Mist and dust and blood boiled in the air. The palms of my hands were wet with rain. I lay on the grass, hands spread, legs cut into: blood boiled upwards and joined into itself. Scarlet shapes. Bright red, fresh, so much more than a simple pinprick. My head spun lightly and there was the pain again. My eyelids bled but I could see past the pain, and then into the blood that shaped itself out of mist. The wolf howled and snapped at dust.

The blood fashioned itself into one shape. It drew together, floating in the air. I began to see part of a mouth, part of a face, part of a throat. Light dust and red blood. Mist—no, it was white dust—flowed along the edge of the cuts on me, rising, joining.

Throat. Chin. Sinews. Lips. The red mouth opened.

"Sav..." a thin, ashen voice whispered in the air. "Save..." Or perhaps it could have been the beginning of the name my mother gave me. Something roared in my ears like waves in a glass or seashell.

"Help me..." the blood-mouth asked. Then the head of the wolf dove through it. Droplets of blood scattered but tried to reform. Warm blood rolled down my face. The wolf's noise was deafening. Its muzzle was red-stained. My hands tried to stop the bleeding, thighs and forearms and face and then my back— Fog. Nothing but fog.

Fog in my mind below the pain. Eaten by thin air.

I remember...

Then something grabbed me.

There was running too fast through the trees. Zigzags. Something cold held me close and whistling wind did not blow across my face. A pale chin above me, and a woman's long hair. The world whirled backward. I closed my eyes and waited—

Hands took me by the shoulders: neither gentle nor ungentle. I had dreamed of nothing but blackness and no sign of my mother. Blood filmed over my eyes and the knife cuts burned.

Leave me alone and stop TOUCHING me. The blades of grass swayed the wrong way and the earth shook below me so there was no way to know which was up. Everything was wet and cold and someone tied up the blood. Bandages out of clothing. A feel of bark and layers of fabric behind my back. I wanted to beg for water in my throat.

"There is no time."

Jon Cullen's face. X-rays. Listening to him—answering him. The cold memory.

I'm going to test your coherence. That is all, he said, and asked nothing worse than a school test. Bodhi must have come to know. Reasoning. Things my mother taught me. Stuttering attempts—my mind was muddy then as now it spun in all directions at once—to decipher languages I didn't know. Then Jon Cullen released me from the hospital still sedated. He bent over my leg now, pale-faced. Always pale. A hand wiped a wet cloth over my face.

I remembered.

"Rhoda Jansen. Thin air."

They didn't understand. I licked stray water at the corner of my mouth. I saw Helen Cullen's face. Still framed by red-gold hair: still beige and fading. A monster.

"Helen. Murderer."

Her eyes were black and behind the rag her hands were gentle. If I had closed my eyes I could have not known.

"Please call me Ellie. I am not your enemy, child."

"Helen. You strangled him with a vine." She wiped the corner of my eyes. I closed them behind the red film.

"No," said the woman's voice, quiet as the click of a streetlight. "He is my sins remembered."

Those words meant flowers in a madwoman's hair. Curved writing tried to dance. Many waters. She was telling that she was mad. She was telling that I was mad. The world swayed again. She was not speaking the right words. Her eyes were lifeless black when they should have been green.

Gold.

"Take him if you would him to live," the cold voice cut like the thinnest and sharpest of skewers. They spoke too quickly. "Treatment is indicated. Yet this was not done with intention of ending his life. I will carry him if you favor it."

Not him.

"That would be best, Jon," the high woman's voice breathed. "I cannot restrain..."

A wolf's howl. Running feet. And then the wolf flung the woman away from me. My eyes opened: it was a clash too fast to see even without the whirling inside. Helen and Leb, Helen and a giant wolf. Only for flashes could the fight be seen. He sped and she raised her hands to throw him down. A slash flung open the brown overall she wore. Then I saw that she defended and he attacked: claws and teeth against open-palmed shielding. The trees around them cracked and bent and it was not only that they crashed into them. I saw a gate she leaped over in two old cedar trunks. The slim human shape changed direction instantly, wolf's bulk a beat behind. Helen's loosed hair fell in a waterfall across her back and flew with her.

