some Skyline chili?' I said, and he hesitated in confusion. 'Go through the drive-through. I have to do some research tonight.'
'Rachel,' he protested as his car gave a cheerful chirp and unlocked. 'I think you deserve at least one night off.' His eyes narrowed and he looked at me over the roof of his car. 'I am really sorry about this. Maybe…we should get the pack contract annulled.'
I looked up from opening my door. 'Don't you dare!' I said loudly in case someone was listening from a top floor. Then my expression went sheepish. 'I can't afford the rider everyone else makes me take out on my health insurance.'
David chuckled, but I could tell he wasn't satisfied. We slipped into his car, both of us moving slowly when we found new pains and tried to find a comfortable way to sit. Oh God, I hurt all over.
'I mean it, Rachel,' he said, his low voice filling the small car after our doors shut. 'It's not fair to ask you to put up with this crap.'
Smiling, I looked across the car at him. 'Don't worry about it, David. I like being your alpha. All I have to do is find the right charm to Were with.'
He sighed, his small frame moving in his exhalation, then he snorted.
'What?' I asked, buckling myself in as he started the car.
'The right charm to Were?' he said, putting the car into gear and pulling from the curb. 'Get it? You want to be my alpha, but have nothing to Were?'
Putting a hand to my head, I leaned my elbow into the door for support. 'That's not funny,' I said, but he just laughed, even though it hurt him.
Two
Dappled patterns of afternoon light sifted over my gloved hands as I knelt on a green foam pad and strained to reach the back of the flower bed where grass had taken root despite the shade of the mature oak above it. From the street came the soft sound of cars. A blue jay called and was answered. Saturday in the Hollows was the pinnacle of casual.
Straightening, I stretched to crack my back, then slumped, wincing when my amulet lost contact with my skin and I felt a jolt of pain. I knew I shouldn't be working out there under the influence of a pain amulet, lest I hurt myself without realizing it, but after yesterday I needed some 'dirt time' to reassure my subconscious that I was alive. And the garden needed attention. It was a mess without Jenks and his family keeping it up.
The smell of brewing coffee slipped out the kitchen window and into the peace of the cool spring afternoon, and I knew that Ivy was up. Standing, I gazed from the yellow clapboard add-on behind the rented church to the walled graveyard past the witch's garden. The entire grounds took up four city lots and stretched from one street to the other behind it. Though no one had been buried here for almost thirty years, the grass was mown by yours truly. I felt a tidy graveyard made a happy graveyard.
Wondering if Ivy would bring me coffee if I shouted, I nudged my knee pad into the sun near a patch of soft- stemmed black violets. Jenks had seeded the plot last fall, and I wanted to thin them before they got spindly from competition. I knelt before the small plants, moving my way around the bed, circling the rosebush and pulling a third of them.
I had been out there long enough to get warm from exertion, worry waking me before noon. Sleep hadn't come easily either. I'd sat up past sunrise in the kitchen with my spell books in search of a charm to Were into a wolf. It was a task whose success was slim at best; there were no spells to change into sentient beings—at least no legal ones. And it would have to be an earth charm since ley line magic was mostly illusion or physical bursts of energy. I had a small but unique library, yet for all my spells and charms, I had nothing that told me how to Were.
Inching my pad down the flower bed, I felt a band of worry tighten in me. As David had said, the only way you could be a Were was to be born that way. The bandage-covered tooth gashes on my knuckles and neck from Karen would soon be gone with no lingering effects but for what remained in my memory. There might be a charm in the black arts section of the library, but black earth magic used nasty ingredients—like indispensable people parts—and I wasn't going to go there.
The one time I had considered using black earth magic, I came away with a demon mark, then got another, then managed to find myself said demon's familiar. Lucky for me, I had kept my soul and the bargain was declared unenforceable. I was free and clear but for Big Al's original demon mark, which I'd wear along with Newt's mark until I found a way to pay both of them back. But at least with the familiar bond broken, Al wasn't showing up every time I tapped a ley line.
Eyes pinched from the sun, I smeared dirt over my wrist and Al's demon mark. The earth was cool, and it hid the upraised circle-and-line scar more reliably than any charm. It covered the red welt from the band the Weres had put on me, too. God, I had been stupid.
The breeze shifted a red curl to tickle my face, and I tucked it away, glancing past the rosebush to the back of the flower bed. My lips parted in dismay. It had been trampled.
An entire section of plants had been snapped at their bases and were now sprawled and wilting. Tiny footprints gave evidence of who had done it. Outraged, I gathered a handful of broken stems, feeling in the soft pliancy their unstoppable death. Damn garden fairies.
'Hey!' I shouted, lurching up to stare into the canopy of the nearby ash tree. Face warm, I stomped over and stood under it, the plants in my hand like an accusation. I'd been fighting them since they'd migrated up from Mexico last week, but it was a losing battle. Fairies ate insects, not nectar, like pixies did, and they didn't care if they killed a garden in their search for food. They were like humans that way, destroying what kept them alive in the long term in their search for short-term resources. There were only six of them, but they had no respect for anything.
'I said hey!' I called louder, craning my neck to the wad of leaves that looked like a squirrel's nest midway up the tree. 'I told you to stay out of my garden if you couldn't keep from wrecking it! What are you going to do about this!'
As I fumed on the ground, there was a rustling, and a dead leaf fluttered down. A pale fairy poked his head out, the leader of the small bachelor clan orienting on me immediately. 'It's not your garden,' he said loudly. 'It's my garden, and you can take a long walk in a short ley line for all I care.'
My mouth dropped open. From behind me came the thump of a window closing; Ivy didn't want anything to do with what was to follow. I didn't blame her, but it was Jenks's garden, and if I didn't drive them out, it would be trashed by the time I convinced him to come back. I was a runner, damn it. If I couldn't keep Jenks's garden intact, I didn't deserve the title. But it was getting harder each time, and they only returned the moment I went inside.
'Don't ignore me!' I shouted as the fairy disappeared inside the communal nest. 'You nasty little twit!' A cry of outrage slipped from me when a tiny bare ass took the place of the pale face and shook at me from the wad of leaves. They thought they were safe up there, out of my reach.
Disgusted, I dropped the broken stems and stalked to the shed. They wouldn't come to me, so I would go to them. I had a ladder.
The blue jays in the graveyard called, enjoying something new to gossip about while I struggled with the twelve-foot length of metal. It smacked into the lower branches as I maneuvered it against the trunk, and with a shrill protest, the nest emptied in an explosion of blue and orange butterfly wings. I put a foot on the first rail, puffing a red curl out of my eyes. I hated to do this, but if they ruined the garden, Jenks's kids would starve.
'Now!' came a loud demand, and I cried out when sharp pings pinched my back.
Cowering, I ducked my head and spun. The ladder slipped, crashing down into the very flower bed they had destroyed. Ticked, I looked up. They were lobbing last year's acorns at me, the sharp ends hard enough to hurt. 'You little boogers!' I cried, glad I had on a pain amulet.
'Again!' the leader shouted.
My eyes widened at the handful of acorns coming at me. 'Rhombus,' I said, the trigger word instigating a hard-learned series of mental exercises into an almost instinctive action. Quicker than thought, my awareness
