I realized that Alek's truck was almost out of gas, so I detoured past the B&B turnoff and headed into town. I grabbed a change of clothes from my house and checked on the store, taping up a note saying we were closed for the weekend. I hoped my few regulars would forgive me. The wards on both apartment and shop were intact and undisturbed. Then I filled Alek's tank, amazed at how much fuel fit in it as opposed to my little econo vehicle, and headed back.

I hadn't realized how worried I'd still been until I heard her laughing and teasing Max as I entered the Henhouse. Harper was awake and sitting up.

I took a moment to check my wards, though they'd done a fat lot of good against the ninja assassin. Still, it made me feel slightly better, though that could have been the feel of my magic rushing through me. All the sleep I'd gotten had done a decent job of fighting back the exhaustion, my nap with Alek refreshing me more than I realized.

If the assassin returned here tonight, I would be ready. I had an idea or three about how to deal with him. No more hesitation.

Harper and Max were playing the Electronic Talking Battleship with an original board, a relic from the late eighties. The electronics still worked, little pings and crash noises coming through the speaker.

"Hey," Harper said as I came in and settled into the chair I'd slept in the night before. "Where's your handsome half?"

"Out," I said. I didn't know what to tell her.

"Still riding the secrets train, I see," she said, making a face.

"Glad you are feeling better," I said.

"She's fine. She's just lapping up the attention." Max entered a number and a letter. A crashing noise rang out from the Battleship board.

"Fuck, you sank my battleship." Harper stuck her tongue out.

Max laughed and then straightened as his phone buzzed loudly in his pocket. He pulled it out, flicked the screen, and then handed it to me. There was a text from Alek, telling me he was going to meet with Justice Eva to interview alphas and work on the case.

"There's a second Justice in town?" Max asked.

"Wait, what? Who?" Harper set the gameboard aside with a wince.

"Some woman, a wolf, named Eva Phillips. She's kind of a bitch. Oh, and she told Sheriff Lee and some of the Wylde pack what I am. So I give it a day or two at most before every supernatural in town knows. Kickass, eh?" I pulled my knees up, tucking my feet under me, staring at the text message on the phone.

Phone. Oh, right. "Max, can I check my messages on this thing?" I asked.

"Sure, if you know how to work it, and you know your box number and password."

"I don't know. I'm so ancient I might have forgotten." I smiled at him. "I touch this screen thing here, right?"

"Okay, okay," he said, putting up his hands in surrender. "I could have worded that better. You are as bad as Lea."

"That's not my name," Harper said. "Don't make me kick your ass."

"Like you could catch me right now, gimpy."

"Guys," I said. "I'm trying to check a message here?"

They continued making silly faces at each other as they cleared the Battleship board and began a new game.

I had one message, sent this morning at seven fifty am.

"Jade Crow? This is Liam Wulfson. Alek gave me your number. He said if we found the car to call you, since he wasn't expecting to be in town. He said you could help and would want to see it. I'm out at the…" He paused. After a breath he called out, "Justice!" and I heard a woman's voice answer, followed by a shuffling noise and a crack that sounded like a gunshot. Then the message ended.

Fuck.

I played it again. And again. Each time hearing the same thing. Him telling me they found the car. Him calling out "Justice" and then the sound of a gun. Adrenaline hit me as I realized that Alek was going to meet with Eva. I dropped the phone as I jumped up and had to scrabble for it under the bed.

I called Alek back but his phone went straight to voicemail. I checked the text message and it was timed stamped over twenty minutes before I'd seen it.

"Jade?" Max and Harper looked at me, alarm in their faces.

"Why didn't you see this before?" I yelled at Max, shoving the phone in his face. "Why is it here twenty minutes after it was sent?" Why did I stop for gas? For clothes? How much time had I wasted? Would she hurt Alek?

"Jade!" Rosie came into the room, flour from the bread she had been kneading floating off her hands and arms. "Stop yelling."

I stopped and looked at her, shaking. The twins and Junebug appeared in the doorway behind her, all my friends watching me for an explanation.

"The Justice," I said. "The woman. I think she killed Liam."

"Liam? Like Wulf's son Liam?" Rosie said, her hands twisting in her apron.

