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 By the time Phi arrived at the barbecue the next afternoon, bursting to tell her friends her strange news, there was an ominous coil of smoke drifting up to the sky that said someone had let Finn at the coals. As she swung the garden gate open, her suspicions were confirmed by the sight of Mr Farrier wearing an apron and a blackened chef's hat that was only slightly less charred than the spatula he was waving at his son.

 "Finlay!" he roared, quivering like an angry hedgehog, "How many times do I have to tell you? You. Do. Not. Go. Near. Fire!"

 The barbecue appeared to have collapsed, and the coals on the lawn caught fire just as Mr Farrier flung the chef's hat onto the ground - and straight onto the magically enhanced flames.

 There was a soft 'whumph' and everyone hit the floor with tried and tested reflexes as the coals exploded.

 "I was just trying to help," said a feeble voice from the ground.

 Phi got up, and saw her friends similarly dusting themselves off. Celia flashed her a conspiratorial grin, while Riose very carefully brushed dust off his sunglasses. All of them had grimy faces, but with the habit of long experience, Celia plucked some wet wipes out from her bag and handed them round.

 "Don't," advised Jo, scrubbing at her cheeks. "Darling, your little - problem with fire has been around for the last six years. What made you think it was going to go away today?"

 Finn scowled through the layer of soot on his face. "Mum thinks I'll grow out of it."

  "Oh dear..." Mrs Farrier, who had the same outlandish red hair as her son, came out from the house with a tray of food and stopped short. One corner of her mouth twitched but she flattened her expression as Finn's father got up. "Albert, didn't I tell you not to let Finlay near the barbecue?"

 His father gaped, and flung the spatula to the ground. "This is not my fault! I told that little ragamuffin to keep his flammable fingers away from my..." He looked like he was about to cry. "My beautiful new Firemaster 1000."

 "You'd better get the spare out of the toolshed-no, not you, Finlay!" his mother ordered. As Mr Farrier stomped off to the shed, she broke into a wide grin and gestured to them all to sit at the rickety picnic table. "Well, you managed not to destroy last year's barbecue," she sighed, patting her son absently. "I suppose you were due one. Keeps your father on his toes."

 "Sorry," muttered Finn, once more eyebrow-free but unlikely to stay contrite for long.

 "I'd heard of witches who had too much power to control it," was Riose's muffled comment as he dusted soot from his hair. "I didn't believe it till I met you."

 Finn shrugged. "It's only fire. I'm fine with everything else."

 "You're useless with everything else!" shouted his father as he hefted the back-up barbecue across the frizzy lawn. "Just my luck! The one decent talent we've got in the family, and the scoundrel's got so much of it he can't even light a candle without turning it into a national emergency!"

 The witch's face fell, and just to cheer him up, Phi gave him a kiss on the cheek. He brightened, then gave her a sly glance and put on an even more depressed look, bottom lip sticking out as he sniffled loudly.

 Jo patted him on the back. "You're just a firestarter."

"A twisted firestarter," capped Celia, to widespread groans. "I can't believe you didn't stop him, Ri."

 The lamia looked startled. "Don't you remember what happened last time I surprised Finn?"

 The girls exchanged glances. "Yes," they chorused. Riose's clothes had been crisped off his body; the rest of him had been untouched. "Encore," added Jo with a wink.

Despite pointed throat-clearing, Riose turned an unfazed face her way. "So, Phi, how did it go after you left us?"

 "Coward," muttered Jo very softly, but Phi found herself the focus of four intense stares and unable to decide who was discomfiting her most; it was a tie between Jo's citrus eyes and the shrewd knowing of Riose.

 She took a deep breath, let it out, and then the words gushed forth, low and fast. "I think I've met my soulmate."

 The reactions were swift: Finn choked on a piece of tomato, and Celia managed to pound him on the back and gawk at the same time. Jo's surprise was quickly overridden by a wicked, querying smile, while Riose only stared, eyebrows raised and eyes childishly wide.

 Ever the equable one, Riose was first to probe. "What do you mean 'think'?"

  "Good point," Jo agreed in a moment of rare concord. She pointed a breadstick at Phi. "From what I've heard, it's all mystical wonder combined with insatiable lust and fluffy pink clouds. Or silvery cords. Aren't you supposed to look all...starry-eyed and dreamy?"

 "It didn't feel like that at all," she said, mulling over that brief - too brief - contact. "It was more like..."

 The heat had broken over her as suddenly as an African morning, and his mind had been an extension of that, a rough and sandy place where his thoughts shivered like mirages, yet she had barely coasted the edges of it.

 "Being burnt alive," she said without thinking.

 There was a dead silence, before Finn lifted his glass and murmured, "To romance! May we all have the Christian martyr experience with our Wun Twoo Luff."

 "Want to try again, Phi?" suggested Riose, with a little sparkle in his eyes.

 This wasn't going quite as she had planned. "Let's," she said weakly, and proceeded to explain it all, even the embarrassing parts, her face growing more and more flushed as the story went on. All of them were markedly silent, even Finn, who usually would have wolf-whistled and pouted in appropriate places.

 "Okay," the redheaded witch said, no longer slouching over the table. "So...we have an enigmatic pervert who tries to set you on fire, and because you dreamed of him, you think he's your soulmate? Some random-"

 Mistakenly, she attempted to interrupt. "That's not it-"

 "No, Phi, just no!" snapped Finn, a flush to match hers creeping up his neck. "He is not your soulmate, he's obviously a maniac and if you're dreaming of him, isn't it rather clear that it's a warning?" His voice was a deadly whisper, and his eyes were...

 Oh no. Finn's eyes were crackling with witch power, with the dark blue heart of a flame, and in synchronised haste, all of them leapt from the table. When they said Finn had a fiery temper, it was no joke; anyone intending to confront him had learned to do it over the phone.

 "Distract him," muttered Phi from the corner of her mouth. "If his hair goes, we're in trouble."

 What do you mean if his hair goes? Where's it going? demanded Jo silently. The wildcat had cleverly put the picnic table between herself and Finn. I've never seen him this riled.

Lucky you, Phi responded. She had helped Celia to give Finn a makeover while he was asleep in a moment of girly abandon. When he woke up to find he was covered in sparkly green eyeshadow and cherry lipstick, and his hair had somehow gone flamingo pink, he'd been...less than pleased.

 She edged towards the bucket of water next to the barbecue.

"Oh no..." moaned a faint voice: Finn's father had taken his attention from the coals, and was looking distinctly panicky. He scurried off in the direction of the house, with a parting plea of: "Try not to blow up my begonias!"

"Finn, cool it," ordered Riose, hands out.

 "I will not cool it!" hissed the witch, fists clenched. "Some disgusting pervert has been spying on MY best friend-"

 With a sound like tissue paper crumpling, his hair caught fire.

 Phi grabbed the bucket of water and threw it. The fire died with the sound of a giant gasping, and a cloud of smoke rose from Finn. Dripping, he glared through his hair, but his eyes were back to a swirling navy.

 "I'm still right," he said through gritted teeth, spirals of smoke drifting idly from his ears.

 Mrs Farrier appeared from the house, looking faintly worried. As she saw her son, anxiety dissolved into exasperation. "Finlay! You know how I feel about you smoking."

 The witch scuffed his feet. "Sorry. It was an accident."

 Mrs Farrier turned her weary face to the rest of them. "Kids, please - Mr Farrier has a delicate disposition. Try not to upset him any more, I need him to put up some shelves later."

 "Is he okay?" said Celia, ever the polite one.

 Finn's mother rolled her eyes. "He's rocking in a corner muttering about the begonias. I'm sure he'll be fine after I offer to buy him a new Firemaster 1000, and if you lot pretend to be normal for a couple of hours, okay? Then we can all have some dinner." Shaking her head, she swished inside.

"I didn't know you could catch fire," managed Riose, whose cool façade was looking distinctly ragged.

 Finn smiled tightly. "I don't advertise the fact."

 "Doesn't it hurt?" asked Jo, prowling closer to peer at Finn's bedraggled form. "You don't look singed, but..." She prodded him, and yelped as his hair sparked violently.

 "Don't be so twitchy, and no, it won't hurt," he snapped. "It's not a hot flame - that takes more power than I've got. Like when you light alcohol."

  "Don't be barbaric, darling!" They all knew Jo's horror of doing anything so wasteful as burning alcohol; the wildcat much preferred to drink it, especially her lurid and layered cocktails. "So if you're a firebug, could we all wind up as someone's main course if you get mad?"

 Finn shook his head, now smoke-free. She was grateful to Jo for distracting him, but knew the lull was temporary. "No. I'm good at setting inanimate stuff on fire-"

 "You think?" interjected Riose, undoubtedly remembering being left on the middle of the football field sans clothes and with only a, well, a handful of dignity. What a divine sight that had been!

 Finn ignored him. "-but living things require a much larger amount of power. What I have is power that turns into fire - if I want to set someone on fire, I have to be able to flood them with magic, literally replace every drop of blood in their veins with it. It's impossible. Maybe a dragon could do it, but I couldn't even get close."

 The wildcat tipped her head to one side, pursing her icy-pink lips. "So Phi's mystery man couldn't have hurt her, then?"

 Finn's expression switched into a scowl at the mere mention, and she tried to look as unobtrusive as possible. "Well...now you mention it...I don't know. All the heat spells I know warm the air and not the person - for the same reason I can't just snap my fingers and turn you into charcoal, a spell can't warm your body. I could have set your clothes on fire, but I couldn't have dried them."

 "He wasn't a witch," Phi interrupted softly. "He felt old."

 She sighed inwardly as Finn's eyes narrowed, as mordant as his voice. "Oh good. So he's not just a perverse pyromaniac, he's a geriatric perverse pyromaniac."

 "Finn," said Celia in alarming imitation of her mother's stern, ringing tones, "Don't make me tell everyone about what really happened with Mandy Withers."

 The witch mouthed wordlessly. As if the words were yanked from him, he muttered, "Fine. Your soulmate might turn out not to be a reject from the freak show. But if he is, I get to gloat, right?"

 Phi was used to Finn's version of an apology "Yes, you can gloat. So...what is he, then? A vampire?"

 Riose shook his head. "Nope. I've heard of a couple who could light candles, nothing bigger, and definitely no heat. And I don't think it's a shapeshifter skill."

 Jo shrugged. "Not that I've ever heard. We're more talented in the hunting department. Looks like we're down to dragons, and they're nearly all dead or asleep."

 "I didn't see any horns," she reminded them. "Isn't there anything else it could be?"

 Celia raised her hand, a wry smile lighting her. "I have an idea, but Finn has to promise not to burst into flame."

 He pulled a strand of hair through his fingers. "I'm too damp."

 "Good. I think Phi should go back to the lake and ask him."

 Finn gave her a disgusted look.

 "Actually..." Riose gave the human a little approving nod. "That's not a bad idea."

 "Does no one remember the bit where he tried to burn her alive?" asked Finn loudly. Phi had the feeling comments in this vein were going to go on for some time, and knowing Finn, possibly forever.

 "And," added Jo, waggling a finger at her, "find out if he really is your soulmate this time. No more of this 'I think' business. And if he is..." Her wicked smile glittered with promise. "I hear there are some...bonuses from having a man who can read your every thought. Do let us know."

 "Don't let me know," advised Riose with a wink of one turquoise eye. "I know none of you are the chaste, perfect angels I like to think you are, but let me pretend, okay? You'd all be far too tempting otherwise."

 Phi hadn't needed an excuse to go back to the lake; in her heart, she knew she had been planning to return anyway. But somehow - it warmed her to have all her friends' approval.

