Adam put his hands over mine, where they still rested on either side of his face. He closed his eyes, breaking the searing, jumbled knowing that flowed between us.
It was through the pack bonds that I felt him gently stem the flow of power, feeling his gratitude and reassurance slide back down those channels. And I knew, because the pack knew, that everyone would be heading toward us as soon as they could.
My phone rang and I flinched. Adam’s rang, too, as his body spasmed with his change. Normally I would have let him go—changing was painful, and his change from the beast to human was much worse than the change from wolf to man. But I needed to touch him, and he made no effort to back away. Maybe he needed me to touch him, too. In due course, the sounds of his bones reshaping themselves died away.
The flesh between my hands smoothed and softened until it was Adam’s human face I held. I bowed my head until my forehead rested against his collarbone. After a moment I felt the first sobs rise up.
Eventually I ran out of steam and just lay there. At some point he’d sat up and pulled me into his lap.
“Stupid,” I said into his shoulder. I pulled back so that I could swipe at my snot-and-tear-wet face with the corner of my T-shirt. I got half of it done, but the other half of my face was too sore to touch.
“What’s stupid?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse.
“I should have known that you were too pigheaded for a mere ancient artifact to swallow down.”
He put his head on the top of mine and said, “Swear to God, Mercy. Best two out of three. Best two out of three.”
After a while, we helped each other to our feet and staggered back to the SUV.
His clothes were trashed, but that was a common hazard of being a werewolf, so we always kept spares in his SUV. While he dressed, I called Zee.
“Hello, Mercy,” he said.
“Hey.” My throat closed. I looked over at the Soul Taker and thought about how much power it represented.
“Liebchen?”
I thought of the night that Zee had come out to fight zombies with me. I thought of the collection of blades and other weapons he had once made that now resided in a secret room inside his home, where they would do no more killing. If Zee wanted to go out and slaughter people, he didn’t need the Soul Taker to do it.
“I have a bargain for you,” I said.
Mary Jo brought her first-aid kit and supplied me with painkillers and an ice pack. She didn’t comment about tear tracks or snot while she gently cleaned the sore side of my face. When I insisted on sitting on the ground next to the Soul Taker to make sure that no one touched it, she and Honey stayed to guard me.
Adam had taken a lot more damage than I had, but he was already mostly healed by the time the first of the wolves had found us. Once assured that I wasn’t going to die anytime soon, he took the rest of the wolves to see what Bonarata had done to our vampires.
Zee came about fifteen minutes later, walking through the pack vehicles to get to us. I expected him to go straight to the Soul Taker, but he stopped and squatted across from me first.
He scowled at me. “I have decided,” he said, “that the bargain you offered me still left me in your debt.”
I might have said something smart-mouthed, but it hurt to talk. I only managed an “Oh?”
He nodded almost angrily. “To regain the balance between us, I give you this.”
He touched his index finger to my forehead and coolness washed over me, taking with it the pain of the last week. I shivered with sudden exhaustion and only just remembered not to look him in the eye.
I opened my mouth and he put his finger on my lips. “Do not,” he said sourly, “even think about thanking me.”
I nodded. Then he stood up, dusted off his hands, and grabbed the Soul Taker. As soon as he touched it, I felt the blood bond I shared with it become muted.
He walked off without another word. As soon as she judged him to be out of earshot, Mary Jo said, “I didn’t know he could heal people.”
“Me, neither,” I said.
I went to work the next day because I was a small-business owner and Friday was a business day.
I took my Vanagon, begrudging every mile I put on her. Part of me knew that was stupid—cars needed to be driven. But I wanted to choose when I drove her. It had taken me a long time to find the Jetta I’d totaled in August. Old VWs were scarce. I’d have to get serious about running down a replacement. Maybe I’d see if Adam wanted to take a weekend and head to Seattle.
About nine in the morning, I was underneath the greasiest engine compartment I’d seen for a couple of weeks, trying to find an electrical wire hidden in a half inch of mud-grease. I knew—from my own investigations on the upper part of the engine compartment—that terrible mechanics (or ham-handed amateurs) had worked on the wiring in this lovely cabriolet a number of times in its four decades of life. That meant the wire I was looking for could be anywhere.
