It didn’t take Helena long to find Bette. She simply followed the sound of swearing.

“*****!” Her voice breached the momentary silence. “*****, *****, *****!”

Helena swept her flashlight across the road, down each side in turn.
Bette has sitting in a drainage swale, pants leg torn, a nasty gash
across her kneecap. She’d gotten careless. Her foot hit a patch of
gravel on the berm and threw her off balance and into the ditch. A
follow-up slip on the wet grass and she’d gone down hard, wrenching her
knee.

“What the ***** are you doing here?” Bette demanded.

“Tina sent me back for you,” Helena lied.

The very bad mixture of wine, gin and vermouth was producing a dull
pounding in her head. Added to her circumstances–sitting in mud with
an injured knee and her worst enemy looking down on her–it was just
too much for Bette to handle. She just wanted it to all go away,
especially the Helena part of it.

“I don’t need you,” she slapped the soggy ground and made a disgusted
face when her fingers slipped into the muck. “I don’t need anybody.”
She rubbed her forehead.

“Right now, Bette Porter, you need all the help you can geteven if it
comes from undesirable quarters.” Helena kept her voice calm, her face
neutral. There were ways to stir Bette to action that didn’t entail
making a bad situation worse. She owed Tina that much.

The calm reasonableness in Helena’s voice infuriated Bette, who pursed her lips and made a rude noise.

“I’m coming down,” Helena announced, using the same soothing but
authoritative voice she used with the children when they were being
uncooperative.

“You can just ***** stay right where you are. I can get up.” Bette
planted the palms of her hands on the wet ground and tried to push
herself up and onto her feet. She almost succeeded, but the injured
knee buckled and she fell heavily to the ground again. “*****!” she
yelled in pure frustration.

Helena made her way cautiously down the slope, until she’d reached the
angry Bette Porter. She crouched down on her haunches, balanced the
flashlight on her knees, and reached out to touch Bette’s knee. Bette
slapped her hand away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ***** touch me,
you.”

“Vampire? Dragon?” Helena allowed the absurdity of it all light up her
eyes in a spark of humor that merely served to stoke Bette’s anger.