Mercy," he said,"in a fair fight between near equals, I'll back you every time. It's the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I'm working on that.

Charles preferred his deer to taste like meat and his pancakes to look like pancakes. Brother Wolf thought he was too picky. Brother Wolf was probably right.

Some truths are truths, no matter who says them.

And that's when Anna realized that what the wolf had been asking Bran for was death. Impulsively, Anna stepped away from Charles. She put a knee on the bench she'd been sitting on and reached over the back to close her hand on Asil's wrist, which was lying across the back of the pew. He hissed in shock but didn't pull away. As she held him the scent of wilderness, of sickness, faded. He stared at her, the whites of his eyes showing brightly while his irises narrowed to small bands around his black pupil. "Omega," he whispered, his breath coming harshly.

She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Stuff that. I'll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do." "What's that?" asked Calvin. "You don't need to encourage her," said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me. "The same thing that people with degrees in history do," I said. "Fix cars or serve frnech fries and bad hamburgers.

Not that I'd really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I'd wanted to keep open if I could.