I should have known.
When things are good — really, genuinely good, the kind of good where you start sleeping through the night and laughing at things without checking yourself — that's when the thing you weren't watching for walks through the door.
It walked through mine on a Wednesday.
Not dramatically. That was the part I hadn't expected. I had been braced, somewhere in the back of my mind, for drama — another Crone move, another document, another midnight call. What I got instead was a woman in the hospital lobby at two in the afternoon asking for Dr. Voss.
Her name was Mila Ashveil.
She was fifty-three, east side, with the bearing of someone who had been important in a specific world for a long time. She wore pack insignia I recognised — Ashveil, but older design. The generation
