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had been talking about before this new murder interrupted us.
    He jerked as though struck and looked at me, hate creeping into his pale eyes.
    “Before?” Alek asked, rising to his feet.
    “This is Crow business. Shishishiel will protect us. This is not for outsiders to interfere.”
    “Yeah, ‘cause Shishishiel the great crow spirit dude is really doing a bang-up job so far, right?” I glared at him, refusing to be intimidated anymore. Jasper had been right about more than one thing. Something unnatural was at work here.
    Killing a shifter isn’t as hard as killing a sorcerer. You don’t have to eat their heart, for example. Decapitation will do the trick, or just a large amount of physical damage all at once. Like exploding someone’s chest and removing their heart and lungs and stuff. That seemed pretty effective. Not an easy thing to do, however, to a man who could turn instantly at will into a bird and fly away. A man who would have hundreds of years of experience, be stronger and faster than a human, and who could tank a lot of damage.
    “You will be gone from this place by nightfall,” Sky Heart said to Alek, though he pitched his voice loudly enough that I’m pretty sure the whole camp could hear him. “And you will take that woman with you.”
    “Shifters are dying,” Alek said. “I will be going nowhere until that stops. You can either help or get out of my way. I obey the Council, not you.” He was standing up to his full six foot six height and had turned on his Alpha power, as I liked to think of it. Waves of it radiated off him like heat on asphalt and for a moment it was as though the huge white tiger that was his alternate shape lived just beneath his skin, his ice blue eyes the eyes of an apex predator, his muscles tensed and ready to make the kill.
    Sky Heart seemed to shrink under that power, but he clutched the beaded bag around his neck and pressed his lips into a line. “I must discuss with Shishishiel,” he said loudly, and then added so quietly that I barely heard him, “please, give me tonight to think on this.”
    I couldn’t recall a time in my childhood that Sky Heart had ever said please. Score one for Alek, I suppose. Or score one for how dire this situation was. That was a pretty uncomfortable thought. Shishishiel was a powerful spirit, but these murders weren’t stopping without additional help, that much was clear.
    I turned from the staring contest as Alek nodded and forced myself to look more closely at the body.
    “Who was he?” I asked.
    “Mark, my husband,” the woman who had broken the news said. I hadn’t heard her approach but she stood, thick shoulders shaking and eyes runny with tears, not ten feet away.
    Most of the People are named pretty generic names. It keeps it easy for records when they have to pretend to be further on generations of who they really are. There are a lot of biblical disciples in there, Matthews, Marks, Lukes, and Johns. For the women, flower names are pretty usual. Except in my family, of course. We all get rocks. The way the People often differentiated one John or Luke or Rose from another was using nicknames.
    “Redtail,” I said, half question, half vague recollection from decades ago.
    “Yes,” she sniffled. That made her Mary, or Marigold, I thought. Some things from childhood were so clear, other things faded away and lost. Sadly, the clear things were pretty much all the awful, hurtful parts.
    I looked away from the grieving woman and tried to look at Redtail in a clinical way. CSI: Magic edition , right? I could do this. I concentrated, bringing up a little power, trying to figure out what I wanted to know, to see. There wasn’t a Dungeons and Dragons spell for figuring out how someone was murdered, was there? Nothing came to my mind.
    I thought about how I could see my own sorcery, about how Samir used to demonstrate things to me and I could see and feel his power, familiar but different. Like how warm water and cold