‘No, really,’ he said, frowning over her back. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

And before she could protest, he’d pulled her cardigan and T-shirt down far enough to make her blush.

‘Dee?’

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘It’s a butterfly. It’s a symbol of, oh, I don’t know. Having the courage to fly. Well, I fly all the time. I didn’t need an insect on my back to help me. I’ll probably be the only hawk with a butterfly on its back. All the other hawks will laugh at me.’

He was smiling. ‘It’s beautiful. And so small. I really like the color’

Dee turned, trying to see. ‘Color? It’s black.’

‘It’s green.’

Which made Dee shake her head. ‘Of course.’

She tugged her clothes back up. ‘We’ve gotten off topic, Danny. You either need to take me seriously, or I go home alone.’

He flailed a bit, shoving his hand through his hair. ‘You’re asking a lot, Dee.’

‘I know.’ She was asking everything. ‘Believe me. Will you come to the house?’

‘Of course.’

She nodded. He took her hand again and they walked on. The trees were beginning to writhe as they passed, and Dee could smell cut grass and a hint of rain. The very air was in turmoil, as if Mare had been weaving her fingers through it. It gave Dee a chill.

They reached the house to find it dark and empty. Lizzie had obviously cleaned, because there wasn’t anything out of place. The only thing Dee heard was the throb of complete silence.

Something was wrong, though. Off. Dee stopped in the middle of the living room floor, but she heard nothing but her own steps echo off the hardwood. She thought to call out, but Lizzie’s door was closed. She looked hard into the shadowy corners without seeing anything. She took a sniff.

Ah, that was it. It was the power signature in the air. She caught Mare’s licorice and a whiff of Lizzie, gardenia and roses. And there, underlying it, a new scent. A tang of spices that made her think of something ancient and powerful and beautiful. She looked toward the bedrooms. Even though she couldn’t hear anything, she felt it. Power. Hell, there should have been waves of purple wafting out from beneath the door.

Was Lizzie here? Was she okay? Was it this Elric she was sensing?

‘She’s fine,’ Danny said.

Dee turned on him. ‘Could you at least wait for me to say it out loud?’

‘You did.’

‘No, Danny. I didn’t. And how do you know Lizzie’s okay? She just lost her guy this morning. This guy I’ve never met…’

‘I hear it. Like I heard the witches. This gives me a good feeling. A… hmmm, wow. Whatever she’s been up to, she’s enjoying it.’

‘Well, thanks for putting that image in my head.’ His grin was impish. ‘You wanted me to believe I can hear things.’

‘I just don’t want to hear what you’re hearing. Not about my little sister’

‘From what I saw of her, she’s not so little.’

Dee physically turned him for the stairs. ‘Come on. I brought you here to see my studio. Not eavesdrop on my sister’

Dee’s studio shared the second floor with Mare’s bedroom. Fourteen steps up and a slide of the hand along the banister from the outside world to hers. She had no control over the outside world. The downstairs rooms were kept fairly anonymous. Even her own bedroom was nondescript. Pale gray walls, black duvet, and thrift store dresser. Zen, Lizzie called it. Disinterested was the truth. What was the point of decorating a room that would see such uninspiring use? Dee saved all her whimsy for her studio.

She climbed the fourteenth step and led the way into her room. She flipped the light and held her breath.

‘Good God,’ Danny breathed, frozen to the spot.

Dee stayed where she was by the white hutch she used as a storage cabinet. This room was her sanctuary, her soul. It was what kept her sane when the responsibilities and the isolation wore her away. It was the only place on earth she didn’t feel like somebody’s mother.

The studio faced south, a stark wood-floored, slant-ceilinged, well-windowed space furnished in secondhand rockers, her grandmother’s trunk and a pair of cluttered worktables she’d painted cobalt teal, the very color, she realized, of Danny’s eyes. Multicolored bottles filled the sills to catch the sun, and every flat surface held a vase or bowl or pot stuffed with flowers from the garden. The air was thick with their scent. Her easel stood by the north wall, and jewel-toned saris draped the windows in purples and reds and oranges. Travel posters took up the stark white walls. Vienna, Rome, Bali. Peru. And, of course, Montmartre.

‘You’ve really never been to those places?’ Danny asked, bemused.

Dee looked at the Byzantine dome of Sacre Coeur. She knew how many steps it took to get to that door, too. ‘Some day.’

