My fingers had crept into my hair and were tugging at it. My voice had thinned, small and high again, the voice of me from a long time ago. “I wish I could rip those images from my mind. I wish I could dig them out. For years, I assumed I didn’t have them. That would have been so much easier. But when she was right there in front of me, all of a sudden, so were all those memories. All at once. When Henry took aim at her, I didn’t think about it. I acted.”

Malachi stood up slowly, but did not turn around.

“Yes!” I shouted, anticipating what he might say before he had a chance to open his mouth. “I know what you believe! I know you think I missed my chance to liberate my mother’s soul, all because I protected her body! I get it now. I see how hard it is to kill a Mazikin when it’s wearing the skin of a person you care about. I get it. You must love that.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said, so softly I almost missed it.

I tore my fingers through my hair and headed for the door. “Now they’re using her to get to us. They’ve set up a meeting, using the pretense that my long-lost mother wants to see me again. You’re coming with me. To translate. See, I can’t even understand what she says.” Bitterness broke my voice, leaving it hoarse. “I assume you can, though. You couldn’t have spent all those years with Ana without learning some Spanish.”

“You’re right,” he said, finally turning to me, his eyes ebony pools of sorrow. I almost screamed at him to stop looking at me that way. It wasn’t fair, and I needed to get away before I made a fool of myself by collapsing into his arms and begging him to never let me go.

I groped for the doorknob, desperate for my escape. “I’ll let you know when it’s all set up. It should be great fun.” I welcomed the cool air on my burning skin as I swung the door open. “I’ll be back tonight. We have less than a week before the city’s emergency shelters close for the season. We need to locate the new Mazikin nest, and Sil in particular, before they start picking off those folks—as well as our friends—one by one. So study your maps, and tell the others to get ready. We’ll be patrolling heavily, but probably in shifts from now on. The objective is still to find a Mazikin and track it back to the nest or capture one and force it to tell us where they are. Does that sound like an acceptable plan to you?”