Not All Is as It Seems

This story was previously published in the anthology Temporally Out of Order, released by the small press Zombies Need Brains LLC, and is still in print. Used by permission.

Author’s note: This short story takes place (in the JY timeline) after Broken Soul and before Dark Heir.

I didn’t like moonless nights. Even with the protective ward up over the house and grounds, I felt isolated and vulnerable, not that I’d ever tell Big Evan. After years of struggling, his business had recently taken off, the result of an offer from the rich son of a sultan to create astounding and extravagant lighting for his string of casinos and clubs around the world. It required travel, this time back to Brazil for a week, which we all hated, but the gig was profitable enough for us to finally put money aside for the children’s educations. And Evan was making a name for himself and his fantastic lighting creations. He was fulfilled and excited. I could live with a little disquiet.

I finished washing dishes, listening to the kids play in their rooms, Angie talking to an imaginary friend or a doll or toy soldier and Little Evan making growling noises as he played with his newest toy bear. He’d picked it out himself, a pink bear with purple nose, paw pads, and eyes. Probably a girl’s toy, but no one cared in this household. Our children were being raised to express themselves and their imaginations as every proper, nascent witch should—

The ding on the wards interrupted my woolgathering. I dried my hands, spotting two figures standing on the street, side by side, slender males by their body shapes, possibly human, but they could be anything. There was no car by the road, so they had walked, or flown, or run. Or teleported. I studied them, and they didn’t move, though they could surely see me outlined in the lighted window. There was no movement, no small shifts of posture or weight distribution, no change in body position at all. I smiled grimly. It was one hour after dusk, the perfect time for vamps to come calling. Not that I ever had vamps come calling. But these two didn’t move, exactly the way vampires didn’t move, in that whole undead thing. With the Mithran/Witch Accords being planned, there was no way to ignore them or send them on their way.

I picked up the landline phone and held it up for them to see, then pointed at it to indicate I was checking them out. One bowed, an old-fashioned and proper bow. The other waved, a modern gesture.

Son of a witch on a switch! I have vamp callers.

I dialed Jane Yellowrock at Yellowrock Securities and went through the electronic procedures to be put through to my best friend. While I waited, I put on a kettle for tea. Even though things had been strained between us, I knew she would take my call. Jane killed rogue vamps for a living and there was no one better to give me advice. When she answered I said, “Big-cat, I’ve got vamps in front of the wards and my hubs is out of town.”

“Descriptions.” That was my pal: economy of, well, of everything.

I gave her the descriptions and heard her make a call on another line, her voice growing clipped, pointed, and slightly snarly. When she came back on she said, “Lincoln Shaddock sent them on an errand. I wasn’t able to find out what kinda errand. I don’t like it, though I have no reason to tell you to turn them into fried toads. Your call whether to let them in.” Jane sounded ticked off, letting me know that she was not happy that visitors had come calling without her prior approval. I had a feeling it wouldn’t happen again. Ever.

Turn them into fried toads was my BFF’s way of describing my new death magics, if used to defend myself. At the simple thought, I felt my powers rise, eager to be let loose, free and destructive. The only problem was that I might not be able to get them back under control. I could kill the ones I loved while trying to defend them. No. Not an option.

I breathed slowly, forcing the magics back down as I stared into the dark, watching the patient-looking vamps. With the accords so close, little moments like this might make a huge difference in vamp–witch relations for years to come. “I’m letting them in.”

“Your call,” she repeated. “I’ve sent a message to them that if they hurt you or yours, heads will roll.” Jane was a rogue-vampire hunter and the on-again/off-again Enforcer to the biggest, baddest fanghead in the Southeast, so when she said heads would roll, she meant it literally.

“Thanks. Later, Big-cat.” I ended the call and set the phone down. I held up one finger so the vamps would understand that I needed a moment, and went to my living room, where I prepared three defensive workings and one offensive working. The defensive ones would turn an attacker into fried vamp, which would take a long, painful time to heal, even with access to healing, master vamp blood. The offensive one would kill them true-dead.

I checked on the children, who were playing together now in Little Evan’s room, bear and toy soldiers in some form of Godzilla bear versus the U.S. Army. I closed the door and opened the front door. Night air breezed through, still warm from the day, but holding the bite of deepening night. I took another breath and let it out, thinking, Bite. Ha-ha. Nerves. I prepared the easiest defensive wyrd spell, dropped the ward with a thought, and waited.

