“Christopher, you matter to me. Shattered or not. You are my friend.”

Christopher opened his arms. The books fell to the floor. He clutched at me, long fingers gripping my shoulders. “Don’t go. Don’t go to that terrible place, or he will shatter you and then you’ll be alone. You will be like me. Don’t go, Mistress.”

Jim moved, but I shook my head.

“What terrible place?” I asked, keeping my voice soothing.

He shook his head and whispered, “Don’t go . . . Don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” I promised him. “I won’t go, but you have to tell me the name of the place.”

“You don’t understand.” Christopher looked at me, and in his blue eyes I saw pure panic. “You don’t understand. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, but not there. I cannot go there again.”

I wouldn’t go there either, if I knew where “there” was. “It’s okay. Just tell me . . .”

He shook his head. “No. No. It’s not.”

“It will be okay.”

He reached out, touched the strand of my hair that had slipped out of my braid, and yanked it, ripping some hair out.

Ow.

Jim lunged at Christopher, knocking him back. The thin man fell on the floor. I rammed Jim with my shoulder. “No!”

Christopher scrambled to his feet, wild-eyed, a few strands of my hair in his hand. “Don’t trust the wolf!”

He turned and fled down the hallway.

“What the hell?” Jim growled. “I’m going to have him sedated.”

“He knows something,” I told him. “I don’t know if he had a vision or someone told him something, but it freaked him out and he can’t explain it. Let’s see what he does with the hair. I might be able to figure it out from there.”

Hair, like body fluids, retained the magic of its owner once removed from the body. A year ago I would’ve killed Christopher to retrieve the hair, because studying it would reveal all my secrets. But my secrets were about to burst into the open anyway. Hugh knew the truth, Roland probably knew as well, and sooner or later everyone would know. I had come to terms with it.

“If someone told him something, it has to be either someone in the Pack or divination magic,” I thought out loud.

Even now the Keep held at least two hundred shapeshifters, and strangers weren’t welcome. Christopher never left the Keep and the grounds.

Jim growled. “I’ll put a guard on him. Someone discreet. If he’s getting his information from some apparition that manifests in his bedroom at night, I don’t want him sharing your hair with it.”

I looked at him. “What wolf do you think Christopher was talking about?”

“Beats me.”

There were more than six hundred of them and I didn’t have many fans among them.