"Jon, do not kill the child!" she cried out. Her husband left me. There were two of them now. But the wolves knew each other's heads.

It was fast, then. A treetrunk snapped around the wolf. The moment later the wood fell apart, but then the shape of a vampire had grabbed it. I did not see it move. The bark was a rough sense of reality. Blood smelt sharp.

The two cold ones flung—threw away—the body, far into the trees—skidding on its own wolf's head. I did not hear Leb rise.

I tried to stand. I was halfway on my knees. "Don't." I lurched forward and began to fall on my face. But icy hands took me: I struggled.

"What is the reason, boy?" Wolves howled. He pressed my arms to my side with cold hands. "Helen, draw away the interfering puppies and rendezvous with my sister."

"The Quileute children are younger than he. They must not be harmed."

"As you wish."

Clutched to another. I wanted my skin to run away from him. He froze the blood that was left in me. He was a statue, an ice statue and a terror of the cold. He dragged me away: tree blurring into tree and those frozen hands, always those frozen hands. I lost the ability to tell the difference between the trees long before he stopped. The dust and the mouth stung my mind like a screw screaming in a thousand drills, and the distant howls of wolves had long since faded away.

He was forcing a salt-tasting drink into my mouth. Holding my throat.

"Be still. I am healing you." In a wide bare room; a crackling plastic sheet spread over a couch; a wide glass window and trees rising up behind it, making the gold light of a sunset into green. Antiseptic stung viciously, stabbing across face and body. I tried to curl into myself.

"Were I my sister I could pluck the knowledge directly from your head. Or not: for your unexpected resistances." His white hands were sticky with my blood. He bent over me again. I should have tried better to make him stop. His face was too close to my skin. "The spacing of these cuts lies too thin—and with too great a finesse—for a werewolf's claws. Too proximate still for our own nails." His own were closely trimmed: only a very thin line of lighter white below the ball. He pressed on changed bandages and sent another wave of pain. He'd stripped me. I whimpered something.

"I have no prurient interest, boy. Hypovolemia. Do you understand? Hypodermic, below the skin. Septicemia. Ischaemia."

Decipher the word from the parts. "Stupid games."

"No game," Jon Cullen said. His dark eyes were flat; his cheeks sharp as Bodhi's. He easily held me down as if he was an icy rock. "Drink again."

Blood loss. I had not bothered to give on the day.

I was sure the face I had seen in blood was a woman's; that she begged for help; and that I did not want to give it.

Fingers pressed down on chin and throat. It sparked on my tongue. A drug; another sedative; something dissolved; drinking blood to replace blood stolen, not blood...

I gagged. Part of it dribbled past my chin. "Monty's not stupid. He'll know where you are."

Then I spat in his face. He showed no sign of exacting revenge.

A door slammed closed. "That's why I'm here," spoke a high female voice. "Jon, if you keep him here than something bad will happen, but I can't see what the bad thing is going to be. So make him sleep..."

A needle split open veins in my wrist. Something checked the pulse. They forced me to drown.

"Goody! It would have been very bad for you to sleep too long."

It was muddy and hopeless and dark. The words were loud and then soft.

"You should really have one of those drips in your arm, but we can't run you to hospital. So eat and drink up."

"Or I will force you," a lower voice required. Something shook over rough road.

It's a car. Shards of metal slammed against each other. My skull beat against itself. I was covered by a heavy blanket, scratching relentlessly.

Monty, Leb, cold Jon. Alora. The large dark shape next to her in front was more impossible to know. He pressed another salt-tasting drink.

Antony.

There was a strong sickly floral scent spilled everywhere, as if someone had destroyed a perfume shop. The car windows were closed.

"And eat," he said. It was a Happy Meal. My hands barely worked: they looked pale in the low light. Streetlamps flowed past, distant-spaced. Not a busy road.

"Proteins," Alora said, "it'll be good for you. We can always buy more. Humans are quite easy to feed and you can eat such a lot of things. It hasn't been easy for us in here."

