I uncrossed my arms from in front of me and shook my hands to loosen them before I bent at the waist and put my palms against the ice-cold, snow-dusted parking lot. Exhaling into the stretch, I felt my muscles pull. Around me were the soft, familiar sounds of the zoo preparing to open, mixing with the scent of exotic manure. If Nick didn’t show in the next five minutes, there wouldn’t be enough time for a decent run.

I had bought us both runner passes months ago so we could run anytime from midnight to noon when the park was closed. I had woken up two hours earlier than usual for this. I was trying to make this work; I was trying to find a way to mesh my witch’s noon-to-sunup schedule with Nick’s human sunrise-to-midnight clock. It had never seemed to be a problem before. Nick used to try. Lately, it had been all up to me.

A harsh scraping pulled me upright. The trash cans were being rolled out, and my pique grew. Where was he? He couldn’t have forgotten. Nick never forgot anything.

“Unless he wants to forget,” I whispered. Giving myself a mental shake, I swung my right leg up to put my lightweight running shoe atop the hood. “Ow,” I breathed as my muscles protested, but I leaned into it. I’d been slacking off on my workouts lately, as Ivy and I didn’t spar anymore since she had resumed succumbing to her blood lust. My eye started to twitch, and I closed both of them as I deepened the stretch, grabbing my ankle and pulling.

Nick hadn’t forgotten—he was too smart for that—he was avoiding me. I knew why, but it was still depressing. It had been three months, and he was still distant and hesitant. The worst thing was I didn’t think he was dumping me. The man called demons into his linen closet, and he was afraid to touch me.

Last fall, I had been trying to bind a fish to me to satisfy some inane ley line class requirement and accidentally made Nick my familiar instead. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was an earth witch, my magic coming from growing things and quickened by heat and my blood. I didn’t know much about ley line magic—except I didn’t like it. I generally only used it to close protective circles when I was stirring a particularly sensitive spell. And to make the Howlers pay what they owed me. And occasionally to fend off my roommate when she lost control of her blood lust. And I had used it to knock Piscary flat on his can so I could beat him into submission with the leg of a chair. It had been this last one that tipped Nick from hot-and-heavy, maybe-this-is-the-one boyfriend, to phone conversations and cold kisses on my cheek.

Starting to feel sorry for myself, I pulled my right leg down and swung the left one up.

Ley line magic was heady in its rush of strength and could drive a witch insane, making it no accident that there were more black ley line witches than black earth witches. Using a familiar made it safer since the power of a ley line was filtered through the simpler minds of animals instead of through plants as earth magic did. For obvious reasons, only animals were used as familiars—at least on this side of the ley lines—and in truth, there were no witch-born spells to bind a human as a familiar. But being both fairly ignorant of ley line magic and rushed, I had used the first spell I found to bind a familiar.