to call Mary while he was out there and update her on the situation now that he had a human voice again.
When Tallulah lowered the glass, she began playing with her bracelets. “You know that the Calhouns gave up boundary magic a generation or two before you were born,” she said to Beau.
“I do,” Beau replied. “My grandmother was the one who decided the family should be done with it. She said black magic brought nothing but pain.”
Tallulah glanced at me curiously to see if I’d be offended, but I just gave her a steady look. Beau’s grandmother sort of had a point.
“That wasn’t here in Atlanta, though,” Tallulah said.
“No, my family was in Savannah then.”
Tallulah nodded. “My mother’s family still lives in Savannah. To this day, when you drive around the older parts of the city, you’ll sometimes see bright blue bottles attached to trees or left out on porches. It’s more decoration than belief now, like hanging a dream catcher, but the tradition originally comes from spirit bottles.”
“That’s hoodoo,” Beau protested. “African magic. My people wouldn’t practice that.”
I managed not to roll my eyes. Ah, racism.
Tallulah shrugged, draining her glass of bourbon. “I don’t know where the Calhouns got the tradition—maybe they picked it up from hoodoo, or maybe the practices had a sort of parallel development. That happens a lot in magic. What I do know is, if you had a pesky ghost on your property back in the eighteenth century, you called the Calhouns to come bottle it for you.”
“And then what?” I asked.
Both of them looked at me as though they’d forgotten I was there. “Then you left the bottle out in the sun,” Tallulah said, as if it were obvious. “Trapped spirits can’t abide sunlight.”
“Don’t I know it,” Beau murmured.
Tallulah actually flushed. “I apologize—”
He waved it off. “I’m just surprised I haven’t heard any of this before, considering it’s my own family.”
“Witches can be very reticent,” she said primly, smoothing her slacks.
I snorted.
“What?” Beau asked me.
“It’s just a massive understatement. You know that boundary witches are feared and hated, but we’re still witches. The clans have to tolerate us. As soon as your family stopped activating your witchblood, though, you stopped being witches to them.” I tilted my head at Tallulah. “They’d have no reason to confide in you or share your family history. If you weren’t a vampire, I doubt anyone would still remember the Calhouns were boundary witches.”
Beau raised his eyebrows at Tallulah. She made a sour face but gave a grudging nod as she fussed with her hair. “It’s not how I would put it, but I don’t entirely disagree.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere, though,” I said. “For one thing, the spirit bottle that exploded tonight was different from what Tallulah is describing. It’s like someone took that idea and figured out how to weaponize it with the Unsettled.”
Beau nodded, and even Tallulah tipped her head in acknowledgment. “And secondly,” I went on, “this wasn’t a boundary witch.”
Tallulah started in her seat. “What on earth makes you say that?”
Right. We hadn’t told her everything. I glanced at Beau, who gave me a tiny nod. To Tallulah, I said, “Because someone has been growing mandragora in Beau’s backyard.”
“What.” Her reply was so sharp it wasn’t even a question. “That’s impossible.”
She sounded properly outraged, but there was something else in her expression too. I got the impression that Tallulah was not quite as surprised as she wanted us to think. I glanced at Beau, but he gave no indication that he thought Tallulah was lying. Maybe I was just paranoid.
“It’s true, Tally,” Beau said quietly. “I saw it myself.”
“I find it difficult to believe that someone just happened to plant mandragora in Beau’s own backyard at the same time a completely different person is trying to kill him,” I went on. “There is one brain behind this, and they want us to know how smart they are.”
“That’s awfully dramatic,” Tallulah complained.
“It’s true, though,” Beau said. “The mandragora could have been planted anywhere, but they chose the cardinal vampire’s backyard.”
I nodded. “The only reason I can think of is to show off. ‘Look how clever I am.’”
“A very personal touch,” Beau mused.
“It could still be a boundary witch,” Tallulah snapped, looking at both of us.
“No,” I replied. “Whatever this spirit bottle spell is, it’s boundary magic. And a boundary witch wouldn’t need mandragora.” Which meant I’d completely wasted my time questioning the Horsemen at the cemetery.
Tallulah opened and closed her mouth several times, and