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discovered the weight room and had needed an edge, just to stay alive. Once he’d put on some muscle and got himself a don’t-screw-with-me attitude he didn’t much need to be invisible anymore, but it wasn’t something you forgot.
    Jack was finishing up his story with a new ending: Cody got a few of the foxfolk to help him trick Raven out of his magic cauldron-it looked like a tin can, this time around-and started stirring up some trouble out of it again. ‘Course Raven would get it back, but that’d be another story.
    Moth took a drag from his smoke and flicked it away. The butt landed in a shower of sparks in the dirt and one of his dogs growled. Judith, the pit bull. Still jumpy after living with Moth for going on three years now. Her previous owner had turned her out on the dogfight circuit before he’d run into an unfortunate accident and Moth had inherited her. Moth never felt sorry? for the way things had worked out. Any time he got an attack of conscience, he just had to take a look at the webwork of scars that circled her throat and ran like a city street map along her flanks and stomach.
    Beside his chair, Ranger stirred. He was a big German shepherd, the alpha dog in Moth’s pack, ninety pounds of goofy good humor that could turn instantly serious on a word from Moth. Ranger checked Judith out, then turned his attention to Jack, dark gaze fixed on him like he was thinking of taking a bite out of him. Jack brought that out in all the dogs, even good-humored Ranger. None of them ever took to him. “Too much crow in me,” Jack said when Hank mentioned it one time.
    Jack and his crows. Moth shook his head. He’d never seen such a pack of badass birds before, always hanging around the yard, teasing the dogs. But he let them be because he could see they were just being playful, keeping the dogs on their toes, not being mean. Moth couldn’t abide meanness.
    He leaned down to scratch Ranger behind the ear, then lit up another cigarette. Hank gave him a look. When Moth nodded, Hank got up and fetched another round of beer from inside Moth’s trailer. Four bottles. Jack and Katy were drinking some kind of herb tea they’d brought along in a thermos. Smelled like heaven, but Moth had tried it once before. It tasted like what you might get if you brewed up a handful of garbage and weeds.
    “Didn’t that story have a different ending the last time you told it?” Benny asked.
    Jack shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s a true story. What you’ve got to remember is that Cody and Raven never had just the one go at each other. Things that happen between them happen over and over again. Sometimes the one of them’s on top, sometimes the other.”
    “But how true are they?” Hank wanted to know.
    Moth caught an odd note in Hank’s voice, like the question was more important than he was letting on.
    “True as I can tell them,” Jack said.
    Anita nodded. “Truth’s important.”
    “But it’s not the most important thing we can offer each other,” Katy said.
    Now Moth was intrigued. Katy never had much to say of an evening. She’d sit there, smiling, listening, quiet. Her voice had a husky quality, like she didn’t use it often.
    “And what would that be?” he asked.
    Katy turned to him and Moth was struck all over again by the blue of her eyes. It was like a piece of the bluest summer sky had got caught in them and decided to stay.
    “Playing fair,” she said.
    Moth could go with that. Sometimes the truth did nobody any good, but playing fair-that never hurt. Karma was the big recycler. Everything you put out came back again.
    Benny stood up from his lawn chair and added a couple of pieces of an old wooden chair to the fire they had going in the oil drum. It was a good night. The moon was hanging low, like it was playing hide-and-seek with them, just the rounded top showing up from behind the roof of the abandoned factory that loomed over the back end of the junkyard. The sky was clear-not like last night.