EDTI woke refreshed, with no assist from the alarm, from a sleep so sound it seemed as if a cat had guarded my dreams.That was an odd fancy, I thought, lying there and not exactly in a hurry to rise. It’d been years since I’d lived with a cat—Gran’s big old Maine coon, that would have been—Bowditch, by name.I’d been wounded when I arrived, suddenly and without warning, long years ago, on Gran’s doorstep. Not just your garden variety gunshot wound, either; I’d been elfshot, and I should’ve died, because that’s what people who’ve been elfshot do.Gran said that I hadn’t died because Zephyr had gotten me across the World Wall almost immediately after I’d been hit. The poison had changed, said Gran, before it had a chance to kill me.As guesses went, it was as good as any.Though it hadn’t killed me, being elfshot didn’t made me any stronger, either. I was sick for months, needed a lot of feeding up, and sun, and sleep. Bowditch, being a past master in the art of napping, had guarded my sleep by day.
