A stray thought presented itself. “How did you know I was close?” he asked. Driving one-handed, Edmund swerved around a truck, hitting seventy on the coiling roads outside Asheville. Up into the hills that surrounded the city.
“I felt you in my blood.”
Shock moved through him. Angelina Everhart-Trueblood should not be able to sense him. She was not a Mithran, not his scion, not... not anything that should permit a mental or mystical connection. Their connection was a bond of fealty, not a bond in the Mithran vampire way, yet he had felt a command through that bond, acalling. What had the little girl done with his sworn word?
He swerved around two slower cars and took a turn too fast. Angelina was a double-X-gened witch, having received the witch trait from both her father and her mother. Double-X-genes were rare; he knew of only a half dozen in the Americas. Over the connection, he heard panting. Angie was powerful. And terrified.
“I’m only a few minutes away, Angelina. Tell me about”—his mind went blank for a moment—“about the dog. Where is he? Will... will he bite me?” he asked, to give her something to focus on.
“No. George is under thehedgewith us.”
“Tell me about him.”
“George is my basset hound and Mr. Shaddock gave him to me. I’m teaching him to fetch, but his legs are short and he keeps tripping over his ears. George. Not Mr. Shaddock.” Edmund smiled and she kept talking as he negotiated the hills and the snaky roads. He pulled up to the house, braking hard to miss thehedgethat glowed red over the house and grounds, clearly visible to Mithran eyes. A warning to his kind to stay away. Oddly, it was bright enough that even humans could see it tonight, bright enough to cast a reddish shadow. Faster than human, he slid hisweapon from the glove box and leaped from the car, dashing into the shadows, away from the beacon of car lights, leaving them shining to attract a predator’s attention, should they not all be “stopped.”
As Angie talked his ear off, he studied the witch ward, shining into the night. There were shadow groups in the human government and human military, and many less-than-savory characters from the underbelly of society, who wanted witch children. They were in high demand in the magical slavery market. He had no idea what he could be facing. Fear made his pupils expand fully; his fangs clicked down on their hinges.
He would protect this family.
“I am here, Angie. I’m going to scout the edges of thehedge, up the hill. I need to end our call to be silent. I’ll call you right back. Is that acceptable?”
“Okay, Edmund. I saw your car lights. Bye.”
Edmund turned off his cell and pocketed it. He moved around the side of the property, wishing he had kept a change of shoes in the Maserati. The soles of his Italian leather La Destreza shoes were useless for an inaudible reconnoiter. He made his way to the back of the property and saw a shimmer of brighter light there, mostly yellow with striations of blue, purple, red, and hints of green, oddly static-looking. Inside the glow were two forms, a man and a woman, both wearing night camouflage. The two were indeed “stopped,” like mannequins, as if they were frozen outside of time in a... a temporal distortion.
The woman knelt, facing away from the man, wearing a dual ocular headset, a matte black sniper rifle in her arms, aiming back up the hill. Her hip pressed the man’s and the point of contact glowed silver. The man leaned against thehedge of thorns, a small device in both hands, pressed against the energies, emitting the prism of light. He wore dark glasses against the glare.
The colored light was odd, wavy, spotty, broken, as if it was no longer moving, but hard, stationary, plasticized. Whatever had stopped the people had stopped light too, or slowed it to something visible. Edmund thought back to Angie’s description of creating her small, strong ward. Was it possible that she had tied it to the outerhedgeand to her mother’s death magics? If so, this temporal anomaly could be unstable.
It had been centuries since he felt the cold, but it crawled up his spine on icy feet now.
He sent his senses searching up the hill where the woman was aiming. There was no glow of undeath, no sound or scent of life except for small animals and a distant herd of deer. Yet the magic of death clung to the land and he had an instinctive revulsion to the dregs of power that had depleted the hillside of life. Fear clung there, as if the death magics cast by Angie’s mother still had the power to drain him.
Retrieving his cell phone, he took dozens of photographs under various filters of the couple and the device they used. He sent them to his military and tech security team, texted the situation, and asked for input.
He had no idea what might happen if he reached into the light or touched the couple who had attacked the ward. Edmund chose a stick from the dead forest and touched it to the rainbow of light. The stick passed through easily. Gently, he slipped it forward, through the stopped magics, to inspect the man’s pockets, lifting a lapel, poking at pouches on his military-style pants. All were empty, but a faint silver glow appeared at the point of contact each time the stick touched him. The same glow appeared when he inspected the woman, growing brighter each time. It seemed cautionary and he stepped away, tossing the stick uphill, completing his circuit of the largehedge of thorns, back to the car. He turned off the headlights, slid the weapon into the waistband of his dress slacks, strode to thehedge, and called Angie on his cell.
When she answered, he said, “Angelina, let down your personalhedge, please, and come to the front of the house.”
“Ummm. I tried.” She sounded mortified. “I can’t make it go away.”
“We’s stuck!” EJ chirped in the background. “And I gotta peepee!”
“Angie, do aseeingworking and tell me if you detect a thread of your magics tying your small ward to thehedge of thornsaround your home.”
She whispered over the cell connection, “Ohhhh. I tied them together.”
The Everhart witches had devised numerous wards based on the originalblood-hedgeof protection. Because few of them had to be recharged, he presumed they were either solar charged or ley line powered, though they never volunteered such information. The outer ward wouldn’t simply stop at dawn, wear thin, or die off. It had to be turned off, as if with a switch.
“Edmund, it’s worse,” she whispered again. “My protection ward has tails. One goes to the back of the house. Somehow, I tied my ward to themagic that was breaking through thehedge. And... oh no. It’s tangled in Mama’s death magics and to angel magic too.”
“Angel?” The little witch must have created a ley line feedback loop, powering it with even more energy than Angie possessed herself. If it broke, would the children enter the temporal distortion, blow up the house and parents and themselves, or perhaps send time-warped space and death magics out like shrapnel?
“Whoot!” Angie shouted, and he jerked the cell away from his head. Vampire ears were not made for the shrill tones produced by a witch child’s vocal cords. “I got it! I can’t make it go away but I can move it. Me and EJ are scooting to the front door.”
“Angelina, wait. Take some pictures of your father and mother and send them to me.”
“Okay.” He heard clicks, followed by grunting and dragging sounds and the chuffing whine of an unhappy dog. The front door opened and he saw the children through a red-gold ward of energies as they came down the steps and along the drive. The children were beneath a low-lying, moveable ward, the upper dome of which was just high enough to allow them to sit up. “I’m hanging up so I can push,” Angie said. The call ended and Edmund studied the photos she had texted. Her parents did appear frozen.
