through the china and trashing anything bottle-like in a big garbage bin. I tried not to think about what some of those pieces must have been worth.
“Miss Lex,” he said when I entered. He was standing on a counter so he could reach the top shelf of one of the cupboards. “I’ve already been through the upstairs, but this room is obviously taking longer. Were you able to learn anything new?”
I told him about Sophia’s demands. “She wants me on the call?” he asked, looking perplexed. “Why?”
“Probably so she can embarrass me and try to convince you I should be fired,” I said.
For the first time that night, Beau’s face broke out in a grin. “So she’s an admirer.” He leaped nimbly off the counter, landing soundlessly on the floor like a cat.
I sighed. “I sort of killed her son, who was my half brother. It’s a long story.”
Beau’s eyes widened slightly, but all he said was, “All right. Lead on.”
We went back into the office, where I called Sophia on speakerphone. The bitch let the phone ring seven times before she answered. “Sophia Jasper,” she said, sounding downright professional. Beau shot me an amused look.
“Sophia, it’s Lex again. Did you get the money?”
“I did. Is Abner Calhoun with you?”
“I’m right here, ma’am,” Beau drawled. “So pleased to meet you. Call me Beau.”
Sophia let out an actual girlish laugh. “I’ll do that. And I’m Sophia. My companion speaks very highly of you. His name is Preston, originally from Charleston.”
Well, that explained why Sophia had agreed to the call. I’d known Sophia was in a long-term relationship with a vampire, but I hadn’t known his name. “I know Preston well,” Beau said easily. “Good man. But if you’ll pardon my ill manners, Miss Sophia, we have a rather time-sensitive problem here.”
“Yes, the spirit bottles. What do you need to know?”
Beau nodded at me. “What’s their range?” I asked.
“It depends on the number of spirits captured,” she said, her voice hardening now that I was speaking. “The more spirits, the farther the impact.”
“Can you give us an estimate?”
She let out a small, frustrated noise, but said, “The most powerful spirit bottle I’ve seen had about a hundred ghosts inside. It took out all the people in a fast-food restaurant.”
Beau and I exchanged a look. That gave us an overall sense of scale, but the Atlanta History Center was on a massive piece of property, and we’d been the only living people there that night. “Hold on a moment, please,” I said to Sophia, and pushed the “Mute” button on my phone. “How many ghosts were taken from each location?” I asked Beau.
“I told you, they pool, like gravity. I never got a head count.”
I waved a hand. “Just give me a guess.”
His face was grave. “Four or five hundred, at least.”
Chapter 30
We spent another twenty minutes asking Sophia every question we could think of about spirit bottles. According to her, any glass bottle would work, as long as it had a lid or stopper. They could only be set off at night, but as long as they were kept away from the sun, they could be stored indefinitely and used later. Sophia managed to slip in a couple of disparaging remarks about me, but overall she kept it more professional than I’d expected.
“What about the trigger?” I asked. “How do you actually set it off?”
“That depends on the witch, of course,” Sophia said impatiently. “The idea of putting spirits into bottles came about because trades witches needed a way to free a place of unwanted ghosts. As long as you have access to mandragora, it’s much easier to make a spirit bottle than to actually lay the ghosts—”
“Wait, are you saying that it’s easy to make a spirit bottle?” I interrupted, because that sounded very scary.
She huffed. “I’m saying getting spirits into bottles is easy, but turning the bottle into an explosive, that’s the trick. And that part’s not boundary magic, not really. The way I’ve seen it done, you bind two identical bottles together with magic, and trap spirits in one of them. To set it off, you leave the spirit bottle at the target location and destroy its twin somewhere else.”
Okay, I actually kind of followed that—she was talking about a form of sympathetic magic, which Lily used a lot. It was basically binding two things together so that one could stand in for another.
“But in theory,” Sophia went on, “you could create the trigger another way, depending on the