The vamps walked slowly up the drive, not moving with vamp speed, but like humans, which should have put me at ease but didn’t. Nothing a vamp could do could put me at ease, not with Big Evan gone and me with the kids to protect. The vamps stopped a polite three feet from the open doorway and I looked them over. One was wearing jeans, his red hair in a shaggy, mid-eighties style, his hands clasped behind his back. The other had dark brown hair cut short, wore a suit and tie, and looked like a lawyer at first glance. Until I looked down at his hands. They were callused (strange among vamps) and stained with dye or ink—a working man’s hands, not the smooth hands of most dilettante vamps, letting humans do everything for them. Something about the man’s hands set me at ease, and I nodded once.

The suited one bowed slightly again, something military in the action, and offered me his full titles, in the formal way of vampires who want to parley. “Jerel D. Heritage, at your services, ma’am. Of Clan Dufresnee, turned in 1785 by Charles Dufresnee, in Providence, and brought south when Dufresnee acquired the Raleigh/Durham area. Currently stationed with Clan Shaddock of Asheville.”

The other vamp said, “Holly, turned by the love of my life in 1982, and now serving with my mistress, Amy, under Clan Shaddock.” Unassuming history, no last name, making him very young as vampires went. More interesting, he was ordinary-looking, until he smiled, a fangless, human smile, but one that transformed him into a beautiful man. I knew why Amy, whoever she was, had turned him. It was that smile. He tilted his head in a less formal bow than Jerel’s and yet somehow turned it into a graceful gesture. “We come in peace,” he said, the smile of greeting morphing into true humor.

Jerel looked like a fighter and a gentleman from his own age, a bit stiff, too formal for modern custom, yet the kind of man who stood by his word. Holly looked like a dancer and a poet. Yet, possibly, Holly might be the more dangerous of the two because he looked so unvampily kind. Looks can be deceiving.

Reluctantly I said, “Molly Everhart Trueblood, earth witch of the Everhart witches. I grant safety in my home to guests who come in peace.”

The two seemed to think about my words before they carefully stepped in. They took chairs in my great room, the space and furniture sized for Big Evan, oversized leather couches and recliners and lots of wood. The smaller vamps looked like Angie Baby’s dolls in the chairs. The one in the suit—Jerel—said, “We come at the request of the Master of the City of Asheville, to ask if you recently came into possession of a teapot.”

My brows went up, and I barely managed not to laugh. This visit by vampires was about a teapot? I said, “I drink black China tea when Jane Yellowrock, my friend,” I enunciated carefully, to remind them that I had friends in high vamp places, “is here to visit. I prepare herbal teas as needed for health. I have several teapots. None recently acquired.”

“We received a call from the Enforcer’s partner Alex Younger, while we awaited your response to our visit,” Jerel said. “No insult was intended in our unannounced arrival. Please allow me to explain.

“The Master of the City, Lincoln Shaddock, was turned in 1864. When he was freed from the devoveo—the madness that assaults our minds after we are turned—the first thing he did was visit his wife, though this was strongly opposed by his master. The year was 1874, and his wife had remarried. The meeting was . . . unfortunate.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

Holly smiled and Jerel frowned before going on. “The teapot we seek was his wife’s. It is a redware, hand-thrown, English-styled piece, salt-glazed in the local tradition, and painted with a yellow daisy.”

“I see,” I said, not seeing at all. My powers, my death magics, had begun to roil as he spoke. I held on to them with effort, trying to balance my waning earth magic with my growing death magic. “Again. I have acquired no teapot in the last few months and certainly not one like you described.”

“May we”—Jerel took a breath and his face twisted in what I might have assumed was human distaste, had I not known he drank blood for substance—“inspect your kitchen?” he asked.

I stood in surprise and said, “No. You may not.”

Angie Baby burst from behind the door opening and down the two steps into the great room, shouting, “You can’t have him! You can’t!” Child fast, she whirled, strawberry blond hair streaming behind her, and ran through the house. The door to her room slammed.

My mouth slowly closed; I hadn’t been aware that it hung open. Everything—every single thing—had just changed. “Will you do me the kindness of waiting here while I speak with my eldest?” I asked carefully. When they both nodded, as unsure as I was, I added, “There is a kettle of hot water on the stove. Tea is in the tin beside it. Please make yourselves at home in my kitchen. And if you take the opportunity to search for the teapot you desire, I assure you, it isn’t there.”

Jerel said, just as carefully, “As I recall, children are . . . difficult, at times.”

“Yes. I’ll return as soon as I know what’s going on.” They nodded and I followed my daughter to her room. When I was still several feet away, I heard the sound of furniture moving and realized that Angelina was barricading her door. My eldest, possibly the only preadolescent witch with two witch genes on the face of the earth, was hiding something. Something important. Something dangerous. Something that could hurt her? Had bespelled her?

