In her dreams that night, Sanaa went to the mountain clearing again. With trembling hands, she gripped the rusted bell they used to summon the dragon and waited. The same dream had haunted her since the night she found out she was pregnant. Sanaa went to the clearing then, just as she did in the dream, but the dragon's words of warning scared her off from her task.

This time, for the first time, Sanaa rang the bell. She could hear the hollow clang reverberating off the canyon walls in her dream. But when Sanaa opened her eyes, she was still in Ronin's bed, wrapped in the massive down comforter. Ronin and the baby were nowhere to be seen, but his soft voice and the infant's bright laughter filtered through the half open door.

She grabbed her discarded pajamas and tugged them on before she went into the living room. The baby lay in a basket on the deep kitchen counter, propped up by a series of pillows so she could see her father work. Ronin stood at the kitchen table bent over the charred carcass of a bat demon.

"Tell me that's not what's for breakfast," she said.

Ronin glanced over his shoulder. The warmth of the smile that spread across his face lit up the dragon's eyes, but there was no fire in them for once. "I'm teaching Shayla here about scrying."

“Shayla?”

He shrugged. “It seemed to fit.”

Sanaa plucked the girl from the basket and nuzzled her cheek, noting the scent of fresh soap against her baby soft skin. He'd even taken the time to slip her into one of the adorable but completely impractical lace dresses he bought for her. "And what, pray tell, is that?"

“Powyr comes from the wyrd which is infinite, right? But the ways a person can come up with to use it is decidedly more finite. You can learn a lot about an opponent by their methodology. Figure out the methodology of someone powyrful enough and you have a calling card."

A smile tugged as Sanaa's lips as she let the baby latch onto her nipple. Something about the moment, listening to the Dragon show off his knowledge while holding their daughter, felt precious. "What do you use to figure that out?"

“I pull apart a sample of their work. Spell and charms are difficult, they just leave residue behind, but it's pretty easy when someone is kind enough to leave fleshy samples of their work on my front lawn. Awfully sloppy of her, though.”

"A horde of dark walker’s spawn attacked your house in the middle of the night, and the part that is tripping you up is that they didn't poof into non-existence?"

Ronin furrowed his brow and laughed. “I guess I didn't realize how strange that would sound to someone who doesn't apply powyr that way. If all I have is a spell or charm to work with, I have to rely on my own powyr to find what I need. It can be done, but it takes more time and energy than I have to spare right now. If I have something physical, I can use physical tools, like scrying, to amplify the effect."

Everything about his demeanor was looser, freer than she’d ever seen him. If she’d known one night of great sex could improve his mood so much, she would have suggested it sooner.

"Okay, that makes sense. But you already know that Niabe made the bat thing. I don't see how this helps."

A strange expression crossed the Dragon's face, but he turned his eyes back to the burned carcass before Sanaa could gauge its meaning. "The identity of the caster isn't the only thing I can learn from a sample."

Ronin's hesitation caught Sanaa's attention though he tried to cover it by plucking a sliver of heart tissue from the body and setting it on a wooden cutting board. She'd never known the Dragon to hesitate about anything...unless he thought the fallout of his actions might be too much for her. "What are you trying to learn now?"

"Where Niabe is," he said.

Sanaa started to tell Ronin that he was wasting his time, that she could tell him exactly where her mother lived or at least guide him to her building. But when she opened her mouth, it dawned on her why he hesitated.

No dark walker, no matter how desperate to cling to the remains of their old life, would ever guide a skinwalker to their lair. That had been a ploy to lull Sanaa into a sense of security. It had worked.

“Is this how she keeps finding me?”

“No, I think she’s using more visceral powyr for that.”

Sanaa rolled her eyes. “I don’t understand what that means.”

Conversations with him had a way of making her feel like she hadn’t been raised in the same world as Ronin. But the isolation skinwalkers courted out of necessity, left them at a disadvantage when it came to the ways of the rest of the powyr users of the world.

“The creation of life is one of the most complex and least understood forms of powyr there is. A mother infuses the child she carries with wyrd.”

“Like antibodies.”

“Exactly. That process leaves a trace just like any other form of powyr.”

She glanced at the baby in her arms, her nose scrunching rapidly as she guzzled mouthfuls of milk. “I don’t feel anything unusual.”

“It’s like scrying. You have to know how to do it.”

Sanaa took a moment to sort through the implications of Ronin’s words. The pit of her stomach sank. “You’re telling me she can find me anywhere in the world?”

“Maybe not that accurately. But she would always know which direction to find you. After that, it’s a matter of time and patience.”

“Running was never an option.”

He shook his head. “Not for one second.”

It had occurred to her more than once since the first attack that if she took the baby and ran, Niabe might simply follow. The confirmation that escape was not, and had never been, possible settled on her like a weight slung across her chest.

