When they slowly drag to meet mine, her eyes are proud and contrary. They will not bow down or apologize. “Never you mind. It’s a little trick I learned a long time ago from my mother, a way to spread the toxin out over many doses to many people when you need to unload without a mark. The allure draws ’em in by the handful.”
I jump to my feet. “Are you kidding me? All those people in there tonight? Are they gonna die?”
“Sit down,” she demands. “No one is dying tonight. I fed on a blend, remember? To draw out the poison. Dilute that between so many servings of food and drink distributed to so many people, and the worst you can expect is a high demand on the town plumbing.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you said no bane witch has ever spared a mark?”
“They haven’t,” she confirms. “But over many centuries there have been a few near misses. Marks who died before the hunt was over, of natural causes or some unforeseeable mishap. Marks who suffered a fatal accident in the pursuit, usually because the witch bungled it, ending up in a physical fight for her life, using whatever was available to her. We’re not perfect, Piers. This is not a science. It’s magic. And sometimes magic is messy.”
My brow rumples. It sounds like the out my mother was looking for her entire life. “Why couldn’t we just do that then? Someone like my mom at least, who wanted a murder-free life?”
Myrtle chuckles, reaches into a candy dish and pops a peppermint into her mouth. “Ah, see, that’s the rub. It only works once. I mean, you can employ it more than once in your life, but not in succession. The next time I feed, were I to try it again, the consequences would be dire. We’re talking about fay magic, Piers. The Aos Sí. The nøkken. The People of the Threshold. The Hidden Ones. There isn’t a loophole, so don’t go searching for one. They’re tricksters, you understand? They think of everything before you can even blink an eye. They made us what we are. Embrace it.”
“I’m trying,” I spit out, but even I hear the whine in my voice. “It’s a little hard with Regis telling me stories about you killing men as young as twenty-one years of age. I thought we weren’t supposed to be savages. I thought killing an innocent was our highest crime. We’re supposed to operate by a code!”
She draws her hair over a shoulder, the long line of her necklike a column of marble, an exclamation point. “Yes, I remember him well.”
“So, you admit it?” I fume. “You did kill him. How could you? He’s practically a child.”
Her ire is immediate. It stings my eyes like a flash burn. “Thatboyyou speak of had been raping his two younger sisters since the age of fifteen. The eldest girl was nine when he started, but the youngest was only three. He wasn’t sorry or even ashamed. He liked it. He liked it so much that he began raping the girl down the street, a seven-year-old whose mother dropped her off from time to time for babysitting. By the time he made it up here, he’d already abducted and raped two other young girls, one of whom died from a fatal infection of injuries sustained in his assault.”
I swallow my blame. I should have known better. Regis didn’t know the full story. How could he?
“They come in all shapes and sizes, Piers—the monsters we fight, the demons. All ages. All ethnicities. From all walks of life. But if you think for one second that I enjoyed stealing the many years he had left, then you don’t know me, and you may as well walk out that door right now. I fed for two weeks before I found the courage to do it. Two weeks wrestling with my own conscience, knowing that if I didn’t, more little girls would lose their innocence, their security, even their lives. So, you tell me, who should I have chosen, him or them?”
I lower my gaze. “So, what do we do now?”
Her lips purse as she draws a deep breath. “We wait.”
When I glance at her, she elaborates.
“We let him sweat it out, the sheriff. Let him think what he wants but stay out of his way. Whatever was between you two—don’t bother denying it, I have eyes, you know—it ends now. We’ll tell the venery Ed was my doing. That way, if Brooks does come for us, they’ll blame me. You can’t afford any more heat. With any luck, my cycle won’t begin again for some months, maybe even a year or more. Gives me time to sort my next move. But you haveyour mark, the Strangler. We’ll focus on sourcing new material for your feed. No more mushrooms.”
My mind flickers to her shelves in the bunker, lined with jar after jar of toxic herb, flower, berry, and root. “There should be something suitable in your hideout, right? You said I had a gift for concentration. Surely anything you have on hand would work. They can’t all be mushrooms, can they?”
She looks worried, and that worries me. “No, they aren’t all mushrooms. But we’re suspects now. I loathe the thought of using anything that grows naturally within a thousand square miles with your boyfriend so hot and bothered to put one or both of us behind bars.”
“He’s just doing his job,” I defend. “You have to consider what this looks like from the outside. He’s sworn to protect his community.”
“So am I!” she insists bitterly.
“I know that, but he doesn’t. How could he? You can’t expect him to just take your word for it.”
She rolls her eyes, lips tight. “Well, in any case, maybe I can get something carried in.”
“Carried in?” A shipping trail of toxic plant material sounds like a bad idea.
“Poisonous vegetation from a different region, hand delivered by another bane witch. It’s something we do from time to time for one another, inside andoutsideof the venery.”
“Outside of the venery? You mean—”
“A separate venery, another family of bane witches. I told you before, we aren’t the only ones of our kind.”
My mind spins as it takes this in, dissects it, tucks it away in aptly labeled boxes. “You said the only other venery in North America died out years ago.”
“And so they did,” she tells me. “But there are two in France, one in Italy, and another in Barcelona. Maybe as many as three in South America—Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador—but we lostcommunication with the Quito clan over fifteen years ago, so who can say anymore? And at least one more, vast as I understand it, in Eastern Europe, spread over several countries—Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and who knows where else by now.”
My skin erupts in chills, dotting with goose bumps as the numbers increase. How many lives have we taken? How many more have we saved? “That many?”
