Her voice came small and scared. “I know.”

No more excuses. “Would you like me to do a reading and see what input the cards have as you make your decision?” I was careful to word it that way. People always have to make their own choices.

“Oh, please!” She threw the soiled tissue into a wastebasket. Then she started to laugh. “You think I asked you here to read my cards?”

My knee started bouncing again. “That is what I’m best known for among witches.” A coldness was forming in my stomach that had nothing to do with the iced mocha. “Ms. Diamond, I’m not into gossip. If you don’t want your cards read, then I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”

Vivian assessed me, her blue eyes icy. “Lorrie told me how you helped her last year. Help her again.”

I froze. My heart leapt to my throat.

Had Lorrie told my dark secret? She’d vowed to never speak of it! And she’d told Vivian?

I’d done some Tarot readings for Lorrie last year. A real creep had been stalking her, and his dangerous intentions were clear in the cards. She didn’t have time or the grounds to get a restraining order so, to protect her and her daughter, I resolved to help. I confronted him. The situation with him got out of hand, though, and…I accidentally killed him. It wasn’t intentional or premeditated. The police never solved the case. I suspected they hadn’t tried too hard. The guy turned out to be a druggie and a convicted rapist, released from the pen on a legal technicality. Still, he was a human being, and I’d taken his life.

I put on a confused smile. “I’m sorry; I don’t understand. How is helping her move to Cleveland relevant?”

“Miss Alcmedi, I’m not talking about you moving her knickknacks.”

“Then what did Lorrie tell you I helped her with?”

“She told me enough to know that your interpretation of the Rede is, shall we say, looser than most witches’.”

The Witches’ Rede is a code of ethics written in the twentieth century but based on older documents and traditions. Due to my lineage—traceable back to ancient Greece—I considered myself more of a pagan, but I generally accepted the Rede’s standard.

I stood. “That’s not true.”

“Well, you’re obviously not as concerned about your karma as I am about mine. Besides, Lorrie’s murderer would anticipate me taking action. I’d be burning myself at the stake to even think about trying to confront him. But you…you, he’d never suspect.” She smiled confidently. “You’re only a name on the rosters, someone who won’t even attend local meet-ups. An inactive solitary.” The last sounded demeaning.

I wanted to retort something nasty, but I didn’t. First, what I had done would cost me, karma-wise. Second, I chose to be solitary and refused to let her make me feel like it was a bad thing. A slow breath escaped me. Vivian knew about a very criminal action of mine, an action never publicly known or prosecuted. That made me extremely nervous. In fact, my legs felt weak. I wanted to sit down, but sitting might indicate I was interested and wanted to hear more.

“Her killer must be stopped,” Vivian stated.

“I’m sure the police will see to that if you go to them.” I said it confidently, but I knew it was a lie. Lorrie had been a wære. Out of fear, and probably power envy, otherwise fine police officers conveniently forgot their “Serve and Protect” oaths when a wære was involved. They even had a shoot-first policy. The police were protected by self-defense claims, and frightened human juries—suspiciously, such cases were all scheduled so a full moon would expose jury members who were wæres—readily and regularly agreed with the police.

When officers refused to investigate a crime involving a wære, it was tolerated by their superiors and supported through “paperwork” claims. This meant that until the insurance companies, currently in litigation, reached an agreement with the individual states about police coverage, the officers could refuse wære-related duties because the risks were “higher than normal.” The legal battles were spearheaded by lawyers for families of deceased officers who had been left without financial compensation due to carefully worded loopholes.

I’d written in my column about the insurance companies wanting premium payments from a specialized task force created for crimes involving wæres and vampires. Likewise, the states were accusing the insurance companies of taking advantage of the times. Both sides argued vehemently because the coverage reached too deeply into their financial pockets.

Privately, I feared both sides would find a mutually agreeable solution: declare open hunting season on all wæres.

I didn’t blame people for being fearful of something they didn’t understand. After a couple of decades, humanity as a whole was still adjusting to the fact that vampires, witches, wæres, fairies, and other supernaturals had lived among them for thousands of years. They would probably never have known if it hadn’t been for a freak mutation of wære genes or, some said, a military experiment that had gone bad. Up until then, if anyone heard a tale of someone being bitten by a “werewolf,” they assumed it was fiction. After the wære “virus” appeared, it became a fact to fear.

When things changed, all kinds of other-than-humans had to come out of the paranormal closet. Just like all downtrodden minorities, they had to organize to protect themselves. For the wæres, the extermination threat was immediate. They reacted with a wære-enforced responsibility policy. They broadened their kenneling approach and developed a local-level system that identified all wæres to an area pack leader. The system went through some restructuring and refining processes, but it was all handled by their own kind, and proven sympathetic folks like me, so they could trust the security of their identities. It was working. In the last few years, instances of wære attacks had become rare.

Vampires, thanks to their magnificent and well-funded propaganda machine, had a head start: humans bought into their alluring image long before the virus. The fairies convinced citizens they were benign in a brilliant-if-utterly-false public relations campaign and weren’t considered as threatening as wæres. Neither were witches, for the most part.

But with the change of a word or two in certain laws, we’d all be lumped into a single “shoot on sight” category. Large portions of every group organization’s dues went to cover costs for political lobbyists and legal eagles trying to keep that from happening.

That complex cycle of legal logic was just the human side. WEC’s machinations were infinitely more intricate and ambiguous. That was why I stayed away from them.

“No,” Vivian said. “If the American justice system decided to deal with the murderer, influential people would find a way to free him. But we both know what a joke that idea is. The laws won’t touch him. We’re on a precipice here, Miss Alcmedi. If we don’t show people that we witches will police our own like the rest of the unnatural population, this world is going to get very ugly very soon.”

I agreed with that theory, but I didn’t intend to tell her that.

Carefully, she said, “The murderer needs to be stopped immediately and permanently.”

“And you want me to stop him ‘immediately and permanently’?”

“Yes.”

“Lord and Lady!” I continued, feigning confusion. “I don’t think we’re on the same page here.”

“Don’t be coy, Miss Alcmedi. It doesn’t become you.”

I wanted to smack that smug smile off her smirking face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. As a solitary, perhaps you don’t realize how information and details sometimes come out during spiritual discovery. It can be like hypnosis and therapy and confession all rolled into one. And you’re not a good liar.”

I stared. My meditations were like confessional therapy, but they were private.