Temple pressed one hand to the wall. The torn wallpaper snaked back into place, and the rip disappeared. With his other hand, he touched the hook of his cane to the center of the harvester’s chest.
Most of Temple’s power came from this house. His family had lived here for more than two hundred years, and every generation had left it stronger than the last. At some point in the mid-nineteen hundreds, it had achieved at least a mimicry of life.
Temple’s bond to his home was part of what made him such a powerful and dangerous wizard. The house’s magic had other side effects, too. Things like doors and cabinets opening for you on their own, bathwater that always ran at just the right temperature, and floors that never needed sweeping or vacuuming. Also, I was pretty sure the mice in the attic had developed a primitive hunting-and-gathering society.
In the past, Temple had channeled the house’s power effortlessly. These days, well, there were leaks. A warm draft blew through the hall as he worked on the harvester. The old floorboards creaked. In the kitchen, the garbage disposal growled to life, then shut off a moment later.
But he got the job done. The harvester’s ember eyes brightened, and the blood oozing from her wounds hardened and flaked away like black mud.
“She’ll be hungry after this,” said Temple. “She’ll need something dead to eat.”
“Are you about to send me to forage for corpses and lingering souls?”
He stared at me like I’d asked him to change the channel on the microwave. “I was going to grab the leftover pastrami from the fridge. I’m pretty sure that’s dead. But if you want to go grave-digging, don’t let me stop you.”
“It’s two in the morning. Cut me some slack.” I smacked his pom-pom.
“What kind of nitwit stabs harvesters at two in the morning?”
“I used to do most of my stabbing after midnight,” I said.
“Pah.” He hobbled off. “I’ll be in the kitchen making a harvester special for our guest and a hot fudge sundae for me.”
More dairy. Terrific. “Temple—”
“I’ll eat what I want,” he snapped. “Should I make one for you, too?”
“Duh.”
This next part was easy enough. I’d stitched and stapled and superglued thousands of lacerations over the years, both on myself and on others. Now that Temple had cleared the magical poison, the harvester’s wounds should heal up in no time. The staples were just to speed the process and minimize scarring.
As I worked, I imagined Felipe chiding me.This is not your purpose, Jennifer.
I knew his voice, deep and smooth, better than I knew my adopted parents’. His words had etched themselves into my brain. He and the rest of the Guardians Council believed the Hunters of Artemis were humanity’s best weapon against the things that went bump in the night. For more than two millennia, they’d bound young girls to a life of power and violence, never realizing just how creepy and messed-up that was.
In their defense, Ihadsaved the world more than once, and I’d hunted a lot of truly nasty creatures. That was how I’d justified staying with Felipe and the Council for so long.
I was twenty-three when I walked out on them. At first, they’d threatened me. Then they pleaded. None of them knew how close I came to huntingthem. I wanted to punish every one of the bastards for what they’d done to me.
Felipe never said a word. He just stood silently off to one side with his arms folded. To this day, I didn’t know if he was disappointed or proud. Probably both.
“You don’t own me,” I muttered. “You don’t get to tell me my purpose.”
The harvester tilted her head.
“Sorry, not you.” I finished the first stab wound and moved to the next. “I was talking to the memories of a bunch of old men and women who took an orphan out of South Korea and brought her to America to hunt monsters.”
I couldn’t tell if the harvester cared, or if she even understood, but it felt rude to work in silence without even trying to talk to my patient.
“Felipe was the one who arranged the adoption and placed me with my parents. The Council likes using orphans. They think we’re disposable, so it’s less of a mess if the binding ritual goes wrong or the kid gets eaten by a rabid adlet—that’s a kind of human/dog hybrid.”
The adlet had been one of my first hunts. I’d been thirteen. I’d spent half my life in an orphanage and the rest in California, so I was utterly, laughably unprepared when Felipe flew me to Alaska to spend four cold, miserable days tracking the adlet who’d mauled a couple of oil-company surveyors. I’d killed it with a blessed narwhal horn.
I used the forceps to pinch the harvester’s third wound shut. This one only needed a single staple. “There you go. If these don’t come out on their own after a week, come here and I’ll remove them, all right?”
The harvester touched the staples.
I swatted her hand away. “Don’t pick at them.”
