I spent the next day mostly laying in bed or at my table, too tired to really do all that much else knowing my party was soon. That was always the main problem with making plans — plans in the afternoon meant it felt like nothing could be done beforehand. Even waking up early in the morning, I felt like there wasn’t enough time before my scheduled leave to do or watch anything. The only thing I’d managed to bring myself to check off a list was a single conversation with Hunter, his bracelet and locket in my jacket pocket as I was left to think.

  Lord had kept me company most of the time, and I was in the process of teaching him to play poker with a set I’d found in one of the Covenant house closets. It was slow, and I’d needed to find a way for me to prop up his cards without me seeing them, but it worked for what we needed.

  He was catching on fast, and even if I wasn’t the best teacher he was still managing to slowly whittle down my chips.

  You know, no one’s ever taught me to play a game, he said, sounding pleased as he purred to announce, I’m gonna raise fifteen.

  I folded, and I went about gathering up the cards and shuffling, noticing with some frustration he’d had a fucking eight high. How the fuck were you supposed to tell that a cat was bluffing?

  “I probably should have started you with goldfish,” I admitted, sighing as I set the deck down, “you wanna cut?”

  Lord pawed at the deck, managing to slide a chunk from the top partly off, and I cut the deck from there even as my door opened. I was just dealing out the cards, sitting his two in the little stand we’d made for him, when Misha came down my stairs.

  The man looked angry about something, dressed as he normally was in a pair of slacks and a button down shirt, with three books under his arm. He crossed my room, only stopping to look between me and Lord before shaking his head. I looked up to him, not sure what to say, and he pulled the chair across from me over to the side as he sat down.

  We sat in silence for a long moment, even Lord merely staring the man down as he silently swished his tail. Misha spoke up first, and he hesitantly observed, “you’ve been avoiding me for a few days now, beautiful, everything okay?”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot,” I said, not bothering to start the game with Lord as I half looked away from Misha. “I talked to Tara about you.”

  The man stared at me for a long moment, nodding as he tried to defend himself, “look, Mary, I don’t know what she told you. I want to say though that-”

  “She told me enough,” I said, nodding as I felt my breathing grow heavy, my nails wish to grow out, the wolf wanting to run, “and…well, she told me enough. I don’t know what to think really, but… well, I don’t think I’m ready to actually be with anyone just yet. I’m… not sure what to think of what I heard, and I haven’t been sure how to talk to you. I… I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.”

  Misha shook his head, looking somewhere between saddened and annoyed as he tried saying, “it doesn't matter anyway. I just got through having a talk with The Lady.”

  “Why did she do that?” I asked, furrowing my brow with some curiosity, “you’re no longer my parole officer, it shouldn’t matter what you do.”

  “I’m still her employee, or at least I was,” the man said, giving a sad chuckle as he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, passing it over to me. I took it up, looking down to see a few phone numbers written next to Hotel, Cell, and office. I frowned at the sight, and I was still scanning them when Misha sat down the three large leather bound books he held, each two inches thick and rather worn looking.

  I looked over them, unsure of what they were, and took the top most book and flipped it open to a random page. The page had a rough drawing of a strange creature, with a dog skull for a head alongside long arms and claws. A header above it, written in larger letters and underlined, read Hollywood Cemetery Ghouls: Allied, with a disorganized recollection of facts and paragraphs below that.

  “I started working with The Lady when I turned fourteen, three days after I became a werewolf,” Misha said, tapping the books. “By the time I was sixteen I started keeping journals about everyone I met and about everything I saw. Twenty-two years later, that is everyone and everything I have ever killed, fought, or needed to deal with for more than a few minutes of time working for The Lady.”

  “Why are you showing these to me?” I asked, frowning as I flipped through the book, finding things ranging from named people, vague descriptions, titles, and more.

  Arthur Baker: Allied.

  Genuine Risk Lane Poltergeist: Fraud.

  Hustle Family: Terminated.

  Shadow At the Crossroads: Informant, high risk.

  Finally I came toward a section two thirds toward the back of the book where things switched to blank pages, and I flipped back maybe two dozen pages of various things I’d helped him with or heard about. The crime scene in the apartment, roughly drawn out, a few fey, ghosts, vampire, and finally an entry which made me stop. There, written in the same heading style as the others, read Bloodhound: Subdued and past a few lines below that Mary Diana Jameson: Allied.