"I hope you’re a better sorcerer than Janna is a soothsayer," she said. "She's wrong 60% of the time."

“I’m decidedly mediocre. Any powyrful being can learn to weave magic like this, but you’ll always be strongest with your innate form of powyr. I can get by with fire spells, but this method of powyr is not my natural state.”

“Then why do it at all?”

Ronin lowered his hand over the lump of tissue and whispered an incantation. Sanaa had no idea what the words meant, but when he pulled his hands away only a smoldering pile of ashes remained. “Because this kind of powyr is never wrong.”

He scooped the ash into his hands and sprinkled it over a map beside him. The black particles gathered in one spot, a street in Albuquerque.

One hour and a phone call to enlist Kane for babysitting duty later, Sanaa and Ronin stood in front of a stone building downtown. Steel letters against the facade labeled the building as the Channing Memorial Library. Ronin paused at the front steps, his eyes gliding over the stones and narrowing as if he noticed something she didn’t. It wasn’t until they were in the front lobby that the dragon shared what he noticed outside.

The Dragon slipped his keys to her, sliding them into the pocket of her jeans. "If something happens, get in the car and drive back. Don't wait for me."

Sanaa rolled her eyes. The white knight routine was getting old. “I can take care of myself.”

“It’s not about that,” he said. “There’s a ward on the building. I saw it on the way in. You should be feeling it now.”

She paused and closed her eyes, trying to get a sense of something unusual in her body. Sure enough, there was a difference she hadn’t noticed before, a weakness in her muscles, a mild disorientation. The feeling reminded her of the guppy demon’s poison.

“There are spells that do that?”

Ronin nodded. “No powyr, no shifting. It puts us at a hell of a disadvantage.”

"You must be out of your damn mind if you think I'm leaving you here to fight her by yourself," Sanaa said.

"Fight? And here I thought you were just paying your poor, old mother a visit," Niabe said.

Sanaa turned to find her mother standing behind her. The bitter smile on her blood-red lips reminded Sanaa of a cat waiting to devour a wounded bird.

Niabe turned her eyes to Ronin, and the smirk widened to a sneer. "I suppose congratulations are in order now that you've decided to make an honest woman of my daughter."

“Mock me again, bitch, and those will be the last words you ever speak."

Niabe wrinkled her nose but the delighted malice never left her eyes. "Is that any way to talk to your new mother-in-law?"

"I suppose not, but it's a perfect way to talk to the bitch who's trying to kill my daughter.

"Don't take that tone with me, boy. I was serving powyr greater than you could possibly grasp long before you decided to slum it in our mountains. Why those old fools have put up with your residence for so long—”

"Oh, for fuck's sake! Fight later," Sanaa said through gritted teeth. "Mother, it doesn't have to be this way."

Niabe turned, and, for second, Sanaa thought she saw tenderness in her eyes– the tenderness a mother might have for her daughter in crisis. But as quickly as the emotion appeared, it vanished leaving behind only the cold dark walker her mother had become.

“You weren’t much bigger than her when your father died, you know. And I wasn't much older than you. Times were harder then. There was no rich, handsome dragon living in the mountains to come and save me.”

"Is that why you've always hated me? Is that why you're trying to kill my baby?" It sounded a little melodramatic even to Sanaa, but what did she have other than the evidence of her own eyes? The reality was her own mother had tried to kill her three times in as many days. They both knew Sanaa was running out of extra lives to make up the difference.

Niabe clicked her tongue softly and shook her head “A true mother's love is always the hardest to understand. Maybe you'll learn that one day."

"Lady, you have got a fucked up idea of a mother's love," Ronin said.

"The Dragon in the Mountain doubts my devotion to my daughter? Then let me prove it." Niabe turned and took Sanaa by the shoulders.

The tender gesture between mother and daughter might have played out hundreds of times between them if things had been different. But life hadn't been different, not for either of them. In another life, she might have been a loving daughter introducing her new boyfriend to her mother. Instead, Sanaa was bringing the father of her baby like death to her mother's door.

"If you love him, fight with him. But if you love her…run." Niabe leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Sanaa’s cheek. She turned to Ronin and smiled. "Nice meeting you again. Mind the heat. We wouldn't want you going mad and seeing your dead wives again."

A jolt of shock ran through Sanaa. It didn't upset her to learn that Ronin had been married before, but it surprised her that he had never mentioned it. She glanced at Ronin to gauge the truthfulness of her mother's words by his reaction.

A cold smile came to his lips, fury in his eyes as he spoke. "I keep my promises, dark walker. I'm going to rip the flesh from your skull before this is all over."

Niabe laughed, a high, tinkling sound that bounced off the stone walls of the library. "Oh, I don't doubt you will try."