"Yes. I have to find him. Alek is going to meet her." I threw the phone at Max and pulled Alek's keys from my pocket. I could trace these—they were his; he kept them on him all the time.

Except I needed them to drive. No, wait. Someone else could drive me. I looked desperately at Levi over Rosie's shoulder.

"Can you drive? I have to track Alek. We have to save him."

"Go," Junebug said. She and Ezee stepped aside as I rushed out the door, Levi at my heels.

Levi's Honda Civic didn't look like a speedy car, but he had clearly made some aftermarket modifications to it. We gunned down the drive and out onto the road. I poured magic into the keys, visualizing Alek, his smell, the feel of him. The link was strong, an undeniable pull and a thick silvery thread stretching out into the dark.

I wasn't that surprised when it took us back to the quarry.

"She has a gun," I told Levi as he cut the lights and stopped the car just off the highway. We were going to walk in on foot, just in case.

He nodded and shifted to his animal form. Wolverines look somewhat like bears, but cuter. Until they open their mouths or reveal their claws. Then they are kind of fucking scary. Wolverines the size of a Doberman? Scarier. Levi slipped silently into the shadows, leaving me alone on the track.

I ran. Eva would be able to hear me coming no matter what I did, so I gave up stealth in favor of shields and speed.

Mental note: definitely taking up running if I lived through the night. My lungs and legs burned. My pool exertions were clearly not enough to counter my sedentary, geeky lifestyle.

Alek was ahead, his keys yanking me toward him with the power of a rare-earth magnet. I dropped the tracking spell and stuffed his keys in my pocket, stopping only long enough to pull Samir's knife from its sheath at my ankle. If this thing could hurt an Undying, I figured it could really fuck up a shifter.

I threw light out ahead of me, not trusting just the moonlight, though the rising moon was nearly full. Soft purple light spread across the quarry like bioluminescent graffiti. Just beyond where we'd parked the night before, I saw Alek.

He was on the ground, not moving, looking like an apparition in the ghostly mix of silver moonlight and violet spell light. A furry body streaked toward him and I almost blasted it off the stones. Then I recognized Levi's shape as he shifted from wolverine to man and bent over Alek's body.

I skidded to a stop and fell to my knees on the rocks, my hands reaching for Alek, feeling for a pulse. He was warm to my touch, his chest still rising and falling. I looked up, looked around.

"No one around that I can smell or hear," Levi said. "There is something on him though, something wrong with his smell. And I smell blood." He touched Alek's collar where a smear of greenish fluid had stained his grey undershirt.

I saw a stain along Alek's side and lifted his arm. Blood soaked his side and the back of his shirt. Cursing, we turned him carefully and found the bullet wound. Bitch had shot him in the back.

"Alek," I said, shaking him. "Alek, you have to wake up." I knew what the smear was before I found the puncture mark in the side of his neck, near where it joined the shoulder.

"We have to get him to Vivian," I said. "He's been poisoned."

"Poisoned?" Levi shook his head. "But—"

"Don't fucking argue. This is how Dorrie died. We don't have time."

"Dorrie is dead?"

"Levi! Please." I tried to lift Alek, but couldn't even get his torso off the ground.

"I've got him," Levi said. He lifted Alek as though the man weighed only a hundred pounds, but Alek's body was long and awkward. I grabbed his feet and we managed to carry him to the boulders. Levi sprinted down the road and brought his car as close as he could get it, while I hovered over Alek, nervously watching the shadows of the quarry for movement. Getting him stuffed into the small vehicle was another exercise in frustration. Everything was taking too long.

Vivian lived above her practice, and my shouts and banging on her back door brought her downstairs quickly.

The three of us managed to get Alek inside, but his body wasn't going to fit on an exam table, so Vivian had us take him into her office. There was a narrow couch there along one wall, but it was far too short and cramped for him to fit, so we laid him on the floor. She listened to his heart, checked the puncture wound, and pressed a bandage to the bullet wound in his back. Then she checked his reflexes, and poked and prodded him while I tried not to chew off all my fingernails or blow the place up with the rage and magic boiling inside me.

"We can try adrenaline straight to his heart," she said finally, looking up at me. "If we can rouse him, enough that he can shift, he might stand a chance."

