Quinn and Simon exchanged a glance. “She’ll kill you, Lex,” Simon said softly. “Please, please, just wait here. We’ll call you when it’s over, and then you can come get your family.”
I straightened up, feeling ridiculous in my green scrubs. At least I was feeling better. “Thanks, but I’m not really a ‘just wait here’ kind of girl.”
Simon looked pleadingly at Quinn, who shrugged. “She’s a witch problem now,” Quinn said cheerfully. “No skin off my nose.”
Without waiting for a response, I took off for the house as fast as I could, which turned out to be at a sort of mincing trot. I could feel a pull in my back from the stitches. They would need to come out soon, I realized, but although I felt weak and run down, my condition was worlds better than when I’d woken up in the hospital that morning.
When I reached the stoop, I didn’t bother trying to be sneaky. The baby was screaming too loudly for me to hear anything anyway. Instead I just threw open the unlocked front door and beelined toward the first-floor bedroom, the guest room off the kitchen. John was smart—that was the room with the heaviest door and the smallest window. It was where I would have holed up, too.
When I rounded the doorway to the back hall, though, Darcy was nowhere near the guest room door. I froze. Could she have given up? Gone outside to help Victor with Simon and Quinn? Or was she waiting to ambush me? Then Charlie took a deep breath, and in the tiny pause I heard a clinking sound in the kitchen, like someone shaking a piggy bank.
I darted forward, past the locked bedroom door and all the way into the kitchen. The blonde woman from the Depot was standing in my brother-in-law’s kitchen, rifling through the junk drawer in the counter island. She had fished out three keys so far and had them lined up on the counter in front of her. Crap. I’d known John my whole life, and he would never have a lock in his house without also having the corresponding key. One of those was going to work.
Quietly, I moved to put myself between Darcy and the bedroom door. Apparently satisfied with her find, Darcy collected the keys and started back toward the bedroom, which is when she spotted me.
“Oh, great,” she yelled, over the sound of Charlie’s wails. “The girl with the weird blood. Of course you’re here.”
She took a few steps toward me. “Hey, Darcy.” I stalked forward to meet her, which she wasn’t expecting. “Rough night? Me too.”
She opened her mouth to yell something back, and I slammed my left fist into her nose.
It collapsed with a very satisfying wet crunch, and Darcy shrieked with pain, staggering backward, away from the bedroom door. I shook out my hand discreetly, but my own pain wasn’t bad. I’d gotten my weight behind the punch. Her eyes went wide with shock as she held her fingers up to her nose, then examined them in disbelief.
That stopped me for a moment and seemed to confirm my suspicion that the vampire thing was bullshit. I’d broken someone’s nose before, and Darcy’s had felt just like anyone else’s. And now she was bleeding like anyone else. Liberally.
Regaining her balance, Darcy swung at me, a clumsy roundhouse that I easily blocked with my right forearm as I jabbed with my left. Same spot. She screamed in pain and frustration and kicked out at me. I turned my body to take the kick in the side. It stung, but no more than any other kick would. No, she wasn’t some superpowered creature of the night. She was just a deranged kidnapper. And that I could fight.
Encouraged, I launched myself at Darcy, throwing my upper body into her chest and riding her to the ground. I pinned her with a forearm under her throat. Her eyes bulged as she reached for my hair. I slapped her hand down with my free arm. Blood streamed from her nose down her cheeks and into her expensively highlighted hair. “Let me be clear,” I said coldly. “I will always come for that baby. Always. And if I ever see either you or your boyfriend again, I will not hesitate to break your fucking necks. Do you believe me?”
Darcy made another grab for my hair. I slapped her down again and dug my forearm harder into her neck. Adrenaline churned in my bloodstream. “I said, do you believe me?”
Glaring at me, she nodded.
“Why her?” I demanded. “What do you want with Charlie?”
Her cold facade broke, and she let out a surprised laugh, disturbing because it sounded so completely normal. “You don’t know?” she asked, genuine amazement in her voice.
