The last of my daylight hours had been spent in the garden. Messing about in the dirt with pixy children getting in the way is a great way to ground oneself, and I found I owed Jenks a very large thank-you—in more ways than one. It wasn’t until I went inside with my spell-crafting materials and a sunburnt nose that I found out what their cheerful shouts and calls had been about. They hadn’t been playing hide and seek; they were intercepting splat balls.

The small pyramid of splat balls neatly stacked by the back door had shocked the peas out of me. Each one held my death. I hadn’t known. Not a freaking clue. Seeing them there ticked me off, making me angry instead of afraid. Next time the hunters found me, I vowed, I’d be ready.

After my whirlwind of spell crafting, my bag was full of my usual charms. The dowel of redwood from work had been a lifesaver. Any wood can store spells, but redwood lasts the longest. The amulets not in my bag hung from the cup hooks in the otherwise empty cupboard. They were all great spells, but I needed something stronger. Sighing, I opened the next book.

“Transmutation?” Ivy said, setting the forms aside and pulling her keyboard closer. “You’re that good?”

I ran a thumbnail under a fingernail to get the dirt out from under it. “Necessity is the mother of courage,” I mumbled. Not meeting her eyes, I scanned the index. I needed something small, preferably that could defend itself.

Ivy returned to her surfing with a loud crunch of celery. I had been watching her closely since sundown. She was the model roommate, clearly making an effort to keep her normal vampy reactions to a minimum. It probably helped that I had rewashed my clothes. The moment she started looking seductive, I was asking her to leave.

“Here’s one,” I said softly. “A cat. I need an ounce of rosemary, half a cup of mint, one teaspoon of milkweed extract gathered after the first frost … Well, that’s out. I don’t have any extract, and I’m not about to go to the store now.”

Ivy seemed to swallow back a chuckle, and I flipped to the index. Not a bat; I didn’t have an ash tree in the garden, and I’d probably need some of the inner bark. Besides, I wasn’t going to spend the rest of the night learning to fly by echolocation. The same went for birds. Most of those listed didn’t fly at night. A fish was just silly. But maybe …

“A mouse,” I said, turning to the proper page and looking over the list of ingredients. Nothing was exotic. Almost everything I needed was already in the kitchen. There was a handwritten note at the bottom, and I squinted to read a faded, masculine-looking script: Can be safely adapted for any rodent. I glanced at the clock. This would do.

“A mouse?” Ivy said. “You’re going to spell yourself into a mouse?”