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  “You think because you can change things here, you have power?”

  She advanced. He retreated. She got him on his knees in a second with one hand on his wrist and the other bending his hand back. No tricks, just speed and strength and desire.

  “I don’t need tricks,” she sneered, pushing him harder.

  He cried out in pain. His head bent, and she used her knee to nudge his face none-too-gently upward. He wasn’t crying, the way the boy would’ve been. Her hair hung around her shoulders again.

  “You think this is yours?” She bent his arm harder, until he squirmed. “It’s not. This is mine. My place. My time. And you are just a player in it for my pleasure.”

  Incredibly, though she bent his wrist so far the bones creaked, he shook his head. “It’s not real. This isn’t real.”

  “It’s real, sweetheart.” The witchwoman’s voice dipped low and hard.

  He shook his head again. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, and his lips skinned back from his teeth, but he still tried to deny her. She leaned over him, driving him back onto his heels.

  “I need to dream this,” he said under his breath. “I don’t know why, but I do.”

  “Who told you that?”

  He looked up at her, face creased. “Spider.”

  She broke his wrist. And then his arm. He screamed and dropped to the sand when she let him go. He held his injured arm close to his body, curled like a shrimp. She kicked him in the kidneys, just for fun.

  The boy stepped forward and, growling, the dogman got between him and the man curled on the sand.

  “Who the hell is Spider?” The witchwoman’s voice rose and her hands moved, nails growing, getting ready to pinch and claw.

  The man only shook his head, moaning into the sand, heedless of the way it filled his mouth. He pushed with his feet to get away from her and even managed a few inches before she reached to grab his hair and yank his head upright.

  “Answer me,” the witchwoman said. “Or this gets nasty.”

  “Spider is a guide.” He moaned. Sweat had broken out on his face. He cradled his wrist and turned his head to heave.

  A guide? The witchwoman bent to spit into his face, but a figure in the edge of her vision stopped her. She looked up.

  The boy.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, swallowing his own fear. “Don’t do that anymore.”

  She dropped the man’s head into the sand and stepped over him to walk toward the boy. “Hello, sweetheart.”

  The boy shook his head. He carried the red-and-white ball. “You shouldn’t hurt people like that.”

  She moved closer. “I’m not hurting anyone, sweetheart. It isn’t me.”

  “Stop.” The boy backed up a step. The ball grew smaller and he put it in his pocket.

  From behind her stepped the dogman, growling. The dogman stank of meat and blood and earth, all overlaid with the same sour stench of burning leaves. She shrank from it in disgust.

  “Look what you’ve done,” she said to the boy. “Hurry, hurry, run and scurry. I can’t hide you now.”

  The dogman growled louder. Saliva dripped from its muzzle to stain the worn denim jeans, the grotty work shirt. Its hands were dark with grime. The witchwoman pointed at the rope coiled on its belt, and the hammer.

  “Look, sweetheart. It’s got its tools.”

  The boy stared without moving. He felt her wanting him to do it, to make the chaos, to bring the world to its knees around them, but he didn’t do it. He would not give her what she wanted, though the dogman snapped and snarled. Even though she pinched and grabbed.

  “Don’t I always take care of you?” she asked again as the dogman moved toward the boy. “Don’t you trust me?”

  The boy’s mouth tilted on one side. Too late, she realized he’d tricked her. She looked to the sand, fully black. Her plaything had vanished.

  “Get him,” she muttered to the dogman. “Bite him. Make him bleed.”

  The dogman moved forward. The boy held up his hands. He cried out. He covered his face.

  The earth shook, and this time, the witchwoman smiled.

  Chapter Seven

  The gym, as always, smelled of sweat and effort with an undertang of sexual frustration. Tovah had been there for half an hour, working in the small back room where she could punch and kick away on a bag without attracting too much attention. Where if she fell on her ass when she tried to kick, nobody would see. The mirrors reflected her stance and posture without hiding any details. Red face, messy hair, sweat-stained T-shirt. She’d stopped wearing shorts a long time ago, hating herself for giving in to vanity and societal pressure but unable to bear the constant scrutiny on her as she worked out. Or the questions, usually well-meaning but annoying and invasive all the same.

  How’d you lose it? How can you work out without a leg? Can you still feel it, sometimes?

  Usually women just looked and whispered to their girlfriends behind their hands. Men asked, straight up and blunt. At first she’d been glad for the questions, but then she quickly realized they weren’t listening to the answer. They asked, but they never really wanted to hear it. They wanted to ogle her prosthetic leg. She might not have minded if they’d also wanted to ogle the rest of her.

  She hated being reduced to a single limb.

  Now she worked out in sweatpants even though she got too hot and sweated twice as much. Kick. Kick. Punch-punch-punch. Take a breath. The empty room echoed with the sound of her blows and the rasp of her breath, and she worked until she had to admit defeat against the bag, which swung placidly on its heavy chain as though it wanted to mock her for giving up so soon.

  Grabbing her water bottle, Tovah headed out into the main gym for the row of treadmills lined up along the back wall. They all pointed toward an equal row of televisions tuned to the same station. Nodding at a woman whose name she didn’t know but whom she saw almost every time she came to the gym, Tovah hopped up on the end unit and fiddled with the controls until she had them set just right. A slight incline, a pace that wouldn’t kill her. She stuck her bottle in the holder, hung up her small towel and started walking.

  She’d always hated exercise, preferring instead the pleasures of the couch and an afghan and regulating her weight by food intake rather than physical activity. She’d rather have curled up with a good book and a glass of wine than gone for a walk. Kevin had been the active one, the sports fan, the golfer, the racquetball/basketball/softball player who spent most of his free time running around with some piece of sports equipment in his hands.

  The accident changed everything, her interest in working out included. It had been twelve kinds of pain in the ass to get back on her feet…both the original and the new-and-improved. But that wasn’t the reason why she had made the gym her second home.

  The doctors and physical therapists and nurses, hell, even the staff psychologists, had all told her there was nothing she couldn’t do with her new leg that she couldn’t have done with the old. And Tovah, stubborn about that sort of thing, had set out to make that so. Running. Kickboxing. She did all of it, mastering each new skill as a challenge she’d set herself. They’d told her she could do all of it, and she was going to.

  A groan from the treadmill next to hers caught her ear, and Tovah looked over. Briefly, she thought the woman there might be having some trouble, but then she shot Tovah a grin.

  “Sorry. Got carried away. But really, c’mon, can you blame me?” She jerked her chin toward the bank of televisions, now showing the close-up of a somewhat familiar face.

  Tovah wasn’t sure of the actor’s name. “Is that the guy from Runner?”

  “Yep. Justin Ross.” The woman fanned her face with a little sigh. “Otherwise known as Hotty McHottenstuff.”

  Tovah laughed and grabbed tighter to the handles as the treadmill started going a bit faster. “I don’t watch that show.”

  This seemed tantamount to declaring she didn’t bathe or brush her teeth, based on the look the other wo