It’s Too Dark to See, But I’m Rolling My Eyes
Not long after dark, Eli and I drove up to the Elms Mansion and Garden and parked on a side street. I was in street clothes instead of the new gear, because the smell of the leathers was too much for my sensitive nose. I had tried them on, however, and they were luscious, but not luscious enough to wear without a really good airing out.
The weather was cool, the humidity was low for New Orleans, and the sunset had been spectacular, a red wash across the western sky. As we walked up, we saw five witches warding the grounds: Lachish, her gray hair like steel in the garden lights, Molly with her glorious cap of curls, and three others. One was Bliss, and the young woman had changed a lot since she accepted that she was a witch and began training. She was still ethereally beautiful, with very pale skin and black hair, but she no longer lived at Katie’s Ladies, no longer serviced vamps and bigwigs in town by donating blood or other services. And she no longer went by Bliss, but by her given name, Ailis Rogan. I inclined my head, letting her know that I recognized her, but didn’t go over. I wasn’t sure how much of her past she had shared with others. There were two more witches I had met before, Butterfly Lily and her mother, Feather Storm. Neither was a powerful witch, but they were useful to route magical workings through, when a full coven of powerful witches was unavailable, as for this test.
Big Evan stood to the side. In order to protect his children, he hadn’t outted himself, and he was here incognito, wearing a ball cap and sunglasses, looking like a bored human husband, but watching everything with a keen eye.
The five witches had drawn a witch circle that covered the house, the extensive grounds in back, the large central patio directly behind the house that lined up with a gazebo and a statue, the garden areas, the trees that lined the property, part of the sidewalks, and the curb at St. Charles Avenue. In back, the witches were standing at pentagram points with Lachish at north, and the two weaker witches standing in between the stronger witches. Moving sunwise, it was Lachish, Butterfly Lily, Molly, Feather Storm, and Ailis/Bliss. By pulling on Beast-vision, I could see the working as it unfolded, rising very slowly from the circle and beginning to lift to cover the house and grounds.
Jodi and Sloan Rosen were standing outside the house grounds and the warding, watching the witches work. Jodi was a small, curvy blond, who was the public face of NOPD’s paranormal department, while Sloan spent most of his time in the bowels of the woo-woo room in research. Not that Sloan couldn’t do the same job as Jodi, but he had a huge price on his head, put there by the local chapter of some big gangs. Sloan had been undercover with them and had barely gotten out with his head—and loads of info on the gangs. If it hadn’t been dark, I doubted he’d be in public.
In the middle of St. Charles Avenue, in front of the Elms, Derek and his small, loyal, most experienced team of men were working on issues related to parking and witch safety during and after streetcar transportation up and down the major thoroughfare. Safety for the streetcar was paramount, as so many out-of-towners would be using the streetcar for transportation between the Elms and nearby or French Quarter hotels.
“Jodi,” I called out. She started to reply but snapped her head to the circle. The sizzle of magics interrupted, of a working shattering, swept over me, scorching hot, lifting the hairs on my body and up my neck. I inhaled and caught the stink of ozone, the smell of smoke.
In an instant, everything went wrong, in overlapping impressions and sensations.
Big Evan roared with pain. He threw his head back, spine arching, and cartwheeled into the circle, through the rising magics, to land on the grass. Fire flared from one arm and both legs, the stink of burning flesh on the air. Smoke rose in puffs and spirals. The circle and warding began to fall.
And the faint stink of old iron and salt came from all around.
Along with Eli and Jodi, I raced for Big Evan. But the working hadn’t completely fallen and I caught the others, holding them back. “It’s not down yet,” I said. Eli jerked free and sped into the dark, for what, I didn’t know. I pulled Jodi away, and signaled to Derek to keep his men away, watching helplessly as Evan rolled in the grass, trying to put out the flames. Roaring with pain and anger.
