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said. He glanced at New Thing. “Besides digging up worthless ’maldies for the fold—”
    Teresa bristled. “We need new members, at least you’re always whining that we do—and now that they’re cremating nine-tenths of them the second they kick I can’t be fussy about who I take. If she can’t hunt, we’ll just kill her.” New Thing trembled. “And I had business elsewhere, that’s all you need to know. So where’s my meat?”
    Joe shrugged. “Tell us the business, and we’ll give you a meal.”
    She wrapped her bony fingers around his neck and lifted him straight off his feet, her tarnished silver rings sinking into his throat. “Your precious was first hunter last night,” she said, not raising her voice. She never needs to. “Her job is to make sure my share got put aside. So why didn’t she?”
    Joe just hung there, oozing smothered fury. Teresa turned to me and smiled. “Get over here.”
    I got. The studs of Teresa’s leather jacket glinted as she raised Joe higher; a nicer jacket than Joe’s, the black leather less cracked and worn, but it wasn’t hers . She and Mags got it off a hoo years before my time. Joe was buried in his. His second skin.
    “It’s nice and simple,” she said, staring daggers. Her arm didn’t even tremble. “Any hunt, first rights on half the meat is mine. And you were first hunter, and responsible for my share, so why’d you go and eat my share? And don’t tell me”—a singsong falsetto—“‘Oh, Teweesah, I was so hungwy .’ If you’re smart.”
    First hunter. Jesus, did she really think we had nothing better to do than play carcass cop with each other, wagging fingers over meat she had no right to touch? I just shrugged. “I got nothing, Teresa.”
    “You got nothing.”
    “I’m just saying, maybe you don’t wanna hear it, but we wanted it, we ate it, we didn’t feel like leaving you any.” The truth is never a good idea around Teresa, but I was tired and my bullshit tank was down to fumes. “And there was no point anyway, because that was last night and here you are, half a day later? And you weren’t anywhere in sight when we left or came back? Even if we’d left you the whole damned deer you couldn’t have eaten it, the meat’s too old. Ruined.”
    And what the hell’s wrong with the bitch that I even have to say this? We can’t eat stale kills, nothing over an hour dead’s even digestible, so what kind of crazy power trip is she on to want tributes of rotten carcass that hasn’t had a heartbeat in hours, days? Eat your damned fist if you need dead flesh that badly. Hell, make a hoo-barbecue and cook it, if you really want to make us all puke. That’s the one thing about my appetites that hasn’t changed since I died: There’s just nothing out there nastier than cooked meat.
    Joe shook violently, toes dangling, insects flying off his skin into the grass. Teresa hoisted him higher. “You didn’t feel like it—well, I guess you think it’s some kind of noble gesture, admitting it. So what do I do now?” She’d trotted out her weary voice, an all-giving mother faced with a rotten kiddie brat; the grunts and moans of it were like the spasms of a dying engine. “Tear off your other arm? But you’d probably like that, no more hunting duties at all. Give you a nice skin slip? Put you on permanent day-watch duty, so I never have to see your sorry face? But then what do I do about the rest of you—”
    “Just where the hell have you been, Teresa?” Ben spat the words, scraps of his old black fedora flapping like wagging fingers. “You find some little nest of hoos too stupid to move to town and decide to keep it to yourself, ’cause God forbid the rest of us ever get a crack at some good meat—”
    “You nearly broke my goddamned neck getting to the shitty meat last night, Mighty Hunter,” Mags shot back, scratching doglike at her shoulder until a cluster of wasps and hide beetles flew up around her ear. She and Ben have always