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“Isn’t that what you want?” Octavia looked innocent in a real sly way.

“Well, yeah, but I don’t want her to die. I mean, I don’t want anything she can’t get over to happen to her. I just want her away and not coming back.”

Amelia said, “ ‘Away and not coming back’ sounds pretty final to me.”

It sounded that way to me, too. “I’ll rephrase. I want her to be off somewhere living her life but far away from me,” I said. “Is that clear enough?” I wasn’t trying to sound sharp; I just wanted to express myself.

“Yes, young lady, I think we can understand that,” said Octavia with frost in her voice.

“I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding here,” I said. “There’s a lot at stake. I think Calvin kind of likes Tanya. On the other hand, I bet he could scare her pretty effectively.”

“Enough to get her to leave forever?”

“You’d have to demonstrate that you were telling the truth,” Amelia said. “About her sabotaging you.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Okay, here’s what we think,” Amelia said, and just like that, Phase One was in place. It turned out to be something I could have thought of myself, but the witches’ help made the planning run much more smoothly.

I called Calvin at home, and asked him to stop by when he had a minute to spare around lunchtime. He sounded surprised to hear from me, but he agreed to come.

He got a further surprise when he came into the kitchen and found Amelia and Octavia there. Calvin, the leader of the werepanthers who lived in the little community of Hotshot, had met Amelia several times before, but Octavia was new to him. He respected her immediately because he was able to sense her power. That was a big help.

Calvin was probably in his midforties, strong and solid, sure of himself. His hair was graying, but he was straight as an arrow in posture, and he possessed a huge calm that couldn’t fail to impress. He’d been interested in me for a while, and I’d only been sorry I couldn’t feel the same way. He was a good man.

“What’s up, Sookie?” he said after he’d turned down the offer of cookies or tea or Coke.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t like to be a tale-teller, Calvin, but we have a problem,” I said.

“Tanya,” he said immediately.

“Yeah,” I said, not bothering to hide my relief.

“She’s a sly one,” he said, and I was sorry to hear an element of admiration in his voice.

“She’s a spy,” Amelia said. Amelia could cut right to the chase.

“Who for?” Calvin tilted his head to one side, unsurprised and curious.

I told him an edited version of the story, a story I was extremely sick of repeating. Calvin needed to know that the Pelts had a big beef with me, that Sandra would hound me to my grave, that Tanya had been planted as a gadfly.

Calvin stretched out his legs while he listened, his arms crossed over his chest. He was wearing brand-new jeans and a plaid shirt. He smelled like fresh-cut trees.

“You want to put a spell on her?” he asked Amelia when I’d finished.

“We do,” she said. “But we need you to get her here.”

“What would the effect be? Would it hurt her?”

“She’d lose interest in doing harm to Sookie and all her family. She wouldn’t want to obey Sandra Pelt anymore. It wouldn’t hurt her physically at all.”

“Would this change her mentally?”

“No,” Octavia said. “But it’s not as sure a spell as the one that would make her not want to be here anymore. If we cast that one, she’d leave here, and she wouldn’t want to come back.”

Calvin mulled this over. “I kind of like that ole girl,” he said. “She’s a live one. I’ve been pretty concerned over the trouble she’s causing Crystal and Jason, though, and I’ve been wondering what steps to take about Crystal’s crazy spending. I guess this kind of brings the issue front and center.”

“You like her?” I said. I wanted all cards on the table.

“I said that.”

“No, I mean, you like her.”

“Well, her and me, we’ve had some good times now and then.”

“You don’t want her to go away,” I said. “You want to try the other thing.”

“That’s about the size of it.