 "This idea sucks," announced Finn loudly.

 Well. Almost all her friends.

~*~

 Don took the cup from Zeke with distaste contorting his mouth. The brew Avy had demanded he prepare did smell vile, but what was in that cup was more precious than all the gems buried in the earth. She had opened her little bag and handed him the oldest and mot withered of her horns.

  It is no use to me, she told him. But to Poseidon...yes, there is enough power left to make him a marvel among his own. You must powder it, and boil it in water. That will make enough for several weeks.

 Zeke had his doubts about handing even a scrap of dragon power to Don Ivan, but he wasn't the tyrant here, just the slave.

What did you think of his little wife? she had asked unexpectedly. Her thoughts jabbed like starlings at his mind, trying to search out his secrets.

 "Nothing special," he had lied, careful to keep his hands steady as he ground the horn with a mortar and pestle. It crumbled easily; another sign of its age, but the scent that rose from it was pungent, a mix of old blood and earth. "She doesn't like him."

 I wouldn't expect her to, she said tautly. He has considerable charm, but there is something in his mind...something he did to her. But I don't need her to like him. I only need her to be helpless.

 Yes, he had thought in the deep and private cage of his thoughts. You always liked people to be helpless around you. And now you are just as helpless, worn down by time. I know how you hate yourself - I remember how you cried when the first grey hair appeared. How you screamed the first time a man looked at you and thought you ugly.

 And I know you hate me because I will never age, never know the feel of my bones crumbling within my skin; never feel others' pity or hear their revulsion. Hate springs so easily from love, we both know that.

 "She will be," he'd vowed, and wondered why the words were sour in his throat. "She was - curious about me."

Curiosity is not enough. Make her care, Ezekiel, make her chase you - make her yours. Yours and ours.

 Make her mine? He had wondered why the thought sang through his blood. He didn't need to shut his eyes to see her, drenched in moonlight, a pale curving form.

  No one has ever been mine. I have always been someone's. Someone's toy, someone's pet, someone's whipping boy.

 "I will do my best," he answered, and could not conceal the yearning in his voice. Delphine Thetis lingered in his mind, an opalescent phantom who shimmied before him, water trailing down her body.

 He had wondered if she'd taste of the sea, salt and warmth.

 Now, with Don Ivan before him, his contempt radiant in his eyes, he rather thought that if he did this - if he handed Delphine Thetis to Don, she would taste the same, salt and warmth, but it would be tears he drank down, tears and rancour.

 He rubbed his temples: she was just a girl, an ordinary girl, and he had to stop these ridiculous fantasies.

 Don sipped gingerly at the draught. "It tastes like chicken soup," he announced.

 Figures, thought Zeke. It's no good for the soul though.

 The dolphin drank down the rest and dropped the cup to the floor when he was done. It clattered at Zeke's feet, but he refused to stoop and pick it up.

 "You dropped something," he informed the shapeshifter dryly.

 The lagoon-blue eyes narrowed, and like the crackle of storm heat, Zeke felt the power building up in Don Ivan, spreading through his body. "Then you'd better do your job and clean it up, hadn't you?"

 The anger flickered in the back of his head, but Zeke quashed it. No, no, if there was one thing Don Ivan had pride in, it was his overblown dignity. "Your mother might clean up after you, but I won't. You're supposed to be an adult - why don't you try acting like one, and maybe the pretence will stick?"

 He turned to Avy and gave her a little bow; yes, he knew exactly how to get his dear decrepit mistress on his side. "After all," he added, meeting her blind eyes with impunity, "a lady once told me that respect is a better currency than paper and metal."

Clever, my pet, she said fondly, putting him back in his place with that one malicious endearment. Spare me your clumsy manipulations - I do agree that boy is outrageously arrogant. He does indeed need to learn respect. Her voice hardened, sawing a rough line of pain along his skull. But I will teach it, not you.

 Her attention turned to Don, and Zeke tried to concentrate on keeping his feet in a world that had blurred around the edges.

 That power is a gift, Poseidon. What I gave, I can take away and I won't hesitate to if I think you are doing anything to jeopardise my preparations. You came begging to me, not the other way around, and you have been rewarded...and punished.

 Don Ivan had taken a step back, but it was anger and not fear that flared in his face. "You can't do anything to me."

 No, she agreed, her voice strong with amusement. You did it to yourself. Power really is a drug, Poseidon...and powdered dragon horn is an incredibly addictive drug. The effects will wear off in, oh, around three days. I'd recommend you come here before the cramps start, or you may not make it back. Her rattling laughter was a sad echo of the rich sound that had captivated men so long ago. I would hate to lose such influential help.

 "You're lying," the dolphin said, showing what Zeke thought was remarkable stupidity for someone who'd sought out a murderess who harvested dragon horns. "You're just trying to scare me."

 Avy wouldn't like that. She admired confidence, but he knew from long experience she loathed slow learners.

 Three days, she answered tautly. Maybe then you will believe. Get out of my sight, child. Contempt clanged on that last, and he knew that Avy would not be quick to end Don Ivan's misery when he came crawling back to her, begging for more.

 With a swagger in his step that would not last, Don Ivan strolled out of her refuge and into the sultry evening.

~*~

 When everyone else had ambled home, stuffed full of food and only slightly singed, Phi and Finn cleared up the mass of plates. She could tell from the stiffness in his movements that he was still angry. When the last of it was piled high in the kitchen, they escaped upstairs to the relative privacy of Finn's room.

 She grimaced at the mess and stepped tidily over it to slump on the big beanbag he kept in the corner. "You're going to have to stop sulking at some point."

 Finn stuck out his tongue, throwing himself on his bed. "You stop doing crazy things, I'll stop sulking. Deal?"

 She leaned forward. "And what if I'm right? What if he is my soulmate?"

 Puzzlement fluttered in his eyes.

 "Do you think my parents would make me marry Don if they knew I'd found my soulmate?"

 "Oh." The soft sound was left framed on his lips, but he shook his head. "And if they won't let you wriggle out of it 'cause you don't like that moron, do you think anything else will change their minds?"

 Phi was trusting it would - her parents had broken their own engagements because of love; even now, the night that Daniel Thetis had raced through a snowstorm to claim Marie Laveau for his own was a famous pod legend. She didn't even know the stranger by the lake, let alone love him, but she hoped maybe she could convince him to play out the farce with her.

 "It has to," she said tightly. "It's that or the Furies - which would you prefer?"

 "Bloody Riose!" Finn gave her a venomous look. "I can't believe he put that stupid idea into your head. Phi, they're assassins. They don't help people, they kill them. They'll eat you up and spit you right out again."

 "Don said much the same," she informed him, seeing the same hard disbelief mirrored in his face.

 That stopped him: his eyes widened, and his mouth drew into a ruler-thin line. "Ugh. I agreed with the Podfather?"

 Different logic had led them to the same answer, she suspected, but either way, both were wrong. She would handle the Furies because she had to - because there was no other way than this. She had thought long and hard about Riose's words - they'll ask a price - and knew she would trade a part of her soul, her life to keep Don Ivan from her heart and body.

 "You did," she confirmed. "Finn, I can't...I can't marry him. I have to find a way out of this."

 A shiver rolled lazily up her back, followed by another and another, as if the tides were moving in her spine, until she was suddenly shaking.

 "Phi...?" His voice was warm and alarmed, all the anger gone from it.

 The memories had flashed against her eyelids before she could try and stop herself: the flashing scarlet of hungry eyes, the feel of stone scraping on her hands and the strange, twiggy sound as her arm broke-

 "He s-scares me," she managed to stutter out, wanting to offer him some explanation, some way to alleviate the fright in his eyes.

 Finn's arms were around her, solid and just real enough to drag her out of that old nightmare. She leaned into him, grateful for his murmured reassurances, for his lack of questions. Riose would have pried, however gently, would have tried to think it through: that was why she went to him for advice. But Finn just sat there, smoothing the shivers from her with his voice and his calm embrace.

 "Want me to beat him like an egg?" was all he said.

 "No, I want to do it," she muttered into his shoulder.

 He snickered, and that exorcised the last of the tension from her. "Trust you." His tone changed subtly; a rueful note crept in. "And I just bet you aren't going to tell me what he did to freak you out."

 She shifted, and he carefully moved her round so they were sitting side by side against his wall. It was strange how safe she always felt with Finn, even knowing how - well, how flammable he was. His anger was a wild, explosive creature, but it was easy to understand and easy to control if you had a bucket of water to hand. "You'd go nuclear."

 "You can't tell me he doesn't deserve it," he said with a shrug. "I still think he keyed my mom's car. Bit too much of a coincidence, you know? I tell him pink not only makes him looks fat, but also brings out his conjunctivitis, suddenly there's a big eye scratched on the hood."

 Privately, she too thought that kind of pettiness was exactly Don's trademark, but she wasn't going to give Finn an excuse for a vendetta. Don had the support of all the pod boys, and none of them liked outsiders, especially loud-mouthed witch outsiders who 'stole' their women. They had dolphin skins and Neanderthal brains tucked under them.

 "Still," he said eventually, "it's your secret. If you ever want to tell me, I'll listen."

 "I know," she murmured, but didn't add: yes, you'd listen, and then you'd try and hurt him, and if you were lucky, someone might intervene before they drowned you. And then you'd be tried under pod law for taking revenge for something they're all convinced is a hallucination anyway. And pod law favours us, every time.

 "And I still think running after your stalker is stealing all his fun." He gave her a faint grin. "See, that was civil."

 "We'll have to agree to disagree then," she said wearily. She didn't want to have this conversation a thousand different ways, which was invariably what would happen if she let Finn get away with it. "Let's talk about something else, please."

 His eyes rested on her face, and she didn't know what he saw, but it made him nod. If she'd had a mirror, she might have seen the strain that shadowed her eyes and made her skin too pale against the fiery fall of her hair, but as it was, she was just thankful he agreed.

 "Well," he murmured thoughtfully. "I could tell you about the expedition Kirsty and I took to the haunted house out on the Ghost Roads...but I think a story this good needs ice-cream to accompany it..."

~*~

Don Ivan lurched onto the fabled Ghost Roads, a manic grin stretched across his face, his eyes unusually mellow with astonishment. The tonic had slid into his blood stream with the familiar warmth of a friend's smile, sweeping out to his toes and fingertips.

 It will be like a part of your own power, the hag had said. You will be everything you already are - and more, as if you have become more potent - as if a god has leaned down to breath holy air into you, to make your every thought better and brighter.

 What an understatement. What a phenomenal understatement.

 He licked his lips, and that prickling pressure tap-danced on his mouth for minutes afterwards, the barest taste of his incredibly heightened senses. His eyes throbbed in their sockets from the glaring green of the trees and even the air seemed to tingle in his lungs, carrying a hundred scents he had never noticed. He thought that if he wanted, he could reach up and pluck the clouds from the sky to wind around the branches.

 Like a drunk man, he staggered along the paths,  the familiar made new and exciting by the draconic essence that lifted him high, high, higher. Even the ground under his feet was a mass of ridges and contours, and he marvelled in the sharpness of his eyes, the sounds that nearly overwhelmed him.

 Stupid woman, he thought. Stupid raddled crone, giving away power like this for almost nothing! And now that he had it at last, he didn't need her. Repellent bitch, hunched on her throne as if she still thought to rule.

That was his job. He had the way, he had the will and now he had the power. The merpeople would honour him as the greatest king they had known, immortalise him in song and story - and he would lead them back to glory and might, back to where they belonged.

