“Sounds familiar. Seems like werewolves think of nothing else.”

“The funny thing is, I don’t think they ever knew about me in me own time. Druids were everywhere back then. But now that I’m one of only three, I suddenly matter. I don’t suppose ye could drive me out of here to where there’s some trees? Siodhachan says there’s nothing tethered to Tír na nÓg in this area and I can’t make me own tethers. We have to go somewhere called Payson. Or near it, anyway, up to someplace called the Mogollon Rim.”

She nods and says, “All right. That’s about an hour and a half away, but I’ll do it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

She leans forward, her blue eyes intense and her voice low. “Run with me in the forest, as wolf and bear.”

I blink, surprised at the mildness of the request. “Gladly. That’s no hardship.”

“Good. What are your other forms?” she asks, leaning back and dropping her eyes to me right arm, where the shape-shifting bindings are. The designs give a good idea of the basic creature, but the specific animal is not always obvious.

“Ah. Me hoofed form is a ram. And then there’s the bear, a red kite for the winged form, and in the sea … well, it doesn’t really matter. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve shifted to that form. I’m not fond of it.”

“Why? What are you in the sea?”

“In English it’s called a walrus.”

Her eyes nearly start from her head, and she quickly covers her mouth so that she won’t spit anything out. She struggles to swallow her last bite and then gasps when she finally manages to choke it down. Slapping her hand flat against the table, she says, “You are the walrus? Of course you are. You’re the walrus. Goo goo ga joob! Ha! That’s perfect!”

“Goo goo ga what? What’s that mean?”

“We’ll listen to the Beatles in the car and it’ll all become clear. Come on, teddy bear. Let’s do the dishes.”

“Wait. What’s a teddy bear? I’m a black bear.”

“Don’t knock it. People like to cuddle with teddy bears.”

On the way up to Payson she tells me a bit about her history. She’d shared last night that Gunnar Magnusson, the old alpha, had originally bitten her and brought her into the pack, but she hadn’t revealed the circumstances surrounding it.

She’d been living on a farm some distance outside Reykjavik. During a full moon, a small band of men, recent arrivals from Norway, had invaded and slain her father and brother. Greta hid in the barn, but it was only a matter of time until they found her. Gunnar and Hal, hunting beneath the moon’s glow, heard the cries of battle and arrived before the invaders could find and violate Greta. They tore out the Norsemen’s throats and then had to decide what to do with her. There weren’t supposed to be any wolves in Iceland, and their presence needed to remain a secret, so their choices were to kill Greta or make her a werewolf like them. Gunnar bit her, then he and Hal stayed until dawn, when they could shift and explain what had happened. Gunnar shifted, Hal stayed in his wolf form, and Gunnar told Greta that she could choose death or choose the pack. The pack would offer her a violent life, but, he promised, she would never get so close to death again.

Gunnar and Hal became her father and brother after that. And Gunnar’s promise held true for centuries: She never came so close to death again, until the night that the Polish witches almost killed her in the meadow around Tony Cabin—the night Aenghus Óg opened a portal to hell. She blamed Siodhachan for that, for the deaths of the pack mates who didn’t survive that night, and for Gunnar’s death in Asgard as well. Siodhachan had told me as much, but it was far different when it came from Greta’s perspective. To her way of thinking, Siodhachan had done her serious wrong, and for the life of her she could not imagine why Hal would continue to have dealings with him.

We’re driving past a sign that says SYCAMORE CREEK when tears escape from her eyes and run down her cheeks. “I think sometimes about all the other packs in the world, who have never met Atticus O’Sullivan. How they still have their alphas. How they never had to watch their pack mates be killed by silver.” She sniffles and takes her hand off the steering wheel to wipe irritably at her cheek. “And I wonder why it was my pack that had to suffer.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to dump on you.”

“Dump away, love. It’s all I’m good for. I don’t have an answer for you, though.”

“No, I don’t need an answer. I guess I just needed a release. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” A minute passes without any words. A mile underneath the car’s wheels, during which I realize that I am probably no more to her than an exercise in mental health. And I am fine with that. She has suffered long enough. If I can bring her to a semblance of balance and that is all, then I have done Gaia’s work here.

Then she says through a sob, “I miss them.”

“Yes. It’s our duty to remember the dead. And our duty to let them go.”

She weeps in silence, aside from another sniffle or two, and then she gasps, “Oh, shit! The dead must be, like, everyone you’ve ever known. Owen, I’m so sorry.”

“Ah, not to worry. Everyone’s gone but Siodhachan and the Tuatha Dé Danann, but I’d already outlived most of the people I knew and didn’t get along with the rest. But I remember them all.”

“What do the Druids believe about death?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I mean, it happens.”

“Right, but what happens after death?”

“Feck if I know, Greta. I haven’t died yet.”

She laughs and says, “No, I mean, do you believe in an afterlife? A paradise?”

“Oh, aye. Once the Tuatha Dé Danann agreed to leave this world to the Milesians, they created nine planes, of which Tír na nÓg is the largest. There’s also Mag Mell and Emhain Ablach and others. But I can’t tell you where I’ll be going, or where anybody else goes, or what will happen when I get there.”

She drives us up to this Mogollon Rim, the very southern tip of the Colorado plateau and another elemental’s territory, and takes a left at a sign marked WOODS CANYON LAKE.

“We’re up on the Rim now,” she says. The road is paved for a few miles, until we get to the turnoff for the lake, but she keeps going and it becomes dirt. “Most everyone turns off at the lake, so after another five miles we won’t see anyone. Great place to run around.”

She’s right about that. It’s mostly tall ponderosa pines mixed with the occasional juniper, and the undergrowth isn’t bad at all—only sage and something she says is called manzanita. She pulls over and we get out of the car, and I enjoy the silence after the slam of the door. No industrial hum here. I say hello to the elemental, and it welcomes me. Through it I am able to discover that there are bound trees within easy running distance.

