Rick stared at me, a wry look on his face, amused despite the blood washing over his feet. Rain pelted down on us all, Kem’s fur matted. Rick’s black hair lay against his skull like a coat of paint, his black eyes so dark they looked as wide as vamp pupils. I looked down at myself, my blanket shredded with long swathes of skin showing through. I put a palm to my belly. I was completely human. I was healed, though I remembered Kem’s claws striking my middle. You did this once before, I thought at Beast. Half shifted.
Yes. Will not accept beta place to Kemnebi, black leopard with ugly skinny tail and stink of human. Smell of strange hot country.
I chuckled beneath my breath. To Rick I said, “I’m going back to the hotel. I’m out of clothes. We’ll talk later.” I raised my voice, “When Kem-cat becomes human again, tell him if he kills you, I’ll kill him. You belong to my Beast.”
Rick’s mouth curled up higher on one side. “I’ll do that. Is this a proposal or something?”
My stomach plummeted. “Something.” But I didn’t know what. “Later.” I slid into the cab, pulling the doors shut. With a crunch and splash of tires on rock and mud, I pulled away. I was halfway to the hotel when I had to stop at a drive-through for food. I consumed a bucket of regular recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken and six biscuits. And I couldn’t stop laughing, a breathy, half-hysterical sound, a soft note of dread and pain in the depths. I was still laughing when I dialed the twins’ room.
Back at the hotel, Brian met me at the curb, wrapping me in a white robe and carrying me through the lobby, dripping. A small crowd was sitting at the fireplace, flames licking the air as we passed. They clapped, as if this was an Officer and a Gentleman moment and I was being carried by my prince charming, up the elevator. I laughed, still with that wild ringing note, and Brian kissed the top of my head like he might a small child’s, appreciating the moment.
When we got to the suite we now shared, he lowered my feet to the carpet and took in my bedraggled state, his eyes glued to the wet skin beneath the soaked blanket and the bundle of wet clothing in my hands. I shivered hard, despite the time to warm up and the food. I said, “Hot shower. Three double stuffed potatoes and a two pound steak, so rare it’s still mooing. Please.” I shut my room door in his face.
Half an hour later I was warm and mostly dry, my hair braided and wrapped in a towel. I had looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and decided not to do that again. I looked as if I had lost ten pounds, and as if I hadn’t slept in weeks. My eyes had dark circles, my cheeks were sunken. The half-shift had taken a lot out of me. Better than dead cat, Beast thought at me. She had a point. In the common area of the suite, I sat down at a small table and dug into the food, eating with a steady precision more suited to a robot than a hungry human. The twins watched me with hooded eyes, nearly as still as a vamp, except for the whole needs-to-breathe thing.
When I was done, Brandon said, “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
I grinned. Beast hacked deep inside, amused. “Yeah.” I picked up my cell, keys, a leather jacket, and the scarf I’d taken from Evangelina. “I’ll be back in a bit. I have to see a witch about a problem.”
“Does this problem have to do with the parley?”
“Yeah.” I left the room, calling for the SUV on the way down.
I drove into Molly’s driveway and parked in the false dusk of the storm. It was still raining, but now there were breaks in the downpour, moments when sprinkles pattered down, moments when it stopped altogether. The sky was variegated, darker to the east where the storm was fleeing, the clouds piled on top of each other as they rushed from the cold front. I turned off the engine and sat.
Molly’s house was different since I’d been here last. Big Evan and Mol had added on a garage with a man-den over it, enclosed the old carport, added a bathroom and a master bedroom out back. The addition had doubled the size of the house, but they had maintained the quaint 1920s mountain style of peaked gables and arched windows.
I hadn’t been invited over since I’d been back. Not once. I remembered a time when Mol, Evan, Angie Baby, and I had dinner here several times a week. But the invitations had stopped when Molly had been put in danger on my watch, when Angie and Little Evan had been kidnapped. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I had become persona non grata in Big Evan’s eyes. His car was in the drive; there would be no slipping in and out without him knowing. I had no idea if I’d be welcomed or told to leave, especially once I reminded them of that recent danger. I hadn’t finished my jobs by killing off all the werewolves, and destroying the blood-diamond, bringing danger back to haunt them again. My insides felt hollow, despite the proteins, fats, and starches I’d eaten.
The house sat on the crest of a mountain at the top of the world, and the views were spectacular. The front yard was lush with fall plants, mums of all colors and sizes, a burgundy-leaved Japanese maple as centerpiece; maple varieties were grouped everywhere, some whose outermost leaves had begun to go salmon or yellow in the chill. The backyard would rival any garden anywhere, with fruits and veggies so tasty and big they looked like mutants. Mol’s an earth witch and her gift is herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature.