 No one would ridicule them as the jokers, the Samaritans, as insipid or nice or weak. And once Daniel Thetis had stepped down, once Phi was his and the future secure, he would unroll the plan that had formed in his mind so many years ago, when he had seen that the merpeople were incomplete, like half of a broken heart.

 And as he walked deeper onto the Ghost Roads, moving with more confidence as his body grew used to its new limits, he came closer to their opposites, a people equally as fragmented, as desperately in need of the merpeople's solidarity and closeness as the merpeople were in need of their strength and wildness.

 When the pod and the Pack ran together at last, the moon herself would shiver at their passing.

Try to bring more, more then I can handle
Bring it to the table
Bring what I am able

In the absolute stillness of the Ghost Roads, Don Ivan searched.

The dragon power was still searing through his veins, and the night was closing in. If he'd seen himself, he would have been shocked to see a faint gold luminescence hanging around his body, giving him the look of a ragtag angel.

 His enhanced senses could pick up the traces of their scent all around, and in the last few minutes, the smell had become more pungent. They were close, he was sure, and he thought if he cast out his mind like a net, he would find some fierce creatures tangled there. But then he would give away his awareness of them, and there lay his main advantage.

 Last time he'd come hunting wolves, it had been for sport with his cluster of brawling friends. The pod boys had spent their lives rolling from one fight to the next - there was always someone who thought them weak, kind, gullible, who thought they could steal their money and their girls. So many of those fights had been with the Pack.

 But only once had been in the Ghost Roads, and there the pod boys had quickly learned that while they reigned supreme in watery realms, the Pack ruled the woodlands. Unable to tell the Pack's scent from the thick foliage, they had been ambushed and soundly beaten.

 Now, though, he could scent them: a heavy, wild odour of wet fur and mud underfoot, all smoked in blood. It became unbearably strong, and he had to school his face into an appropriate mask of surprise as a woman's voice cut from the shadows:

 "Well, aren't you a fish out of water."

 He had to admire how they had manoeuvred him deep into their territory - too far in to call for help or escape.

 "Does that make you a bitch in the manger?" he retorted snidely, then remembered he wasn't here to pick a fight.

 She moved out of the shadows, her skin bluish in the fading light and her eyes the eldritch green of someone who had spent too long on four legs. Dark hair cupped her face like loving fingers, the dramatic effect superseded by the fact that she was very definitely naked.

 "If you'd like," she said, the purr along the words matched by a light roll of her hips.

 He was amused; behind him, he could hear the patient pad of wolf feet. He might not have come to pick a fight, but the Pack had.

She was rather obvious bait, and even if his superior senses weren't screaming the approach of another wolf, he'd have been on his guard. "That's not what I'd like."

 She moved forward, stamping unnecessarily hard; trying to cover the noise of her friend's feet. "Are you sure?"

 The stalking footsteps quickened, charging; around Don, time seemed to slow, becoming thick and liquid as treacle. There was the change in the air, pushing on his back, and the sound of a body in motion-

 He stepped sideways, pivoting and reaching out his hands with what seemed like ridiculous ease to help throw the wolf past him. It slammed into a tree hard, barely missing the girl.

 "Nice try," he said casually, dusting off his palms. His heart beat as evenly as before until he caught a whiff of their fear on the air, sharp and acid. It woke a savage joy in him. "Not exactly the height of subtlety though."

 The wolf's form shivered and melted into a broken heap of angry boy, glaring up at him with sullen eyes. "How'd you do that?" he demanded, gingerly testing his arms and legs.

 Don gave them a slow smile, wasting a little charm on them. "Be nice and I might show you."

 "What do you want?" That was the girl, her voice hard and practical. Every line of her body was tight now, poised on the balls of her feet.

 He gave them both an even look. "An alliance."

 The stark shock on their faces was everything he could have hoped for. And as the moon floated high into the sky, dolphin and wolves sat down together and spoke of power.

~*~
 
 The dream settled on her like morning dew. It sank into her, shifting her from the limbo between sleep and waking into the dark spirals of memory.

 She breathed in salt air, and opened her eyes.

 The beach was gravelled and small and pitted with rockpools, each cupping a miniature moon in its waters, flickering like myriad blinking eyes. Her feet curled tightly into the stones, trying to anchor herself against a tempest that was brewing in her heart, a storm that would sweep across them all.

 War was coming: she knew it, and so did he.

 He sat beside her with his hands set behind him, legs stretched so the wavelets just brushed his toes. His foot toyed with the water as a cat might with a mouse, darting at the foam, and she relished the playful smile on his face.

 She...through the distant wonder of the dream, Phi rose up, looking through fresh eyes with interest. This wasn't the life she knew: she'd never been to a beach like this, nor was her skin so milky, while her nails seemed to snag the secret glow of the moon and throw it back in pale ovals.

 Who was she? Where - when was this?

 "Zeke, I want you to leave," she said, the scene playing itself out like yarn unravelling. "It's getting dangerous."

  And as the boy turned his face to her, Phi felt a hot wave move through her. It was the boy from the lake.

 Zeke: the name took meaning beyond mere sound. It was a boy beside a lake, with a mind full of mirages. It was eyes that were gleaming with an unnatural copper light, and an impish, quirky smile that faded as he looked at her. It was the faint scent of candle smoke and a heavy, tropical heat that spread even to his voice.

 "It's always been dangerous for me. Nothing's going to change."

 "Everything's going to change." The foreboding knotted her throat, and images flitted through her mind. Times that might be, prophecies she had made, each darker than the last. "You must tell Avy."

 "I'll tell her, but she won't listen. She backs Kheo to the hilt. Shame the hilt isn't in his infernal back."

 No. She had to save at least one of her family. Avy was pompous and arrogant, but she was most politically aware of them all. If she could sway Avy, then maybe the others... "She loves you."

 "She loves Fireblade," he corrected shortly, and pain twisted his mouth. "But I'm as close as she's going to get, so she pretends, and I pretend, and sometimes it's close enough to being true to make us believe."

 Yes, we all do that, she wanted to say. Longing for the dream, we lie and lie and lie so that reality is less ugly. Avy longs for my husband, I long for his sovereign, and you - what do you long for?

 "Even false love is a lever," she said in a low voice. "Please, Zeke, try to convince her. I've dreamed - I've seen such terrible things. I can't stop the war, but maybe I can stop my family from dying-"

 She caught herself, but too late. Always too late.

 The coppery eyes were dull with shock, black in the gloom. "It's certain then? But the diplomats..."

 Her breath rasped in her throat, and every long night of recent times flooded into her thoughts. So many, oh, too many to count. The words tumbled out, and she couldn't stop them. All her frustration and fear were bound up in one rush.

 "I've seen a thousand things, Zeke, and I don't know which will come to pass. The future changes every instant. Three months ago, war was a possibility. Now it's almost certain. I don't know if what I see is a warning of what not to do, or a path I must take, or someone's wishful thinking. I see Fireblade fighting, Bhari and Hael arguing, Kheo throwing off his crown, my sisters dead and dying, my friends fighting with me and sometimes we fight the witches, sometimes we fight each other, and I don't know which is real!"

 She wrenched her hands into her hair, tugging hard. If she pulled hard enough, maybe this horror would be plucked from her, erased and thrown away to rot in the light of day as nightmares ought. The last words, echoing silently about her mind for so many days, were harsh and anguished.

"I just can't tell!"

And then she felt warmth curling up her body. It chased away the nightmares with tropical heat, and she felt Zeke's hands on her forearms, steadying her, sending power through her.

 "All you can do is what you think is right." His eyes were earnest, and she pitied him for his innocence. He had not seen as she had. "War will come, we all know it. Kheo wants the witches gone. But Hael doesn't - he made them, he won't let them be destroyed so easily. You won't either. Without you, the Five are crippled. Hold on, you have to hold on."

 Aching with the promise of loss to come, she let him think his comfort had worked. "Talk to Avy."

 "I will," he assured her. He got to his feet. "I have to go. I'm due to meet Fireblade, and if I'm late...you know how it goes."

 More than anyone else, she knew. On his legs, the faint shadows of bruises for those who cared enough to see.

 Without so much as a goodbye, he left, and she was momentarily hurt. Then she gasped as orange light danced on top of the waves, moving like the waters of heaven and sending thick curls of steam to carry the beloved scent of the ocean to her. Suddenly the gloom was gone, replaced by darting fires that moved like a shoal of strange fish under the surface.

  She turned to thank him, but he was already out of sight. The lights were fading, but the image stayed with her for a long time: fire and water, making something of beauty.

~*~

 The small neat building that lurked on the wild edges of the Ghost Roads had become known as a haunted house. Night-time rovers spoke of screeches and unearthly moans, while thrill-seekers skulked in the undergrowth hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghoul or boggle, and the intrepid ventured into the shuttered house.

 Iry Lupine, local werewolf, long-time cynic and the closest living creature to the ghostly cottage, had been asked what he'd heard. His blunt reply: "Two people havin' a damn good time."

 His remarks were dismissed as characteristic scepticism, and the haunted house became just as infested with the breathing curious as the spectral dead. To a certain extent, both were right: the house was indeed inhabited, and the bleak aura of death that hung about it was no fiction, but the man who made himself a home in this nest of shadows was very much alive.

 And right now, he was dangling upside down from a tree.

 From the grainy depths of dirt on the ground, a mobile phone rang.

 A pair of eyes squinted down. They were a bright, focused blue, like a splash of winter's lifeblood, and right now, they were glittering with mild displeasure. Against the pearled whiteness of his skin, they blasted out at an empty sky, matched only by the shocking blue of his hair. His expression showed the faintest trace of annoyance, and the fullness of his mouth was indented by two curving canines.

Blue Malefici, suspended from a rope snagged around his ankle, muttered something that would have made a child's eyes pop. In keeping with Murhpy's infamous law, some moron always called when he was tied up. He reached out and used a deft flick of ice-blue power to flip the phone into his hand.

 The caller's name flashed once, twice, as 'Don't Stop Me Now' jangled out onto the still forest air. Somehow, he wasn't surprised she was calling; after all, no one else would have the sheer gall to lay traps around his own house. In a way, it was charming and certainly inventive. Maybe he'd make his revenge less...cutting.

Blue snapped open his phone. Had the local people seen the famed Demon Fury at that moment, they might have doubted the truth of the horror stories.

 "Morning."

 "So it is." The woman's voice, low and slow, was carefully polite, forcing a distance between them that was mere illusion. "How are you?"

 "Well hung," he said dryly. "As I expect you know. Ingenious snare. I particularly like the way you appear to have made a rope out of rock, though I must say, it does chafe."

 There was a brief silence on the line, then he heard the burr of amusement in her words. "It's a useful spell. But I'm not calling to gloat." After a moment, she added, "Much."

 The blood was beginning to thump in his head, forming a painful pool at his crown. "Get it over with."

 She hung up.

 The undergrowth rustled behind him, and he rotated awkwardly to see her step from the path, a smile tipping up the corners of the mouth that he had laid kisses on when they last parted. Bitter kisses, tracing the edges of her lips as a torment, just to see the pain form tired spiderwebs over her eyes and feel some strange, sweet pleasure ring in his heart.

 They had that much right about the Grieving Fury; her soul stood in her eyes, bare to anyone with the skill or the sorrow to see it. But for the rest...the rumours he had spread were a bundle of contradictions, designed to confuse and contort.

His witch took a good look at his plight, then whipped out a camera and took a picture of it for posterity. Undoubtedly that piece of artistry would be framed and displayed at the soonest opportunity. If it was anything like the last time he'd been caught out, Vaje Chusson would be wearing it on a T-shirt next week.

