Dappled patterns of afternoon light sifted over my gloved hands as I knelt on a green foam pad and strained to reach the back of the flower bed where grass had taken root despite the shade of the mature oak above it. From the street came the soft sounds of cars. A blue jay called and was answered. Saturday in the Hollows was the pinnacle of casual. Straightening, I stretched to crack my back, then slumped, wincing when my pain amulet lost contact with my skin and I felt a jolt of pain.  I knew I shouldn’t be working out there under the influence of a pain amulet, lest i hurt myself without realizing it, but after yesterday I needed some"dirt time" to reassure my subconscious that I was alive. And the garden  needed attention. It was a mess without Glen and his family keeping it up. The smell of brewing coffee slipped out the kitchen window and into the peace of the cool spring afternoon, and I knew Ashley was up. Standing, I gazed from the yellow clapboard add-on behind the rented church to the walled graveyard past the witch’s garden. The entire grounds took up four city lots and stretched from one street to the other behind it. Though no one had been burried her for almost thirty years, the grass was mown by yours truly. I felt a tidy graveyard made a happy graveyard. Wondering if Ashley would bring me coffee if I shouted, I nudged my knee pad into the sun near a patch of soft-stemmed black violets. Glen had seeded the plot last fall, and I wanted to thin thm before they got spindly from competition. I knelt before the small palnts, moving my way around the bed, circling the rosebush and pulling a third of them. I had been out here long enough to get warm from exertion, worry waking me before noon. Sleep hadn’t come easily either. I’d sat up past sunrise in the kitchen with my spell books in search of a charm to Were into a wolf. It was a task whose success was slim at best; there were no spells to change into sentient beings-at least no legal ones. And it would have to be an earth charm since ley line magic was mostly illusion or physical bursts of energy. I had a small, but unique library yet for all my spells and charms I had nothing that told me how to Were. Inching my pad down the flower bed, I felt a band of worry tighten in me. As Clay said, the only way to become a Were was to be born that way. The bandage-covered tooth marks on my knuckles and neck from Madison would soon be gone with no lingering effects but for waht remained in my memory. There might be a charm in the black arts section of the library, but black earth magic used nasty ingredients, like indispensable people parts, and I wan’t going to go there.