a completely uncontrolled weapon, Odessa. It’s dangerous.”
“But if you go back to Colorado, you’ll be safe!”
She was clearly worried. It was kind of touching. “That’s sweet, but I don’t want to go back to my safe little corner while someone is using spirit bombs to kill people in Atlanta. They’re made with boundary magic. If there’s a chance I can help dismantle or find them, I need to be here.”
As I said the words, it occurred to me just how much I meant them. I wasn’t going to get on a plane until I’d found the bomb maker.
Odessa finished her toast and set her mug down on the counter. “Well, I need to get out to the horses.” She gave a little hop off the counter and swung her arms up like an Olympic gymnast. I pretended to applaud, and she beamed at me. “Would you like to come see the barn?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to sound interested. If you’ve seen one barn, you’ve kind of seen them all, but it was obviously important to her.
Odessa brightened. “Great! Let me just leave Becca a note; she can find us there.”
She reached into a drawer for a Post-it pad and pen. We went to the foyer to get our jackets, and Odessa stuck the note on the now-empty coat-tree. Then we carried the mugs outside, where Odessa led me around the side of the house to a row of shiny golf carts. “We could walk,” she said, with a sly smile, “but I just think these are fun.”
“That’s fine.” My back and hips ached along with my wrist now, and I wasn’t overly eager to make the walk. I gingerly climbed in on the passenger side, letting Odessa navigate us across the driveway and down the red-clay path.
She’d set her tea in a cup holder, but I just took small sips to keep mine from sloshing. It was cool enough on the forest path for me to enjoy having the hot cup, even if I could really only hold it in one hand. There was a lot less light in the forest than near the house, and I wondered how something could be so dense and forbidding yet have so much life inside. “Do you ever have problems with animals?” I asked Odessa, raising my voice to be heard over the low purr of the golf cart.
“Nah, not really. There are some rabbits and squirrels, but we get very few predators,” she told me. “Which is good, because the horses would freak out. We used to get deer, but not so much anymore.” She smiled. “Beau used to get mad at me for feeding them during the day. I thought they were cute, but he says they’re pests.”
Privately, I agreed with Beau, but didn’t say so.
In a few minutes we reached the clearing where Beau and I had visited the other night, and Odessa sped the cart along the paddock fence to the barn. I hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, but it was obviously well kept, with bright red paint and white trim that made it look like something on a postcard. It was bigger than I’d imagined, although really, I had no idea how much space you needed to keep horses.
Odessa parked and picked up her mug, swinging her legs out of the cart. There was a bounce in her step now, and I had to move quickly to keep up. “We’ve got five horses now,” she said cheerfully as she approached a door in the center of the building. “When I was younger we kept a pony and a donkey too, but Beau didn’t replace them when they passed away. I think they were mostly there to make me happy.”
She took hold of a metal handle, pulled one-handed, and swung the door sideways in an impressive show of strength. The door was twice as wide as you’d find on a house, and tall enough to accommodate the horses; it had to be heavy. “Deimos is my favorite, of course,” Odessa went on, “but I love them all.”
The smells of manure and hay floated out, and I squinted to see the building’s interior, which was shaped differently from the barn at the Pellar farm. There was a wide aisle going straight down the middle, and spacious stalls on the left side, each with a hand-painted sign bearing the horse’s name. The right side of the building was closed off with doors, and I figured they led to