we were in a triangle, with Big Evan at north, his largest flute in his lap, Molly to his right with her plant, and me to his left with my Glob and le breloque at my knees. “Closing the circle,” Evan said, his voice deep and sonorous in the empty room. He blew a single note on his flute, a basso sound that echoed in the ceilings and made my flesh quiver. The breathy tone felt potent and imperative, as if something deeply significant was happening. Magic swept across my skin as the circle closed and some version of a hedge of thorns rose over us.
I shook the strange sensation off and plopped le breloque onto my head. Its magics shivered through me. The crown seemed to adjust to my head size, as if it knew I was about to call on it, as if this was something more than trying on a hat. Maybe it had felt the circle closing and reacted to the power. Or maybe it was once again claiming me. I’d intended to give the thing to the NOLA witches, but with Lachish Dutillet spending time in a null-room prison, I’d never gotten around to it. Never thought about it again. Which was interesting, but a thought for another time.
The alcohol was cold on my fingertip and I squinted my eyes and made a face as I stabbed myself with the lancet. Which hurt bad for such a tiny wound. I dripped three drops of my blood into the silver shot—um—chalice. “Okay. What now?”
“This is your magic, Jane,” Molly said. “Do your thing.”
“My thing.” Crap. Flying by the seat of my pants was how I got into this mess. But Moll was right. My magic wasn’t witch magic. She couldn’t help me. Carefully, I sought my skinwalker magics, the silver energies of the Gray Between, shot through with motes of darker power, now bound with the pentagram of witch magics inside of . . .
Inside of me.
Witch magics. Timewalking magics. Le breloque magics. Glob magics. Vampire priestess magic. My own magics. And the magic of an angel of the light. All bound together in a body with shredded DNA. I studied the red mote zipping along the star pattern of magics in my middle. And the silver and charcoal motes of my own power zooming along with it, adhering to the new pattern. And the faint, barely there shadow of black magic that had jumped into me.
Hayyel, the angel, had told me something about the pattern of my magics. What was it? I pulled the memory from the deeps of my mind, but it was half-formed, half-remembered. Something like, The new configuration of energies within you is a new strength. He said he had healed my soul home. And then he disappeared. Had Hayyel done this to me? Had he let my DNA get scrambled and let me get sick, so that I would . . . what? Die? A plan by the Almighty to get me to do something? If so, what? The disease within me had to do with timewalking. With changing time. So that meant . . . it had to do with fangheads and maybe the rainbow dragons, who wanted vamps to have never been. Yeah. That was a lot of help. Not.
I blew out a breath and tried again. Studying the magics. Wondering what an angel might want. Hayyel had been partly responsible for the making of the Glob. Sooo . . . Well-worn thought paths trampled down again.
The Sons of Darkness had been trying to bring their father back from the dead and steal power that wasn’t theirs when they dug up their father’s body and gathered the iron spikes and the wood of the crosses of Golgotha. They were trying to be as powerful as Jehovah and raise someone from the dead. They hadn’t known which implements of torture and death belonged to the murderer or the thief or the innocent, so they had used all of it. They had messed up. When they raised their father from the dead, he was a monster, whom they had been forced to kill and then chop into tiny bits to keep him dead. Hayyel knew all about the creation story of the vampires. Did he intend me to timewalk and fix something in the past? Or stop someone else from doing that and messing up the here and now? Or something else, even more obscure?