"Do it," I said. I remembered her description of the poison. How it was eating away at his organs, his heart. I grasped my talisman and prayed to the Universe not to take him. I had just gotten him back. He couldn't die like this. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

She left and came back with a long-needled syringe that looked like something out of Pulp Fiction , partially filled with greenish liquid. Deftly she knelt over Alek and sliced his shirt open. With a murmured prayer of her own, she jammed the needle into his heart, depressing the plunger.

We all held our breaths. The silence was complete, only the sound of Alek's ragged breathing, like the ticking of an old, erratic clock, breaking our vigil.

Nothing. His eyelids didn't even flutter.

"More," I said.

Vivian shook her head. "That's all I had. That stuff is highly regulated."

"No," I said. "I won't accept this. Get out." I needed them out, needed time and space to think, to figure this out. I had power. Lots and lots of fucking power. What was poison against a motherfucking sorceress?

"Jade," Levi said, touching my shaking shoulders with gentle hands.

"Out," I said. Whatever he saw in my face convinced him it was in his best interest to go.

They left me alone with Alek. I placed my hands on his chest, trying to send my magic into him, visualizing the poison as a foreign agent, as a thing that could be burned out and destroyed.

For a moment it felt like his body responded; his breathing changed, grew steadier beneath my palms. I sank into him with my consciousness and my heartbeat changed, turning erratic and painful. My lungs burned and a headache to end all headaches speared me between the eyes. I was dying.

I lashed out with magic, recoiling from the acid eating away at me. Recoiling back into my own body. Bile rose in my throat and I vomited blood, barely turning my head to the side in time to avoid splashing Alek's chest. The headache continued but my heart steadied and the feeling of my insides burning away faded.

That was not the way to heal someone with magic, apparently.

"Alek," I said. "Tell me how to do this."

No answer.

So much power, and here I was, helpless again. I got up, took a folded throw blanket from the narrow couch, and spread it over him. I found tissues and cleaned up my vomit as best I could before lying down next to Alek, pressing myself against him. His heart was still beating. He was still fighting.

I touched the puncture wound on his neck, imagined Eva luring Alek out to the quarry. What would she have told him? How did he not see her lies? I guessed that she would be very good at not quite lying. Did she have others helping her? No way to tell. Alek would have been vulnerable anyway. He didn't like her, perhaps didn't even trust her, but she was a Justice. They had both been sent by the Council. He would trust in that. Let her get close enough to shoot him in the back. To drive the poison needle into his flesh.

Tears choked my throat, burned my eyes. That bitch was going to die. I wanted to go find her, but I couldn't bring myself to leave him. The least I could do was stay, keep trying with my magic to heal him. I pressed more power into him, not sinking into him with my mind but just letting magic flow into him. But I might as well have been channeling at a rock. A rock would have absorbed the magic better, probably.

Sorcerers can't eat shifter hearts. They have a level of immunity to most kinds of magic and their power can't transfer. The same thing that protected shifters from sorcery was preventing me now from helping him. The best I could do was kill him more quickly. I smashed that thought to pieces as I rubbed the tears from my eyes.

The door creaked open and Levi poked his head in, one hand on the door as though ready to flee and close it behind him if I snapped at him again.

"Jade," he said softly. "Can we help?"

"No," I said. "No one can." Then I froze, a memory rising in me. Alek and Carlos roaring and crows falling from the sky, changing back to their human forms.

"Wait," I said. "If he shifts, could he heal? Ask Vivian."

"Yes," she said, looking in at me from under Levi's arm. "I think he is strong enough. But he can't shift if he doesn't wake up. I think there is too much damage."

"But what if someone made him shift?" I asked.

"No one can force a shift on another," Levi said.

"I've seen it. I watched Alek make crow shifters come back to human."

Levi looked down at Vivian and they both shook their heads. "Perhaps that is a power the Council grants. I've never heard of such a thing, but Justices are special."

"So we'd need a Justice?" I asked, defeat stabbing the hope in my heart to death. "I thought it might be an alpha thing."

"No," Vivian said.

The only Justice I had access to wouldn't do it, I was sure of that. For a moment I indulged in a very violent fantasy of hunting her down and forcing her to make Alek shift, but I knew from the tiny bit of logic left in me that she would never cave. Eva had too much at stake if she was willing to kill another Justice.

