Niko decided that if I could talk, I could stand after all and finished the job by pulling me to my feet. He was right. I weaved, even with his hand still holding me up, but I did stay up. Niko was the rock that at times held me up and at other times could take me down as efficiently as Suyolak had-which reminded me. “What was that?” I repeated, wiping dirt and blood from my face.

“A distraction,” Rafferty answered, his shaggy hair tangling in the wind.

A distraction could be good. If I’d distracted Suyolak enough that he’d swatted me with his antihealer mojo, then Rafferty might have been able to swat him right back-only harder. I looked past him. Shit. Suyolak was still standing, still grinning, looking so much the cheerful Rom, so like our mother, he could’ve been her slightly more sociopathic cousin. With hair grown long in the coffin and a face that was meant to attract the unwary, to anyone but us he would look like a god come to Earth. To me, he looked like a trap. One thing he didn’t look was one bit distracted, which meant I was the one distracting Rafferty, not Suyolak-and that wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.

“Why the hell didn’t you take him while he was doing the same to me?” I held on to my gun stubbornly. I might be the fly and Suyolak the swatter, but that didn’t mean I was going to be flattened without getting off at least one round-not next time.

“Probably because if he had, you’d have done more than hit the ground. You wouldn’t have gotten back up again,” Niko said as he steadied me.

“I took only one or two beats of your heart.” Suyolak raised his voice over the growling that was still coming from Delilah and had been joined by those of Catcher. “You do not miss them now, do you? One or two seconds of your life. Believe me, by the time I am finished here, you’ll be glad to die those few seconds sooner than the rest.”

Now Rafferty did split enough of his attention to the nearest warm body. It happened to be Goodfellow. He took his arm and pushed him toward Catcher. “Hang on to him. You might need some help, but do it. He’s okay now, but that could change when it all starts. It could flip a switch and I don’t want him any closer to Suyolak.” He took Catcher’s face, gripping the fur on both sides, focusing on him. “I’ve got one chance at this, Catch. I can do this, but not if you go Cujo on me, okay?” The growling and snarling had stopped and Catcher regarded him with an eerie silence before pressing his nose into his cousin’s hair, snuffling, and then blowing out air in an aggrieved sigh. But he stayed put, aggrieved meaning agreeing if not particularly liking it.

“Good.” Rafferty straightened. “The rest of you stay back and out of the way. That’s the best thing you can do for me. I’ve got more power up between you and him. Hopefully he won’t get through again if you don’t give him reason to. He wants me first.” With that, he moved toward Suyolak and away from us. Ill- tempered and bossy to the end, that’s who he was. Cranky I could understand, but telling me what to do, that wasn’t going to fly. Like him, I’d gone up against creatures better than I was, and I’d survived, but that was only because I’d always had help. Without the last, I still would’ve gotten the job done, but I wouldn’t have walked away to tell the tale. We’d gotten Rafferty into this. It would be a piss-poor partnership if we didn’t help him to live to pass through and see the other side of it.

The hand that had been holding me up now moved to my shoulder to hold me back. “Wait,” Niko ordered.

I hadn’t moved. There was a time to make your move. If you were good, you knew it when it came. There were many things I wasn’t especially good at in life: handling customer relations, dealing with relations of any kind, keeping the smart-ass in check, not recognizing addiction when it bit me and everyone around me in the ass. But one thing I did know was the right time. The shot I’d tried to take at Suyolak hadn’t been it. That had been the first punch in the first round. That wasn’t the moment I was talking about. Our moment in this game now was the last ditch, now-or-never-again time that you had to take or you wouldn’t live to take anything else. I knew it because Nik had taught me to know it… and being half predator-more than half, whichever-that didn’t hurt either.

We were waiting for the end of the line, and we weren’t there yet. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the other kids, Mom,” I grumbled.

“I feel for you,” he commented wryly. But he let his hand drop away, because he trusted me. It was impossible to fathom how he kept that trust day after day when my subconscious was determined to do everything it could to deserve anything except that trust-or maybe it wasn’t so much trust as acceptance, unconditional and never-ending. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought I hadn’t felt lucky since I was five. I should’ve felt lucky every single day of my life.

“I wish someone felt for me,” Robin complained with a sneeze. He was crouched beside Catcher with one arm hooked around the Wolf’s neck. “Felt for me, felt of me. Anything at this time would be welcome, because I had much higher hopes of this ending with me not dead. So any fondling or groping would be welcome.” Catcher turned and gave him one broad lick across the mouth and nose before going back to snarling and staring at the two healers approaching each other. “Not what I had in mind, but the effort is… ah… appreciated, thank you.” Goodfellow scrubbed his face with his sleeve.

“You should’ve said more in your call to Ishiah,” Niko said, moving to stand beside me now that I could actually stand on my own. “If you can actually consider monogamy, then you owed Ishiah more than a weak excuse for a good-bye.” Niko, like me, did understand the impossible nature of a good-bye, but unlike me, had the balls and the spine to tell someone else to go above and beyond.

“Your brother might need a mommy, but I do not,” Robin shot back stiffly, still hanging on to Catcher. He didn’t need a mommy, but it looked as if he had one huge teddy bear. “When I tell Ishiah… Whatever I plan on telling him, it won’t be only because I don’t think I’ll be around later for the consequences. He deserves better than that.”

“Not soap opera. Battle. Be ready,” Delilah contributed with an impatient toss of white hair and a deep rumble in her throat that outdid Catcher’s. “Humans, pucks, even Auphe. Hopeless all.” Delilah, who didn’t trust anyone but herself and didn’t want to; whole and complete within herself, that’s what she thought. She was the unlucky one, but I didn’t think she’d ever know it.

Catcher moaned. He knew what it was to be lucky, to have someone-family or otherwise-and that meant what he was now seeing had to be his worst nightmare: Rafferty and Suyolak coming together.

The moon had risen behind the antihealer. It was the same moon from my dream. Huge and orange, shedding the light of a forest fire down on us. It hardly ever looked like that in summer. I took it as a sign that fate was feeling particularly bitchy, giving a nightmare-perfect background to another nightmare, the one we were facing. Suyolak spread his arms under it. “So long has it been since I’ve seen the sky. So long has it been that I walked in a world that had never seen my like”-he lowered his arms and finished lazily-“and is now seeing it again, Wolf.”

Rafferty staggered. I smelled the blood he spat on the ground in front of him, but he didn’t fall. He wiped his mouth. I saw the dark stain on his hand. He spat again. More blood.

“It was called consumption in my day. Now you call it”-Suyolak tipped his head to one side as if listening, picking the term from a mind-“tuberculosis. It is an ugly word for such an elegant process that eats your lungs small bite by bite. A tiny predator ranging wild within. Marvel at the beauty of it.”