“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come over right after I get off work, probably around five.” Phone in my hand, I jumped out and grabbed the mail from my mailbox, which sat up on Hummingbird Road. Then I got back in my car quick as I could.

That had been stupid. I could have gone without checking the mail for one day. Habits are very hard to break, even when they’re unimportant habits. “I really am lucky you live with me, Amelia,” I said. That might have been spreading it on a little thick, but it was the absolute truth.

But Amelia had gone off on another mental path. “You’re speaking to Jason again? You told him? About things?”

“Yeah, I had to. Great-grandfather can’t have everything his own way. Stuff has happened.”

“It always does, around you,” Amelia said. She didn’t sound angry, and she wasn’t condemning me.

“Not always,” I said after a sharp moment of doubt. In fact, I thought, as I turned left at the end of Hummingbird Road to go to my brother’s, that point Jason made about everything changing when the vamps came out . . . that just might have been something I really agree with.

Prosaically, I realized my car was almost out of gas. I had to pull into Grabbit Quik. While I was pumping the liquid gold into my car, I fell back to puzzling over what Jason had told me. What would be urgent enough to bring a reclusive and human-hating half fairy to Jason’s door? Why would he tell Jason . . . ? I shouldn’t be thinking about this.

This was stupid, and I should be watching out for myself instead of trying to solve Jason’s problems.

But after a few more seconds of turning the conversation over in my head, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that I understood it a little better.

I called Calvin. At first he didn’t get what I was saying, but then he agreed to meet me at Jason’s house.

I caught a glimpse of Jason in the backyard when I pulled into the circular driveway of the neat, small house my dad had built when he and my mother were first married. It was out in the country, out farther west than Arlene’s trailer, and though it was visible from the road, it had a pond and several acres lying behind it. My dad had loved to hunt and fish, and my brother did, too. Jason had recently put in a makeshift range, and I could hear the rifle.

I decided to come through the house, and I took care to yell when I was at the back door.

“Hey!” Jason called back. He had a 30-30 in his hands. It had been our father’s. Mel was standing behind him, holding a box of ammo. “We decided we better get in some practice.”