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with a cane rammed through the plywood-covered door.
    Beau. His eyes locked on me and he barreled right toward me. This Bindspoken witch was the owner of Wolfsbane and Absinthe, the local pagan supply shop. He wore his trademark plaid flannel with the sleeves rolled up to expose the white thermal underwear beneath. The cigar perched at the corner of his mouth was alsotypical of him. However, his hurried, irritated gait and the lowered position of his bushy white eyebrows weren’t.
    He pointed at me. “It’s all your fault!”
    The anger in his accusation hit me like a slap. “What’s my fault?”
    He stomped faster in my direction, but was still slow because of his prosthetic leg.
    Even so, I had to fight the instinct to back up. “What’s wrong?”
    He shouted, “William is catatonic!”
    William was his son, and also a wærewolf. Somehow, he’d gotten too close to a witch doing magic and it caused him to go into a partial shift. He’d been stuck that way for a long time, housed and cared for in the upper floors of the local pack’s den. When I’d done the forced-change spell for Johnny and his men, Beau had asked that William be included.
    Since Beau had given me a powerful charm that had saved my life, I owed him a favor. I’d agreed to have William in the spell. Someone from the den had sedated the wild, half-formed creature in order to move him and keep him still during the spell. He’d transformed fully into a wolf like everyone else. The fact that he had been drugged beforehand meant that when he did not regain consciousness after the transformation, I wasn’t alarmed.
    “I thought that spell was supposed to give them their man-minds,” Beau growled, still advancing, “but somehow it took his away!” He wasn’t slowing down to just verbally confront me. He was a freight train about to run me over.
    Suddenly, Ivanka shot forward, grabbed his arm, and thumped her cast across his chest in restraint. “Keep back.”
    “The man-mind doesn’t come until the next regular cyclical change,” I explained. That was how it worked with the others. But then the others hadn’t been mindless beasts for years prior to the spell.
    Beau struggled with Ivanka and drew his cane up as if to cudgel her. Even with a broken arm, she was dangerous.
    Both were distracted.
    I made for the front doors and the last thing I heard as I pushed through them was Beau shouting, “You’ll pay for this, Persephone Alcmedi!”
    My escape revealed, I sprinted away.
    Living in a haven is like living in a movie theater; sometimes when you emerge, the brightness of the world is stunning. Sure, it was presently an average afternoon in late November, but the waning light on the buildings opposite pierced my retinas like high beams. I nearly ran over an elderly black woman. Shouting back my apologies, I ran east on Euclid Avenue, squinting and sometimes pushing my way along the sporadically crowded sidewalk.
    If the complaints rising from behind me were any indication, Ivanka was pursuing me with more intent than was socially acceptable. So, I jumped in the nearest cab and gave the driver the address of the coffee shop.
    Out the back window I saw Ivanka stop on the sidewalk, her cheeks flushed in anger, and she shouted something in Russian I didn’t understand.
    Settling into my seat, I tried to take in Beau’s news.
    William is catatonic.
    The spell could not have taken his mind, but then it was after that spell that Johnny had tried to kill me. I thought back, recalling my wording, considering the placement of the candles, the stones. I analyzed every detail but could not identify a misspoken phrase or anything that was obviously out of place. I could look at the charts, compare planetary positions of the first spell to the second, but I doubted that would make this kind of difference.
    That was the only plan I had when I arrived at the coffee shop. Since I’d taken a cab instead of walking, I was early and there was time to talk to