I didn’t bother with simple responses. I unleashed the spell I had prepared for the vampires and blew her door off the hinges. It was a restricted spell, releasing and containing any debris, intended to toss vamps off my property but not injure them. Much. Angie’s door shuddered, tilted in from the top, and fell forward to rest upright against my daughter’s bed.

Big Evan would have some new things in his honey-do jar when he got home.

Angie was standing at the foot of the bed, fists on her hips, and shouted, “You broke my door!”

“Yes. I did,” I said as I crawled over the mess of the door, the bed, and the toy box, and into the room. Except for tears and an outpoked bottom lip, Angie Baby looked all right—no streams of black magic wafting off her, no dark manacles. Standing with my hands on my hips I demanded, “Young lady, what is going on?”

“George is mine. He came to me,” she shouted, arms out wide, her face red, tears streaking her cheeks. “They can’t have him!” She was positively furious. I struggled not to smile at the picture she presented; she needed only a sword and blue paint to look like a Celtic warrior princess, and something about her stance made me feel inordinately proud. My baby was defending something, not bespelled.

I sat on the foot of the bed and laced my fingers together. From behind me, my familiar—not that I had a familiar; no witches have familiars—leaped into the room and stalked across the bed, purring. I said, “Tell me about George.”

Angie’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but when I didn’t do anything more frightening, she opened her toy box and removed a teapot. It was redware, made from local red-brown clay and glazed in red-brown, except for the yellow daisy on the front. Angie cuddled the teapot like a doll in both arms. And I had never seen it before, which pricked all my protective instincts again. “How did you get it?” I asked. “Did you buy it with your allowance? Did someone give it to you?”

“No,” Angie said crossly. “It showed up in my toy box this morning. Like poof.” Like poof meant like a spell. Like magic. “Its name is George. It loves me.”

“May I hold it for a moment? Please?”

Angle scowled but passed the teapot to me. It tingled in my hands like an active working, a spell still strong. Worse, it felt . . . alive somehow. As if it quivered in terror. I handed it back to my daughter, who petted the teapot and said, “It’s okay, Georgie. I got you now. It’s okay.”

“Angie Baby, do you remember the time KitKit disappeared? We looked and looked and then we found her at Mrs. Simpson’s place, down the hill?” Angie’s scowl was back and, if possible, was meaner. “She was lapping up milk from a bowl and Mrs. Simpson was mincing salmon for her. KitKit had no interest in coming home, but she belonged here, with us. Remember? Mrs. Simpson gave her back to us.”

Angie looked down at the teapot, her hair falling forward over it, a tear splashing on the top handle. “But . . .” She stopped, sniffling. “Okay. But I wanna give George to them myself.”

“Okay. Can you be nice?”

“I don’t wanna be nice. But”—she sniffled—“I can be nice.”

I stood and grabbed up KitKit in one hand and helped Angie over the mess of her broken door with the other. In the great room, Angie, with huge tears racing down her cheeks, walked slowly over to the two vampires. They watched her come with strange lights in their eyes, and I realized that human parents didn’t allow their children anywhere near vamps. Human children, and especially witch children, were surely rarities in their lives. Angie stopped about six feet away, inspecting them. To Jerel, she said, “You’re not wearing a sword. You got one?”

“Yes, little witch child. I have a sword.”

“Can you use it good? Well?” she corrected before I could. “Can you use it well?”

“I can. I am a swords master as well as a master cabinetmaker.”

“You get to protect George and fight off the bad guys.” To Holly, she said. “Here. George is scared. It needs you to hold it close and pet it. Like this.” Angie demonstrated, one hand stroking the pot.

Holly knelt on one knee and extended his hands. Grudgingly Angie placed the teapot in his hands. Holly gathered it close, holding it as Angie had, and petted it. Angie let out a sob and raced to me, burying her face against my capri-clad thighs.

I pointed to the door and the vampires both bowed, so vampy formal, and departed, closing the door quietly. I watched and as soon as they reached the end of the drive, I raised the protective wards and pulled Angie to me on the couch. At the door to the hallway, Little Evan was hugging the jamb, crying in sympathy with his big sister. I held out a hand to him too, and we all four snuggled on the couch, my children, my unfortunate not-familiar, and me.

An hour later, as I was tucking a sleeping Angie back into bed, I heard another ward ding. I had a very bad feeling when I looked out and saw the same two forms at the end of the drive, illuminated by the security light. With trepidation, I went to the toy box and looked inside. The teapot was nestled into a corner.