“Let’s get out of sight of the road before we shift,” she says, and together we jog into the trees until the car and the road are out of sight. I can pretend it’s old days again.

“Have you ever seen a werewolf shift?” she asks me.

“Aye. Saw a lad in Flagstaff do it. Ty Pollard.”

Her face lights up. “Oh, I know Ty! Sam’s husband. Nice fella and good to have at your shoulder. Anyway, I’m glad you’ve seen the change before, so you won’t be shocked.” She pulls off her shirt and adds, “It’s not a pretty sight.”

“Well, those are pretty—”

“Ha! Stop. You know, my wolf is going to want to play with your bear. And when I say play, I mean fight. You up for it?”

I grin and say, “Yes. That’s what I was doing with Ty.”

“Throat and spine are off-limits.”

“Those are the rules,” I agree, as she continues to undress and I get started doing the same.

“My wolf is going to be pissed. Changing during the day with the moon out of phase is painful. I mean more than usual.”

“Understood.”

“Talk to you later.” She smiles and winks at me and then, free of her clothes, winces as the transformation begins. Bones snap and shift underneath the skin, threatening to burst through in places, and she falls to all fours. The worst part has to be the knees popping and reforming in the other direction for the back legs. I feel a bit guilty as I mouth the words and bind my spirit to the shape of a bear, a process that Gaia has made quick and painless for us. We are her creatures, and our bodies are hers to shape as she wishes.

Greta’s wolf is powerful and angry, as she promised. She growls once low in her throat and then launches herself at me. I stand up, take her charge in the chest, and then we tumble, clawing and snapping at each other. She gets in a good bite on my left chest, near the crook of my arm, and I’m able to rake my claws down her left ribs. She makes a few superficial scratches, but her claws aren’t like mine. We disengage and face off. She barks, I bellow, and then her aggression dissolves and she wants to play in a different way. She splays out her front legs and lowers her head to the ground while her tail rises and actually wags. She barks once and then takes off deeper into the forest. I give chase, surprising her by closing the gap on the straightaway, but I’m not nearly so agile. Every time she changes direction, I lose ground. We run for ten minutes, top speed, then she leads us into a meadow, where we scare a small herd of elk that had bedded down for the day. She’s not interested in hunting them, though; she turns and faces me, tongue lolling out, happy, and then begins to circle me and growl again. It’s back to fighting.

Our second tussle lasts much longer than the first, and we mess each other up pretty good. There’s no audience, no one to stop us, and it’s savage. She takes plenty of punishment and delivers it right back. We stagger away, bleeding like lambs, both trying to give the impression that we’re ready for more, but in truth we’re maybe ready for a break. We’re panting, too concerned with breathing to waste anything on vocalizations, and that’s a reliable sign that we have worn each other out. She walks up to me, ears and tail up, nonaggressive, and sits down, her bloody muzzle raised to look at me. I sit too, then decide to go ahead and lie down on my right side to draw more energy for healing. She slumps over onto her left side so that we’re lying in the meadow facing each other.

I hurt in places I didn’t know were places. Somewhere, Siodhachan had picked up a binding to shut off pain, and he taught it to me, but I don’t use it now. Greta doesn’t have a binding like that. It wouldn’t be fair.

Gradually our breathing slows and our eyelids grow heavy. I see hers flutter closed a couple of times before mine do the same.

I awake later to popping and crunching noises as she shifts back to human form. We lost a few hours, judging by the sun, and I feel warm and much better when I shape-shift myself.

“Thank you,” Greta says. “I needed a good fight.”

I lack skills for expressing emotions other than anger and impatience. I feel them quite often but rarely communicate them. All I manage to say is, “Me too.”

Her eyes trail down my body. “You heal well.”

“A good thing, that is. So do you.”

“Ready to go back?”

We walk to where we left our clothes—a decent hike, during which she talks a lot and I grunt in all the right places and try to think of something appropriate to say. I’m uncertain if she wants to see me again. I still think our time together might be more about her past than about a present attraction. Her rate of speech might indicate her own nervousness about where we go from here, but, if so, why exactly is she nervous? Is it a sign that she likes me and wants to share everything, or is it a desperate bid to fill the time so that I won’t ask to turn a dalliance into something more?

She finally stops talking when we reach our clothes, yet I’m not ready with anything to say. I must look as scared as I feel, because, after we’re dressed, she examines my face for a few moments and then smiles in an attempt to put me at my ease.

“Thanks for listening to me ramble on,” she says. “You’re quite good at it.”

I have never been accused of being a good listener before. It was probably a result of my discomfort with the language. Or else it emphasized how much this jump forward in time has changed me.

Greta throws up her hands and lets them fall back down to slap against her legs. “This was fun.”

“Well—yes. It was.” Unexpected and very welcome fun.

“I know you have to go now, but feel free to visit again.” She comes closer until her nose almost touches mine. Light dances in her blue eyes. “You know. If you’re free. And if you feel like it.”

“I will.” I nod at her, relieved at the invitation. “I like you.” Gods below, you’d never think I came from a family of bards. If me uncle had heard me say that shite he would have taken me balls because I wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

“Good. Let’s leave it at that.” She kisses me quickly on the mouth and heads for the car, with me standing there stunned. She’s almost out of sight before I can compose a sentence.

“Balance and blessings go with ye!” I call after her. She doesn’t answer, but I’m sure she hears me.

I shake my head, trying to clear it. I desperately need to find me own balance. I have so much catching up to do.

First on the list is catching up in Tír na nÓg, because I can speak Old Irish there and not sound like I took a hammer to me skull.