“Though not each and every one of them,” Zia adds. “There was one they couldn’t find because he doesn’t have enough blood on his hands.”

Lizzie’s eyes are clouded, unhappy, and then I remember her telling me about how all the trouble she got into was because of some Unseelie fairies.

“These are the bogans that you met at the crossroads?” I ask her.

She nods. “The ones that killed Anwatan—the deer woman. They also killed Timony—or at least this fish guy who travels with them did.”

My gaze goes to Timony. Incongruously, I wait for him to pipe up in a Monty Pythonesque voice, “But I got better.”

“I was dead,” he says instead. “Lizzie brought me back.”

“And I killed one of them,” Lizzie says.

Maida gives her a wicked grin. “Oh, you’ll have crow boys mooning over you when they find out.”

“It’s not . . . I don’t . . . “ She sighs and tries again. “What the bogans did was wrong, but I don’t know that killing them solves anything.”

“It stops them from doing more harm,” Zia says.

Maida nods. “And it will make the others think twice before they try the same.”

“I suppose. It’s just . . . ”

Zia cocks her head when Lizzie’s voice trails off.

That every life is sacred, Honey says.

That’s a funny thing for her to say, I think, considering how she so recently tore out Del’s throat. But then I remember how upset she was after she’d killed my sister’s friend Pinky. When I asked him about it, Joe told me that while she knew it had to be done, she also knew she’d have to carry the weight of it with her forever. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d gone into the situation accepting the responsibility for her actions and knowing what she’d have to take away from it.

“But she eats other animals,” I had said to Joe. “She kills them.”

“It’s not the same,” he told me. “That’s a whole different wheel of life and death.”

Lizzie’s nodding in agreement with Honey while all that’s going through my head.

“Are you sure you don’t have any cerva blood in you?” Maida asks. “Because they’re all about finding peaceful solutions.”

“And you’re not?” Lizzie says.

The crow girls look at us, one by one, their gaze finally resting on me.

“If we’d known they’d tried to hurt our friend Jilly,” Zia says, “we would have led the crow boys in their attack.”