Alexander was trusting that I would help him with his children, at the very least. And both of them were small. I felt heartless, reducing the children to mere subjects of analysis. I couldn’t help it, I suppose, because I was still worried about everything that remained unsaid: about the mother’s whereabouts, the reason for the shots the father had taken, and worse still—who had shot him, and where that person was. Why did he need to mask his scent by hanging rue all over my house? Did it have anything to do with whoever had wounded him like that? Alexander hadn’t given many clues, but I sensed that it did. That enemy—was it like him, a superior creature? I was afraid again, but no longer of Alexander and his nature—rather of what I didn’t know.
The first thing I wanted to do was go down
