I called Sinclair and found myself irrationally disappointed to get his voice mail in turn, but I relayed Casimir’s message and asked him to give me a call to confirm.

Okay, so that was done.

Meanwhile, propped against the futon in my living room, the buckler that Stefan had given me offered a silent, shining reprimand for my lack of diligence. I checked the time and took another shot at it.

Nope, still not as good without an actual opponent. This time I lasted all of five minutes—hey, time passes a lot more slowly than you might think when all you’re doing is holding an image in your mind—before abandoning my effort.

Acting on an impulse I didn’t care to analyze, I tried calling Stefan to see if he might be available to help me train. After all, he seemed to be invested in the process. And, okay, let’s be honest; despite the bad timing, the possibility that Stefan Ludovic might actually have feelings for me was intriguing.

No luck—just more voice mail.

I hoisted the shield again and spent a few more minutes angling it here and there to create bright points of reflected sunlight for Mogwai to chase across the floor. “Here’s the thing, Mog,” I informed him. “I want to get good at this, I really do. And I know I need to practice. I just think I need . . . incentive.”

Finally copping to the fact that he was never, ever going to catch any of the dancing sunbeams, Mogwai shot me a look of betrayal, turned his back, and sat down to indulge in a vigorous bout of indignant grooming.

“It’s no good because it’s not real, right?” I said to him. “There’s no satisfaction. You know what I mean?”

Licking one outstretched haunch, my cat didn’t deign to acknowledge my comment.

For a moment, I entertained the thought of calling Cody to enlist his aid, but I wasn’t sure about the protocol of disturbing a werewolf around the time of a full moon, and truth be told, a werewolf wasn’t the kind of menace I needed.

I thought about calling Lurine, too, but . . . see, here’s the thing. I don’t know exactly what Lurine’s capabilities are, other than the ability to shape-shift into a glorious and terrible monster. I mean, I have a pretty good idea that it involves sucking the essential life force out of the occasional ordinary human being to sustain her immortal existence, which may or may not be what she did to her late and relatively unlamented octogenarian husband, millionaire California real-estate tycoon Sanford Hollister, but I don’t know for sure.

And I don’t want to. After all, it didn’t happen in Pemkowet, so it’s not my concern. Call it a cop-out. I don’t care.