Legs like lead weights, I got out of the SUV, pocketed the keys, and moved up the paved drive. On the chill breeze, I caught a whiff of werewolves, but the scent was faint, distant, and quickly gone as if it had never been. But it was real, not a figment of my imagination or fear.
The new door in the middle of the old carport opened and a small whirlwind flew through. “Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane! Aunt Jane!” she squealed, the high pitch nearly bursting my eardrums. I stooped to catch her and Angie Baby threwherself into my arms with enough force to make me stagger. Her arms went around my neck, choking, her strawberry-blond-streaked hair whipping in the gusty wind. I smoothed it down with one hand and looped the other arm under her bottom to support her weight as I carried her toward the house. “I missed you,” she said.
My heart melted into a big puddle of goo. “I’ve missed you, Angie Baby.” I batted away tears that gathered any time I was near her. “You’ve grown two inches, at least.”
“I’m a big girl now.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, “Daddy’s at the door and he’s mad. Why is he mad at you?”
I didn’t lower my voice when I answered, but spoke in a normal tone, my booted feet bringing me closer to the glowering man, knowing he could hear me. “Because I let the Big Bad Ugly vampire witches steal you and nearly kill you. Because I put your mama in danger.” Big Evan’s glower turned uglier, colder. I thought about werewolves in the mountains near this house, killing people. “Because he loves you all so much that he’d fight anything to protect you. Your daddy’s doing the right thing, Angelina. He is.” I handed her to him.
The big man took her in gentle hands and set her down behind him, his body a barrier between us. I thought my heart would break. “Go back to the movie, Pun’kin,” he said.
“Okay, Daddy.” Her footsteps tapped away.
There weren’t many men who made me feel little, but Big Evan was one of them. He stood six feet six, and weighed over three hundred pounds, mostly muscle. He had red hair, a full red beard, and brown eyes so hard they could cut stone. He crossed his arms and braced his feet. Waiting. I pulled the damp lavender scarf out of my pocket and held it out to him. “Tell me what you smell. If you think it’s important, we need to talk. You, Molly, and me.”
Evan took the scarf and held it to his nose. He breathed in. Evan is a sorcerer, one of the few alive anywhere, and still in the witch closet, to protect his kids from unwanted attention. His eyes flew down to mine. Widened. He inhaled again. “I smell Evangelina and blood magic.”
I nodded. Evan knew about the witches in New Orleans and the diamond. Of course, he thought it was still safe and in New Orleans. “She stole the pink diamond from my weapons safe,” I said. “She’s been using it on vamps, blood-servants, and me. She’s using it to grow younger and prettier. Though she has the right to draw on her sisters’ magics, they haven’t noticed the changes in her. Which means she’s not just drawing on them as coven leader, she’s spelling them too.”
“That bitch is spelling my wife?” he snarled. Evan’s eyes narrowed, calculating, putting together what he might do to stop it. When he reached the end of his ruminations, he said something vile under his breath. “And I can’t interrupt the spell without serious consequences. Why didn’t you destroy the relic?”
“How?” I asked. “How do you destroy something that absorbed the energies of dying witches for hundreds of years? Drop it in the ocean? In a volcano? What happens to the energies in any of those cases? They don’t just wink out, poof, it’s gone.”
“You’ve brought nothing but evil to this house in years. I don’t want you here.”
Tears burned in my eyes, but he’d never see them. “Fine. You figure out how to handle it.” I yanked the scarf away, swiveled on a heel, and stalked back to the SUV.
“She lost some weight.” It sounded like the words were dragged out of him. I stopped, staring out at the curve of the world. The sky was bright, a patch of blue showing in the west. “Evangelina has. And”—he blew out a breath that sounded like a small storm—“at least fifteen years.”
I clenched my hands and turned back. “Her hair is silky as a child’s,” I said, “something adults’ hair loses by the time they’re forty or so. If her skin glowed any more we wouldn’t need lights. She let a vampire feed from her. I saw the wounds. When I accused her of it in front of her sisters, I don’t think they even heard the words.”
“This is your fault.”
“Accepted.”
“You better come in.”
I took a breath to steady my nerves and entered the house. The new door opened into a great room. The former carport’s back brick wall was now a fireplace with merrily burning gas logs and a hidden laundry room. Bump-out windows were on the western side, Molly’s orchids on display. Some were in bloom, including a heavenly vanilla. Big Evan stood still, mentally checking the house wards, eyeing the locks. “No opening the doors, Angie,” he said.