I knew my daughter was strongly gifted with power, and she was probably capable of calling the pot back to her, but I hadn’t felt any kind of magical working in the house or on the grounds. Which meant the teapot had come back on its own or under another’s working. It might be a danger to us all. As if it were made of dynamite instead of fired clay, I lifted it from the box and carried it out onto the front lawn, to within four feet of the ward and within six feet of the vamps. Who now looked like what they were—dangerous predators; unhappy, dangerous predators.

“Do you taunt us with the return of our master’s teapot?” Jerel asked.

“No. It came back on its own.” Both vamps blinked, the twin gestures too human for the bloodsuckers. “It’s heavily spelled and seems to have a will of its own. I’d like to try an experiment. I’d like to drop the ward, hand you the teapot, and see what happens.”

“You did not call the teapot back to you?” Jerel asked.

“No. My word is my bond.”

Jerel nodded once, the gesture curt.

I dropped the ward, stepped to the vampires, placed the teapot in Jerel’s hands this time, and stepped back. The ward snapped back into place. Within thirty seconds, the teapot disappeared. “Not me. Not my magic. Certainly not my daughter’s magic.” I let derision enter my tone, because no witch’s gifts came upon them before they reached puberty. Except Angie’s. And that was a secret. A dangerous secret, to be protected as much as my children themselves.

The vamps looked from me to each other, and back. “What do we do now?” Holly asked.

“You will break this spell,” Jerel demanded.

“Tell me the tale of the teapot. And how the Master of the City knew it had appeared at my house. I’d be very interested in that one.”

Holly’s eyes went wide—human wide, not vamped-out. “That never occurred to me. Where did it come from and how did it get here, and how did our master know of it?”

“Right,” I said. “You go back to the vamp master and ask him those questions, because if he wants his teapot—or whatever it really is—back, I’ll need to know everything to break whatever spell is on it.”

“We will be back by midnight,” Holly said, excitement in the words.

“Wrong. I have a family and you two have intruded enough on family time tonight. You go back and chat with your master. I’ll see you an hour after dusk at Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café.”

“Your family business,” Jerel said, letting me know that my entire extended family could be in danger because of the blasted teapot.

“Tomorrow,” I said, and turned my back on the vamps. Secure behind the strongest wards that Big Evan and I could create, I walked slowly back to my house and shut the door on the bloodsuckers. And leaned against it, trembling. I was in so much trouble. I had less than twenty-four hours to break a spell on a weird teapot that was clearly far more than a teapot. No wonder Lincoln Shaddock wanted it, whatever it really was.

•   •   •

I got the children off to school in the morning, without letting Angie discover that the teapot had returned to her toy box, and texted my sisters: 911 my house. Hurry soonest after breakfast crowd. They’d all get here as fast as possible. The 911 call was used only for extreme emergencies. Meanwhile I set four loaves to rise and made salad enough for all of us, all my sisters. There were seven of us, or had been until our eldest had died after turning to the black arts. We were still grieving over that one. Four of us were witches, and the remaining two were human. Four of the youngest were taking classes at various universities and colleges in the area, but they’d get here any way they could after the 911 text. Family always came first.

•   •   •

Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, my air witch sister, set her toddler Iseabeal Roisin—pronounced Ish-bale Rosh-een—down at the door. Ishy ran, shouting for the cat—“Kekekeke”—her arms raised. The witch twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, had called in sick for their morning classes and closed the herb shop. Our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were the last to arrive, having cleaned up the café after the last of the breakfast crowd.

When we were all sitting in my kitchen, the toddlers happily talking to each other in incomprehensible kid language, I realized how long it had been since we’d sat like this, working on a magical problem. Since our eldest, Evangelina, had died as a result of consorting with demons. Well, at the hand of my BFF, but that was another story. We were all red-haired, some more blond, some more brown, some of us flaming scarlet. All of us with pale skin that simply couldn’t tan. All of us rowdy and chattering and happy to be together again. We had to do this more often. Not the teapot part, just the playing-hooky-and-visiting part.

To capture their attention, I centered the teapot atop the old farmhouse table, then caught them up on the teapot problem, the vamp problem, and the time limit problem. I had been studying the teapot for hours, so I already had some new things to share. “It isn’t, strictly speaking, just a teapot. It’s both a teapot and not a teapot, the result of a spell, and is magical, in some way, on its own. I can’t tell why it keeps coming back here and I can’t make it stay away.”

“Yeah,” the human Regan said. “That whole not having a magic wand really sucks.”

“Ha-ha,” Liz said, sounding bored with the oft-used banter.

“What I want to do is to raise the wards on the house, make a magic circle, and study it together.” I looked at the human sisters. “You two will have to babysit and keep watch. Pull us out if anything strange happens.”