Aubrey crawled under the car and scared the bejeebers out of me, and I shoved most of my face into the greasy mass above me before I realized what had happened.
He laughed, then apologized for it because he’d been a sweet young man. “Hey, Mercy,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you thank you—and tell you good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” I asked.
He smiled again—and it looked like the one Wulfe had given me yesterday: sweet with a hint of wickedness. “I get to go,” he said, sounding excited.
“Yeah?” I asked, smiling back at him.
He nodded. When he hit his head on the car, there was no noise and the grease fairy didn’t cover his face. “But they said I could tell you thank you.”
“Time to go, boy,” said a familiar voice, sounding kinder than he usually did when talking to me. That’s fathers for you.
I skittered out from under the car, but quick as I was, Aubrey and his guide-to-wherever-dead-souls-go were gone.
About a half hour later I’d managed to get the grease off my face and most of my hair—and also found the wire about two inches from where it should have been. I was trying to decide how to bill a job that cost four dollars in parts and took me fifteen minutes to fix after I’d spent two and a half hours looking for a short. Two and a half hours was pretty good for chasing down an electrical fault, actually.
Once, Zee and I together had spent three days on a Vanagon, trying to find an intermittent short. We’d come out disagreeing on which wire was the problem, replaced them both—and had it come back in the next day. Tad, who was manning the shop while I went for lunch, had fixed it in ten minutes.
I’d just worked out the taxes on the invoice when I felt an odd tug inside my head. I grabbed the top of the counter, because I was sitting on a very tall stool, and held on while someone pulled a spiritual octopus out of me complete with a million arms loaded with suction cups. When it was finished, I was sitting on the floor, curled up in a ball with a bloody nose.
My phone rang.
I read the caller ID and answered it only because it was Zee.
“The Soul Taker is no more,” he said, sounding satisfied.
Bargains, I thought, are how you deal with the fae. If I gave Zee the Soul Taker, he agreed to destroy it. And heal me, too. It had been a good bargain.
“Got that,” I told him. “It had a few more holds on me than I thought it did.”
“Ja, it happens like that sometimes. Good that you did not pick it up. Eat something, you’ll feel better.” He paused. “I am hungry, too. I’ll bring lunch.”
“Paper or plastic cups if you bring drinks,” I told him. “No skull cups.”
“Underhill wanted the Soul Taker,” Zee said. “Tad told me what she said when she gave you the cup for me. She would have kept her bargain to keep your family safe. And a favor from Underhill is no small thing.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “You had first dibs.”
He laughed and hung up.
When he came in twenty minutes later, he brought street tacos from our favorite food truck. He handed me a soda in a can with a little emphasis. But what we talked about was fixing cars.
When lunch was over, he stayed to help, and we were both working on a twenty-year-old Mercedes convertible when the phone rang and the bell jingled at the front desk.
“Desk or phone?” I asked.
“Pest oder Cholera—es ist ein und dasselbe,” he grumbled.
“If I go to Germany and everyone thinks I’m a grump, it will be your fault,” I said. “And since when do we compare our customers to diseases?”
“Since I sold you the garage and they became your customers,” he said. “I will get the phone.”
I was still smiling when I walked into the office—to see Warren.
“Hey,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I have a deadline,” he said. “And it occurred to me that I have a friend I can ask for help.”
Adam had given him two days to deal with whatever was making him so crabby.
“Always happy to poke my nose into your business,” I said.
Loud and muffled German leaked through the closed door to the bays. “Hey, maybe if I can fix what’s making you grumpy, we can try it out on Zee.”
Warren gave me the faint smile that deserved. “I doubt it. Leopard don’t change its spots. Come take a drive with me.” He turned and walked out the door, tension obvious in the set of his shoulders and the snap in his voice.
Eyebrows climbing at the order—I’d have thought yesterday would have cured him of talking to me like that—I stuck my head back into the bays and called out, “Test driving. Back whenever it happens.” I started for the door, then considered the new Subaru and stripped out of my greasy overalls.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for Warren to gesture me into the driver’s seat of his new car. I sat down on the leather and couldn’t help but smile as I adjusted the seat to fit me.
I started the car with a push of the car-starter button. A message popped up on the space-age screen in front of me that said: Driver Not Registered. Do You Wish to Register?
