mother, she said, “We’ll be home as soon as the weather lets up. You, Carmen, the kids, and the animals go stay at Evangelina’s, okay? Put up a ward there. Attach it to the ley lines below the house.”
Evangelina’s house was sitting on ley lines close to a liminal line. Powerful. Very powerful. Any ward opened on that old house should withstand anything. The ley lines were how Moll’s sister had captured a demon and set a lot of the mess of my life in motion. Molly’s death magics had first appeared there, and to this day, nothing would grow there.
After a lot of magical strategy chitchat, Molly ended the call and leaned against her husband, her red hair against his broad chest. “I have to call the insurance company. Our rates are going to go through the roof. Which we don’t have anymore, it seems.” She sobbed once, hard. Big Evan pulled her close, tears in his eyes too.
I walked away. They were in danger because of me. They had lost their house because of me. My fault. Guilt, my old frenemy, clawed into my soul. “Jane,” Alex called as I moved through the empty inn area. I waved him away and made it to the front door. Yanked it open, the icy air instantly clearing my head.
A gong shivered through the air, through the floor, through the walls. Gong. GONG. GONG! The hedge of thorns around the house wavered and shook in a coruscating wash of light.
I raced outside. Big Evan thundered through the inn after me. Molly was on our heels, moving faster than I ever remembered. I stopped and they passed me. The ward bonged over and over, a steady thrum of dissonant notes, and I pulled on Beast’s night vision, placing all our people.
The witch twins were standing back-to-back in the snow. Focals lay at their feet: moonstones as big as my fist at Cia’s feet for the moon witch; Liz was a stone witch, and she had a huge, clear orb at her feet, quartz, maybe, and beside it was a two-foot-long multicolored crystal spire of tourmaline, as big around as my arm.
Shiloh raced at vamp speed from the side of the house, a popping smudge of movement. She threw her back to the shoulders of the twins, facing out. Cia made a little erp sound. Liz cursed. They hadn’t known she was here. I had forgotten to tell them, and it seemed Molly had forgotten as well. Shiloh dropped a strap over her head and shoulder and aimed into the dark with an AR-17. There were extra magazines in her belt, each holding thirty rounds. “Hi,” she said to the two witches. “It’s been a while, and I’m a little different nowadays, but you’re my aunts. I’m Shiloh, and what you can call a combo witch. Earth and a little fire. I’m making myself a conduit and giving you my magic to use while I keep you safe from human weapons.”
“But. You’re a vampire now,” Liz said, intrigue and horror on her face.
“I don’t eat family,” Shiloh said, amused and exasperated. “And being a bloodsucker doesn’t stop my magic.”
I loved that girl. Shiloh was badass. She looked fully healed from having her throat torn out. Always a plus. The gonging bonging continued, speeding up slightly. The ward over the house and grounds brightened and dimmed with each percussive stroke.
Molly dropped her back to the twins’ other shoulders, so they all four stood facing outward. Big Evan scuffed a ten-foot circle in the snow crust and took the north position. “We have air,” he said, speaking of himself, “earth-death, stone, moon, and earth-fire. Five of us. My power, my will to your wills.”
“My will to your wills,” the others repeated. Quickly they fell into that meditative state that synchronized their magics.
It wasn’t a perfect circle. They needed a water witch to make it perfect. But it was an Everhart-Trueblood grouping, and that made it powerful, linked by bloodlines and love. Which was the first time I understood that Molly’s family knew about her death magics. I was proud of Molly for telling them. It couldn’t have been an easy convo.
Big Evan pulled out a multitubed flute, the kind the god Pan always used in stories, and blew a soft, tremulous note. The circle flared up and the witches each took a step to their assigned places.
Edmund moved slowly to stand beside me. He wore a bandolier-style holster with two nine-millimeter semiautomatics and four full