I hugged her. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow. Tonight we all need to rest. And we need to take time to remember Jezebel, because there might not be much time tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said.

We went inside.

My aunt tore through me like a hurricane. “You left me behind.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You will not do that again.”

“Yes, I will, if I find it necessary. Bringing you to the Pack would’ve resulted in us being torn to pieces.”

Erra squinted at me. “What happened?”

“For two years a shapeshifter woman took care of Julie and acted as my bodyguard. I trusted her with my life and the life of my adopted child. Tonight he made her try to murder my best friend’s baby. She failed but she injured the Beast Lord’s mate.”

Erra peered at Julie. “You told me this one was dead.”

“I didn’t want you to kill her,” I said.

Erra peered at Julie. “You gave her our blood?”

“It’s a long story.”

“You like horses, child, don’t you?”

Julie looked at me.

“Go ahead and answer,” I told her.

“Yes.”

“And wolves. You have an affinity for wolves and wolflike dogs. They make sense to you.”

“Yes.”

“What color is my niece’s magic?”

“It’s difficult to describe.”

Erra glanced at me. “You have a child of the Koorgahn. And a throwback to a pure-blood, too. Look at that hair.”

Koorgahn? She probably meant kurgan. The only kurgans I knew about were the burial mounds peppering the old Russian steppes, Asia, and southern Siberia. The kurgans served as burial mounds for the ancient race of Scythians, and the earliest ones dated sometime around the ninth century BC . . . They were blond. The ancient Greeks described them as red-haired or fair-haired with blue or gray eyes, and the mummies the archaeologists pulled out of the ancient grave sites matched that phenotype.

“Who are you, child?” Erra asked.

“I’m her Herald,” Julie said.

“At least you have a Herald. You’ve done something right. I need to speak to my niece alone. We’ll talk more later.”

Julie looked at me. I nodded and she went deeper into the house.

“My father has been talking to her,” I said.

“Of course he has. He always wanted one, but they were a proud people. He couldn’t buy a child of royal blood and he couldn’t broker the marriage of one of his offspring to theirs. First, they knew his reputation, and second, they were afraid to lose the Sight. It was believed that a mixing of two powerful bloodlines could produce a child unable to see magic, and they wouldn’t expose one of their own to that risk. When it was clear that magic would vanish from the world, her people killed themselves by the hundreds because they were going magic-blind.”

My aunt, the downer.

“Binding a child of the Koorgahn. A dangerous game you’re playing, squirrel.”