I could enter the Gray Between and crawl through the falling energies, but at the thought, my belly wrenched with what I hoped was only phantom pain. I might die before I ever got to Evan. I ground my teeth against the fear and reached inside myself to touch my skinwalker magics, gathering them. Just in case.
Jodi pulled her radio and identified herself and her twenty, which was cop-speak for location, as she gave the Elms’ address. The witches in the working struggled to hold the degrading circle, trying to keep it from exploding or imploding or whatever was trying to happen.
Molly shouted her husband’s name, but didn’t move from her place as she and the other four witches gathered the energies of the circle and the incipient ward, as if pulling huge cables, coiling them on the ground, lowering the power into the earth, grounding the energy. From Evan, broken energies sparked and sizzled and flew into the air. Though he had to be in horrible pain, he was trying not to use his air magics to put out the fire, which would have been a snap. But not today, not in front of witnesses, and not against the green flames.
“—Medic!” Jodi demanded, and I realized she was still speaking into her official police radio, words fast and clipped. “We need an ambulance at the Elms on St. Charles and Eighth. Single burn victim. Paranormal injury, accidental or criminal, unknown. I want marked cars at Seventh, Eighth, and Harmony streets to keep the public back.”
Someone said, “Ten-four, Detective.” There was a click and to me Jodi said, “Did you see what happened?”
“Something went wrong with the circle, and then Evan jumped inside it, which is either the height of stupidity or something heroic,” I said, trying to figure out why Evan had thrown himself into the ward. He had to have seen something dangerous inside, but I couldn’t spot anything.
Evan was still rolling, and with Beast-vision, I could see gold energies cocooning his body as he drew on his personal protection magics, but the flames weren’t going out. Green flames. Green magic, attacking Evan. “The fire has weird green tints,” I said. “It isn’t an ordinary fire. It’s magic.” And it was attacking Evan.
“It’s a targeted spell,” Jodi added grimly, drawing the same conclusion.
I pulled my skinwalker energies out, a gray and silver cloud of my magic, the Gray Between, laced through with darker silver-gray motes of dancing power. I wasn’t planning on bubbling time, but already my guts twisted, a taste of blood in the back of my throat.
The ward fell. Molly dropped the powers she had been holding and raced toward her husband, her hands doing something, too fast to see. Eli sprinted in from the side carrying his medical gobag, a blanket, and a fire extinguisher. He tossed the bag and extinguisher to me and shook out the blanket on the run. He threw it on Big Evan and rolled the much larger man in it, applying his own body weight and slapping with his hands to smother the weird green flames. The purely mundane remedy was working. I let go of my own power, swallowed back the vile taste of blood, pulled the pin on the bright red extinguisher, raced forward, and aimed carbon dioxide at the burning grass, the white cloud suffocating the last of the fire. It took longer than it should have to kill the flames on the grass, and the stench of ozone mixed with iron and copious amounts of salt hung heavy on the air by the time the last flame died.
Molly and Eli were kneeling beside Evan. Lachish stood at his head and Bliss/Ailis at his feet, already working to dampen his pain and speed healing, which was Ailis’s special gift. I could see the brilliant energies, blues and purples, blending into a dark but vibrant working.
Big Evan sighed as the working descended and his pain began to ease. Tears and mucus glistened on his face. “I’m okay, Mol. Let me see.”
“No! Don’t look.”
He caught both of her hands in his one unburned, catcher-mitt-sized hand, and the blanket slid down. “You know I’m going to look,” he said with a pained version of his old smile. He did. The shreds of his clothes were charred; his left arm and both legs looked like raw meat; the red body hair and outer skin were gone, as if blisters had formed and burst, exposing cooked muscle and blackened, ropy veins. “Well, dang. I won’t look so pretty at the beach next summer, but at least I still have my limbs.” He let Molly go and touched his face, sounding mournful. “It burned off part of my beard.”
