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likely.”
    “Still, it’s probably not a bad idea.”
    Janice nodded. “You never know when opportunity is going to strike again.”
    I reminded Luke to make sure he put Penny back in the car the second she was finished and said we’d be right back.
    “Just hurry up in there. It’s coming up on eleven and we’re not even at the halfway mark yet.”
    The inside of the bathroom shack was worse than the outside. I found myself wishing I’d worn a hazmat suit.
    “Good thing you’re a healer,” I said as I washed my hands in a sad little trickle of icy cold water. “This place is a bacteria incubator.”
    Janice was staring at her reflection in the dingy mirror. “Why didn’t you tell me about my hair?” she muttered then set to work.
    “Can’t you do that in the car?” I asked as she ran her fingers through her long wavy hair. “Luke’s waiting.”
    “Be right there,” she said, but I knew her idea of being right there was very different from mine.
    I rearranged my ponytail and wished once again that I had been born with curly auburn hair instead of stick-straight blond, then hurried back out to Luke.
    Who, as it turned out, was up a tree.

9

LUKE
    I’m a dog guy. I grew up with dogs. I get dogs. I know what it means when a dog wags his tail or when the ridge of fur at the top of his spine lifts like a line of porcupine quills.
    Dogs are simple and direct. Dogs don’t mess with your head.
    Cats are a mystery to me. Cat signals are like animal cave drawings better left to a student of the species.
    You would think the fact that the woman I loved was a sorceress-in-training would be enough to deal with, but fate wasn’t through with me yet. She had cats. Lots of cats.
    And one of them talked.
    Yeah, it freaked me out, too. There really was no way to adjust to a cat that could explain quantum physics to you or turn you into a catnip mouse if the spirit moved her.
    The truth is, except for the talking and the magick and the litter box thing, I liked Penelope. She was a mellow cat. No diva hissing or scratching. No pouncing or swinging from the curtains. She slept, she ate, she slept some more. She was a house cat who’d been a house cat since before we were a loose collection of colonies with an English accent.
    In other words Penny the cat wouldn’t know the great outdoors if it bit her in her hairy butt.
    So what the hell was she doing up a tree?
    And the bigger question was, what the hell was I doing up the same tree trying to lure her down with an Egg McMuffin?
    “Okay,” I said, scrabbling for a foothold on the snow-covered branch, “so I dropped the ball. I shouldn’t have turned my back on you.”
    Penny the cat stared back at me with those unnerving golden eyes.
    “C’mon,” I said, extending the morsel toward her. “You know you want it.”
    She didn’t say screw you out loud but she might as well have. Clearly the cat expected better than fast food.
    “Now I remember why I didn’t become a firefighter,” I mumbled as she inched farther up the tree. Cops didn’t do this crap.
    For that matter neither did dogs. You wouldn’t find a poodle up a tree or a rottweiler. Ground level was good enough for a dog.
    “Luke!”
    I looked down and saw Chloe looking back up at me. “Your cat’s up the tree.”
    “Impossible! Penny doesn’t do trees.”
    On cue Penny the cat gave another of those yowls she’d been unleashing all morning.
    “Damn, I wish she’d stop that.”
    “Penelope,” she said, “come down here.”
    I swear I didn’t see the cat move. One second she was looking down at me from the uppermost branch. The next she was wrapped around Chloe’s neck like a boa.
    And I was still up a tree.
    “Are you coming down on your own,” Chloe asked, “or do you want me to magick you down?”
    I did my best lumberjack impression and landed on my feet next to her.
    You wouldn’t think a cat could look disdainful but Penelope managed it.
    “The cat hates me,” I said as we