He didn’t look as though I’d relieved him of guilt. “If you hadn’t let me stay—”

“We like you,” I told him. “We’ll take you how you come.”

I’d told him that before. He was, I thought, starting to believe it.

He took a breath, then frowned at me doubtfully. “Ancient powerful forces of magic and all?”

“Yup. You’re in good company in this family.” I gave him a rueful smile. “Joel is possessed by a volcano spirit. I have Coyote, who likes to show up and make trouble whenever he chooses. Even Adam comes with Christy baggage that just keeps on giving.”

“Okay,” he said. “You are all cursed, and I fit right in.”

I laughed. Aiden learned fast. Anyone listening in would never think that he’d been trapped for who knows how long in that magical land and had only popped out just a few months ago. Jesse credited it to her tutoring with the aid of Netflix.

“I did come down to ask about Underhill’s door,” I said.

He nodded. “I already talked to Adam a little about it. She told me she put it there …”

He frowned trying, I knew, to recall Underhill’s exact words. Exact words were important to the fae—and Underhill, as far as I’d been able to tell, followed the rules that governed the fae. “She said, ‘I need a door to Mercy’s backyard. I miss you. The fae aren’t playing nice and I don’t want to owe any of them anything.’”

“Why would she owe the fae anything?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t specific, so maybe it was something she said to distract me from the fact that she put a doorway in our backyard.”

“Can anyone else use the doorway?” I asked.

He nodded. “Me and Underhill. I made her spell it that way as soon as I saw it. She guards her doorways pretty zealously anyway, but there are monsters in Underhill and sometimes we get out.”

“Yep, well, there are monsters on this side of Underhill’s doors, too,” I told him briskly. “Don’t get feeling too special.”

He started to smile at me—and then his gaze grew suddenly intent. “Mercy, what happened?”

“My eyes aren’t swollen anymore,” I said, a little indignant. “I spent time with a cold washcloth.”

He reached up and put a hand briefly on my face—his hand was warm. “Your eyes are sad, Mercy. Washcloths can’t help that.”

I told him about my neighbors. I included the jackrabbit and the ghost. I left out my interlude with Adam.

“Their deaths hurt you,” Aiden said when I finished. “I am sorry for your loss.” Frowning, he leaned against the door. “There are a few things that can use a bite—use that blood contact to make people do their will. Vampires, for instance.”

“Marsilia would never permit it.”

Aiden shook his head. “Not Marsilia’s seethe. The ones in Underhill wouldn’t owe her any fealty.”

Like the rest of us, his thoughts had immediately gone to the door in our backyard when looking for a culprit.

“There are vampires in Underhill?”

Aiden said, “Everything you’ve told me about your neighbors’ deaths could have been done by the fae. Other than a few of the less powerful fae—and creatures like the goblins, whose control of glamour is different—they could all take on the form of a jackrabbit. And while the fae don’t use blood as often as, say, the witches do, there is a lot of magic in blood. But you told me that it didn’t smell like fae magic to you. That still leaves other options. When the fae were driven out, there were still servants, curiosities like me, and prisoners left behind in Underhill. Tilly opened the prisons when she exiled the fae who were their caretakers. Most of the prisoners were—or had been—fae, but not all of them were. There are some weird things roaming around. Weirder even than I am.” He shivered.

I was still stuck on vampires. “Vampires? Really? In Underhill? That’s like finding coyotes in ancient Egypt.”

“There weren’t coyotes in Egypt, right?” he asked.

“Not unless Coyote—” I held up a hand. “Sorry. Let’s get back to the idea that something escaped from Underhill through the door in our backyard and killed my friends.” I had a thought powered by his tales of creatures set free by Underhill. “How many escapees could there have been?”

“If something escaped, it would have had to be before I found the door,” he said. “I could believe that one creature escaped—but she doesn’t like to lose her captives.”

“It wasn’t there when I got home,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “That makes multiple escapees even less likely.”

“Would she know if something escaped?” I asked. “And more importantly, would she know which something escaped?” And hopefully give us more information on what it was and how to kill it.

He nodded. “I think so. But she will know that I’ll be mad at her over it—so getting her to tell us if something escaped will be hard. I’ll call her and see what she will tell me. It might take a while for her to answer.”