“We always get stuck with babysitting duty,” Regan complained.

“Word,” Amelia said, sighing her agreement. “Fine. I’ll go play with the kiddies.” To her sister she said, “If you need help hitting them with a broomstick to break a circle, lemme know. I want in on some of that.”

I raised the house wards and my witch sisters made a protective circle around my kitchen table by joining hands. It wasn’t as formal as the circle in my herb garden, but it was enough to study the current situation. The combined magical power of the Everhart sisters is weighty, intense, and deep. It tingles on the skin, it whispers in the air, and in this case, it made a teapot spill its secrets.

Half an hour after staring, we broke for tea and slices of fresh bread with my homemade peach hot, untraditional peach preserves with chili peppers. While I put the snack together, Liz said, “His name is George.”

“Not he, as in a human he,” Cia said, “but a male something.”

“He stinks,” Carmen said. “A bit like muskrat. Or squirrel. Something rodent-ish.”

“I got wet dog out of the scent,” I said.

“Whatever he is, he’s alive,” Liz said.

“And not evil,” Cia added. “Trapped. The result of a hex.”

“Only a witch could have done a spell that captured a soul with a hex, and a blood witch at that,” Liz said, exasperated. Blood witches spilled blood to power spells. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Human sacrifice had been known to be involved in black-magic ceremonies.

As we talked, I passed out plates, butter, and the peach hot, and topped up our mugs. “It feels like wild magic. Something not planned, but the result of something else. As if the incantation is sparking off all over the place.”

“Why did it come here?” Cia asked.

“Opposites attract?” Carmen asked. “Your house is free and happy and he isn’t?”

“Maybe he thought you could free him?” Liz asked.

“Or the death magics pulled him in against his will,” the human twins said, nearly synchronous, walking into the kitchen together.

“Somebody didn’t call us for the eats. Bad sisters,” Regan said.

Amelia added, “Right. Evil sisters. And anyway, you left out the death-magic possibility. Maybe it’s here to get Molly to do something deadly to it.” No one replied, and I sat frozen in my chair, my hands cupped around my heated mug.

“What?” Amelia asked, her tone belligerent. “Sis, the witches among us were there when your magic turned on the earth.”

“The rest of us saw the garden of death afterward,” Regan added.

“And we all know it’s still dead,” Amelia said. “Doesn’t take a witch to know that nothing will ever grow in that soil again.”

“And then there’s the whole thing about your familiar keeping you in control,” Regan said, the conversation ping-ponging as my world skidded around me.

“And about the music spell Big Evan made to keep your magics under control,” Amelia said. “Not talking about this is stupid. Gives it power.”

Regan said, “My twin is taking her second year of psychology. Pass the cream. Thanks. She’s teacher’s pet because she can add the witch perspective to the psycho stuff.”

Amelia huffed with disgust. “Not psycho stuff. That’s rude to people with emotional or mental disorders or illness.” Regan rolled her eyes and buttered her bread, taking a big bite.

The time my human sisters argued allowed me to settle. “Okay.” The Everharts went still as vamps themselves. Because Amelia was right. It wasn’t something we talked about. Ever. And secrets, things hidden, buried, and left to molder in the dark of one’s soul, did give evil the power to rule. “So,” I said, taking a fortifying gulp of tea. “What do you think about the death magics? Did the teapot come to me to die?”

My sisters all broke into talking at once, suggesting things like meditation and prayer, singing chants, spells to disrupt my death magic, and hinting that we simply bust the teapot and see if that would work to free the trapped soul. At that one, the teapot vanished, and appeared instantly back in hiding in my daughter’s toy box. Liz dubbed it the teleporting teapot. Then the human sisters cleared the table and started research into Lincoln Shaddock’s history, trying to find out about his relationship to witches and the teapot. There was nothing in the standard online databases, but I had an ace in the hole with Jane Yellowrock. She had tons of data on vamps, including Lincoln Shaddock, and she sent it to us, no questions asked. The information she offered confirmed the vamps’ story.

Shaddock had been turned after a battle in the Civil War. When he came through the devoveo, he traveled to find his family. His wife had remarried and moved south. She rejected him. According to the data, there was evidence that she was an untrained, unacknowledged witch, not uncommon in those witch-hating times. There was nothing about a teapot, not that it mattered.

By lunchtime, we had a plan. Of sorts.

•   •   •

We closed the café and the herb shop at dusk, and rearranged the tables so there was an open place in the middle of the café. All of us, children, witches, and humans, stood in the middle, circled around the toy box with its magical teleporting teapot, held hands, warded the space where we would work, and blessed our family line with the simple words, “Good health and happiness. Protection and safety. Wisdom and knowledge used well and for good. Everharts, ever hearts, together, always.” Then we broke the circle and the human twins piled our children into my car and headed back to my house. We witches? We waited.

