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pretty messed up. Knife wounds, gunshot wounds. I think one of the vampires broke my spine.”
    My hand was shaking when I put my glass of water on the table next to the teacup. “How is that even possible? I mean, you’re right here. Is this a shapeshifter healing ability? The shifter community is pretty private about their—your—supernatural talents, but I’ve never heard even a hint that you can regenerate something as bad as a broken spine.”
    “We can’t,” Jack said flatly. He stood up and rolled his neck, as if he could feel the pain from his memory. “A very powerful Atlantean priest, who happens to be a giant pain in the ass, healed the injuries and my bones. But I was still dead—at least in part. The human side of me had gone over, or tried to go, I guess. I’m not much for the metaphysical stuff. But the tiger half of my dual nature was still clinging to life, though just barely.”
    I stared up at him. “You came back, though. How—”
    “Well, the tiger in me wasn’t ready to die. I stayed in animal form for a long time. Eventually that part of me convinced the rest of me to live.”
    He said it like it was so simple.
    “Sure, no problem. I understand perfectly. You died, or half of you did, but the other half—the furry half—didn’t, and the doctors at the hospital just hung around trying to figure out whether to bring you Jell-O or Meow Mix,” I said, not even realizing I was shouting until I got to “Meow Mix.”
    “I don’t think doctors actually carry Jell-O around,” Jack said cautiously, in a “back away from the crazy woman” tone. “That’s more of a nurse’s assistant or candy striper job, isn’t it?”
    “Who even says candy striper anymore? There are no candy stripers. Why are we talking about candy stripers?” I jumped up off the couch, displacing Lou, who was vocally unhappy about it. “Where did you do this amazing recuperation? Why wasn’t the hospital on CNN, holding a press conference about their incredible doctors?”
    “I was never in a hospital. I was in a secret, magically warded cave near the peak of Mount Fuji, in Japan,” he said, as if that were any kind of normal answer.
    All at once, the fight went right out of me, and I sank back down on the couch and put the afghan over my head.
    “Of course you were,” I mumbled. “Where else?”

Chapter Five
    I woke up feeling hung over. After my spectacularly impressive (read: idiotic) meltdown, Jack had muttered something about it being late and beat a hasty retreat. I’d managed to lock the door behind him and then hadn’t even bothered to walk to my room, but had collapsed on the couch, pulled the afghan back over me, and gone to sleep.
    A long, hot shower and three cups of pumpkin-spice coffee later, I was dressed in jeans and a soft, emerald-green sweater, and mostly functional. I ate some cereal with a banana sliced into it, fed Lou and gave her a farewell cuddle, and headed out to face my family. Eleanor was working this morning at the shop, so I hadn’t planned on being in until noon to spell her for lunch.
    Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike lived in a meticulously maintained old farmhouse about five miles from me, and kept chickens, goats, and an ancient horse who had to have his teeth rasped periodically so he didn’t bite his own gums. When vampires and other supernatural creatures had “come out of the coffin,” so to speak, I’d briefly entertained the thought that Bonnie Jo was some kind of horse vampire, because of the teeth. Then again, I’d also believed that my chemistry teacher was a snake shifter, because he’d had a habit of hissing when he said any “S” words. The word sucrose still made me nervous. Luckily, it didn’t come up a lot in conversation.
    All of us in Dead End had already known that there were other beings in the world, even before they came out to the rest of humanity. Our town had long been a haven for all kinds of weird people—human and other—so it hadn’t