My call connected, and I could hear it ringing on the other end.

“Is he . . . human?” Siobhan asked.

I had to smile. I hardly knew what the question meant anymore. For the past year or so I just thought of those I met as sentient beings, because they sure came in all shapes and sizes.

“Not really,” I told her. “He looks like a Kickaha, and he’s lived on the rez, but he’s supposedly one of those rare mixes you don’t find much among the animal people. His father was pure-blooded corbae, his mother pure-blooded canid.”

“Which means?”

“Crow and dog. Hang on. Someone’s picking it up.”

But it was Cassie, Joe’s girlfriend, who answered, not Joe himself.

“Joe’s already on it,” she said without any preamble.

Cassie was a seer, like Galfreya, only she was human and used cards instead of a scrying bowl. I guessed Christy had been right the other day. You didn’t have to scratch far under the skin to find that pretty much everyone in Jilly’s periphery has some connection to the world most people don’t even know exists, never mind sees. So I knew about Cassie’s gift, but I was still startled at how she’d answered the phone.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Joe put some kind of mojo on Jilly after that last time people were messing around with her. I don’t know exactly what—I mean, it’s Joe, right? But whatever it was, he set it up so that when something dangerous is threatening her, it would take her out of danger and send a warning to Joe. And that’s what happened last night.”

“So you know where she is? She’s okay, right?”

“No, that’s the problem. It was supposed to take her to the Greatwood—that place in the otherworld she used to go when she was in the hospital.”

“Yeah, she told me about it.”

“Except it didn’t,” Cassie said. “He had me lay out the cards before he went looking. One of them showed you. One showed that old woman of the woods—you know who I mean?”

“No.”

“She’s got a hundred names. Joe calls her the White Deer Woman, or Grandmother Toad.”

“What was the third card?” I asked, because Cassie always laid them out in threes.

“The Greatwood.”

“But you said she wasn’t there.”

Cassie sighed. “I know. Your card was clear, but the other two weren’t quite right. It was like there was a mist on them, or a veil. I think the cards were trying to look into some piece of the unknown, and that’s all they could give me.”

“Is Joe coming here?”