“Okay.”

Stefan escorted me to the door and helped me into my jacket. “Until then,” he murmured. “Be well.”

Outside, the cold air made my eyes water. I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder and walked slowly to my car. I couldn’t think about what had transpired today, not yet. Hell, maybe never.

And yet, despite everything, I’d just agreed to go out on a date with Stefan next Saturday.

My life definitely wasn’t normal.

      Twenty-eight

I might have avoided thinking about Janek Król during daylight hours, but my dreams that night were haunted and fragmented.

No surprise, I guess.

It wasn’t a reprise of my nightmare, not quite, but there were elements of it. I dreamed of vessels of blazing light bursting into shards; and I dreamed of the dome of heaven cracking asunder with a thunderclap.

I dreamed of the faces of my loved ones turning away from me in disappointment.

It’s tikkun olam, I protested in my dream, dauda-dagr’s hilt clenched in one fist. I’m repairing the world!

My mother shook her head at me, and I realized blood was dripping from the dagger’s blade, falling silently in the dune hollow in which I stood, drops of blood making dark pits in the sand.

I dropped the dagger in horror. In his wheelchair, Janek Król stared at me with his hollow, haggard gaze and pointed a stern finger at me, then turned his hand palm outward, transforming it to a symbol from my mother’s reading: El Mano, power, the thing I yearned for and feared. In my dream, his hand was hale and unravaged.

Heavyhearted, I knelt to retrieve dauda-dagr.

With great power comes great responsibility, Bethany Cassopolis whispered in my ear from behind. Right, devil-girl?

Still on my knees, I whirled on her, but no one was there. I fell, catching myself on my free hand.

Dauda-dagr’s tip scored the sand.

Daughter, my father’s voice rumbled from beyond, you have but to ask.

Absently, as though I stood outside my own body, I watched myself inscribe a sigil in the loose sand, stand, and call my father’s name.

Overhead, the sky cracked open all over again and the trumpets of Armageddon sounded with a clarion blast.

“No!”

My cry of denial jolted me awake, a whimpering sound stuck in my throat. I was tangled in my sheets, my heart was racing, and my skin was damp with sweat. On the bed beside me, Mogwai let out a low, purposeful yowl. Reaching out with one forepaw, he extended and retracted his claws to prick and knead my sheet-shrouded arm.

It was strangely reassuring. My racing heart slowed. Mogwai withdrew his paw and began purring deep in his chest, regarding me with slitted green eyes.

“Thanks, Mog.” I disentangled my arm and stroked him. “As kind-of, sort-of familiars go, you’re not half bad.” Mogwai flicked one notched ear in acknowledgment and continued purring contentedly.

Once I’d gotten out of bed, washed, and dressed to face the day, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t scheduled to work until tomorrow, but between Janek Król’s death and my disquieting dreams, I was filled with restless energy and a sense of foreboding. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. I wanted to talk to someone, but I didn’t know who.

My mother always said that when you didn’t know what else to do, you might as well clean house, so I put my restless energy to good use and gave the apartment the kind of top-to-bottom thorough scouring it only got . . . well, that it pretty much never got. I even pulled out the refrigerator so I could vacuum and scrub the floor behind it, which, by the way, was pretty gross.

At least it was productive, and it freed my mind enough so I could think about who I might talk to.

The only person who could really, truly understand the decision I’d made yesterday was Stefan, but he was the one person I didn’t want to see today. It sure as hell wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with my mom. I mean, yes, I can talk about almost anything with her, but somehow I couldn’t see myself telling her I’d mercy-killed a hundred-and-some-year-old Dachau survivor.

Or Jen, or Sinclair, or . . . anyone fully human, really.

I could have talked to Cody about it, I thought wistfully. The wolf in him would have understood. But I was too hurt and, frankly, too pissed off at Cody for that to be an option.

Lurine was the logical choice, but she was also a good friend of my mother’s. I didn’t have any problem asking her to keep minor confidences—after all, she was my friend, too—but this was major. And there was the fact that when it came to me, Lurine didn’t trust Stefan any further than she could throw him. Actually, scratch that; Lurine in her true form could probably heave Stefan a considerable distance. Let’s just say she didn’t trust him and I didn’t particularly feel like defending him to her.

Cooper was a possibility. I’d come to consider him a friend, and there was no doubt in my mind that he would understand. Then again, that was the problem. Cooper might understand too well. He’d been Outcast at seventeen, and while the body he was trapped in might be strong and healthy, more than two hundred years as a never-aging seventeen-year-old boy had given him a nihilistic streak. When he’d been ravening, he’d practically dared me to use dauda-dagr to take him out. I didn’t want to give him any ideas.

So no, not Cooper.

By the end of the day, my apartment was spotless, and I was no closer to a resolution than I’d been when I started. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be alone—no offense to Mogwai—in my apartment for another minute.