I grinned wider, showing my blunt teeth even as Beast’s claws pressed down on my brain, breaking the compulsion. “Convenient,” I said again.

“Stepping through a portal, I was, when I felt dis—” his eyes slid away in thought, “—dis power draw. I stop. I listen. And I follow it to dis strange place, and then I follow it again to underworld of yellow grass. Not my underworld, no. But a thing of darkness pull me there. And any hunter who kill that dark thing,” he nodded and more blood flowed, “is a friend of mine.”

I smelled truth on him and yet I still didn’t believe him. I rose in one long motion and sheathed the unbloodied-blade. The bloodied one, I wiped off on the hem of my tee shirt, then sliced the scrap off. Folded it. And put it in my pocket. And I made sure Pretty Boy and Joanne Walker saw me do it. If she needed something for a blood-spell, we had it. Joanne stared at me. Laz looked disconcerted and scheming all at once.

I looked around, and discovered that we had come out in a different place from where we went in. It felt like a few hours had passed too, but my subjective time sense was getting all mixed up, so I wasn’t sure. We were near the Mississippi, the sour smell of its power wet on the air. “I have to eat,” I said. “Shifting uses up a lot of calories.”

“Calories?” Pretty Boy asked, like he’d never heard of them. “Shifting uses up magic, no?”

Jo startled. “Oh. Oh. Yeah, of course it does. No wonder . . .” I ignored her and jerked a thumb the direction I wanted to go. “Let’s take a walk along the waterfront. There are some really good restaurants and diners there.”

Minutes later, we had taken two turns and I came to a dead stop, staring through a window. The diner was one I knew. And in my world, the proprietor, Antoine, was dead. In my world he’d been an African witch or shaman or something, and he’d been killed by one of my kind.