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Not slows. Stops, like a switch, and every muscle in her back goes stiff under my hand, and I understand about two seconds too late that I've walked into something.

"No," she says.

"Okay. It's scentless, so if it's..."

"No, Gage." She pulls back far enough to look at me, and her face is wrecked and she's not hiding behind it anymore. "I couldn't feel it. I can't feel anything. There's nothing there. There hasn't been since I woke up yesterday."

The room gets very far away.

"Since when?"

"Since the gravel at the mansion." She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "Since I made that line. I woke up and the whole area was flat. No seams. No wards. I can't find the front step. I couldn't find your ward from six feet away and I closed it with my own hands, and Sunday I could feel the whole town."

"The bulb."

"What?"

"Yesterday morning." My voice doesn't come out right. "Over the sink. Your hand went a foot wide and hung there, and then it found it. I saw it."

She stares at me.

"You saw it."

"I saw it."

"You didn't say anything."

"No." And there it is, all the way down. "I told myself you'd had one hour of sleep and it wasn't the morning to make you explain your hands to me. The truth is that I'd just handed you that envelope from my pocket and I didn't have it in me to give you something else bad before breakfast."

She's quiet.

"So we're square," she says.

"We're not square. You told me. I sat on it."

I get my hand around hers. "Can you still work your magic?"

"The bulb worked."

"Then it's not gone. It's finding what you need that's gone."

"That's worse." Her jaw sets. "Gage, that's so much worse. Tomorrow night I'm supposed to walk into a house with seams under it, and the seam is the only thing in the world I might be able to do anything about. But, I can't find a door unless you help me and put my hand right on it."

Then she doesn't go, my wolf says.

She goes. I already know she goes.

"Then I'll be in your hands and help," I say.

"You can't feel them either."

"No. But I can see where you're pointing, and I can tell you when you're a foot wide."

She laughs. It's a terrible laugh, but it's the first one today, and I'll take it.

Sid spends the afternoon on the arm of the couch beside her instead of on me, which he never does.

He doesn't say anything about it. Neither do I.