She sank her elbow into my side and dug it in to the bone. “Come on. Spill. You’ve got to have some kind of super-cool talent for Cord to be so nutso about you.” She bent and snagged another rock. “You should have seen him at the Rebec place. He was all but salivating over you. I figured you must be dead.” She winced. “Not that we go around killing and eating people—it’s bad press—but accidents happen. Meat is meat. I just mean he doesn’t much care for non-wargs, but he went ballistic when that Fury came to. I thought he was going to rip her—” As though sensing my unease—maybe she smelled it?—Dell dropped that line of thought. “So…anyway…you were about to tell me all about you.”

“I’m a Gemini.”

“Like the constellation, right?” She drew squiggles in the air to represent the stars. “What makes a Gemini a Gemini?”

I stopped walking and stuck out my hand. “Want to find out?”

“I asked, didn’t I?” She clasped palms with me without hesitation. “Now what?”

The spur in my fingertip slid from its sheath, the nail falling to the ground, and I pricked the back of her hand, between the knuckles. The wild tang of her blood flooded my veins, and a buzzing noise poured into my head. I barely heard her exclamation as a thick, golden pelt sprouted from my black-clawed fingertips up to my elbow, the spur receding as a claw took the place of that missing fingernail.

“Whoa.” Dell poked her button nose under my jaw. “You even smell like a warg. Kind of like me. Like a sister or cousin or something. Is that it? Can you do more? Can you shift into a wolf? Can you shift into my wolf?” The implications caught up to her. “Wait—does this mean you can copy anything?”

I held up a hand to halt the avalanche of questions. “Yes, I can do more. No, I can’t fully shift. And yes, I can copy any supernatural talent.” I rubbed my ear with the unclawed hand. “What is that sound?”

Dell took my paw in her hand, flipping it over and stroking the tawny fur, which soothed me the way a good foot massage might. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Voices.” I focused on the noise. “But not voices. There are so words. There’s just…presence.”

When I closed my eyes to focus, a ribbon of shimmering pavement stretched in my mind’s eye from here past the horizon. Warmth spread through my chest, filling jagged cracks left from Lori’s loss. The void still yawned in her absence, but the flaming light penetrated the absolute darkness that had shrouded me for so long. For a second or two I felt…at peace.