Remi
My mother didn’t know it, but she was helping me to get through this day. Yara Vaughn had spent a lot of time trying to teach me how to be positive like the rest of my family. My mom was a pediatric nurse who wore scrubs with black kittens on them every day, my father was a security guard at Deerfield High—mostly to keep me in line and be there when I shifted—and my siblings were all photocopies of each other. They laughed all day and shifted just for fun and had no problem with the fact that huge black cats would jump out of our bodies at random. And Yara wanted me to be just like them.
She’d sit with me after I’d done something mean like claw into the wall or shred my sister’s cheerleading uniform just to upset her, and she would ask me, “Remi, what does being so mean and so negative solve?” I’d never been able to answer that question, and eventually, she stopped asking and expecting my attitude to change. But Yara would be proud of me today.
When Elena Devore had shown up without Christine, my first reaction was to scream. I’d given them everything they’d needed. I’d shown them Nathan’s house, suggested the motion detectors, and I’d even helped them set them up. And they still hadn’t gotten the job done. But instead of screaming, I was waiting for one of my other plans to work.
I’d set a trap at Trenton in case Nathan hadn’t intended to go home. I’d sent his old boss a message, posing as a higher-up in Human Resources, to get him to make Nathan formally quit in person. I’d also set traps at Emma’s house, and Paul’s, and a big one at Sophia’s.
I’d told Kamon, rest his soul, where her friends lived hundreds of times, but even with the terrible things he used to do to his prisoners, he’d said there was a code hunters lived by, and that there was no honor in ransoming teenagers and old people to get Christine to come to us. He’d only agreed to my ideas of luring Nathan and using a witch to pose as Lydia when he was sure that his less than brilliant plan of sitting in her old home and waiting for her to come there wasn’t going to work.
Now that Carter’s friends valued my opinion more than anyone in Kamon’s army ever had, one of my hateful ideas had to pay off soon. I knew it would.
I was a little hesitant to work with them, especially after hearing Elena Devore whisper dark spells that were so strong that they made my stomach turn, but Carter was still leaving me out of his plan, so instead of playing cards with the hunters, I was playing with magic with a coven.
“Remi,” Sam said. Elena Devore’s daughter reminded me of Emma in a way. This was how she would act if she weren’t trying to conform to Sophia’s idea of a good witch. “What kind of magic does your family practice?”
“They mostly shift,” I said. “My grandmother can do some spells, but she never taught me.”
“Dark spells?” she asked.
I laughed. “My grandmother is the cheer coach at Deerfield High and has been doing that since she was in her twenties. My mother was a captain when she was in school, so was my sister, and one of my brothers was the first male member. So … no. Not dark spells.”
She smiled and kept mixing whatever it was that she was mixing in a small glass bowl. We were alone in their fancy dining room. Most of her family had gone out for drinks to drown the pain of our failure.
“It must suck,” she said, “to be the only interesting person in your family.” I twirled one of Kamon’s knives through my fingers and shrugged my shoulders. But it did suck. There was a solid ten-year span of my life where I wished I could just pick up pompoms and cheer like Hannah or sing like Michael or be interested in science and medicine like my mother.
“I don’t know what I would do without my family. We do everything together.”
“Like the typical family?” I asked, and smirked.
“I think we’re pretty typical. Families like ours have bad reputations. They call us covens, but really, two witches hanging out at the mall together could be a coven. It’s just a group, that’s just a title, and we’re just a family … a family that likes to kill together.” She laughed and poured something that smelled like strawberries into her mixture. “We’ve done that in secret for long enough. Our time has come to rule.”
“That sounds like something Kamon used to say. He thought that his time was coming when Lydia died, but …”
“I’m … very sorry for your loss. I really am. Lydia has taken many people from me, so I know how you feel. And one of her agents killed my brother recently. He wasn’t being very careful, and they got him. You’ll hear us saying his name from time to time. Brent. He was only twenty years old.”
Her face didn’t change at all when talking about her dead brother. Even saying Kamon’s name still felt like dying to me. Worse than dying. It felt like living without him.
“That’s why you’re rebelling against her?” I asked.
“Partly for Brent and partly because it’s just the right thing to do. Our people have suffered long enough, and we’ve waited long enough.”
“Why is that?” I asked. “Why wait? I know why my family would stay in hiding and follow Lydia’s rules, but why yours? Why would you live in secret like they want you to?”
“It takes a lot of preparation to bring a species out of hiding,” she said.
That wasn’t the same reason Kamon had given me. He’d thought it would cause more trouble than it was worth unless he was dead and didn’t have to deal with the consequences.
“We have to do things exactly right and be very careful. We’re good at that. We make very little noise, so no one knows we’re here. That makes it hard for people like Lydia to sense things about us. And we have spells that make their powers mostly useless. Thanks to us, they are currently in the midst of a psychic blackout. She won’t find us. No one can.”