“Evan!” Molly was crying, but not tears of fear or worry. Molly was mad. Which was dangerous on all sorts of levels. Molly had death magics to control and hide, and being angry tended to bring them to the surface.
“I’m fine, sweetheart,” Evan said. “Breathe.”
“You breathe!”
Evan laughed, the sound pained and a little wild. “I am. That’s the important thing to remember. I’m still breathing.”
“Nothing a little vamp blood won’t heal,” Eli said. Four of the witches whipped their heads to him, clearly scandalized. “Not that your spells aren’t great and all, ladies, but I know this vampire? And he’ll be happy to heal. He even swore an oath to do anything necessary to help.” Eli gave me an evil grin. “Perfect time to test out that primo promise.”
“Right,” I said, relief scudding through me. “Get Alex to send Edmund here.” I stopped, thinking about what I had just said. I was treating Edmund like a blood-slave, which made me no better than a vamp. I rubbed my head and drew on the hard-taught manners I so seldom used. I rephrased, “Please ask Alex to please request the presence of Edmund here.”
Eli gave a half-smothered, derisive breath at my polite words.
“Molly, remember what Edmund promised. Evan will be fine. He’ll see it happens. But what we need right now is for you, all of you, to tell us what happened.”
“I’m breathing,” Evan said, his voice tight with pain, “so I can talk.” In the distance multiple sirens sounded as police and ambulances closed in from every direction.
“Okay,” Molly said, though it was a lie. She wasn’t okay at all. But the word meant that she was reining in her anger.
I knelt beside Evan as Molly lent her Earth magics to helping Evan with pain relief, tears drying on her face. “Evan,” I said, “you were outside the circle, and Jodi and I smelled a spell go bad. And then you jumped into the circle. And then we saw that you were on fire. Did you go on fire before you jumped into the circle or after? How do you remember it?”
“I didn’t jump inside. I’d have broken the circle.”
“You did jump,” Lachish said. “The circle didn’t break and it should have.”
“No, no,” Jodi said, her eyes holding a faraway stare. “There was the circle you had already raised, and then the ward you were starting to raise. And there was a third working. Something outside that was activated before Evan jumped into the circle, before he caught on fire. And it wasn’t your workings. I smelled something odd.” Jodi pulled out a psy-meter and started scanning the grounds.
“Iron and salt,” I said. “And here all along I thought that salt and iron were the antithesis to magic.”
“Nothing is ever an absolute,” Jodi said. “So that means the circle itself may have been a target instead of a bystander. Is that even possible?”
“It’s possible,” Lachish said, drawing out the word, sounding uncertain.
“Explain,” I said.
“There are two ways it might work. One: a group of witches were nearby with a working in process. Then our working triggered it, attracting it to us. The timing and similarity of energies being raised would have to be impeccable, which, to my mind, rules out an accidental merging. Two, which is much more likely: there was a booby trap working on the grounds, and when we raised the circle, and triggered the hedge of thorns ward, our actions activated the concealed working. The explosion was close enough to Evan to propel him into the circle.”
“That’s it,” Evan rasped. “The magic was under my feet. It exploded upward and threw me inside.”
I remembered the spell that had knocked Evan flat to his back earlier in the morning. That might have made him more likely to be hit again, but I didn’t want to say that aloud. “Okay. Assuming door number two,” I said, “and assuming Evan was an accidental target instead of the intended target, what would be needed for a booby trap?”
“A focus is the easiest method,” Lachish said.
“That’s it,” Big Evan repeated, now sounding dreamy, as Molly’s and Ailis’s magics pulled his pain away. I wondered if the young, untrained, and inexperienced witch could tell Evan was a witch, but she didn’t act odd, so I guessed not.
Emergency vehicles closed in on the Elms, the sirens doing that house-to-house fast echo of a neighborhood in the muggy South. “Yeah,” Evan said. “I saw a green leaf iron . . . focal.” And he was suddenly asleep, knocked out by the healing spell.