Seven Sassy Sisters’ was decorated in mountain country chic, with scuffed hardwood floors, bundles of herbs hanging against the back brick wall, tables, and several tall-backed booths, seats upholstered with burgundy faux leather and the tables covered with burgundy and navy blue check cloths. The kitchen was visible through a serving window. It was comfortable, a place where families and friends could come and get good wholesome food, herbal teas, fresh bread, rolls, and a healing touch if they wanted it. We also served the best coffee and tea in the area. But it wasn’t the sort of place that vampires, with their fancy-schmancy, hoity-toity attitudes, would ever come. Until they knocked on the door just after dusk.

This time there were four vamps: Holly, his red hair in a ponytail; Jerel; a blond female vamp wearing a fringed leather vest, jeans covered in bling, and cowboy boots; and Lincoln Shaddock. He bore a striking resemblance to the actor in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a beak-nosed frontiersman, but with a clean-shaven chin, tall, rawboned, and rough around the edges. Unlike most vamps, who dressed for effect, Shaddock was wearing dark brown jeans and a T-shirt with a light jacket. And an honest-to-God bolo tie with a gold nugget as the clasp.

I took a steadying breath and unlocked the door, stepping back as they filed in and stood in a semicircle on one side of the toy box. The witches stood ranged on the other side. Holly said, “May I present—”

The outer door slammed open and Angie Baby raced inside, strawberry blond curls streaming and tangled, face flushed and sweaty. She had run from . . . somewhere. She dashed between us, rammed the toy box open, grabbed the teapot, and screamed, “George is mine! He likes me, not you!” And . . . she stuck her tongue out at Lincoln Shaddock, the most important master vamp in the Appalachian Mountains.

We were all frozen, my sisters in horror, me in sudden, blinding fear for my child, Jerel with a sword half-drawn, Holly with a bemused smile on his face, and Shaddock in . . . fury. Utter, encompassing fury. His pale skin flushed with blood, his eyes vamping-out, the pupils widening, white sclera flaming scarlet as the capillaries dilated. And his fangs clicked down from the roof of his mouth, the snap the only sound in the dead-silent room. Then everything happened at once.

Lincoln pointed a long, bony finger at Angie and took a single step toward her.

Moving faster than I could follow, Jerel drew his sword with a soft hiss of steel on leather. Holly stepped toward Angie Baby. Both vamps put themselves between my daughter and the enraged vampire. Jerel pointed his sword at his master’s throat. Holly maneuvered, bare-handed, his feet rooted and knees bent, clearly much more dangerous than he appeared—a martial art master of some form or other. Or several. Bladed. That was what Jane called it. His body was bladed. He was primed to attack his boss.

Lincoln slowed but shouted, “Witches deal falsely! We will have our property!”

“Children are sacrosanct, my lord,” Jerel said softly.

“It would pain us to bring you harm,” Holly said, his red ponytail swinging.

“I am not ready to become the MOC, just yet, honey, but if you hurt that young ’un, I’ll let ’em take your head,” the blonde said, which identified her as the heir apparent of the Shaddock Clan, Dacy Mooney. And she too stepped between the vamp and the rest of us. I remembered to breathe and reached for Angie, pulling her close enough for Carmen to activate the ward we had prepared. It closed us in and closed the vamps out. “Take a good cleansing breath, Link,” Dacy said. “Relax. Or it will be the last time you lose your temper.”

Outside, my van squealed into the lot and stopped hard. The twins bailed out before the vehicle even stopped rocking, one holding two handguns, the other with a shotgun. “Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed softly.

“I’m not here as the blood-master of my clan,” Lincoln Shaddock said with a strong Tennessee/Kentucky accent. “I’m here to regain what I lost.”

“We all want to regain what we lost when our humanity left us,” Dacy said, “but we got rules and limits. And memories. That has to be enough,” she finished, her tone telling how much she had lost and how painful memories could be.

“Children. Are. Sacrosanct,” Jerel said, his tone adamant, light glinting off the steel of his long sword.

The twins moved into the room and positioned themselves so they could shoot Shaddock and not one of us. Holly shifted so he could get to Regan and Shaddock both. His face was intent, focused, and troubled. He would kill if he had to. But he clearly didn’t want to.

