"Ye' can't even stand right," Felix groused from his seat on the lawn. The courtyard behind the hotel was a vibrant outstretch of trimmed grass and not much else, but it was isolated and quiet, and that was perfect right now. Tisper ignored him and stomped through the grass to pluck another arrow from her quill.

"What makes ye' think you can shoot drunk?" The way he said drunk rang over too many times in her head. His accent was a slippery thing to grasp tonight.

"I am not drunk," Tisper said, drunkenly. She walked her feet another inch apart and brought her archery bow to eye level. Up. Just a bit. Just a nudge.

She released. The arrow cut straight, but missed the bullseye that Felix had gouged into a tree with his pocket knife. "Shuck."

Felix slouched forward with his elbow on his knee and his cheek in his palm, somehow looking twice as bored as he'd been before. "Was that meant to be shit or fuck?"

Tisper let her shoulders sink and searched the earth around the tree for her arrow. It was dark, though. Her balance wasn't its best.

She'd managed to catch the last of the reception after the meeting with Qamar. Under the stress of it all, she'd filled her plate three times with gourmet dishes from the buffet table, and so much wine, each inhale still tasted like fermented grapes. But there was something irresistible about California wine. Izzy said it was something about the seasalt from the coast—how it ripens the vinyards. Got her drunk twice as fast, that was for sure. Or maybe she'd just had twice as much as usual.

She hadn't seen Jaylin after the news about Olivia. She'd searched the entire hotel and she couldn't find him. It was Felix who'd convinced her to stay put and let Quentin handle it, so Tisper did the only thing she could think to do; she gorged on that delicious California wine.

Maybe too much, she supposed as she clawed through scattered leaves and brush. Goddammit. It was too dark here and the world was sliding around beneath her feet. She'd never find her arrow.

From behind her, Felix taunted, "Tilting yer head like that won't make it slide back out of the shadows."

"Oh it won't?" In a poorly concocted Scottish accent, she mocked him; "It won't make it slide back it ay th' shadows?"

To her surprise, Felix was laughing.

"You are cruel when yer drunk."

"You had your turn last night. Now it's mine." She knelt to weed through the brush for her arrow, but suddenly Felix was behind her. Just there, in a blink. She'd noticed it twice now, how he moved like a shadow in a quick eddy of light—swept past her fast and silent, but still very much existing like a breeze on her back. She hadn't even heard him move from his place, yards behind her in that lush green grass.

"We'll look tomorrow, ay? When the sun's up. Try again."

He held a new arrow in front of her face and Tisper took it from him begrudgingly. She walked herself back a distance away and brought the bow to eye level. Again, when she fired, the arrow zipped right passed the marred tree, but this time, what followed it was a sharp squeak that made her heart plunge into her stomach.

"What was that?" she asked Felix.

He said nothing, but looked in the direction it had come from. Clutching her bow to her chest, Tisper followed him into the tree lining. She used her cell phone to light the ground beneath their feet—and Felix ducked beneath branches, pausing now and then to sniff at the air or listen to the silence, until finally they'd come across the fletching of her arrow, poking up from the forest floor.

When she saw the tiny feathered body it had gone through, Tisper gasped.

"No, no, no," she bemoaned, turning away from the sight. "No, I didn't mean to—"

"Ah," Felix said. "Just a finch. Thing's still alive. Not for long, I bet."

Tisper made a sound of distress, a high pitched squeak against her palm. "Oh, I didn't mean to. This is horrible."

Felix looked up to her with one risen brow. "Should I put it out'f it's misery then?"

It hurt Tisper's heart to know the poor thing was in pain. She nodded her head and backed her way out of the trees.

It was twenty minutes before she heard a single rustle coming from the shrubs. Instead of the rifled red hair and the forest-green eyes she expected, Felix came back as wolf—fur sopping wet and a subtle flicker in his dripping tail.

