“I said no.”
I gritted my teeth. “I want to call BJ.”
She hesitated when she heard his name. She hated all witches too, but everyone liked BJ, probably because his magic powers were limited and he was no threat to anyone.
Her phone rang and she snapped it out of her back pocket. “Michael, please tell me you have news.” She paced the room again, her dark skin growing pale. She closed her eyes for a long moment and tilted her head to the ceiling.
I looked to Josh for answers—he could hear the conversation. He frowned and looked confused.
“Where would they get that from?” She sounded stressed. There was a delay then she asked, “So, what do we do?”
“What is it?” I snapped as she slipped the phone back in her pocket.
She turned slowly, her eyes on Karson, filled with concern. “They used bone ash mixed with a concoction of arsenic. The arsenic is painful and it makes a vampire very unwell, but we burn it off after a few hours and it’s not an ongoing problem. But bone ash is lethal.”
I didn’t know what bone ash was, and I barely registered the name. All I heard waslethal. My blood iced. The ground quivered under my feet. He was going to die.
No.I couldn’t lose him. I’d lost my mother, the only other person in my entire life who had truly loved me, and now him.Please, no.A terrible whining sound peeled from my lips.
Monique shifted her gaze to me and it softened briefly. “It won’t kill Karson, but it will disable him for a while. He’ll have to ride it out until the death inside him withers …”
I sucked in a shaky breath and sagged into the chair.
Josh shivered. “By using both, they were making sure he went down.”
Monique nodded.
My fingers stroked up and down Karson’s arm. “Can we do anything to help ease his pain?”
“Michael has some mirthroot. It may help ease it, but vampires burn off anything in their system pretty quickly.”
“What is bone ash?” Josh asked.
“Exactly what it says it is. It’s made from the bones of dead vampires. Years ago, they made arrows out of them. A strike to the heart will kill most vampires. Bone ash is rare because vampires are hard to kill to harvest the ash, and because the vampires hunted for any weapons laced with it and destroyed them. I didn’t know there were even any left in existence.”
Josh shook his head. “There are a lot of vampires now, five dead in the alley. If the humans or the witches know about them and make weapons from them, we are all royally screwed.”
“They’ve already been cleaned up.” She walked across the room and stared out of the glass door.
My phone stopped vibrating then started again. Dahlia wasn’t giving up.
“Besides, the older vampire lines were far more powerful than modern-day ones, and the most potent bone ash comes from child vampires.” My gut twisted. Children like Karson was, who were hunted and slaughtered without mercy. Monique went on. “There are no children anymore, and while the ash of modern-day vampires would still hurt, I doubt it would kill. And there’s barely anyone alive skilled enough to hit the heart of avampire if they’re moving.” Her eyes shifted to me. “It would take another vampire or a witch with certain powers.”
Witches born to fight.
“If the vampire is moving, he would be hard to hit.” Josh raised his brows. “If he’s unaware …”
Monique rubbed her forehead. “I doubt they have any more blades. Like I said, those weapons were all destroyed.”
“Not all of them, clearly.”
“So, who would know about bone ash?” I asked. “It would have to be someone who knew about the history or was connected to it in some way?”
Was that surprise I could see in her eyes that I thought to ask the question? “I suspect it was handed down through the generations.”
“Someone like Sarah,” I said gravely.
“It would take a witch and a strong one, probably a direct descendant from the old lines, to know the spell. A witch like Caron, for example.”