There was a shout from outside, and I automatically glanced toward the back door at the other end of the kitchen, half expecting someone to burst through it. In that instant, Darcy wriggled hard enough to free one arm. She grabbed the nearest thing within reach—a plastic baby toy with animals that popped out of little doors—and swung it at my head.
I saw the hit coming and flinched away, managing to soften the blow a little. The hard plastic still crashed into my skull, staggering me enough so that Darcy could throw me off her. She scrambled toward the back door.
When she reached the exit, she turned to look at me, straightening up. My mouth dropped open. Before my eyes, her nose was healing: the bleeding stopped, the swelling went down, the bones wriggled into place. All the bruising on her face and arms faded away, and she suddenly glowed with life. She opened her mouth and snarled at me, “This isn’t over.” Then she turned and fled into the night.
Weakened from shock or the hit to my head, I managed to slump against the bedroom door before I collapsed.
What the hell was happening?
Chapter 7
After I caught my breath, I raised my fist to rap on the door behind me. “It’s Lex,” I yelled over Charlie’s cries.
“Lex?” John’s voice was baffled.
“Yeah, it’s me. You can open the door. She’s gone.”
After a moment, the heavy wood door popped inward, dumping me over the threshold to the bedroom. “Whoops,” I said out loud. Probably should have moved aside. John stared down at me, utterly confused. Charlie hiccupped with surprise, her screams turning to whimpers.
“Hi,” I said from the floor, realizing that I might be in mild shock. “Maybe you could help me up.”
John slung Charlie onto his hip in a practiced move, then reached his hand down to help me up. I let him pull me to my feet. “What the hell is going on?” John demanded. He didn’t get upset very often—I’d probably seen him truly angry three times in all the years we’d known each other—but when he did, his temper was awe-inspiring. “You could barely move your fingers the last time I saw you. How are you here? Why are you wearing scrubs? Who were those people?!” By the end he was nearly shouting.
“John,” I said softly, “you’re scaring the baby.”
He looked down at Charlie, whose face had crumpled again. Before she could start crying, he cuddled her to his chest and murmured about getting her a ba-ba. “Come with me,” he said to me over the baby’s head. “We need to talk.”
I followed him into the kitchen, where he pulled an empty bottle out of the cupboard and began to fill it with whole milk from a carton in the fridge. The doorbell rang, and John looked up in alarm. “Hang on,” I said, raising a hand. “I think that’s for me.”
Before John could answer, I trudged back through the house, stepping around an explosion of baby toys that had nothing to do with the break-in, and looked through the peephole. Quinn was standing alone on the front porch. I opened the front door. There was blood spattered over most of his suit jacket, but he wasn’t even breathing hard. “Victor?” I asked in a low voice.
Quinn shook his head. “Staked him. Simon’s taking care of it. Darcy?”
“I broke her nose, and she ran away,” I reported.
He blinked at me. “You broke her nose?” he said incredulously.
I gave a little shrug. “I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t prepared to kill her.”
“That’s not what I—” Quinn started to say, but he stopped and shook his head. “Look, I need to
talk to your brother-in-law.”
Automatically, I shifted my weight so I was blocking the doorway. “You’re not going to hurt him.” It wasn’t a question.
“No,” he said, his voice firm. “But I may need to press his mind. It won’t hurt him, I swear.”
I examined his face for a long moment. He looked back at me without flinching, his face open. I didn’t want anyone messing around with John’s brain . . . but Quinn had helped John and Charlie. Maybe he’d earned a bit of trust. “Take off your jacket first,” I told him.
Quinn looked down. When he saw the blood, he shucked his suit jacket and casually tossed it behind the bushes near John’s front door. He stepped through the doorway and paused, frowning. “What?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t have been able to just walk in like that.” Quinn answered.
“Lex?” John called from the kitchen. “Who is it?”
“Figure it out later,” I told Quinn. He shrugged and followed me through the house to the kitchen.
John was leaning against the counter, a burp rag tossed over his shoulder. He was cradling a much calmer Charlie in his arms as she slurped down her milk. When we came into the room, she tilted her head to check us out without taking the bottle’s nipple out of her mouth for a second. She grinned at us from around it. It was adorable, and I felt a familiar stab of grief, a sensation I have all the time when I’m with Charlie. Sam is missing this.
