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thin, and he was wearing the ragged cutoffs with the yellow splotches from the time we’d painted his living room. They rode low on his hips, showing off a hard stomach and thighs heavy with muscle. The sight was enough of a distraction that it took me a minute to notice his accessory—a now-empty bucket clutched in one hand.
    “Big-time war mage,” he taunted, yelling to be heard over the blaring radio. “Is that the best you can do?” I followed his gaze down to the water balloon I gripped in one hand. “I bet you can’t even hit me,” he jeered, dodging back and forth along his driveway, deliberately using only human speed.
    I took a drink of the beer I’d gone into the house to get and grinned back, making very sure not to watch the garden hose that was slithering toward him through the grass like a long green snake. And then it pounced, pumping jets of icy water all over his bare torso. He cursed and whipped around, grabbing it in a two-handed grip that only made it that much easier to spray him full in the face.
    “You cheated!” he sputtered, looking outraged, before putting on a burst of speed that made him only a blue and tan blur as he tackled me around the shins.
    I went down, but hit tile instead of grass, so hard that I slid all the way across the corridor, bashing my head on the side of the water fountain. I lay there for a minute, panting, until an orderly caught sight of me and hurried down the corridor, looking concerned. I waved him off and staggered back to my feet, amazed to find that I wasn’t dripping wet.
    I exited medical and propped myself against an empty piece of wall down the hall while I waited for my heart rate to edge back into the safe zone. A couple passing mages gave me the once-over, but looked away when I scowled at them. I rested my head against the wall and swallowed, wondering if I was crazy.
    The day I’d just relived had been a few months before I moved to Vegas, when I was still working for the Corps’s Jersey office. Like most Weres, Cyrus didn’t care for city life and felt claustrophobic in apartments. He’d had a house on a few acres in Galloway, close enough to Atlantic City to make his cover as a ne’er-do-well with a gambling habit believable, but far enough away that he could breathe. I’d driven down one Saturday with a six-pack and a birthday cake to celebrate his turning the big three-oh, and found him feeling playful.
    He never did finish washing that bike.
    I hadn’t thought about that day in months, but it had been just as clear as if it had happened yesterday. Clearer, because I couldn’t taste yesterday’s fettuccini like I had the chlorine in that water or the smoothness of that beer. I’d never had a memory that real.
    If it was just my memory.
    Had Sebastian been right? Was I somehow tuning in to what Cyrus was thinking about? If so, it would quiet the biggest fear I had about this proposed expedition.
    Mated was a Were term, and not one that was usually applied to human-Were couplings. My parents had been married for more than four decades, but no Were had considered them mated. I think most of Lobizon had assumed that Mother was going through some kind of phase and would eventually come to her senses. Because human marriages, even long-standing ones, didn’t bind two people as closely as a mating.
    Or so I’d heard. It wasn’t like Mom had bothered to explain exactly what the term meant. With Neuri forcing me to keep my distance from the clan, she’d assumed I would marry a human. So had I, until I met Cyrus. Not that we’d gotten around to talking marriage. In fact, we’d only recently gotten back together after a lengthy split. So mating didn’t seem too likely. Not to mention that Cyrus had never so much as uttered the term.
    But despite occasional rumors about my mental stability, I didn’t go around hallucinating.
    I didn’t want to feel hopeful, in case I was wrong. But I didn’t think I was—that crack to the jaw still hurt