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come just in time – the true poison has been taken from you,
although you were close enough to smell it, to understand what it
truly means."
    "But I don't," I said. "I don't understand
any of this."
    "You felt fear, but you were not conquered by
it," she said. "That is a Protector's strength. We understand what
lies underneath, we have to before we can rise to fight it. But it
cannot destroy us."
    "What do you mean?"
    "You, my child, are what comes after me.
There are only a handful of us in this world at any one time – the
healers, the ones who make a safe haven and who guard it, sometimes
by a word or an invitation inside for a cup of tea, sometimes with
our own blood and tears. This is not your safe house, it is mine –
but some day you will make your own haven. It is coming."
    I should have known long before now, but it
was only in this moment that I really made the connection in my
mind.
    "You are the tabby cat," I said in sudden
understanding.
    "Sometimes," she said, smiling. "And yes,
although you don't think you remember that now, you've seen me here
at least once in the aftermath of a battle with some demon out of
shadow. Human stupidity, or arrogance, or greed – something that
comes out of the dark and has the power to hurt the innocents in
its way. I Protect."
    "How…?"
    "It will come to you, " she said gently. "It
is given to all of us to find the one who will succeed us
eventually – and I can see that someday you will take my place. Not
here, but somewhere else, in a safe house of your own, in some
other corner of the world where there is a need for healing magic
and a healer to wield it." She paused, hesitated slightly as though
she were weighing something in her mind, and then came to a
decision and reached to lift a slender silver chain over her head.
It bore a pendant, a single round stone, golden except for a dark
vertical streak in the middle, looking like a lion's eye. Before I
had a chance to protest, to refuse, the chain had slipped over my
own head, the pendant coming to rest over my heart. "This will tell
you when it is time," she said. "I only have a little time left –
and when I am gone you will make a safe house, and it will grow old
roses in the garden, and call to the sick and the wounded and the
ones who need protection. And in that stone lies the spirit and the
wisdom that I myself inherited once from all the ones who came
before me. I have learned all it needs to teach me – it's yours
now. You are the Protector. This house remains a safe haven for as
long as I stay here – but the shadows come for us all, it is what a
Protector knows from the very beginning. Make another safe house,
for all the hurt ones in this, your corner of the world. It will
take as long as it must… but don't let it take too long" She leaned
over and actually kissed me on the forehead, as though in
benediction. "Go, now. And remember."
    My mother died when I was sixteen years old.
The authorities came for me and for my brother, and took us from
our father's house – they separated us, and I don't know where he
went, in the end. I never saw him again after that last tearful
goodbye, when they tore us apart from one another and he was put in
one car and I in another and we were driven off in opposite
directions. I was placed with several foster families, but nothing
ever seemed to work out – not least because I was given to bringing
in stray cats from the neighborhood, and speaking to them in a
quiet gentle voice, and holding the feral animals until they
stilled in my arms and looked at me out of glowing eyes that were
blue or bright green or tawny orange-gold – and we had an
understanding, that I would heal, and protect and care.
    And then, before I turned seventeen, my hair
turned silver-gray overnight.
    I had not worn the cat's-eye pendant which
the witch from the cottage had given me; I had kept it safe, but I
taken it off from around my neck as soon as I was able to after she
had placed it there