She sounded a little cocky, but I didn’t mention it. As of now, we were on the same team.
“They can’t see anything?” I asked.
She shrugged. “They see what we let them see.” Her eyes lingered on my face long enough for me to remember that she was an evil witch and that I shouldn’t trust her. Something about the tilt of her head and the slight smile on her face made me think that she was setting me up for something.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I said, and gripped Kamon’s knife.
“No reason, Remi. I’m just so happy to have you here. Your ideas are impressive. My mother is so excited about what you can do for us. No pressure.” She laughed, but she’d said that in a haunting way. I suddenly felt pressured.
Someone cleared their throat, and I jumped. Carter smiled at me from the doorway, wearing another ridiculous suit. I froze and tried to think of a way to explain why I was in the house that he’d told me to stay away from.
“Sam,” he said. “I see you’ve met Remi.”
“I have, and if I’d known she was so cool, I would’ve asked you to introduce us sooner.” Carter smiled, really smiled, and turned to leave the dining room.
“Wait,” I said. “You’re not mad that I’m here?”
“No. I knew you would get restless in there. I’m psychic, remember?” For a moment, I thought he was acting like his old self, like my friend, but he didn’t make a silly face like I expected him to. The old Carter would have crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out at me.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I have some business to attend to. I’ll see you later.”
“Wait, we’re actually working on things, too.” He chuckled and kept walking. “Carter, come back.”
“I have to go, Remi. Have fun playing with silly witches who think they will rule the world. Sam and her family will be lucky if I let them live.”
Sam laughed and flipped him off. Carter left without giving me a chance to tell him how much I’d helped his friends. And to say they were his friends, he sure didn’t spend a lot of time with them.
“How do you know Carter?” I asked.
“We … used to be a thing.” My jaw dropped. “What? Why are you shocked?”
There were about a million reasons why I was shocked. I said the biggest one. “You’re not human.”
“No, but Carter doesn’t mind magic. He doesn’t like it, which is perhaps why we are no longer a thing, but he isn’t as hateful as all copies are supposed to be.” That was the only part of that explanation that I agreed with. He wasn’t a creep who lived in a cage, but the Carter I knew hated magic and anyone with it.
After meeting Sam and her family, I’d thought he was using them for their home, kind of like they’d used Devin, but now I didn’t know what to think.
“After the explosion, I contacted him because we share a common goal,” she said. “He wants revenge, and we want Lydia and her copy dead. We have different ideas on how to achieve that goal, but one of us will get there. He doesn’t believe that our rebellion will work, but he was raised to believe that he’s stronger than us. So I guess it’s like a competition between friendly exes who have agreed to live in peace after this game is over, no matter the winner.”
Carter had a lot of girlfriends, but I couldn’t imagine him with someone like Sam.
“Come with me,” she said. “I don’t want you to be bored in here. My uncle needs this.”
I followed Sam out of the dining room and into the first bedroom on the hall where Elena Devore and her brother were. They referred to the old man as Lord even though Elena was clearly in charge. The sixteen witches and wizards in their family seemed to respect him though. He only allowed Sam to drop his title and call him uncle. Elena was tending to a nasty wound on his arm. Nathan had dragged his flesh off of his bone and cracked that, too.
There was at least a slight chance that Nathan was dead and Christine’s life was ruined like mine was. But Nathan was a shifter who could heal quickly, so I didn’t allow myself to get too hopeful.
“Why aren’t you healing yourself with magic?” I asked.
“We don’t know enough about his pack,” he said, “so we don’t know what the bite will do. I don’t want to close the wound and leave anything inside of me. I’d rather not become a canine shifter today.”
He should’ve been more worried about his rancid arm getting infected than turning into a dog.
“Ghosts are born into their pack,” I said. “Kamon told me that. He used to hunt them. Julian wanted one as a trophy.”
Sam poured the slimy contents of the bowl onto her uncle’s arm, and it bubbled like peroxide on his wrinkled and bronzed skin. I couldn’t stomach the sight of his mangled flesh trying to stitch itself together, so I walked out of the door.
“Oh, Remi,” Elena said. “I was thinking about what you told me … about how Christine doesn’t die when you think she will die. He noticed that, too.”
“And?” I said.
She placed a towel on her brother’s nearly closed wound and smiled at me. “That reminds me of a spell from a book called Magic of the Dead,” she said. “Someone has given her a soul, and based on what you told us, I think I know who gave it to her and when it had to happen.”
“And?” I said again, trying to get to the point, the one that mattered most.
“And,” Elena said. “You’ve given us yet another idea. Our little heir may have a gift with the dead because of her mother. Spirits have a way of finding those with that gift, and I happen to know a lot of spirits.”