Kiery ran to grab more towels and start mopping up the bloody mess on Gianna's bathroom floor.

"Crap, crap, crap," she muttered as the blood smeared everywhere. Blood was such a damn sticky liquid. She'd had to clean up Lucas' bathroom more than once because he'd come in torn up, but he'd never bled puddles. At least not in his bathroom. He'd had the good taste to take that to the professionals at the clinic.

She threw the soaked towels into the bathtub, rinsed them, then tried to mop up the blood some more. There was a second blood here too. Aaron had already bled and stained the grout.

This bathroom had seen some things.

She rummaged around in the cabinet—nothing. Not even peroxide. She piled the blood towels into the tub, then jumped in to rinse off, and threw her bloody clothes in with it. She'd just run back to her room wearing Gianna's robe.

She glanced at the newly minted SableFur Luna passed out on her miserable little bed, her arm wrapped in hand towels. The bleeding seemed to have eased up.

"Just hold on until this Ana gets her," she muttered, knowing Gianna couldn't hear her.

She ran back to her room, grabbed fresh clothes, and peroxide and ran into the kitchen. Cook was there with his stunned kitchen crew, trying to figure out what to cook for dinner.

"Cook," she said.

"Is it true?" Cook asked. "Magnes is dead?"

"Magnes is worse than dead. The Moon destroyed him," Kiery said.

"With starlight wolves?" one of the line cooks asked.

"Yes," Kiery said, trying to sound like the composed Elder Oracle and First Beta's mate she was, and not the trying-to-cover-up-a-bloodbath she-wolf she actually was in that moment. "I'm sure the wolves are still going to be hungry, but I'm also sure there's not going to be dinner. They're looking for Adrianna and her sons now. Or what's left of her."

Cook nodded soberly, and a couple of the kitchen wolves made small sounds of concern. Cook said, "She left the house hours ago."

"Adrianna did?" Kiery asked. "She left before all this happened?"

Cook nodded again. "Took the pups and left. Nobody else went with them."

"Tell Lucas. Gianna's really worried that the pups are alone with a dead or dying mother. If they're far from here, they need to get found," Kiery said, then, "Cook, I need some bleach. Alpha Aaron bled all over her bathroom and she didn't get around to giving it a proper cleaning."

"I'll send for—"

"I'll do it," Kiery interrupted.

"But you're an Oracle, Kiery."

Cook said that as if she was too good to mop a bathroom. Oh, the stories she could tell from her own time training. "I was Gianna's last teacher. She knows me, not the others. I can handle cleaning a mess, Cook. I've been with Lucas for years, remember?"

Cook gestured to one of the wolves, who darted into a side closet and brought her a bottle of bleach, a bucket, and a mop. Even better than the bleach she'd been hoping for.

Kiery picked up her prizes. "And in about six hours or so, a human's going to show up. Her name is Ana. She's a vet, and Luna Gianna's private physician. She's not an IronMoon, just a mercenary human who follows money. If I'm not around, let her in and make sure nobody kills her."

Cook nodded.

The bleach stank to the Moon, but it cut through the blood, and made quick work of everything. She poured it over the towels in the tub and rinsed them out, sneezing on the overwhelming stench and the burn on her hands, but she had to keep the Mark secret from SableFur, and that meant getting rid of the evidence.

Gianna hadn't moved. She risked pulling at the towel-bandages and dousing the wound with peroxide. It foamed and hissed, and Gianna twitched, but she was so exhausted and wretched that she didn't do much else.

"Well, at least it's sort of stopped bleeding," Kiery whispered to herself. It looked pretty bad: like meat that had been tenderized. She put a clean towel under it just in case and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait for the arrival of the human.

~*~ Kiery's Dream ~*~

She was at the mouth of a large cavern. A huge cavern where everything seemed to be bathed in fire, and ghoulish skeletal heads stared down at her from the ceiling. All around her were the press of shadowy bodies, their attention focused at the stage at the other end of the cavern.

She'd been here before.

But Magnes was dead.

The shadowy wolves were silent this time, but expectant. She couldn't see faces. Everything was shrouded in the glow of flickering flames, but the flickering brushed along the shadowy skin to reveal the bones underneath, like the reverse of clouds passing in front of the sun.

She stepped through the crowd towards the stage. The shades shuffled, jostling a bit.

They shouldn't be aware of her.

The Tides roared in the distance, and her mind wobbled.

A moment in the dream to center herself in the center of the current, then pushed forward again.

The fire and ash made it difficult to breathe. It wasn't ash, it was some kind of fetid, dry dust. She coughed and tasted something musty on the back of her throat. What was burning? She didn't smell anything burning except wax and oil, like lanterns.

On the stage—which was made of thigh bones lashed together by strips of sinew—was an altar of stone. She went up the steps, aware of the way the bones creaked under her weight, and walked to the altar.

There was a scepter made of a war-form's humerus, and the ball end dotted with fangs to make a small, spiked globe. There was a war-form skull. The lower mandible removed, and the fangs turned upside down and arranged along the top of the skull to make a crown, and the skull rested on a cloak made from a silvery-blue pelt.

Kiery touched the pelt. It had been Aaron's pelt before.

