“Robert would’ve read for another half hour whether you gave him permission or not.” Melinda smiled and stood on her toes to kiss her husband, who grinned.

“I know, but now he feels like we’ve entered a conspiracy. It’s a male-bonding thing.”

Mel rolled her eyes in my direction, then tipped her head at the door. I shut it. The room warmed up noticeably within a few seconds. Maybe sweating was an important part of summoning a goddess, although that sent my mind down paths I didn’t think it should follow. I mean, candlelight, sweat and deity-summoning all went together if you were summoning a particular sort of goddess, but Mel’d never mentioned being a disciple of Aphrodite. Of course, she’d never mentioned being anybody’s disciple, so what the hell did I know?

“Since we have four of us, we might as well make use of that. Two men and two women.” Mel dimpled. “That works out well.”

Gary and I exchanged glances. “I keep telling people it’s not like that, but nobody believes me.”

“I don’t tell ’em any such thing. Who’m I to shatter their illusions, ’specially when their illusions set me up with a pretty girl?”

“You could do worse,” Mel told me. “I mean, not that you’ve done badly with Edward.”

The smile that’d come up at Gary’s flattery fell away again while Billy made a small no! stop! gesture toward Mel that I probably wasn’t supposed to see. She looked between us in bewilderment. I muttered, “Yeah, that thing with Thor didn’t turn out so well in the end. We broke up tonight.” Chasing ghosts and cauldrons was a pretty good distraction, but the reminder made me want to crawl in a hole and pull the earth over my head for a while.

Dismay washed over Melinda’s face. “Oh, Joanne. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. What happened?”

“It…” Pulling the world over my head wasn’t going to work, and I had more important things to do than dwell. “It doesn’t really matter very much right now. Let’s deal with the zombie-producing cauldron first.” I caught Gary’s frown and exhaled in exasperation. “Look, teacher-man, I know you don’t like me running away from problems, and I promise I’ll get all maudlin and heartbroken tomorrow, okay? This is more important.” While that was true, it didn’t stop my head from stuffing up like somebody’d filled it with cotton bandages. I snorted snot into a thick murky sinus cavity and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Yeah, that was me, Joanne Walker, Tough Girl. “What do we need to do, Mel?”

She said, “Choose a direction,” and while she was probably talking to all of us, I said, “North,” without thinking about it, which made her smile. Defensive, I said, “What?” and her smile broadened.

“Nothing. It’s just that north is the direction usually associated with finding wisdom.”

Oh, God. My esoteric self was making Meaningful Choices in the midst of my minor emotional breakdown. I hoped the Maker of the world, or whoever’d mixed me up, found that kind of thing amusing, because I didn’t. Melinda pointed to the bar of the circle that pointed north, and I stomped over to it and folded my arms like a sulking child. Which I was.

“East,” Gary said, and I couldn’t help notice that when we were both facing the center of the circle, that put him on my left, beside my heart. Apparently not even the universe believed it wasn’t like that. Jeez.

Melinda was smiling again. “Sunrise, the opening of the ways, the opening of the heart. Bill, I think you’d better take west. It’ll balance us man and woman, and you can be the guide to closing what Gary’s opened.” She stepped up to the circle directly across from me, and power danced over my skin as Billy took his place to my right.

“I thought we were going ask a goddess for help,” I said uncomfortably. “How come this feels a little too much like it’s about me?” I didn’t think I was being egocentric, not when Melinda’d arranged the circle around my initial choice.

“You’re the strongest of us.” Somehow Melinda managed to be reassuring, placating and teasing all at once. “Besides, I could have come up with something equally impressive-sounding if Gary’d chosen somewhere else. Youth to age, if he’d taken the south, man to wife if Billy and I were facing each other. Want me to go on?”

A blush curdled my cheeks. “That’s okay, thanks. What now?”

“We may as well sit down. This can take a while.” Melinda did as she suggested, tugging a pillow beneath herself. Gary and Billy followed suit, but I froze halfway into my own crouch.

Light shimmered at the heart of Melinda’s power circle before she even began speaking, so faint I called up the Sight in hopes of seeing more clearly. For long seconds nothing resolved, only scattered bits of brilliance, like the last rays of sunset on the water. Without really thinking, I knelt and put my fingertips on the chalk outline. Magic sparked as if I’d touched a live wire, a gentle shock that pulled silver-blue power from me. It bolted around the circle, hiccuping with recognition as it touched first Gary and Billy, then whisked around to greet Melinda and meet itself.

Silver shot up, crashing into the ceiling. I looked up for the first time, finding another circle inscribed above us, capturing the magic that poured out of me. A nattering little part of my mind thought I should be afraid: spilling power like that was usually a bad sign. This time, though, it felt more like healing; like it had when I’d tried to breathe life back into Cernunnos’s forest, or like when I shared a bit of my own strength with Gary to shore up his weakened heart. Encouraged, I leaned in to it, pressing my fingers against the concrete.

Magic cracked, an audible sound of thunder, and slammed through the quartered cross. Hints of color that weren’t mine danced in the silver and blue: fuchsia and orange, rose-pink and yellow, and a deeper silver that was somehow different from my own, carrying more weight and confidence with it. The effect was a gorgeous cascade that made auroras pale by comparison.

And something at the heart of it was desperately trying to break through. The nattering voice at the back of my head cried another warning, but something familiar rippled through the encroaching presence: the cool touch of mist, the scent of rich earth, a soft crystalline laughter from an unearthly throat. I breathed, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Power spiked, almost all of it my own, but bits and pieces fed in by my friends. Their trust burgeoned in me, and I lent that to the blazing circle, offering a safe refuge for the traveler.

The boy Rider appeared, pale and disheveled and without his mare. Without the Hunt, for that matter, and, as I frowned at him more carefully, it started to look like he was without mass or physical presence, either. He whispered, “We bring death where we ride, and now death itself has called us to it. Follow me, gwyld. Follow me if you can.”

He winked out, leaving only a glimmer of starlight behind.