 "Whatever it is," he began, slowly curling his body up to try and reach his ankle, "it must be important. After all, there are only two reasons you seek me out, and you don't look faint with lust."

 Along the soulmate link, her emotions moved like jittery colts, shying from something that he didn't yet know. She was a deep, cool green on his senses, pine and oak leaves mingled into an enduring vitality, and as familiar to him as the weight of his skin on his bones.

 "Hanging upside down might do it for bats, but not for me," she informed him, sharpness unsheathing like a cat's claw.

"Pity," he remarked, and bent almost double, grabbed the rope and used it to haul himself upright, if still shackled. Now he could see the frown entrenched in her forehead. "Serious?"

 "Aspen rang me last night. He wanted me to look up the breaking of blood-oath."

 He fed a little power into the rope, seeking out a weakness. "Martin knows better than to swear silly oaths, with the exception of that ring he seems determined to leave on Tamara Slone's finger. And he knows blood-oath can be broken."

 She craned her neck to watch him, soot-black hair slithering over shoulders that were white as clouds, and he found himself caught by the almost imperceptible push of her pulse in her throat, beating the same rhythm as his own heart. Even now, the small motions of her very life could fascinate him.

 "He wanted to know how," she said, and there was a grim note on the last word. "I had the distinct impression he wants us to help someone."

 "Charity is a virtue, but we are most assuredly vices," he said, finally finding a fracture in the rope. He twisted his own power into the gap, using it like a crowbar. "However, I might be prepared to make an exception."

 The rope shattered into gravel, and he landed lightly on his feet, pebbles clattering about him.

 Startlement had erased the lines from her face, though he knew it was surprise at his words. "You'd...help?"

 He shrugged. "Delphine Thetis is an extremely influential figure in the local pod, whether she knows it or not. Nightfire stands to gain more than it will lose."

 Dumbstruck, she stood agape a moment, and he enjoyed the bemusement in her eyes. "How did you know-"

 "The mer have tangled with us on a number of occasions. You'd be well advised to check your own archives for meetings with them. They're children of the Burning Times as surely as you are."

 The mention of the ancient dragon wars made her eyes widen. "What has that got to do with anything?"

 "Everything," he answered. "I take it you aren't prepared to grant her request - if she chooses to ask us."

 "No." The denial was firm; in business matters, she was implacable, and however much he despised her endless concern for the insignificant and unfortunate, he admired her professionalism. Reluctantly. "I've read the files. Last time we gave our...help, the results were disastrous."

 "Which is why the decision rests on a majority," he completed smoothly. "I'll be interested to hear what Therese says."

 His witch gave a long-suffering sigh. "She won't decide until the request is made. Then she wants a meeting - us and Delphine. Her brother's snarled up in this."

 Unsurprising. Riose Orage had had the makings of a fine assassin, with a precision and unflappable logic that allowed him to manipulate the nastiest situation to his ends. A considerable dash of the charm his sister lacked had greased his way.

 And then...he had turned his back on it all, displaying a disturbing streak of sentimentality. Sometimes Blue wondered what had prompted Riose to leave, what could hold more thrill than dancing on the edge of danger, flirting with death like a lover, and cuckolding it with as little care.

 Most of the time though, he just didn't care.

 "Then we'll have to wait and see." He turned towards his house, digging out the keys. "Read up on the mer. Even I clawed my way through that load of paperwork."

 "It won't change my mind."

 He threw a glance back at her, a hesitant dryad among the grove trees, his stormy days and Sunday blessings. "I didn't think it would."

 He left her to mull over those words. His mind was already playing out this delicate game with Delphine Thetis with the care of a chess player, moving, switching, endlessly considering how best to gain.

 He knew the dark, despicable secrets of the mer. The question was...did Delphine?

~*~

 The boy who had turned his back on the Furies walked into the local ice-cream parlour, scrubbing sleep from his eyes. Riose wasn't a morning person, but Celia's promise of a sundae breakfast had lured him from the comfort of his bed.

She was sat in a booth, already halfway into a chocolate-smothered confection and flicking through a magazine.

 He paused, drinking in the focus in her face, the careless fall of her hair that she brushed back time after time. Her eyes were the lovely cool colour of a hawk's, pale as cider and always fizzing with life. If sometimes Riose wondered why he was so drawn to her hedonism and passion, he put it down to his spartan childhood and the sterile training of the Furies.

 They'd never understood why he'd left them for what they called 'human pretensions', and he'd never been able to explain. Looking at Celia now, he thought perhaps he could find the words.

 She was so absorbed that she didn't notice he was there until he whipped the spoon from her hand and stole a mouthful of ice-cream.

 "Hey!" She snatched back the spoon and gave him a whack on the knuckles. "I already ordered yours. It'll be over in a minute."

 He slid into the seat opposite her. "How come I have to wait?"

 "Because you bitched about how melted it was last time," she retorted, and wound some chocolate syrup round the spoon. "Aspen rang. He wants me to come over tonight. You're invited."

 Despite the relaxed atmosphere, she sounded terse, and stabbed the ice-cream with more ferocity than was necessary.

 "He's got an answer then," he murmured, more disturbed than he wanted to admit. "I thought he'd remembered wrong. I didn't think you could break an oath like that."

 Celia shrugged. "If anyone was going to have the answer, they would."

  That was certainly true. It was just...he didn't trust their solution. And he was going to do everything he could to make sure Celia was free of the Furies' clutches. "We'll see. Even if they do know how to do it, there's no guarantee they'll help Phi."

 "There's no guarantee of anything in this life," she said in prim tones that were a perfect mimicry of her mother. "Death and taxes, Ri, and our psychotic friends are the worst of both worlds."

 He saw his opportunity then. "Speaking of psychotics...what do you think about Phi's mystery man?"

 Celia grinned. "Now, now, Ri, give the voyeur a chance. He sounded cute. I want one."

 Cute. Sometimes, he didn't understand humans at all. "He could be anything, Cee. Finn's right to be worried."

 She raised a slender black eyebrow and pointed the spoon at him. "Or he could be her soulmate."

 "That doesn't make it any less dangerous. If anything, it makes him more of a threat." There was one thing he knew about the soulmate principle: it could be used to break as easily as to mend. "Having that kind of power over someone...who knows what he wants?"

 She gave him a look, thankfully blotted out as a mound of ice-cream was placed in front of him. "Maybe he doesn't want anything," she suggested acidly. "Maybe you're being a pessimist, as per usual. For all we know, he's just one of the Pack who got curious about her. Or someone shy with a crush."

 He didn't want to play the game of if, a game that inevitably ended in disappointment and deception. Instead, he decided it was a good moment to try out the only practical suggestion he and Finn had come up with during an intense discussion. "Either way, I don't think she should go down to the lake on her own."

 Her glare intensified, until he thought he felt his eyeballs boiling dry in their sockets. He'd never met another human who could make him squirm like Celia. The instant her stare moved from aggravated to what he privately classed as thermonuclear, he wanted to crawl under the table and cower.

 "You can't tell her to stop going," she snapped. "We both know it's about the only time she can go there without running into one of the pod."

 "I wasn't going to tell her to stop," he offered meekly. "I was just going to follow her."

 She snorted. "No."

 "But-"

 "No."

 "The pervert-" he tried.

 "No," she said, and her stare moved up to Ass-Kicking Alert. Riose gave up. Well, he gave up trying to get her approval.

 "So, any good tips in there?" he enquired slyly, tapping the magazine with his spoon. He craned his neck, reading the tagline. "Oh dear - 'The Divine Feminine: Turn yourself into a Sex Goddess in Ten Easy Steps'?"

 "Sssh, it's entertaining," murmured Celia around a mouthful of caramel delight.

 Riose gave her an affectionate look. "Cee, hate to tell you, but you're already a sex goddess. Or hadn't you noticed Will Ratner drooling every time you lick ice-cream off your fingers in that...provocative way?"

 "It's not provocative!" she dissented with a wave of her hand. "I just don't want to waste good ice-cream."

 Riose, who had always been thoroughly appreciative of the way Celia treated junk food like it really was an organic experience, held his tongue. And as he sat listening to this delightful human reading out the article in her best plummy tones, he thought of the shadowy life he'd once had, coloured in shades of grey and red, and felt only the tiniest stab of regret.

 And as he sat there, sun slowly warming his face through the window, ice-cream pooling in the bowl, Riose Orage couldn't have been happier.

~*~

 Phi woke quite suddenly, blinking away the afterimage of watery fireflies. That was her ceiling, and she swung her feet onto carpet and not gravel. Even so, she felt disoriented and vague.

 Who was that woman? She knew which war it must be, even though it seemed impossible: the names had given it away. Bhari, Fireblade, Kheo - the architects of the Burning Times. The last wild and fervent swansong of the dragons, who had destroyed themselves in civil war, though there had been nothing civil about it.

 That was when Ryar had made the mer, hoping something would survive the wreckage.

 But surely Zeke couldn't be that old - he just couldn't! That would make him...gods, nearly thirty thousand years old. That was insane. Unbelievable. Nonsense.

 You don't even know if it was true, she told herself. You want to know about him so much - why shouldn't your mind conjure up a pretty legend for him? It's all very romantic, isn't it? Casting him as the hero, saving this woman's family.

 Troubled, she put the thought of him out of her mind and went down to breakfast.

 Her father was sitting at the table, a newspaper in front of him and tired lines on his face. Around his cup of tea, his hands were rigid and his usual smile was missing.

 "Morning sweetheart," he said in an odd flat voice. "I think we need to have a little chat when you've had breakfast."

 Her stomach roiled, chasing away any appetite she'd had. He looked so serious. "Let's have it now."  

 He gestured her to sit down. "Your mother tells me you aren't happy with your marriage."

 Your mother shouted at me, she translated mentally, and prepared herself for a tough conversation. "I'm not."

 His face sagged, and he rubbed at his cheeks as if trying to scour away the expression. "I thought...you and Don...I thought you were..." He made strange twisting motions with his hands, not unlike an amateur magician, and when no rabbit materialised, she realised what disturbing fact he was trying to convey.

 "Together?" she squeaked indignantly. "But...you know I hate him!"

 He grimaced. "Your mother and I used to argue all the time too - we'd insult each other, play pranks, I'd pull her hair. It was our way of pretending there was nothing going on. She was engaged to Laurie, and I was good as promised to Michelle Thelasso, and...you and Don seemed the same. I thought maybe you didn't want us to know."

 "You seriously thought I was sneaking off to, to, play at sweaty snugglebunnies with him?"

 He spat out his tea, and she realised that she'd just suggested she had a sex life to her own father. Oh god. "I've never heard it put quite that way," he said faintly.

 Silence reigned supreme, claiming a brief empire in the Thetis household.

 "Sweaty snugglebunnies," he murmured, as if hypnotised by the phrase. An unruly blush rose in her cheeks. This was high on her list of conversations she had hoped never to have. "Sweetheart, you do have the most...disturbing turn of phrase. Though your mother used to call it-"

 "No!" she squealed, clapping her hands over her ears. "There is such a thing as too much information!"

 He chuckled, and it banished some of the tension from the air. "All right, all right." Sober again, his eyes were soft. "I am sorry, Phi. When your mother saw happiness, I thought it meant now, not in the distant future. But you know...I think you will come to love him. I don't see what else it could mean."

 Any one of a thousand things, she thought. But it was time to unleash her last defence, and she hoped that her father of all people would understand. He too had broken with convention for the sake of love.

