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    “I know everything there is to know about you,” Lola said softly. “I know more about you than you do.”
    Hannah pulled her gaze up to the goddess and tried to meet that far-too-wise stare, but she couldn’t. She settled on staring at Lola’s nose.
    “I could ask you what you’re so afraid of, but I already know. I’m not so cruel that I would tease the words out of you just to hear you say them. I get no satisfaction from making Cougars lay themselves bare and confront their weaknesses.”
    “What do you want from me?”
    “I want you to accept what is best for you.”
    “In your opinion, you mean. And you mean Sean, and we’ve already discussed this. I’m finding him someone else.”
    Lola rolled her eyes. “When’s the last time you fought for anything?”
    “I feel like I’m fighting all the fucking time.”
    “And are you winning? And when you do win, how do those victories feel? Do you feel energized, or do you feel empty?”
    Hannah stared at the goddess and twirled her braid some more. Her brothers always told her she looked like a bimbo when she did it, but she’d always found it comforting. Perhaps it had become something of a tic in twenty or so years, but she imagined there were worse ones to have. The only cure for it, probably, would be cutting her hair. “I can’t answer that.”
    “I don’t really expect you to.”
    “What
do
you expect me to do? You send me those dreams, and I—”
    “No, no, no. I don’t send you the dreams. You have the dreams because of what you are. You’re the righter of wrongs. The only thing I did was send my Cougar to find you. I didn’t make you what you are. There are others beside me, you know. Gods and goddesses who don’t usually concern themselves with my Cougars, but who do make it their business to intercede in my affairs when it suits them.”
    “And who do you think could possibly be sending me violent nightmares inciting me to hurt people?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “So you
do
know.”
    “Yes. Very rarely do the whims of my brother and my own intersect. As you know,
avenger
is not a role that is often filled. It was because of my brother’s magic—his interference—that the role came into being. It was necessary because of something else he made.”
    “What are you talking about? I read the book of your lore. There’s nothing in it about your brother. What did he make?”
    “There wouldn’t be any information about him there, or any of my siblings.” Lola drew circles around the text on her notepad. “That was intentional on my part. I did not wish for you to seek any of them out or for you to give them any reason to pay attention to you. Gods and goddesses often treat each other’s followers as if they were toys.”
    “Is that what your brother is doing to me? Making me some kind of toy?”
    “I doubt he sees it that way.”
    “Tell me what it is that he made that would require there being an avenger in the first place.”
    “I have my Cougars. He has his shifters as well, but they are less able to regulate themselves. It is harder for them to be human, I suppose, and sometimes they do inhuman things. He could not bear to destroy them, and I could not interfere because there are very old rules amongst the gods preventing it. My brother and I came to a compromise. The avenger is a balancer, along with her numerous other jobs within the glaring. She’s the one who corrects any outside threat from my brother’s shifters. Not everyone has the right mix of passion and restraint. You’re the first one in fifty years. Perhaps he thought it was time to clean up his mess, and I should have known his shifters were nearby when I realized what you were.”
    “And this balancing is supposed to be
my
job? Why me, and not Belle or some other woman in the glaring?” Hannah asked.
    Belle Foye seemed like a natural choice. As sister of Sean, Mason, and Hank, she was an insider. She was brave and smart and had a good heart.