“John, this is Quinn,” I said, ushering Quinn into the room beside me. “He’s the one who told me you needed help.”
Quinn didn’t offer to shake hands, which was okay because John’s hands were full. “Mr. Wheaton,” Quinn began, keeping his voice low. “Would you mind if I spoke to you privately for a minute?” John glanced at me, then down at Charlie. “I’m sure Lex can hold the baby,” he added reassuringly.
John looked at me again. If it had been anyone else, I doubt he would have relinquished his hold on his daughter. But John had trusted me since before he could shave. I nodded, and he shrugged and started toward us.
When he was still a few feet away, something happened to Quinn. He let out a startled gasp and bent over, trying to turn it into a cough. John paused, uncertain. “You okay?” I whispered to Quinn.
He nodded. “Just . . . swallowed wrong or something.”
Shrugging, I walked forward and took Charlie from John. She smiled at me around her bottle again and reached up to grab a strand of my hair. I didn’t wear it down very often, especially when I was around my niece, but the scrubs Simon had stolen for me hadn’t come with a hair tie.
“Hey, baby-baby,” I sang down to her. “Let’s go sit on the couch.”
I backtracked into the living room, settling myself into a plush armchair. I wanted to keep an eye on the two men, but after the healing and the fight, I was too wobbly to keep standing. I could hear Quinn’s voice behind me, speaking in low, soothing tones, and John’s familiar voice answering him.
My body may have been exhausted, but my thoughts continued to churn. My mind wouldn’t stop cycling through memories from the day, starting with the discovery that I was even still alive. It felt like a day out of someone else’s life, or from one of those schlocky horror movies Sam had made me sit through when we were in high school. Vampires and witches and werewolves? It was just too much.
And yet . . . I had run out of other ways to explain what I’d seen.
Charlie had fallen asleep, her little hands relaxing around the empty bottle. It dropped to the floor, rolling away into a pile of toys. I ignored it and raised her limp body to my shoulder, patting her back to coax out a sleepy burp. I kissed her head, snuggling her close. Being near Charlie always soothed me, and after a while my thoughts stopped spinning. Before I knew it, my eyes were drifting closed. Tomorrow I would figure out all of this weirdness, including what Darcy wanted with my niece. For now, though, Charlie was safe. And I was grateful.
Suddenly a quiet voice whispered in my ear, so close that I would have been startled if I’d had the energy. “John thinks you made a miraculous recovery, then came over to help him chase a raccoon out of the house,” Quinn said. “I’ll stop by the hospital and take care of your sudden departure, but then I’m done. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from the witches soon. It was nice knowing you, Allison Luther.”
“Don’t call me . . .” I mumbled, but he was gone. I let my eyes fall shut and succumbed to sleep.
Chapter 8
I woke up to a tugging, insistent pain on my scalp. It was on the opposite side of my head from where the baby toy had left a lump, but it still kind of hurt.
I opened my eyes. Charlie gurgled up at me, smiling. She was sitting up, facing me, with all of the fingers on one hand tangled firmly into my hair like an anchor line. She tugged joyously, using her leverage to swing back and forth a little on my stomach. “Charlie,” I reprimanded gently, but she just grinned wider, showing off her little teeth. She babbled some nonsense at me. I squinted at the clock on the far wall. Ten after six. “At least someone in this family’s a morning person,” I told her. Usually I was still at work at six, but my sleep schedule seemed to have adjusted back to normal while I was in the hospital. That was going to be a pain in the ass when I returned to work.
I looked around the room. I was still in John’s recliner, although at some point he had raised the footrest for me. He’d also draped a polar fleece throw over both of us.
“Good morning,” John said, stepping into the doorway. He was blowing on the surface of a coffee mug, and there was a second steaming mug in his other hand.
“Hey,” I said groggily, sitting up and lowering the footrest, using one hand to stabilize Charlie in my arms. She wriggled impatiently, and I carefully leaned over to set her down on the floor. She immediately crawled off toward the nearest pile of toys. I nodded at the second cup. “Is that for me, or are things just so bad that you’re double-fisting caffeine now?”