 "What if there's someone else?" she asked tentatively.

 His eyes widened. "Phi...?"

 She swallowed hard. "What if I love someone else?"

 They stared at one another, and she saw herself in his face, in the startled line of his mouth and the slope of his nose. "Do you?" he said finally.

 Then the lie struck her. She knew he would never accept a chance meeting with a stranger, but someone she had known all her life...? Yes, that might wash. "Dad, it's Finn."

 He put his head in his hands for a moment, and she thought all she would see would be disappointment. Instead, when he looked up, there was resignation and the faintest of ironic smiles. "I thought it might be," he sighed. "Him or that vampire you're so fond of."

 Riose would never be able to keep up a pretence for long. Well, not the pretence of affection. He wasn't a tactile person, and she needed Finn's brand of flash and dazzle rather than Riose's subtler affection.

 "If you're certain, I can hardly stand in your way," he continued, regret heavy in his voice. "I may be a gambler and a maverick, but I'm not a hypocrite."

 "A maverick?" she repeated, baffled. "I've never heard anyone call you that."

 "You wouldn't have." His eyes were sad, and for the first time, she saw a man who was a stranger to her - a man hard enough to have turned his back on pod tradition for nothing more than the flighty whim of love. A man who wore his grief under his skin, rarely letting it show on his face - until now. "We agreed that we would try to keep you children free of what we'd done."

 What they'd... "What do you mean?"

 He closed his eyes, and she thought with a cold shock that this was how his death mask might look: old and rugged, terribly sad. "Phi, if you really mean to do this, if you honestly cannot bear Don - if you are prepared to break blood-oath, I want you to know what it means. I want you to go and talk to two people for me. Today, if you can."

 This was...weird. There was a note in his voice she had never heard and was unable to interpret. That strangeness made her stomach flip over, neat as a salmon leaping. "Okay...who?"

 "Your godmother, and Iry Lupine."

 Jessica Arryn, her bubbly godmother, was pushing ninety from the wrong side, and still pushed men into the lake to 'test their reflexes' as she put it, though everyone knew that what she meant was 'eye up the talent'. She'd only seen her godmother last week, and of course at the funeral, but she couldn't imagine why she was being sent to her.

 Iry Lupine, the infamous lone wolf of the valley, was even more of a mystery. How did her father know him? The Pack and pod had been at loggerheads for years and Iry was the most cantankerous and paranoid of all the werewolves.

 "Why them?" she asked. "What can they tell me that you can't?"

 "In many ways, they remember it all better than I do," he answered vaguely.

 "Remember what?" The same thing that hurt him so, she guessed, and stamped the trials of every year so clearly on his features.

 "Go and see them," was all he said. "Then decide what you want to do."

 Confused, she went to fetch the phone and retreated to her room to brood over what it might all mean.

It was time to tell Finn his dream had come true.

~*~

 "WHAT?" screamed Finn down the phone. "Phi, are you kidding me?"

 "No," she said meekly. "You're the only person he might believe."

 She heard strange noises on the other end of the phone. It sounded like he was hitting something. Hard. At last, breathless, he came back on the line. "You're nuts. Your mother will go spare. She'll never bake me cookies again. My cookies...Phi, think of the sugar."

 "He's not going to tell her," she answered, ignoring his typical melodrama. She was quite proud of her neat plan. "He wants to meet you and have a chat. Make sure you're serious."

 "Serious?" he shouted, a crescendo arcing over the line. "Serious about murdering you! This is massive abuse of our unfortunately platonic friendship! Not to mention the fact that I have a date with Hannah Dresden on Friday and it's going to be very hard to explain that I'm pretending to be madly in love with you."

 "It only needs to be long enough to persuade my dad," she coaxed. "And you're the only person I could trust. Think of how infuriated the pod boys will be! You'll be wonderful."

 Silence. "Your shameless flattery may be working," he said reluctantly. "Tell me more."

 She smiled. She'd known he'd cave in, if only because the opportunity to wind up the pod's possessive men was too good to pass up. The witch had become their personal nemesis after convincing three of the pod girls to let him take them to dinner and then introducing them to various of the local Nightpeople who had been too safety-conscious to approach them around the pod.

 "Well," she said, "he wants me to go and visit some people first. But if you could just hold my hand, and kiss me on the cheek, and things like that."

 "So...no ravishing you on the dining table, then?" he inquired innocently.

Typical Finn. "That's unhygienic."

 "If that's your only objection, I'll bring a tablecloth."

 "You're insufferable," she informed him. "But fantastic."

 "All right," he said grudgingly. "I'm in. Just think - ten years, and all it took to hurl you into my open, adoring arms was Don Ivan proposing. If I'd known, I'd have gone to pick rings with him. We could have made it a girly day out. We'd have got coffee and compared notes, and I'd have painted his toenails, and plaited his hair, and-"

 "Try not to say things like that around the pod," she interrupted dryly. "This won't work if you're dead."

 "You ruin all my fun," he teased. "Ring me when you need me to play your loving boyfriend, okay? And if you still have to go running after your lakeside weirdo - be careful."

 "I will," she promised, knowing it wasn't the answer he wanted.

~*~

Phi was a frequent visitor to Jessica Arryn's ramshackle bungalow, and had been ever since she was a child. Once, her unconventional godmother had looked after her when her parents were performing pod duties. Later, when her mother had first become bedridden, it was to take her away from a house that began to have the lank feel of sickness about it.

Not today.

 She was ushered into the sitting room, the old dolphin shooing away her offer of help with a dry, "I'm not in my dotage yet, Delphine! Give me a few more years before you write me off as decrepit."

 "I hadn't-" Phi began to protest before she saw the merry glint in Jess Arryn's eyes.

 "I know you hadn't," she was reassured. "Unlike most of those tykes. Huh, your hair goes grey and they think you've had it!"

 Like many of the mer, Jess's hair had turned a burnished silver long before any age began to show in her face. True to form, she had refused to accept maturity gracefully. Only her hands were truly old, liver-spotted and shaking a little as she brought Phi a cup of tea.

 "So," her godmother said, leaning back in her favourite chair. "What brings you here, my darling? You don't usually call without warning."

 She took a breath and let it out. "Dad sent me."

 "Did he now. And why might that be?" As brown as the silt of the Nile, her godmother's eyes were shrewd as ever, and a rueful smile hooking up her mouth said she might know the answer already.

 She remembers it better than I do, her father had said - what a bizarre comment. He was forever saying that every moment with her mother was clear as daylight, so what could he mean? "He...he sent me to ask about him and mum. He wants you to tell me what it meant."

 Mrs Arryn tapped a thoughtful finger on her mouth. "I thought he might. I told him you weren't going to accept Don Ivan, but the optimistic fool went ahead with it anyway. Mindless, that. He's always been a slave to your mother's wishes."

 It was a shock to hear her father denigrated so, and it made anger rise up in her throat - and then a thought popped into her head, small and nasty: but he still wants you to marry Don.

 "What did he mean?" she asked quietly.

 Her godmother sighed. "You have to understand, it began long before your mother and father were born. And it began with Aurora."

 "Aurora?"

 Jess reached for a picture that stood on the mantelpiece and handed it over.

 It was a watercolour, drawn with a stark simplicity and bold colours that made it all the more vibrant. A portrait of a girl, with red hair and smoke-grey eyes that glanced coyly at the artist, half-smiling. Phi had seen it before and thought it a badly-done painting of herself.

 "But she-"

 "Yes, the similarities are...uncanny." Jess's voice was low, rough with emotion. "She would have been your great-aunt."

 Startled, Phi looked her straight in the face and saw a curious vulnerability quivering there. "You knew her."

 "She was one of my closest friends. Seeing you...for all of us who were there, it reminds us of her. We love you for many reasons, my darling, but I would be lying if I said you don't bring her to life again. I look at you, and I remember better times. Maybe I'm just getting old, and every piece of the past seems better, but I don't think so."

 "What does this have to do with my parents?" she asked, baffled. If this Aurora was her great-aunt, she must have been around Jess's age - long before her parents were even born.

 "Her death was the catalyst for change in the pod. Massive change. Bear with me, Phi. It takes some telling. Even when I tell myself, I sometimes wonder if it all happened."

 Somehow, she had known Aurora was dead. The almost lost tone her godmother used had betrayed it.

"There are two things you should know about Aurora," Jess said slowly, her eyes staring through the wispy layers of time into that golden-tinted age. "The first - the least important - is that we adored her. She always seemed brighter and bolder than anyone else, or maybe that's just how I remember her. She was a thrill-seeker, always looking for adventure, and more often than not, she found it. The cleverest person I ever met, but...she could be cruel, too. Especially when it came to men. It was as though she needed them to know she was better, smarter, quicker, and so sometimes she'd play with them. She thought it clever and dreadfully funny, but it was cruel."

 She paused, and her mouth twisted. "And the second - she was the first child of the Pack and the pod."

 ...what? Thunderstruck, Phi could only stare. "But the Pack hate us."

 "Now they do, yes." A sad smile creased her mouth. "But then, it was different. We mixed together - we drank together, we ran together, we sang together. And eventually - inevitably, really - there was a marriage. No one expected any children, but then Aurora was born. And no one expected her to have to any power, but she turned out to have more power than any of us."

 If it had been anyone else, Phi would have accused them of spinning stories. "Was she a wolf or mer?"

 "Both. The witch who examined her said she could be one or the other - but after the first time she shapeshifted, she would be stuck with that form. It seemed something of Ryar did linger in us after all. As it happened, Aurora chose dolphin form, but it didn't really matter. She was just as much part of the Pack as she was pod. She was everything that was wild and free in us, everything passionate and hungry. The best and worst of us all."

 "What happened?" she asked, eager to hear, enthralled by the wonder and love in her godmother's voice.

 The faded eyes filled with sadness, overlaying the nostalgia in a dreary film. "He happened. That was the summer that the boy came."

~*~

 Things had been different then: she had been young, for one thing. Jess Arryn had been one of the riotous darlings of the pod, forever wreaking havoc with her three witch friends, and the other. The fourth: the one they pretended had never existed now.

 Aurora had been her closest friend, yet now was irrevocably furthest from her. Untouchable, she lay beyond reach, living only in the memories of the pod and the boy who stole away the summer.

 Aurora had been a beautiful girl, with a careless laugh and endless mad ideas, and people gathered around her as if they could warm themselves on her spirit. Snaky red hair made her exotic and her mouth was nearly always smiling, even if the words that came from it were dagger-sharp. Charm and tenacity and artfully applied cosmetics got her whatever she wanted.

 And the summer that the boy came, the last Indian summer, Aurora decided that what she wanted was him.

 He just appeared at the lake one day, a stranger with an aloofness to him that too many people mistook for timidity. His copper eyes were like nothing they had ever seen, and sometimes when she glanced at the shore, Jess thought that they shone like flames.

 Things were simpler then - strangers weren't to be feared, just dragged into the boisterous banter of the shapeshifters. So every day, the pod would try and coax him into the lake, and the pack would invite him to run with them, and every day, the boy refused with a little smile. But he'd sit a little closer, and sometimes comment on their chatter, and gradually they broke through what they all thought to be shyness.

 His name was Zeke, and he came from a distant place that he didn't like to talk about. He was a shapeshifter, but his power wasn't like anything they had ever felt: he was raw and crackling, deep umbers and burnt sienna. Sometimes, when she sat near him, Jess could feel heat radiating from him like a fever.