"Alora, eyes on the road," Antony rumbled.

"Do you like my perfume? It's gardenias and pink roses, it's pretty."

"It's positively horrible."

"I used up all my bottles but it's still not as strong as the other thing," Alora chirped. "But if I just keep driving and Antony helps me then I probably won't have a little slipup about eating the right things. At least Jon bandaged you up nicely, and the antiseptic smell is pretty strong too, above your..."

"Alora, stop talking of it. Ingesting the likes of him would defile you in any case," Antony said.

The food slipped down.

"A feeble-minded street Arab," he said. "My control is not Helen's or Jon's but it is strong enough for this mortal waste."

The world should become slightly clearer. Fat and salt and warmth, if it had not been tampered with. My head throbbed. The cuts burned, slightly dulled now.

"It's okay to be mad," Alora said smoothly. "But you have to be careful about changing mad people, because they stay mad. Do you see things that really come true later, anything at all, Xavier? I did when I was human. It was why they thought I was mad and locked me in a very bad place. Things are better these days even if you are mad. Is there anything that you see is true before you are told it, or things that you know immediately?"

It took too long to follow the yellow thread of her words. "Of course not. What I see is not how it turns out most of the time. Delusions." My voice was thin and cracked.

"I can see the future," she said, spilling away into other worlds—perhaps a distraction. "And Bodhi hears voices inside her head all the time; she cannot stop them. But maybe you're just crazy. That's okay, though. It doesn't make you less of a person."

I saw she drove with attachments to the pedals for her legs, a higher seat. Under a passing street light Antony's eyes were yellow as he stared into the back. The doors were locked on the inside.

"What's going on?" I said. The car rattled. Half-formed ideas fell away from me. Alora spoke into a silver mobile phone on her dashboard.

"Jon, I still can't clearly see," she said. "They always change. They must be mad. It's worse than he is. And little Monty also blinds me."

"I ought to fight rather than act the nanny," Antony said: short-tempered. Dangerous.

The answer to them was in a low, unclear tone.

"There is the...creature. And there is Carl. And the other who changes all the time," Alora said. "And I see the Moirai shall not intervene. There are things you must tell, Jon."

Another low answer: only a word or two vaguely guessable. You drove cars so as not to be tracked, I thought. Not by smell. Not by trail. Not by the ways humans hunted.

Monty seems to be...alive. He was more innocent than he tried to make people believe. His friend's head hit the ground like a piece of rag.

A wave of rubble swept through my head again. It wasn't burning below the bandages: it was shining knives in sharp clean antiseptic, perhaps something that ground down the pain. Cold sweat dripped from forehead and beating palms. If you folded a piece of paper and dipped it into water, slowly it dissolved away.

"Maybe we can store him, though we can't trust him to behave himself," Alora said. "Drink, Xavier. Let's go."

I wanted to remember and replace the puzzle pieces in my head. Sickly orange lights flashed through the windows and sped away again. The cloud of perfume was so heavy in the air that I should have been able to see it, weighty like a living thing. I stared at it and tried to make it move. The voices in front were too low and too fast to follow. Nonsense. Colors flashed.

"Wake. I will force this down your throat or you will probably expire." There were metallic edges on my mouth. Cold inhuman hands—like a statue, only a statue, not the one I was afraid of. Ignore statues as not real...

You'll drown me. The hands let me go and someone spoke of disgust.

Street signs flashed rarely by but not one yet I knew of. Crossing southeastward like on a bus. Country roads with odd names and rattling gravel below the wheels, blurred whites below orange light. I was very tired.

Carl, Moirai. New words.

"How about some nice, happy music?" Alora's voice rang out. The radio's lights danced to cheerful oldfashioned jazz with an underbeat like rattling bones. It blocked out the voices.

Know what's—wanted. Gas for one thing...

Scream and make a break for it when they stop. They don't have oil-generating superhuman powers. I lay on my arms, fingers scrabbling at the ends of bandages. Plasters on my face. Another black wave struck at my head. I felt a hand of rock press down on my tongue.

It was a little lighter outside and my mouth was dry and empty.

