"Oh." After a pause I said, "Can I ask, where are you from?"
    "Right here," Carrie chirped.
    "I see."
    "Been in the libraries forever."
    I don't doubt it. "Thank you, you've been very helpful. All of you."
    "You're welcome. I hear you have a very nice husband," Molly added.
    "He's... yes."
    "That's good. He'll die before you," she went on conversationally. "But that's all for the best, usually."
    "Mother," Carrie sighed. "Don't mind her, she thinks that just because it's happened to her.... Anyway, is there anything else we can do for you today?"
    "Not just at the moment, that I can think of."
    "We're open 'til six," she reminded me cheerfully.
    "Thank you."
    "Don't forget to bring those books back tomorrow."
    "I won't."
    "You know," Kane remarked as we walked out, "the non-supernatural to supernatural ratio is running a little lean here."
    Adam stayed behind, curious to see what if anything would happen once we had gone, since it seemed the women couldn't see him.
    "See what I mean? She seems very nice," Carrie said.
    "I don't know, she didn't strike me as a mother yet."
    "Judging from the way she was screaming the other night," Martha sniffed in passing.
    "Most people don't scream 'the wolves,'" Molly said doubtfully. "At least, I don't remember you doing it," she said to her daughter, "and I certainly didn't do it. And we all know that your daughter hasn't...."
    "No, she hasn't. Have you noticed that Edgar making eyes at her, though?"
    "Not a very good catch, Edgar."
    "What with him being crazy, and the son of an ancient lineage of werewolf blood?"
    "Yes." She nodded firmly.
    "Do you think... you think they're going to actually run it through a bandsaw?"
    "I think they probably have."
    "Hm. Well, Edgar's fortunes will improve...."
    "I don't know how well he gets along with his father."
    "Generational strife is a bad thing," was the solemn judgment.
    Adam caught up to us and relayed what he had overheard.
    "The bit about the werewolves doesn't surprise me in the least," I said. "What an... odd bunch of women." They don't seem to be bothering anything, just staying there in the library, being archetypal. From there we went to the mill, and Kane went looking for the second-shift foreman.
    "Mr. Roberts, Mr. Prime," he nodded. "Mrs. Roberts. Heard you were in town. Anything I can do to help you out?"
    "Just curious about how much you're moving through here, I heard they had you put on a third shift?"
    "Oh, yeah. Things are good 'round here in the timber business, but not so could we couldn't use some additional investment," he added. "There's certainly room for expansion, we do have the third shift, have men here for the two primary shifts, working at a decent capacity. Not like it was in the glory days, but we're moving timber through." He started showing us around, rattling off statistics at which we all nodded and made appreciative noises.
    I stuck close to Adam in case I fainted again and probed out to the people working there, making sure that none of them were werewolves. They all seemed like normal people happy that they weren't working third shift.
    Adam could read the foreman's body language; he was nervous, but it was a Don't Let Me Screw Up This Potential Windfall kind of nerves. Especially since the man had jumped visibly at his first sight of the gorilla. And something had changed when the third shift was mentioned; for some reason, he was uncomfortable talking about it, and quickly changed the subject. He did not mention any statistics for it.
    Kane brought it up, of course.
    "Well," the foreman pawed at the back of his neck. "I don't have statistics I can give you, we've only been doing it for twenty-two days, we normally operate on a month-by-month basis for tracking flow-through, and so far we've only gone twenty-two days. What I can tell you, it's a one quarter shift of people, and honestly it's more of a community move than anything else," he admitted. "In the hopes of improving the local economy, one of the people nearby, one who's invested heavily in the community ownership of the mill, has decided to put some additional money forward on this, get some people out here, so we have the third shift running. But the statistics for that right now are so sketchy that I really don't want to go into too much detail about it." He was very uncomfortable, that was clear to all of us.
    Oh dear god, don't let old man Jenkins' stupid project throw all of this off, he was thinking. I already feel like an idiot trying to explain this to these people, they're gonna be wondering why, they're gonna think there's no room for competition, they're gonna think we're overlogging the area, oh my god, bad enough that we've got to transport all this damn wood down here and cut it up, we're gonna have to transport all of it back up, I am gonna be so happy to see all of this gone tonight.
    "Anyway, I'd like to introduce you to some of the men we've got working up here...." He started taking Kane and Adam around. The latter noticed that one of the storage bays was not being used at all, the door closed, that people's paths curved around it, their bodies tensed when they neared it.
    I laid a hand on a support beam and very, very carefully reached out to get a sense of the building itself. It had once been happy, the heart of a thriving community, and was now an unhappy place. My only previous experience like it was an encounter with a child who knew that his parents were abusing his little sister: knowledge of something bad happening combined with powerlessness, something I've never received from an inanimate object. The ethereal magic bleeding off the trees must have settled into the surrounding structure; that storage bay was definitely where the argent wood was kept. I patted the beam gently.
    

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