 And he seemed to light a fever in Aurora. Here, at last, was a man she couldn't win. He would answer her politely, and chat to her with the same equable respect he gave everyone, but his eyes never lingered longer than was correct and almost everything about him remained locked tight inside his head and heart.

 He was a challenge, like a butterfly caught in old amber waiting to be chiselled apart.

Determined now, Aurora redoubled her efforts. And gradually, bit by bit, as the sight of red-haired wolf and stranger became familiar, she pushed past his barriers. She unravelled his secrets - though what they were, no one but Aurora ever knew.

 As the summer wore down, baking slowly into autumn, Jess and Aurora drifted apart. Tangled up with the copper-eyed stranger, she no longer ran with the Pack or came to the pod's evening meets. Her curiosity had been overtaken by a dreamy infatuation; a huskiness in her voice when she said his name, though that was all she would say about him.

 Soon, she was as much of a stranger to them as Zeke. In the space of a season, she became a voluntary pariah, walking strange paths with him, hinting of secret places and dark desires.

 Only two people tried to win her heart back: Iry Lupine and Jess met several times, trying to understand where their fiery wolf had gone, leaving this dreamy star-crossed drifter in her place. They tempted her with meals and parties, engagements and weddings, evenings in and evenings out.

 But mundane as they were, neither of them had half the appeal of the boy with the fever-bright eyes.

 The last time they saw her, she was wistful and cryptic, a fey vision of her old self. The snaky red hair was utterly untamed, so tangled that Jess begged Aurora to let her comb it. Her make-up was gone and she seemed flushed and intense, her eyes too big and bright in an otherwise pallid face. Her only colour was in those bright stripes on her cheeks, and the rest of her seemed bleached and shrunken.

 She spoke of love and loss, of sacrifice and longing, of times gone and times to be. And she spoke too of one other thing - of wishes and ashes, as if there were no difference between the two.

 They begged her to stay, but she refused. Iry caught her as she turned to leave, a fear in his eyes that would be mirrored on every face all too soon. He'd loved her, poor fool, and maybe if the boy hadn't come, Aurora would have run with him under the blind moon, singing out the footsteps of their lives.

"You're burnin' up!" he'd gasped, dropping her arm as if it were cherry-red iron.

 Those eyes, the same sweet green as summer grass, had glowed. "Not yet," she said softly, "but soon."

 The next day, Aurora was dead and the boy was gone.

~*~

 "How did she die?" she said, morbid curiosity getting the better of her.

 There was a shininess to her godmother's eyes. "She did burn up in the end. It was the strangest thing I ever heard of. Her skin, her face - they were untouched, but the healer said that every vein and organ in her body was powder." Her voice was clipped and factual, chopping herself off from the past. "Her throat was charred, as if she'd tried to swallow fire. She almost looked like she was asleep."

 There was more, Phi sensed, but she didn't pry. She could see her godmother's grief, hovering like a wraith beneath a tranquil surface. "So the boy killed her?"

 "Who else?" Jess answered bitterly.

 "Did the Pack blame us?"

 She shook her head. "Not for that. We were devastated, but all the blame lay with the boy. No, it was the funeral that divided us. Things were tense already. Alwyn Thetis, your great-grandfather, led us then, and he was as conservative as your father is liberal. My god, if he knew what your father was doing, he'd spin in that grave so fast you could hook him up to a generator and power half the town."

 She'd always had the impression that her father didn't entirely approve of Alwyn.

 "He'd always been dubious about our close ties to the Pack - and he was downright disapproving of Aurora's family. He thought that our power was weakening, that we were diluting the precious blood with outsiders. When she died, he took it as a sign and started to push for what he called 'community spirit'." She snorted. "Arranged marriages had always been a pod tradition, but really, when they felt like settling down, a couple would go and chat to their parents, who would nod and smile and look a bit faint at the thought of paying for a wedding. Alwyn wanted to breed us like cattle - marry the strongest together, regardless of our feelings, to try and keep the bloodlines pure. My god, that man was a sanctimonious moron! Why, if I had a big enough stick and-"

 "Aurora's funeral?" Phi prodded gently, used to her godmother's fly-by rants.

 The angry flush dimmed in the old dolphin's cheeks. "Because she took dolphin form, we asked the Pack if we could bury her as pod. Well, they wanted to honour her as one of their own, so we reached a compromise. We'd build her a pyre, but the Pack would bury the ashes in their hunting grounds. They agreed, albeit reluctantly, and when the day came, nearly all of us were there, Pack and pod.

 "But...you know, sometimes I think there was sorcery in the air that day. Rain poured down, on and on, and no matter how long we waited, we couldn't light the pyre." A faint frown drew lines on her forehead. "Eventually, we had to give up. We put a tarpaulin over the pyre and left some of the boys to stand vigil. And when the morning came, the boys were asleep and her body was gone. Vanished."

 "Someone stole it?" she said, disbelieving.

 Jess shrugged, her voice heavy with those old grudges. "Looks like it, my darling. Well, the Pack were furious - some hotheads thought we'd carried out the ceremony once they'd left and scattered the ashes in the lake. There were harsh words on both sides, old vendettas and silly accusations, and it was just the leverage Alwyn needed. Aurora's parents left before they were forced out, and that was the end of our great union. We split, we broke and among all the shouting and the anger, fear arrived. We became afraid."

 She paused, and added softly, "And we have remained afraid. We breed you as if you're prize dogs and frighten our children with tales of the wolves in the woods. They mock us and fight us, and all of us have become too old and too proud to admit that we're wrong. The pod and the Pack are family - Aurora was proof of that. And when she died, it was as if all our faith died with her."

 Phi let out a breath, unaware that she had been holding it. Obsession and fear and divisions, all the same things that seemed to be occurring again. And the link between it all: Zeke, simmering under Aurora's tale.

 She felt cold when she remembered how close she might have come - she might have shared her great-aunt's fate if...if...if he had not run away. Why had he run? Had he been terrified by the ghost of Aurora, fluttering in her features?

 Yet this wasn't an answer. A piece of an answer, like a fragment from a shattered vase, but no more than that.

 "But - what does this have to do with my parents?" she asked again, urgency under the words now.

 Jess blinked, as if drifting away from a dream. "I...that's Iry's part of the story," she said finally. "I suppose in a way, he was the arbitrator of that tragedy."

 "It wasn't a tragedy," she protested, but quietly.

 Her godmother cocked a silvery eyebrow. "Wasn't it?"

 It was hard to meet those old, knowing eyes and see the truth reflected there, a truth she already knew. The cracks had been there already as the pod retreated further and further from the world, but it seemed that her parents had helped to put the last shining nails in the coffin she lay trapped within: living, but as one dead.

Wish I knew what you were looking for:
Might have known what you would find.
And it's something quite peculiar...
Something shimmering and white

 This time, when Celia stepped into Aspen Martin's house, the atmosphere was tight and watchful.

 When he saw Riose at her shoulder, Aspen's eyes widened fractionally. "Riose Orage? You've grown up."

 "I've been told that's the right direction," was Ri's short reply.

 A faint grin touched Aspen's lips. "I dunno. Vaje seems to be going for 'out', these days."

 "Hey!" shouted the coyote shapeshifter from inside. "Liking your food's no crime, Martin. At least Zane doesn't call me 'lamppost'!"

 "It's the closest he can get to 'vampire'," Aspen explained, waving them in. "He's only two, for crying out loud."

 Celia turned to share a dry smile with Riose, and nearly stopped in her tracks.

 His face was a blank mask, lifeless as a sculpture: even his eyes were flat and imperturbable . It was as if the spark that lit him had been snuffed out, with only the hitch of his chest to tell her he still breathed. Disturbed, she reached back to brush his fingers with her own.

 Even that light touch made him start, but at least his eyes softened.

 "Relax," she whispered.

 "I can't," he replied in a disconcertingly normal voice. "And don't bothering whispering - we've all got preternatural hearing here."

 Vaje stuck a red-smeared face round the door, the smell of pasta wafting out. "Yeah, but some of us are polite enough to pretend we haven't." He gave Riose the same look Aspen had: a brief flick of the eyes that looked like nothing but seemed to see everything. "Been a while."

 "Not long enough," Riose muttered. He trailed into the living room after her, sitting himself next to her in a way she could only describe as territorial, one arm stretched along the back of the chair behind her head, bristling like an indignant cat.

 "Dinner first, or business?" Aspen asked gently, coming in with a bottle of red wine - or what she hoped was wine. The glance he gave Riose was cool, and she had the feeling she was watching the opening moves of some intricate game. "And Celia had better be the second, Riose."

 Only reflex made her grab Riose's T-shirt as he bounded to his feet. People had made that remark before, and he'd shrugged it off, but now...

 "Let go, Cee," her friend ordered, even though he could easily have torn free.

 "No," she snapped. "You should know better by now, Ri. People always think the worst. And Aspen, that's out of order. I've known Ri a damn sight longer than I've known you, and excuse me, but I've seen the marks you leave on Tam's neck, so don't, just don't lecture me."

 For a long moment, Aspen watched her, his ever-changing eyes slipping from colour to colour like a sunset on speed. Then he nodded. "Yeah. Okay. You're old enough to make your own decisions."

 Riose sat back down, a grim set to his face. "She's my friend, Martin. I'd never touch her."

 The cork popped out of the wine bottle. "Sometimes...you know, you get involved with the Furies for too long, and you forget that not everyone thinks the same way." Aspen cracked a rueful smile, and she hoped Riose saw it for the apology it was. "Some days I still get up and all I can do is put a price on everyone I see."

 That frank confession made something squirm in her stomach like a viper.

 "I know," was Riose's reply. "I used to be the same."

 Used to...? "Tell me you didn't work for the Furies as well," she said in disbelief. Riose? Their quiet, thoughtful Riose, hard to fathom but easy to like, was that where he learned the inscrutable smile and the composure he sculpted about him like clay?

 "He never got in as deep as we did," Vaje said, stood in the kitchen doorway,. He was wiping his hands with a towel - how could he be doing something so ordinary, when those extraordinary words dangled in the air? "Ri had family who cared. Makes all the difference, Cee."

 She put her fingers to her temples, counting silently. Another to add to the tally, another who had that slick void gaping in his soul. She'd known Riose since she was five, five for god's sake! What kind of childhood had that been, what might he have become if his family hadn't...

 No. She didn't want to consider it. Reality was already nasty enough, never mind adding in a hundred ugly what-ifs.

 "Okay then," she muttered. "What did you find out, Aspen?"

 He handed her a glass of wine, but she suspected it was so he could look directly into her face. "There were two cases in the archives. Bad news first: neither ended pleasantly. Good news: the same loophole those two exploited applies to Phi as well."

 "What loophole?" Riose, already delving into the problem.

 "Okay. A bit of history first for Cee, as she doesn't know. Most people only know the Furies as assassins. But we're...I mean, they're much more." Aspen's voice took on the careful cadence of rote learning. "Research and record-keeping are just as important, even if they don't bring as much money or prestige. In particular, our records of Nightworld law are immaculate and we also have a number of spells which are...unknown...outside the Furies."

 "And they've been damn troublesome at times," Vaje butted in.

 Aspen gave a little shrug. "When it comes to blood-oath, there are two ways out: one of the parties involved must die, or it must no longer be possible to hold them to the terms of the original agreement."

 "What do you mean?" she said cautiously. There had been a strange note in Aspen's voice, a hesitancy she didn't like.

 He licked his lips. Beside her, Riose was still and attentive, while even Vaje had straightened up to listen.