Lincoln blinked and looked at my daughter, cradling a reddish and yellow teapot like a pet. His fangs clicked back into his mouth. His eyes paled and lightened, as did his skin. And he blew out a puff of breath as if he really needed to breathe for something other than talking. He looked up to me. “My apologies, ladies. I am . . . not myself tonight, I haven’t been myself ever since I felt the burst of magic. I raced to see if . . .” He paused and shook his head as if changing what he had been about to say. “But it was only the teapot. But the teapot was better than nothing. Better than the nothing that I had. I ask your forgiveness.”

And then he did the strangest thing. The fiercest fanghead in the hills dropped to one knee. The three defending vampires stepped slightly to the side so Lincoln could see us, but not so far that he could get to us if he still wanted. He said to Angie Baby, “I especially beg your forgiveness, little witch child. I was distraught and forgot how frightening my kind can be.”

“George is scared of you,” Angie said.

Lincoln smiled, a purely human smile, and said, “No. The dog was named George, not the teapot.”

Angie narrowed her eyes fiercely. “What kind of dog?”

Lincoln’s smile widened. “A basset hound. He was my best, my very best, dog. Ever. I gave him into my Dorothy’s keeping before I went off to war. He was ancient and toothless and fierce in protecting her when I appeared that night. Until he caught my scent. There must have been something still of the human scent about me. For he came to me when my Dorothy would not.”

“Bassets weren’t imported to the U.S. until the late eighteen hundreds,” Regan said, her shotgun broken open and resting on a table, her eyes on her tablet.

“Incorrect,” Shaddock said, as if a discussion about basset hounds were the purpose of this gathering. As if he hadn’t just threatened my baby. “George Washington himself received a pair of bassets from Lafayette.”

“Huh. Yeah. You’re right. Legend, unsupported.”

“Truth,” Lincoln said.

I asked, “What did you hope when you felt the magic last night?”

Shaddock shook his head slowly, in sorrow. “The foolish dreams of an old man. When my Dorothy rejected me, she threw out a . . . It was as if I was hit with a bolt of lightning. I never saw the like, not before, not after. When I came to, my wife was gone, along with the teapot she had been holding, and the old dog. Gone and never returned, never seen again. Last evening, I felt the same jolt of power, of lightning, and I ran to the old log cabin, hoping . . . hoping foolishly.” He shook his head. “Hoping that my Dorothy had come back to me. Somehow.”

Dacy Mooney said, “By all that’s holy. That’s why you kept that old cabin? Hoping your wife would come back?”

“’Tis so, Dacy. Foolish. I know. Foolish,” he shook his head. “She returned to her husband. She lived on until her natural death.”

“Had you been bleeding when you woke from your wife’s”—temper tantrum wouldn’t work—“anger?” I asked.

“Yes. I had healed, but I could still smell my blood, going sweet and rancid on the air. How did you know?”

Because wild magic did this. And wild magic is even stronger with blood, I thought, though I didn’t share this with Shaddock. Carefully, feeling my way, I said, “There is a spirit trapped in this teapot. It isn’t human. It’s possible, maybe, that the dog’s soul is stuck in the teapot and it is tied to your blood.”

“George doesn’t like you,” Angie Baby said. “Weeell, he likes you, but he’s mad at you.” Her eyes went wide. “He’s pooping on your pillow!”

Lincoln dropped to the floor, sitting on a level with my baby, eye to eye, on the far side of the ward. He looked awestruck, if vamps could look struck with awe. “I went away for a week,” he said, “to do business in town, to register to fight in a war I never wanted. George was but a few months old. When I returned he raced to our marriage bed and he . . .” Lincoln’s smile went wide. “He defecated on my pillow.” Lincoln’s eyes rested on the teapot in Angie’s arms. “Oh my God. It’s George.” He held out his hands, beseeching. “I never wanted to leave you. Never. War was never my desire.”

Angie scowled so hard she looked like that Celtic warrior, fierce and unyielding. My baby was going to grow up . . . a warrior. A true warrior. Pride filled me. I said, “Angie? What do you think?”

Still scowling, Angie walked to the edge of the ward and I quickly dropped it. For all I knew, my powerful child could walk straight to them with no ill effect, but I didn’t want that to get around, if so. Grudgingly she placed the teapot in Lincoln’s outstretched hands and he gathered the reddish and yellow teapot close, stroking it, murmuring, “I am so sorry. I beg your forgiveness. And yours, little witch child. Most earnestly.” To me he said, “I owe you and yours a boon, whatever you may want, at a time of your choosing. If it is within my power to provide, it shall be yours.”

I wasn’t holding my breath for that. “Angie, go to your aunt Regan.” My daughter walked around Lincoln, sitting on the shop floor, cuddling a teapot, and took her aunt’s hand, her face long and woebegone. I was pretty sure Regan hissed a threat to beat her black and blue if she ever jumped out of a moving car again. And then hugged her fiercely. I’d deal with my daughter later. For now, we still had vampires in my family business, and vamps still drank blood. Dangerous, even if they did look cute and defenseless sitting on the floor.