Warren touched the tablet-like secondary screen that lay between the driver’s and the passenger’s seats, and the message went away. I gave him a quick glance because that touch had been overly quick and the tap had been a little harder than I’d have used on a touch screen I wanted to last a few years.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Howard Amon Park,” he said, and he gripped the car door and gritted his teeth.
“Okay,” I said.
I might work on old cars most days, but we could do new cars, too. Adam’s SUV was brand-new and had all the whistles and bells. But it seemed to me that Adam’s SUV had quite a lot fewer bells than this car—in a literal sense. I hadn’t gone a block and it had beeped at me five times. Twice it was because I went over a white line, but the other three were so quick I couldn’t figure out what it thought I’d done. There were little green and red lights that were on a heads-up screen that I was unsure of, too. By the time I pulled onto the highway, I was a little tense. I also was a lot more careful to keep the car between the lines.
“Use the cruise control,” he said.
I did. Adam’s SUV didn’t try to steer for me, but I knew what automatic steering was supposed to do. As I was glancing at the cruise control buttons, the car dinged rudely, and a red banner flashed in on my dashboard and on the tablet between Warren and me: Stay Alert!!! I guessed that the second banner that the passengers could see was a courtesy to warn them that they were about to die.
I turned off the automatic steering because it was irritating having the steering wheel fight me, but after a mile I noticed it was doing it again. I turned it off a second time.
By the time I drove into Howard Amon Park, I was pretty tired of hearing all the beeps and dings. The car told me to keep my hands on the wheel when my hands were on the wheel. It told me to watch the road when I was watching the road, and also when I wasn’t watching the road—which was even more annoying.
I parked the car and asked Warren to find the owner’s manual. I took about ten minutes to skim through it and then got to work turning off all the helpful modern things designed to drive werewolves (who were control freaks one and all) batty.
“There,” I said, backing out of the parking space. “That should help.”
I hadn’t driven a mile before it was at it again.
The engine stopped while we were at a red light. I’d never driven a car that did that. It was supposed to save gas, but the mechanic in me worried about the starter. The Subaru restarted itself without warning, and both Warren and I flinched.
“I’m pretty sure that was one of the things I turned off,” I said as the car informed me I’d crossed the lane marker and my hands weren’t on the steering wheel. The tires might have touched the white paint between my lane and the shoulder, but both of my hands were on the wheel.
“Yes,” he said. “Did you think I couldn’t read an owner’s manual?”
I cleared my throat. “It has not been my experience that owners of new cars read their manuals unless their names are Kyle.” Kyle had highlighted his favorite parts—mostly having to do with safety.
A warning light flashed on.
“You are low on washer fluid,” I told him.
A message came on the car’s tablet-sized screen that said we were low on washer fluid. A moment later a red alert light came on the dash, and when I toggled it, it told me we were low on washer fluid. Warren’s phone chimed and he didn’t even look at it.
“It goes through a lot of washer fluid,” he said. “Gets the windshield real clean.”
I bit my lip and tried not to laugh.
“I’ll have an email about the washer fluid, with an explanation on how to fill it up. And a number for the dealership if I’m too stupid to follow their step-by-step instructions and want a mechanic to fill my washer fluid.” He paused. “Kyle will get the text and email, too.”
I rubbed my face and the car dinged and told me to keep my hands on the steering wheel.
“He don’t say anythin’,” Warren said. “He just buys washer fluid and sets the bottles on my side of the garage.”
“It’s not supposed to turn all of its helpful technology back on,” I offered. “I could try to troubleshoot it, but most of these kinds of programs are proprietary. Probably easier to take it in.”
“It doesn’t do it if I’m not in the car,” he said.
I looked at him. I forgot for a moment that I was supposed to be careful not to look people in the eyes—but nothing happened when I met his gaze. I stared some more, just to be sure. That ability had evidently disappeared when the Soul Taker was destroyed.
The car told both of us to Stay Alert!!!
“Can you trade it in for something a little older?” I asked.
“Kyle gave me this car,” he said carefully.
“I know that.”
“Kyle grew up in a shitty home that taught him a lot of stupid things. Most of them he’s shed like a snake sheds its skin. But the one thing that he’s held on to is that he tells me he loves me with gifts.”
I could see that.
