I stammered, “I care. I seem to be the only one who does.” I had to get Beverley out of Vivian’s house.

“Leave it to the authorities.”

“You mean the same system that would have sent Theo to a State Shelter to die? I can’t do that.” I snorted. “I won’t do that.”

“You called and threatened this Vivian, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

Nana stopped rocking and let the hoops rest in her lap, and only then did she glance up at me. “I’ve raised a bully. How in the name of Athena’s sweet justice did I do that?”

I could’ve given her a list. She had been a hard-as-nails authority figure in my youth. If I reminded her of that now, though, she’d just deny it. I stopped and crossed my arms. “I’m not a bully.”

“I suppose you have another name for it? Like Public Attitude Manager. You young people make everything so difficult.”

Where had that come from? My anger slipped a little toward worry. What had Nana done now? “Make what difficult?”

Nana put her quilting aside and picked up her cigarette case. “You’re either overanalyzing or overemphasizing. Can’t you ever oversimplify anything?” She put a cigarette to her lips and readied the lighter.

I eased down on the bed, rubbing my forehead. “What are you talking about?”

She took a long draw off the cigarette and released it slowly. She crossed her legs and started rocking again. “You know, you probably wouldn’t be so rash and dramatic if you put your passions where they were supposed to be and let that young man smooth you out a little.”

“What?” The shriek leapt out of me as I stood.

“It would do you good, you know. Goddess knows he wants to.”

“Nana! I’m trying to talk to you about the safety of a little girl I was getting rather attached to before her mother moved to the city! What Vivian’s done is totally against the Rede—damn! I wish I’d thought of that when I was on the phone!”

“Go cleanse your chakras and meditate. You’ve got it so bad you can’t think straight.”

“Got what? What do you think I’ve got, besides the insanity in my gene pool?”

She just rocked and stared at me. Her usually expressionless face had changed. Her cheeks rounded just a little, narrowing her eyes in the scariest way—she was amused. At me. At the thought of me having a boyfriend. It made me feel embarrassed and small.

“He’s a wære, Nana. He’s probably the one who tossed the trash you griped about on my lawn. What happened to the ‘witches and wolves aren’t meant to mingle’ bit you always preach at me?”

“They don’t make good friends, but it’s my understanding that for an occasional tryst they’re all right.”

I walked out. Nana encouraging me to have a tryst with a wærewolf caused my creep-o-meter needle to spike.

Chapter 12

I was on watch with Theo.

The regular creak of Nana’s rocker told me she was still quilting. Celia and Johnny were in town getting groceries. Erik was sleeping on the third floor—I could hear his regular snores faintly through the ceiling.

The wæres had the IV bag—changing down pat; I wouldn’t have to do it on my watch. I checked Theo’s toes. They were cold, and the greenish color now had some yellow to it. Still swollen.

She was damn lucky to be alive at all. And very unlucky to be my friend.

I washed her face and cleaned dried blood from between her fingers and from the cuticles of her nails. The professional shaping and painting of them had been ruined in tearing her dashboard apart.

Guilt overwhelming me, I sat in the window seat, as far from Theo as I could be while still being in the room. I drew a small circle around me in the air and meditated. Cleansing my chakras, as Nana had suggested, would have entailed energy work, and that wasn’t safe around Theo. A full transformation would cure her and save her life, but a partial transformation would doom her irreparably. So I kept this meditation to a mental exercise and refrained from sticking my toes in the stream. I didn’t need to wash the negative energy away immediately; I could do that later. Besides, my guilt over Theo’s condition was tightly wound up in that energy, as it should be. I deserved to bear that guilt.

“Let it go.” Amenemhab padded to the water’s edge, a few yards upstream, and began to drink. After a moment, his ears pricked forward and his head came up. Water dripped from his muzzle. His attention focused across the stream.

The buckskin mustang galloped through the woodland. Sunbeams shining through the branches flashed on her hide, making the dun glow golden. Her thick black mane and tail flounced, accentuating her graceful and majestic strides—fast but unhurried, or at least not urgent. As evidenced by every flexion of her sinewy limbs and sleek form, she ran for the joy of running.

“Who is she?” I asked.

Amenemhab stared after her so long I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Then he said, “She is the One who called to you. Who comforted you in the cornfield.”

“The Goddess? Is a horse? In my meditation?”

“She can be anything, anywhere. Today, in this hour, She is here and She has taken the form of a horse. Today She feels the current of energy and moves with it, perhaps stirs it and guides it along the proper paths as She guides us all.”

“I must have lost my way, then.”

The jackal cocked his head at me. “Why do you say this?”

“I don’t feel like I’m treading a path, but a rocky mountainside that isn’t supposed to be traveled. I have taken steps away from the Rede, away from Her guidance. And away from common sense. That’s why She was there,” I pointed, “and not here.”

“Just because you cannot see the path beneath your feet does not mean it isn’t there. It is simply a road less traveled, as it were.”

“Ah. A bumpy road designed to tame the more stubborn, no doubt.”

“Or a path meant to show the more resilient that they are capable of more than the average task.” When I didn’t respond, he continued: “She relishes what She can do and takes the form that accomplishes Her task with the most efficient grace. Shouldn’t all living things relish what they are, what they can do and be and create? Wouldn’t happiness and peace be attained if everyone did?”

“Of course.”

“Then why do you try to limit what She can call you to do?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

Knowing what he was getting at, I disagreed emphatically. “She wouldn’t want me to be an assassin. To break the Rede.”

“Those who choose not to abide by the laws of the Rede, those who subscribe to no laws that would censure them, will not be stopped by any laws. Justice may come in the afterlife, but sometimes they need to be stopped in their present life, stopped before they interfere with greater plans.”

I hoped that didn’t mean the Goddess wanted Vivian on the Elders Council. “You’re saying She would want me to be a killer?”

“Is that so inconceivable?”

I smirked. “So I’m the lucky one who gets to fuck up my karma, right?”

The jackal opened his mouth in what had to be a smile. “Perhaps you have it backwards. Perhaps this charge is the opportunity to exculpate trespasses in the past.”

“Karma doesn’t work that way.”

“Doesn’t it?”

This was like braiding thorny branches; every twist had painful possibilities.

“She wasn’t here as a brilliantly white unicorn or a midnight mare,” he said. “She showed Herself to you in the colors of mild tarnish, in the wilder form of a mustang.”

The stream trickled by, the only sound between us for many minutes. I thought Amenemhab would lope off and leave me with that thought, but he didn’t. He sat and watched the play of light on the water, patiently waiting for me to figure it out. Fine.

This was bigger than me, my easily bruised ego, or my karmic future. Still, I did not have to like any of it. And the weight on my shoulders felt impossibly burdensome. How could I be that important? I never stood out anywhere else in my life; I wasn’t ready to think there was any place that I should. So I said the words he probably knew were coming: “I don’t want to be a killer.”