It was a good thing nobody decided that was a good night to pick a fight with me. I wasn’t sure, but I had the instinct that I’d have beaten them to death. I just walked and walked, the city blurring around me like so much concrete visual noise. I was so angry that I didn’t have anywhere to put it. I’d trusted Gran and Uncle Bill. I’d put my faith in them. In recompense, they’d knowingly put me in potentially lethal danger by withholding information I could very well need. The fact that I’d gotten by without that knowledge might be a point in their favor. It was true that I’d survived, so far, but I hadn’t been doing the job that long. Uncle Bill had been at it a few decades. Would he have survived that long without the knowledge they’d deprived me of? I had my doubts. I had so many doubts about everything. I’d devoted myself to Gran’s cause and her will without question, but that devotion was fragile. It drew its strength from my faith in her and that faith was cracking. Without that faith, without that devotion, what would I be? Who would I be? I didn’t have a good answer and it scared me to death. After a while, the walking, emotional pain, residual hurting from what the Raven’s Council had done, and several days’ worth of tiredness caught up to me. I went home to my tiny studio apartment and crawled into bed. I only paused long enough to kick off my shoes.

It was a fitful, restless sleep filled with half-formed dreams and memories. I couldn’t remember the details when I’d lurch half out of sleep. All that remained was cold, shuddering dread. When a furious pounding on the door woke me up, I was happy to abandon traitorous sleep. I peered through the peephole and saw a familiar figure in the hall, glaring at me as though the door didn’t even exist. I opened the door for Annie Mathers. She strode past, very pointedly aiming her shoulder to bump mine. She was stronger than she looked because it pushed me back a step back when her shoulder hit mine. I closed the door and turned to face her. I nodded in greeting.

“Annie.”

She glared at me. “Where is my sister?”

“She's with Gran. I’ll take you to her.”

“Now,” she demanded.

Under normal circumstances, or if she’d been less demanding, I’d have done as she asked. Instead, I made Annie wait while I brushed my teeth and poured some cold coffee into a battered travel mug. She fumed at the wait, but I’d decided that I needed to make it clear to her that she didn’t set terms in my home. She might be a power to be reckoned with, but I’d had a shitty few weeks and wasn’t interested in taking orders from anyone at that precise moment. I pulled on a light jacket and looked at her.

“Now we can go,” I said.

“You’re rather full of yourself, aren’t you?”

There was no visual change, but I felt it as power gathered in her. She might not have Jessie’s mercenary spirit, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do something appalling to me if she put her mind to it. I raised an eyebrow and bared some teeth at her in something no one would ever mistake for a smile.

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“You sure that’s the best move?”

Something about me gave her pause. Gears started spinning in her head and she did the math. She was in my city. More to the point, she was in my home. Yeah, it might have been nothing but a lousy studio apartment, but it was still my home. Whatever faults I might have, I wasn’t nearly so incompetent that I’d leave myself undefended there. Perhaps the largest part of her uncertainty came from the fact that I was just standing there. Something or someone had put the Wormwood Witch down for the count. Yet, I had managed to drag Jessie out of the situation and bring her somewhere relatively safe, all while evading the attention of something terribly powerful. I wasn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with Pierce Carter and Annie Mathers wasn’t to be underestimated, but I was no slouch with the magical violence and I was in a bad mood. It only took her a moment. Yet, in that moment, she seemed to glean and weigh all of the information and all of the dire implications. She gave me a little nod and her power retreated.

“Perhaps it’s not the best move,” she agreed.

I nodded and opened the door. I stepped out onto the concrete walkway, ignoring the chill in the morning air. She followed me out. Her gaze unsettled me. It was unyielding, questing, and almost inhuman in its intensity. I didn’t live far from Gran’s, so we walked. I had other things on my mind and didn’t try to engage Annie in conversation. I was still bleeding from the knowledge of Gran and Bill’s betrayals. I couldn’t make it fit into my world in a way that made sense. Maybe the oppressiveness of my mood was more than she could bear, but Annie broke the silence.

“You seemed to have healed up well,” she said, before adding, “physically anyway.”

I nodded. “Yeah, mostly. I still ache. Get tired faster than I used to.”

“Those should pass. The demands of the kind of healing you underwent are tremendous. Still, the resilience of youth is shocking. You’ll probably feel normal in another week or two.”

“That’s something,” I said, but I was already slipping back into my brooding.

“What happened?”

I gave Annie a sidelong glance. “I was stupid. I underestimated,” I checked that thought. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t see most of it. You’ll have to ask Jessie.”

Annie fell into a dark silence of her own for a little while. No one along the way decided that we were good candidates for muggings, harassment, or human interaction on any level. I saw a few people take a look at us and then cross the street. It was probably a rational move. There was enough pent-up hostility and anger between the two of us to give even the most hardened city dwellers pause. I stopped and looked up at Gran’s house. It had seemed like such a refuge for so long to me. A haven from all the ills of the world. Now, it looked like a sham, a fairy tale gingerbread house to lure in the unwary and ignorant. I ground my teeth for a moment and then walked up the path to the door. Annie and I stood on the porch. She turned and gave me a hard look.

“If Jessie dies because of this, you understand I’m going to kill you, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised that she felt the need to say it out loud.

I lifted a hand and knocked on the door. Annie peered at me, curious, but said nothing. There was a long pause and then I heard shuffling steps. Locks were undone and the door opened. Gran looked at Annie, gave her a respectful nod, and turned her gaze on me. She frowned a little in apparent consternation.

“What are you knocking for, lad?”

I stared at her, willing myself to be as cold and calculating as she had been my entire life. “That’s what you do at a stranger’s house.”