“He don’t want gifts in return,” Warren said. “It ain’t transactional.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But if he can’t give me somethin’, it hurts him. Took me a long time to figure that out. He’s been trying to get me a car for two years and finally talked me into letting him do it. I told him to pick out anything—but it had to be something that wouldn’t stand out, because that was the pretext he was using to buy me a car.”
“And you think he won’t understand about the dinging,” I said.
“It don’t do it if he’s in the car.”
“What?” I said.
“It don’t do it if he’s in the car.”
“I heard you the first time,” I told him. He grunted.
“I won’t hurt that man,” he said in a soft voice. “He only just survived his family. He don’t let no one in as far as I am in. I won’t hurt him by trading this car in.”
“I see,” I said. The only sounds in the car the rest of the way back to the garage were the sounds the car made at me.
Zee came out and scowled at me as we got out of the car. It wasn’t his I’m-angry scowl, just his usual you-made-me-deal-with-customers scowl. I tapped the hood of the car a couple of times and said, “Zee, this car has a problem.”
I explained what was going on, in detail. Zee pursed his lips, opened the car door, and looked inside. Then he held out his hand.
“Keys,” he said.
I saw a flash when Warren almost reacted to the sharp note in Zee’s voice, then he controlled it and tossed Zee the key fob. Zee was gone about ten minutes, and when he got out of the car, there was something softer than usual in his face.
“Kyle bought you that car,” he said.
Warren nodded.
“He picked it out and drove it home—you didn’t go with him.”
“It was a gift from Kyle,” Warren said. “I wanted it to be the gift he wanted to give me.”
Zee smiled, a real smile, one of the ones he only shared with people he likes. “He wanted you to be safe,” Zee said. “So he bought you a car that would keep you safe. And he thought about it all the way to your house—like a wish. And sometimes, if you happen to be around a lot of magic—like maybe your mate is a werewolf—a little magic happens.”
I thought about the girdle—that hadn’t felt especially magic to me until Wulfe had been nearby.
He gave Warren back the key fob. “It should behave itself now. If it starts up again, bring it to me.” He paused. “I think you got a keeper,” he said, and went back into the office.
I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the car.
Adam and I went to the special showing of The Harvester at the pumpkin patch on Saturday night. I had tried to stay home. I liked horror films, especially bad horror films—but I had no desire to revisit the Soul Taker. However, Adam had a plan, and it was a good plan. I dressed up a little more than I usually would for a movie showing held in a barn.
Waiting for the show to start, Adam put his lips against my ear to murmur, “Marsilia called with thanks. She also told me that Zee has been spreading the story about how we took down Bonarata and gave the Soul Taker to him instead of Underhill because he would destroy it and free the people, our people, that it had killed. She said that our credit with the supernatural residents of the Tri-Cities is getting a pretty good boost from that.”
“Zee is spreading that?” I asked. Zee didn’t gossip.
“Uncle Mike,” Adam said. “But he wouldn’t be doing it if Zee hadn’t asked him to.”
“Damage control,” I said. “And we’re in better with the vampires than we have ever been.”
Wulfe, Marsilia, and Stefan had taken most of the torture Bonarata had meted out on his visit. But it had been a lot of damage. The rest of their people were mostly newly made or weak, and Bonarata had scared them badly.
They’d been in pretty bad shape by the time the pack found them. Our pack had gotten them fed and transported back to the seethe before daylight. Physically, Marsilia had assured Adam, they’d be okay in a few weeks.
“Marsilia intends to move the seethe,” Adam murmured.
I blinked. “To the house in Benton City?”
“No,” Adam said. “She’s going to build a new house. She asked me for the name of our contractor.” He paused. “I don’t know what to think about it—but she’s bought Elizaveta’s property in Finley.”
I didn’t know what to think about that, either. “I wouldn’t live there.”
“She says it has power.”
“Yikes,” I said.
His shoulders shook with silent laughter. We were in a movie-theater barn. Good manners said we had to be quiet.
I don’t know if anyone else thought the movie was scary, but I spent a great deal of it with my face pressed against Adam’s shoulder. Adam seemed to spend a lot of the movie trying not to laugh and saying things like “That’s not what arterial spurting looks like” and “Heads don’t roll like that. They aren’t round, they’re rounded.” But he said them quietly, so we only got a few odd looks.
