The song is Two Against Nature by Steely Dan. 

"It's a vampire's car."

"Says the guy with a Zirconian architect's car."

Okay, that was a good one.

We were standing in the expansive lobby of the hall, with the other alphas and betas and aide-de-camps and whatnot. The smell of fresh paint still hung in the air. Attractive waitresses served canapes and crystal flutes of champagne.

Thurgood was alone. The Willow pack beta had long vowed never to set foot in the Sunshine Beach Pack again, owing to some past history he steadfastly refused to talk about.

We were looking down at the parking lot spread out in front of us through the enormous glass facade, framed by the blue waters of the lake and the mountains beyond. Almost lost amongst the sea of black SUVs, a shark-finned Cadillac and a metallic-brown French goddess were parked together, chrome gleaming in the sun.

"It was a bargain. One elderly owner since new, no rust, runs sweet as a nut, everything works except for the cruise control."

"Look, Thurgood. All Cadillacs are vampire cars. People are going to see you driving around in that thing and automatically assume that your boot is filled with dead bodies and jerrycans of blood.

Thurgood chuckled. "They won't. They love it. All the kids want to go for a ride in it. It was a good deal, I'm telling you."

"Don't come crying to me when your own pack members start pelting your car with garlic."

I looked around the room. Brian was talking to some of the leadership from the Kuruman pack, all the way from the Northern Cape in South Africa. There were hundreds of other delegates from packs around the world, most of whom I only ever saw at this time of the year. This was the only time of the year we ever saw most of them. And for good reason.

The talk was polite and even-pitched, but it was all too obviously a facade. People shot dark glances and glowered at each other in between the niceties. The simmering tension was palpable. There were already some minor scuffles breaking out in the distant corners of the room.

Most of the others looked at least a generation younger than we were. I immediately thought of Evan. He wanted nothing to do with this. Not that I had ever expected him to inherit my role.

"We really are getting old." I redirected my gaze to the champagne flute in my hand. "Give it a few more years. Then we'll shove off, make way for some new blood, retire to somewhere sunny, sip pina coladas on the beach."

Thurgood's eyes traced the path of a yacht making its way across the azure waters of the lake. There was a beautiful she-wolf on the deck, her gaze directed at some distant point opposite to our location, dress billowing in the gentle afternoon breeze.

Back inside the foyer, Wethermore was over in the corner, entertaining the delegation from Tennessee. Age had hollowed his figure, but he was still the same person who had led the Golden Fir Pack for over three of its greatest decades, who had been one of the driving forces behind the formation of the Organisation of Pan-Lycan Unity, the same person who had led the Independent Territories to peace after the turmoil of the 1990s.

"There's still some way to go before we become truly hopeless salvage cases. Who said you can't teach an old wolf new tricks?"

Two black four wheel drives with Zirconian plates pulled up to the porte-cochere outside the foyer, closely followed by a Mercedes S600 Guard limousine, and even more black four wheel drives. The Zirconians were here.

The man who got out was the Mercedes was the type whose face you would forget while talking to him. He barely glanced at us. He was the Zirconian Minister for Defense, although most people still thought of him as the Minister for Internal Affairs, a position he had vacated three years prior.

Thurgood looked into his champagne flute. "Not even a wave. Bloody ivory tower bastard, doesn't have a flying clue what's going on outside of that fence."

I watched as the grey-haired, grey-suited bureaucrat was immediately surrounded by an army of bodyguards and rapidly whisked into the assembly hall. The doors closed behind him. "He's alright in a benign kind of way. He just sees this whole thing as another embellishment on his CV when he inevitably takes some kind of upper-management role on retirement."

"No. They're all bad. Especially that Lycan Front piece of scum. What's his name, Brioni. That fucker would sell his own family into slavery for political gain."

He took a long sip. "Anyway, where was I? The crazy guy I was talking about before you started going off about vampire cars, the one I had to take down yesterday. He'd cracked. He was just rambling like crazy, talking about his mate and his family, society, life, whatever the hell. And he was frothing. Properly frothing at the mouth."

"You said he marched all the way from the Zone to your pack?"

"I'm almost certain he did. And you know what? I agreed with him. The stuff he was saying. I felt what he was feeling. People don't care at all anymore about what's going on outside of their own packs. They don't care because they've been sheltered from all that stuff, they barely even know what we're up against. They've never had to deal with them in any serious way. When we were little we went to each other's packs all the time. Now we just wall ourselves up. It's not healthy. And this kind of thing isn't helping it."

