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Raven klok ed as softly as I’d spoken, then sprang up and beat wing around the circle, stopping four times to crash his wings against it.

Cardinal directions, I expected; power criss-crossed me as he smacked the final line into place, and I felt something uncoil within me.

Rattler unwound from my abdomen, a thing of light and lines just as Raven was, and inclined his head to me, as if respecting the choice I’d made.

He stretched out along Tia like he’d done to me earlier on the street, then hissed once in anticipation.

It had only been seconds, but it felt like I had been holding back power forever when I finally released it, trusting Raven and Rattler to be my tempering.

The healing itself was easy, with two spirit guides and the untapped magic pounding through me.

Rattler’s first gift had been the sloughing away of all my time-consuming visualizations, all my vehicle metaphors and layering processes that had let me heal before he came to me.

Both patient and healer only needed the right mindset, the acceptance of the basic shamanic belief that life was change, and change could be effected instantaneously.

I knew it could be done, and it was easier on a canine mind, even one burying a human mind within it, than it would have been on a conscious human.

Inside one breath she was bleeding out from the throat; inside the next, she was listless from blood loss, but whole.

Even burned patches of fur were restored, and all the smaller wounds from our fight disappeared.

Awakening outrage lit Tia’s eyes and she writhed under my hand, which still lay tight against her throat.

I shook my head, denying her escape. Pinning her down not just with my weight, but with sheets of silver-blue magic.

Contempt flashed across her face, expressed by a curled-back lip that exposed her canines.

I felt a surge of power as she attempted to transform from wolf to human shape.

It should have worked. Hours earlier, it had: I’d been unable to hold her behind shields in the moment of transformation, one magic canceling the other out.

But I had Rattler with me now, and he lay coiled around Tia like she was his own oversize stuffed animal.

Her shifting powers were inherent, as much a part of her as her nose, but Rattler was a master of shapechanging, as would be any creature which shed its skin.

Between his will and mine, she would remain in wolf form until I chose otherwise.

And choose I did. My magic already lay in her flesh, from the wild and exhausting battle against cancer all the way to the healing I’d just performed. I let it sink deeper, searching inside for the gift, or the curse, that made her what she was.

Werewolf, no question about it; the word itself was a point of pride to her. A point of vulnerability, too: it meant so much that it offered me a path into a deep part of her soul, a place I had no business going.

I went.

A man-made stone hill of ridiculous height swelled up before me, then faded again, leaving behind a vaguely recognizable afterimage: steep sides, a broad flat top and greenery below; one hill built on another.

Then it was gone entirely, a midnight garden growing around me.

Ancient woods with massive, wide-spread trees and thin undergrowth littered a rolling landscape, forty shades of green.

But something unhealthy discolored its beauty.

Darkness turned greens to ichory black and throttled the life from the great trees.

I’d never entered a garden that felt rotten to—or from—the core; even my own Spartan internal world was only that, not spoiled.

I turned cautiously, wishing I had my sword in hand, but tight-woven shields would have to do.

A cave mouth, alarmingly familiar, lay to my left.

Last time I’d seen it, a rockslide had been pulled into it, blocking it.

Now, though, it was open to the world, and a mewling black beast crawled from it as I watched.

It was followed by two more, all of them nasty little things covered in slime, though they rolled and rubbed themselves in dry moss until the goop came off.

They got bigger as they rolled, shedding the worst of their ugliness and taking on a more common place form: wolves, born from the bowels of the earth.

They paced toward me without seeing me, growing larger with each step, until they were in front of me, and abruptly, all at once, threw off their lupine bodies to become women every bit as striking as Tia Carley was.

I shot a compulsive glance at the night sky. The moon was quartered, just enough to spill light through the wide-spaced trees. Not, certainly, the full moon werewolves were legendarily bound to.

The three women leaped into canine form again, leaving one another behind.

I followed one, inhumanly quick on my feet as I often was in gardens; no need to change form here, for which I was grateful.

My quarry stopped often, becoming human, seducing and killing men—always men, never women—and moving on.

Time and again she met with her sisters, all of them vicious with killing pleasure, and as weeks rolled into years it because obvious these beasts were by no means tied to the moon.

Their power came from somewhere else: from the cave they’d crawled from, and from the being who lay somewhere within it.

A banshee had called him the Master, and what little I knew about him said that if werewolves were his creatures, the world would be a better place if they were eradicated.

