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was grateful that my coyote form kept me from being able to ask questions. I doubt I’d have had the willpower to keep my mouth shut otherwise, and I thought the forest was one of those things I wasn’t supposed to see.
    Zee opened the truck door for me and I hopped in so he could drive me to the next place. The girl watched us drive off, still not speaking. I couldn’t read the expression on her face.
    The second house we stopped at was a clone of the first, right down to the color of the trim around the windows. The only difference was that the front yard had a small lilac tree and a flower bed on one side of the sidewalk, one of the few flower beds I had seen since I came in here. The flowers were all dead and the lawn was yellowed and in desperate need of a lawn mower.
    There was no guardian at this porch. Zee put his hand on the door and paused without opening it. “The house you were in was the last one who was killed. This house belongs to the first and I imagine that there have been a lot of people in and out since.”
    I sat down and stared up into his face: he cared about this one.
    â€œShe was a friend,” he said slowly as his hand on the door curled into a fist. “Her name was Connora. She had human blood like Tad. Hers was further back, but left her weak.” Tad was his son, half-human and currently at college. His human blood hadn’t, as far as I could see, lessened the affinity for metals he shared with his father. I don’t know whether he’d gotten his father’s immortality: he was nineteen and looked it.
    â€œShe was our librarian, our keeper of records, and collector of stories. She knew every tale, every power that cold iron and Christianity robbed us of. She hated being weak; hated and despised humans even more. But she was kind to Tad.”
    Zee turned his face so I couldn’t see it and abruptly, angrily, opened the front door.
    Once again I entered the house alone. If Zee hadn’t told me Connora had been a librarian, I might have guessed. Books were stacked everywhere. On shelves, on floors, on chairs and tables. Most of them weren’t the kind of books that had been made in the last century—and none of the titles I saw were written in English.
    As in the last house, the smell of death was present, though, as Zee had promised, it was old. The house mostly just smelled musty with a faint chaser of rotten food and cleaning fluids.
    He hadn’t said when she died, but I could guess that there hadn’t been anyone here for a month or more.
    About a month ago, the demon had been causing all sorts of violence by its very presence. I was pretty sure that the fae had considered that, and was reasonably certain the reservation was far enough away to have escaped that influence. Even so, when I regained my human form, I thought I might ask Zee about it.
    Connora’s bedroom was soft and feminine in an English cottage way. The floor was pine or some other softwood covered with scattered handwoven rugs. Her bedspread was that thin white stuff with knots that I always have associated with bed-and-breakfasts or grandmothers. Which is odd, since I’ve never met any of my grandparents—or slept in a bed-and-breakfast.
    A dead rose in a bud vase was on a small table next to the bed—and there wasn’t a book to be found.
    The second bedroom was her office. When Zee said she was collecting stories, I’d somehow expected notebooks and paper, but there was only a small bookcase with an unopened package of burnable discs. The rest of the shelves were empty. Someone had taken her computer—though they’d left her printer and monitor; maybe they’d taken whatever had been on the shelves as well.
    I left the office and continued exploring.
    The kitchen had been recently scrubbed with ammonia, though there was still something rotting in the fridge. Maybe that was why there was one of those obnoxious air fresheners on the