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"Why was he doing that." She stopped picking at her skin and looked at me properly. The flat hostility she wears like a jacket had slipped somewhere along the road where she lost her pride and begged for help, and she hadn't noticed. A broken girl was peering at me now. "I filmed you. I sold it to the network to spite you. I got your entire life taken apart on purpose and enjoyed every single moment of it. And that man brought me blankets."

"He doesn't know that part."

"He knows I'm a witch with a price on my head who drove a demon parade up to his front door and put his kid in danger."

"Yeah, well." I leaned back against the doorframe across from her. The tap in the kitchen dripped, the tap, tap, smacking me inside the head like a nail being lodged there. I'd been meaning to mention that tap to Amber for a week and kept forgetting. "He's got four kids and a mate who feeds strangers. Even undeserving ones. Some people are just good and kind for no reason and with no agenda. Go figure, huh?"

Sasha made a noise in her throat and went back to her hair and the blood crusted there. The conversation was over as far as she was concerned. Me, on the other hand, I had a lot more to say but I had to gather my thoughts before I started screaming at her. I poured a glass of water I didn't want, just to have something to do with my hands.

"They came with me," she said from behind me. "Didn't they."

"Yes, they did."

"I lost them at the county line. I know I did. I'm good at that, I've been doing it for two years…"

"They weren't chasing you, Sasha."

"I know that now." It came out high pitched, almost as if she was a frightened child. She pulled the quilt up and turned over to face the wall, which is a thing people do when they're finished with a conversation and also when they're about to cry. I didn't know her well enough to tell which it was.

"Did you see anything else out there?" I asked her back. "On the road."

She took four seconds to say no, which is three and a half seconds too many.

"Sasha."

"I'm tired and I got hit in the head. I think I have a concussion. Ask me tomorrow."

Before I could grab her by her matted hair and drag her outside like the trash that she was, I tightened my hold on the glass of water and walked outside to cool down.

Alex came out onto the porch a little after four.

I'd washed my hands twice in the meantime and they still felt wrong. That tacky feeling under the nails that soap doesn't touch was tormenting me hours later. I had a borrowed sweater on with somebody else's smell in the collar and I was sitting on the top step watching the sky over the tree line stop being properly black. The yard looked plowed. There was a shovel leaning against the porch rail and I'd made sure not to think about what it was for since I sat down.

He lowered himself onto the step beside me and the wood groaned from his weight.

"Kiddo."

"I have to go to the coven on Thursday."

He didn't answer. I watched his hands instead of his face, because I'm a coward. He sat there, forearms on his knees, fingers hanging loosely, and a split across one knuckle he hadn't noticed or hadn't cleaned purposely.

"Don't try to talk me out of it or prevent me from doing it," I said. "Please. I'll lose the argument and I have to go anyway, so."

"I wasn't going to stop you."

That had my head snapping up. Alex Greywood, a hundred-and-four-year-old Alpha, was looking out at his own wrecked property with his mouth slightly open the way people do when they're too tired to keep up appearances. He'd aged five years since the afternoon. There was gray in the stubble along his jaw that I'd swear wasn't there at breakfast.

"You're not?"

"No." He scrubbed a hand down his face, hard, like he was trying to get the tiredness off it with the motion. "I've been sitting in my office since two working out how anything got through wards my grandfather laid, and I keep coming back around to the same conclusion. I don't like where it takes me."

"Somebody told them how to bypass the wards."

"Somebody told them where Jack was sleeping." He said it flat and level. The flatness was so much worse than the growling had been when we fought earlier that evening. "Which means whatever you decide about Thursday, somebody in my house hears it. Whatever you decide about that mark. Whatever your cop finds in his basement."

"I said about nine words about all that in the kitchen." Taken aback, I even glanced around us as if expecting to see someone eavesdropping.

"I'm a hundred and four." Something that was almost his usual grin came, transforming his face, but disappeared too quickly. "I don't do much anymore. I hear everything, though."