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“About a year.”

“Then you must see as I do that there needs to be a joining together of all the different forms. The only thing that has allowed us to move in to every city and take over the smaller groups is the fact that the larger groups won’t help them. They’re like city neighbors who only call the police if it’s their own apartment being robbed. They let anyone who isn’t like them go to hell.”

“I agree that the lycanthrope community could use a little togetherness, but I’m not sure torture and blackmail is the way to get it done.”

He clamped his hands over his eyes, back bowing, as if he were in pain. The snake man touched him with small dark hands. Chimera shuddered, then raised up, the snake man still touching him, comforting him, I think.

Chimera looked at me, eyes very direct. He grasped the leather hood and pulled it over his head. His dark hair stood on end, sweaty, needing to be combed. The touch of gray at the temples wasn’t distinguished anymore. It looked more like mad-scientist hair, as if he’d done something awful and it had changed colors over night. I could see the scars at the side of his neck now. Orlando King, alias Chimera, looked down at me.

I just gaped at him. I was too surprised for anything else.

“I see that you didn’t recognize me, Ms. Blake.”

I shook my head, and tried twice before I could say, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” That sounded lame even to me, but what I meant was Orlando King, bounty hunter extraordinaire, should not have been the leader of a group of rogue shapeshifters. It wasn’t doable somehow.

“That’s why you knew about all the shapeshifters in town, because they came to you for help.”

He nodded. “I have been known, since my accident, to hunt down rogue lycanthropes and not inform the authorities. A few bad apples don’t have to spoil the entire barrel.”

I looked at him and tried to think. “People thought your near-death experience had mellowed you, but you contracted lycanthropy, that’s why you stopped being a bounty hunter.”

“It seemed wrong to hunt other unfortunates,” he said. “People who had less to do with the accident that made them what they were than I did. At least I was hunting the werewolf that almost killed me. I was trying to hurt it. Most people who survive an attack are just innocents.”

“I know that,” I said, voice soft, because knowing Chimera was Orlando King didn’t help solve the mystery for me; it deepened it. I was more confused than when I walked in the damn building.

“But my change of heart, as you put it, came later. Wolf lycanthropy showed up in my bloodstream within forty-eight hours of my attack. I decided I would take out as many monsters as I could and let them take me out before the first full moon.” He stared past me, eyes distant with remembering. “I took the most dangerous jobs I could find, until I ended up trying to kill an entire tribe of weresnakes in the depths of the Amazon basin.” He looked at the small dark man still at his side. “I decided that dozens of any animal would surely kill me, and if not, then at the first full moon I would be in an area devoid of any human except the people I’d come to kill.”

“Logical, I guess,” I said, because it seemed appropriate to say something.

His gaze flicked to me. “I had planned my death, Ms. Blake, but every animal I tried to kill just wasn’t up to killing me. By the time I had my first full moon I’d been infected by a great many forms of predatory lycanthropy. And on that first moon, I changed into what Abuta and his people are, then a wolf, then a bear, then a leopard, then a lion, so forth, and so on.” He was looking at Abuta, and his face held some of the religious fervor that the smaller man seemed to emanate. “They thought I was a god because I could take so many forms. They worshipped me, and they sent half their tribe to accompany me back to civilization.” He laughed then. It was abrupt and unpleasant. Something about that laugh raised the hairs on my arms.

“You