I knelt and checked his palms. Nothing there except blisters on the burned one. Eli said, “Jane, my cell just went out.”
“Lachish,” I said, pulling my own cell, “we need to keep everyone away from here, away from Evan, away from the circle. You know that my house has been attacked twice, by two witches using iron focal items. So was I, personally. Evan got some of the backlash.” I took a surreptitious look at my left palm, which was unmarked, no green eye there. Thankfully. I scrubbed my palm on my pants before opening my phone. “Alex sent you the photos. Did you recognize anyone through the pixelated-out mess?”
“No,” she said. “Their body shapes might have been any of dozens of witches in the state. But there was nothing visible of their faces.” Which I knew.
“My phone’s out too,” I said to them, poking at the dead screen. “Proximity to the broken circle?”
Lachish said, “It could be. Or it could be a multilayered spell with interrupted communications as part of it.” She looked at Jodi, who immediately started barking orders at the officers, to cordon off the whole block. Too many things were going on, going wrong, and I tried to think, while Jodi, standing on the patio tiles, waved the approaching ambulance into a parking spot. I could hear the voices as they explained to the cops and the paramedics what the witches were doing and what the holdup was. The cops checked their cells, to discover that they were out. Even their radios were nonfunctional, though the car engines themselves were seemingly fine. While the human cops cordoned off the area, I walked around the healing working and murmured to Molly, “Where are your kids?”
“Being watched over by a teenager playing World of Killer-Death-Something, and a werewolf.” She sounded wry, as if her life had taken off on an inexplicable tangent and nothing made sense anymore.
“Can you find any other icons that might be on the grounds?” I asked, not adding, Like Evan did.
“Yes, I think so.” To Lachish, she said, “I think he’ll sleep now. The ambulance is here. We should clear a path from the street to Evan first, and get him to the hospital, where the vampire can help heal him.”
“I wouldn’t let a fanghead touch my—” Lachish stopped. “Never mind. Things change. Maybe the suckheads have changed too.” More reluctantly she added, “And if it was my husband there, hurt, I’d strip naked and slow-dance with a vamp for the chance to get him help. You’re right. We need Evan in a safer place so we can tackle the whole yard.”
“Good enough,” Molly said, tension leaking away, making her shoulders droop. “And by the way, you and Jane need to go over the list of witches who were at the cemetery when Jane was struck by lightning, and add a few last names. She has a right to personal protection. She has a right to see which witches might be responsible for the attack on her.”
“None of my coven would be involved,” Lachish said, her chin up and shoulders hunched in what looked like a pugilistic stance.
“You’re probably right,” Molly said, her tone composed and serene, “but it’s smart to consider everything. No stone unturned, you know?” she said.
Lachish didn’t like it, but she gave me a curt nod. She gave Molly a small come this way gesture with her fingers and said over her shoulder, “We can start at the ambulance and work our way to Evan. Then once he’s in the ambulance, we can clear the yard, beginning at the area where your husband entered the circle. We need to find out what attacked him and how he was able to enter without breaking the energies. The circle should have stopped him.”
Molly’s expression didn’t change, but her scent went to panic, fast. Lachish didn’t know that Big Evan was a male witch—whose magics had never been studied—and this wasn’t the time to explain it all.
Speaking loud, I said, “It could be part of the focals’ working. First disrupt a working and its ward, and then allow people in to attack. All you have to do is figure out how to defend against both parts. Or it might be because he was in the backlash of the same kind of magics today.”
Molly blinked and said, “Exactly,” maybe a little too emphatically, but Lachish was already on the far side of the patio, bending over a place in the grass, a spot of browned grass similar to the ones at my house.
Lachish said, “There’s something here—”
“Don’t touch it!” I shouted.
The explosion threw the witch across the grass, toward the ambulance. Dirt and grass and two tree branches blew outward. Beast shoved me into action and I threw myself over Molly to protect her. Eli hit the earth. So did two of the uniformed cops. Jodi and all the other officers drew their service weapons. One raced to unlock bigger firepower and came out with a city-issued automatic rifle.
