I yank a blanket out of the truck.
“Gram?” I make my voice as nonconfrontational as possible, creeping forward across the snow.
Her tiger self turns and faces me, teeth bared, ears back. She doesn’t recognize me, maybe? Maybe she’s so far gone she doesn’t recognize anyone? For a second I’m more scared than happy to see her. I feel like a corpse, just flesh and bone, waiting to be mauled by tiger teeth. But she’s not just a tiger. She’s my grandmother.
“It’s me, Zara,” I say, taking a tiny step forward. “I’ve brought a blanket.”
I hold it in front of me.
“You must be kind of cold?” I add. “Plus, if you want to be human, I thought you’d rather not be naked out here where people could see you—like the lobster guy.”
She sniffs the air. The dinghy’s engine starts on the water. She does not look happy. She makes a little noise as her ears move forward into a slightly less confrontational stance.
“Right. That’s right. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I say.
Her muscles are rigid and tight, ready to pounce or run away.
“I’m your granddaughter. Um … I love you?”
The silence between us is like a broken chicken bone, jagged and thin. I am scared and tired and love her so terribly much, this massive predator of a grandmother. Her sorrow is my fault, because I wanted so badly to retrieve Nick that we fell into a trap. And Mrs. Nix died because of it.
“Please, Betty,” I whisper her name. I squat down low, making myself small. The blanket twitches in my hands.
She lifts her head to stare into my eyes. I try to remember if I’m supposed to stare back or not, wondering what big cat behavior protocol is. I decide to screw that and just do what Zara behavior dictates; I stare back into her big, amazingly brown eyes. As I do, the pupils dilate, shifting into circles. This always happens when she’s about to change. I stay in my squat but shuffle-turn and give her privacy. After a moment a hand reaches over my shoulder and yanks the blanket away.
“Good of you to bring a damn blanket. Nobody’s going to want to see my ugly old ass,” she says gruffly.
I give her a second, which is as long as I can manage, and turn around.
“Gram?”
No answer.
I try again, say the words that are the most important. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know.” She doesn’t meet my eyes, but I don’t care.
I hug her anyway.
“I missed you so much.” I almost sob it out because it’s so true.
She nods really quickly. The movement of her face against mine feels familiar and good. “I know. Missed you too.”
After a couple of moments, I pull away to look at her. Her face is worn and tired and her eyes are dull, not half as spunky as normal. She smells of wood and blood and death. She turns away and watches the lobsterman’s dinghy slowly move across the water.
Out of nowhere she says, “This is bigger than us. There is a giant out there against us, a literal giant, Zara.”
Betty closes her eyes. I tuck the blanket around her a little more tightly. Her shoulders are gaunt now, not so ruggedly muscled.
“I brought your boots. Well, they were in the truck. Hold on. You have bare feet in the cold,” I tell her as if she didn’t know it. I jog to the truck, pull out the boots, and bring them back over, the whole time thinking, “Do not disappear again. Do not disappear again.”
As soon as I put the boots on the ground, she slips each of her feet inside, not bothering to lace them up. She stands up again, but her posture isn’t as straight as it’s always been. Her shoulders aren’t squared against the world.
Snow falls onto the harbor. Only a couple of lobster boats are still moored. Even the harbormaster’s boat has been hauled out and put into dry dock, which is a trailer in the parking lot by his office.
Betty’s voice flattens, cold as the blending snow. “Too many people, good people, have died.”
She shudders, and Betty is not the kind of person who shudders, and I would bet a million dollars that she’s remembering what happened here—how Mrs. Nix died in an explosion—how the grief and pain made Betty turn tiger, devour a pixie, and then disappear for days and days.
We stand there for another minute, even though she’s shivering. And I tell her everything that’s happened since she’s turned. She knows some things already because she witnessed them while she was in tiger form. She knows that I got Nick back. She knows that my mom is gone again. I tell her the rest of it too, about how Nick is being a jerk a lot of the time, about Cassidy’s visions, about the army we’re trying to build. I expect her to argue with me about that one because she’s always been pro-secrecy when it comes to regular people knowing about pixies and weres, but she just listens and takes it all in. She gives none of her wisdom, none of her sarcastic comments.
While I talk, the lobsterman ties the dinghy to his real boat, climbs aboard, and starts the engine. It sputters out. His swearing echoes across the water. Betty smiles at it.
“Some things don’t change,” she says. “When he does finally get that motor on, he’ll have to run it a couple minutes so it doesn’t keep stalling out.”
I nod even though I’m not all that concerned with the lobsterman. Instead, I tighten my arm around Betty’s waist.
“You can’t leave again,” I tell her.
She opens her mouth to say something, but an ambulance roars into the parking lot, lights on, no sirens though. Keith jumps out of the driver’s seat.
“Betty!” He smiles and hollers but his eyes are concerned. “Betty! Holy God! What happened to you?”
She shoos him away. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve been missing for days! You’re at the city harbor, buck naked except for a blanket. You are hardly fine!” He insists that she sit in the back of the ambulance and she asks him why he’s even here. He stares at her for a second while giving her another blanket and wrapping a blood-pressure cuff around her arm. “That guy on the lobster boat reported a tiger in the parking lot. Josie thought he was probably 10-44.”
I must look confused, because Betty sighs out, “10-44 is the code for crazy person.”
Dispatchers use “10” codes to talk on the radio to the cops and ambulance drivers.
“The cops are looking for a big cat,” I say. “I, um, Keith, you must know that.”