“Sure, sure. I told you. I do it all.”

“Except feet, cover-ups, and memorials,” I couldn’t help but add.

“That’s right.” She nodded her head, a look of complete sincerity on her face.

While I was trying to decide if Rose was worth her numerous thorns, Bubbe appeared by the open door. When she saw I was inside the office, she disappeared. She was quick, but not quick enough. There was no missing the ancient bone knife she grasped in one hand, or the squirming rabbit dangling from the other.

Uh-oh. My chair screeched across the wood floor as I shoved it away from my desk. My gaze shot back to Rose. “Well, thanks for stopping by. I have a few more interviews today, then you’ll hear back from us.”

She frowned. “Hey, but what’s the pay? My last job, I rented. Gave the shop twenty percent for the space. You work out a deal like that?”

“Hard to say.” I grabbed her by her fuchsia fingertips and jerked her out of her seat. “My office manager will give you a call.”

Checking her manicure, she cast a suspicious look over her shoulder at me and stomped out. I waited until the door to the shop closed behind her before spinning on my heel and going in search of Bubbe.

The door to her basement office was closed.

I didn’t knock.

“Bubbe, what exactly do you think-” I stopped midtirade. A suburban mom dressed in yoga pants and pink cami top glanced up at me. In her hands was the stone knife, which shook violently above the quivering body of the rabbit. Bubbe held the rabbit by feet and ears.

“Bubbe!” I shrieked.

The soccer mom jumped backward, letting the knife clatter onto the cement floor. Bubbe barely cocked an eyebrow.

“Yes, devochka moya,” she replied.

Bubbe liked to speak in Russian, especially in front of her clients. Her childhood was spent roaming the steppes in what is now called Russia, and everything from her clothing to her accent was calculated to remind you of that. Never mind that she had lived in America for around a hundred and fifty years.

“Drop the rabbit,” I ordered. I wasn’t completely sure what Bubbe had in mind for the little cottontail, but I didn’t need locals thinking we practiced animal sacrifice.

“Pfft.” She turned her back on me and gestured to the wide-eyed woman who had pressed her back so tightly against the wall I was afraid she’d leave a perfect size-six impression in the concrete. “Pick up the knife,” Bubbe told her.

The woman glanced from me to Bubbe, obviously weighing which one of us was more dangerous. It was times like this I wished I’d inherited my mother’s six-foot-two-inch frame. Unfortunately, without it, I just didn’t look intimidating. And, thanks to Bubbe’s high priestess status, she didn’t need it.

My grandmother murmured a few words, and the air around her seemed to shift, making her look larger and darker. Cool air nipped at my ankles. The old reprobate was actually casting a spell to strengthen her position. I could have countercast but, number one, I didn’t want to alert her to my newly found powers and, number two, me taking on Bubbe magically would have been like a field mouse taking on a cougar.

I still could have stopped her, but it would have meant throwing myself across the room and knocking her to the ground. Not exactly a tale I wanted Bubbe’s client to be sharing with her friends over lattes. I couldn’t give up completely, though. So, drawing myself up as tall as I could, I took a step forward and did my best to look threatening.

The soccer mom’s gaze danced from me to Bubbe to the knife. Her hands quivered, and a thin sheen of sweat appeared over her upper lip.

I stared her down, willing her to stay safely against her wall and away from my grandmother’s bunny-killing plans.

Bubbe murmured something else and flicked one finger toward the other woman’s midsection. Her lower lip clamped between her teeth; the suburban mom folded her hands over her lower stomach, then with a breath that made her entire body shiver, squatted and slid her hand toward the knife.

I hated when my bluff was called.

“Bubbe,” I warned.

My grandmother ignored me. “Remember what I told you. Just run it down his body.”

I couldn’t let this go on. Annoyed with Bubbe for giving me no more notice than she would a snot-nosed youngster, I took a step forward, right into the soccer mom’s path.

“I said to stop.” I faced Bubbe, fairly confident the other woman wouldn’t decide to use the knife on me instead of the rabbit.

Still holding the bunny tight, Bubbe sighed, her lined face tired and sad. “What are you so afraid of, devochka?”

“Nothing, but you can’t do this”-I motioned around the room-“here.”

“This?” She shook her head. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is. If you did, you wouldn’t have your-what you call it?-panties in such a wad.”

I flushed. This was not a conversation I wanted to have in front of a customer-even if she was Bubbe’s customer.

“She will not hurt the little bunny. Just give him a shave. Hair, that is all. No blood.” She looked back at the woman. “You want a baby? Come. Let’s finish this.”

I blinked. Hair? That was it? I’d embarrassed myself to save a rabbit from a close shave-literally? Even more embarrassed, I mumbled an apology under my breath and stumbled from the room.

“Amazons gave up paying a blood price, even rabbit blood, four hundred years ago.” Mother stood in the doorway of her gym, dabbing her chest with a damp towel. Wet with sweat, her light brown hair looked almost as dark as mine. “You know that.”

My mind stuttered. Blood price-could that be what the dead teens were? An arrow in my head began to whirl. Was this the killer’s motivation?

“All Amazons?” I asked, my mind wrestling with the suspicion.

“We’re talking about Bubbe.” She gave the towel an impatient snap and stalked back into her gym.

I glanced toward my grandmother’s workroom, guilt causing my gaze to fall short. I loved Bubbe, but still…I thought of the rabbit, his ears clutched in Bubbe’s fingers. How could Mother expect me not to think she was going to kill the little carrot snatcher?

Feeling somewhat justified, I turned and followed Mother. Her gym was cool and quiet, as if the stacks of iron weights soaked up any stray noise that dared attempt to enter the room. Usually I found the place relaxing, but today tension streamed from Mother. My sense of vindication quickly dissipated, and I had to resist the urge to twist with discomfort like a guilty two-year-old. I covered with attitude.

“I never know what Bubbe may do,” I said, defensiveness raising my voice.

She snorted. “You know what she won’t do. She never supported the blood price or the mutilation. None of it. None of her children ever suffered-not even her sons.”

“Not even her sons,” I repeated, my fingernails jabbing into palms. Yet another sore spot. In the last few days it seemed like every scab I had had been picked to bleeding.

I’d first learned about my grandmother’s sons when I was pregnant with my own. When they were only hours old, she’d left them on a doctor’s doorstep-helpless little bundles, discarded, forgotten. I hadn’t understood it then, and I didn’t understand it now.

Mother picked up a fifty-pound dumbbell and began doing curls. I’d have thought she hadn’t noticed the effect this topic still had on me, except for her next words. “Just because you didn’t want to give up the boy you carried, doesn’t mean Bubbe did anything wrong. You need to let it go.”

Harsh as her words sounded, she didn’t say them in a bad way-more resolved and a tad morose-like she had let me down. Which she had. Pretty much everyone had.

I’d never considered the abortion that many pregnant Amazons chose when they carried a male child. And at first I’d even agreed to give my son up for a human adoption, thinking in the long run it would be for his best, but then, as he grew inside me, as I’d felt him move, seen his foot shoving against my stomach, I’d lost my resolve.