She blanched. "Please tell me you didn't—did you eat it? God, I thought you'd snap it's neck or something." Tisper sat there tugging at her hair, trying to sober and stomach the thought. Felix paced past her and she felt the wet of his fur brush her arm—but he didn't stink of blood as he usually did. Instead, he smelled like dirt and water. He must have washed off in a stream or a pond.

"Okay." She said once she'd managed to talk her head straight. "Okay, I guess—at least this way, its body doesn't go to waste. I guess that's a good thing."

Felix dropped down on the grass with a yawn.

"Okay," Tisper said again and shoved herself to her feet. "I'll keep practicing."

And hopefully she wouldn't kill anything else tonight.

Tisper fired her arrows, striking the bullseye only once in twelve shots. At one point she'd gone inside for a drink—noticed the refreshments were still out and topped off her old glass of wine. Minutes later, she was stumbling outside just as bleary as she'd been before—a bit more floaty in the head, even.

But she couldn't help it, Tisper was worried. She was always worried lately. Jaylin was there in the back of her head like an exam she wasn't prepared for, or a looming date with someone she just wasn't interested in. The boy was stormy weather and the thought of addressing all of the things gone wrong in him felt dreadful, but if he didn't snap out of it soon, she might have to. He wouldn't respond well to that. That was the part that really scared her. The thought that he'd hate her when she inevitably tried to help him.

Even just knowing he'd run off left her worried sick, but this kept her head together. Just her bow and her arrows and the summer sky. And the wolf, who had fallen asleep on the lawn some time ago.

He'd been no help tonight, Felix. But that was fine with her. There was something in the way they butted heads that felt normal when nothing else did. Even when he was absolutely unbearable, he was good company.

And once the heat of the sticky summer night had dried his coat, Tisper plopped down in the grass and laid her head beside him. The sky above her swirled, the air tasted like grapes. She knew he'd protest if he were human, but he wasn't human, and he couldn't snap at her with all those trilled R's and soft E's. So she reached a hand out to touch the fur on his head.

"How do you know about archery?" she asked.

The wolf cracked an eye open and grunted, but he didn't move.

Tisper continued anyways, "Why do I get the feeling your last name isn't Cummins?"

Felix lifted his head finally, his ear twitching as she ran her fingers through the soft fur between his eyes.

"It's nice when you can't respond. It's almost like you aren't judging me." Then Tisper shut her eyes and thought back to it—to the way he'd said "sure" when she asked if Cummins was really his name. "Maybe you made a new name for yourself," she mused, "like I did. It's a strange name, but it's mine. Tisperella, you'll never know another person with that name. My brother still calls me Steven. I hate him." The stars danced—some of them shimmering, little cat-eyes in the sky. Some of them swaying from the wine. They were so beautiful, though. She couldn't stand to see them still. "I miss him and I hate him."

Felix flattened himself on his side again, this time sprawled out—Tisper's arm trapped beneath his head like a pillow, her fingers brushing over the soft velvet fur of his ears. She liked wolf Felix. He almost seemed more human than the human one.

She kept talking after that. About Phillip, about her grandmother. About Julia and Jaylin. She talked for a long time about things she'd kept to herself since Julia died, because it felt selfish to bother Jaylin with them. Felix didn't seem to mind, so she babbled on for some time to the wolf at her side. And maybe he wasn't listening, but he wasn't stopping her either.

She was on the topic of Phillip's newborn baby when Alex came bursting through the exit door and into the courtyard, Sadie puttering out just behind him.

"Have you seen Quentin?" he asked, his chest heaving. 

Sadie wore a frown, searching around the tree-lining like Quentin might come slipping out from the shadows any moment. It would have been a fitting thing for him to do, that idiot knight in shining armor.

Tisper sat up. "No. Alex, what's wrong?"

"You need to come with us," Sadie said, cracking nervously at her knuckles.

"Why, what is it?"

"It's Jaylin... kind of."