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"There's no scent." He'd stopped dead in the middle of the store with his head up and his nostrils flaring. His eyes had gone full wolf, gold glowing like fires in the sockets. "Hazel, there's no scent. I could've sworn…" he shook his head as if to clear it. "Nobody came through that door." He muttered lamely.

Which meant the hex hadn't been thrown at me.

It had been left there for me.

Set, tuned, and parked in that shop like a bear trap under leaves, keyed to something, waiting however long it needed to wait for the something to walk past. Could've been sitting under that glass for a week. Could've been a month, humming to itself, while women in expensive coats leaned over it and talked about half sizes.

And I had walked past it, on my own two feet, in shoes I'd chosen, on the fourth stop of an afternoon that I had personally insisted on, in a store that I had personally picked out of a window, because it had the good boots I wanted.

Because she knew it had the good boots I wanted.

Because she'd taken me in the same shop when I was nine years old so I could gawk in awe at all the pretty things sold there.

Something went cold at the top of my spine and slithered all the way down it.

"We're leaving." Ace's hand closed around my upper arm.

"Yeah." My voice came out strange and flat from somewhere far away, and I let him steer me toward the door. I stepped pass the hole in the glass where a mirror used to be, and I did not put the boot down. "Yeah, we're leaving."

Behind the register, one of the humans was still crying and screaming. Brynn, with the braces and the ponytail, was on the floor behind the counter with both hands over her ears, and somebody was on the phone hysterically telling what happened to someone. I caught the word witches in the middle of a sentence.

My magic gave a slow, interested pulse under my skin, and I clamped down on it so hard my teeth ached.

Nine hundred and forty dollars, I thought. That's what I'd tell them. I broke your case, I ruined your afternoon, I put that girl on the floor, and here is a shoe I wanted and here is money for it. I’d add I am so very sorry, too.

The words never got anywhere near my mouth. The word sorry rarely does.

The sun was too bright on the sidewalk. Colors always are, after such a large extension of magic.

"Hazel." Ace put himself between me and the street without seeming to care what I thought about it, and I let him. Eleven days ago, I would've had something to say about it. "Talk."

"I'm fine."

"You're holding a shoe."

I looked down. I was, in fact, holding a shoe. One suede stiletto ankle boot in oxblood, size eight, four and a half inches of covered platform, with a small tag hanging off the heel that said nine hundred and forty dollars, and a fine spray of my own blood across the toe from where the glass had opened up my palm. What is it about that specific model and bloodstains?

"It's a boot," I said absentmindedly.

Then I laughed. It came out of me wrong. Too high and too long, the kind of laugh that makes a beta wolf put a hand on your back and start scanning rooftops. Because here's the thing I'd figured out somewhere between the second hex and the empty doorway, standing in a wrecked store on Euclid Avenue with a nine-hundred-dollar boot in my fist.

She hadn't tried to kill me.

Twice she attacked so far, with all the time in the world to prepare, from a distance, with nobody there to interrupt, and both of them had missed. Danika Byrne did not miss. Danika Byrne could put a curse through a keyhole from three streets over without breaking a sweat, and I'd watched her do it.

Those hexes were never meant to land.

They were meant to teach me that she could reach me anywhere. In any store. On any street. In any city in the world, standing in front of any display case, on the fourth stop of an ordinary afternoon, at any time. They were meant to put me on the floor in a place I loved with a stranger's screaming in my ears, so I would understand that she chose the room, she chose the shoe, and she chose the time and place.

Message received, Grandmother.

Loud and clear.

I limped to the car with my ruined palm wrapped in the hem of my shirt and my magic humming so hard it made my back teeth rattle.

I made one decision on the way, which I did not share with the wolf holding my elbow.

If she wanted to teach me lessons, I'd write some of my own. With a sigh I glanced down at the boot I was clutching like a lifeline.