"I can't stand it anymore," Diana hissed. "What's going on?"
Just then, Nissa said in a quenched voice, "All right, we will. Yes. "Bye." She carefully replaced the handset.
Then she turned very slowly to face the others.
Or not to face them exactly. She was looking down at the floor in an unfocused way that scared Keller to death.
"Well, what is it?" Keller growled.
Nissa opened her mouth and raised her eyes to look at Winnie. Then she looked down again. "I'm sorry," she said. "Winnie, I don't know how to say this." She swallowed and then straightened, speaking formally. "The Crone of all the Witches is dead."
Winnie's eyes went huge, and her hands flew to her throat. "Grandma Harman!"
"Yes."
"But how?"
Nissa spoke carefully. "It happened yesterday in Las Vegas. She was outside her shop, right there on a city street, in broad daylight. She was attacked... by three shapeshifters."
Keller stood and listened to her pounding heart.
Winnie breathed, "No. That's not possible."
"A couple of wolves and a tiger. A real tiger, Keller, not any smaller cat. There were human witnesses who saw it. It's being reported as some bizarre escape from a private zoo."
Keller stood rigid. Control, control, she thought. We don't have time for grieving; we've got to figure out what this means.
But she couldn't help thinking about Grandma Harman's good old face. Not a beautiful face, not a young face, but a good one, with intelligence and humor in the keen gray eyes. A face with a thousand wrinkles-and a story to go with each one.
How would Circle Daybreak ever get along without her? The oldest witch in the world, the oldest Hearth-Woman.
Winnie put both hands to her face and began to cry.
The others stood silently. Keller didn't know what to do. She was so bad at these emotional things, but nobody else was stepping forward. Nissa was even less good at dealing with emotion, and right now her cool face was sympathetic and sad but distant. Iliana looked on the verge of tears herself, but uncertain. Galen was staring emptily across the room with something like despair.
Keller awkwardly put an arm around Winnie. "Come on, sit down. Do you want some tea? She wouldn't like you to cry."
All pretty stupid things to say. But Winnie buried her strawberry-blond head against Keller's chest, sobbing.
"Why? Why did they kill her? It isn't right." Nissa shifted uneasily. "Paulie said something about that, too.
He said we should turn on CNN." Keller set her teeth. "Where's the remote?" she said, trying not to sound rough. Iliana picked it up and punched in a channel. An anchorwoman was speaking, but for a second Keller couldn't take in what she was saying. All she could see were the words on the screen:
"CNN SPECIAL REPORT: ANIMAL PANIC."
And the footage, rough video from somebody's camcorder. It showed an unbelievable scene. An ordinary city street, with skyscrapers in the background-and in the foreground ordinary-looking people all mixed up with... shapes.
Tawny shapes. About the same size she was in panther form, and sinuous. They were on top of people.
Four of them... no, five. Mountain lions. They were killing the humans. A woman was screaming, flailing at an animal that had her arm in its mouth to the elbow. A man was trying to pull another lion off a little boy.
Then something with a white-tipped muzzle ran directly at the camera. It jumped. There was a gasping scream and for an instant a glimpse of a wide-open mouth filled with two-inch teeth. Then the video turned to static.
"-that was the scene at the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles today. We now go to Ron Hennessy, live outside the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce..."
Keller stood frozen, her fists clenched in helpless fury.
"It's happening everywhere," Nissa said quietly from behind her. "That's what Paulie said. Every major city in the U.S. is being attacked. A white rhino killed two people in Miami. In Chicago, a pack of timber wolves killed an armed police officer."
"Shapeshifters," Keller whispered.
"Yes. Killing humans openly. They may even be transforming openly. Paulie said that some people claimed to see those Chicago wolves change. She took a deep breath and spoke slowly. "Keller, the time of chaos at the end of the millennium... it's happening now. They can't cover this up with a "private zoo" story. This is it-the beginning of the time when humans find out about the Night World."
Diana looked bewildered. "But why would shapeshifters start attacking humans? And why would they kill Grandma Harman?"
Keller shook her head. She was rapidly approaching numbness. She glanced at Galen and saw that he felt exactly the same.
Then there was a choked sound beside her.
"That's the question-why," Winnie said in a thick voice. Usually, with her elfin features and mop of curls, she looked younger than her age. But right now, the skin on her face was drawn tight, and her birdlike bones made her look almost like an old woman.
She turned on Keller and Galen, and her eyes were burning.
"Not just why they're doing it, why they're being allowed to do it. Where's the First House while all this is going on? Why aren't they monitoring their own people? Is it because they agree with what's happening?"
The last words were snapped out with a vicious-ness that Keller had never heard in Winfrith before. Galen opened his mouth, then he shook his head. "Winnie, I don't think-"
"You don't think! You don't know? What are your parents doing? Are you saying you don't know that?"
"Winnie-"
"They killed our oldest leader. Our wise woman. You know, some people would take that as a declaration of war."