“Get off me, you big oaf,” Molly said, pushing at me. “I’m suffocating here.”
I rolled to the side and got to my feet, pulling her with me and running my hands over her and her baby bump, leaning in and breathing her scent deep. Molly wasn’t fine, but she wasn’t bleeding or leaking amniotic fluid from the concussive release of magic. Lachish, however, wasn’t moving. “Lachish is hurt,” I said. “Stay with Evan and keep his healing wards up. Don’t wander.” I spotted Bliss—Ailis—standing in the shadow of the back door, with a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. The elegant hostess, Amalie, stood beside her, face pale and drawn. “Ailis,” I said.
“The explosion shut off my cell phone,” she said. “I don’t know how to summon yet, so I was going to call in some more of the circle to help, but the phone is fried.”
“I know. I need you over there.” I pointed at Lachish, whose blood I smelled on the air. I walked slowly across the lawn toward Lachish, my eyes on the ground. But it was getting darker and even pulling on Beast-vision I couldn’t see well enough to step safely. “Watch the ground for any indication of dead grass or magics.”
She came, feet uncertain, eyes wide, watching the ground, and followed in my footsteps to Lachish. The coven leader was bleeding from the mouth, her left arm looked as if it had an extra elbow above the wrist, and her lower left leg was deformed. Both leg bones were broken, not quite compound fractures, but close. But she was breathing and her heart was beating. “Don’t touch her until the paramedics can get here. Set a healing circle,” I said, “and”—I looked around—“where are the two aka witches?” I asked, meaning Butterfly Lily and Feather Storm.
“They took off the moment the circle was down.”
“Guilty or afraid?”
“Terrified,” Ailis said. “I have the healing circle up. I can hold it for a while alone, but I’m not used to using my gifts, so . . .” She opened her lips to drag in a deeper breath, and finished, “So I can’t promise anything.”
“You didn’t run,” I said. “You could have. I’m proud of you.” Ailis sent me a smile that suggested I shouldn’t be proud just yet because she might still run, but she returned her attention to Lachish.
Carefully I walked to the side street. “Eli,” I said as I neared, speaking softly, “the magic may have been intended to interfere with communications too.”
“You think we set off a prepared working early. As in, this was probably supposed to happen after all the witches were gathered in one place. Which would mean the witches who set it weren’t on the inside of the plans.”
“I think so. Maybe. But multipurpose spells are difficult to craft, harder to power, and tricky to activate and deploy.” I lowered my voice even more. “I have no idea what the double exposure to the green energies will have on Evan, or have on the spells here, for that matter. But we need to get Lachish and Evan to Tulane.”
“Suggestions?”
“I find the icons, and you shoot them?”
“Anything with explosions—where people don’t get hurt—is fun. I’m in. I’ll tell Jodi, and she can tell the cops what we’re doing so they don’t shoot us.”
“Good idea. I always like not being shot at.”
“But the adrenaline rush is such a high.”
“It’s too dark to see, but I’m rolling my eyes.”
“Love you too, babe. I have a .22 target pistol in the SUV. I’ll be right back.”
It didn’t take Eli long to talk to Jodi and get his pistol, and bring the cop she insisted go with him up-to-date. The officer was a recently discharged boots-on-the-ground soldier, and the two army boys bonded immediately over weapons and blast radii and other weapons-porn, and discussed what they needed to take cover behind to be protected. I let them talk and make decisions and move the other cops back and generally handle all the details while I studied the grounds with Beast-vision.
