“Slay him with my wit,” Beezle said. “Besides, I think he’s broken. He hasn’t moved at all.”

I cautiously approached the shifter. The shifter’s eyes registered my presence, but that was all.

This was the thing that had broken through the defenses of my house. It had taken my guise and committed more than one murder. And yet I felt sorry for it. The shifter had no will of its own. Its will came from his master, and now his master was gone.

“Did Alerian make you?” I asked.

“Yes,” it said. “And forgot me, for many years. Then Michael found me, and gave me purpose again.”

The shifter was too powerful a weapon to anyone who found and controlled it. I couldn’t let it leave, and I didn’t have the stomach to master it myself.

“Give me your hand,” I said to it.

It put its palm in mine, willingly, trustingly. I sent a little questing thread of magic from me into its body, looking for the place where his magic was born. I found it where his heart should have been, and instead there was a changing cloud, a little ball of power that could become whatever its master wished it to be.

I sent my magic inside that cloud, untangling the knots that held the shifter together. The air filled with little droplets of silver water, like the shifting surface of Alerian’s eyes. The water floated up and dissolved as little by little the shifter disappeared.

After a few moments, it was all over.

“Well,” Beezle said. “Yet another unexpected ending. You’ve hardly set anything on fire for days. Are you feeling all right? Do you want to burn the shed down just to get it out of your system?”

I laughed and walked toward the house. Nathaniel and Samiel had returned inside with Adam. “I think we should buy a new place. Too many bad things have happened here. And maybe we’ll be able to keep the address away from Jack Dabrowski this time.”

“I doubt it,” Beezle said. “But we can have a new house if you want to.”

“I want to,” I said as we climbed the stairs back up to my apartment. Nathaniel passed Adam back to me, and I smiled down at him.

“You know what I want?” Beezle asked.

“What?”

“Chinese takeout.”

“Pork dumplings?” I said, picking up the phone.

“Pork dumplings!” he said, raising his fist in the air.

I looked down into the face of my child, my beautiful Adam, and was grateful. Grateful for him, and grateful for the man who had fathered him as well as the one who would be his father. I was grateful. We were safe. We were home.

I picked up the phone, and placed the order.