table, trying to act as though two of us hadn’t just had a close encounter of the ambiguous kind. The one-eyed hawk, a female, was perched on top of a high kitchen shelf, where she’d made a nest out of paper towels, twigs, and a fair amount of hair, most of it mine. She was watching me with one unblinking golden eye, like a hostess who suspects you might make off with the silverware, or the host. Our other fosterling, Rocky the raccoon, was curled up catlike on the hammock chair that hung from the ceiling. The bat, who had no name, was hanging upside down from the dream catcher beside the bed.
I wouldn’t have minded escaping into sleep myself.
Red and Mal and I were being awfully polite to one another, but there was a peculiar undercurrent in the room, a low level hum from the conversation we weren’t having.
At least, Mal was clearly too sick to have been doing anything carnal to me. And it hadn’t been carnal. At least, I didn’t think it had been.
Mal had explained that I had nearly fainted, and I’d just finished telling Red about my earlier encounter with Marlene. It seemed like the safest subject at the moment— well, the safest for me, at any rate. I was pretty sure Red wouldn’t be paying Marlene any house calls, even if she found a timber rattler in her basement.
Red winced when I got to the part where Marlene told me she’d have to take care of the problem herself. “No wonder you wanted to bite her. What made that fool woman think her dog had been bred by a coyote, anyway?”
“She said she heard coyotes howling,” I said. “I guess she just assumed.”
Red shook his head in an almost canid gesture of bafflement. “I hear it all the damn time. People see a stray dog, start insisting I come by because it looks like a coyote. So I show up and take a look, and it’s some poor mutt that got left by the side of the road. But no one ever believes me. ‘It must be a coydog,’ they say. ‘Kill it before it eats my babies.’ I tell them it’s more likely to be a wolf hybrid than a coydog, but no one ever listens.” Red stood up and took a Budweiser out of the icebox. “Either of you want one?”
I started to say something about it being a little early for drinks, but then realized that the winter sun was already dipping below the horizon. It had been so warm lately that I’d forgotten it was January, the dark month when the ancients used to light candles and look for omens, and modern folk plan tropical vacations.
“I’ll stick with my tea, thanks.” Malachy was frowning. “Tell me, why is it so unlikely that a coyote male might breed a domesticated bitch in heat?”
Red popped the top of his bottle. “Because the coyote male would have to be in season, too.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Folks always seem to think that wolves mate for life, and coyotes don’t, but they’re wrong.”
I busied myself examining my nails and realized that, once again, I’d forgotten to wear the golden topaz engagement ring Red had given me last year. I hoped he didn’t think it was symbolic; the ring just wasn’t practical with latex gloves, and besides, my divorce still wasn’t final. We’d decided it was a friendship ring for now.
“Fascinating,” said Malachy, stirring sugar into his tea. “So coyotes do mate for life?”
“Sometimes.” Red took a swig of his beer. “But sometimes wolves lose a mate and then take another. They don’t all just pine away.”
Still, wolves were a hell of a lot more faithful than people. After all, wolves didn’t wake up one morning and decide they were bored with their old mates. You didn’t get packs splitting apart because the alpha male had decided that the alpha female just didn’t do it for him anymore. Werewolves, on the other hand, were as monstrous as humans when it came to fidelity. Or maybe it was just my former husband who was monstrous, in either form.
I stood up and checked on our European-style coffeemaker. It didn’t require electricity, and Red swore it made a better brew, but I had yet to taste the evidence.
“Don’t be so impatient,” said Malachy as I started to press down on the plunger. “It’s not ready yet.”
I sat back down, feeling petulant. “I hate this coffeemaker. It