The night grew deeper and artificial lights came on from all around, throwing long grayed shadows and shorter black shadows, which interfered with my Beast-vision and made it harder to find the pale greenish energies I was hunting for, buried beneath the grass or in flower beds. I found three probable sites of unexploded focal icons in the backyard, one to the very back of the property, and the other two out to the sides of that one, positioned halfway between it and the exploded ones. There were probably more in the front yard, and since magic was mathematics and geometry, there would be a specific number and placement of them, oriented along specific lines and compass points. We had blown two, with injuries, at east and west, near the house. With three more in the back, that was five, and covered a shape that might be a triangle, which would intersect with similar shapes in the front yard. However, the front and side yards were minuscule as compared to the back. The mathematics were going to be either magnificent and complicated or overly simplistic and imbued with raw power. I was going with curtain number two, but none of the witches were available to help me with my speculations.
“Jane, we’re ready,” Eli said.
“Okay. Here’s how it will work. I’m going to walk up close to a location that looks likely to hold a focal item, point at it, and then I’m going to back away and you are going to shoot it. There may be an explosion or there may be nothing. If it explodes we’ll know we were successful. If it doesn’t we won’t know diddly-squat and we’ll have to figure out something else.”
“How come you can see the magic stuff?” Eli’s new partner asked.
“She’s Supergirl. She has X-ray vision,” Eli said.
“Rolling eyes again,” I said, checking out the cop’s name badge, which was P. Nunez. In any other part of the country, that would be a Latino name. In this part of the world, it was just as likely to be Cajun. “How close do you need to be to hit a target about four inches across?” I asked.
Eli said, “Distance on this property won’t be a problem, but the angle of shot might be, if the target is buried. If you can tell me how deep, I can make adjustments by climbing trees or on top of the gazebo.”
“Okay. Gazebo first.” I pointed to a place behind the ornate columned gazebo. “Maybe four inches deep. The apex focal is there. Nunez, we can boost him up.”
The cop’s eyebrows went up and Eli said, “She’s stronger than she looks. Supergirl, remember?” At the base of the gazebo, the guys put weapons on the patio tiles and I took off my jacket, laying it near the firepower. Nunez made a cup of his joined hands, boosting Eli up about eighteen inches. My partner caught a column to hold his balance and I stepped close and bent, hands to knees, offering my back as a step stool. He transferred his weight to me one foot at a time.
“Next time, take off your freaking combat boots,” I said. “The treads are getting grit on my shirt.”
“Such a girly comment,” he said as he stepped onto Nunez’s right shoulder and I stood, taking his other foot on my left. Nunez was shorter than I was and when Eli bounced up off us and pulled himself up to the gazebo roof, it was an ungainly leap, but it was sufficient.
I brushed off my now-dirty shirt and called up, “When you hand-wash my shirt, be sure to let it soak, you thug.”
“Yes, dear,” Eli said, accepting his weapons from Nunez, who clearly didn’t know what to make of us or our relationship.
“He’s my brother,” I said to Nunez. “You can see the resemblance in the jawline and the snark line.”
The cop shook his head and called up, “Target?”
“Acquired. Back off at least fifteen feet. That’s about ten feet father than Lachish and Evan were thrown.” We walked back and hunkered down, kneeling on the patio. Louder, Eli called out, “Everybody down. On one.” He counted down, “Three. Two. One.”
The shot and the explosion seemed to happen simultaneously. A frisson of magic spiked the air and shivered across me. I was expecting it this time and I was holding my left hand open. An eye appeared there for a moment, green lid closed, green lashes resting along the skin over the metatarsal of my little finger. And then it faded. I was still marked. Now I had to worry about Evan. And Lachish.
There were emergency vehicles gathering, blue and red lights creating a stained glass effect on the nearby buildings. A fire truck pulled to the curb, brakes hissing. Voices called; people raced here and there. I hoped that the paramedics standing at the ambulances had sufficient skills to work with witches. Not all the city’s EMTs had taken the specialized training.
Nunez and I accepted Eli’s weapons, and before we could raise hands to help, he found a good handhold, slid off the top, flipped over and through his arms and into a swing, dropping free and landing in a crouch.
“Showoff,” I muttered.