He didn’t mean that he’d use the phone.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” I started to go, then paused. “I should let you know that Adam and I are going out hunting jackrabbits.”

He frowned. “I think I should come along,” he said. “Just in case. Let me get my tennis shoes on.”

BY THE TIME WE WENT BACK UPSTAIRS, ADAM WAS waiting for us in his wolf form.

“I talked to Aiden. He agrees it might be something escaped from Underhill,” I told Adam. “He has decided to come help.”

Adam looked at Aiden, who gave him a cool look and said, “You are lethal, no doubt. Mercy is quick. But I lived in Underhill for a long time, and I made some friends there as well as enemies. Some of them … I know what they did in Underhill, but I have no idea what they could do out here. Magic works differently out here. Maybe we’ll run into someone I know and we can chat. And if not—well, most things burn when I want them to.”

Adam huffed a reluctant agreement. We didn’t like using Aiden as a weapon. He was under our protection, not the other way around.

But he was right—he knew things we didn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “But if I say run, you run.”

He gave me a look. It was probably not a look of agreement. Who was it that said leadership is a matter of never giving orders that you know will not be obeyed? I figured that his silence was the best I was going to do.

I stepped into Adam’s office to change. Modesty was a thing that I’d left behind a long time ago, but Aiden looked like a kid. Unless there were dying people involved, I would strip naked out of his sight.

Once I was changed into my coyote self, Aiden let Adam and me out of the kitchen and closed the door behind us. They followed me through the backyard. Night had fallen and the stone fence looked strange in the light of the waxing moon, out of place and mysterious. We all climbed through the old barbed-wire fence instead of climbing over the stone.

I HAD THOUGHT THAT I REMEMBERED EXACTLY WHERE the jackrabbit had been. But though I could smell a mouse somewhere nearby—and Adam scared up a pair of rabbits of the regular variety following the only rabbit trail we could find—there were no jackrabbits.

We went to the Cathers’ house and sniffed around the garden. I found a rabbit trail, but it was crossed and recrossed by a dozen people walking over it. I finally found a bit of it that led off the property, and the three of us set off through fields and backyards to find out if it was a jackrabbit.

Rabbits of all kinds smelled like rabbits. I could tell one individual rabbit from another—but to my nose there was no difference between a Flemish giant and a cottontail.

As soon as the trail took us through private property belonging to other people, Adam called pack magic to make us harder to notice. I didn’t argue; people shoot at coyotes and I had the buckshot scars on my backside to prove it. The danger was reduced because it was night—but there were three of us, and a 250-pound werewolf and a boy weren’t as good at stealth as a coyote was.

Rabbits don’t travel in straight lines, and this one had rambled all over. Our bit of hometown was a patchwork quilt of large fields and once-large fields broken up into odd-shaped properties with homes ranging from 1960s trailers to modern mansions and everything in between, as well as a few industrial plants on the river.

We passed by or through hayfields, marijuana farms, organic farms, berry farms, and a few small vineyards, though the best vineyard country is on the other side of the Tri-Cities, and we ran through a lot of backyards, too. There were horses, cows, goats, chickens—all of whom ignored us, wrapped as we were in pack magic. The cats saw through the magic, as did the foxes. But they only watched our passing without sounding any alerts.

At one point we jumped into a backyard that was full of old cars. Most of them were rotted husks, with kochia, tackweed, and Virginia creeper growing up through the old floorboards—but there was a row of cars next to the house that were covered in tarps, and one of them …

I ducked my head low and tried to see under the tarp without being too obvious about it. Adam nipped me lightly on the hip and Aiden laughed. A light went on in the house and we all scrambled to get out of the yard before the back porch light turned on.

Fortunately, there was a break in the fence big enough for Aiden to get through, and even more fortunately, that was the hole the rabbit had used to get out, too.

Trailing prey by scent for long takes a lot of concentration, even when there aren’t mysterious tarps hiding what I was pretty sure was an old Karmann Ghia. Adam and I started trading off who was following the trail every ten minutes or so.

Rabbits are usually more territorial than this one was. I’d trailed rabbits in circles before, but never such a long trail over new territory. We didn’t run into any old trails where the rabbit crossed its own path, as it would if this were its usual haunts. It made me think we might be on the right track.