 "The first case is the easiest to understand. It was a very similar situation. In Europe, the wolves have a royal line, an old dynasty. Their current heir was to wed a member of the werewolf aristocracy in Russia. But he loathed the girl - there was some human girl in a nearby village he'd fallen for instead, but as there was a lot of tension between Russia and Europe, the marriage had been pledged through a blood-oath."

 Aspen took a deep breath. "He came to the Furies asking for help. This was way before my time, and a little before Vaje was recruited. Pursang studied the agreement he'd made and found one small flaw: the marriage was contracted between two werewolves. If he wasn't a werewolf, the agreement was null and void."

 "Hang on," objected Riose, "You can't just...not be a werewolf. It's not like changing circles if you're a witch."

 Aspen grimaced. "Yeah, and don't we know it. The Furies had a very old and dangerous spell in their archives that allowed them to steal a dragon's power - moving it from the body of a sleeping dragon into anyone else. Pursang adapted the spell to take the werewolf's essence - to take what made him a shapeshifter, only this time, they wouldn't shift his power into anyone else. It would just dissipate into nothing. The werewolf would be left human - free to marry his girl, free from any retribution."

 His voice slipped back into normal tones, softer and less focused. "It worked exactly as it was meant to, except for one thing. It started a civil war between the European wolves and the Russian wolves. It turned out that they didn't care whether the marriage was between wolf and wolf or wolf and human. They'd been after the political power, trade agreements, tracts of land, that kind of thing. They were livid. There's still tension, even a hundred years on."

 "What happened to the wolf?" she asked, curious. The political repercussions didn't bother her much - Phi was always telling her that the mer were known for their relaxed and peaceful nature.

 "Killed himself," said Aspen quietly. "He didn't understand what it meant to be human - he couldn't live without the wolf in his heart. Love wasn't enough to hold him together."

 "Sometimes it isn't," murmured Vaje roughly, but when she looked at him, his eyes were distant, touched with tragedy.

 "But it can be done," she persisted. "If they had to, the Furies would make Phi...like me. The mer couldn't hold her to the marriage."

 It would be an act of desperation, but unless Phi's parents relented, was there any other way for her friend? It would be last resort, a terrible one, but still - it was there.

 "It's not that simple." Aspen took a slug of wine, looking ever more uncomfortable. "The second time it happened, the results were even worse. There was a massive war. After that, the Furies decided that next time they interfered, they'd need a unanimous agreement - Nightfire, Pursang and K'Shaia. If Phi decides there's no other way out, she'll have to persuade all three of them."

 "Do you think that's possible?" was Riose's cool inquiry.

 The vampire looked at Vaje helplessly.

 With a sigh not unlike a father rescuing an errant child from a tricky predicament, Vaje took over. "Pursang...I'd say yes. I can't imagine why she'd refuse. K'Shaia - well, Therese can be stubborn-"

 "Tell me about it," muttered Riose.

 "-but if Phi's ballsy enough, she'll win her over. Therese likes guts."

 "With ketchup," Aspen put in brightly.

 Vaje gave him a slow stare. "Martin, you must stop saying things like that. I know it's true, you know it's true, but Celia doesn't need to know."

 She definitely hadn't wanted to know that. Even for one of Aspen's disturbing asides, that was...frightening.

 "It's Nightfire that's going to be difficult," continued Vaje.

 She glanced at Riose and got a quick nod of confirmation.

 "The Demon Fury?" she voiced in a tone little above a whisper. She didn't want to mention his name any louder - it was stupid and superstitious, but she'd always thought that thinking about something too much would draw it to you. And if there was one person she didn't want near her, it was the Demon Fury in his gory splendour.

 "He's a contrary son-of-a-bitch," Vaje muttered, eyes narrowed in intense dislike. "He'd turn her down just to watch her fall apart, piece by piece. He might pretend to help and then tell the mer everything that's going on. And god help us all if he finds her interesting."

 She didn't want to ask, but knew she had to.

 "Last thing he found interesting," Vaje answered in response to her pleading look, "we were cleaning it off the walls for a week."

 "It stank," mumbled Aspen, dread leeching his expression to a ghostly pallor.

 Riose cleared his throat. "And so does the deal you made with Cee. What price did the Furies ask for this favour, Aspen? Her life? Her freedom? Or just her sanity? It's usually one of them."

 The lamia lifted his eyes slowly, irises clashing in crocus-yellow and dusky purple. "It was Pursang I went to. And I...negotiated."

 She felt Riose's fingers brush her neck lightly, and his voice popped into her mind, full of incredulity. That means he offered to pay part of the price himself, Cee. I never thought he'd do that...I...maybe he has changed.

 Aspen looked at them. "It was the best I could do, Cee. Pursang will collect a favour from you, to be paid at a later date, when all this is over. She promised no physical or mental harm would come to you."

 Once, that would have sounded safe. Now, it made her wonder what kind of harm would come to her.

 Somehow, she had the feeling dinner was going to be thrown away tonight.

~*~

 Don Ivan stepped onto the Ghost Roads without caution, astonishingly bold and alive among the forest. The evening's shadows didn't seem to quite reach him, shying from this golden boy.

  He had spent most of the night convincing the Pack that he wanted to ally their strength to his - that he alone of the mer would give them the power they had craved so long, the acceptance they pretended not to want.

 How their hunger filled their eyes, hunger and terror mixed into a desperate violence. He couldn't help but pity them, even as he moulded them into the tools he would use to bind the pod to him.

 He was met on the edge of the Pack territory by Susie, the leggy girl who had acted as bait for him. She gave him a small nod, her eyes mistrustful.

 "We have to get moving," she announced by way of greeting, gesturing him into the woods. "I got 'em all gathered, but they're getting fidgety."

 She was the closest thing they had to a leader: their last one had walked away from them a year ago, leaving the wolves floundering for unity. Under Alex Morelli, they had become a guerrilla force. Without him, they were just the tatters of a militia, cruel and impulsive.

 And while it made him grind his teeth that he'd have to pander to their egos, cuddle and coax them, it was only possible because they were so disorganised.

 "Lead on," he murmured.

 Her bitter laugh rose above the rustling leaves, and she cast him a dark glance even as she moved to obey. "Isn't that going to be your job?"

 You don't know the half of it, he thought, casting a cool eye over her slender form. I'll lead you, and you'll love me, my dear, and I will remake us as we should have been: wolf and mer, beautiful and terrible.

 When he reached the clearing, they were there: forty or fifty people, most of them young, all of them huddled together as if a chill had seized them. Too many had those eerie green eyes and a feral slackness in their faces - only a few regarded him with any real interest. Those were the ones who would be his most loyal supporters, but first they would be trouble. Wolves always were.

 But unlike the pod, they were dispensable.

 There was an awkward silence until Susie stepped forward.

 "Well, this is where it starts," she announced with a defiant nod. "You all know Don Ivan - he's the pod's heir, and he has an offer for us."

 One of the few who stood apart from the group spoke up, his face bored. "Better make sure no one's followed him. There's a lot of nosy people round here. And we all know the little fishies like company." Narrow eyes were full of familiar contempt. "Don't want anyone unexpected joining this fucking soiree."

 It made sense, but the wolf's insolence rankled. "If you find anyone, just turn them away. Nothing more than bruises."

 Susie snorted. "And I suppose we handle your little wife with kid gloves."

 Good news was always out-sprinted by bad news, wasn't it? Just the thought of Phi, stubborn, foolish, infurating Phi, made him want to push her head under the water and hold it there until that vicious mouth was silent forever.

 God, it was such a shame he needed her.

 "If you come across my little wife," he snapped, "you can push her in a pit of spikes for all I care, as long as she's capable of saying 'I do'."

 The werewolf's smile was amused. "Well, you heard the man." She called several names and the werewolves stood. "No one comes near here, especially the pod."

 They melted away into the forest, but lingered on his senses like fond memories long after.

 "Now..." That was the man again, his teeth bared in an insolent smile that matched the scorn in his eyes. "Let's get down to business. Either you start saying something interesting, Ivan, or we'll have you for breakfast. I've always like sushi."

  This one was definitely trouble. Don stared back at him, and inspiration came as an icy tingle in his skull. Yes...that would do...

 He reached out with his drug-enhanced power and twisted the air like...this, and looped it like...that, glorying in how easy it was. He'd barely have been able to before, but now-

 The man gagged as the invisible noose tightened about his neck. The cord of air stretched from him to Don's hand, and he gave it a little tug. The Pack should all be able to sense what he'd done, but they'd never be able to imitate it.

"I've always liked obedience," he said coldly. "Why don't you sit? I won't make you beg - for now."

 The man clawed his throat, eyes white and horrified. Air whistled between his lips and with hardly a thought, Don found himself tightening that leash, a little more and more, feeling a deep warmth at the panicked gasps of the man. How easy, how breathlessly delightful to just pull it a little more and more-

 The knowledge of his own death was written in the man's face, in his brilliant eyes and straining jaw. A soft sunset colour was spreading over his face, and Don felt that he was watching the mysteries of the world unfold before him, lovely and dark and so, so rich in power - and his. All his...

 "He's sat!" The harsh voice was Susie, clutching his arm. "We get your point, Ivan. He'll choke if you don't stop."

 Choke-

 Don blinked, and the sleepy spell lifted from him. With a brisk gesture, he loosened the leash, and the man who lolled on the ground like a rag doll spluttered and coughed, bracing himself on shaking arms.

  Now the silence was fearful and focused. He looked across the faces, noting those who were disgusted, those who were impressed - and those who were neither.

 "I think it's time to clarify the terms of this alliance," he murmured.  

~*~

 Avy lives in the past because she cannot bear her present, and cannot contemplate the future she wants for too long. Clutching at her ghosts, she tries to hold them close, only to find they evaporate in her arms.

 And strange, as the years have pattered by, she has found her memories whittled down to a hard core. Fireblade, who spurned her; Zeke, who did not, and her sister, the youngest of all the sirens, Ryar.

 Ryar: her eyes always tear-drenched and afraid, prey among a host of predators. Only luck had kept her from an early grave. If she hadn't been a child of Sangager, if her voice had not had the wicked thrill of blasphemy in a cathedral, if Fireblade hadn't taken her to wed and to incarcerate, if, if...

 Luck had drawn people to her. Even the courtiers found solace in her winding songs. And the commoners, well...

 The commoners had loved her.

Avy had failed to see the power of that love: all of them had. It had drawn people to Ryar when she betrayed the Five, just as Fireblade and Kheo had repelled them with their spite and arrogance.

 A war begun for love: it was not the first and it would not be the last. And like all wars, it ended in hate.

 Try as she might, Avy can never forget the expression on her brother's face when he hewed the horns from her head, calling it mercy, crying as he stole her very being from her. Her brother, her keeper and jailer, caging her in this useless form.

 He had asked for her surrender, trembling as he did so, and she had been convinced he would give in. Instead, when she refused, he had asked again - and again - and thinking she sensed weakness, she continued to refuse. Ryar's warnings had echoed dimly in her mind, but she ignored them, her belief in herself stronger than her belief in her wretched, weeping sister.

So too had Fireblade ignored Ryar's pleas for an end to the cruelty. Both of them had been fools not to heed her.

 In the last days of the war, she searched for Ryar, hoping that her sister's phenomenal healing talents could mend even that most grievous of wounds. But all she found was Fireblade.

 She was used to seeing him as invincible, a fearsome sight in battle, the sword he was named for swinging a burning path through his opponents. But when she stumbled over him, he was sat beside a lake as if he meant to keep vigil over it forever.

 "Fireblade?" she had said, disbelieving. She had thought him dead like Kheo and the others.