“Ummm,” I said. “We may have a way to free George.” If it really was the spirit of a dog stuck inside the stoneware teapot. “But we need the teapot back for a bit.” Without hesitation, Shaddock placed it on the toy box and took a step back to the tables and chairs that we had placed along the wall. Holly pulled out a chair and Link sat, his eyes never leaving the teapot.

It was a wild magic spell, somehow tied to Shaddock, for him to have felt the reappearance after so many years. I didn’t ask where the teapot had been, but I had a bad feeling that Dorothy’s wild magic had knocked it out of its own timeline and into the future a century and a half or so. The four of us witches stood at the four cardinal points, circled around the toy box, hands clasped. As eldest, I took north, even with my magic so damaged and me having to rein in my death magics beneath fierce will.

Together we said the words to an old family spell, softly chanting. The wyrd spell was originally meant to heal that which had been wounded by black magic. “Cneasaigh, cneasaigh a bháis ar maos in fhuil,” we said together. The rough translation, from Irish Gaelic: “Heal, heal, that which is soaked in blood.”

We chanted the words over and over as our power rose. And rose. I closed my eyes, feeling my sisters’ magic flow through me and through the floor, into the earth. Fecund and rich and potent. Power. Life. And when our massed magics were meshed and full, we directed the working, like a pin, a pick, an awl, directly at the teapot.

It shattered.

Pieces flew through the air, and beyond the circle, breaking it. The power that we had been using blazed up and out in a poof of heated air and broken stoneware. We ducked. Shattered pottery crashed into the floor and walls. And into Lincoln Shaddock’s bony knees.

The vamps reacted faster than I could see, racing at us, weapons to hand. Ready to kill.

“George!” Angie Baby shouted, and broke free from a dumbfounded Regan to throw herself at the multicolored, long-eared dog standing on the toy box. He licked her face and nuzzled her. And then he turned to stare at Lincoln. He sniffed, smelling, tasting the air, redolent with the ozone of burned power and vampire blood.

“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered. “It worked.”

George slowly dropped his front paws off the box and waddled to his old master, to Lincoln, licking the trace of blood off Lincoln’s bleeding knees.

“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered again. “It really worked.”

Lincoln Shaddock dropped again to the floor and pulled George into his arms. He was crying, purely human tears, and the old dog licked them from his cheeks. Lincoln chuckled and rubbed the basset behind the ears. “You are a sight for sore eyes, you are, old boy. Good old boy. Good George.”

It was the first major working we had done as a family since we’d lost our coven leader and big sister. Tears fell down my face in joy and delight and excitement. My earth magics weren’t what they had been before. But they weren’t dead. Not yet.

•   •   •

One week later to the day, there came a knock on the wards. Holly and Jerel stood there, in the dusky night, waiting patiently. Carrying KitKit, I went to the front door and dropped the wards. When the vamps reached the porch, Jerel bowed again, stiffly formal, and opened a folded note. Vamps have great night vision, and when he read, I had no doubt he could see the words.

“Lincoln Shaddock, Blood-Master of Clan Shaddock, does not forget his promise of a boon to Molly Everhart Trueblood and to Angelina, her daughter. But he offers this small token of thanks, for the memories and humanity gifted by the child and her tender care of his beloved dog, George.”

Holly knelt and set a small bundle on the grass at the bottom of the low porch. “He is from a line of champions. And his name is George.”

From behind me, Angie squealed and threw herself off the porch and directly at the basset puppy. The two tumbled across the night-damp grass and rolled, the puppy licking her face. In my arms, KitKit struggled and scratched and hissed, and made a twisting, leaping, flying movement out of my arms, over my shoulder and back inside. The puppy, seeing the movement, raced after, managing to trip over his huge paws and step on his own ear, sending him flying. Angie, to my horror, whirled and threw herself into Holly’s arms for a hug that left him shocked and motionless on his knees, and then slammed into Jerel to hug his knees. And then she was gone, inside, chasing after the pets. Oh dear. I had a dog. Big Evan would be home tomorrow and . . . we had a basset.

Before he stood, Holly removed something from his pocket and handed it to me. “Final thanks,” he said, backing away, “but not a boon.”

I looked down at my hand and saw what looked like a diamond. Payment for an old dog was a diamond? A diamond? When I looked up, the vamps had gone, disappeared into the shadows. I closed the door and reset the wards. And went to check on my enlarged family.

Big Evan would have a cow.