I slid my fingertips over my cheek, feeling the thin line, perfectly healed. “What,” I asked for the third time, “happened?” The scar felt weird. I’d always had good skin.

“The Hunt took Cernunnos away,” Marie said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever hurt him like that before.”

“Bully for me.” I kept rubbing my cheek. “How’d I get into the parking lot?”

“I carried you,” Gary volunteered. “The diner was on fire.”

I turned around and looked at it. Sure enough, it was on fire. There were firemen there now, and I realized I ‘d been hearing the sounds of water and steam and men calling to one another since I woke up. Clouds of steam and smoke rose up, and, as I watched, a section of the roof fell in. All and all, I was glad Gary hadn’t left me in there. “Thanks. What happened to the sword?”

Gary jerked a thumb toward his cab. “In the back seat. I thought we oughta leave it in you until the paramedics got here, but Marie kept sayin’ we had to get it out. Guess I’m not much good at sayin’ no to a dame.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you look like the henpecked husband type.” My fingers drifted back to the hole in my shirt, feeling skin through it. It felt perfectly normal. I pulled the collar of the shirt out and peered down. Gary guffawed. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and kept looking.

My bra was a bloody mess, and there was a gash in it. “God damn it,” I said, “that was a new bra.”

Gary laughed again, and I looked up long enough to glare at him. “Sure, laugh. It cost sixty bucks. Goddamned men don’t have to buy goddamned expensive underwear…” I peered down my shirt again. There was no indication the bloody mess on the shirt and bra was from my own bleeding. Breasts, bra, blood, no hole in my chest. Lookit that. I felt like an X-File.

“You kept flashing between living and dying,” Marie said. “I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t live if the sword stayed in you.”

“You were right.” I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.

“So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.

“And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”

“It was magic,” I mumbled.

“What?” Gary laughed again.

“It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.

“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.

“A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”

“Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”

Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”

“Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”

I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.

“You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt was after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.

“I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.

“Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?” I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.

We went to talk to Billy.

Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.

When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.

There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the department look good. I went to the academy, managed to survive it and gratefully slunk back to the garage, there to stay.

A year later, Nichols retired and Captain Michael Morrison replaced him.

Odds are that Morrison and I never would have so much as spoken, if I hadn’t brought my car to the precinct car wash fundraiser. I was not prone to doing that sort of thing: my car, Petite, is my baby, and I prefer to wash her myself, but Billy’s oldest kid begged and pleaded with me, and I was weak in the face of big-eyed nine-year-old boys. So I brought her to the car wash.

How any red-blooded American male could mistake a 1969 Mustang for a Corvette, even an admittedly sexy ‘63 Stingray, I will never understand. But Morrison did, and I laughed in his face. If I were to be totally honest, I might go so far as to say I mocked him mightily, before, during and after laughing in his face.

I didn’t know at the time that he was my new top-level supervisor.

I say that like knowing would have made a difference.

I generally went to some lengths to avoid admitting to myself that I’d behaved like a complete, unmitigated jerk. It was like a horrible, embarrassing reversion to elementary school, where you indicate you think a boy is cute by throwing rocks at him. Once I’d lobbed the first rock, so to speak, I didn’t know how to stop, and the relationship hadn’t exactly improved with time. As far as I could tell, neither Morrison nor I had much life at all outside of the station, so we ran into each other often enough to develop a long-term, standing animosity. We were like Felix and Oscar without the good moments.

So when I’d asked for some personal time off to go meet my dying mother, Morrison’d been in a hurry to tell me that the department could only afford me six weeks of leave, and then they’d have to replace me. I told him I’d be back in a month.

That month stretched to two, then three. When I called to say it was pom? to be another month, Bruce at the front desk sounded downright grim, and told me that Morrison wanted my ass in his chair the minute I got off the plane.

Which was why I was now on Morrison’s side of Morrison’s desk, in Morrison’s remarkably comfortable chair, with my feet propped up on Morrison’s scarred gray desk. I just had to push my luck.

The office was large enough to not be claustrophobic. The door opened against a half wall of windows that let in the mild winter light. Two chairs that fit under the category of “comfy” were on the opposite side of Morrison’s desk, the side I was supposed to be on. Another three folding chairs were tucked around a long brown table shoved under the windows and into the back corner. The table, like Morrison’s desk, was buried beneath chaotically distributed paperwork.