From Dead to Worse

all. It was his pure blood.
    “There may be enough insurance money for the girl to go, too,” Alcide said, since he was no fool. “The aunt wasn’t too clear about that, but she knows we’ll help.”
    “And she knows who ‘we’ is?”
    He shook his head. “We told her it was a secret society, like the Masons, that Furnan belonged to.”
    There didn’t seem to be anything left to say.
    “Good luck,” I said. He’d already had a fair share of that, no matter what you thought about the two dead women that had been his girlfriends. After all, he himself had survived to achieve his father’s goal.
    “Thank you, and thanks again for your part in that luck. You’re still a friend of the pack,” he said very seriously. His beautiful green eyes lingered on my face. “And you’re one of my favorite women in the world,” he added unexpectedly.
    “That’s a real nice compliment, Alcide,” I said, and drove away. I was glad I’d talked to him. Alcide had grown up a lot in the past few weeks. All in all, he was changing into a man I admired much more than I had the old one.
    I’d never forget the blood and the screaming of the horrific night in the abandoned office park in Shreveport, but I began to feel that some good had come out of it.
    When I returned home, I found that Octavia and Amelia were in the front yard, raking. This was a delightful discovery. I hated raking worse than anything in the world, but if I didn’t go over the yard once or twice during the fall, the pine needle buildup was dreadful.
    I had been thanking people all day long. I parked in the back and came out the front.
    “Do you bag these up or burn them?” Amelia called.
    “Oh, I burn ’em when there’s not a burn ban on,” I said. “It’s so nice of you both to think of doing this.” I wasn’t aiming to gush—but having your very least favorite chore done for you was really quite a treat.
    “I need the exercise,” Octavia said. “We went to the mall in Monroe yesterday, so I did get some walking in.”
    I thought Amelia treated Octavia more like a grandmother than a teacher.
    “Did Tray call?” I asked.
    “He sure did.” Amelia smiled broadly.
    “He thought you were fine-looking.”
    Octavia laughed. “Amelia, you’re a femme fatale.”
    She looked happy and said, “I think he’s an interesting guy.”
    “A bit older than you,” I said, just so she’d know.
    Amelia shrugged. “I don’t care. I’m ready to date. I think Pam and I are more buddies than honeys. And since I found that litter of kittens, I’m open for guy business.”
    “You really think Bob made a choice? Wouldn’t that have been, like, instinct?” I said.
    Just then, the cat in question wandered across the yard, curious to see why we were all standing out in the open when there was a perfectly good couch and a few beds in the house.
    Octavia gave a gusty sigh. “Oh, hell,” she muttered. She straightened and held her hands out. “Potestas mea te in formam veram tuam commutabit natura ips reaffirmet Incantationes praeviae deletae sunt,” she said.
    The cat blinked up at Octavia. Then it made a peculiar noise, a kind of cry I’d never heard come out of a cat’s throat before. Suddenly the air around him was thick and dense and cloudy and full of sparks. The cat shrieked again. Amelia was staring at the animal with her mouth wide open. Octavia looked resigned and a little sad.
    The cat writhed on the fading grass, and suddenly it had a human leg.
    “God almighty!” I said, and clapped a hand over my mouth.
    Now it had two legs, two hairy legs, and then it had a penis, and then it began to be a man all over, shrieking all the while. After a horrible two minutes, the witch Bob Jessup lay on the lawn, shaking all over but entirely human again. After another minute, he stopped shrieking and just twitched. Not an improvement, really, but easier on the eardrums.
    Then he lunged to his feet, leaped onto Amelia, and made a determined effort to choke her to death.
    I grabbed his shoulders to pull him off of her, and Octavia said, “You don’t want me to use magic on you again, right?”
    That proved a very effective threat. Bob let go of Amelia and stood panting in the cold air. “I can’t believe you did that to me!” he said. “I can’t believe I spent the last few months as a cat!”
    “How do you feel?” I asked. “Are you weak? Do you need help into the house? Would you like some clothes?”
    He looked down at himself