He gave me a self-satisfied grin and brushed his hands together. Eli seldom deliberately displayed his skills and combat readiness, but he was having fun, his body odor heavy on victory pheromones, which were musky and acrid, but he didn’t swagger. Uncle Sam’s best didn’t need to swagger.
He had to climb a tree to get a firing angle on the next focal item. Once he was settled into a firing stance, I moved to Evan and took both of his hands as Eli counted down.
“Three. Two. One.”
The explosion was intense, stronger than the others, as if they got worse as more and more of them went offline. I ducked but kept my eyes open, watching Evan’s palms. Green eyes appeared in both palms, for half a heartbeat. The lids were partially open.
I didn’t know what it meant that both palms were marked. It could be that he was under the power of the two witches. Or was a target they were intent upon attacking. Or that they had spelled him already, as they had me. There wasn’t a single good reason I could come up with for Evan to have witchy eyes in his palms.
Molly had said I was free of latent magics, but my palm had displayed green eyes. I had to think the eyes were linked to me, through the first scanning spell. But how could the witches turn it off and on? Good question. Were we all a danger to the conclave? Better question. Should we stay away? Best question. And the answer was no. Together, we could defeat anything a spell could throw at us. Yeah. That.
Keeping my worries and conclusions to myself, I went to help Eli down from a perch much higher than the gazebo. He stretched down and gave Nunez the pistol, then motioned us two feet apart and dropped down. He landed, taking the fall on bent legs, a hand on Nunez’s shoulder and one on mine. I stumbled, not expecting him to drop that way, and bit my cheek. Just a nick, which I ignored. I didn’t even flinch. How could I in the presence of so much testosterone?
When my partner was in place for the third shot, I dropped to the ground by Lachish, who was struggling to resist Ailis’s healing magic, struggling to break free of the painkilling sleep. I took both of her hands, turned them so I could see the palms, careful not to jar the broken arm, and whispered, “It’s okay. It’s a healing working. You broke your arm and leg. You’re in pain. Let Ailis help you until I can get an ambulance.” Oddly Lachish stopped struggling and relaxed.
“Thank you,” Ailis said, her shoulders dropping.
“This explosion may be worse that the last one,” I warned. “Can you cover us all in a ward?”
“On one!” Eli called out.
Ailis cursed with great force and even more imagination about donkeys and male body parts. I stuttered in laughter as a ward opened over us.
“Three.”
I opened Lachish’s fingers so I could see her palms.
“Two. One.” The explosion was shocking, and I felt a concussive blast knock into the ward at the same moment that two green eyes appeared in Lachish’s palms. Staring at me. The ward Ailis had raised shivered and shook, the energies blasting up in a shower of purple sparks. The eyes seemed to look around me and I closed the palms, fast.
The tree branch where Eli was stretched out in a shooter’s stance fell with a crack. My partner rolled backward along the limb, tucked, pushed off with one foot, and rolled to the side. Another branch broke. Both limbs hit the ground. He leaped and landed, rolled again to his feet, the target pistol nowhere in sight, and a small subgun I hadn’t even noticed on him, held at firing position. Above me, Ailis’s palms were marked with staring green eyes. She squeaked and the protective ward spluttered and fell.
I motioned to Eli to hold his open palms out. There was a faint gleam of green in both. His eyes held mine in the darkness as I heard what might have been laughter in the air. It wasn’t his. And while it wasn’t mad, maniacal laughter, like something from a serial killer TV show, it wasn’t ordinary giggles from girls’ night out either. It left a bad taste in my ears. So to speak. I opened Lachish’s palms, and the eyes were gone. I smelled a hint of iron and salt and I knew that the witches responsible for this working had been watching, though from nearby or with the witch equivalent of a crystal ball, I didn’t know.
Molly shouted, “The wards are all down! The offensive working is no longer active.”
