“When she was giving birth to Cassy, she ordered the nurses around, and when they refused to do every little thing she said, she knocked over the IV pole and broke things. Then she threatened to kill me if I ever touched her again.”
“I knocked over the IV pole because I was in pain and no one would give me the good drugs. I threatened you for the same reason.”
“Uh-huh. Bossy. And I love you for it.”
Bruiser was hovering in the shadows of the opening to the back mudroom entry. He was half-hidden by the kitchen island and was watching me with such tenderness, my heart turned over and landed in a puddle of coronary mush. He raised his brows in a question and gestured at the big space. His lips moved soundlessly:You okay?
I nodded.
He blew a kiss my way. It was a sweetness I had never experienced before. My coronary mush was so syrupy it was like molasses and brown sugar and marshmallow cream. I smiled at him and eased down to the pillow placed for me. When I looked up again, Bruiser and Eli were exchanging hand signals. They were both weaponed up and wearing comms headgear and multi-ocular eyepieces, ready to protect the inn while the rest of us were occupied trying to find and reach Ed.
Molly was watching me, wearing an expression I couldn’t name. It was penetrating and affectionate and I turned my head away, uncomfortable. People loved me. It was weird.
The circle had been made by flour from the kitchen to represent Molly’s earth magics and with five small wood flutes placed at the five points of the pentagram. The flutes would call to Evan’s air magic. The two-foot-tall rosemary plant by Molly’s knee was a call to life. I studied the plant, inhaling the rich herbal scent. Molly had brought a dead rosemary plant back to life once.... I looked my question at her and she gave me a saucy grin, as if she was saying,Yeah. So what?She was in control of her death magics, which was good. “I’m ready,” I said.
Beast thought,Beast needs dead cow for magic.
No. You don’t,I thought back.
She chuffed at me, cat laughter.
“And so are we,” Moll said. “Put on the crown. Take up the Glob. And here’s a lancet set.” She tore open some sterile packets, arranged everything on a silver tray, and held it out to me. “Clean your finger with the alcohol, prick your finger, and let three drops of blood fall into the silver chalice.”
I took the tray from her and fought laughter because this circle was supposed to be sacrosanct and laughing at her here seemed rude. “This isn’t a chalice,” I said, straight-faced, holding it up. “This is a silver shot glass.”
“If I say it’s a chalice, it’s a chalice,” Molly said, her eyes narrowing.
“Bossy,” Evan said.
“Stop saying that.”
“She’s so sexy when she’s bossy,” Big Evan said to me.
“TMI,” I said. “Waaay too much TMI.” Molly glared at me and I flapped a hand at her. “Okay, fine. Whatever. Your shot glass is a chalice.”
Inside the open circle, we were in a triangle, with Big Evan at north, his largest flute in his lap, Molly to his right with her plant, and me to his left with my Glob andle breloqueat my knees. “Closing the circle,” Evan said, his voice deep and sonorous in the empty room. He blew a single note on his flute, a basso sound that echoed in the ceilings and made my flesh quiver. The breathy tone felt potent and imperative, as if something deeply significant was happening. Magic swept across my skin as the circle closed and some version of ahedge of thornsrose over us.
I shook the strange sensation off and ploppedle breloqueonto my head. Its magics shivered through me. The crown seemed to adjust to my head size, as if it knew I was about to call on it, as if this was something more than trying on a hat. Maybe it had felt the circle closing and reacted to the power. Or maybe it was once again claiming me. I’d intended to give the thing to the NOLA witches, but with Lachish Dutillet spending time in a null-room prison, I’d never gotten around to it. Never thought aboutit again. Which was interesting, but a thought for another time.
The alcohol was cold on my fingertip and I squinted my eyes and made a face as I stabbed myself with the lancet. Which hurtbadfor such a tiny wound. I dripped three drops of my blood into the silver shot—um—chalice. “Okay. What now?”
“This is your magic, Jane,” Molly said. “Do your thing.”
“My thing.”Crap.Flying by the seat of my pants was how I got into this mess. But Moll was right. My magic wasn’t witch magic. She couldn’t help me. Carefully, I sought my skinwalker magics, the silver energies of the Gray Between, shot through with motes of darker power, now bound with the pentagram of witch magics inside of...
Inside of me.
Witch magics. Timewalking magics.Le breloquemagics. Glob magics. Vampire priestess magic. My own magics. And the magic of an angel of the light. All bound together in a body with shredded DNA. I studied the red mote zipping along the star pattern of magics in my middle. And the silver and charcoal motes of my own power zooming along with it, adhering to the new pattern. And the faint, barely there shadow of black magic that had jumped into me.
Hayyel, the angel, had told me something about the pattern of my magics. What was it? I pulled the memory from the deeps of my mind, but it was half-formed, half-remembered. Something like,The new configuration of energies within you is a new strength. He said he hadhealed my soul home.And then he disappeared. Had Hayyel done this to me? Had he let my DNA get scrambled and let me get sick, so that I would... what? Die? A plan by the Almighty to get me to do something? If so, what? The disease within me had to do with timewalking. With changing time. So that meant... it had to do with fangheads and maybe the rainbow dragons, who wanted vamps to have never been. Yeah. That was a lot of help. Not.
I blew out a breath and tried again. Studying the magics.Wondering what an angel might want. Hayyel had been partly responsible for the making of the Glob. Sooo... Well-worn thought paths trampled down again.
The Sons of Darkness had been trying to bring their father back from the dead and steal power that wasn’t theirs when they dug up their father’s body and gathered the iron spikes and the wood of the crosses of Golgotha. They were trying to be as powerful as Jehovah and raise someone from the dead. They hadn’t known which implements of torture and death belonged to the murderer or the thief or the innocent, so they had used all of it. They had messed up. When they raised their father from the dead, he was a monster, whom they had been forced to kill and then chop into tiny bits to keep him dead. Hayyel knew all about the creation story of the vampires. Did he intend me to timewalk and fix something in the past? Or stop someone else from doing that and messing up the here and now? Or something else, even more obscure?
Surely an angel of the light, assuming he was one, wouldn’t have done something without the direction of the Almighty. Except... doing things on their own is how angels supposedly fell from the light and entered the dark in the first place. Over and over. I’d been over this ground so often my mind knew the patterns and I was getting nothing new, except that maybe Hayyel didn’t have a job for me. Maybe he hadn’t been part of causing the cancer. Maybe it was all just timewalking, which actually made more sense than an angel needing me to do something for God. Yeah. Okay. That was a relief.
I picked up the Glob. It contained a splinter of the Blood Cross and the Blood Diamond, powered by the magic of sacrificed witch children, and some iron discs made from the melted-down spikes of Golgotha. I turned it over in my hands.
