“If you’ve hurt her—”
“If I’ve hurt her, it was my right, and there is nothing you could do about it if you tried.”
Fury and terror mingled and briefly canceled each other out. “Whatdid my aunt see in you?” Selena blurted.
The laughter from the assembled spirits included both Yellow Dog and the half-remembered voice. Snake-Eater rounded on them, flushing.Some men can’t bear to be laughed at.Someone had told Selena that once—a therapist probably. They hadn’t been wrong.
“Enough,” said Hawk. “Snake-Eater, this person has come to ask for aid against you. What have you done? Speak only the truth to me.”
“I need not lie,” he said coldly. “I courted her kinswoman and loved her, but she went away and left me behind—”
“She died!” Selena interjected.
Ocotillo looked at her as if death was a human failing, and one in poor taste at that. Selena clenched her fists. “She died,” she repeated, “and you’re responsible, aren’t you?”
Snake-Eater stared at her, unblinking. Selena tried to feel her way through the next words, aware that she was taking a terrible gamble.“You said she shouldn’t have given so much of her strength away. But she gave it toyou, didn’t she?”
“Is this true?” asked Hawk.
For a moment, Selena thought that Snake-Eater wouldn’t answer, but then he said, grudgingly, “It was freely given and freely taken. Why would she give so much away, if she did not have enough to spare?”
“Because shelovedyou, you asshole!”
A little silence fell. Selena felt hot, then cold. Had Amelia even known that Snake-Eater was taking strength from her? Surely she would have stopped if she’d known.
Or maybe, like Selena herself, she had thought that her place was to give and give until there was nothing left of her at all.
Hawk’s shrug was a ripple of feathers and unseen wind. “Her choice was her own,” the god said, and Selena knew that there would be no help from that quarter. Beings that could barely conceive of death would hardly care about such human frailties. “Go on, Snake-Eater. Say what you mean to say.”
“Then this one came and took her place. I watched her until I knew that they were kin, then gave her the traditional courtship gifts.Whichshe accepted.”
A murmur went up from the spirits. Selena’s stomach clenched. “You left dead rattlesnakes on my doorstep! I didn’tknowwhat they were!”
“But gifts were given and accepted?” Hawk asked.
“I didn’t know I was accepting them!”
Another, louder murmur. Clearly ignorance was no excuse. It was Selena’s worst nightmare made flesh: a place where she did not know the rules and had violated them and would suffer the consequences.
“Hardly seems fair,” said Yellow Dog. “If somebody leaves food lying around and you come along and eat it, who’s fault is that, really?”
“That is true,” said a tall woman with the bald red head of a turkey vulture.
“And then,” said Snake-Eater, ignoring that, “when the courtship was complete, when it was time for joining, she turned in my embrace and told me that she was already mated!”
This time the murmur was clearly disapproving. Even Yellow Dog seemed a bit taken aback. Hawk turned to stare at her, looking far less human than before, like an Egyptian god with an animal’s head. “And is this true?” she asked.
“Yes—sort of—but I didn’tknow!”
“Snake-Eater’s people mate for life,” Ocotillo said coldly.
“So do mine,” said the familiar voice. “But we generally choose mates that know what’s happening to them.”
Snake-Eater made a hostile sound in the speaker’s general direction. Selena racked her brain, trying to remember where she’d heard that voice before, but all she could think of was “Now it’s time for some Pink Floyd ...”
“DJ Raven?!”
The spirit grinned at her. They had glossy blue-black hair that ruffled like feathers, and Selena was pretty sure that she could see a ragged Nirvana T-shirt underneath their robes. “Oh, are you a fan?”