It was an Oracle's now. Gianna's.

The crowd shifted.

Adrianna, wearing nothing, strode up onto the stage. Trailing behind her were her two sons in pup-form.

Kiery had to catch herself from screaming. Her balance rocked on the Tides. She dropped to her knees onto the bones and grabbed the altar as Adrianna, unaware she was there at all, donned the crown.

The pups—her two sons—had been skinned of every shred of hair, from ears to tip of their tails, and were soaked in scabs and blood.

"No, no, no," she whispered, brain rocking dangerously.

Adrianna swept the cloak around her shoulders, and seized the scepter, and faced the shades. She raised the scepter and howled the Luna's song of victory. The shades answered. The flames trembled. The pups threw their heads back and howled.

~*~

The doorbell rang at three in the morning.

Kiery yanked out of her dream with a yelp, fell out of her chair, grabbed the floor with the flats of her palms.

The skinned, bloody pups burned in the front of her brain.

"The dream changed," she rasped to herself. The Moon had refused to let her onto the Tides for weeks, but still haunted her with dreams. The original dream had been Magnes, and the pelt had been Aaron's. Now the dream had changed: Adrianna, wearing Gianna's pelt. And the crown had changed. In the other two, the fangs hadn't been desecrated. Gabel's skull had still had its fangs.

It changed... for the worse. Somehow that was possible. Somehow doing everything the Moon had wanted had made things worse.

The doorbell rang again.

"Crap!" she breathed. She lunged up to her feet and bolted out of the room.

By the time she got there three warriors were growling at the human woman on the other side.

"Oh hey, guys," she was saying as the three wolves snarled at her and demanded she explain what she wanted. "Wow, you guys have big teeth."

"I'm expecting her," Kiery said, shoving the warriors out of the way. The woman on the other side was surprisingly tall, slender in a strong way, and while not exactly beautiful, strangely attractive, with a mane of dark hair coiled off to one side, and bright, dancing green eyes full of mischief. Her scent said she wasn't the least bit intimidated by the three warriors.

This was a human?

"Ana," she said simply, hefting the big square-sided bag on her shoulder. "I don't usually make housecalls, but I've been told you pay well."

"Who is this?" One warrior, Evan, demanded of Kiery.

"My name's Ana," the human said. "Doctor Ana. I'm Luna Gianna's private doctor."

"You're IronMoon?" Evan demanded.

Ana grinned. "I'm whatever you pay me to be, big guy."

"We have doctors," Evan said.

"I called her," Kiery said, shouldering Evan out of the way. "I'm Elder Oracle Kiery. I sent for you."

"Kiery, Kiery... oh, I know that name. Wow, Gabel wants you dead. Like not just dead, but like plaything dead."

Kiery sighed. "Yeah, I'm sure he does. Whatever. Can you come inside, please?"

"Sure, sure, where's the blood and gore?"

"Eh, that's already been cleaned up," Kiery half-lied. "It's her hands I want you to look at. She's this way."

The human turned around, stuck her tongue out, and wiggled her fingers at the males, then sauntered after Kiery.

"So why'd you call me?" Ana asked once they were in Gianna's room. "This pack has doctors."

"Because I don't trust any of them, and you shouldn't either." Kiery grabbed her and shoved her nose into Ana's hair. It was a dumb thing to do, but this weird human showing up on the heels of the most horrifying dream she could remember seemed strange.

"I was just kidding about the doing anything for cash," Ana said. "Okay, well, maybe not..."

"You are human," Kiery said, stepping back.

"Awww, I'm flattered," Ana said cheerfully. She pulled on some gloves with a snap. "You okay? You look pasty even for an Oracle, and you're shaking. Pupils dilated to hell. Or do you just have some stuff you'd like to share?"

"I'm an Elder Oracle," Kiery said, trying to scrounge up some dignity. "I just had a dream straight from Hell."

"Damn, and then you wake up to me? The Moon must hate you." She turned her attention to Gianna. Took one look under the towel. "Yup. The Big Boss's got a matching one. He enjoyed the process of getting it more, though. What the hell happened to her? She's been gone like a month."

"The Bond, silver, and using her Gift too much," Kiery said. Gianna shifted in her sleep, but didn't protest. Maybe it was a good sign she was at least a little coherent if disturbed.

Ana picked up Gianna's hands and turned them over. "Well, this is a half-baked stitch job. These look like they've been run over a few times. Okay. I'll get to work."

"Is she going to survive?" Kiery asked.

"I'm a vet, not a human doctor, but my highly attuned instincts say she probably just needs some sleep and food and time. So let me get to work. You go sleep."

"Don't trust anyone here," Kiery said.

"Not even you?"

"Maybe not even me. Don't tell anyone about her arm. Not even Lucas, my mate and the First Beta. Play dumb about it."

"Why?"

"Because if this pack finds out she's still mated or re-mated to Gabel of IronMoon they will chew through all of us," Kiery said.

"Right. Got it. Bloody warlord and all that." Ana snapped fingerguns at her.

Kiery sighed and shook her head. "Where the hell did they find you?"

"Stripmall working for hams."

"I'm sorry I asked..."