John smiled and came over to set the mug on the coffee table next to the armchair. “I was waiting for you to put her down. She’s going through a sweeping-mugs-off-the-table phase.”
“Mmm,” I said, inhaling the scent of hazelnut. “Nice timing.” He’d put in a little milk, no sugar, just the way I like it.
“Charlie has me trained. She wakes up at six, so I wake up at six.” He glanced up at the clock. “I guess the extra ten minutes of sleep is her concession to last night’s adventures.”
I glanced at him warily. “Yeah, that was something.”
He shook his head in amazement. “I still don’t understand how it got in here. Must have left the back door open or something.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said noncommittally.
“I’m just glad you got it out of here okay. Aren’t raccoons one of those animals that carry rabies? Ugh.” He winced. “You sure it didn’t scratch you or anything?”
“No raccoon scratches,” I said honestly. I took a long sip of the coffee. Part of me couldn’t believe this was actually working—John seemed to wholeheartedly believe the story Quinn had fed him. And Charlie was a baby; it wasn’t like she’d remember anything. The attack on the house, the 911 call, that frantic drive from the hospital to John’s house . . . to him it was like none of it had ever happened. In the early morning light, with my coffee in hand and my friend nearby, it seemed a lot easier to buy John’s new version of events than the bit about vampires and witches. I wondered if I could convince myself that the whole thing had been a dream.
I yawned, and the stitches in my back pulled with the movement. I must have winced, because John said worriedly, “Is your back really okay?”
“Yes,” I assured him. “I’m fine. Well, not fine, but I’ll be fine soon.” My head ached, and every part of my body felt unbearably sore. Kind of like the way I felt after the one time Sam had talked me into attending a ninety-minute hot yoga session.
I lifted an ar
m and tried to scratch my back where the stitches were irritating my skin, but I couldn’t reach. John put his coffee down and took a step toward me. “Here, do you need me to—”
“No,” I yelped, jumping out of the chair and backing away. John’s mouth dropped open, and even Charlie stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “That was an overreaction.”
“No, I’m sorry. I thought . . . I mean, it’s been so long, and you’re like my sister . . . I should have realized it would be awkward.” Pacified, Charlie picked up a wooden spoon and began gravely beating it against the side of a toy dump truck like she was getting paid by the hour to do so.
I squeezed my eyes shut. John thought I was afraid of his seeing me naked because we had a fifteen-year-old history. And it wasn’t like I could tell him the truth.
I took a deep breath, which is when I realized that my scrubs stank of sweat and dried milk. “Do you have something I could wear home?” I asked.
John hesitated, and I opened my eyes. “I have a box of Sam’s stuff in the attic,” he began, but I shook my head quickly.
“Just some sweatpants or something would be great.”
John got me some of his athletic pants and another long-sleeved Luther Shoes T-shirt, which I took into the bathroom. I made the mistake of glancing in the mirror, and wrinkled my nose at my lanky-haired, red-eyed reflection. I could have been a coed who’d just gotten trashed at a frat party. I’ve always looked young for my age, at least in the face. In high school John used to call me Babyface when he wanted to tease me, and the guys in my platoon had had a field day with it when I was in the army. I made a face at the mirror and stripped out of the scrubs.
There was a metallic tinkling sound from the floor, and I glanced down. Staples. At least one of the injuries—for some reason I hated thinking of them as stab wounds—had been held shut with staples, and they’d forced themselves out of my skin as it healed. I turned and looked over my shoulder, trying to see my back in the mirror. Whoa. One of the wounds, a couple of inches below the army tattoo on my shoulder, was now just an angry pink line. That must have been the stapled one. The others still had the stitches, but the skin had grown together around them, and now it was bright red and irritated. Great. I reached back to try to touch one of the injuries, but there was no way I could reach. I sighed. The stitches needed to come out, which meant I’d now have to track down either Simon or Quinn, since I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone else what had happened. I’m not particularly shy, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy exposing my naked back to a strange man bearing scissors.
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