I said, “Can you wake her up?”

Grant limped close, studying my face, probably seeing all kinds of ugly emotions rising from my heart. But there was only compassion in his eyes. “You went somewhere. Back.”

“Back,” I agreed. “Can you do it?”

Grant hesitated, staring from me to the old woman. His eyes grew distant, thoughtful.

“She’s aware of you,” he said, limping to the side of the bed. “Even unconscious, a part of her is reaching toward you.”

A chill raced over me. I watched the old Black Cat’s slack face. Remembered her golden eyes, the vibrancy of her lush curves. That cruel zombie smile.

Antonina, I told myself. Not the Black Cat.

And yet, I could not separate the two. It was impossible.

Grant bent over, and placed his mouth close to the unconscious woman’s ear. He sang to her, softly, but his voice rolled through me like the ghost of a summer storm, rich and heavy with thunder. I moved closer.

Her eyelids flickered. Her mouth moved, tongue darting over cracked lips. Grant motioned for me to grab a bottle of water from the nightstand, and I was ready when the old woman drew in a long, rasping breath. I rested the mouth of the bottle against her lips, and she instinctively tried to drink. I was careful only to let her sip. She finally opened her eyes, and met my gaze.

She recognized me immediately, but I could see now that it went deeper than that. I should have noticed before—realized something was wrong. The first time I had met this woman, believing she was Winifred Cohen, she had known things about me. I assumed, erroneously, that she had witnessed my grandmother in action. Only half right. Winifred had seen little or nothing. But the zombie, on the other hand, and her host…

“I know who you are,” I said softly to the old woman, when I was certain I had her full, conscious, attention. “Antonina. Black Cat.”

The faintest hint of a smile touched her mouth, sending a chill through me. I wanted to back away, but held steady, forcing myself to hold her gaze; golden-flecked, with shimmers that rose from the very human brown of her eyes. I would never forget those eyes.

“Hunter,” she whispered. “She was so taken with you.”

“The demon who possessed you,” I said.

She wet her lips. “My protector. I searched for her. For years. I felt her close sometimes, as though she was watching me, but she never…came home. Not after that day. You kept her from me. Both of you did.”

I ignored that. “You’ve been up to your old tricks. Hurting people.”

“Making right,” replied the old Black Cat. “I forgot you all, for a time. I forgot so much, but the Kuomingdang would not believe that. They did many things to me, trying to make me talk. All I could tell them were stories about Siberia. But one day they pushed me too far. I killed those men. I didn’t know how. Just that they were dead. I got out, and forgot them, too.”

The Black Cat closed her eyes, sighing. “I had such terrible dreams, Hunter. I wanted a new life. I wanted to be someone else.”

“You cut those tattoos off your body.”

“Part of the bad dream.” Her voice softened so much I could hardly hear her. “But I kept them. You don’t…throw away pieces of yourself. Like trash.”

Grant placed his hand on my shoulder. I straightened, fighting for my voice. “It was all a lie. You set Ernie up. You killed Samuel and Lizbet. Finally, you killed them. And you had yourself shot.”

“Making right,” she whispered again. “I dreamed of you, Hunter. All these years, dreaming of you. Feeling you, in my veins. And then one day I crossed paths with Winifred Cohen. I found her. I think I had been searching, all along. Quiet woman. But I could hear her.” The Black Cat brushed fingers across her brow, but barely, as if the effort hurt and weakened her. Her hand fell limp into the covers, and her eyes drifted shut. “I…absorbed her. I made her tell me what she knew of the others. And your grandmother. I wanted to punish that woman. She loved those children.

“But it all became a dream again,” she added, a moment later—sounding confused, and sad, and tired.

Grant drew me away. “Before, when we first met her, she truly believed she was Winifred Cohen. She believed everything she told us, right down to cutting the skin off a live woman. Which she did, apparently. Just to herself. Her immersion in that personality was flawless, even to me.”

“And now?”

“It’s like watching a quilt that has been cut into pieces. She’s floating in and out. Part of her is reaching for the Winifred personality. Other parts are just…resting in what she was. She’s crazy, Maxine. Well and truly scrambled. I think it’s possible she ordered the hit on herself, believing she deserved it. That she was Winifred and needed to die.”

I looked at the Black Cat. It had been only hours for me. Hours, since I had seen her as a young woman. And now she was shriveled, a shell, shot and maybe dying in a hospital bed. I had no idea what to do with a psychotic old woman who was part demon, who murdered, who believed herself to be both victim and predator. She had taken a fucking knife and cut the skin off her body. God only knew what else she had done in the past sixty years.

Dek and Mal were heavy in my hair. I looked for the others, and found them arrayed around the room, bathed in the fluorescent glow of the long bulb arranged in the wall panel above the Black Cat’s head. Raw and Aaz ate popcorn as they stared at the old woman. Zee perched at the bottom of the bed, his claws bunched up in the covers surrounding her feet. Watching her solemnly.

Maybe she felt his attention. She opened her eyes, and stared right at him. Showed no fear. Just that faint smile, which shifted from sweet to cold, to cruel.

“Your highness,” she rasped mockingly.

“Cat,” whispered Zee. “Miserable Cat. Nothing left but threads.”

Gold glinted again in her eyes, but stronger, brighter. Hot with fury. Grant stiffened, and in two strides I was back at the bed.

“You should have killed me then,” she said, trying to sound threatening, though the effect was little more than an angry, bitter whine. “But you both were too weak.”

I could have said something about mercy. I could have told her that she had been an innocent, and that the formerly possessed should be given a chance to start over. But I looked into those golden eyes, fading even now into dull human brown—glazing over with forgetfulness and confusion—and kept my mouth shut. Mercy, again. Mercy, me.

I snapped my fingers at the boys, and they fled into the shadows. All of them, except Zee. I said to Grant, “Can she harm anyone else?”

“She’s dying,” he said simply. “I can see it all around her. She’s fading. I doubt she’ll last the night.”

I nodded stiffly, sick to my stomach. Sick to death. I was walking away, again, but I wasn’t going to kill in cold blood. Not like this.

I met the old woman’s gaze. “Good-bye.”

“No,” she murmured, brow crinkling with confusion. “Not yet. I didn’t finish. I didn’t finish with you. Wanted to punish…her grandchild. Punish her.”

“You punished yourself,” I replied, and left the hospital room.

Grant and I went to my mother’s apartment on Central Park. Everything was dusty. The white sheets that covered the furniture had turned gray. The windows were filthy. The air was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. But the electricity and water worked—paid for each month by one of the law firms that had overseen my mother’s affairs since her murder.

In the closet I found clothes wrapped in plastic. I found a locked chest full of guns. A box crammed with cash and precious jewels. And in the kitchen cupboards, Spam. Along with two forks.

“I feel like royalty,” Grant said.

I tried to smile. Around us, Raw and Aaz were tumbling along the hardwood floors, tossing Dek and Mal through the air like spears—making the serpentine demons squeal with delight. I looked for Zee. I walked through the apartment, thinking of the last time I had been here with my mother. Wondering if Jean had ever come back.