People knew who he was, of course, so we got some of those looks, too. But mostly Tri-Citians were respectful of our privacy. As long as there weren’t scary monsters mucking about (werewolves were respectable monsters), people mostly left us alone.
After the movie was done, the writer came out. He looked nervous, proud, and nervous again by turns—but was a pretty interesting speaker. I had not expected that, considering the lines in the movie. He talked for about fifteen minutes and then took questions. The fourth question was about the two bodies found earlier this week in what looked like a copycat crime.
Adam had anticipated that question.
He stood up and introduced himself for the benefit of anyone who didn’t know who he was. Then, with permission from the writer, he told the story of the Soul Taker. He didn’t tell them everything—all the people in this room thought they knew what the Soul Taker was from the movie they had just watched—and if it had been scarier than that, they didn’t need to know it. He touched on the killings of four decades ago and then credited an unknown evildoer with releasing the sickle into the wild because of the movie.
By the time he was finished, there was a hush in the room, and several local reporters Adam had called earlier today asked a few good questions.
We left eventually.
“Well,” I said, “between your storytelling and Zee’s storytelling, our wolves are once again the heroes of the Tri-Cities and Bonarata is going to be rolling in the grave he should be in.”
Adam snorted. Then he said, “I feel bad for that writer. I took away his moment of glory.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” I said. “You just made his movie into a cult classic.”
The following Friday found me baking brownies for the gamers in the basement. Because there were no extra wolves living with us, I had all the ingredients I needed.
The pack’s ongoing pirate LAN game was open to anyone in the pack who wanted to play. But a couple of weeks ago a spin-off adventure in the Dread Pirate franchise had been released, this one designed to be played Dungeons & Dragons style. Which meant that players had to go in as a team and survive till the end. It was intended for four to eight pirates, and tonight the diehards had gathered for a game-until-we-drop that was expected to run at least until dawn.
Adam, Mary Jo, Ben, Warren, and Darryl had volunteered to test the waters. I wasn’t playing because the part of the game I really liked was killing my fellow pirates, not amassing imaginary treasure.
This afternoon, Sherwood had called me to say he was joining in. I didn’t get to ask him any questions, because he said what he had to say and hung up.
Sherwood had showed up tonight, his one-eyed, half-grown kitten riding on his shoulder like a prince of India riding on an elephant. He hadn’t said anything to me, just waved and headed rapidly downstairs, where the rest of the pirate crew were already gathered.
I put the brownies in the oven and licked the spoon. They’d been at it for about three hours. Jesse had watched for a while, but Tad and Izzy had come over. They’d set up in the big meeting room to use the projector system to play YouTube math videos. Calculus 101, I was informed, was a flunk-out course, and they were all planning on acing it.
The stairs creaked, and I looked over to see Sherwood carrying dishes.
“I’ve been knocked overboard and retrieved unconscious,” he reported. “We’ll find out in ten minutes of gameplay whether or not I survive.”
Sherwood’s eyes looked happy, I thought, as he reached up to scratch Pirate—the cat—under his chin. He flexed his white mittened feet into Sherwood’s shirt and purred.
“Experiment a success?” I asked as Sherwood moved away to put the dishes in the sink.
He looked at me.
“No urges to kill Adam and become Alpha in his place?” I clarified.
He smiled. “None,” he said, then sobered. “I still don’t remember how to tone down how dominant I am when I want to. Which means that Darryl and Warren and I might have to dust up a bit to put everything in order. But not now—because my wolf understands that a dustup might hurt the pack’s ability to defend our territory, and we are at war.” He shook his head. “Wolf logic for you. But yes, Adam and I are all right. And Warren and Darryl and I can engage in mock battle without anyone getting riled.”
“Because?” I asked.
“Because the pair of you together make a better Alpha than I would,” said Sherwood.
I frowned. “That’s not how being Alpha works.”
“Not usually, I grant you,” said Sherwood. “But the way the magic of this pack works, you two are one.” He smiled, a sharp expression. “Coyote’s daughter brings something to the mix. I felt it that night—when Adam was fighting off the Soul Taker.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “We know that you were the Great Beast of Northumberland. Were any of the other guesses right in the betting pool?”