Time, as if in response to my thought, warped forward.

The three wolf sisters came together and faced a woman with light-colored hair.

She was unarmed and unafraid, waiting on three killers beneath the light of what was now a full moon, and when they were within a dozen feet of her, she knelt and put her hands in the earth.

Shockingly, I recognized the gesture. I’d used it myself, calling up a power circle to contain a wendigo only a few months earlier.

Magic sprang up for her as it had done for me, flares bringing my attention to a huge circle of standing stones so distant from us and from one another that I’d never have noticed them without the magic suddenly flowing through them.

I didn’t understand a word of the language she shouted in, but I didn’t need to: its effects were vivid and obvious.

The wolf sisters collapsed in on themselves, writhing, howling, twisting as their very bodies were reshaped.

As the magic inside them was countermanded by someone else, their master howled up out of the darkness to object.

The fair-haired woman slapped his presence away as if he was nothing more than an annoying bug.

The moon rose and set and rose again as the woman worked her magic, and on the final night, the third night of the full moon, she left the sisters beaten and battered, but not dead.

Come morning, they staggered to their feet and tested their shapeshifting skills, and found themselves as werewolves of legend were: bound to human form all but three nights of the month.

Cursed to human form: that was the word Tia had used.

The fair-haired woman had cursed them to near-mortality, and in doing so used more magic than I’d ever seen anyone do.

My stomach lurched, pulling me toward that show of power, and for the first time in my life I actually wanted to follow.

To find out who she was, and to study with her, learning what more I might be able to do.

I would, I promised myself. Very soon, I would.

But time twisted again, dragging me out of the midnight garden I thought represented the past, and thrust me into a spiky angry garden I was reasonably certain represented Tia’s current situation.

Thorns dragged at me, prickling protests that told me what she’d been trying to do, though having touched on the Master’s presence in a world gone away, I almost knew already.

So much power necessary to break the fair-haired woman’s spell.

The troupe with their transformative dances, with the enormous gathering of healing magic meant for so many people, offered her almost the only chance she would ever have to break the magic binding her to a mostly-mortal life.

She was sick, from her ancestors’ points of view; all the werewolves through history were, tied as they’d been to the moon.

Only healing magic could cure that. Three nights of the dancers’ power sucked up might have been enough to counter the ancient magic.

Failing that, having discovered me , my own talent might be enough to rip apart a spell set millennia ago.

And only the death of innocents could feed the Master, who was weak.

I’d interrupted his feeding a year ago; my own mother had done the same, almost thirty years prior to that.

He had to be starving by now, but a wicker man full of people who’d done nothing to deserve death might have offered him enough appetizer to lend Tia’s desperate transformative magic a little strength.

It would certainly endear her to him, so if he should ever loosen himself from the rubble holding him down, he might turn some aspect of his power to freeing her from the constraints her kind had been put under centuries ago.

As far as hedging bets went, it was a good call.

Except I wasn’t going to let her do it. Not on any level, not tonight, not ever. I reached for Rattler, feeling his comforting presence, and turned my attention to Tia.

Judge, jury, executioner. That was the role I’d seen Big Coyote in, in his white-hot desert.

I played the same one now, without compunction.

I knew now what the anomaly I’d seen in her DNA was.

Not the cancer which had attacked her, but a twist of genetics that made her other than human.

I unwound that spur, unthreaded it and filed it down with a rattlesnake’s rattler made raspy, made it smooth and even, nothing unusual about it.

It felt almost gentle, the push of magic that slowly altered the wolf under my hands into a woman again, but I wasn’t kidding myself.

There was nothing gentle or kind about what I was doing.

It was ruthless and brutal and I had no doubt at all Tia would probably rather die than be changed the way I was changing her.

That would have to be her choice, though. I wasn’t going to make it for her.

I finally sat back, letting go the magic that pinned her down as I let go the healing—if I could call it that—magic as well.

Tia’s eyes opened and I saw—only saw, didn’t feel— her reach for the shapeshifting magic; saw her try to become what she’d been, a massive, dangerous beast who preyed on those weaker than herself.

Saw her try, and saw her fail, the magic no longer hers to command.

No longer an active part of her, though I wasn’t really certain I’d stripped it away entirely; I wasn’t sure that could be done.

But it would take years at best for her to find it again, and I thought a lifetime might not be enough.

Her screams tore at my skin as I got up to find my clothes.