Brian walked into Kenneth's office through the elevator doors. The battle was not going well. He had managed to kill several of the wolves himself, but there were more here than they had ever anticipated and he kept losing contact with more and more teams. The team he had sent down to the garage hadn't checked in for a while and he was too well trained to ask for a SITREP over the radio, encryption or not.

Kenneth was leaning over his video feed screens with Nova standing icily behind him. Both of them were watching the monitors closely.

"Kenneth, you wanted to see me?" Brian wasn't sure why had been called off the front lines, but from the look of his Head of House and the monitors in front of him, especially the floor levels they were both looking at, things were going even worse than he dared fear.

"Brian," Kenneth started slowly, not taking his eyes off the monitors, "Why are there still werewolves infesting my tower?"

Brian's first thought was to scoff and roll his eyes at the rhetorical question. Well Kenneth, the wolves are still here because we haven't been able to kill them all yet. He also knew that if those words and that sentiment left his lips, he would be dead and ash in moments.

Brian went with the diplomatic approach, "The wolves are moving faster than we anticipated. Our weapon accuracy has been less than ideal, and the wolves are finding ways to slip through our canalizing approaches and traps. We have killed several, if I had to guess at least thirty to thirty five percent of the wolves have been killed or neutralized."

"A fair estimate, if a little ambitious," Nova said. "And yet they continue to climb, and their allies have proven to be even more surprising than we thought. Have you heard from your team that you sent down to the garage to deal with that group of wolves, lately?"

Brian shook his head. He realized too late that she had baited him and he fell neatly into the trap she had set.

"They're dead, Brian," Kenneth stated firmly as he stood up from the monitors and faced his lieutenant. "The entire team was taken out in less than a few moments by a creature I have never even heard about, much less seen."

Brian felt himself take a step backwards, "What do you mean, Kenneth? A creature? That doesn't sound like you, what the hell happened to my men?"

Brian didn't have time to even blink before Kenneth was on top of him pressing him down as he was bent backwards onto a desk top.

Kenneth spoke soft and low as he held Brian down, "It was a shapeshifter of some kind. A tigress from what I can tell. That girl that you were so confident was going to be a liability and a weakness, tore through MY people in seconds. They didn't even move to defend themselves."

Brian shook his head in disbelief, "No, Kenneth, there must be some kind of mistake, there's no such thing."

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"It's no mistake, Brian," Nova said coldly as she pressed a few buttons on the console. Brian's head was turned and watched a recording taken of the basement garage, as a tiger, or something that looked like a tiger sprinted across the garage floor and ripped through the three vampires' bodies, severing one's head and disemboweling the other two before snapping their necks. Brian watched in wide eyed horror as the scene played itself out over and over again, on loop.

"What the hell is that?" Brian asked unable to hide the true fear he felt from entering his voice.

"I don't know, Brian," Kenneth said as he let his lieutenant stand up. "The wolves have never bothered to attack us here in the city. And I have never seen or heard of anything like this before."

Kenneth looked out over the Los Angeles morning, through his heavily tinted windows. He was tired and should be sleeping. It might be why he seemed to be making mistakes. That had to be it. The wolves were never this coordinated, or this motivated to cause this much death and destruction. It had to be because he was tired.

"Brian, end this. No matter the cost. I want this done. You have permission to do anything and everything in your power to get it done. I want the wolves dead. Do I make myself clear?" Kenneth's eyes bored into Brian's with an intensity and something else that Brian had never seen there… desperation?

Brian nodded, "It will be done, my Head of House." Without waiting to be dismissed he moved back to the elevator and hit the "thirty" button. As the stainless-steel doors slid closed in front of him, he saw Kenneth sit down heavily in his chair as Nova laid a calming hand on his shoulder. Brian mused with some trepidation just how short the ride down was going to be to meet the attacking wolves. It was a much shorter trip than he would have ever dared to guess if someone had posed this kind of situation as a theoretical question to him before today.

* * * * *

They passed floor after floor, and even after sweeping through each floor just as thoroughly as the first few, they hadn't found any vampires to speak of in the past half dozen floors.

"Did we kill everyone already?" Katherine asked.

"It seems to be the case, but that can't be," Charles said, "perhaps they've pulled back and are planning a counter attack?"

Aceso shook her head, "Since when have vampires ever had the guts to take us head on? And if that was the case, why give us free roam of their home? No, something else is going on here."

Floor by floor they climbed, making radio calls with each new floor cleared and climbed. Ansuya and her group were somewhere nearby. Javier and his pack was still in the basement. The Matriarch had tried to get to the room where Acharya was trapped but couldn't find any controlling mechanism for the doors and had decided to leave a few guards there and continue with her climb.

After they had passed onto the thirtieth floor, the group was getting restless and very wary. Amanada commented, "Maybe the vampires are letting us get this high in their tower and have something horrible planned for us?"

William shared a look with Aceso and the rest of his pack. They found themselves in a narrow hallway with no doors to either side. It felt wrong to William, Aceso mirrored his mental doubts in her expression, but she nodded and William took point.

Halfway down the hallway, William felt more and more uneasy. He was about to tell them to turn around when gunfire rang out in front of them. He backed up and shoved the group back towards the exit and to the floor.

One of Malik's people who was in the rear howled in rage. William looked up, seeing a solid steel wall where the door they had entered used to be. William didn't have time to think, but he didn't know what to do either.

In the very back of his mind, he heard a familiar laugh and a condescending voice say, "Since when did lack of a door ever stop a werewolf?"

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