The paramedics trotted over, one with an oversized orange supply kit. They started to Evan first, but a man appeared in front of them with a small pop of sound and said, “See to the lady first, if you please.” I felt the power of vampiric compulsion flow through the damaged yard. “I’ll see to the gentleman. I’m a doctor,” he added, sounding and looking perfectly human, probably to keep the human paramedics relaxed and calm.
Really? I thought. Dr. Edmund Hartley. But why not? He was old enough to have taken out a few years of his very, very long life to go to medical school. Of course, he might have attended in the seventeen hundreds. And of course, he didn’t need medical training to heal.
Pushing outward with his compulsion, he said to the medical personnel, “Lachish Dutillet is a witch, so you’ll want magical protection while you assess her and secure her for transport to Tulane University Hospital. The beautiful Ailis should be able to provide you with that assistance.”
Ailis gave him a look that would have cured leather, but he ignored it. The two might have had a history. Interesting.
Tulane University Hospital was the only hospital in New Orleans that kept paranormal medical experts on contract. They also had medical and technical personnel who dealt with the needs of supernats and their injuries. And they had, on at least one occasion, allowed vampires into the ER to treat dying patients.
Edmund turned to me. He was dressed in a black tuxedo with a burgundy hankie and cummerbund, and very shiny patent leather shoes. There was a faint five o’clock shadow along his jaw, which I thought might be the first time I had ever seen a vamp with ungroomed facial hair. Fangs dropping with a tiny schnick, he said, “I haven’t fed tonight.”
“Noted,” I said, and pointed at Evan.
“As my mistress requires.” The words were quite clear, despite being spoken around the fangs. He offered me a tiny bow that managed to come across as mocking.
Something that smelled like cinnamon with a hint of anise and . . . maybe chocolate mint wafted from Edmund. He smelled like a bakery. I said, “Alex and the Robere brothers will draw up the primo papers tomorrow. I’ll approve them and get the signing witnessed.”
“Agreed, my mistress. And then they may be stored at the Mithran Council Chambers along with all such legal writs.”
I narrowed my eyes and answered without agreeing to that, “Heal your other master. Please.”
Edmund gave a deeper bow and actually clicked his heels together, a military tradition that went back centuries, though no one but me might have heard the patent leather tap. He knelt beside Evan and pulled off his tux jacket, tossing it to the grass. With deft motions, he rolled up both sleeves of his pristine dress shirt. As if just seeing her, he offered Molly a truncated bow and, at the same moment, bit into his own left wrist with a quick, tearing action that almost seemed graceful. Or ritualistic.
He lifted Big Evan’s head off the ground and held the bloodied flesh over Evan’s mouth, allowing several ounces to dribble in. Vamp magic and witch healing magic grew on the air, competing and blending, like spices that weren’t usually used together, but that somehow worked. The air took on a piquant tang, with a hint of red peppers.
Evan swallowed. His hands glowed green.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“No!” The Gray Between exploded out of me. I threw myself at Edmund. Faster than the speed of sound. Faster than time. In the instant of the leap, in the moment of no time, I took it all in.
Edmund halted in the act of turning to me. Eli was swiveling with the subgun, pivoting on one heel, the other foot held up, stationary in the air. The green magics around Evan’s hands were an unmoving cloud of gas and icy sparkles. Molly was frozen too, her hands reaching for Evan’s face, her brow crinkled as if she knew something had just gone wrong. Really badly wrong. There were green clouds of gas on her hands as well, but on Molly, the spell was shot through with blackness. Her death magics had been activated.
As I leaped through time, my belly was already cramping, tearing, ripping along my side where something had never healed quite right. I caught Edmund by the shoulders, jerking him into my arms, into the bubble of time, with me. Whatever was happening, whatever spell had been activated in the instant before I leaped into the Gray Between of time, was still happening. Edmund’s eyes vamped out. His taloned hands reached for me, gripped the back of my head. Jerked me to him. His head tipped back. Fangs struck at me, like a snake striking at prey.