“Anyway,” Crush went on, “I’ve been to his butcher shop a few times since he caters to polars and, I think, lions, and he’s still known in his neighborhood for being kind of short on temper. So if I were you ... I’d let him make his dry meat.”

They all silently agreed to let the butcher keep making his dry meat while they went back to their conversation.

Eventually, they went to get something to eat. Crush gawked at the array of things to choose from, smiling up at Wishbone when the former cop turned around.

“Crushek.”

“Hey, Wish. How’s it all going? How are the kids?”

“Pretty good. And you. Heard you moved to the Brooklyn House.”

“I did.”

The polar glanced around, stepped closer. “Watch your back, Crushek.”

“From other cops?”

“No.”

Crush’s eyes crossed. “Right.”

“Bears who work for her”—and he knew who Wishbone meant when he said “her”—“going around asking questions about you.”

“Anything specific?”

“Just digging. Probably trying to discredit you. Don’t know how far she’ll go, though. I don’t know what you did to piss her off, but ...” He picked up a tray of whale fat slabs. “Just be careful, man.”

“Thanks, Wish.”

Suddenly not hungry, Crush stood there staring at the table. When the answers to his problems didn’t miraculously appear amid the deer steak and zebra burgers, Crush started to walk away.

“Have you tried the bison dogs?” Van Holtz asked. How long he’d been standing there, Crush didn’t know.

“I haven’t.”

“They’re good. Different. Add a little Dijon mustard and relish.”

Deciding to follow the wolf’s suggestion, Crush filled up his plate and found an empty table. He dropped into a seat and Van Holtz sat down next to him. In silence, they ate until the table began to fill up with Cella’s aunts. They mostly ignored the two males, eating their own food, and talking shit about some of the other party attendees.

When Crush was nearly done, Cella’s Aunt Karen leaned over and asked Kathleen, “No one thinks it’s strange that them two are friends?”

The entire table looked over at Cella and Dee-Ann Smith, both of them laughing.

“It is surprising,” Kathleen admitted. “Considering the past.”

Crush wiped his mouth with a napkin. “You mean when Cella was in the Marines?”

Kathleen and her sisters laughed. “God, no. I’m talking long before that. When we hexed them.”

Crush looked at Van Holtz. They both frowned at each other before Crush asked, “You hexed the Smiths?”

“Not me personally. Our ancestors. But the Smiths deserved it. They were eating us.”

The bison was sticking in his throat, but Crush was a cop. There were just some thingshe simply couldn’t walk away from.

“Wolves were eating tigers?”

“They weren’t wolves then. They were cannibals.”

Van Holtz leaned around Crush to see Kathleen. “Excuse me?”

“You didn’t know that? You’re living with one of them.”

“She’s not a cannibal.”

“And I don’t raise horses. But my ancestors used to.”

“I’m still unclear—”

Kathleen cut Crush off. “Some time in the sixteen or seventeen hundreds, I forget which, the Malones were once again forced out of Ireland.”

“Once again?”

She fluttered her hands. “Anyway, they were traveling through England and there was this area they were warned not to go through, but they went anyway because, ya know ... tigers. Figured they could handle anything, but what they didn’t know was that the Smiths were lying in wait.”

“Lying in wait to ... eat you?”

“And rob. That’s what they did. Most of the Malones got away, but the Smiths actually caught a few.”

“And ate them?”

“Among other things. The matriarch of the Malones at the time, she got really pissed and she said if they were going to be as low as dogs, they should be dogs. Then they hexed them.”

Crush finished off his hot dog and, after chewing thoughtfully, finally said, “I’m not sure turning violent, vicious, cannibal killers into actual predators was the best idea your ancestors had.”

“In their defense, though, at the time there was a lot of wolf hunting in England, so they probably thought the Smiths would be destroyed, but who knew the inbreeding cannibals had their own witches? A spell here, a spell there, and they were able to shift back and forth just like us. From what I understand, my relatives were sorely disappointed by all this.”

“You mean because now the Smiths didn’t have to track down any weapons ... because they had become weapons?”

“Yeah,” Kathleen sighed. “They clearly hadn’t thought long term.” She patted Crush’s leg. “But we all have stories like that, right? Mr. Van Holtz here is descended from German barbarians.”

“It’s true,” Van Holtz admitted. “We’re the real reason Julius Caesar charged back across the Rhine and burned the bridge his troops had built before we could cross it.”

“What about you, dear?” Kathleen asked Crush.

“Well, my parents died when I was really young, but when I was older I managed to get a little information about my great-great-great-grandfather, who liked polar bears and used to sit around thinking about how much he’d like to be a polar bear. Then one day he woke up and he was a polar bear.” Crush thought about that a minute and added, “In retrospect, not nearly as interesting as barbarians fighting Julius Caesar.”