"I'm supposed to be delivering a message to a vampire who is here without my mistress's permission," he said, getting to the point. "I need a witness he won't notice."

He hung up without getting an answer, or even telling me when he was coming to pick me up. It would serve him right if I just went back to sleep.

Muttering to myself, I threw on clothing: jeans, yesterday's T-shirt complete with mustard stain, and two socks with only one hole between them. Once I was more or less dressed, I shuffled off to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of cranberry juice.

It was a full moon, and my roommate, the werewolf, was out running with the local pack, so I didn't have to explain to him why I was going out with Stefan. Which was just as well.

Samuel wasn't a bad roommate as such things go, but he had a tendency to get possessive and dictatorial. Not that I let him get away with it, but arguing with werewolves requires a certain subtlety I was lacking at-I checked my wristwatch-3:15 in the morning.

For all that I was raised by them, I'm not a werewolf, not a were — anything. I'm not a servant of the moon's phases, and in the coyote shape that is my second form, I look like any other canis latrans: I have the buckshot scars on my backside to prove it.

Werewolves cannot be mistaken for wolves: weres are much bigger than their non-preternatural counterparts-and a lot scarier.

What I am is a walker, though I'm sure there once was another name for it-an Indian name lost when the Europeans devoured the New World. Maybe my father could have told me what it was if he hadn't died in a car wreck before he knew my mother was pregnant. So all I know is what the werewolves could tell me, which wasn't much.

The «walker» comes from the Skinwalkers of the Southwest Indian tribes, but I have less in common with a Skin-walker, at least from what I've read, than I do with the werewolves. I don't do magic, I don't need a coyote skin to change shape-and I'm not evil.