to take a taser-infused, steel-toed boot to the nuts. This were didn’t need to wonder. His whole body went stiff, and he thudded to the floor, shaking as he tried to curl up into a ball. She’d never done that to her packmates, but it worked gangbusters. She’d tried to find a way to make her knuckles electric too, but carrying that many batteries got way too heavy. The boots were enough to deal with the worst, and her regular knuckles were good enough for the rest.

  Cray watched the fight go down with dread spreading across his face before he noticed Clare had turned her attention to him.

  “Oh, fuck this.” He’d concluded that if two of his were comrades couldn’t bring her down, he couldn’t either.

  He didn’t make a beeline for the door like she thought he would, though.

  Instead, he reached into his coat and drew a firearm. A small one. Didn’t look like it packed much of a punch and probably couldn’t shoot accurately beyond ten paces. Unfortunately, she was less than three paces away when he squeezed the trigger.

  Whatever safety device the weapon had kicked in and gave her a quarter of a second to act.

  The magnetic heels in her boots knocked her across the room.

  Clare hadn’t practiced doing much more than using them to jump as high as she could, but that training helped. She crashed into the wall behind the counter and thumped to the floor. She needed to test more with the equipment, but the only way to counter the problem of launching herself was to pad up and brace for a hard landing.

  Gravitium would change that, but she had no hope of getting her hands on even half a gram of it. The folks up in the air cities had claimed it. They sent their hitters to find anyone who kept some for themselves and teach them not to try it again for as long as they lived.

  Clare covered her head and curled up as more shots rang out through the small room. None of them hit her through the counter.

  “You fucking moron!” The were she’d cracked over the head roared and slapped the weapon out of Cray’s hand. “We need her alive! Rich is going to kill you if he finds out you tried to shoot her.”

  “You saw what she’s packing!” Cray growled back. He did have some spine left, but not much. “You think you can take that on? I say blow the bitch up and let Rich sort the mess out.”

  “Blow the bitch, up, huh?” Clare was back on her feet, faintly stunned from her trip across the room. However, the device whirring into place from her coat’s arm didn’t require steadiness. “Sorry, you had your chance. It’s my turn now.”

  The were didn’t notice the swelling or the cut from her knuckle dusters. He smirked and jutted his chin out. “Come on. Give me your best shot. When you’re done, we’re taking you back bloody and beaten for a real lesson from Rich.”

  “Hard pass. But thanks anyway.” The coils in what had once been a grappler—twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago, by her estimate—whirred and slotted the trigger into her left palm, ready to fire.

  Dumbass didn’t move. Didn’t have the chance to move. A round the size of her palm jumped from the device. The charge excited the particles enough to set off a small explosion when it hit the target.

  She’d tried it out enough times to look away before the blast went off, but it left her ears ringing. It didn’t sound like a traditional explosion. More like a pop from the sudden drop in air pressure around it.

  Not much of the were was left standing. A foot with three toes had been shorn off at the ankle, and that was it. The rest splattered across the window, wall, and ceiling around him. Bits of brain and skull plopped down after a few seconds.

  “Shit.” She scowled at the device. “Not my best shot. There’s still some of him left. Then again, not my worst.”

  She primed the coils again and let the whirring sound alert Cray. The human blinked from the bright light of the blast, but he had enough wits to throw his hands up.

  “I’m done, I’m done!” He didn’t bother collecting the firearm slapped from his hand. He grabbed the surviving were, who groaned and shivered, and dragged him to his feet on their way to the door.

  They broke away at a sprint as soon as the injured were could carry himself without help. He would need a while to recover properly from what she’d done. He wouldn’t tell anyone how she’d manhandled them, but word would spread about the mess she’d made. Hopefully, it would keep people from messing with her again.

  Which was a good thing, since her particle gun was a single shot. Clare had worked out a thousand different ways to make it a repeater, but they required more energy than she could carry. When she could make it work, the particle blast back would recharge any round coming from behind and thus power itself. It didn’t scale down, though.

  “Shit.” She inspected the device to make sure nothing had burned out before pulling the spent cartridge. She had a few more in her pack. It was probably for the best Cray decided not to test her. If he told people her weapon only had one round in it, she would face complications.

  “Shit is right!” Max exited the back when he stopped hearing violent sounds and found his store covered in blood and viscera. “What the hell happened here?”

  “I the hell happened.” Clare shook her head as she slotted another round into the gun and pushed it back into her sleeve.

  “You the hell is going to clean that fucking mess up!”

  “I saved you from being rolled over for the second time this month,” Clare reminded him with a raised eyebrow. She didn’t have it in her to mop up the werewolf. “Tell you what. I’ll call in a couple of people in my pack who do this for a living, and you pay them out of the money I saved you. Not only the protection but from the free work I did in the back.”

  Max narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t argue. She had saved him a lot of money.

  Clare drew her comm. A quick check revealed it hadn’t been affected by the electromagnets she carried. She called in a small crew to help with the cleanup.

  They were thankfully close and showed the same reaction Max did.

  “What the fuck did you hit him with?” Rory was first through the door, and he couldn’t help laughing. “Please tell me you finally worked up that hammer idea I sent you. This would be the absolute best time to try it.”

  “I told you I’m forever constrained by the sheer number of battery packs required to throw something like that around. It’s technically feasible, except not the way you designed it. I’d have to carry a six-ton pack to make it work, though. Max needs this place cleaned up on the double. Can’t have him lose money because customers feel icky walking in a puddle of werewolf goo.”

  Rory grinned and ruffled her rust-red hair. They kept doing that, which was why she kept her hair shoulder-length or shorter. At the moment, it barely reached her neck.

  “No problem. We’ll have this cleaned up in a jiff. Though I’ve never seen a fine citizen of New Houston turn their nose up at business because blood was spilled.”

  The three werewolves on his cleanup crew looked somewhat less confident. Not because they thought no one would walk over the corpse she’d left behind. That happened all the time. Cleaning the whole damn place up would take a few hours of dedicated elbow grease to make it somewhat presentable.

  Max appeared to agree with them.

  “What was the tussle over this time?” Rory asked when the others broke out the cleaning materials. “Please don’t tell me someone called you little again.”

  “Last time I got into a fight over that, I was fifteen. Not worth it. Nah, three assholes from Mez’s… Well, I guess it’s Rich’s pack now. Either way, they tried to shake Max down for another dose of protection money to assure his allegiance to the new regime. Thought they could take me for a ride, too.”

  Rory winced. “The other two were alive enough to run away, I guess. Or is this more than one body?”

  “They took a nasty beating, but they’ll live to tell the tale.”

  “I doubt that’ll be the tale they tell,” Rory remarked. “Get out of here, squirt. We’ll finish this off.”

  Clare shrugged and decided that was exactly what she’d do. She’d put the whole afternoon aside to help Max out, so she had no more work lined up. She needed the rest. Plus, meds to help with the bone pain that came from throwing herself across a room.

  She headed out.

  The pack’s compound felt like home. She remembered playing on the playground Jeremy had set up. Maye worked up the water slides one summer eight years ago, and they used them for extra money. Here, she had her own room, her workshop, and a ride to the dump yard whenever she needed parts. Where people in the air cities sent their trash down.

  Not their rotting stuff, though. That went into recyc centers on the other side of the desert where it was used as compost or something for the people growing their food. No, the dump outside New Houston held their electronics and such after they’d been resold, recycled, and resold again.