He grinned at me, a sudden happy expression, but before he could say anything, we were interrupted.
“Pegleg!” Ben’s shout rose from the basement. “Get your arse down here. You’re waking up and there’s a bleeding kraken after us!”
“All hands!” bellowed Captain Wolf Larsen (Adam).
“Coming, Captain!” Sherwood’s cat clung easily as Sherwood ran down the stairs.
I pulled the brownies out of the oven and set them to cool before I frosted them. As I got out the ingredients for the frosting, I heard the soft sound of a violin being played in my backyard.
I looked out the window over the sink. Night had fallen and it was darker outside than in my kitchen, so I couldn’t see very well, but I thought there were people sitting on the picnic tables in the backyard.
I went outside, shutting the door quietly behind me. As I stepped out, there was a flurry of movement and small shadows scattered away. My eyes couldn’t quite catch them, though I could hear the sound of wings and the rustling of dry grasses.
“Your people?” I asked Tilly, who, in her guise of a ten-year-old girl, was sitting on the ground, her face intent.
She nodded but kept her rapt gaze on Wulfe as if she’d never heard music before. I listened for a few more bars, searching for the title of the familiar piece, and finally found it—The Lark Ascending.
Wulfe sat on top of one of the picnic tables. He wore a white dress shirt unbuttoned too far and black dress pants rolled halfway up his calves. His legs were crossed at the ankles and he was barefoot, though there was a chill wind that made me wish that I’d stopped and grabbed a coat. Wrapped around and around his waist was the embroidered silk belt.
Sitting on the bench of the picnic table nearest to Wulfe’s concert platform was a figure shrouded in a black robe. A hood was pulled over his head and he wore what appeared to be a porcelain mask over his face. There was a small hole in the pursed lips of the mask, but the eyes were just painted on. I tried not to wonder about what his face looked like beneath the mask.
I sat next to Stefan and listened to Wulfe play. After a few minutes, Stefan stirred and tried to talk. But his voice was hoarse and slurry, as if there were something wrong with his tongue, so I only caught “owe.”
I shook my head. “We’re friends, Stefan. There’s no account keeping between friends.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh, then he started coughing, a dry, dusty sound that made his shoulders heave as he bent down until his forehead pressed into his knees. I reached out a hand but didn’t touch because I couldn’t see how he was hurt.
Adam had told me that Marsilia had been in a bad way, but Stefan had been worse. I understood that Marsilia had already recovered thanks to heavy feeding, but Stefan would take more time. His damage had been more than physical, Marsilia had told Adam. But she hadn’t chosen to elaborate.
Wulfe came to the end of his piece and brought his violin down to rest on his lap.
“If he doesn’t try to talk, then he doesn’t have to breathe,” he said, watching Stefan.
Stefan nodded and the coughing diminished. He sat up with an effort as Wulfe slid off the table and put his violin in its case.
“You’re done?” asked Tilly, clearly disappointed.
“Yes, lady,” he said gravely.
She pouted at him, and he raised an eyebrow. “I come and go,” he told her. “You’ll hear me again.”
She watched him a moment, her mouth twisted unhappily, but finally nodded. Then she was up on her feet and running into the darkness without another word. I heard her door squeak open—it didn’t usually squeak—and the sounds of small creatures scurrying before the door clicked shut.
She hadn’t once looked at me.
“Thank you for the concert,” I said. “And for bringing Stefan here.”
Wulfe smiled at me, and it was a real smile. He walked to me and dropped to one knee, then he took my hand and kissed it.
“Bravissima,” he said. “Excellently well done, Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman. Well done.”
I frowned at him. “Does this mean you’ll quit stalking me?”
He laughed but did not answer, just went back to get his violin.
Stefan leaned down until his mouth was next to my ear. “Be afraid,” he whispered clearly, and almost soundlessly.
I stared into his porcelain mask and knew that he wasn’t talking about Bonarata.
Violin in one hand, Wulfe came back and picked Stefan up with careless ease.
“He should still be resting,” he told me, “but he wanted to come with me tonight.”
“I’m glad he did,” I said sincerely.
The kitchen door opened. I didn’t have to look to know that Adam was watching.
Wulfe gave me an angelic smile, then vanished.