 He had turned his head slowly, as if dragging himself from a potent dream. "Little Avy. You lived."

 She had recoiled at the expression in his eyes - haunted and full of a vulnerable anguish and odd...something she could not identify, yet terribly familiar.

 Brushing aside her hair, she showed him her horns. "Barely."

 Some small horror twitched on his face. "You as well," he breathed. "How many..."

 "Countless," she said bitterly. "Ulryat could not bear the shame. She...she leapt from a tower."

 He turned back, his voice flat. "She was ever proud."

 Not anymore, she wanted to say, but her mind was filled with the broken form of her sister, with the long black hair that trickled across the ground, sticky with blood.

 "I thought none of the Five had survived," she remarked, trying to guide the conversation.

 He shuddered, but did not take his eyes from the water. "I alone."

 "I thought...Ryar..." The rebel witch she had managed to snare had screamed that she lived - that she fled the wrath of her husband, that she had gone to make some atonement for her betrayal of the dragons.

 His laughter cracked the air, an ugly serrated sound that made her take a step back. "I suppose you wanted to use her again, Avarice, like you always did." He whipped around then, his eyes flaring up like the core of a volcano. "Did you think she would lay those lovely hands on you and make the world right again? Do you really think she would hand you back a way to harm her, do you think she would put a knife at her breast for you to thrust in?"

 She saw the truth of it then, speared on his face like a mouse struggling under a cat's claws .

 It was frenzied grief twisting his face so, grief and guilt that had put these rough wounds in him, though she still could not comprehend the strange look in his eyes.

 "For me...no. But for you - I think she would have done anything for you, Fireblade," she said slowly, now stepping back. "And she did, didn't she? You called her traitor, but it was you who betrayed her with a dozen women, you who pushed her further and further from us, you who filled her eyes with a monster!"

 He threw back his head and howled, a long dirge that dragged like nails across her soul. She shivered through it, but did not run. There was no point; if he meant to harm her, he could do it easily.

 "We are all monsters," he said bitterly, staring at his hands. "She always knew it. I think...I think she wanted to die, Avy. She wanted me to kill her. She couldn't live with the pain."

 So he had done it. He, who had protected Ryar so long, had snatched the wonder of her music from the world, leaving it bleak and still.

 "I loved her," he confessed in a cold, wretched voice, and the words shocked her. "I saw the moment when the life left her, Avy, and as it slipped away, I knew, and it was too late! I loved her, and I...I..."

 He put his head in his hands, and in the heavy slant of his back, she saw something new: the submissiveness of the worshipper. The strange expression on his face became clear. This love, his first, his last, barely realised and never proven, had already become his obsession.

 She looked over at the lake. Ryar was beneath there, that was why he watched it as if the world bobbed on its currents.

 Her sister's body - her sister's horns, her sister's bones, still full of that magnificent healing power. If-

 "Leave here," he ordered, his voice low and vicious. "Leave here and leave her. She is mine now, she was always mine." A low snarl trickled from his lips. "I will guard her from thieves and vultures, Avarice, and I know exactly what you are. Go, and never come back."

 She went...but she could be patient. She could wait. Fireblade's grief was a transitory thing, she was certain. Eventually, she would return. She would have her sister's power, and be whole once more.

 And now, after the years of endurance in her crumbling body, she has the means.

~*~

Iry Lupine, lone wolf and lone gunman, lived on the very edges of the Ghost Roads. Strictly speaking, it was Pack territory, but his reputation was ferocious enough to keep anyone from trying to evict him.

Phi began the long walk out to his home with trepidation in her heart. What would Iry Lupine add to the story? It must be to do with breaking blood-oath, but she couldn't see how a lone wolf had brought her parents together or why Jess had called it such a tragedy.

Before her mother had been bedridden, they'd been a happy house. There had been parties and barbecues, and she remembered her father clumsily whirling her mother about the house one Christmas, drunk on sherry and wine.

Something was missing, and it made her uneasy.

At least the woods were cool and shady, blocking out the evening sun. But even knowing she had permission to be here, she was jittery. The Ghost Roads had always been forbidden and after her first, last and only encounter with their dangers, she'd never been tempted to break the edict.

 Her ears seemed to prickle: were those footsteps behind her?

 You're being stupid, she told herself firmly. Determined, she walked on and on, trying to ignore the feeling that unseen eyes were watching her.

 She stumbled on a tree root, swearing softly-

 "And here was me thinking you fishies were so polite," a voice remarked, sharp and nasal.

 Oh no. She lifted her gaze to see three wolves watching her, one with a particularly nasty smile on his face.

 "I'm paying a visit," she said with all the calm she could muster. She had to hope Iry's name would prove enough deterrent. "Iry Lupine and I have business."

 The smiling one threw back his had and gave a raw, barking laugh, more like a jackal than a wolf. "Course you do, course you do. We all know how sociable Iry is! Why, just yesterday he had the Furies round for tea and tiffin." The smile widened until she thought his lips might split at the corners. "Nice try, but brainless. Just as brainless as trying to spy."

"I don't care what the Pack do," she said scornfully. "Just like you don't care what we do."

 But her words only seemed to infuriate him - that grin was turning into a slow, hungry grimace, and the other two straightened, interest sparking in their faces. This wasn't going well.

 "Yeah, and I'm sure you'd hate it if we started taking an interest." He moved forward. "You think we're such barbarians, don't you? I see it every time I go near your stinking lake, all of you sneering and staring."

 Phi backed away. Running would be pointless - they knew this area better than she did. Little as she liked the idea, she was going to have to apologise for whatever it was they thought she'd done and hope she came away from it with nothing more than a few bruises.

 Riose had taught her to punch, but he'd also told her that when she was outnumbered, the smart thing to do was whatever kept you alive. In fact, he'd said the best thing to do was let them think you beaten already, to cry and beg and grovel if it would let you catch them unawares later. He hadn't sounded like he was joking.

 "Not me," she said steadily. "It's Don and his friends who make trouble, not me."

 "You're that girl." One of the others spoke up, frowning. "You don't run about with the pod - you're friends with that human and the big-mouthed witch."

 At that moment, she could have kissed Finn for his total inability to leave an insult unspoken. "I am," she confirmed. "My friends are from outside the pod. To be honest, most of the mer don't like me much."

 Their leader eyed her. "You're that one, huh." But worryingly, none of them relaxed. "That must make you Delphine Thetis."

 Reluctantly, she nodded. This didn't look good - it hadn't looked good from the moment the trio had shown up, but there was a queer note in his voice that made her flesh creep as though her skin was about to shrug right off.

 "He told us to put her in a pit of spikes." The last of the three made this horribly disturbing statement, and Phi's stomach contracted into a tight, painful knot. Surely they wouldn't-

 "Well, we don't have one, do we?" the leader said shortly.

 Oh thank god.

 "Morelli made us take out the spikes," he continued with so much regret that her head swam. "We'll just have to leave her down there."

 She sped up her backward shuffle. Calling for help seemed futile - the town was beyond the limits of her telepathic strength, but even so, she sent out a faint cry in that direction, hoping.

 "None of that now," chided the wolf. He gestured to the other two, and they moved to flank her. The only way out was behind her, and that meant turning her back on them. He snapped his jaws indolently, more crocodile than canine in that moment. "Maybe I'll leave you with a little something to remember me by."

 The second one spoke up again, with a little shake of ash-blond hair. "No hurting, we were told."

 "Not her," was the hissed answer. "He said we could do we what we liked as long as she could still croak out her marriage vows."

Don? Don was tangled up with the Pack? But...why? He hated them - he saw them as sport, as targets, as mere objects to mangle and beat when he needed somewhere to vent his temper.

 "But-" The blond boy tried again, and she thought she could see anxiety on his face.

 The leader made a brief gesture, and the boy fell silent with a fearful compliance that only honed her fear. "Now..." he murmured, "Yeah, a little keepsake'd be fair payback." His stare was avid, sliding up and down her body as he was eyeing up a prime cut of meat. His voice was full of false sympathy. "If you hold still, it'll probably just sting."

 Oh, would it now? The clammy fear was quelled by a hot wash of anger, rising up from her ribcage to make the world seemed sharp-edged, awareness bristling over her bones. Breaths sawed through her body, and she knew if she wasn't careful, her godawful temper would make her do something stupid. But a small arctic part of her commented that this imbecile deserved it.

 Riose's advice floated up: she let her face fall into limp, frightened lines, even though what she really wanted to do was snarl right back. She even quivered, hoping he took it for paroxysms of terror.

 He did, reaching out a hand to brush at her neck. "A beautiful bit of flesh," he murmured in tones so intimate they should have been said in other circumstances, sweeter ones. "God, I bet you taste good..."

 His body was pressing against her, and in that moment as he half-closed his eyes and leaned back his head-

 She would not let this happen.

 Her knee slammed up and forward. He screeched like a banshee, and she brought her closed fist down on the back of his neck with enormous satisfaction as he doubled over...

 Two sets of arms grabbed her and she was forced onto the ground, kneeling.

 "That was not smart," the blond boy muttered very softly. "Worth seeing though."

 Their leader lurched to his feet, his face a brilliant mask of fury. "You little bitch!"

Before she even saw him move, he hit her across the face so hard she thought she felt her cheekbone crack.

 Oh gods above, she'd never felt anything like it! She swallowed down nausea, as strange shades of indigo and red streaked across her vision. Was that really her gasping, that pitiful hoarse sound? Her head rung like someone had set loose a horde of drunken bellringers in a convent, and she hung limply in their arms.

 There was shouting, buzzing like locusts over the pain, but the next few minutes were a daze. They were dragging her somewhere, feet catching on the ground, seeming not to care about the branches that whipped her or the stones that scraped her feet.

 She fell, grazing her hands and knees, only to be hauled up and pushed on, head spinning. Twice she had to stop and vomit, and the second time earned her a slap that crumpled her onto the ground.

 The leader went to do it again, but one of the others - the soft-spoken one - caught his arm, shaking his head. She supposed she should have been grateful, but she was too busy trying not to cry more than she had to, trying not to break in front of them.

 "You can carry her then," snapped the leader, turning his back on her.

 The soft-spoken one crouched in front of her. His eyes were a startling shade of blue, pale as porcelain. He gathered her up in his arms with ease and she was surprised at the care he took.

 She was even more surprised when a light mental touch brushed her mind, though even that made her wince.

I'll try to find one of your friends, he said, and she caught a name like a whisper escaping from cupped hands. Sam, gentle Sam whose voice made her think of waves breaking. She nearly giggled at the silly thought, a dozen others flitting crazily through her head, shattering the pain into wicked shards that jabbed at her skull. But I can't get away until tonight. Any earlier, and someone'll get suspicious. We weren't supposed to hurt anyone, we weren't, I didn't think he'd do that to you...

 Phi couldn't even summon the energy to thank him.

 She drifted then, caught in the pain that spun about her like a vortex, drawing her down, down, down into a dark maw, ready to swallow her, to take her-

 It was only when those warm arms laid her down onto a chilled, hard floor that she surfaced in the world again to see the wolf climbing up a knotted rope that was hauled up as he vanished. Oh god, she was in a pit, she really was - all she saw was stone and a faint circle of light far, far above, briefly blocked by Sam's body as he crawled out...

 And then she was alone, imprisoned in the murk with only the echoes of her pain for company.

 Buried in the earth, bitter tears fell from her eyes, felt only dimly as she slid down, down, down into delirium.

It leads you here - despite your destination
Under the Milky Way tonight

Ripples Chapter Nine