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“I’ll be fine,” she replied. “I have a change of clothes at the shop. I had planned to take a couple of books from our library and indulge in a snow day reading feast, but I’ll just pull a couple of books from HGR’s shelves instead. I might even bake a batch of cookies and join the girls for a movie.”

It all sounded normal and reasonable, which was why he didn’t believe her. This was Tess, and she was rarely interested in things that were normal and reasonable.

“All right,” Simon said. “I can—”

“Stop sounding like a pack nurse trying to keep the pups in one place. Go home and work on keeping your own brainless pup from romping outside in a blizzard.”

If she was going to put it that way . . .

“I’ll walk the humans over to the apartments,” he said, his hackles raised a little about being called the pack nurse. He held out his hand. She dropped the key ring into it.

When he got back downstairs, Heather and the Ruthie were returning from the front of the store.

“I finally got ahold of Karl,” the Ruthie said, smiling at all of them. “He appreciates your letting me stay here.”

Simon couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so he led his gaggle of chatty humans to the efficiency apartments. He’d opened up some of the Courtyard stores in order to study humans more closely, to watch them just as Elliot kept watch over the ones who were the city’s government. Looking after some of them made it all so . . . personal. Humans and terra indigene weren’t supposed to be friends. It wasn’t done.

But, somehow, it seemed he had done exactly that.

Meg wanted to savor her first ride in a pony sled, but the wind had picked up, driving the snow and making it hard to enjoy anything but the prospect of reaching a warm, dry place. So she huddled in the back of the sled with Nathan while Jester sat on the seat, so bundled up she had barely recognized him. The only one of them who seemed to be enjoying himself was Twister, whose harness bells jingled and whose clumpy pony feet spun the snow all around him as he trotted down the road.

He might be removing enough snow off the road that someone could drive a BOW all the way to the Green Complex, Meg thought. As long as that someone didn’t wait too long.

Would it make a difference? How would it make a difference? She’d felt edgy, itchy, ever since the snow had started falling, driving Nathan nuts because he picked up the mood but didn’t understand the source. Edgy and itchy, but the real prickling under her skin didn’t start until she saw Simon.

“We’re here,” Jester said, twisting on the seat.

Nathan scrambled off the sled, then waited for her to pick up the carry bags containing the food she’d bought during her midday break. He went ahead of her, breaking a trail, for which she was grateful. She wasn’t quite as grateful when he stopped at her stairs, shifted into that weird and disturbing half-man / half-Wolf shape, grabbed one of the carry sacks, and bounded up the stairs with it.

The stairs were buried under snow, and it would have been hard for her to haul both bags because she couldn’t see where to put her feet, and he had been trying to help. Still, she avoided looking directly at him—and at the parts that weren’t adequately covered with fur—while she opened her front door, stomped off what snow she could, and stepped inside.

Shoving the carry bag into her hand, he immediately shifted back to pure Wolf.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked.

His answer was to choose a spot on the latticework side of her porch where he had some protection from the snow and wind—and where anyone coming up the stairs wouldn’t see him before he saw them.

He lay down and gave her an “Idiot, aren’t you going to close the door?” look. So she closed the door, shrugged out of her wet winter clothes, and hung them in the bathroom to drip.

She put the food in the refrigerator and cupboards, and wondered if anyone would think to check for edibles before they all spoiled.

The prophecies and visions didn’t work the same in the outside world as they had in the compound. Her own experiences, her own memories provided context. That was why, when she saw Simon standing in the Private doorway, she had slipped into that weird kind of vision that didn’t require cutting.

Fur. And teeth. And terrible cold. Then flashes of the remembered images from the visions she had seen about the Courtyard. A storm. Men dressed in black. A sound like motors and hornets. The interior road near Erebus Sanguinati’s home. Sam howling in terror. A white room with that narrow bed. And Simon Wolfgard.

She shifted the images this way and that like puzzle pieces, changing the sequence and searching for clues. She could save Sam. If she followed one sequence of images, she could do that much. After that? She wasn’t going to give in. She wasn’t going to hand over her body like it was someone else’s property. She would fight as hard as she could for as long as she could. The only thing she would gain from fighting was her own sense of being a person instead of a thing, because the end would be the same.

This was the beginning of the prophecy she’d seen about herself.

This was the night she was going to die.

CHAPTER 25

Slow and steady, Monty thought as the cab did a crawl and slide down Whitetail Road. Slow and steady.

Every time they reached a traffic light, he listened to the zzzzzeeeeeeeee of tires spinning as the cars tried to get enough traction to move through the intersection and keep going. When they finally reached the Chestnut Street intersection and it was clear they were going to wait through several changes of the traffic light before the cab would be able to make the turn, Monty said, “I’ll get out here,” and paid the driver.

“I think we’ll get through this storm all right,” the cabby said as Monty got out. “It looks like the snow is letting up.”

Asia listened to the putt putt brrmmm of a BOW growling its way through snow. Then she called the special messenger.

“Simon Wolfgard is headed for the Green Complex. Your benefactor’s property should be there already. Looks like some employees are staying overnight in the apartments above the shops, but there’s no one in the business part of the Courtyard who will interfere with you.”

“We’re all in position. The Stag and Hare is still open and crowded. You can blend in there. As soon as we’ve reacquired the property, we’ll be heading out of the city. I’ll call you.”

Maybe he would call her. She had a feeling she might be conveniently left behind. That was fine. The messenger and his men were just the diversion she needed to acquire the pup and get out of the Courtyard before the Others knew what happened.

She waited another minute, then left the maintenance garage and hurried to the garage that held the BOW Darrell had driven last week.

That space was empty, but when she opened the next door, that garage contained a BOW. She unhooked the vehicle from its power source and got in. The BOW grumbled when she turned the key, but the engine turned over. She located the controls for the lights and wipers. When she turned on the lights, she noticed the power bar showed a thirty-percent charge.

She couldn’t remember how much charge the BOW had used the night Darrell had driven to the Green Complex, and that annoyed her. Asia Crane, SI, would remember that kind of detail from just a glance at the dashboard.