Free License to Ensorcell by Katharine Kerr Page B

and you kept sneaking off with that young ranger, the cute one. I’m not surprised you don’t remember Miriam.”
    I refused to look Nathan’s way. “The suspicions about that relationship were totally unfounded,” I said in a steely cold voice. “But didn’t the biting incident happen the first time Pat changed?”
    “The second. We just pretended he was our family dog,” Kathleen said to Nathan. “He was only thirteen then, so the wolf was just dog-sized. But her parents threatened to sue, so Grandpa had to pay all the medical bills and stuff. If the rangers had impounded Pat—God, who knows what would have happened when he changed back.” She glanced my way. “So it was a good thing you and that ranger were—”
    “He was just being kind to the family,” I said, again in the steely voice. “Out of respect for our grandparents’ age.”
    “Oh, yeah sure, Nola! But anyway, Miriam was so dumb! You should never just go up to a strange dog and try to pet it.”
    “So my father used to tell me.” Nathan forced out a smile. “Well, thank you again.”
    We all walked out onto the porch so Kathleen could unlock the gate with her electronic device. Since I’d left my sunglasses in the car, I stood blinking at the green of the garden to let my eyes adjust to the light.
    “The rhododendrons are doing well this year, huh?” I said.
    “Yeah, but there aren’t as many hummingbirds as there used to be.” She sighed with a shake of her head. “It’s all the damn chemicals people use.”
    “You sure it doesn’t have something to do with your surfeit of cats?”
    “Nola!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “They don’t eat the birds. I told them not to.”
    When we got back to the car, Nathan stripped off his jacket and laid it in the backseat. Kathleen kept the heat up so high in her house that he’d been sweating. Normally the very idea of a sweaty guy would have turned me off by itself, but on him it smelled oddly good, acrid, yes, but at the same time, intensely male. I put my reaction down to spending time in my sister’s menagerie, an uprush of animal instincts in answer to the pheromones. I rolled down the car windows to let them escape.
    “Your sister,” Nathan said abruptly. “She’s not quite right in the head, is she?”
    “Say what?” I snapped.
    “Not quite all there.” He frowned at me. “I’m trying to be tactful.”
    “You’re not succeeding.”
    “Very well, then. She’s stupid, isn’t she?”
    I wanted to shove him out of the car and drive off, but since it was his car, and he was a cop, I decided against it.
    “I wouldn’t call her that.” I tried not to snarl. “She’s just never had to depend on her intelligence to get what she wants in life.”
    “Not with looks like that, no. Pity.”
    Rather than get into a nasty argument, I started the car. As we headed back to the city, Nathan sat silently, staring out the car window at the random suburbia of San Anselmo. Once we were back on Highway 101, I headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. Nathan watched the green hills roll by until we passed Mill Valley.
    “If I remember correctly,” he said then, “lycanthropy’s supposed to be spread through werewolf bites. In the superstitions about it, that is.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard those, too. One theory is that it’s a virus carried in saliva. Pat, though, just inherited it somehow from some ancestor. Maybe the virus installed itself in the family genes or something. I guess that can happen. I’m no geneticist.”
    “Obviously not.” He continued to stare out the window. “Have you read that police report yet?”
    “I haven’t, no, just glanced at it. I got hung up in Pat’s journals.”
    “Well, the Romero girl fought back. When he shot her, the killer must have been at point-blank range, judging from the wound analysis. She got her claws into him at some point. The technicians managed to extract some blood and a trace of skin from under her fingernails and from a