He turned to look down at her. ‘I’ll take you.’

God, she wanted to just say yes. ‘Thanks for the offer. But there’s stuff you need to know first.’

‘About your painting, obviously.’ He walked over to where canvases sat stacked against the bare white walls. He bent, hands clasped behind his back as he studied each one carefully. Dee rubbed her hands along her jeans and prayed for strength.

‘Do you know what that is?’ she asked Danny as he stood considering a painting that looked like a patchwork quilt of greens and golds. ‘Salem Valley. See the river snaking through? And the cliffs at the edge? See the design?’

It was what she painted. The designs of her life. All experience reduced to geometries and color, as primary as it got.

‘I shifted into a hawk to get that perspective. I also ate two mice and chased a pigeon for three miles. And that one, the violet and green? It’s the flowers on Salem’s Mountain.’

He tilted his head, trying to pull a flower from the simple lines.

‘I was a hummingbird to see that. Exhausting. Those little bastards never stop fighting. And a cat to see the white one. It’s a garage door.’ Titanium white on Payne’s gray on burnt sienna with just a stroke or two of alizarin crimson, the composition of genteel decay. ‘I trotted all over town for two weeks before I found that one. A subject has to strike me, and it usually doesn’t until I’m shifted. The one by your arm is the sun reflecting off the rim of Linda Rose’s trash can. I was a rat that day. Rats see a lot. And they have a passion for trash cans.’

And, of course, if I even tried to have sex with you, I’d turn into your mother faster than you can say Oedipus.

He stopped in front of each painting. He fingered through the stacks as if checking CDs in a record store. He was silent. Dee waited where she was, her hands twisted together, her chest suddenly constricted with dread. Say something.

‘These are beautiful,’ he breathed, turning on her, his hands up as if trying to take it all in.

‘I use acrylics. They’re cheaper, have purer color, and they work faster. I get up before the sun comes up so I can be shifted and anonymous by the time I’m seen. I’ve only been caught once. Fortunately it was a frat jock on the way home from a kegger. Much better than the time in Ames, Iowa, when I got mad at Lizzie’s high school principal and turned into a rott-weiler in his office chair. That was the second time we moved. The third was when Mare started her period in the middle of chemistry lab. Everything in the room started flying. She almost burned down the school. Well, we didn’t move because of that, really. It was that Xan smelled Mare’s power coming on and-’

‘Dee,’ he said softly as he came up to her. ‘Shut up.’

He laid his hands on her shoulders, stilling her. He looked down at her as if discovering something amazing. His eyes, like pools at sunset, seemed to glow in the dim light. ‘You don’t show these, do you?’ Not a question at all.

‘Of course not.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re personal.’

‘They’re unique and amazing. You could be famous.’

Dee scrunched up her face. ‘Oh, yes. I enjoyed being famous so much I changed my name and moved across the country. I’m happy as I am.’

Her heart had gone on alert again. She was trembling. He stroked her shoulders as if it were the most natural thing to do, and it took her breath, because it was so alien to her. It made her shoulder flare, as if his fingers had lit that butterfly into sunlight. It made her ache. This was so important. Didn’t he know how important this was?

‘You’re not happy,’ he said. ‘You’re in prison here. You’re dying and you don’t even know it. God,’ he said, shaking his head in amazement. ‘I knew you were special, but I had no idea. I don’t think even you have any idea.’

‘I didn’t bring you up here for that,’ she protested, suddenly afraid of things she hadn’t even anticipated. Beautiful? They were beautiful? ‘Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you hear how I painted them?’

‘I don’t care if you rode a monkey in a wet suit to paint these. They’re magnificent.’

Dee was rubbing her forehead again. ‘I. Shape. Shift. I’m not delusional. I’m not lost in Dungeons and Dragons. When I was thirteen I shifted into a wolverine and treed Mare for two hours when she broke my bike. I do this, Danny. You have to believe it.’

For a long moment, he just looked at her. Just held her, his big hands gentle on her sore shoulder. Dee couldn’t look away. He was mesmerizing, a phantom in the shadows who dangled terrible possibilities before her.

‘Dee,’ he said. ‘You don’t belong here. You belong out in the world, where your work can have a chance to be seen.’

‘Much tougher to turn into a ferret if you’re famous, Danny’

‘You can be anything you want. Don’t you get that? This can get you out of the bank and off wherever you want. The rest doesn’t matter’