A gentle snore reached her ears. It broke the spell that had her balancing on the balls of her feet, nearly ready to return to bed. She continued on. In the living room she dressed, found Jack's wool navy peacoat in the closet and a pair of gloves.

She tiptoed into the kitchen to look for an offering. Normally, she used red wine, but Jack's wine rack was empty. Stymied, she turned a circle in the center of the kitchen, too warm in Jack's wool coat, searching for a suitable substitute.

Nothing. Well, there was a two-liter of Coke on the counter, but that wouldn't do.

She went to the refrigerator and found milk, orange juice, and lime Gatorade. When she'd been a kid she'd always used milk. A few times she'd even used grape Kool-Aid. Annie had always told her it was the intention that counted, not the offering itself.

Not seeing much of a choice, she grabbed the milk and filled a glass with it, then headed upstairs to the roof and the greenhouse.

The cold snatched her breath away when she opened the door. She inhaled the clean, fresh air, feeling a subtle warm pulse in her chest in response. Her magick. What stars she could see through the city's light pollution sparkled in the sky, free of insulating cloud cover, which meant it would be frigid in the morning.

Mira opened the smooth glass door of the small greenhouse, flicked on the lights, and stepped into the temperature-regulated building. Jack only had a few plants in here now. Some ferns, hostas, and other things she couldn't identify.

Bare planting beds circled the room. In the center was a grassy area with a fountain and a few stone benches. The sound of running water met her ears.

She closed her eyes, enjoying the small taste of life in the dead of winter. It seemed out of character for Jack to have a place like this, but it seemed out of character for him to be taking artsy photographs, too. Basically, that only proved that she didn't really know him.

She flipped the light back off to let only the moonlight fill the small room. It was enough to see by, if not see well. She slipped off her gloves and coat, laid them on a stone bench, and took her glass of milk to an earth-filled planting bed near the door.

To her right the full moon hung in the sky, silver and swollen, visible through the glass wall of the greenhouse. Normally, she did this outside, no matter the temperature, but she needed earth and that was hard to come by on the roof of a ritzy downtown apartment building.

Mira set the glass down and mounded the earth with her hands, enjoying the feel of it against her palms. Then she closed her eyes and murmured a small prayer.