  My picture was drawn, as I looked even just weeks ago, as I still largely looked. Tired and gaunt with wild and knotted hair, sat across a leather chair, wearing a pair of borrowed jeans and one of Misha’s button-downs that was too small on me. My first few nights waiting for my trial, where Misha had lent me clothes from his trunk, before The Lady found me a few items in my size. It looked almost romanticized, and you could still tell how horrid I was, how cruel and animalistic I’d looked to him.

  I shook my head, and I asked again, “Why are you showing me all this?”

  “The Lady is reassigning me,” Misha said, seeming slightly disgusted by the words, “trading me out with a friend of hers in Los Angeles, apparently getting some changeling who wanted somewhere less dry and crowded. As far as I can tell though, she’s promoting you to replace me instead, which means you’ll need this.”

  I nodded, furrowing my brow as I sat the book back down and slowly asked, “am I no longer on parole?”

  “No idea, ask her,” the man said, rising to his feet as he tapped the piece of paper he’d given me, “apparently this witch she’s trading me to owns a historic hotel, and she’s putting me up in one of the nicer rooms. This is my new cell number, it’s local to there but it won’t work until I’m moved in next week. This is the hotel’s number, ask for Misha Lyon if you need to call me that way, and that’s the office I’m being given according to her.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I… I don’t know what to say,” I muttered, rising to my feet as I folded the paper back up, half-holding it between us. “I mean, all this suddenly? I guess it just feels a little weird and well… Tara told me what you did, and I can’t stop wondering why. It doesn’t feel like you, why would you cheat on Annabelle? I mean, people can get better, but just… you always sound so happy about her, it doesn’t feel like you, and I don’t know what to think about that.”

  Misha nodded a few times, pacing the ground as he rubbed the back of his head in frustration. He was upset, weirdly the last reaction I expected from the questioning, and after a moment he told me, “hold onto the number, you can always call me whenever you want, but even if you don’t just hold onto it. You can call me in ten, five, three fucking years and tell me what you think after you’ve had a few cases go bad on you and you stopped caring about anything. This last year has been pretty quiet compared to everything else I’ve ever dealt with, and I kept you out of the worst of it, got it?”

  “why are you snapping at me?” I asked, rising to my feet as I felt the wolf wanting to come out, trying to figure out where this had come from, “I didn’t fucking realize that having a few bad days at work was excuse for cheating on your girlfriend, I just wanted to know what happened since I heard it from fucking Tara and Lord first! What, was that why you never really pushed to socialize me like The Lady wanted, didn’t want me finding out?”

  “I figured I got raised you don’t bring up people’s laundry unless you have good reason,” the man muttered in disgust, closing his eyes as he seemed to hold himself back, “look, I’ve done some shit in my past, and you’re right I could have gotten you more friends than I did, but I was protecting you. The less you blend in with humans, the less use The Lady has for you, the less you have to lose. I loved Annabelle, but you don’t fucking know anything about her or The Lady where I want you dragging this out.”

  “And that justified cheating on her?” I asked, not even sure where he was going with this.

  “You want to know what we did the night before I slept with Tara?” Misha asked, shaking his head as he glared up at me, “we were doing a job for The Lady, someone decided to turn his daughter into a vampire, a six year old dying of bone cancer, and then he got killed by a vampire hunter. You know what turning into a vampire does? It doesn’t heal you, doesn’t make you some idealized body like being a werewolf, it keeps you in perfect condition, same thing you were when you died. You know what happens when a fucking six year old is in constant pain and is constantly starving for blood to help the pain? You end up with a lot of bodies, and a lot of good Samaritans with their throats ripped out on the street.”

  I froze, too horrified to even move as he explained it, and Misha shook his head as he picked the third notebook up again. The man flipped through it for several seconds, before setting it down on its pages, and I knew what the contents probably were

  “Read up on it sometime if you want, but you want a little spoiler on how it ended?” he asked with a cold chuckle, looking like he he wasn’t even believing the event had actually happened, “The Lady tells us to take care of it, that it’s better to just show this kid the sun than keep her alive. She doesn’t even offer to help, she can survive the sun, she just tells us to deal with it. So we find this girl, and we drive her out to a farm The Lady owns, and we sit with her and talk to her about the time she went to the zoo and how much she liked the animals, I’m using my powers the whole time to keep her calm as possible, Annabelle’s holding this girl in her lap when the sun finally comes up, and you want to know what she tells me? ‘I’m going to be finding ash in my pockets for years,’ just that, laughing about it. Few hours later she’s laughing over breakfast like nothing happened, talking about getting some sleep and going to Vergil’s club that night while I’m hour one on a sixteen hour bender she thinks I’m fucking overeating about.”

