Luki dropped a tangle of wires and broken, camouflaged plastic at my feet. I realized what it was when I knelt to look closer. "Why did you bring me a hunter's camera?" I asked, poking it to look for savable parts.

"I found that just outside your backyard," Luki growled. "It was pointed at your house."

I glanced outside my sliding door into the moon-lit night and frowned. "Okay. That's a bit creepy, I'll admit."

"Can you take the role out and look at the pictures?"

I turned back to the camera. The casing was cracked and pretty much useless, but there was a chance I could get the internal memory card. "I can try. Why'd you break it, anyway?"

"I couldn't get it off the tree. I have paws, you know, not fingers."

"You hold root beer fine."

"Whatever. Can you do it?"

I broke open the case to reveal the inner circuitry. "Yeah." After a moment, I found what I was looking for. The small, eight-gigabyte chip would fit my camera, with luck.

And it did. Once I had everything plugged in to my desktop, I opened up the folder with the files. Luki watched over my shoulder. "Here we go," I said, double-clicking on the first image. It took a second to pull up.

"Whoa," I said, and Luki growled.

"That's me," she said.

"Yeah." I looked closer at the picture, green from the night-vision setting. There was Luki on my back deck, illuminated by the porch light. She wasn't standing, but there was no way that the figure could be a regular wolf.

"There's you." Luki tapped the monitor with a claw.

I squinted. There was a shadow in the sliding door that was about my shape, and I could see one of my hands on the glass, about to push it open and let her in.

"When was this taken?" I asked. Rhetorically, really, as the day and hour were in the bottom left of the picture.

"The date says the twenty-fourth of November. That was . . ." Luki paused, thinking. "My second visit. When you came out with me."

I closed the window and selected all the remaining files to open them at once. Twelve twenty-four. A month after the first. This one showed the fire we had when I gave Luki a gift for Christmas and toasted marshmallows. One twenty-two. A scene much like November. And then, finally, the current date: two twenty-one. The last one showed Luki up close, looking up at the camera with a quizzical tilt of her head.

"I don't like this," Luki said with a low growl. "I can smell trouble."

I tapped my finger on the mouse while I thought. "Well," I said after a while. "As weird as that is, maybe it's really just a hunter's camera?"

"Sure," Luki said sarcastically. "And it's only coincidence that the only pictures are ones of me. Someone's watching me, and I know who. It's that crazy guy who either hates my guts and good looks or hates werewolves in general. Probably both."

"Maybe," I agreed reluctantly. "But why in the world would he set up a camera at my house?"

"For once, Jake, try not to be an idiot," Luki said acidly. "Think. He knows who I am as a wolf, but he might not know who I am as a human. He's keeping tabs on you to see if we might have any sort of relationship, romantic or otherwise. Hell, there's probably another camera aimed at your front door. If he can get to you, he'll be able to get to me."

That made something click in my head. "That's why you won't tell me who you are," I said. "It's your best chance of protecting yourself."

Luki fixed me with her deep yellow eyes and shook her head. "No, retard," she said. "It's my best chance of protecting you."