I shook my head. Young as I might look, I had no desire to sprawl out on a floor with teenagers. “If you’re all right, I’m going to go talk to my friend. He was checking the security.”
Odessa waved a hand, her gesture bigger than it needed to be. “Have at it.”
I almost asked if I could get her a glass of water or something, but I held my tongue. Odessa was a legal adult. It wasn’t my place to mother her.
I went back downstairs. There was no sign of Milburn in the grand entrance. Before I checked in Beau’s office, I heard a scratching sound at the front door. I opened it, and Tobias was there, tail lifted and alert.
“Hey,” I said. “Anything to worry about?” I figured he would have howled if there were serious trouble.
Tobias reached his muzzle out and gently took the right sleeve of my jacket in his teeth, pulling lightly. “You want to show me something?” I asked. In answer, he tugged again. I stepped out on the front porch and pulled the door closed behind me. “Okay, lead on.”
I expected him to head for the woods on the opposite side of the driveway, where we’d taken the path to the stable, but he turned and trotted around the house, forcing me to jog to keep up. The exercise might have felt good under other conditions, but my lower back was starting to ache again, and I had to hold one hand on the holstered Glock as I ran so it wouldn’t chafe my skin.
But I didn’t ask Tobias to slow down, and we soon rounded the corner of the house to a yard big enough for a wedding reception. Beyond the yard, at the very edge of the light from the house, I could make out a line of trees. That must be the forest that Beau had donated to be a public park. I slowed to a walk and then stopped long enough to briefly check the woods with my boundary magic mindset.
Beyond the bright blue of Tobias’s life force, I could see glowing things moving around up ahead—remnants. We’d reached the edge of Beau’s property and the end of the ghost-free zone.
Remnants wandering around a creepy, unfamiliar forest. Awesome.
I dug in my pocket and pulled out my small Maglite, clicking it on. Tobias had turned to check on me, and my flashlight beam caught his eye shine, making him look like a demon himself. He was standing at the edge of the trees, waiting.
“I really don’t want to go into the forest,” I told him when I caught up.
Tobias turned and pawed at something at the base of a tree. Thankfully, it was one of the closest trees, and well away from any ghosts.
I walked toward him and shone the flashlight down. In my head I was expecting a weapon or maybe some spell supplies, so at first I thought Tobias was showing me something that had been discarded among the plants. It wasn’t until I crouched down that I understood he wanted me to see the plants themselves.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
I was squatting in the middle of a massive patch of mandragora.
Chapter 26
At some point in the planet’s history, magic had arrived on the scene and inserted itself into the evolutionary lines of certain organisms.
Most notably, of course, magic had merged with humans to create superpowerful conduits, whose descendants had evolved into three separate groups: witches, werewolves, and vampires. But magic had also appeared in a particular plant family: the Solanaceae, also known as nightshades.
Simon and Lily referred to this magical vegetation as “fetters,” magic-laced plants that were both incredibly dangerous and incredibly useful. Mandragora, wolfberry, and belladonna were the major players, and witch botanists had spent generations breeding magic out of these plants. You could go to a garden store and get yourself a half dozen innocuous strains of mandrake that had no magical properties, but Mandragora interitio, the magical variety, was supposedly almost impossible to find.
As with any controlled substance, though, there were plenty of people willing to pay big money for the fetters, and so the Old World had a weird little black market for magical plants.
It all sounded ridiculous, but I’d seen firsthand what belladonna could do to a vampire. An enormous dose of the stuff had nearly killed Maven, who was probably the most powerful vampire on the planet. After the attack, I’d made a point of familiarizing