  My face turned up in disgust, and I shook my head, not sure what I was hearing as I asked, “and what? You didn’t break up with her, you slept with her sister, what’s that supposed to even mean? Sure, that was fucked up about her, but how is that supposed to justify doing that and just, keeping it going? I’ve heard you talk about her, you didn’t break up with her, you still fucking love her, what was the point of doing that?”

  Misha paused for a long time, and finally stepped away as he told me, “you know what, fine, I’m not a good person. I’m an asshole, a lot of people rightfully hate me here, and you know what I’ll do anything to feel a little better, because it’s what you have to do. You have my job now, you have to do all the paperwork and you get to be the one who looks at all the crime scenes and follows every order, and hugs the screaming kid while she turns to ash. You ask me, a night of cheating you end up regretting the next morning is a lot better than The Lady giving her incinerator a workout after someone pisses her off.”

  “It’s still not an excuse,” I said, shaking my head as I sat back at the table, keeping my eyes on ground, “you can’t just fucking use people because you feel like it, that’s what we did in the Purists. You were the one who told me I was too good to do that.”

  “Like I said, keep the number,” Misha said, making sure the paper was sat firmly in place as he tapped it twice, “then the first time you get ordered to kill a werewolf hunter who thinks he’s saving lives so he refuses a contract with The Lady, behead a vampire who has no idea what they are just yet, or exorcise a ghost that was just trying to avenge their death and got confused, you call me. When The Lady kills someone you care about because you yelled at her for being a fucking idiot, beats you half to death because she thinks it’s good fun or a brag to other vampires, or you just have enough and do anything to feel good again, I’ll be there to talk. Give it time, Mary, and I’ll give it three years before you're as bad as me if you don’t get out now without telling anyone.”

  “I’m not going to be like you,” I said slowly, frowning as I tried to not look up to the man, as I rested one hand on the journal before pulling it away, “I’m going to get better, not worse. One step at a time. I have friends here, I have… I can do something good here.”

  “Well, if you do, I want to hear,” Misha said, nodding for a long time as he seemed to let the words rest with him, “It might do me some good either way to know if someone can do this job without it changing them. I’d be rather impressed. You ask me though? I think you should buy a bus ticket in cash, drop your phone off in a ditch, and go find somewhere to start over before The Lady finds a way to keep you under her thumb. You ever need a place to crash, I’m a country away.”

  I nodded, and the man left my room, the sound of his thudding footprints filling the air. Lord slowly walked over to me, laying against my arm as he gave a comforting purr and I ran my fingers through his hair.

  My hand hesitantly turned the journal over, and I read Sally Adams: Terminated, next to a picture of the girl, held in the arms of another on water stained paper. I slammed the book shut, and I felt my breathing grow unsteady as Lord pushed hard into me.

  You’re not like him, Lord told me, and I nodded a few times as I tried pushing the panic away.

  “I don’t want to be,” I agreed, trying to focus on my breathing, “I…I want to get better, I want to be good, I want to be human.”

  You will be, Lord agreed, and I scratched behind his ear. You’re a good person, Mary. You remind me of Mother. You’re my new favorite milf.

  I nodded, not sure if I should have considered that a compliment even more even as a smile crossed my lips as I gave a small laugh at the comment and I asked, “who told you about that?”

  Tara ranted about it to me, the cat answered, nodding in thoughtful acknowledgment. I think she was under the assumption you’d told me already… or you know, most people don’t think about telling cats about THEIR FUCKING CHILD.

  “I’ll explain it all later,” I muttered, shaking my head in disbelief.

  I was about to continue the conversation when I looked over to where Misha had just been, and nearly jumped from my seat as I saw The Lady sat there. She was wearing a black leather skirt and red tank top with a blazer over it, her hair was pulled up into a messy bun as she tilted her head and looked me over with a curious stare.

  We sat in silence for several seconds, and slowly she announced, “I would like both of you to come along with me. I have…news I see you’ve been partially informed about.”