Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and «seen» in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained, he shrugged and opened the car door for me.

The vampire attack made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the clay hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters' herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys' horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I'd not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.

Just after dusk, with a cold front Mowing through and the temperature dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn't all the vampires'.

Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened to look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going sky-clad for a ceremony, but I wasn't a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn't dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.

When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along with the gold nugget necklace she never removed, Jane climbed to the top of the rock garden, avoiding my herbs with careful footsteps, and sat. She was holding a fetish necklace in her hands, made from teeth, claws, and bones.

She looked at me, standing shivering in the falling light. "Can your camera record this dark?" When I nodded, my teeth chattering, she said, "Okay. I'll do my thing. You try to get it on film, and then you can drive me over. You got a blanket in the backseat in case we get stopped?" I nodded again and she grinned, not the half smile I usually got from her, but a real grin, full of happiness. We had talked about me filming her, so she could see what happened from the outside, but this was the first time we had actually tried. I was intensely curious about the procedure.

"It'll take about ten minutes," she said, "for me to get mentally ready. When I finish, don't be standing between me and the steaks, okay?" When I nodded again, she laughed, a low, smooth sound that made me think of whiskey and woodsmoke. "What's the matter?" she said. "Cat got your tongue?"

I laughed with her then, for several reasons, only one of which was that Jane's rare laugh was contagious. I said, "Good luck." She inclined her head, blew out a breath, and went silent. Nearly ten minutes later, even in the night that had fallen around us, I could tell that something odd was happening. I hit the record button on the camera and watched as gray light gathered around my friend.

If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whorled. It coalesced, thickened, and eddied around her. Beautiful. And then Jane… shifted. Changed. Her body seemed to bend and flow like water, or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light. The bones beneath her flesh popped and cracked. She grunted, as if with pain. Her breathing changed. The light grew brighter, the dark motes darker.

Both began to dissipate.

On the top of the boulders where Jane had been sat a mountain lion, its eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor, the big cat of the western hemisphere sat in my garden, looking me over, Jane's travel pack around her neck making a strange lump on her back. The cat was darker than I remembered, tawny on back, shoulders, and hips, pelt darkening down her legs, around her face and ears. The tail, long and stubby, was dark at the tip. She huffed a breath. I saw teeth.

My shivers worsened, even though I knew this was Jane. Or had been Jane. She had assured me, not long ago, that she still had vestiges of her own personality even in cat form and wouldn't eat me. Easy to say when the big cat isn't around. Then she yawned, snorted, and stood to her four feet. Incredibly graceful, long sinews and muscles pulling, she leaped to the ground and approached the raw steaks she had dumped earlier. She sniffed, and made a sound that was distinctly disgusted.

I tittered, and the cat looked at me. I mean, she looked at me. I froze. A moment later, she lay down on the ground and started to eat the cold, dead meat. Even in the dark, I could see her teeth biting, tearing.

I had missed some footage and rotated the camera to the eating cat. I also grabbed her fetish necklace and her clothes, stuffing them in a tote for later.

Thirty minutes later, after she had cleaned the blood off her paws and jaws with her tongue, I dismantled the tripod and drove to the McCarley home. Jane—or her cat—lay under a blanket on the backseat. Once there, I opened the doors and shut them behind us.

There was more crime scene tape up at the murder scene, but the place was once again deserted. Silent, my flashlight lighting the way for me, Jane in front, in the dark, we walked around the house to the woods' edge.

I cut off the flash to save her night vision, and held out the scrap of bloody cloth to the cat. She sniffed. Opened her mouth and sucked air in with a coughing, gagging, scree of sound. I jumped back, and I could have sworn Jane laughed, an amused hack. I broke out into a fear-sweat that instantly chilled in the cold breeze. "Not funny," I said. "What the heck was that?"

Jane padded over and sat in front of me, her front paws crossed like a Southern belle, ears pricked high, mouth closed, nostrils fluttering in the dark, waiting. Patient as ever. When I figured out that she wasn't going to eat me, and feeling distinctly dense, I held out the bit of cloth. Again, she opened her mouth and sucked air, and I realized she was scenting through her mouth. Learning it. When she was done, which felt like forever, she looked up at me and hacked again. Her laugh, for certain. She turned and padded into the woods. I switched on my flash and hurried back to my car. It was the kids' bedtime. I needed to be home.

It was 4 a.m. when the phone rang. Evan grunted, a bear-snort. I swear, the man could sleep through a train wreck or a tornado. I rolled and picked up the phone. Before I could say hello, Jane said, "I got it. Come get me. I'm freezing and starving. Don't forget the food."

"Where are you?" I asked. She told me, and I said, "Okay. Half an hour."

Jane swore and hung up. She had warned me about her mouth when she was hungry. I poked my hubby, and when he swore, too, I said, "I'm heading out to the old Partman Place to pick up Jane. I'll be back by dawn." He grunted again and I slid from the bed, dressed, and grabbed the huge bowl of oatmeal, sugar, and milk from the fridge. Jane had assured me she needed food after she shifted back, and didn't care what it was or what temp it was. I hoped she remembered that when I gave it to her. Cold oatmeal was nasty.

Half an hour later, I reached the old Partman Place, an early-nineteenth-century homestead and later a mine, the homestead sold and deserted when the gemstones were discovered and the mine closed down in the 1950s, when the gems ran out. It was grown over by fifty-year-old trees, and the drive was gravel, with Jane standing hunched in the middle. Human, wearing the lightweight clothes she carried in the travel pouch along with the cell phone and a few vamp-killing supplies.