"You know, you call for your mother a lot when you're out of things," Alora's voice said cheerily. "It's rather sweet."

"I knew that. What are the Moirai?"

"You're filthy as well as a weakling," Antony accused.

"That too." Dried sweat and sticky substances by the cuts and worse. It hurt to move. I babbled again.

"You could talk. It wouldn't hurt you. Are you going to let me go? Later?"

The one of Helen's sins isn't on their side. Probably not the white thing outlined in blood.

"If you don't know what the other one was, Imogen's story had something similar. She said it was a Jansen, but the details don't fit it happening here. Happening there. But if it wanted Jansen blood..."

Pretty sure I don't have that qualification.

"Mayor Jansen?" Antony said. "Hm. The Moirai would take notice were she to be attacked."

A street sign flashed by: it was back in the state. Alora must have circled back, judging how long and how fast. It wasn't yet dawn. It was just light enough to see the brown tint on her windows.

"The mayor's not the only Jansen. If you don't kill humans—go after your enemies."

"There's bad news too, Xavier." Alora tapped her fingers on the wheel with a sound like ice chips colliding against each other. "Do you want another Happy Meal to make things better? I love how cheerful they look, although I never got to have any when I was alive. We just can't hunger for the same things normal people do any more. It only tastes like plaster, even the pink things, and it always comes up again as black sludge. It's very icky." I tried to glare at her. At last she continued.

"Your father's found traces of your blood and it won't be long before they identify it. And little Monty still believes it was Helen or one of us. That poor dear puppy." She drove a right turn so sharp as to shake the car and send even Antony slipping from side to side, and rammed down a hand for the shrill tone of her car horn. The plastic bottles scattered below the seats rattled back and forth.

Who to believe indeed?

At least some broken pieces made a picture. I lay in Alora's back seat, too exhausted to sit up. "Then Bodhi and the others are hunting this...Carl. Why haven't they been successful?"

Antony turned back again. "We did not tell you of him," he began as if about to make another threat.

"Helen did. He's her sins remembered. She changed him."

But then they both burst into laughter.

"Never," Antony said. "Thoroughly wrong. How any of us might have thought you possessed some kind of talent is beyond me," he hissed.

"It's okay, Xavier, he just has power envy," Alora stage-whispered, and giggled too long over it. "Antony has power envy over Bodhi and me..."

Then she broke off. The car's steering whirled in the wrong direction: Antony grabbed it from her.

Alora stared into space, all golden eyes in a small light-skinned face. The road zigzagged and rattled below and Antony cursed, and she cared nothing for it.

"They're ambushing Bodhi," Alora said. Antony laughed.

"Fool they! A primitive plan. Are Veronica and Killigan able to assist her?"

Alora stared ahead and past the glass of windows and windshield. "They offer her food."

"A tribute. They beg for mercy already," Antony said. "She ought to refuse."

"Antony, it's wrong," Alora's high voice said. "There are pines behind her. A small gravel path. An old sign—it's...rusting and about forest fires. I have to know where. Antony, you have to go. Run, it's faster." Alora's fingers frantically reached for a screen showing maps. "Where? Where it is blood, bad blood, all blood. He sharpens himself to razor wire. Bodhi is strong but there's too much from the warm throat. And there is also the other and that makes it all go black and wrong in my head—" A finger jabbed at a line: her screen moved in response, showing contour lines of ground height and cycling tracks. I blinked. Like Jenessa's screen when she was fast, a map like flashing bright video and hopeless to follow.

"It's stopped now," Alora said. Her voice was a monotone for once in place of the cloying cheer. "Everything's stopped. Help her now. Run for it. Jon, you too." She pressed a button.

Antony reached for the door handle in blinding speed, thrust himself out, and then he was gone from the moving car, running faster than it. Alora gripped the wheel.

"I know how," I said. "So if you wanted to run out too, then..."

Steal her car and run for it. Bound to be some money in the glovebox. Moving an arm sent red streaks aching inside. Alora smiled as if she could see that future.

"No," she said, "but I'm going to make sure you put some clothes on."