"The Council, what about them?" I was grasping at very tiny straws but any glimmer of a chance…

"They do not directly interfere. We may as well ask Jesus Christ to intercede," Levi said, a bitter note in his voice. I wondered at it but shoved the questions aside.

"Jade," Vivian said. She licked her lips and glanced up at Levi again. "The Justice is strong. He's suffering. He will take a long time to die. That isn't right."

"No," I whispered. "It isn't. Just…give me a few minutes. Let me say goodbye."

My real words were unspoken. Give me time to think. Give me time to figure out how to cheat my own personal hell, my own Kobayashi Maru.

She nodded, and they left me alone with him again.

My magic was no good, not the way I wanted to use it. Bernard Barnes had been able to affect shifters with his magic. I didn't want to think about the evil warlock who had nearly killed my friends, who had used dark rituals to bind shifters into their animal forms and turned them into living magic batteries for his use.

I hated touching his memories. The last time I had, I had done so quickly, using Bernie's knowledge to lock Sky Heart into his human form, preventing him from fleeing Not Afraid's wrath. I had been so full of rage, my heart full of images of death, that delving into Bernie's power inside me hadn't fazed me then. It had barely registered. Yet in so doing, in using Bernie's knowledge, I had brought about the death of my father. Or at least, the man I'd thought was my father.

Bernie had been a serial killer. His psyche, and therefore his memories, were sick, full of things I didn't want to see or experience, twisted experiments, a full spectrum of human suffering and death. A PowerPoint presentation in full sensory detail on how awful one being can treat another.

But somewhere in that knowledge could be my answer. If Bernie could lock a shifter into animal shape, he could force a shift. He had laid a magical trap that had nearly forced my friends to turn on each other, had pushed them to shift. Somewhere in the hellish miasma of his memories, there might be a way to save Alek.

I had to look.

I slipped my hands around Alek's limp fingers, closed my eyes, and sank down into my own mind.

But the first memory that came wasn't Bernie's. It was my own.

"Come on in, Jess, I won't bite," Ji-hoon says. He sits at his drafting table, pen in hand. There is ink on his lip where he chews the pen nub while inking.

I slip into the room. I'm in trouble, I think. I lit a boy's hair on fire with my mind. Pretty sure that was going to be the final straw. I don't want to go back onto the street but at least I am a couple years older now. Stronger.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I lost control."

"That boy called you some pretty awful names?" Ji-hoon has his own kind of magic, like how he always knows things. I know that the school called him, so it isn't really magic, but something in his face calms me. He's not mad.

It's weird.

"I know that is no excuse," I say, trying to show how mature I am. How I can take responsibility for my actions.

"The school can't prove you did it, since all witnesses say you were standing ten feet away," he says. "Relax."

"But I hurt someone."

"And you feel terrible about it, even though he was totally being an asshole. That's good. The fire only burned his hair, from what the principal told me. So you stopped yourself, put it out, right?" He smiles at me and goes back to inking, putting clean black lines over his sketches, bringing the comic to life.

"I did, but…I don't feel good. I feel like a freak, like a bigger asshole than he was." Now I'm a little mad. I want him to tell me I'm a bad person. This power inside me, it isn't normal. I couldn't be like my real family, and now I'm not like my new one, either. I'm a freak.

"You don't feel good because you are good," Ji-hoon says. "Your magic is just magic, Jess. It is like lightning or the ocean. A part of the world. It can be harnessed and used for good or ill. But it just is. You choose. Today you chose to hurt. Now you know what that feels like. Tomorrow you can choose differently."

"My magic hurt him," I say.

"No," he says. "You hurt him. Your magic is no more to blame for that than my pen is for creating this line."

The memory faded and I sank deeper, cursing at my subconscious. It hurt to see Ji-hoon, even in my memories. I had buried that family, hiding them so I wouldn't dream, wouldn't hurt. Parts of myself felt like they were waking up now. Parts I wasn't sure I wanted to see again, things I didn't want to feel.

I shoved that away, too.

