“You’ve met my mother,” I told her, and she laughed. I loved my mom, too, but I was very glad she lived in Portland.

“I’m glad I have you and Dad,” she said. “That way, it’s okay that Mom is…”

Flaky? Selfish? Horrible?

“Mom,” she concluded.

We watched Korra for a while longer. Darryl rejoined us as soon as we turned the volume back down.

“I am not wanted in the kitchen,” he said. Darryl loved to cook. “Christy says that men can’t cook.”

“You’re a great cook,” Jesse told him.

He smiled at her, a gentle smile he saved for Auriele and Jesse. “I know. I’m better than any of them, but they won’t listen to me.”

“I think I like Korra better than Aang,” I said after we’d watched another five minutes. “She gets to go do things instead of waiting around for other people.”

“I hear you,” agreed Darryl.

“I think I’m going to go check on Medea,” I said.

With Lucia’s big dog in the house, we’d shut Medea in the tack room out in the stables. The horses in the pasture whinnied at me when I walked by. I threw them a couple of flakes of alfalfa hay, though there was plenty of grass in the pasture. A couple of extra flakes wouldn’t hurt them.

Medea greeted me with frantic purrs. I sat down on the wooden floor next to her and petted her, trying not to think.

There were two Western saddles bedecked with silver on wooden saddle racks and another pair that were more everyday trail saddles. Blue ribbons and big, oversized awards plastered one wall. Everything was covered with dust, as if, like the horses, they had not been used since Peter died.

Eventually, Darryl came out to talk.

“Hey, girl,” he said from the doorway.

“Hey.”

“Jesse was summoned as taster in the kitchen,” he told me. “They should be over at the house by now, in the middle of changing.” Adam’s plan had been to find a quiet spot near Guayota’s place so that all the wolves could change. Then they would wait until the small hours of the night and take what advantage surprise might offer them.

I’d been keeping track of the time, too. “I’ll let you know if our mating bond tells me anything,” I told him, my attention firmly on the way Medea’s rabbit-soft coat rippled under my fingers.

“We’ll all feel it if anyone dies,” Darryl told me after a very long moment. “Why don’t you come into the house? I’ll keep Christy in line.”

I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. He smiled sheepishly. “Okay. But I expect she’ll behave in front of everyone, anyway.”