her when someone even approached the children's doorway. Probably.
"Just checking," I said. Holding the tray in front of me, I turned, finding Molly in the shadows of the wide hallway. Her long, thin nightgown fluttered in the air from the open windows; her red ringlets hung down her back. She looked like something from the nineteen hundreds, except for the iPod around her neck. I set the tray on a little spindled table in the hall and offered her one of the mugs. Molly crossed the wide hallway on bare feet and took it.
"No one can get in," she said, sipping. "Not through my ward. Or at least not without fireworks going off. You don't have to prowl the house with butcher knives."
I pulled and flipped a knife. The blade caught the lamp, bright and glittering, the narrow, deep flukes along the blade appearing almost ornamental with their silvering, making the weapon strong, flexible, lightweight, beautiful, the blade's silver plating poisonous to vampires. A work of art. It was a new blade. I really liked it. "Not a butcher knife. It's a vamp-killer."
"It's a claw, is what it is," she said, the wry tone becoming drier, sharper. "I counted.
You're wearing ten. Just like your Beast's front paw claws."
I shrugged. It was true; I had ten. As a skinwalker, I had a preference for big cats -
puma, African lion, leopards, but mostly for the mountain lion form. It was easiest to be Beast. If I ever discover a skinwalker psychiatrist, I'm sure he'll apply some Jungian or Freudian school of thought to me, and the weapons I choose will be a big part of the analysis.
"Are you going hunting inhuman form?" she asked, her voice now carefully emotionless. When I nodded, she said, quietly, "Be careful, Big Cat. He's not finished grieving. If he has laid a trap, you might slip past him as Beast, but not as Jane."
"I know," I said. "But I have a job to do. And the sooner I get it done, the better." I slid the vamp-killer into its loop. "I still wish you and the kids would go back home."
She hesitated for an instant, clearly remembering Leo Pellissier and his vamp goons.
She shook her head. "Not until Big Evan gets back from Brazil and the contractor has the new room closed in. A house with no walls means I can't ward it properly." She held up a hand to stop my protests. "We're in less danger here than we are in the hills without Big Evan. And you know we've had . . . trouble lately. My kind aren't exactly popular. I'll go back in two weeks like we planned. Besides" - her tone had turned ironic, and she sipped her tea - "youactually needus now. Angie's the reason why Leo didn't burn the house down around you. He won't be back, at least until he can make sure of killing only you and not a houseful of children. And the wards willnever be down again."
I flinched just the tiniest bit. She had a point. "Okay," I said. "I'll be careful." I took my own mug in hand, the stoneware warm and oddly comforting. "See you in the morning.
Night, Molly."
"Night, Big Cat."
Downstairs, while I sipped hot tea, I put on my silvered chain-mail collar over the gold-nugget and chain necklace I never took off, added a couple more crosses, tied and strapped on my new steel-toed boots, and put on a thick denim jacket I'd picked up in a shop catering to farmers to replace the leather jacket lost in my last vamp fight. Another was on order, but until it arrived, denim would have to do. I holstered my big-ass shotgun across my back. I tugged on my hair to make sure it was difficult to grab. Long hair made a handy-dandy handle to pull in a fight, and once an opponent had it, the fight was over. Rapists and vamps liked victims with long hair. Made them easy to control. I could cut it, but I'd never shifted with short hair and didn't know if that would alter the process.
Dressed for hunting, I left the house, feeling the wards sizzle across my skin, heatless and bright, like holiday sparklers in the hands of Molly's children. I helmeted up, fired up Bitsa - my bastard Harley, put together from bits of this and bits of that - and opened the side gate. I re-locked the new padlock with my new key - which hadn't