Bernard Barnes. Ah. There he was. Brown, thinning hair. Watery blue eyes. Pudgy, pale body. His memories started to flood me but I scoured through them, burning away the images, the impressions. Setting fire to every crime, every murder, every pain perpetrated by his choices, his use of the power he gained. I faced the deaths in my memories and rejected them. Not my actions, not my choices. They had no power over me, no more than death on a TV screen would.

I did not want those things, but I faced them unflinching. For Alek. For myself. What I was and who I was, as Ji-hoon had pointed out when I was way too young to listen, was up to me. My choices. Not Bernie's, nor that boy who so long ago had looked at my brown skin and called me names.

I faced the pain and suffering Bernie had wrought and set it alight in my mind. I sought only his knowledge, the bright core of what he had learned. I wanted the tool, not its wielder. Ji-hoon was right. Power was power.

There, amidst the coals in my psyche, I found the knowledge I wanted. A ritual inscribed in an ancient book, a trap to set for men who could change their shape, forcing them from man to beast.

I am a sorceress. I have no need of ritual to raise power. I had Bernie's power, now scrubbed clean and joined with my own. Just power. Just magic. A tool, a means to whatever end I wanted.

Balancing the scales, perhaps, a little more in favor of good. Not undoing what Bernie had done to gain such knowledge, not justifying it, but perhaps adding my own feather to the opposite side. Bernie had chosen to use the knowledge to bring death. I chose life.

I swam up to consciousness with the bit of knowledge clutched in my mental fist like a pearl. Alek still breathed beside me, his heartbeat fainter now. I pressed my magic into my newfound knowledge, following the unfamiliar patterns and shapes of the ritual with my mind, painting a circle around us in golden light. Magic oozed from me, filling each line as I drew it.

"Alek," I whispered, pouring my will into the circle. "Be a tiger."

Then the circle snapped into place and the hand I held became a paw, too big for my hands to encompass. The man struggling to live beside me became a huge white tiger, his body shoving aside the desk with his weight.

His heart steadied. His breathing evened out. He slept.

Levi and Vivian must have heard me shout with joy as I let the circle fade away. I didn't know what words were coming from my mouth, which languages I spoke to them in. I clung to his paw and rubbed my cheek on his rough fur.

Vivian checked his vitals, drawing blood. She left, but after a few minutes she returned, her face full of awe. When she looked at me, there was a shadow of fear in her eyes. "His body is untainted by poison. He will sleep for a while, I think, while his other self fights the poison, but I think he is strong enough to purge it. The twilight is a powerful place."

"Twilight?" I said.

"Nothing to do with the book," Levi said as he knelt beside me, touching Alek's fur as though to reassure himself that the tiger was real. "It's what some of us call the place where our non-physical self lives. Ezee calls it the Cave, after Plato's work."

His dark eyes met mine, and I was relieved to see no fear in them. Of course, he had known for months what I was. Vivian, not so much. I had a feeling my days of living anonymously as just another low-power witch in a town full of supernaturals were about to be a distant memory after the events of this weekend.

That would be a bridge I'd fireball when I came to it.

"Can we move him?" I asked.

"It's safe to move him," Vivian said with a wan smile. "But I am not sure we are physically capable of getting him out of here."

"I'd like to try," I said. "I'd rather have him at the Henhouse than here. You, too, Vivian. If Eva figures out he didn't die in the quarry, she might come here."

"Eva? The other Justice?" Vivian looked like she might faint. Her face got splotchy and she took a couple of deep breaths.

In my rage and pain I'd forgotten to mention who had shot and poisoned him, and apparently Levi hadn't mentioned it either. Oops.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty sure she's the one killing people and framing wolves. I think she wants the Peace to fall apart. Just wish I knew why."

None of us had answers for that, alas. Yet.

Levi called Ezee and Max. Turned out that three gamers who all played Tetris could figure how to move a tiger out of a small room and into a truck. The whole four people with preternatural strength thing helped, of course. We only had to remove two doors to do it.

I rode in the back with Alek, my cheek pressed to his chest, listening to his heart. In my own heart, the joy of knowing he would survive was fading. In its place rage simmered. White heat flowed through my veins, my magic responding to my mood.

As soon as I was sure Alek would live, as soon as he was okay, I was going to balance the scales another way. I was going to find Eva, and this time, I was going to choose murder.