I just nodded. The guy was a nutcase, but he had been telling the truth. There really wasn't much to add.

"You don't even have to go out to buy food anymore. You can have it delivered right to your pack territory."

"Thunder Falls Fresh, right?"

"It's a bargain. We're saving almost a hundred dollars a month, and it's delivered straight to your door. And it's top quality."

"I think Gerta would have a stroke if I did that."

"Our pack doctor is just happy we'll be able to afford that new ultrasound she's been asking for for the last three years."

"Do you even know where it comes from?"

"We don't know where half the stuff that we use comes from." He shrugged. "It's good quality and cheap. That's all that matters. Right?"

I genuinenly couldn't tell if he was being sincere or slightly sarcastic.

"Hang on." I scanned the room. "Thunder Falls, they're not coming, right?"

The Thunder Falls Pack were fairly well known for their reclusiveness. They rarely ever attended Congress. The air of secrecy extended to their business dealings, which caused no end of rumours.

"One of my good sources tells me they are. Adlai is due to give a speech. On rogues, or something like that." Thurgood looked out at the carpark. "They should be here any minute. Adlai's been busy. They've been buying up companies left and right. They're planning something, and for some reason they're not too shy about it. They want people to know."

"Rogues?" Rogues were generally not big on the agenda of the Congresses, or discourse in general among the alpha fraternity. We had always preferred to just ignore them. This would be a first.

"That was what he said. I don't think he'd lie to me."

I thought back to what I had seen the day before. "They seem to be building up quite a good rapport in the rogue settlements. They're building a supercentre in Copenhagen Town."

"That'll end well."

"Maybe it will-"

"That's Copenhagen Town. They're basically pack wolves shit out of luck. They'd be law-abiding citizens if there was a law. We could have each pack adopt a couple of them and it would work fine. My beat is the East Side. Those people have been lawless since who knows when. Violence is the only language they understand. No amount of supercenters are going to tame them. But anyway. My point is that this stinks. They're up to no good." He shifted his gaze at the security detail in their armoured cars and black military fatigues, guarding the carpark.

"Now you know what else stinks?" His voice lowered somewhat. "The Granite Peak attack. They shouldn't have been targets. They kept to themselves. They didn't have a business in the Industrial Zone. They didn't even employ any rogues. It doesn't make sense. None of it."

"I have no idea. But it might have something to do with that Zirconian photographer."

"The one that disappeared a few weeks ago?"

He nodded gruffly. "I've been getting calls from the Zirconians. They want answers, or some information at the very least." Being a fairly prominent face in the private security scene, Thurgood was one of the go-to guys for Zirconian law enforcement liaisons and journalists looking for a scoop, something he resented to no end. "It's not my problem that some idiot screwed up a place where they're considered a traitor to their own kind. The World News chick, what's her name-"

"Catriona-"

"She told me she's coming over to do some investigating of her own."

"You two know each other?"

"You know her?"

"I went to uni with her."

"It's a small world. Anyway, remember in the '90s when there was a joint thing between the Zirconian army and us to try and stop rogues from crossing through the Highlands?"

I nodded.

I was one of the people who volunteered. She was there, doing a story, with her camera crew and everything. We got along. Famously.

"Anyway, this guy who disappeared, he was one of those obnoxious photographer people, what do they call them-"

"Paparazzi-"

You probably don't get a lot of them in your neck of the woods. But I reckon about 10% of calls I get are from packs telling me one of these morons has embedded himself just outside their pack territory and needs a good flushing out. They always pretend to be pack people. Some of them even use fake number plates. They're pretty easy to spot once you get the hang of it, but you can't get rid of them. They just keep on popping up like cockroaches."

"People want to see pictures of our daily lives? Why?"

"What do you think the Daily Howl puts out when there's a slow news day? And then there's the gossip mags. Don't even get me started on those."

I looked around. "I have to admit, we are a pretty fetching bunch."

Thurgood didn't answer. I momentarily thought that he had lost interest, but then I realised that the entire lobby had fallen silent in the same instant.

I followed his gaze. A midnight-blue Mercedes 600 Grosser was pulling into the porte-cochere. A sharply dressed, bespectacled man of ample proportions emerged from the back seat, followed by several bodyguards.

The Thunder Falls delegation was here.