Sally put away her cell, giving me a glimpse of a silver zippered kit of some kind and what I could have sworn was a hair dryer in the red bag. “Sorry, Sam. But it’s part of my job. Your daddy will be pissed.”
“You tell Death of Flood about this and I’ll rip out your eyeballs.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. We talked about the demon getting free but you said you could hold it. I told you this was a stupid plan to get close to the witch. Can you get the demon back?”
“No. My gift is... wrong, now.”
“How wrong?” Her tone went jagged again.
“When I call the demon nothing happens.”
“And if you just let it go?” she asked.
“It’ll kill all the Everhart-Truebloods and steal their magic. And then it’ll come after me.”
My shaking worsened.
“Well, shit. You really screwed up. Again,” she said.
Death of Magic stared at the snakelike blood demon hanging in the air. “I... I...”
Sally shook her head and to the house shouted, “Little problem out here.”
Little problem.The idiot went to the circles of hell, let loose a blood demon, attacked my house, and set the blood demon on my family. If the demon got free, the result would be even worse than if I had used my death magics—everyone I loved would be dead, their souls sucked into the demon, giving him power. And I still didn’t know what Death wanted. I’d have cried except that the demon whipped his head to me and writhed inthe air. Sam, if he ever had control of the demon he had summoned, was about to lose it.
“Sam...” Sally warned.
“I—I—I—” He stopped, swallowed.
My hubby whistled, the note low and vibrating, like air blowing over a jug. The demon’s motion stuttered to a stop. It began to back up, slowly, and out though the hole my magic spear had made. The instant it was on the street, the hole snapped closed. The ward was unsteady, weak, but better than nothing.
I risked a look around and spotted the children on the sofa, sound asleep. In aseeingworking, I followed Evan’s blue magics tying our babies into slumber with a rope of our own gifts. It was hasty but powerful work, their own burgeoning magics reinforcing the working. Death wanted to use them for some purpose of his own, but if we died, our magics would augment the bindings and the tiny ward around them. The demon could get to them through their blood, but Death couldn’t get to the children now. Half the threat beaten. “Good work. What should we do about flower boy, his nanny, and his demon?”
“Fear,” Evan said, his lips scarcely moving, his long red beard shaking slightly. “That’s Sally’s job, Sally’s title. For which info you may thank your sisters.”
I spotted my cell phone in his shirt pocket. “Is it on speaker?”
Evan whistled a soft note. “Two-way speaker now.”
Cia said from Evan’s pocket, “We’re both on the way, ETA seven minutes. Faster if Liz wasn’t a wuss driver.”
“Not a wuss. Just want to arrive in one piece on mountain roads,” Liz said.
Boadicea and Elizabeth Everhart—Cia and Liz—were twins, and excellent researchers of witch oral tradition. The twins were the babies of the family, fearless, gorgeous, and always trying spells they shouldn’t.
Cia was a moon witch, nearly powerless at the new or sickle moon; Liz was a stone witch, weak from nearly dying, crushed beneath a boulder in a fight with a demon. “Okay. What can you tell us?” I asked.
“The Deaths are an obscure legend tied into oral witch history,” Liz said, her voice tinny over the cell. “There was the first Death, Death of Eden, and his only son, the second Death—Death of Floods. The legendssay Death of Floods has seven children: Death of Starvation, Death of Plague, Death of Childbirth, Death of Age, Death of Misfortune, Death of War, and Death of Magic, who hasn’t used his power since the end of the Burning Times.”
The Burning Times was also called the Roman Catholic Inquisition. So many witches had been killed that our race nearly died out. I stared into the dark and the two standing before the outer ward.
“The Deaths each rule over a form of human death,” Cia said, “except the Death of Eden and the Death of Floods, both of whom retired after they harvested millions all at once. In Flood’s case, according to oral tradition, only eight people escaped.”
“Noah, his family, and his animals,” Liz said.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
Outside, the demon quivered. What might have been a tail whipped hard, hitting the outer ward. The ward emitted a deep and panickeddong, before Death of Magic got the demon in hand again. At the moment we were fine. But if that thing got loose, this could go bad, fast.
